Scioppius was a German humanist of the elder Italianated type, an

elegant Latin stylist, who commented indifferently on the _Priapeia_ and

the Stoic philosophy. He abjured Protestantism, and like Muretus, sold

his pen to Rome. The Jesuits, in his pompous panegyric, were first

saluted as 'the praetorian cohort of the camp of God.' Afterwards, when

he quarreled with their Order, he showered invectives on them in the

manner of a Poggio or Filelfo. The literary infamies of the fifteenth

century reappeared in his polemical attacks on Protestants, and in his

satires upon Scaliger. Yet he was a man of versatile talents and

considerable erudition. It must be mentioned in his honor that he

visited Campanella in his prison, and exerted himself for his

liberation. Campanella dedicated his _Atheismus Triumphatus_ to

Scioppius, calling him 'the dawn-star of our age.' Schoppe was also the

first credible authority to warn Sarpi of the imminent peril he ran from

Roman hired assassins, as I hope to relate in my chapter upon Sarpi's

life. This man's letter to his friend is the single trustworthy document

which we possess regarding the last hours of Bruno. Its inaccuracies on

minor points may be held to corroborate his testimony.

Scioppius refers to Bruno's early heresies on Transubstantiation and the

Virginity of Mary. He alludes to the _Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante_,

as though it had been a libel on the Pope.[118]

[Footnote 118: 'Londinam perfectus, libellum istic edit de Bestia

triumphante, h.e. de Papa. quem vestri honoris causa bestiam appellare

solent.']

He then enumerates Bruno's heterodox opinions, which had been recited

in the public condemnation pronounced on the heresiarch. 'Horrible and

most utterly absurd are the views he entertained, as, for example, that

there are innumerable worlds; that the soul migrates from body to body,

yea into another world, and that one soul can inform two bodies; that

magic is good and lawful; that the Holy Spirit is nothing but the Soul

of the World, which Moses meant when he wrote that it brooded on the

waters; that the world has existed from eternity; that Moses wrought his

miracles by magic, being more versed therein than the Egyptians, and

that he composed his own laws; that the Holy Scriptures are a dream, and

that the devils will be saved; that only the Jews descend from Adam and

Eve, the rest of men from that pair whom God created earlier; that

Christ is not God, but that he was an eminent magician who deluded

mankind, and was therefore rightly hanged, not crucified; that the

prophets and Apostles were men of naught, magicians, and for the most

part hanged: in short, without detailing all the monstrosities in which

his books abound, and which he maintained in conversation, it may be

summed up in one word that he defended every error that has been

advanced by pagan philosophers or by heretics of earlier and present

times.' Accepting this list as tolerably faithful to the terms of

Bruno's sentence, heard by Scioppius in the hall of Minerva, we can see

how Mocenigo's accusation had been verified by reference to his

published works. The _De Monade_ and _De Triplici_ contain enough

heterodoxy to substantiate each point.

On February 9, Bruno was brought before the Holy Office at S. Maria

sopra Minerva. In the presence of assembled Cardinals, theologians, and

civil magistrates, his heresies were first recited. Then he was

excommunicated, and degraded from his priestly and monastic offices.

Lastly, he was handed over to the secular arm, 'to be punished with all

clemency and without effusion of blood.' This meant in plain language to

be burned alive. Thereupon Bruno uttered the memorable and monumental

words: 'Peradventure ye pronounce this sentence on me with a greater

fear than I receive it.' They were the last words he spoke in public. He

was removed to the prisons of the State, where he remained eight days,

in order that he might have time to repent. But he continued obdurate.

Being an apostate priest and a relapsed heretic, he could hope for no

remission of his sentence. Therefore, on February 17, he marched to a

certain and horrible death. The stake was built up on the Campo di

Fiora. Just before the wood was set on fire, they offered him the

crucifix.[119] He turned his face away from it in stern disdain. It was

not Christ but his own soul, wherein he believed the Diety resided, that

sustained Bruno at the supreme moment.

[Footnote 119: We may remember that while a novice at Naples, he first

got into trouble by keeping the crucifix as the only religious symbol

which he respected, when he parted with images of saints.]

No cry, no groan, escaped his lips. Thus, as Scioppius affectedly

remarked, 'he perished miserably in flames, and went to report in those

other worlds of his imagination, how blasphemous and impious men are

handled by the Romans.'

Whatever we may think of the good taste of Bruno's sarcasms upon the

faith in which he had been bred--and it is certain that he never rightly

apprehended Christianity in its essence--there is no doubt he died a

valiant martyr to the truth as he conceived it. 'His death like that of

Paleario, Carnesecchi, and so many more, no less than countless exiles

suffered for religious causes, are a proof that in Italy men had begun

to recognize their obligation to a faith, the duty of obedience to a

thought: an immense progress, not sufficiently appreciated even by

modern historians.'[120] Bruno was a hero in the battle for the freedom

of the conscience, for the right of man to think and speak in

liberty.[121]

[Footnote 120: These pregnant words are in Berti's _Vita di G.B._ p.

299.]

[Footnote 121: He well deserves this name, in spite of his recantation

at Venice; for it seems incredible that he could not by concessions have

purchased his life. As Breugger wrote with brutal crudity to Kepler:

'What profit did he gain by enduring such torments? If there were no God

to punish crimes, as he believed, could he not have pretended any thing

to save his life?' We may add that the alternative to death for a

relapsed apostate was perpetual incarceration; and seven years of prison

may well have made Bruno prefer death with honor.]

Just five years before this memorable 17th of February, Tasso had passed

quietly away in S. Onofrio. 'How dissimilar in genius and fortune,'

exclaims Berti, 'were these men, though born under the same skies,

though in childhood they breathed the same air! Tasso a Christian and

poet of the cross; Bruno hostile to all religious symbols. The one,

tired and disillusioned of the world, ends his days in the repose of the

convent; the other sets out from the convent to expire upon the

scaffold, turning his eyes away from the crucifix.'[122] And yet how

much alike in some important circumstances of their lives were these two

men! Both wanderers, possessed by that spirit of vagrancy which is the

outward expression of an inner restlessness. The unfrocked friar, the

courtier out of service, had no home in Italy. Both were pursued by an

oestrum corresponding to the intellectual perturbations which closed the

sixteenth century, so different from the idyllic calm that rested upon

Ariosto and the artists of its opening years. Sufficient justice has not

yet been done in history to the Italian wanderers and exiles of this

period, men who carried the spirit of the Renaissance abroad, after the

Renaissance had ended in Italy, to the extremest verges of the civilized

world. An enumeration of their names, an examination of their services

to modern thought, would show how puissant was the intellectual

influence of Italy in that period of her political decadence.[123]

[Footnote 122: _op. cit._ p. 70.]

[Footnote 123: Both Berti and Quinet have made similar remarks, which,

indeed, force themselves upon a student of the sixteenth century.]

Bruno has to be treated from two distinct but interdependent points of

view--in his relation to contemporary thought and the Renaissance; and

in his relation to the evolution of modern philosophy--as the critic of

mediaeval speculation and the champion of sixteenth-century enthusiasm;

and also as the precursor of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Schelling,

Hegel, Darwin.

From the former of these two points of view Bruno appears before us as

the man who most vitally and comprehensively grasped the leading

tendencies of his age in their intellectual essence. He left behind him

the mediaeval conception of an extra-mundane God, creating a finite

world, of which this globe is the center, and the principal episode in

the history of which is the series of events from the Fall, through the

Incarnation and Crucifixion, to the Last Judgment.[124] He substituted

the conception of an ever-living, ever-acting, ever-self-effectuating

God, immanent in an infinite universe, to the contemplation of whose

attributes the mind of man ascends by study of Nature and interrogation

of his conscience. The rehabilitation of the physical world and of

humanity as part of its order, which the Renaissance had already

indirectly effected through the medium of arts and literature and modes

of life, found in Bruno an impassioned metaphysical supporter. He

divinized Nature, not by degrading the Deity to matter, but by lifting

matter to participation in the divine existence. The Renaissance had

proclaimed the dignity of man considered as a mundane creature, and not

in his relation to a hypothetical other-world. It abundantly manifested

the beauty and the joy afforded by existence on this planet, and

laughingly discarded past theological determinations to the contrary of

its new Gospel. Bruno undertook the systematization of Renaissance

intuitions; declared the divine reality of Nature and of man;

demonstrated that we cannot speculate God, cannot think ourselves,

cannot envisage the universe, except under the form of one living,

infinite, eternal, divinely-sustained and soul-penetrated complex. He

repudiated authority of every sort, refusing to acknowledge the decrees

of the Church, freely criticising past philosophers, availing himself of

all that seemed to him substantial in their speculations, but appealing

in the last resort to that inner witness, that light of reason, which

corresponds in the mental order to conscience in the moral. As he

deified Nature, so he emancipated man as forming with Nature an integral

part of the supreme Being. He was led upon this path to combat Aristotle

and to satirize Christian beliefs, with a subtlety of scholastic

argumentation and an acerbity of rhetoric that now pass for antiquated.

Much that is obsolete in his writings must be referred to the polemical

necessities of an age enthralled by peripatetic conceptions, and

saturated with the ecclesiastical divinity of the schoolmen.

[Footnote 124: This theological conception of history inspired the

sacred drama of the Middle Ages, known to us as Cyclical Miracle Plays.]

These forces of the philosophy he sought to supersede, had to be

attacked with their own weapons and by methods adapted to the spirit of

his age. Similar judgment may be passed upon his championship of the

Copernican system. That system was the pivot of his metaphysic, the

revelation to which he owed his own conception of the universe. His

strenuous and ingenious endeavors to prove its veracity, his elaborate

and often-repeated refutations of the Ptolemaic theory, appear to modern

minds superfluous. But we must remember what a deeply-penetrating,

widely-working revolution Copernicus effected in cosmology, how he

dislocated the whole fabric upon which Catholic theology rested, how new

and unintelligible his doctrine then seemed, and what vast horizons he

opened for speculation on the destinies of man. Bruno was the first

fully to grasp the importance of the Copernican hypothesis, to perceive

its issues and to adapt it to the formation of a new ontology.

Copernicus, though he proclaimed the central position of the sun in our

system, had not ventured to maintain the infinity of the universe. For

him, as for the elder physicists, there remained a sphere of fixed stars

inclosing the world perceived by our senses within walls of crystal.

Bruno broke those walls, and boldly asserted the now recognized

existence of numberless worlds in space illimitable. His originality

lies in the clear and comprehensive notion he formed of the Copernican

discovery, and in his application of its corollaries to the Renaissance

apocalypse of deified nature and emancipated man. The deductions he drew

were so manifold and so acute that they enabled him to forecast the

course which human thought has followed in all provinces of speculation.

This leads us to consider how Bruno is related to modern science and

philosophy. The main point seems to be that he obtained a vivid mental

picture (_Vorstellung_) of the physical universe, differing but little

in essentials from that which has now come to be generally accepted. In

reasoning from this concept as a starting-point, he formed opinions upon

problems of theology, ontology, biology and psychology, which placed him

out of harmony with medaeival thought, and in agreement with the thought

of our own time. Why this was so, can easily be explained. Bruno, first

of all philosophers, adapted science, in the modern sense of that term,

to metaphysic. He was the first to perceive that a revolution in our

conception of the material universe, so momentous as that effected by

Copernicus, necessitated a new theology and a new philosophical method.

Man had ceased to be the center of all things; this globe was no longer

'the hub of the universe,' but a small speck floating on infinity. The

Christian scheme of the Fall and the Redemption, if not absolutely

incompatible with the new cosmology was rendered by it less conceivable

in any literal sense. Some of the main points on which the early

Christians based their faith, and which had hardened into dogmas

through the course of centuries--such, for instance, as the Ascension

and the Second Advent--ceased to have their old significance. In a world

where there was neither up nor down, the translation of a corporeal

Deity to some place above the clouds, whence he would descend to judge

men at the last day, had only a grotesque or a symbolic meaning; whereas

to the first disciples, imbued with theories of a fixed celestial

sphere, it presented a solemn and apparently well-founded expectation.

The fundamental doctrine of the Incarnation, in like manner, lost

intelligibility and value, when God had to be thought no longer as the

Creator of a finite cosmos, but as a Being commensurate with infinity.

It was clear to a mind so acute as Bruno's that the dogmas of the Church

were correlated to a view of the world which had been superseded; and he

drew the logical inference that they were at bottom but poetical and

popular adumbrations of the Deity in terms concordant with erroneous

physical notions. Aristotle and Ptolemy, the masters of philosophy and

cosmography based upon a theory of the universe as finite and

circumscribed within fixed limits, lent admirable aid to the theological

constructions of the Middle Ages. The Church, adopting their science,

gave metaphysical and logical consistency to those earlier poetical and

popular conceptions of the religious sense. The _naif_ hopes and

romantic mythologies of the first Christians stiffened into syllogisms

and ossified in the huge fabric of the _Summa_. But Aristotle and

Ptolemy were now dethroned. Bruno, in a far truer sense than Democritus

before him,

extra

Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi.

Bolder even than Copernicus, and nearer in his intuition to the truth,

he denied that the universe had 'flaming walls' or any walls at all.

