The Restoration of Christianity: An English Translation of the Christianismi restitutio, 1553 (review)

There has been comparatively little serious encounter with the theology of Michael Servetus and even less among an English-language readership due to the lack of a translation of his major work, the Christianismi restitutio. Christopher Hoffman and Marian Hillar have remedied this problem with a full translation accompanied by copious annotations. The work itself goes far beyond Servetus’s critique of the doctrine of the Trinity: it is a significant source for Servetus’s understandings of substance; the natural order and the elements; and human physiology, including his revolutionary understanding of circulation of the blood in advance of William Harvey. The work also clearly identifies for the modern reader the sources of Servetus’s thought: he examines numerous biblical texts, a significant sampling of the church fathers plus Jewish sources such as the Targums, and select medieval scholastics, all read through the interpretive filter of a Renaissance-era neo-Platonism modified by the Hermetic writings. Servetus was, clearly, widely read—but, contrary to the hyperbolic praise of his grasp of materials found in the prefaces and notes to this volumes, rather deficient in his understanding of the traditions that he attacked. For example, in his view, the church fathers tritheistically identified God as consisting in “three invisible” or “incorporeal entities,” a reading of the sources that appears not to understand that language of hypostasis, as debated by the fathers, originally synonymous with ousia, that was later specified to serve in contrast to ousia in trinitarian formulae. Servetus’s critique assumes a virtual equation of substance, essence, and person and appears to miss the point of Latin trinitarianism that the three persons or subsistences were one res.

The translation is a welcome addition to the literature of early-modern theology and philosophy. We can hope that it leads to further scholarship both on Servetus and to the variant trends in early-modern thought that he represented.