Not distracted in his wits

From How The Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman. Page 2. A nation and people at the cusp of one of those moments of astonishing cultural efflorescence which happens occasionally. At the hinge of the Scottish Enlightenment, ancient passions still abided.

Sixteen hundred ninety-six would be a fatal year for another kind of transgressor. August had been a cold month, in fact it had been raining and freezing all summer. As the Tron Church struck eight o’clock, four young men were hurrying past, huddled against the cold. One was John Neilson, law clerk in the Court of Session, aged nineteen; the next Patrick Midletoyne or Middleton, aged twenty, a student at the College of Edinburgh. With them were Thomas Aikenhead, almost nineteen, a theology student, and John Potter, also a university student at the tender age of thirteen. We do not know for certain, but they may have been coming from Cleriheugh’s Tavern, a favorite neighborhood haunt for students, law clerks, and members of the legal profession.

As they passed the church, Aikenhead shivered from the cold wind blustering around them. He turned and remarked to the others, “I wish right now I were in the place Ezra called hell, to warm myself there.” Again, it is not known whether any of the other lads laughed at his little joke. But the next day one of them, or another of their circle, informed the kirk authorities of what Aikenhead had said.

Aikenhead’s joke turned out to be no laughing matter. Other students revealed that, in between theology classes, Thomas Aikenhead had been systematically ridiculing the Christian faith. He had told astonished listeners that the Bible was not in fact the literal Word of God but the invention of the prophet Ezra—“Ezra’s romances,” as he called it. He asserted that Jesus had performed no actual miracles, that the raising of Lazarus and curing the blind had all been cheap magic tricks to hoodwink the Apostles, whom he called “a company of silly witless fishermen.” He said the story of Christ’s Resurrection was a myth, as was the doctrine of Redemption. As for the Old Testament, Aikenhead had said that if Moses had actually existed at all, he had been a better politician and better magician than Jesus (all those plagues of frogs and burning staffs and bushes and so forth), while the founder of Islam, Mohammed, had been better than either.

All this would have been horrifying and insulting for a believing Presbyterian to listen to, but Aikenhead had expounded larger issues as well. He claimed that God, nature, and the world were one, and had existed since eternity. Aikenhead had opened the door to a kind of pantheism; in other words, the Genesis notion of a divine Creator, who stood outside nature and “time, was a myth.

Maybe Aikenhead had been bored. Maybe the theology student was merely showing off his ability to play fast and loose with issues that others treated with reverential care. The “stunned silence and dumbfounded looks of his listeners must have been very gratifying to a young man who, at the ripe old age of eighteen, believed he knew it all. But the authorities were not amused. The truly damning evidence against Aikenhead came from his friend Mungo Craig, aged twenty-one, who said that he had heard Aikenhead say that Jesus Christ Himself was an impostor. When the Lord Advocate, the Scottish equivalent of attorney general, heard this, he decided that Aikenhead’s remarks constituted blasphemy as defined by an act of Parliament in 1695, which decreed that a person “not distracted in his wits” who railed or cursed against God or persons of the Trinity was to be punished with death.