That 'immaginata circonferenza,' 'quella margine immaginata del cielo,'

on which antique science and Christian theology alike reposed, was the

object of his ceaseless satire, his oft-repeated polemic. What, then,

rendered Bruno the precursor of modern thought in its various

manifestations, was that he grasped the fundamental truth upon which

modern science rests, and foresaw the conclusions which must be drawn

from it. He speculated boldly, incoherently, vehemently; but he

speculated with a clear conception of the universe, as we still

apprehend it. Through the course of three centuries we have been engaged

in verifying the guesses, deepening, broadening and solidifying the

hypotheses, which Bruno's extension of the Copernican theory, and his

application of it to pure thought, suggested to his penetrating and

audacious intellect, Bruno was convinced that religion in its higher

essence would not suffer from the new philosophy. Larger horizons

extended before the human intellect. The soul expanded in more

exhilarating regions than the old theologies had offered. The sense of

the Divine in Nature, instead of dwindling down to atheism, received

fresh stimulus from the immeasurable prospect of an infinite and living

universe. Bruno, even more than Spinoza, was a God-intoxicated man. The

inebriation of the Renaissance, inspired by golden visions of truth and

knowledge close within man's grasp, inflamed with joy at escaping from

out-worn wearying formula into what appeared to be the simple intuition

of an everlasting verity, pulses through all his utterances. He has the

same cherubic confidence in the renascent age, that charms us in the

work of Rabelais. The slow, painful, often thwarted, ever more dubious

elaboration of modern metaphysic in _rapport_ with modern science--that

process which, after completing the cycle of all knowledge and sounding

the fathomless depth of all ignorance, has left us in grave

disillusionment and sturdy patience--swam before Bruno in a rapturous

vision. The Inquisition and the stake put an end abruptly to his dream.

But the dream was so golden, so divine, that it was worth the pangs of

martyrdom. Can we say the same for Hegel's system, or for Schopenhauers

or for the encyclopaedic ingenuity of Herbert Spencer?

Bruno imagined the universe as infinite space, filled with ether, in

which an infinite number of worlds, or solar systems resembling our own,

composed of similar materials and inhabited by countless living

creatures, move with freedom. The whole of this infinite and complex

cosmos he conceived to be animated by a single principle of thought and

life. This indwelling force, or God, he described in Platonic

phraseology sometimes as the Anima Mundi, sometimes as the Artificer,

who by working from within molds infinite substance into an infinity of

finite modes. Though we are compelled to think of the world under the

two categories of spirit and matter, these apparently contradictory

constituents are forever reconciled and harmonized in the divine

existence, whereof illimitable activity, illimitable volition, and

illimitable potentiality are correlated and reciprocally necessary

terms. In Aristotelian language, Bruno assumed infinite form and

infinite matter as movements of an eternal process, by which the

infinite unity manifests itself in concrete reality. This being the

case, it follows that nothing exists which has not life, and is not part

of God. The universe itself is one immeasurable animal, or animated

Being. The solar systems are huge animals; the globes are lesser

animals; and so forth down to the monad of molecular cohesion. As the

universe is infinite and eternal, motion, place and time do not qualify

it; these are terms applicable only to the finite parts of which it is

composed. For the same reason nothing in the universe can perish. What

we call birth and death, generation and dissolution, is only the passage

of the infinite, and homogeneous entity through successive phases of

finite and differentiated existence; this continuous process of exchange

and transformation being stimulated and sustained by attraction and

repulsion, properties of the indwelling divine soul aiming at

self-realization.

Having formed this conception, Bruno supported it by metaphysical

demonstration, and deduced conclusions bearing on psychology, religion,

ethics. Much of his polemic was directed against the deeply-rooted

notion of a finite world derived from Aristotle. Much was devoted to the

proof of the Copernican discovery. Orthodox theology was indirectly

combated or plausibly caressed. There are consequently many pages in his

dialogues which do not interest a modern reader, seeing that we have

outlived the conditions of thought that rendered them important. In the

process of his argument, he established the theory of a philosophical

belief, a religion of religions, or 'religione della mente,' as he

phrased it, prior to and comprehensive of all historical creeds. He

speculated, as probabilities, the transmigration of souls, and the

interchangeability of types in living creatures. He further postulated a

concordance between the order of thought and the order of existence in

the universe, and inclined to the doctrine of necessity in morals. Bruno

thus obtained _per saltum_ a prospect over the whole domain of knowledge

subsequently traversed by rationalism in metaphysics, theology and

ethics. In the course of these demonstrations and deductions he

anticipated Descartes' position of the identity of mind and being. He

supplied Spinoza with the substance of his reasoned pantheism; Leibnitz

with his theory of monadism and pre-established harmony. He laid down

Hegel's doctrine of contraries, and perceived that thought was a

dialectic process. The modern theory of evolution was enunciated by him

in pretty plain terms. He had grasped the physical law of the

conservation of energy. He solved the problem of evil by defining it to

be a relative condition of imperfect development. He denied that

Paradise or a Golden Age is possible for man, or that, if possible, it

can be considered higher in the moral scale than organic struggle toward

completion by reconciliation of opposites through pain and labor. He

sketched in outline the comparative study of religions, which is now

beginning to be recognized as the proper basis for theology. Finally, he

had a firm and vital hold upon that supreme speculation of the universe,

considered no longer as the battle-ground of dual principles, or as the

finite fabric of an almighty designer, but as the self-effectuation of

an infinite unity, appearing to our intelligence as spirit and

matter--that speculation which in one shape or another controls the

course of modern thought.[125]

[Footnote 125: It was my intention to support the statements in this

paragraph by translating the passages which seem to me to justify them;

and I had gone so far as to make English versions of some twenty pages

in length, when I found that this material would overweight my book. A

study of Bruno as the great precursor of modern thought in its more

poetical and widely synthetic speculation must be left for a separate

essay. Here I may remark that the most faithful and pithily condensed

abstract of Bruno's philosophy is contained in Goethe's poem _Proemium

zu Gott und Welt_. Yet this poem expresses Goethe's thought, and it is

doubtful whether Goethe had studied Bruno except in the work of his

disciple Spinoza.]

It must not be supposed that Bruno apprehended these points with

distinctness, or that he expressed them precisely in the forms with

which we are familiar. The hackneyed metaphor of a Pisgah view across

the promised land applies to him with singular propriety. Moreover, as

an acute critic has remarked, things old and new are so curiously

blended in his writings that what at first sight appears modern, is

often found upon reflection to be antique, and what is couched in

obsolete scholastic terminology, turns out upon analysis to contain the

germs of advanced theories.[126] The peculiar forms adapted for the

exposition of his thoughts contribute to the difficulty of obtaining a

methodical view of Bruno's philosophy. It has, therefore, been disputed

whether he was a pantheist or an atheist, a materialist or a

spiritualist, a mystic or an agnostic. No one would have contended more

earnestly than Bruno himself, that the sage can hold each and all of

these apparent contradictions together, with the exception of atheism;

which last is a simple impossibility. The fragmentary and impassioned

exposition which Bruno gave to his opinions in a series of Italian

dialogues and Latin poems will not discourage those of his admirers who

estimate the conspicuous failure made by all elaborate system-builders

from Aristotle to Hegel. To fathom the mystery of the world, and to

express that mystery in terms of logic, is clearly beyond the faculty of

man. Philosophies that aim at universe-embracing, God-explaining,

nature-elucidating, man-illuminating, comprehensiveness, have justly,

therefore, become objects of suspicion. The utmost that man can do,

placed as he is at obvious disadvantages for obtaining a complete survey

of the whole, is to whet his intelligence upon confessedly insoluble

problems, to extend the sphere of his practical experience, to improve

his dominion over matter, to study the elevation of his moral nature,

and to encourage himself for positive achievements by the indulgence in

those glorious dreams from which regenerative creeds and inspiring

philosophies have sprung--

Still climbing after knowledge infinite,

And ever moving as the restless spheres.

[Footnote 126: Spaventa in his _Saggi di Critica_.]

Faith and poetry are the highest regions in which his spirit can

profitably move. The study of government, law, and social ethics, the

analysis of physical conditions to which he is subject, and over which

he has an undefined, though limited, control, form the practical sphere

of his intelligence. Bruno traversed these regions; and, forasmuch as

the outcome of his exploration was no system, but a congeries of poetic

visions, shrewd guesses, profound intuitions, and passionate

enthusiasms, bound together and sustained by a burning sense of the

Divine unity in nature and in man, we may be permitted to regard him as

more fortunate than those cloud-castle-builders whose classifications of

absolute existences are successively proved by the advance of relative

knowledge to be but catalogues of some few objects apprehended by the

vision of each partially-instructed age. We have, indeed, reason to

marvel how many of Bruno's intuitions have formed the stuff of later,

more elaborated systems, and still remain the best which these contain.

We have reason to wonder how many of his divinations have worked

themselves into the common fund of modern beliefs, and have become

philosophical truisms.

It is probable that if Bruno's career had not been cut short by the

dungeon and the stake at the early age of thirty-four, he might have

produced some final work in which his theories would have assumed a

formal shape. It is possible that the Vatican even now contains the

first sketch for such a studied exposition in the treatise on the Seven

Arts, which Giovanni Mocenigo handed over to the Inquisition, and which

the philosopher intended to dedicate to Clement VIII. But the loss of

this elaborated system is hardly to be regretted, except for the clearer

light it must have thrown upon the workings of the most illuminated

intellect in the sixteenth century. We know that it could not have

revealed to us the secret of things.

Bruno cast his thoughts in two molds: the dialogue, and Latin

hexameters. He was attracted to the latter by his early study of

Parmenides and Lucretius. The former seems to have been natural to the

man. We must not forget that he was a Neapolitan, accustomed from

childhood to the farces of his native land, vividly alive to the comic

aspects of existence, and joyously appreciative of reality. His first

known composition was a comedy, _Il Candelajo_; and something of the

drama can be traced in all those Italian compositions which distinguish

the period of his activity as an author in London. Lucian rather than

Plato or Cicero determined the form of his dialogue. An element of the

burlesque distinguishes his method of approaching religious and moral

problems in the _Spaccio della Bestia_, and the _Cavallo Pegaseo_. And

though he exchanged the manner of his model for more serious exposition

in the trio of metaphysical dialogues, named _La Cena delle Ceneri,

Della Causa_, and _Dell' Infinito Universo_, yet the irresistible

tendency to dramatic satire emerges even there in the description of

England and in the characters of the indispensable pedant buffoon. His

dialogue on the _Eroici Furori_ is sustained at a high pitch of aspiring

fervor. Mystical in its attempt to adumbrate the soul's thirst for truth

and beauty, it adopts the method of a running commentary upon poems, in

the manner of a discursive and fantastic _Vita Nuova_. In his Italian

style, Bruno owed much to the fashion set by Aretino. The study of

Aretino's comedies is apparent in _Il Candelajo_. The stringing together

of words and ideas in triplets, balanced by a second set of words and

ideas in antithetical triplets--this trick of rhetoric, which wearies a

modern reader of his prose, seems to have been copied straight from

Aretino. The coinage of fantastic titles, of which _Lo Spaccio della

Bestia Trionfante_ contributed in some appreciable degree to Bruno's

martyrdom, should be ascribed to the same influence. The source of these

literary affectations was a bad one. Aretino, Doni, and such folk were

no fit masters for Giordano Bruno even in so slight a matter as artistic

form. Yet, in this respect, he shared a corrupt taste which was common

to his generation, and proved how fully he represented the age in which

he lived. It is not improbable that the few contemporary readers of his

works, especially in euphuistic England, admired the gewgaws he so

plentifully scattered and rendered so brilliant by the coruscations of

his wit. When, however, the real divine oestrum descends upon him, he

discards those follies. Then his language, like his thought, is all his

own: sublime, impassioned, burning, turbid; instinct with a deep

volcanic fire of genuine enthusiasm. The thought is simple; the diction

direct; the attitude of mind and the turn of expression are singularly

living, surprisingly modern. We hear the man speak, as he spoke at Fulke

Greville's supper-party, as he spoke at Oxford, as he spoke before the

Sorbonne, as he might be speaking now. There is no air of literary

effort, no tincture of antiquated style, in these masculine utterances.

CHAPTER X.

FRA PAOLO SARPI.

Sarpi's Position in the History of Venice--Parents and

Boyhood--Entrance into the Order of the Servites--His Personal

Qualities--Achievements as a Scholar and Man of Science--His Life

among the Servites--In Bad Odor at Rome--Paul V. places Venice

under Interdict--Sarpi elected Theologian and Counselor of the

Republic--His Polemical Writings--Views on Church and State--The

Interdict Removed--Roman Vengeance--Sarpi attacked by Bravi--His

Wounds, Illness, Recovery--Subsequent History of the

Assassins--Further Attempts on Sarpi's Life--Sarpi's Political and

Historical Works--History of the Council of Trent--Sarpi's Attitude

toward Protestantism--His Judgment of the Jesuits--Sarpi's

Death--The Christian Stoic.

