THE SOZZINI FAMILY
In Italy the Reformation had never been successful. It could not be. In
the first place, the people of the south did not take their religion
seriously enough to fight about it and in the second place, the close
proximity of Rome, the center of a particularly well equipped office of
the Inquisition, made indulgence in private opinions a dangerous and
costly pastime.
But, of course, among all the thousands of humanists who populated the
peninsula, there were bound to be a few black sheep who cared a great
deal more for the good opinion of Aristotle than for that of Saint
Chrysostom. Those good people, however, were given many opportunities
to get rid of their surplus spiritual energy. There were clubs and
coffee-houses and discreet salons where men and women could give vent to
their intellectual enthusiasm without upsetting empires. All of which was
very pleasant and restful. And besides, wasn’t all life a compromise?
Hadn’t it always been a compromise? Would it not in all likelihood be a
compromise until the end of time?
Why get excited about such a small detail as one’s faith?
After these few introductory remarks, the reader will surely not expect
to hear a loud fanfaronade or the firing of guns when our next two heroes
make their appearance. For they are soft-spoken gentlemen, and go about
their business in a dignified and pleasant way.
In the end, they are to do more to upset the dogmatic tyranny under
which the world had suffered for such a long time than a whole army of
noisy reformers. But that is one of those curious things which no one
can foresee. They happen. We are grateful. But how it comes about, that,
alas, is something which we do not fully understand.
The name of these two quiet workmen in the vineyard of reason was Sozzini.
They were uncle and nephew.
For some unknown reason, the older man, Lelio Francesco, spelled his name
with one “z” and the younger, Fausto Paolo, spelled his with two “zs.”
But as they are both of them much better known by the Latinized form of
their name, Socinius, than by the Italian Sozzini, we can leave that
detail to the grammarians and etymologists.
As far as their influence was concerned, the uncle was much less
important than the nephew. We shall, therefore, deal with him first and
speak of the nephew afterwards.
Lelio Sozini was a Siennese, the descendant of a race of bankers and
judges and himself destined for a career at the bar, via the University
of Bologna. But like so many of his contemporaries, he allowed himself
to slip into theology, stopped reading law, played with Greek and Hebrew
and Arabic and ended (as so often happens with people of his type) as a
rationalistic mystic—a man who was at once very much of this world and
yet never quite of it. This sounds complicated. But those who understand
what I mean will understand without any further explanation, and the
others would not understand, no matter what I said.
His father, however, seems to have had a suspicion that the son might
amount to something in the world of letters. He gave his boy a check and
bade him go forth and see whatever there was to be seen. And so Lelio
left Sienna and during the next ten years, he traveled from Venice to
Geneva and from Geneva to Zürich and from Zürich to Wittenberg and then
to London and then to Prague and then to Vienna and then to Cracow,
spending a few months or years in every town and hamlet where he hoped
to find interesting company and might be able to learn something new
and interesting. It was an age when people talked religion just as
incessantly as today they talk business. Lelio must have collected a
strange assortment of ideas and by keeping his ears open he was soon
familiar with every heresy between the Mediterranean and the Baltic.
When, however, he carried himself and his intellectual luggage to
Geneva, he was received politely but none too cordially. The pale eyes
of Calvin looked upon this Italian visitor with grave suspicion. He was
a distinguished young man of excellent family and not a poor, friendless
wanderer like Servetus. It was said, however, that he had Servetian
inclinations. And that was most disturbing. The case for or against the
Trinity, so Calvin thought, had been definitely settled when the Spanish
heretic was burned. On the contrary! The fate of Servetus had become a
subject of conversation from Madrid to Stockholm, and serious-minded
people all over the world were beginning to take the side of the
anti-trinitarian. But that was not all. They were using Gutenberg’s
devilish invention to spread their views broadcast and being at a safe
distance from Geneva they were often far from complimentary in their
remarks.
