“ARE YOU A SOCINIAN WITHOUT KNOWING IT?

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, March 16, 2008

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

I know some of you must have felt the way I felt when I first learned about the existence of Unitarian Universalism many, many years ago. One of the first thoughts going through my mind was, “All this time I’ve been a Unitarian without knowing it!” The thought happens so frequently to people who discover us that it has almost become a kind of “inside joke.”

Some of you, I expect, might leave this morning with a similar thought: I’ve been a Socinian my whole life, and didn’t even know it.

I’ve mentioned before that there is a curious phenomenon that we Unitarians – “uni” not “trini”-tarians – for some reason we tend to think in threes. We honor a “trinity” of prophets that influenced the Unitarian movement in early America: William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Theodore Parker. But there is also a “trinity” of Unitarian prophets that were important in our history during the European Reformation movement in the 16^th century.

This is our Partner Church Sunday when we acknowledge our spiritual roots, so I will turn to one root in Europe I have not addressed before.

I have spoken before of Michael Servetus, the Spanish physician and theologian who offended the Pope with his ideas so much that he was imprisoned and condemned to death. After escaping from prison, he went to Geneva where he offended John Calvin so much that Calvin personally ordered him burned at the stake along with his books. And did so.

The second prophet was Francis David, the leader of the Transylvanian Unitarians who in the 16^th century inspired the first law of religious toleration in Western history, though such freedom was short-lived. He would ultimately die in jail because of his views. We admire the Transylvanian Unitarians in part because they still persist in surviving centuries of persecution – persecution from the Catholic Church and the Protestants, from the Romanians who took over their land a century ago, from the Nazis at mid-century, and most recently from the Communists. Four hundred years of persecution, and the Unitarians of Transylvania are still proud to declare their faith. Our partnership with one of their churches there is in part an expression of our respect for their courage.

The third name of our Reformation Trinity is that of Faustus Socinus who led a small Unitarian movement in Poland. His group, unfortunately, did not survive the centuries of persecution. What did survive, though, was the legacy of freedom and reason in religious thought that would influence the course of the modern world. In many ways, his movement which was ultimately destroyed by religious tyranny, had a greater impact on the course of history than any other Unitarian group.

Let me document that statement. After the Reformation period came the Enlightenment, sometimes called the “Age of Reason,” that gave rise to science and to democratic government. The late historian John Herman Randall of Columbia University wrote a classic work on the progress of thought through the centuries, called The Making of the Modern Mind. When Randall got to the age of Enlightenment, he mentioned that the rationalist spirit that gave rise to that whole era “appeared first in the sixteenth century among the Socinians” – the Polish Unitarians.

Here’s another example of their legacy. The guarantee of religious freedom found in the First Amendment to our Constitution was crafted by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. Both Madison and Jefferson acknowledged they got their ideas from British political philosopher John Locke. Locke, in turn, was influenced in his thinking about religious freedom from the work of Faustus Socinus, whose books were part of his personal library.

So the story I’m about to tell is a tragedy and a victory. The tragedy is the violent persecution and eventual extinction of a Polish religious minority in the name of Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic. The victory is because that history has been far more favorable toward the ideas of this group, the Socinians, than the ideas of those who oppressed them.

To set the stage for this story, I need to offer a quick survey of the period of the Reformation. Most of us easily recall the two great names of the time: Martin Luther and John Calvin. They represented what might be called the mainstream protesters. It is misleading to think that their Reformation had much to do with theology. It didn’t. Their challenge was to the authority, far more than the theology, of the Catholic Church. They refused to submit to a church authority they viewed as entirely corrupt. But in terms of theology, there was little difference between what the Reformers thought and what the Catholic Church thought. They all affirmed doctrines of the Trinity, original sin, the atonement of Jesus, and eternal damnation. What they were seeking was the reform of political and church authority more than the reform of theology.

But a real theological reformation movement was taking place in Eastern Europe where the church’s influence wasn’t as strong and the rulers were generally more tolerant: Prussia, Poland, Transylvania, Hungary. These groups, in varying degrees challenged not just the authority, but also some of the basic creeds of the church. The Unitarians were a small sect among dozens. Other groups the Anabaptists, that later became various kinds of Baptists, a variety of Reform Churches, as well as Mennonites, Sabbatarians, Moravians, Hussites, and other various grand many others. These various groups were diverse in their theologies, and there was no one leader to name the movement, but historians have labeled them collectively as the “Radical Reformation” because the challenges to the established church were as much theology as political authority. At that time, Western Europe spoke of Eastern Europe as an “asylum of heretics.”

Compared with Western Europe, Poland during the mid-1500s was more open to religious diversity – the Catholics, the Calvinists, and the Lutherans were all competing for loyalty, and these other groups I mentioned were growing as well. A faction within the Reformed Church was beginning to form around the issue of the Trinity, and those who questioned the doctrine drew together into common cause. These antitrinitarian thinkers called themselves the “Minor Reformed Church,” and their denial of the Trinity was their distinguishing mark. Historians refer to this group, our forbearers, as the “Polish Brethren.” They would later become known as “Socinians.”