Fra Paolo was the son of Francesco Sarpi and Isabella Morelli, Venetians

of the humbler middle class. He was born in 1552, christened Pietro, and

nicknamed Pierino because of his diminutive stature. On entering the

Order of the Servites he adopted the religious name of Paolo, which he

subsequently rendered famous throughout Europe. Since he died in 1623,

Sarpi's life coincided with a period of supreme interest and manifold

vicissitudes in the decline of Venice. After the battle of Lepanto in

1571, he saw the nobles of S. Mark welcome their victorious admiral

Sebastiano Veniero and confer on him the honors of the Dogeship. In

1606, he aided the Republic to withstand the thunders of the Vatican

and defy the excommunication of a Pope. Eight years later he attended at

those councils of state which unmasked the conspiracy, known as

Bedmar's, to destroy Venice. In his early manhood Cyprus had been

wrested from the hands of S. Mark; and inasmuch as the Venetians alone

sustained the cause of Christian civilization against Turk and pirate in

the Eastern seas, he was able before his death to anticipate the ruin

which the war of Candia subsequently brought upon his country. During

the last eighteen years of his existence Sarpi was the intellect of the

Republic; the man of will and mind who gave voice and vigor to her

policy of independence; the statesman who most clearly penetrated the

conditions of her strength and weakness. This friar incarnated the

Venetian spirit at a moment when, upon the verge of decadence, it had

attained self-consciousness; and so instinctively devoted are Venetians

to their State that in his lifetime he was recognized by them as hero,

and after his death venerated as saint.

No sooner had the dispute with Paul V. been compromised, than Sarpi

noticed how the aristocracy of Venice yielded themselves to sloth and

political indifference. The religious obsequiousness to Rome and the

'peace or rather cowardice of slaves,' which were gradually immersing

Italy in mental torpor and luxurious idleness, invaded this last

stronghold of freedom. Though Sarpi's Christian Stoicism and practical

sagacity saved him from playing the then futile part of public agitator,

his private correspondence shows how low his hope had sunk for Italy.

Nothing but a general war could free her from the yoke of arrogant Rome

and foreign despotism. Meanwhile the Papal Court, Spain and the House of

Austria, having everything to lose by contest, preserved the peace of

Italy at any cost. Princes whose petty thrones depended on Spanish and

Papal good-will, dreaded to disturb the equilibrium of servitude; the

population, dulled by superstition, emasculated by Jesuitical corruption

and intimidated by Church tyranny, slumbered in the gross mud-honey of

slavish pleasures. From his cell in the convent of the Servites Sarpi

swept the whole political horizon, eagerly anticipating some dawn-star

of deliverance. At one time his eyes rested on the Duke of Savoy, but

that unquiet spirit failed to steer his course clear between Spanish and

French interests, Roman jealousies, and the ill-concealed hostilities of

Italian potentates. At another time, like all lovers of freedom

throughout Europe, he looked with confidence to Henri IV. But a

fanatic's dagger, sharpened by the Jesuits, cut short the monarch's life

and gave up France to the government of astute Florentine adventurers.

Germany was too distracted by internal dissensions, Holland too distant

and preoccupied with her own struggle for existence, to offer immediate

aid. It was in vain that Sarpi told his foreign correspondents that the

war of liberty in Europe must be carried into the stronghold of

absolutism. To secure a victory over the triple forces of Spain, the

Papal Court and Jesuitry, Rome had to be attacked in Italy. His

reasoning was correct. But peoples fighting for freedom on their native

soil could not risk an adventure which only some central power of the

first magnitude like France might have conducted with fair prospect of

success. In the meantime what Sarpi called the Diacatholicon, that

absolutist alliance of Rome, Spain and Austria, supported by the

Inquisition and the Jesuits, accepted by the states of Italy and firmly

rooted in some parts of Germany, invaded even those provinces where the

traditions of independence still survived. After 1610 the Jesuits

obtained possession of France; and though they did not effect their

re-entrance into Venice, the ruling classes of the Republic allowed

themselves to be drugged by the prevalent narcotic. Venice, too, was

fighting for her life in the Adriatic and the Levant, while her nobles

became daily more supine in aristocratic leisure, more papalizing in

their private sympathies. Thus the last years of Sarpi's life were

overclouded by a deep discouragement, which did not, indeed, extinguish

his trust in the divine Providence or his certain belief that the right

would ultimately prevail, but which adds a tragic interest to the old

age of this champion of political and moral liberty fallen on evil days.

I have thought it well to preface what I have to say about Sarpi with

this forecast of his final attitude. As the Italian who most clearly

comprehended the full consequences of the Catholic Revival, and who

practically resisted what was evil for his nation in that reactionary

movement, he demands a prominent place in this book. On his claims to

scientific discoveries and his special service rendered to the Venetian

Republic it will suffice to touch but lightly.

Sarpi's father was short of stature, brown-complexioned, choleric and

restless. His mother was tall, pale, lymphatic, devoted to religious

exercises and austerities. The son of their ill-assorted wedlock

inherited something of both temperaments. In his face and eyes he

resembled his mother; and he derived from her the piety which marked his

course through life. His short, spare person, his vivid, ever-active

intellect testified to the paternal impress. This blending of two

diverse strains produced in him a singular tenacity of fiber. Man's

tenement of clay has rarely lodged a spirit so passionless, so fine, so

nearly disembodied. Of extreme physical tenuity, but gifted with

inexhaustible mental energy, indefatigable in study, limitless in

capacity for acquiring and retaining knowledge, he accentuated the type

which nature gave him by the sustained habits of a lifetime. In diet he

abstained from flesh and abhorred wine. His habitual weaknesses were

those of one who subdues the body to mental government. As costive as

Scaliger,[127] Sarpi suffered from hepatic hemorrhage, retention of

urine, prolapsus recti, and hemorrhoids. Intermittent fevers reduced his

strength, but rarely interfered with his activity. He refused to treat

himself as an invalid, never altered his course of life for any illness,

and went about his daily avocations when men of laxer tissue would have

taken to their bed. His indifference to danger was that of the Stoic or

the Mussulman. During a period of fifteen years he knew that restless

foes were continually lying in wait to compass his death by poison or

the dagger. Yet he could hardly be persuaded to use the most ordinary

precautions. 'I am resolved,' he wrote, in 1609, 'to give no thought

whatever to these wretchednesses. He who thinks too much of living knows

not how to live well. One is bound to die once; to be curious about the

day or place or manner of dying is unprofitable. Whatsoever is God's

will is good.'[128] As fear had no hold upon his nature, so was he

wholly free from the dominion of the senses. A woman's name, if we

except that of the Queen of France, is, I think, not once mentioned in

his correspondence. Even natural affections seem to have been

obliterated; for he records nothing of his mother or his father or a

sister who survived their deaths. One suit of clothes sufficed him; and

his cell was furnished with three hour-glasses, a picture of Christ in

the Garden, and a crucifix raised above a human skull.

[Footnote 127: We may remind our readers of Henri IV.'s parting words to

Joseph Scaliger: 'Est-il vrai que vous avez ete de Paris a Dijon sans

aller a la selle?']

[Footnote 128: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 239.]

His physical sensitiveness, developed by austerity of life, was of the

highest acuteness. Sight, touch, and taste in him acquired the most

exquisite delicacy. He was wont to say that he feared no poison in his

food, since he could discriminate the least adulteration of natural

flavors. His mental perspicacity was equally subtle. As a boy he could

recite thirty lines of Virgil after hearing them read over once. Books

were not so much perused by him as penetrated at a glance; and what he

had but casually noticed, never afterwards escaped his memory. In the

vast Venetian archives he could lay his hand on any document without

referring to registers or catalogues. The minutest details of houses

visited or places passed through, remained indelibly engraved upon his

memory. The characters of men lay open to his insight through their

physiognomy and gestures. When new scientific instruments were submitted

to his curiosity, he divined their uses and comprehended their mechanism

without effort. Thus endowed with a rare combination of physical and

intellectual faculties, it is no wonder that Sarpi became one of the

most learned men of his age or of any age. He was an excellent Greek,

Latin, and Hebrew scholar; an adequate master of the French and Spanish

languages; profoundly versed in canon and civil law; accomplished in the

erudition of classical and scholastic philosophy; thoroughly acquainted

with secular and ecclesiastical history. Every branch of mathematics and

natural science had been explored by him with the enthusiasm of a

pioneer. He made experiments in chemistry, mechanics, mineralogy,

metallurgy, vegetable and animal physiology. His practical studies in

anatomy were carried on by the aid of vivisection. Following independent

paths, he worked out some of Gilbert's discoveries in magnetism, and of

Da Porta's in optics, demonstrated the valves of the veins, and the

function of the uvea in vision, divined the uses of the telescope and

thermometer. When he turned his attention to astronomy, he at once

declared the futility of judicial astrology; and while recognizing the

validity of Galileo's system, predicted that this truth would involve

its promulgator in serious difficulties with the Roman Inquisition. In

his treatises on psychology and metaphysics, he originated a theory of

sensationalism akin to that of Locke. There was, in fact, no field of

knowledge which he had not traversed with the energy of a discoverer.

Only to poetry and _belles lettres_ he paid but little heed, disdaining

the puerilities of rhetoric then in vogue, and using language as the

simplest vehicle of thought. In conversation he was reticent, speaking

little, but always to the purpose, and rather choosing to stimulate his

collocutors than to make display of eloquence or erudition. Yet his

company was eagerly sought, and he delighted in the society, not only of

learned men and students, but of travelers, politicians, merchants, and

citizens of the world. His favorite places of resort were the saloons of

Andrea Morosini, and the shop of the Secchini at the sign of the Nave

d'Oro. Here, after days spent in religious exercises, sacerdotal

duties, and prolonged studies, he relaxed his mind in converse with the

miscellaneous crowd of eminent persons who visited Venice for business

or pleasure. A certain subacid humor, combining irony without

bitterness, and proverbial pungency without sententiousness, added

piquancy to his discourse. We have, unfortunately, no record of the

wit-encounters which may have taken place under Morosini's or Secchini's

roof between this friar, so punctual in his religious observances, so

scrupulously pure in conduct, so cold in temperament, so acute in

intellect, so modest in self-esteem, so cautious, so impermeable, and

his contemporary, Bruno, the unfrocked friar of genius more daring but

less sure, who was mentally in all points, saving their common love of

truth and freedom, the opposite to Sarpi.

Sarpi entered the Order of the Servi, or Servants of the Blessed Virgin,

at the age of fourteen, renewed his vows at twenty, and was ordained

priest at twenty-two.[129] His great worth brought him early into

notice, and he filled posts of considerable importance in his Order.

Several years of his manhood were spent in Rome, transacting the

business and conducting the legal causes of the Fathers. At Mantua he

gained the esteem of Guglielmo Gonzaga. At Milan he was admitted to

familiar intimacy with the sainted Carlo Borromeo, who consulted him

upon matters of reform in the diocese, and insisted on his hearing

confessions. This duty was not agreeable to Sarpi; and though he

habitually in after life said Mass and preached, he abstained from those

functions of the priesthood which would have brought him into close

relation with individuals. The bent of his mind rendered him averse to

all forms of superstition and sacerdotal encroachments upon the freedom

of the conscience. As he fought the battle of political independence

against ecclesiastical aggression, so he maintained the prerogatives of

personal liberty. The arts whereby Jesuits gained hold on families and

individuals, inspired in him no less disgust than the illegal despotism

of the Papacy. This blending of sincere piety and moral rectitude with a

passion for secular freedom and a hatred of priestly craft, has

something in it closely akin to the English temperament. Sarpi was a

sound Catholic Christian in religion, and in politics what we should

call a staunch Whig. So far as it is now possible to penetrate his

somewhat baffling personality, we might compare him to a Macaulay of

finer edge, to a Dean Stanley of more vigorous build. He was less

commonplace than the one, more substantial than the other. But we must

be cautious in offering any interpretation of his real opinions. It was

not for nothing that he dedicated himself to the monastic life in

boyhood, and persevered in it to the end of his long career. The

discipline of the convent renders every friar inscrutable; and Sarpi

himself assured his friends that he, like all Italians of his day, was

bound to wear a mask.[130]

[Footnote 129: It was under the supervision of the Servites that Sarpi

gained the first rudiments of education. Thirst for knowledge may

explain his early entrance into their brotherhood. Like Virgil and like

Milton, he received among the companions of his youthful studies the

honorable nickname of 'The Maiden.' Gross conversation, such as lads

use, even in convents, ceased at his approach. And yet he does not seem

to have lost influence among his comrades by the purity which marked him

out as exceptional.]

[Footnote 130: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 237.]

Be this as it may, Sarpi was not the man to work his way by monkish

intrigue or courtly service into high place either in his Order or the

Church. Long before he unsheathed the sword in defense of Venetian

liberties, he had become an object of suspicion to Rome and his

superiors. Some frank words which escaped him in correspondence,

regarding the corruption of the Papal Curia, closed every avenue to

office. Men of less mark obtained the purple. The meanest and poorest

bishoprics were refused to Sarpi. He was thrice denounced, on frivolous

charges, to the Inquisition; but on each occasion the indictment was

dismissed without a hearing. The General of the Servites accused him of

wearing cap and slippers uncanonical in cut, and of not reciting the

_Salve Regina_. After a solemn trial, Sarpi was acquitted; and it came

to be proverbially whispered that 'even the slippers of the

incorruptible Fra Paolo had been canonized.' Being a sincere Catholic at

heart, as well as a man of profound learning and prudent speech, his

papalistic enemies could get no grip upon him. Yet they instinctively

hated and dreaded one whom they felt to be opposed, in his strength,

fearlessness and freedom of soul, to their exorbitant pretensions and

underhand aggressions upon public liberties. His commerce with heretics

both in correspondence with learned Frenchmen and in conversation with

distinguished foreigners at Venice, was made a ground of accusation, and

Clement VIII. declared that this alone sufficed to exclude him from any

dignity in the Church.