Only a short while before a very learned tract had appeared which
contained everything the fathers of the Church had ever said or written
upon the subject of persecuting and punishing heretics. It had an
instantaneous and enormous sale among those who “hated God,” as Calvin
said, or who “hated Calvin,” as they themselves protested. Calvin had
let it be known that he would like to have a personal interview with the
author of this precious booklet. But the author, anticipating such a
request, had wisely omitted his name from the title-page.
It was said that he was called Sebastian Castellio, that he had been a
teacher in one of the Geneva high schools and that his moderate views
upon diverse theological enormities had gained him the hatred of Calvin
and the approbation of Montaigne. No one, however, could prove this. It
was mere hearsay. But where one had gone before, others might follow.
Calvin, therefore, was distantly polite to Sozzini, but suggested that
the mild air of Basel would suit his Siennese friend much better than the
damp climate of Savoy and heartily bade him Godspeed when he started on
his way to the famous old Erasmian stronghold.
Fortunately for Calvin, the Sozzini family soon afterwards fell under the
suspicion of the Inquisition, Lelio was deprived of his funds and falling
ill of a fever, he died in Zürich at the age of only thirty-seven.
Whatever joy his untimely demise may have caused in Geneva, it was
short-lived.
For Lelio, besides a widow and several trunks of notes, left a nephew,
who not only fell heir to his uncle’s unpublished manuscripts but soon
gained for himself the reputation of being even more of a Servetus
enthusiast than his uncle had been.
During his younger years, Faustus Socinius had traveled almost as
extensively as the older Lelio. His grandfather had left him a small
estate and as he did not marry until he was nearly fifty, he was able to
devote all his time to his favorite subject, theology.
For a short while he seems to have been in business in Lyons.
What sort of a salesman he made, I do not know, but his experience in
buying and selling and dealing in concrete commodities rather than
spiritual values seems to have strengthened him in his conviction that
very little is ever gained by killing a competitor or losing one’s temper
if the other man has the better of a deal. And as long as he lived,
he showed himself possessed of that sober common sense which is often
found in a counting-house but is very rarely part of the curriculum of a
religious seminary.
In the year 1563 Faustus returned to Italy. On his way home he visited
Geneva. It does not appear that he ever paid his respects to the local
patriarch. Besides, Calvin was a very sick man at that time. The visit
from a member of the Sozzini family would only have disturbed him.
The next dozen years, young Socinius spent in the service of Isabella de’
Medici. But in the year 1576 this lady, after a few days of matrimonial
bliss, was murdered by her husband, Paolo Orsini. Thereupon Socinius
resigned, left Italy for good and went to Basel to translate the Psalms
into colloquial Italian and write a book on Jesus.
Faustus, so it appeared from his writings, was a careful man. In the
first place, he was very deaf and such people are by nature cautious.
In the second place, he derived his income from certain estates situated
on the other side of the Alps and the Tuscan authorities had given him
a hint that it might be just as well for one suspected of “Lutheran
leanings” not to be too bold while dealing with subjects which were held
in disfavor by the Inquisition. Hence he used a number of pseudonyms
and never printed a book unless it had been passed upon by a number of
friends and had been declared to be fairly safe.
Thus it happened that his books were not placed on the Index. It also
happened that a copy of his life of Jesus was carried all the way to
Transylvania and there fell into the hands of another liberal-minded
Italian, the private physician of a number of Milanese and Florentine
ladies who had married into the Polish and Transylvanian nobility.
Transylvania in those days was the “far east” of Europe. A wilderness
until the early part of the twelfth century, it had been used as a
convenient home for the surplus population of Germany. The hard working
Saxon peasants had turned this fertile land into a prosperous and well
regulated little country with cities and schools and an occasional
university. But it remained a country far removed from the main roads of
travel and trade. Hence it had always been a favorite place of residence
for those who for one reason or another preferred to keep a few miles of
marsh and mountain between themselves and the henchmen of the Inquisition.