But soon they had another cause: religious freedom. The various churches joined in a synod to debate different doctrines, such as baptism or the exact nature of Jesus, and they could not reach agreements. Instead they issued a policy that “since in matters of faith no one in the true church of God may lord it over another, nor be forced, each should enjoy freedom of conscience. . . . “ In other words, whatever the outcome of the debates, the Polish Brethren honored the right of dissent within the church, a right they would extend toward all other religious groups as well.

Soon, though, competing groups joined together in denouncing the Polish Brethren for their anti-Trinitarianism. Fortunately, they had an ally in the wife of a wealthy landowner who persuaded her Calvinist husband to give land to establish a town where the Polish Brethren could practice their beliefs with the guarantee of religious toleration. Thus was born in 1570 the town of Rakow, Poland. The beginnings of this Unitarian town were chaotic, though. Their emphasis on individual freedom allowed a bit of anarchy that backfired at first, and almost did them in. It took a number of years before the experiment started to work.

But eventually the town prospered. A university was established that achieved a reputation throughout Europe for academic excellence. A major printing press turned out writings of the Brethren in all European languages. Thirty-five years later, after Socinus had come to lead the movement, and people from outside were referring to its doctrine as “Socinianism,” a visitor from England reported on his experience in the town of Rakow, saying that when he had

“taken pains to pass through the (town of) Rakow, where the heresy of the Socinians flourishes greatly, he felt as though he had been transported to another world; for whereas elsewhere all was full of wars and tumult, there all was quiet, men were call and modest in behavior, so you might think them angels, although they were spirited in debate and expert in language.” (From Wilbur, I, p 361).

That was written in 1612, but long before the town became such a spectacle of angels, back in the 1570s, there was quite an effort to become organized and establish just social policies. It was into that setting that Faustus Socinus came to Poland and to Rakow.

I finally get to Socinus. He was Italian by birth, born within a few years of the beginning of the Catholic Inquisition. His early adult years in Italy were spent in service as a secretary to Isabella De Medici. His heretical views were vaguely known by her father, the grand-duke, and who actually encouraged by Socinus to write on theology, as long it was written anonymously not to draw the attention of the Inquisition.

Socinus would eventually leave Italy, traveling first to Switzerland, and visiting various reformers and heretics. He heard about Transylvania, where a movement of Unitarians succeeded in having a church, and about Poland, where antitrinitarian Polish Brethren flourished in their town.

One day he received an invitation to Transylvania. The Unitarian king had died and there was a doctrinal dispute within the ranks that would threaten the government’s toleration of the Unitarians. Would Socinus be willing to mediate the difficulty? He agreed. He spent four months living with the Transylvanian Unitarian leader Francis David. It was not successful, though, as David was convicted of heresy by the new Catholic leaders of the land, and died in a dungeon prison.

Socinus then traveled to Poland, to the Polish Brethren, and there he found his home for the rest of his life. The leadership in Rakow was still very much in disarray, and when Socinus came, he seemed to have both the organizational and theological skills to bring everyone together. His name would forever be identified with the antitrinitarian movement: Socinianism. They did not call themselves “Socinian,” but the rest of the world did. And it became an accusation of heresy. This was the charge against Unitarians when they appeared in England, and when they appeared in colonial America. Socinianism. The name itself seemed to the orthodox to convict anyone of heresy.

Here’s a bit of trivia that has a point to it. Socinus never formally joined the Brethren, that is, the Minor Reformed Church. He objected to their practice of re-baptizing new members, believing that one is only baptized once. He could not formally join, though, without baptism. It didn’t seem to matter. He became the recognized leader for over the next twenty years without joining. This is indicative of their embrace of freedom, that they would respect him, but also respect his right to dissent, and he would respect their right to disagree with him on the issue.

The Polish Brethren in general, and Socinus in particular, were prolific in their writing and publishing. By far the most important and influential work coming from that movement is known as the “Racovian Catechism.” (Residents of the town of Rakow were called “Racovians.”) It is a “catechism” in its format of question and answer, but unlike other catechisms it wasn’t written as a lesson about the church for its children. It was written more as a P.R. piece to explain the church to others.

I’d like to offer a brief sample of the style and content of the Racovian Catechism. Here is a key section on the person of Jesus:

Q: What are the things that concern (Christ’s) person or essence?

A: Only that he is a true man by nature, as the holy Scriptures frequently testifie, and namely, I Tim. 2.5. . .

Q: Hath he not also a divine Nature?

A: At no hand; for that is repugnant not only to sound Reason, but also to the holy Scriptures.