It does not appear that Sarpi troubled his head about these things. Had

he cared for power, there was no distinction to which he might not have

aspired by stooping to common arts and by compromising his liberty of

conscience. But he was indifferent to rank and wealth. Public business

he discharged upon occasion from a sense of duty to his Order. For the

rest, so long as he was left to pursue his studies in tranquillity,

Sarpi had happiness enough; and his modesty was so great that he did not

even seek to publish the results of his discoveries in science. For this

reason they have now been lost to the world; only the memory of them

surviving in the notes of Foscarini and Grisellini, who inspected his

MSS. before they were accidentally destroyed by fire in 1769.

Though renowned through Europe as the _orbis terrae ocellus_, the man

sought out by every visitor to Venice as the rarest citizen of the

Republic, Sarpi might have quitted this earthly scene with only the

faint fame of a thinker whose eminent gifts blossomed in obscurity, had

it not been for a public opportunity which forced him to forsake his

studies and his cell for a place at the Council-board and for the

functions of a polemical writer. That robust manliness of mind, which

makes an Englishman hail English virtues in Sarpi, led him to affirm

that 'every man of excellence is bound to pay attention to

politics.'[131] Yet politics were not his special sphere. Up to the age

of fifty-four he ripened in the assiduous studies of which I have made

mention, in the discharge of his official duties as a friar, and his

religious duties as a priest. He had distinguished himself amid the

practical affairs of life by judicial acuteness, unswerving justice,

infallible perspicacity, and inexhaustible stores of erudition brought

to bear with facility on every detail of any matter in dispute. But

nature and inclination seemed to mark him out through early manhood for

experimental and speculative science rather than for action. Now a

demand was made on his deep fount of energy, which evolved the latent

forces of a character unique in many-sided strength. He had dedicated

himself to religion and to the pursuit of knowledge. But he was a

Venetian of the Venetians, the very soul of Venice. After God, his

Prince and the Republic claimed obedience; and when S. Mark called,

Sarpi abandoned science for the service of his country. 'Singularly

composed of active and contemplative energies was the life of our

Father; yielding to God that which he was able, to his Prince that which

duty dictated, and to the domain of Venice more than any law but that of

love demanded.'[132]

[Footnote 131: _Lettere_, vol. ii, p. 80.]

[Footnote 132: Sarpi's _Life_ by Fra Fulgenzio, p. 64.]

Paul V. assumed the tiara with the fixed resolve of making good the

Papal claims to supremacy. Between Venice and the Holy See numerous

disputed points of jurisdiction, relating to the semi-ecclesiastical

fief of Ceneda, the investiture of the Patriarch, the navigation of the

Po, and the right of the Republic to exercise judgment in criminal cases

affecting priests, offered this Pope opportunities of interference. The

Venetians maintained their customary prerogatives; and in April 1606

Paul laid them under interdict and excommunication. The Republic denied

the legitimacy of this proceeding. The Doge, Leonardo Donato, issued a

proclamation to the clergy of all degrees within the domain, appealing

to their loyalty and enjoining on them the discharge of their sacerdotal

duties in spite of the Papal interdict. Only Jesuits at first disobeyed

the ducal mandate. When they refused to say Mass in the excommunicated

city, they were formally expelled as contumacious subjects; and the

fathers took ship amid the maledictions of the populace: '_Andate in

malora_.' Their example was subsequently followed by the reformed

Capuchins and the Theatines. Otherwise the Venetian clergy, like the

people, remained firm in their allegiance to the state. 'We are

Venetians first, Christians afterwards,' was a proverb dating from this

incident. Venice, conscious of the justice of her cause, prepared to

resist the Pope's arrogant demands if need were with arms, and to

exercise religious rites within her towns in spite of Camillo Borghese's

excommunication. The Senate, some time before these events happened,

had perceived the advantage which would accrue to the Republic from the

service of a practised Canonist and jurisprudent in ecclesiastical

affairs. Sarpi attracted their attention at an early stage of the

dispute by a memorial which he drew up and presented to the Doge upon

the best means of repelling Papal aggression. After perusing his report,

in the month of January 1606, they appointed him Theologian and Canonist

to the Republic, with a yearly salary of 200 ducats. This post he

occupied until his death, having at a later period been raised to the

still more important office of Counselor of State, which eventually he

filled alone without a single coadjutor.

From the month of January 1606, for the remaining seventeen years of his

life, Sarpi was intellectually the most prominent personage of Venice,

the man who for the world at large represented her policy of moderate

but firm resistance to ecclesiastical tyranny. Greatness had been thrust

upon the modest and retiring student; and Father Paul's name became the

watchword of political independence throughout Europe.

The Jesuists acting in concert with Spain, as well-informed historians

held certain, first inspired Camillo Borghese with his ill-considered

attempt upon the liberties of Venice.[133] It was now the Jesuits, after

their expulsion from the Republic, who opened the batteries of literary

warfare against the Venetian government. They wrote and published

manifestoes through the Bergamasque territory, which province

acknowledged the episcopal jurisdiction of Milan, though it belonged to

the Venetian domain. In these writings it was argued that, so long as

the Papal interdict remained in force, all sacraments would be invalid,

marriages null, and offspring illegitimate. The population, trained

already in doctrines of Papal supremacy, were warned that should they

remain loyal to a contumacious State, their own souls would perish

through the lack of sacerdotal ministrations, and their posterity would

roam the world as bastards and accursed. To traverse this argument of

sarcerdotal tyranny, exorbitant in any age of the Latin Church, but

preposterous after the illumination of the sixteenth century in Europe,

was a citizen's plain duty. Sarpi therefore supplied an elegant Italian

stylist, Giambattista Leoni, with material for setting forth a statement

of the controversy between Venice and Rome. It would have been well if

he had taken up the pen with his own hand. But at this early period of

his career as publicist, he seems to have been diffident about his

literary powers. The result was that Leoni's main defense of the

Republic fell flat; and the war was waged for a while upon side issues.

Sarpi drew a treatise by Gerson, the learned French champion of Catholic

independence, forth from the dust of libraries, translated it into

Italian, and gave it to the press accompanied by an introductory letter

which he signed.[134] Cardinal Bellarmino responded from Rome with an

attack on Sarpi's orthodoxy and Gerson's authority. Sarpi replied in an

Apology for Gerson. Then, finding that Leoni's narrative had missed its

mark, he poured forth pamphlet upon pamphlet, penning his own

_Considerations on the Censures_, inspiring Fra Fulgenzio Micanzi with a

work styled _Confirmations_, and finally reducing the whole matter of

the controversy into a book entitled a _Treatise on the Interdict_,

which he signed together with six brother theologians of the Venetian

party. It is not needful in this place to institute a minute

investigation into the merits of this pamphlet warfare. In its details,

whether we regard the haughty claims of delegated omnipotence advanced

by Rome, or the carefully studied historical and canonistic arguments

built up by Sarpi, the quarrel has lost actuality. Common sense and

freedom have so far conquered in Europe that Sarpi's opinions, then

denounced as heresies, sound now like truisms; and his candid boast that

he was the first to break the neck of Papal encroachments upon secular

prerogative, may pass for insignificant in an age which has little to

fear from ecclesiastical violence.

[Footnote 133: Fra Fulgenzio's _Vita di F. Paolo_, p. 42. Venetian

Dispatches in Mutinelli's _Storia Arcana_, vol. iii. p. 67.]

[Footnote 134: The treatise which Sarpi translated was Gerson's

_Considerations upon Papal Excommunications_. Gerson's part in the

Council of Constance will be remembered. See Creighton's _History of the

Papacy_, vol. i. p. 211.]

Yet we must not forget that, during the first years of the seventeenth

century, the Venetian conflict with Papal absolutism, considered merely

as a test-case in international jurisprudence, was one of vitally

important interest. When we reflect how the Catholic Alliance was then

engaged in rolling back the tide of Reformation, how the forces of Rome

had been rallied by the Tridentine Council, and how the organism of the

Jesuits had been created to promulgate new dogmas of Papal almightiness

in Church and State, this resistance of Venice, stoutly Catholic in

creed, valiant in her defense of Christendom against the Moslem,

supported by her faithful churchman and accomplished canonist, was no

inconsiderable factor in the European strife for light and liberty. The

occasion was one of crucial gravity. Reconstituted Rome had not as yet

been brought into abrupt collision with any commonwealth which abode in

her communion. Had Venice yielded in that issue, the Papacy might have

augured for itself a general victory. That Venice finally submitted to

Roman influence, while preserving the semblance of independence,

detracts, indeed, from the importance of this Interdict-affair

considered as an episode in the struggle for spiritual freedom.

Moreover, we know now that the presumptuous pretensions of the Papacy at

large were destined, before many years had passed, to be pared down,

diminished and obliterated by the mere advance of intellectual

enlightenment. Yet none of these considerations diminish Sarpi's claim

to rank as hero in the forefront of a battle which in his time was

being waged with still uncertain prospects.[135] In their comparatively

narrow spheres Venice and Sarpi, not less than Holland, England, Sweden

and the Protestants of Germany, on their wider platform at a later date,

were fighting for a principle upon which the liberty of States depended.

And they were the first to fight for it upon the ground most perilous to

the common adversary. In all his writings Sarpi sought to prove that men

might remain sound Catholics and yet resist Roman aggression; that the

Roman Court and its modern champions had introduced new doctrine,

deviating from the pristine polity of Christendom; that the

post-Tridentine theory of Papal absolutism was a deformation of that

order which Christ founded, which the Apostles edified, and which the

Councils of a purer age had built into the living temple of God's Church

on earth.

[Footnote 135: Sarpi's correspondence abundantly proves how very grave

was the peril of Papal Absolutism in his days. The tide had not begun to

turn with force against the Jesuit doctrines of Papal Supremacy. See

Ranke, vol. ii. pp. 4-12, on these doctrines and the counter-theories to

which they gave rise. We must remember that the Papal power was now at

the height of its ascension; and Sarpi can be excused for not having

reckoned on the inevitable decline it suffered during the next century.]

A passage from Sarpi's correspondence may be cited, as sounding the

keynote to all his writings in this famous controversy. 'I imagine,' he

writes to Jacques Gillot in 1609, 'that the State and the Church are two

realms, composed, however, of the same human beings. The one is wholly

heavenly, the other earthly. Each has its own sovereignty, defended by

its own arms and fortifications. Nothing is held by them in common, and

there should be no occasion for the one to declare war upon the other.

Christ said that he and his disciples were not of this world. S. Paul

affirms that our city is in the heavens. I take the word Church to

signify an assembly of the faithful, not of priests only; for when we

regard it as confined to those, it ceases to be Christ's kingdom, and

becomes a portion of the commonwealth in this world, subject to the

highest authority of State, as also are the laity.[136] This emphatic

distinction between Church and State, both fulfilling the needs of

humanity but in diverse relations, lay at the root of Sarpi's doctrine.

He regarded the claim of the Church to interfere in State management,

not only as an infringement of the prince's prerogative, but also as

patent rebellion against the law of God which had committed the temporal

government of nations in sacred trust to secular rulers. As the State

has no call to meddle in the creation and promulgation of dogmas, or to

impose its ordinances on the religious conscience of its subjects, so

the Church has no right to tamper with affairs of government, to

accumulate wealth and arrogate secular power, or to withdraw its

ministers from the jurisdiction of the prince in matters which concern

the operation of criminal and civil legislature. The ultramontanism of

the Jesuits appeared to him destructive of social order; but, more than

this, he considered it as impious, as a deflection from the form of

Christian economy, as a mischievous seduction of the Church into a

slough of self-annihilating cupidity and concupiscence.

Sarpi's views seemed audacious in his own age. But they have become the

commonplaces of posterity. We can therefore hardly do justice to the

originality and audacity which they displayed at an epoch when only

Protestants at war with Rome advanced the like in deadly hatred--when

the Catholic pulpits of Europe were ringing with newly-promulgated

doctrines of Papal supremacy over princes and peoples, of national

rights to depose or assassinate excommunicated sovereigns, and of blind

unreasoning obedience to Rome as the sole sure method of salvation. Upon

the path of that Papal triumph toward the Capitol of world-dominion,

Sarpi, the puny friar from his cell at Venice, rose like a specter

announcing certain doom with the irrefragable arguments of reason. The

minatory words he uttered were all the more significant because neither

he nor the State he represented sought to break with Catholic

traditions. His voice was terrible and mighty, inasmuch as he denounced

Rome by an indictment which proclaimed her to be the perturbing power in

Christendom, the troubler of Israel, the whore who poured her cup of

fornications forth to sup with princes.

[Footnote 136: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 312.]

After sixteen months, the quarrel of the interdict was compromised.