As for Poland, this unfortunate country has for so many centuries been
associated with the general idea of reaction and jingoism that it will
come as an agreeable surprise to many of my readers when I tell them that
during the first half of the sixteenth century, it was a veritable asylum
for all those who in other parts of Europe suffered on account of their
religious convictions.
This unexpected state of affairs had been brought about in a typically
Polish fashion.
That the Republic for quite a long time had been the most scandalously
mismanaged country of the entire continent was even then a generally
known fact. The extent, however, to which the higher clergy had neglected
their duties was not appreciated quite so clearly in those days when
dissolute bishops and drunken village priests were the common affliction
of all western nations.
But during the latter half of the fifteenth century it was noticed that
the number of Polish students in the different German universities was
beginning to increase at a rate of speed which caused great concern
among the authorities of Wittenberg and Leipzig. They began to ask
questions. And then it developed that the ancient Polish academy of
Cracow, administered by the Polish church, had been allowed to fall into
such a state of utter decay that the poor Polanders were forced to go
abroad for their education or do without. A little later, when the Teuton
universities fell under the spell of the new doctrines, the bright young
men from Warsaw and Radom and Czenstochowa quite naturally followed suit.
And when they returned to their home towns, they did so as full-fledged
Lutherans.
At that early stage of the Reformation it would have been quite easy for
the king and the nobility and the clergy to stamp out this epidemic of
erroneous opinions. But such a step would have obliged the rulers of the
republic to unite upon a definite and common policy and that of course
was directly in contradiction to the most hallowed traditions of this
strange country where a single dissenting vote could upset a law which
had the support of all the other members of the diet.
And when (as happened shortly afterwards) it appeared that the religion
of the famous Wittenberg professor carried with it a by-product of an
economic nature, consisting of the confiscation of all Church property,
the Boleslauses and the Wladislauses and the other knights, counts,
barons, princes and dukes who populated the fertile plains between the
Baltic and the Black Sea began to show a decided leaning towards a faith
which meant money in their pockets.
The unholy scramble for monastic real estate which followed upon the
discovery caused one of those famous “interims” with which the Poles,
since time immemorial, have tried to stave off the day of reckoning.
During such periods all authority came to a standstill and the
Protestants made such a good use of their opportunity that in less than
a year they had established churches of their own in every part of the
kingdom.
Eventually of course the incessant theological haggling of the new
ministers drove the peasants back into the arms of the Church and Poland
once more became one of the strongholds of a most uncompromising form
of Catholicism. But during the latter half of the sixteenth century,
the country enjoyed complete religious license. When the Catholics and
Protestants of western Europe began their war of extermination upon the
Anabaptists, it was a foregone conclusion that the survivors should flee
eastward and should eventually settle down along the banks of the Vistula
and it was then that Doctor Blandrata got hold of Socinius’ book on Jesus
and expressed a wish to make the author’s acquaintance.
Giorgio Blandrata was an Italian, a physician and a man of parts. He
had graduated at the University of Montpellier and had been remarkably
successful as a woman’s specialist. First and last he was a good deal of
a scoundrel, but a clever one. Like so many doctors of his time (think of
Rabelais and Servetus) he was as much of a theologian as a neurologist
and frequently played one rôle out against the other. For example, he
cured the Queen Dowager of Poland, Bona Sforza (widow of King Sigismund),
so successfully of the obsession that those who doubted the Trinity were
wrong, that she repented of her errors and thereafter only executed those
who held the doctrine of the Trinity to be true.
The good queen, alas, was gone (murdered by one of her lovers) but two
of her daughters had married local noblemen and as their medical adviser,
Blandrata exercised a great deal of influence upon the politics of his
adopted land. He knew that the country was ripe for civil war and that
it would happen very soon unless something be done to make an end to the
everlasting religious quarrels. Wherefore he set to work to bring about
a truce between the different opposing sects. But for this purpose he
needed some one more skilled in the intricacies of a religious debate
than he was himself. Then he had an inspiration. The author of the life
of Jesus was his man.