You will notice the reference above to “sound reason.” This is, in fact, a part of what made Socinians one of the earliest sources of Enlightenment thinking for the coming “Age of Reason.” It is true that they, like all other Reformation Christian sects, believed the Scriptures to be the ultimate authority. But they added, as others did not, that scripture is always subject to interpretation, and reason is by far the best tool to use to understand scripture. Any interpretation that defies your reason is not the true interpretation. If there were ever a direct line from a historical document over four hundred years old, to a church today that affirms itself as a place “where reason and religion meet,” this is it.

In addition to its unitarianism and its defense of reason in religion, the Racovian Catechism denied the doctrine of original sin as unscriptural and irrational. Likewise, the doctrine of atonement is refuted. Jesus is the path to salvation, it said, not because he died on our behalf, but because he modeled how to live an exemplary life.

I certainly don’t want to leave the impression that this document and this movement represent today’s Unitarianism. It doesn’t. For example, though it ascribes to Jesus a fully human nature, nevertheless they grant that God bestowed him divine qualities as he was chosen as God’s unique messenger. Also, though reason was the tool to test biblical interpretations, the miracle stories from the Bible were exempt from that test.

But the Racovian Catechism is to modern Unitarianism what the Magna Carta is to modern democracy. The Magna Carta, you recall, was the first successful attempt to transfer political authority away from the English monarchy to his subjects. The Magna Carta was not at all what we mean today by “democracy,” but it was an essential step, and certainly alike in spirit to modern democracy. So also, the Racovian Catechism was the first organized expression of the spirit of Unitarianism as we know that spirit today, And it also was among the earliest expressions of the spirit of Enlightenment.

There are other important legacies from the teaching of the Socinians. I’ve already mentioned the revolutionary view about complete religious freedom for all sects, a view that can be traced directly down to our own Constitution. The Socinians also held that it is the ethical teachings of Jesus that are the key to the Gospels, and they used the Sermon on the Mount as their main scripture. From this, the Socinian movement developed a keen sense of social justice, giving strong attention to how society treats its people.

From here, though, the story takes an appalling turn. The Catholic Church decided to strengthen its hold in Poland, and organized mobs to attack the dissenting churches in general, but specifically the Polish Brethren. Socinus himself, who spent much of his time in the capitol city of Krakow, was physically attacked on the streets there more than once by mobs. One time, it was a mob of students from the Catholic University who kidnapped from his sickbed at his Krakow home, dragged him into the streets, beat him, burned his books, then threatened to burn him if he did not recant. He refused to recant. They decided instead to drown him, and as they were dragging him to the river, they were confronted by one of the professors who persuaded them not to kill Socinus. This literal Good Samaritan, a Catholic teacher, saved his life. In spite of these episodes of persecution, the Polish Brethren continued to prosper, and Socinus to lead, until his death in 1604, at age sixty-four. It was after that when religious persecution increased.

The Polish tolerance of religions, which up until then was better than most of Europe, was fragile, and in many ways existed because no one faction dominated politically. That would change when a strong Catholic monarch took charge and decided it was time to purify society and cleanse it of dissenters. Acts of violence increased, not just against Socinians, but all Protestants.

But the Socinians, and the town of Rakow, became a special target in 1638. The Catholic ruling government declared that the university in town would not just close, but all its buildings be destroyed. The printing press of the church would be destroyed and any books and tracts they could find, be burnt. And of course, any churches would likewise be destroyed. And they were. All members of the church were given four weeks to leave the town, or they would be executed.

The Polish Brethren fled, and many of them went to a town 200 miles away, where they tried to rebuild their community. In a few years they began building a new college and churches. But the decree still held, and they were run out of this town, too. All their buildings were again destroyed. In 1658, the Polish Senate decreed that all Socinians in Poland must either leave the country, or renounce their faith, or be put to death. The ruling was moderated by giving them two years for each one to decide which fate to choose. They were the only Protestant group given this ultimatum.

Thus began the diaspora of the Socinians. When the deadline of July 10, 1660 was reached, most of them had already gone into exile. Some went to Transylvania, where they eventually assimilated into the Unitarian community there. Some created a settlement in East Prussia, where the community survived for a decade until a sympathetic ruler died and an unsympathetic ruler, this time a Protestant, took over. They were banished again into exile. The most successful group of exiles found a welcoming place in Holland, where there existed a strong liberal Christian group called the “Remonstrants.” They welcomed the small group of Socinian exiles, but within a couple of generations, the remaining Polish Socinians were assimilated into the Dutch church, and the organized Socinian movement came to an end.

What did not disappear, of course, was the influence that this tiny and too often forgotten group had over the course of history, not just Unitarian, but Western intellectual thought in general. The gift they passed on to us, the place of both reason and freedom in religion, we have received in tact. It is now ours to protect and pass on.

So when we leave today, some of us may leave shaking our heads say, “I’ve been a Socinian my whole life without knowing it. Now I know!”