Venice, in duel with Islam, could ill afford to break with Rome, even if

her national traditions of eight centuries, intertwined with rites of

Latin piety, had not forbidden open rupture. The Papal Court, cowed into

resentful silence by antagonism which threatened intellectual revolt

through Europe, waived a portion of its claims. Three French converts

from Huguenot opinions to Catholicism, Henri IV., the Cardinal du

Perron, and M. de Canaye, adjusted matters. The interdict was dismissed

from Venice rather than removed--in haughty silence, without the

clashing of bells from S. Pietro di Castello and S. Marco, without

manifestation of joy in the city which regarded Papal interdicts as

illegitimate, without the parade of public absolution by the Pope. Thus

the Republic maintained its dignity of self-respect. But Camillo

Borghese, while proclaiming a general amnesty, reserved _in petto_

implacable animosity against the theologians of the Venetian party. Two

of these, Marsilio. and Rubetti, died suddenly under suspicion of

poison.[137] A third, Fulgenzio Manfredi, was lured to Rome, treated

with fair show of favor, and finally hung in the Campo di Fiora by order

of the Holy Office.[138] A fourth, Capello, abjured his so-called

heresies, and was assigned a pittance for the last days of his failing

life in Rome.[139] It remained, if possible, to lay hands on Fra Paolo

and his devoted secretary, Fra Fulgenzio Micanzi, of the Servites.

[Footnote 137: Sarpi's _Letters_, vol. ii. pp. 179, 284.]

[Footnote 138: _Ibid._ pp. 100-102.]

[Footnote 139: Bianchi Giovini, _Vita di Fra P. Sarpi_, vol. ii. p. 49.]

Neither threats nor promises availed to make these friends quit Venice.

During the interdict and afterwards, Fulgenzio Micanzi preached the

gospel there. He told the people that in the New Testament he had found

truth; but he bade them take notice that for the laity this book was

even a dead letter through the will of Rome.[140] Paul V. complained in

words like these: Fra Fulgenzio's doctrine contains, indeed, no patent

heresy, but it rests so clearly on the Bible as to prejudice the

Catholic faith.[141] Sarpi informed his French correspondents that

Christ and the truth had been openly preached in Venice by this

man.[142] Fulgenzio survived the troubles of those times, steadily

devoted to his master, of whom he has bequeathed to posterity, a

faithful portrait in that biography which combines the dove-like

simplicity of the fourteenth century with something of Roger North's

sagacity and humor.[143] Of Fulgenzio we take no further notice here,

having paid him our debt of gratitude for genial service rendered in the

sympathetic delineation of so eminent a character as Sarpi's. A

side-regret may be expressed that some such simple and affectionate

record of Bruno as a man still fails us, and alas, must ever fail.

Fulgenzio, by his love, makes us love Sarpi, who otherwise might coldly

win our admiration. But for Bruno, that scapegoat of the spirit in the

world's wilderness, there is none to speak words of worship and

affection.

[Footnote 140: A.G. Campbell's _Life of Sarpi_, p. 174.]

[Footnote 141: Sarpi's _Letters_, vol. i. pp. 231, 239.]

[Footnote 142: _Ibid._ pp. 220, 222, 225.]

[Footnote 143: _Vita del Padre F. Paolo Sarpi_, Helmstat, per Jacopo

Mulleri, MDCCXXXXX.]

The first definite warning that his life was in danger came to Sarpi

from Caspar Schoppe, the publicist. Scioppius (so his contemporaries

called him) was a man of doubtful character and unsteady principles,

who, according as his interests varied, used a fluent pen and limpid

Latin style for or against the Jesuit faction. History would hardly

condescend to notice him but for the singular luck he had of coming at

critical moments into contact with the three chief Italian thinkers of

his time. We know already that a letter of this man is the one

contemporary testimony of an eye-witness to Bruno's condemnation which

we possess. He also deserves mention for having visited Campanella in

prison and helped to procure his liberation. Now in the year 1607, while

passing through Venice, Schoppe sought a private interview with Sarpi,

pointed out the odium which Fra Paolo had gained in Rome by his

writings, and concluded by asserting that the Pope meant to have him

alive or to compass his assassination. If Sarpi wished to make his peace

with Paul V., Schoppe was ready to conduct the reconciliation upon

honorable terms, having already several affairs of like import in his

charge. To this proposal Sarpi replied that the cause he had defended

was a just one, that he had done nothing to offend his Holiness, and

that all plots against his liberty or life he left within the hands of

God. To these words he significantly added that, even in the Pope's

grasp, a man was always 'master over his own life'--a sentence which

seems to indicate suicide as the last resort of self-defense. In

September of the same year the Venetian ambassador at Rome received

private information regarding some mysterious design against a person or

persons unknown, at Venice, in which the Papal Court was implicated, and

which was speedily to take effect.[144] On October 5 Sarpi was returning

about 5 o'clock in the afternoon to his convent at S. Fosca, when he was

attacked upon a bridge by five ruffians. It so happened that on this

occasion he had no attendance but his servant Fra Marino; Fra Fulgenzio

and a man of courage who usually accompanied him, having taken another

route home. The assassins were armed with harquebusses, pistols and

poniards. One of them went straight at Sarpi, while the others stood on

guard and held down Fra Marino. Fifteen blows in all were aimed at

Sarpi, three of which struck him in the neck and face. The stiletto

remained firmly embedded in his cheekbone between the right ear and

nose. He fell to the ground senseless; and a cry being raised by some

women who had witnessed the outrage from a window, the assassins made

off, leaving their victim for dead. It was noticed that they took

refuge in the palace of the Papal Nuncio, whence they escaped that same

evening to the Lido _en route_ for the States of the Church. An old

Venetian nobleman of the highest birth, Alessandro Malipiero, who bore a

singular affection for the champion of his country's liberty, was

walking a short way in front of Sarpi beyond the bridge upon which the

assault was perpetrated. He rushed to his friend's aid, dragged out the

dagger from his face, and bore him to the convent. There Sarpi lay for

many weeks in danger, suffering as much, it seems, from his physicians

as from the wounds. Not satisfied with the attendance of his own

surgeon, Alvise Ragoza, the Venetians insisted on sending all the

eminent doctors of the city and of Padua to his bedside. The illustrious

Acquapendente formed one of this miscellaneous _cortege_; and when the

cure was completed, he received a rich gold chain and knighthood for his

service. Every medical man suggested some fresh application. Some of

them, suspecting poison, treated the wounds with theriac and antidotes.

Others cut into the flesh and probed. Meanwhile the loss of blood had so

exhausted Sarpi's meager frame that for more than twenty days he had no

strength to move or lift his hands. Not a word of impatience escaped his

lips; and when Acquapendente began to medicate the worst wound in his

face, he moved the dozen doctors to laughter by wittily observing, 'And

yet the world maintains that it was given _Stilo Romanae Curiae_.'[145]

His old friend Malipiero would fain have kept the dagger as a relic. But

Sarpi suspended it at the foot of a crucifix in the church of the Servi,

with this appropriate inscription, _Dei Filio Liberatori_. When he had

recovered from his long suffering, the Republic assigned their Counselor

an increase of pension in order that he might maintain a body of armed

guards, and voted him a house in S. Marco for the greater security of

his person. But Sarpi begged to be allowed to remain among the friars,

with whom he had spent his life, and where his vocation bound him. In

the future he took a few obvious precautions, passing in a gondola to

the Rialto and thence on foot through the crowded Merceria to the Ducal

Palace, and furthermore securing the good offices of his attendants in

the convent by liberal gifts of money. Otherwise, he refused to alter

the customary tenor of his way.

[Footnote 144: Dispatch to Fr. Contarini under date September 25, 1607,

quoted in Campbell's _Life of Sarpi_, p. 145.]

[Footnote 145: Fulgenzio's _Life_, p. 61. A.G. Campbell asserts that

this celebrated _mot_ of Sarpi's is not to be found in Fulgenzio's MS.

It occurs, however, quite naturally in the published work. The first

edition of the _Life_ appeared in 1646, eight years before Fulgenzio's

death. The discrepancies between it and the MS. may therefore have been

intended by the author.]

The State of Venice resented this attack upon their servant as though it

had been directed against the majesty of the Republic. A proclamation

was immediately issued, offering enormous rewards for the capture or

murder of the criminals, especially so worded as to insinuate the belief

that men of high position in Rome were implicated. The names of the

chief conspirators were as follows: Ridolfo Poma, a broken Venetian

merchant; Alessandro Parrasio of Ancona, outlawed for the murder of his

uncle; a priest, Michele Viti of Bergamo; and two soldiers of adventure,

Giovanni di Fiorenza and Pasquale di Bitonto. Having escaped to the

Lido, they took ship for Ravenna and arrived in due course at Ancona,

where they drew 1000 crowns from the Papal Camera, and proceeded to make

triumphal progress through Romagna. Their joy was dashed by hearing that

Fra Paolo had not been killed. The Venetian _bando_ filled them with

fears and mutual suspicions, each man's hand being now set against his

comrade, and every ruffian on the road having an interest in their

capture. Yet after some time they continued their journey to Rome, and

sought sanctuary in the palace of Cardinal Colonna. Here their reception

was not what they had anticipated. Having failed in the main object and

brought scandal on the Church, they were maintained for some months in

obscurity, and then coldly bidden to depart with scanty recompense. All

this while their lives remained exposed to the Venetian ban. Under these

circumstances it is not strange that the men were half-maddened. Poma

raged like a wild beast, worshiping the devil in his private chamber,

planning schemes of piracy and fresh attacks on Sarpi, even

contemplating a last conspiracy against the person of the Pope. He was

seized in Rome by the _sbirri_ of the government, and one of his sons

perished in the scuffle. Another returned to Venice, and ended his days

there as a vagrant lunatic. Poma himself died mad in the prison of

Civita Vecchia. Viti also died mad in the same prison. Parrasio died in

prison at Rome. One of the soldiers was beheaded at Perugia, and the

other fell a victim to cut-throats on the high road. Such was the end of

the five conspirators against Fra Paolo Sarpi's life.[146] A priest,

Franceschi, who had aided and abetted their plot, disappeared soon after

the explosion; and we may rest tolerably assured that his was no natural

removal to another world.

It is just to add that the instigation of this murderous plot was never

brought home by direct testimony to any members of the Papal Court. But

the recourse which the assassins first had to the asylum of the Nuncio

in Venice, their triumphal progress through cities of the Church, the

moneys they drew on several occasions, the interest taken in them by

Cardinal Borghese when they finally reached Rome, and their deaths in

Papal dungeons, are circumstances of overwhelming cumulative evidence

against the Curia. Sarpi's life was frequently attempted in the

following years. On one occasion, Cardinal Bellarmino, more mindful of

private friendship than of public feud, sent him warning that he must

live prepared for fresh attacks from Rome.

[Footnote 146: A full account of them is given by Bianchi Giovini in his

_Biografia_, chap. xvii.]

Indeed, it may be said that he now passed his days in continual

expectation of poison or the dagger. This appears plainly in Fulgenzio's

biography and in the pages of his private correspondence. The most

considerable of these later conspiracies, of which Fra Fulgenzio gives a

full account, implicated Cardinal Borghese and the General of the

Servite Order.[147] The history seems in brief to be as follows. One Fra

Bernardo of Perugia, who had served the Cardinal during their student

days, took up his residence in Rome so soon as Scipione Borghese became

a profitable patron. In the course of the year 1609, this Fra Bernardo

dispatched a fellow-citizen of his, named Fra Giovanni Francesco, to

Padua, whence he frequently came across to Venice and tampered with

Sarpi's secretary, Fra Antonio of Viterbo. These three friars were all

of them Servites; and it appears that the General looked with approval

on their undertaking. The upshot of the traffic was that Fra Antonio,

having ready access to Sarpi's apartments and person, agreed either to

murder him with a razor or to put poison in his food, or, what was

finally determined on, to introduce a couple of assassins into his

bedchamber at night. An accident revealed the plot, and placed a

voluminous cyphered correspondence in the hands of the Venetian

Inquisitor of State. Fra Fulgenzio significantly adds that of all the

persons incriminated by these letters, none, with the exception of the

General of the Servites, was under the rank of Cardinal. The wording of

his sentence is intentionally obscure, but one expression seems even to

point at the Pope.[148]

[Footnote 147: _Vita di F. Paolo_, pp. 67-70.]

At the close of this affair, so disgraceful to the Church and to his

Order, Fra Paolo besought the Signory of Venice on his bended knees, as

a return for services rendered by him to the State, that no public

punishment should be inflicted on the culprits. He could not bear, he

said, to be the cause of bringing a blot of infamy upon his religion, or

of ruining the career of any man. Fra Giovanni Francesco afterwards

redeemed his life by offering weighty evidence against his powerful

accomplices. But what he revealed is buried in the oblivion with which

the Council of Ten in Venice chose to cover judicial acts of

State-importance.

It is worth considering that in all the attempts upon Sarpi's life,

priests, friars, and prelates of high place were the prime agents.[149]

Poor devils like Poma and Parrasio lay ready to their hands as

sanguinary instruments, which, after work performed, could be broken if

occasion served. What, then, was the religious reformation of which the

Roman Court made ostentatious display when it secured its unexpected

triumph in the Council of Trent?

[Footnote 148: _Vita di F. Paolo_, p. 68: 'Le cose che vennero a

pubblica notizia e certe sono: che molte persone nominate in quella

cifra, di _Padre_, fratelli, e cugini, per le contracifre consto, dal

Generale de' Servi in fuori, niuna esser di dignita inferiore alia

Cardinalizia.']

[Footnote 149: Sarpi says that no crime happened in Venice without a

friar or priest being mixed in it (_Lettere_, vol. i. 351).]