He sent Socinius a letter and asked him to come east.
Unfortunately when Socinius reached Transylvania the private life of
Blandrata had just led to so grave a public scandal that the Italian had
been forced to resign and leave for parts unknown. Socinius, however,
remained in this far away land, married a Polish girl and died in his
adopted country in the year 1604.
These last two decades of his life proved to be the most interesting
period of his career. For it was then that he gave a concrete expression
to his ideas upon the subject of tolerance.
They are to be found in the so-called “Catechism of Rakow,” a document
which Socinius composed as a sort of common constitution for all those
who meant well by this world and wished to make an end to future
sectarian strife.
The latter half of the sixteenth century was an era of catechism,
confessions of faith, credos and creeds. People were writing them
in Germany and in Switzerland and in France and in Holland and in
Denmark. But everywhere these carelessly printed little booklets gave
expression to the ghastly belief that they (and they alone) contained
the real Truth with a great big capital T and that it was the duty of
all authorities who had solemnly pledged themselves to uphold this one
particular form of Truth with a great big capital T to punish with the
sword and the gallows and the stake those who willfully remained faithful
to a different sort of truth (which was only written with a small t and
therefore was of an inferior quality).
The Socinian confession of faith breathed an entirely different spirit.
It began by the flat statement that it was not the intention of those who
had signed this document to quarrel with anybody else.
“With good reason,” it continued, “many pious people complain that the
various confessions and catechisms which have hitherto been published and
which the different churches are now publishing are apples of discord
among the Christians because they all try to impose certain principles
upon people’s conscience and to consider those who disagree with them as
heretics.”
Thereupon it denied in the most formal way that it was the intention of
the Socinians to proscribe or oppress any one else on account of his
religious convictions and turning to humanity in general, it made the
following appeal:
“Let each one be free to judge of his own religion, for this is the rule
set forth by the New Testament and by the example of the earliest church.
Who are we, miserable people, that we would smother and extinguish in
others the fire of divine spirit which God has kindled in them? Have
any of us a monopoly of the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures? Why do
we not remember that our only master is Jesus Christ and that we are
all brothers and that to no one has been given power over the souls of
others? It may be that one of our brothers is more learned than the
others, yet in regard to liberty and the relationship with Christ we are
all equal.”
All this was very fine and very wonderful, but it was said three hundred
years ahead of the times. Neither the Socinians nor any of the other
Protestant sects could in the long run hope to hold their own in this
turbulent part of the world. The counter-reformation had begun in all
seriousness. Veritable hordes of Jesuit fathers were beginning to be
turned loose upon the lost provinces. While they worked, the Protestants
quarreled. Soon the people of the eastern frontier were back within
the fold of Rome. Today the traveler who visits these distant parts of
civilized Europe would hardly guess that, once upon a time, they were
a stronghold of the most advanced and liberal thought of the age. Nor
would he suspect that somewhere among those dreary Lithuanian hills there
lies a village where the world was for the first time presented with a
definite program for a practical system of tolerance.
Driven by idle curiosity, I took a morning off recently and went to the
library and read through the index of all our most popular text-books
out of which the youth of our country learns the story of the past. Not
a single one mentioned Socinianism or the Sozzinis. They all jumped from
Social Democrats to Sophia of Hanover and from Sobieski to Saracens. The
usual leaders of the great religious revolution were there, including
Oecolampadius and the lesser lights.
One volume only contained a reference to the two great Siennese humanists
but they appeared as a vague appendix to something Luther or Calvin had
said or done.
It is dangerous to make predictions, but I have a suspicion that in the
popular histories of three hundred years hence, all this will have been
changed and that the Sozzinis shall enjoy the luxury of a little chapter
of their own and that the traditional heroes of the Reformation shall be
relegated to the bottom of the page.
They have the sort of names that look terribly imposing in footnotes.