We must reply that in essential points of moral conduct this

reformation amounted to almost nothing, and in some points to

considerably less than nothing. The Church of God, as Sarpi held,

suffered deformation rather than reformation. That is to say, this

Church, instead of being brought back to primitive simplicity and purged

of temporal abuses, now lay at the mercy of ambitious hypocrites who

with the Supreme Pontiff's sanction, pursued their ends by treachery and

violence. Its hostility to heretics and its new-fangled doctrine of

Papal almightiness encouraged the spread of a pernicious casuistry which

favored assassination. Kings at strife with the Catholic Alliance,

honest Christians defending the prerogatives of their commonwealth,

erudite historians and jurists who disapproved of substituting Popes in

Rome for God in heaven, might be massacred or kidnapped by ruffians red

with the blood of their nearest relatives and carrying the condemnation

of their native States upon their forehead. According to the

post-Tridentine morality of Rome, that morality which the Jesuits openly

preached and published, which was disseminated in every prelate's

ante-chamber, and whispered in every parish-priest's confessional,

enormous sins could be atoned and eternal grace be gained by the

merciless and traitorous murder of any notable man who savored of

heresy. If the Holy Office had instituted a prosecution against the

victim and had condemned him in his absence, the path was plain.

Sentence of excommunication and death publicly pronounced on such a man

reduced him to the condition of a wild beast, whose head was worth solid

coin and plenary absolution to the cut-throat. A private minute recorded

on the books of the Inquisitors had almost equal value; and Sarpi was

under the impression that some such underhand proceeding against himself

had loosed a score of knives. But short of these official or

semi-judicial preliminaries, it was maintained upon the best casuistical

authority that to take the life of any suspected heretic, of any one

reputed heterodox in Roman circles, should be esteemed a work of merit

creditable to the miscreant who perpetrated the deed, and certain, even

should he die for it, to yield him in the other world the joys of

Paradise. These joys the Jesuits described in language worthy of the

Koran. Dabbled in Sarpi's or Duplessis Mornay's blood, quartered and

tortured like Ravaillac, the desperado of so pious a crime would swim

forever in oceans of ecstatic pleasure. The priest, ambitious for his

hierarchy, fanatical in his devotion to the Church, relying upon

privilege if he should chance to be detected, had a plain interest in

promoting and directing such conspiracies. Men of blood, and bandits up

to the hilts in crimes of violence, rendered reckless by the

indiscriminate cruelty of justice in those days, allured by the double

hope of pay and spiritual benefit, rushed without a back-thought into

like adventures. Ready to risk their lives in an unholy cause, such

ruffians were doubly glad to do so when the bait of heaven's felicity

was offered to their grosser understanding. These considerations

explain, but are far indeed from exculpating, the complicity of clergy

and cut-throats in every crime of violence attempted against foes of

Papal Rome.

Sarpi's worst enemies could scarcely fix on him the crime of heresy. He

was a staunch Catholic; so profoundly versed both in dogmatic theology

and in ecclesiastical procedure, that to remain within the straitest

limits of orthodoxy, while opposing the presumption of the Papal Court,

gave him no trouble. Yet at the time in which he lived, the bare act of

resistance to any will or whim of Rome, passed with those doctors who

were forging new systems of Pontifical supremacy, for heretical. In this

arbitrary and uncanonical sense of the phrase Sarpi was undoubtedly a

heretic. He had deserved the hatred of the Curia, the Inquisition, the

Jesuits, and their myrmidons. Steadily, with caution and a sober spirit,

he had employed his energies and vast accumulated stores of knowledge in

piling up breakwaters against their pernicious innovations. In all his

controversial writings during the interdict Sarpi used none but solid

arguments, drawn from Scripture, canon law, and the Councils of the

early Church, in order to deduce one single principle: namely that both

secular and ecclesiastical organisms, the State and the Church, are

divinely appointed, but with several jurisdictions and for diverse ends.

He pressed this principle home with hammer-strokes of most convincing

proof on common sense and reason. He did so even superfluously to our

modern intellect, which is fatigued by following so elaborate a chain of

precedents up to a foregone conclusion. But he let no word fall, except

by way of passing irony, which could bring contempt upon existing

ecclesiastical potentates; and he maintained a dispassionate temper,

while dealing with topics which at that epoch inflamed the fiercest

party strife. His antagonists, not having sound learning, reason, and

the Scripture on their side, were driven to employ the rhetoric of

personal abuse and the stiletto. In the end the badness of their cause

was proved by the recourse they had to conspiracies of pimps, friars,

murderers, and fanatics, in order to stifle that voice of truth which

told them of their aberration from the laws of God.

It was not merely by his polemical writings during the interdict, that

Sarpi won the fame of heretic in ultra-papal circles. In his office as

Theologian to the Republic he had to report upon all matters touching

the relations of State to Church; and the treatises which he prepared on

such occasions assumed the proportions, in many instances, of important

literary works. Among these the most considerable is entitled _Delle

Materie Beneficiarie_. Professing to be a discourse upon ecclesiastical

benefices, it combines a brief but sufficient history of the temporal

power of the Papacy, an inquiry into the arts whereby the Church's

property had been accumulated, and a critique of various devices

employed by the Roman Curia to divert that wealth from its original

objects. In 'this golden volume,' to use Gibbon's words, 'the Papal

system is deeply studied and freely described.' Speaking of its purport,

Hallam observes: 'That object was neither more nor less than to

represent the wealth and power of the Church as ill-gotten and

excessive.' Next in importance is a _Treatise on the Inquisition_, which

gives a condensed sketch of the origin and development of the Holy

Office, enlarging upon the special modifications of that institution as

it existed in Venice. Here likewise Sarpi set himself to resist

ecclesiastical encroachments upon the domain of secular jurisdiction. He

pointed out how the right of inquiring into cases of heretical opinion

had been gradually wrested from the hands of the bishop and the State,

and committed to a specially-elected body which held itself only

responsible to Rome. He showed how this powerful tribunal was being used

to the detriment of States, by extending its operation into the sphere

of politics, excluding the secular magistracy from participation in its

judgments, and arrogating to itself the cognizance of civil crimes. A

third _Discourse upon the Press_ brought the same system of attack to

bear upon the Index of prohibited books. Sarpi was here able to

demonstrate that a power originally delegated to the bishops of

proscribing works pernicious to morality and religion, was now employed

for the suppression of sound learning and enlightenment by a

Congregation sworn to support the Papacy. Passing from their proper

sphere of theology and ethics, these ecclesiastics condemned as

heretical all writings which denied the supremacy of Rome over nations

and commonwealths, prevented the publication and sale of books which

defended the rights of princes and republics, and flooded Europe with

doctrines of regicide, Pontifical omnipotence, and hierarchical

predominance in secular affairs. These are the most important of Sarpi's

minor works. But the same spirit of liberal resistance against Church

aggression, supported by the same erudition and critical sagacity, is

noticeable in a short tract explaining how the Right of Asylum had been

abused to the prejudice of public justice; in a _Discourse upon the

Contributions of the Clergy_, distinguishing their real from their

assumed immunities; and in a brief memorandum upon the Greek College in

Rome, exposing the mischief wrought in commonwealths and families by the

Jesuit system of education.

In all these writings Sarpi held firmly by his main principle, that the

State, no less than the Church, exists _jure divino_. The papal

usurpation of secular prerogatives was in his eyes not merely a

violation of the divinely appointed order of government, but also a

deformation of the ecclesiastical ideal. Those, he argued, are the real

heretics who deprave the antique organism of the Church by making the

Pope absolute, who preach the deity of the Roman Pontiff as though he

were a second God equal in almightiness to God in heaven. 'Nay,' he

exclaims in a passage marked by more than usual heat, 'should one drag

God from heaven they would not stir a finger, provided the Pope

preserved his vice-divinity or rather super-divinity. Bellarmino clearly

states that to restrict the Papal authority to spiritual affairs is the

same as to annihilate it; showing that they value the spiritual at just

zero.'[150] Sarpi saw that the ultra-papalists of his day, by

subordinating the State, the family and the individual to the worldly

interests of Rome, by repressing knowledge and liberty of conscience,

preaching immoral and anti-social doctrines, encouraging superstition

and emasculating education, for the maintenance of those same worldly

interests, were advancing steadily upon the path of self-destruction.

The essence of Christianity was neglected in this brutal struggle for

supremacy; while truth, virtue and religion, those sacred safe-guards of

humanity, which the Church was instituted to preserve, ran no uncertain

risk of perishing through the unnatural perversion of its aims.

[Footnote 150: _Lettere_, vol. ii. p. 169.]

The work which won for Sarpi a permanent place in the history of

literature, and which in his lifetime did more than any other of his

writings to expose the Papal system, is the history of the Tridentine

Council. It was not published with his name or with his sanction. A

manuscript copy lent by him to Marcantonio de Dominis, Archbishop of

Spalatro, was taken by that waverer between Catholicism and

Protestantism to England, and published in London under the pseudonym of

Pietro Soave Polano--an anagram of Paolo Sarpi Veneto--in the year 1619.

That Sarpi was the real author admits of no doubt. The book bears every

stamp of genuineness. It is written in the lucid, nervous,

straightforward style of the man, who always sought for mathematical

precision rather than rhetorical elegance in his use of language. Sarpi

had taken special pains to collect materials for a History of the

Council; and in doing so he had enjoyed exceptional advantages. Early in

his manhood he formed at Mantua a close friendship with Camillo Olivo,

who had been secretary to the Papal Legate, Cardinal Gonzaga of Mantua,

at Trent. During his residence in Rome between 1585 and 1587 he became

intimately acquainted with Cardinal Castagna, president of the committee

appointed for drawing up the decrees of the Council. In addition to the

information afforded by these persons, officially connected with the

transactions of the Council, Sarpi had at his command the Archives of

Venice, including the dispatches of ambassadors, and a vast store of

published documents, not to mention numerous details which in the course

of his long commerce with society he had obtained from the lips of

credible witnesses. All these sources, grasped in their diversity by his

powerful memory and animated with his vivid intellect, are worked into

an even, plain, dispassionate narration, which, in spite of the dryness

of the subject, forms a truly fascinating whole. That Sarpi was strictly

fair in his conception of the Council, can scarcely be maintained; for

he wrote in a spirit of distinct antagonism to the ends which it

achieved. Yet the more we examine the series of events described by him,

the more are we convinced that in its main features the work is just.

When Sir Roger Twysden pronounced it 'to be written with so great

moderation, learning and wisdom, as might deserve a place among the

exactest pieces of ecclesiastic story any age had produced,' he did not

overshoot the mark. Nor has the avowedly hostile investigation to which

Cardinal Pallavicini submitted it, done more than to confirm its credit

by showing that a deadly enemy, with all the arsenal of Roman documents

at his command, could only detect inaccuracies in minor details and

express rage at the controlling animus of the work.

It was Sarpi's object to demonstrate that the Council of Trent, instead

of being a free and open Synod of Christians assembled to discuss points

at issue between the Catholic and Protestant Churches, was in reality a

closely-packed conciliabulum, from which Protestants were excluded, and

where Catholics were dominated by the Italian agents of the Roman Court.

He made it clear, and in this he is confirmed by masses of collateral

proofs, that the presiding spirit of the Council was human diplomacy

rather than divine inspiration, and that Roman intrigue conducted its

transactions to an issue favorable for Papal supremacy by carefully

manipulating the interests of princes and the passions of individuals.

'I shall narrate the causes,' he remarks, in his exordium, 'and the

negotiations of an ecclesiastical convocation during the course of

twenty-two years, for divers ends and with varied means; by whom

promoted and solicited, by whom impeded and delayed; for another

eighteen years, now brought together, now dissolved; always held with

various ends; and which received a form and accomplishment quite

contrary to the design of those who set it going, as also to the fear of

those who took all pains to interrupt it. A clear monition that man

ought to yield his thoughts resignedly to God and not to trust in human

prudence. Forasmuch as this Council, desired and put in motion by pious

men for the reunion of the Church which had begun to break asunder, hath

so established schism and embittered factions that it has rendered those

discords irreconcilable; handled by princes for the reform of the

ecclesiastical system, has caused the greatest deformation that hath

ever been since the name of Christian came into existence; by bishops

with hope expected as that which would restore the episcopal authority,

now in large part absorbed by the sole Roman Pontiff, hath been the

reason of their losing the last vestige of it and of their reduction to

still greater servitude. On the other hand, dreaded and evaded by the

Court of Rome, as an efficient instrument for curbing that exorbitant

power, which from small beginnings hath arrived by various advances to

limitless excess, it has so established and confirmed it over the

portion still left subject to it, as that it never was so vast nor so

well-rooted.' In treating of what he pithily calls 'the Iliad of our

age,' Sarpi promises to observe the truth, and protests that he is

governed by no passion. This promise the historian kept faithfully. His

animus is never allowed to transpire in any direct tirades; his irony

emerges rather in reporting epigrams of others than in personal sarcasms

or innuendoes; his own prepossessions and opinions are carefully veiled.

After reading the whole voluminous history we feel that it would be as

inaccurate to claim Sarpi for Protestantism as to maintain that he was a

friend of ultra-papal Catholicism. What he really had at heart was the

restoration of the Church of God to unity, to purer discipline and to

sincere spirituality. This reconstruction of Christendom upon a sound

basis was, as he perceived, rendered impossible by the Tridentine

decrees. Yet, though the dearest hope of his heart had been thus

frustrated, he set nothing down in malice, nor vented his own

disappointment in laments which might have seemed rebellious against the

Divine will. Sarpi's personality shows itself most clearly in the

luminous discourses with which from time to time he elucidates obscure

matters of ecclesiastical history. Those on episcopal residence,

pluralism, episcopal jurisdiction, the censure of books, and the

malappropriation of endowments, are specially valuable.[151] If no other

proof existed, these digressions would render Sarpi's authorship of the

History unmistakable. They are identical in style and in intention with

his acknowledged treatises, firmly but calmly expressing a sound

scholar's disapproval of abuses which had grown up like morbid

excrescences upon the Church. Taken in connection with the interpolated

summaries of public opinion regarding the Council's method of procedure

and its successive decrees, these discourses betray a spirit of

hostility to Rome which is nowhere openly expressed. Sarpi illustrated

Aretino's cynical sentence: 'How can you speak evil of your neighbor? By

speaking the truth, by speaking the truth!'--without rancor and without

passion. Nothing, in fact, could have been more damaging to Rome than

his precise analysis of her arts in the Council.

I have said that the History of the Tridentine Council, though it

confirmed Sarpi's heretical reputation, would not justify us in

believing him at heart a Protestant.[152]

[Footnote 151: _Opere di Paolo Sarpi_, Helmstaedt, 1761, vol. i. pp. 200,

233, 311; vol. ii. pp. 89, 187.]

[Footnote 152: This contradicts the opinion of Hallam and Macaulay, both

of whom were convinced that Sarpi was a Protestant at heart. Macaulay

wishes that he had thrown off the friar's frock. In a certain sense

Sarpi can be classified with the larger minds among the Reformed

Churches of his age. But to call him a Protestant who concealed his real

faith, argues coarseness of perception, incapacity for comprehending any

attitude above and beyond belligerent Catholicism and Protestantism, or

of sympathizing with the deeply-religious feelings of one who, after

calculating all chances and surveying all dogmatic differences, thought

that he could serve God as well and his country better in that communion

which was his by birthright. To an illuminated intellect there was not

in the seventeenth century much reason to prefer one of the Reformed

Churches to Catholicism, except for the sake of political freedom. It

being impossible to change the State-religion in Venice, Sarpi had no

inducement to leave his country and to pass his life in exile among

prejudiced sectarians.]

Very much depends on how we define the word Protestant. If Sarpi's

known opinions regarding the worldliness of Rome, ecclesiastical abuses,

and Papal supremacy, constitute a Protestant, then he certainly was one.

But if antagonism to Catholic dogma, repudiation of the Catholic

Sacraments and abhorrence of monastic institutions are also necessary to

the definition, then Sarpi was as certainly no Protestant. He seems to

have anticipated the position of those Christians who now are known as

Old Catholics. This appears from his vivid sympathy with the Gallican

Church, and from his zealous defense of those prerogatives and

privileges in which the Venetian Church resembled that of France. We

must go to his collected letters in order to penetrate his real way of

thinking on the subject of reform. The most important of these are

addressed to Frenchmen--Ph. Duplessis Mornay, De l'Isle Groslot,

Leschassier, a certain Roux, Gillot, and Casaubon. If we could be quite

sure that the text of these familiar letters had not been tampered with

before publication, their testimony would be doubly valuable. As it is,

no one at all acquainted with Sarpi's style will doubt that in the main

they are trustworthy. Here and there it may be that a phrase has been

inserted or modified to give a stronger Protestant coloring. The

frequent allusion to the Court of Rome under the title of _La

Meretrice_, especially in letters to Duplessis Mornay, looks

suspicious.[153] Yet Dante, Petrarch and Savonarola used similar

metaphors, when describing the secular ambition of the Papacy. Having

pointed out a weakness in this important series of documents, I will

translate some obviously genuine passages which illustrate Sarpi's

attitude toward reform.

Writing to Leschassier upon the literary warfare of James I., he says it

is a pity that the king did not abstain from theology and confine

himself to the defense of his princely prerogatives against the claims

of Rome. He has exposed himself to the imputation of wishing to upset

the foundations of the faith. 'With regard to our own affairs [_i.e._ in

Venice], we do not seek to mix up heaven and earth, things human and

things divine. Our desire is to leave the sacraments and all that

pertains to religion as they are, believing that we can uphold the

secular government in those rights which Scripture and the teaching of

the Fathers confirm.'[154] In another place he says: 'I have well

considered the reasons which drew Germany and England into changing the

observances of religion; but upon us neither these nor others of greater

weight will exercise any influence.

[Footnote 153: _Lettere_, vol. ii. pp. 3, 18, 96, 109, and elsewhere.]

[Footnote 154: _Ib._ vol. ii. p. 6.]

It is better to suffer certain rules and customs that are not in all

points commendable, than to acquire a taste for revolution and to yield

to the temptation of confounding all things in chaos.'[155] His own

grievance against the Popes, he adds, is that they are innovating and

destroying the primitive constitution of the Church. With regard to the

possibility of uniting Christendom, he writes that many of the

differences between Catholics and Protestants seem to him verbal; many,

such as could be tolerated in one communion; and many capable of

adjustment. But a good occasion must be waited for.[156] Nothing can be

done in Italy without a general war, that shall shake the powers of

Spain and Rome.[157] Both Spain and Rome are so well aware of their

peril that they use every means to keep Italy in peace.[158] If the

Protestants of Europe are bent on victory, they must imitate the policy

of Scipio and attack the Jesuits and Rome in their headquarters.[159]

'There is no enterprise of greater moment than to destroy the credit of

the Jesuits. When they are conquered, Rome is taken; and without Rome,

religion reforms itself spontaneously.'[160] 'Changes in State are

inextricably involved in changes of religion;'[161] and Italy will never

be free so long as the Diacatholicon lasts.

[Footnote 155: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 237.]

[Footnote 156: _Ib._ p. 268.]

[Footnote 157: _Ib._ vol. ii. pp. 29, 48, 59, 60, 125.]

[Footnote 158: _Ib._ p. 120, 124.]

[Footnote 159: _Ib._ p. 226.]

[Footnote 160: _Ib._ p. 217.]

[Footnote 161: _Ib._ p. 427.]

Meanwhile, 'were it not for State policy there would be found hundreds

ready to leap from this ditch of Rome to the summit of Reform.'[162] The

hope of some improvement at Venice depends mainly upon the presence

there of embassies from Protestant powers--England, Holland and the

Grisons.[163] These give an opportunity to free religious discussion,

and to the dissemination of Gospel truth. Sarpi is strong in his praise

of Fra Fulgenzio for fearlessly preaching Christ and the truth, and

repeats the Pope's complaint that the Bible is injurious to the Catholic

faith.[164] He led William Bedell, chaplain to Sir H. Wotton and

afterwards Bishop of Kilmore, to believe that Fra Fulgenzio and himself

were ripe for Reform. 'These two I know,' writes Bedell to Prince Henry,

'as having practiced with them, to desire nothing so much as the

Reformation of the Church, and, in a word, for the substance of religion

they are wholly ours.'[165] During the interdict Diodati came from

Geneva to Venice, and Sarpi informed him that some 12,000 persons in the

city wished for rupture with Rome; but the government and the

aristocracy being against it, nothing could be done.[166]

[Footnote 162: _Lettere_, vol. ii. p. 283.]

[Footnote 163: _Ib._ p. 110, 311.]

[Footnote 164: _Ib._ vol. i. pp. 220, 222, 225, 231, 239.]

[Footnote 165: Campbell's _Life_, p. 132.]

[Footnote 166: _Ib._ p. 133, 135.]

Enough has now been quoted to throw some light upon Sarpi's attitude

toward Protestantism. That he most earnestly desired the overthrow of

ultra-papal Catholicism, is apparent. So also are his sympathies with

those reformed nations which enjoyed liberty of conscience and

independence of ecclesiastical control. Yet his first duty was to

Venice; and since the State remained Catholic, he personally had no

intention of quitting the communion into which he had been born and in

which he was an ordained priest. All Churches, he wrote in one memorable

letter to Casaubon, have their imperfections. The Church of Corinth, in

the days of the Apostles, was corrupt.[167] 'The fabric of the Church of

God,' being on earth, cannot expect immunity from earthly

frailties.[168] Such imperfections and such frailties as the Catholic

Church shared with all things of this world, Sarpi was willing to

tolerate. The deformation of that Church by Rome and Jesuitry he

manfully withstood; but he saw no valid reason why he should abandon her

for Protestantism. In his own conscience he remained free to serve God

in spirit and in truth. The mind of the man in fact was too far-seeing

and too philosophical to exchange old lamps for new without a better

prospect of attaining to absolute truth than the dissenters from

Catholicism afforded. His interest in Protestant, as separate from

Catholic Reform, was rather civil and political than religious or

theological. Could those soaring wings of Rome be broken, then and not

till then might the Italians enjoy freedom of conscience, liberty of

discussion and research, purer piety, and a healthier activity as

citizens.

[Footnote 167: _Lettere_, vol. ii. p. 86.]

[Footnote 168: _Ib._ vol. i. p. 283.]

Side light may be thrown upon Sarpi's judgment of the European situation

by considering in detail what he said about the Jesuits. This company,

as we have seen, lent its support to Papal absolutism; and during the

later years of Sarpi's life it seemed destined to carry the world before

it, by control of education, by devotion to Rome, by adroit manipulation

of the religious consciousness for anti-social ends and ecclesiastical

aggrandizement.

The sure sign of being in the right, said Sarpi, is when one finds

himself in contradiction to the Jesuits. They are most subtle masters in

ill-doing, men who, if their needs demand, are ready to commit crimes

worse than those of which they now are guilty. All falsehood and all

blasphemy proceed from them. They have set the last hand at establishing

universal corruption. They are a public plague, the plague of the world,

chameleons who take their color from the soil they squat on, flatterers

of princes, perverters of youth. They not only excuse but laud lying;

their dissimulation is bare and unqualified mendacity; their malice is

inestimable. They have the art so to blend their interests and that of

Rome, seeking for themselves and the Papacy the empire of the world,

that the Curia must needs support them, while it cowers before their

inscrutable authority. They are the ruin of good literature and

wholesome doctrine by their pitiful pretense of learning and their

machinery of false teaching. On ignorance rests their power, and truth

is mortal to them. Every vice of which humanity is capable, every

frailty to which it is subject, finds from them support and consolation.

If S. Peter had been directed by a Jesuit confessor he might have

arrived at denying Christ without sin. The use the confessional as an

instrument of political and domestic influence, reciprocating its

confidences one with the other in their own debates, but menacing their

penitents with penalties if a word of their counsel be bruited to the

world. Expelled from Venice, they work more mischief there by their

intrigues than they did when they were tolerated.[169] They scheme to

get a hold on Constantinople and Palestine, in order to establish

seminaries of fanatics and assassins. They are responsible for the

murder of Henri IV., for if they did not instigate Ravaillac, their

doctrine of regicide inspired him. They can creep into any kingdom, any

institution, any household, because they readily accept any terms and

subscribe to any conditions in the certainty that by the adroit use of

flattery, humbug, falsehood, and corruption, they will soon become

masters of the situation. In France they are the real Morbus Gallicus.

In Italy they are the soul of the Diacatholicon.

[Footnote 169: It is worthy of notice, as a stern Venetian joke, that

when the Jesuits eventually returned to Rialto, they were bade walk in

processions upon ceremonial occasions between the Fraternities of S.

Marco and S. Teodoro--saints amid whose columns on the Molo criminals

were executed.]

The torrent of Sarpi's indignation against the Jesuits, as perverters of

sound doctrine in the Church, disturbers of kingdoms, sappers of

morality and disseminators of vile customs through society, runs so

violently forward that we are fain to check it, while acknowledging its

justice. One passage only, from the many passages bearing on this topic

in his correspondence, demands special citation, since it deals directly

with the whole material of the present work. Writing to his friend

Leschassier, he speaks as follows: 'Nothing can be of more mischief to

you in France than the dishonesty of bad confessors and their

determination to aggrandize Rome by any means, together with the

mistaken zeal of the good sort. We have arrived at a point where cure of

the disease must even be despaired of. Fifty years ago things went well

in Italy. There was no public system of education for training young men

to the profit of the clergy. They were brought up by their parents in

private, more for the advantage of their families than for that of the

hierarchy. In religious houses, where studies flourished, attention was

paid to scholastic logic. The jurisdiction and the authority of the Pope

were hardly touched on; and while theology was pursued at leisure, the

majority passed their years in contemplation of the Deity and angels.

Recently, through the decrees of the Tridentine Council, schools have

been opened in every State, which are called Seminaries, where education

is concentrated on the sole end of augmenting ecclesiastical supremacy.

Furthermore, the prelates of each district, partly with a view of saving

their own pockets, and partly that they may display a fashionable show

of zeal, have committed the charge of those institutions to Jesuits.

This has caused a most important alteration in the aspect of

affairs.'[170] It would be difficult to state the changes effected by

the Tridentine Council and the commission of education to the Jesuits

more precisely and more fairly than in this paragraph. How deeply Sarpi

had penetrated the Jesuitical arts in education, can be further

demonstrated from another passage in his minor works.[171] In a memoir

prepared for the Venetian Signory, he says that the Jesuits are vulgarly

supposed to be unrivaled as trainers of youth. But a patent equivocation

lurks under this phrase 'unrivaled.' Education must be considered with

regard to the utility of the State. 'Now the education of the Jesuits

consists in stripping the pupil of every obligation to his father, to

his country, and to his natural prince; in diverting all his love and

fear toward a spiritual superior, on whose nod, beck and word he is

dependent. This system of training is useful for the supremacy of

ecclesiastics and for such secular governments as they are ready to

submit to; and none can deny that the Jesuits are without equals in

their employment of it. Yet in so far as it is advantageous in such

cases, so also is it prejudicial to States, the end whereof is liberty

and real virtue, and with whom the ecclesiastical faction remains in

bad accord. From the Jesuit colleges there never issued a son obedient

to his father, devoted to his country, loyal to his prince. The cause of

this is that the Jesuits employ their best energies in destroying

natural affection, respect for parents, reverence for princes. Therefore

they only deserve to be admired by those whose interest it is to subject

family, country and government to ecclesiastical interests.'

[Footnote 170: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 126; _Opere_, vol. vi. p. 40.]

[Footnote 171: _Opere_, vol. vi. p. 145.]

The Provincial Letters of Pascal, which Sarpi anticipated in so many

points, suffice to prove that he was justified in this hostility to

ultramontanism backed up by Jesuit artifices. He was writing, be it

remembered, at the very high tide of Papal domination, when Henri IV.

had been assassinated, and when the overwhelming forces of secular

interests combined with intellectual progress had not as yet set limits

on ecclesiastical encroachment. The dread lest Europe should succumb to

Rome, now proved by subsequent events an unsubstantial nightmare, was

real enough for this Venetian friar, who ran daily risk of assassination

in down-trodden servile Italy, with Spanish plots threatening the

arsenal, with France delivered into the hands of Florentines and

casuists, with England in the grip of Stuarts, and with Germany

distracted by intrigues. He could not foresee that in the course of a

century the Jesuits would be discredited by their own arts, and that the

Papacy would subside into a pacific sovereignty bent on securing its own

temporal existence by accommodation.

The end of Sarpi's life consecrated the principles of duty to God and

allegiance to his country which had animated its whole course. He fell

into a bad state of health; yet nothing would divert him from the due

discharge of public business. 'All the signs of the soul's speedy

departure from that age-enfeebled body, were visible; but his

indefatigable spirit sustained him in such wise that he bore exactly all

his usual burdens. When his friends and masters bade him relax his

energies, he used to answer: My duty is to serve and not to live; there

is some one daily dying in his office.[172] When at length the very

sources of existence failed, and the firm brain wandered for a moment,

he was once heard to say: 'Let us go to S. Mark, for it is late.'[173]

The very last words he uttered, frequently repeated, but scarcely

intelligible, were: 'Esto Perpetua.'[174] _May Venice last forever_!

This was the dying prayer of the man who had consecrated his best

faculties to the service of his country. But before he passed away into

that half slumber which precedes death, he made confession to his

accustomed spiritual father, received the Eucharist and Extreme Unction,

and bade farewell to the superior of the Servites, in the following

sentence: 'Go ye to rest, and I will return to God, from whom I came.'

With these words he closed his lips in silence, crossing his hands upon

his breast and fixing his eyes upon a crucifix that stood before

him.[175]

[Footnote 172: Fulgenzio's _Life_, p. 98.]

[Footnote 173: _Ibid._ p. 105.]

[Footnote 174: _Ibid._]

[Footnote 175: Letter of the Superior to the Venetian Senate, printed in

the _Lettere_, vol. ii. pp. 450-453. It is worth meditating on the

contrast between Sarpi's and Bruno's deaths. Sarpi died with the

consolations of religion on his bed in the convent which had been his

life-long home. Bruno was burned alive, with eyes averted from the

crucifix in bitter scorn, after seven and a half years spent in the

prisons of the Inquisition. Sarpi exhaled his last breath amid

sympathizing friends, in the service of a grateful country. Bruno panted

his death-pangs of suffocation and combustion out, surrounded by

menacing Dominicans, in the midst of hostile Rome celebrating her

triumphant jubilee. Sarpi's last thoughts were given to the God of

Christendom and the Republic. Bruno had no country; the God in whom he

trusted at that grim hour, was the God within his soul, unrealized,

detached by his own reason from every Church and every creed.]

I will return to God from whom I came.

These words--not the last, for the last were _Esto perpetua_; but the

last spoken in the presence of his fraternity--have a deep significance

for those who would fain understand the soul of Sarpi. When in his

lifetime he spoke of the Church, it was always as 'the Church of God.'

When he relegated his own anxieties for the welfare of society to a

superior power, it was not to Mary, as Jesuits advised, nor even to

Christ, but invariably to the Providence of God. Sarpi, we have the

right to assume, lived and died a sincere believer in the God who orders

and disposes of the universe; and this God, identical in fact though not

in form with Bruno's, he worshiped through such symbols of ceremony and

religion as had been adopted by him in his youth. An intellect so clear

of insight as this, knew that 'God is a spirit, and they that worship

him must worship him in spirit and in truth.' He knew that 'neither on

this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem,' neither in Protestant communities

nor yet in Rome was the authentic God made tangible; but that a loyal

human being, created in God's image, could serve him and adore him with

life-worship under any of the spiritual shapes which mortal frailty has

fashioned for its needs.

To penetrate the abyss of any human personality is impossible. No man

truly sees into his living neighbor's, brother's, wife's, nay even his

own soul. How futile, therefore, is the effort which we make to seize

and sketch the vital lineaments of men long dead, divided from us not

merely by the grave which has absorbed their fleshly form and deprived

us of their tone of voice, but also by those differences in thought and

feeling which separate the centuries of culture! Yet this impossible

task lies ever before the historian. Few characters are more patently

difficult to comprehend than that of Sarpi. Ultimately, so far as it is

possible to formulate a view, I think he may be defined as a Christian

Stoic, possessed with two main governing ideas, duty to God and duty to

Venice. His last words were for Venice; the penultimate consigned his

soul to God. For a mind like his, so philosophically tempered, so versed

in all the history of the world to us-wards, the materials of dispute

between Catholic and Protestant must have seemed but trifles. He stayed

where he had early taken root, in his Servite convent at S. Fosca,

because he there could dedicate his life to God and Venice better than

in any Protestant conventicle. Had Venice inclined toward rupture with

Rome, had the Republic possessed the power to make that rupture with

success, Sarpi would have hailed the event gladly, as introducing for

Italy the prospect of spiritual freedom, purer piety, and the overthrow

of Papal-Spanish despotism. But Venice chose to abide in the old ways,

and her Counselor of State knew better than any one that she had not the

strength to cope with Spain, Rome, Jesuitry and Islam single-handed.

Therefore he possessed his soul in patience, worshiping God under forms

and symbols to which he had from youth been used, trusting the while

that sooner or later God would break those mighty wings of Papal

domination.

CHAPTER XI.

GUARINO, MARINO, CHIABRERA, TASSONI.

Dearth of Great Men--Guarini a Link between Tasso and the

Seventeenth Century--His Biography--The _Pastor Fido_--Qualities of

Guarini as Poet--Marino the Dictator of Letters--His Riotous Youth

at Naples--Life at Rome, Turin, Paris--Publishes the _Adone_--The

Epic of Voluptuousness--Character and Action of Adonis--Marino's

Hypocrisy--Sentimental Sweetness--Brutal Violence--Violation of

Artistic Taste--Great Powers of the Poet--Structure of the

_Adone_--Musical Fluency--Marinism--Marino's Patriotic

Verses--Contrast between Chiabrera and Marino--An Aspirant after

Pindar--Chiabrera's Biography--His Court Life--Efforts of Poets in

the Seventeenth Century to attain to Novelty--Chiabrera's

Failure--Tassoni's Life--His Thirst to Innovate--Origin of the

_Secchia Rapita_--Mock-Heroic Poetry--The Plot of this Poem--Its

Peculiar Humor--Irony and Satire--Novelty of the Species--Lyrical

Interbreathings--Sustained Contrast of Parody and Pathos--The Poet

Testi.

Soon after 1600 it became manifest that lapse of years and

ecclesiastical intolerance had rendered Italy nearly destitute of great

men. Her famous sons were all either dead, murdered or exiled; reduced

to silence by the scythe of time or by the Roman 'arguments of sword and

halter.' Bruno burned, Vanini burned, Carnesecchi burned, Paleario

burned, Bonfadio burned; Campanella banished, after a quarter of a

century's imprisonment with torture; the leaders of free religious

thought in exile, scattered over northern Europe. Tasso, worn out with

misery and madness, rested at length in his tomb on the Janiculan;

Sarpi survived the stylus of the Roman Curia with calm inscrutability at

S. Fosca; Galileo meditated with closed lips in his watch-tower behind

Bello Sguardo. With Michelangelo in 1564, Palladio in 1580, Tintoretto

in 1594, the godlike lineage of the Renaissance artists ended; and what

children of the sixteenth century still survived to sustain the nation's

prestige, to carry on its glorious traditions? The list is but a poor

one. Marino, Tassoni, the younger Buonarroti, Boccalini and Chiabrera in

literature. The Bolognese Academy in painting. After these men expand

arid wildernesses of the Sei Cento--barocco architecture, false taste,

frivolity, grimace, affectation--Jesuitry translated into culture. On

one bright point, indeed, the eye rests with hope and comfort.

Palestrina, when he died in 1594, did not close but opened an age for

music. His posterity, those composers, lutists, violists and singers,

from whom the modern art of arts has drawn her being, down to the sweet

fellowship of Pergolese, Marcello and Jomelli, of Guarneri, Amati and

Stradivari, of Farinelli, Caffarielli and La Romanina, were as yet but

rising dimly heralded with light of dawn upon their foreheads.

In making the transition from the _Gerusalemme_ to the _Adone_, from the

last great poem of the Cinque Cento to the epic of the Sei Cento, it is

indispensable that notice should be taken of the _Pastor Fido_ and its

author. Giambattista Guarini forms a link between Vasso and the poets of

the seventeenth century. He belonged less to the Renaissance, more to

the culture of the age created by the Council of Trent, than did Tasso.

His life, in many of its details similar, in others most dissimilar, to

that of Tasso, illustrates and helps us in some measure to explain the

latter. It must therefore form the subject of a somewhat detailed study.

Guarini drew his blood on the paternal side from the illustrious

humanist Guarino of Verona, who settled at Ferrara in the fifteenth

century as tutor to Leonello d'Este.[176] By his mother he claimed

descent from the Florentine house of Machiavelli. Born in 1537, he was

seven years older than Torquato Tasso, whom he survived eighteen years,

not closing his long life until 1612. He received a solid education both

at Pisa and Padua, and was called at the early age of eighteen to

profess moral philosophy in the University of Ferrara. Being of noble

birth and inheriting a considerable patrimony, Guarini might have

enjoyed a life of uninterrupted literary leisure, if he had chosen to

forego empty honors and shun the idle distractions of Courts. But it was

the fate of distinguished men in that age to plunge into those

quicksands. Guarini had a character and intellect suited to the conduct

of state affairs; and he shared the delusion prevalent among his

contemporaries, that the petty Italian principalities could offer a

field for the exercise of these talents. 'If our country is reduced to

the sole government of a prince,' he writes, 'the man who serves his

prince will serve his country, a duty both natural and binding upon

all.'[177] Accordingly, soon after his marriage to Taddea of the noble

Bendedei family, he entered the service of Alfonso II. This was in 1567.

Tasso, in his quality of gentleman to Cardinal d'Este, had already shed

lustre on Ferrara through the past two years. Guarini first made Tasso's

friendship at Padua, where both were Eterei and house-guests of Scipione

Gonzaga. The two poets now came together in a rivalry which was not

altogether amicable. The genius of Tasso, in the prime of youth and

heyday of Court-favor, roused Guarini's jealousy. And yet their

positions were so different that Guarini might have been well satisfied

to pursue his own course without envy. A married and elder man, he had

no right to compete in gallantry with the brilliant young bachelor.

Destined for diplomacy and affairs of state, he had no cause to grudge

the Court poet his laurels. Writing in 1595, Guarini avers that 'poetry

has been my pastime, never my profession'; and yet he made it his

business at Ferrara to rival Tasso both as a lyrist and as a servant of

dames. Like Tasso, he suffered from the spite of Alfonso's secretaries,

Pigna and Montecatino, who seem to have incarnated the malevolence of

courtiers in its basest form. So far, there was a close parallel between

the careers of the two men at Ferrara.

[Footnote 176: See _Renaissance in Italy_, vol. ii. pp. 299, 300.]

[Footnote 177: _Lettere del Guarini_, Venezia, 1596, p. 2.]

But Guarini's wealth and avowed objects in life caused the duke from

the first to employ him in a different kind of service. Alfonso sent him

as ambassador to Venice, Rome, and Turin, giving him the rank of

Cavaliere in order that he might perform his missions with more dignity.

At Turin, where he resided for some time, Guarini conceived a just

opinion of the growing importance of the House of Savoy. Like all the

finest spirits of his age, Tassoni, Sarpi, Chiabrera, Marino, Testi, he

became convinced that if Italy were to recover her independence, it

could only be by the opposition of the Dukes of Savoy to Spain. How

nearly the hopes of these men were being realized by Carlo Emmanuele,

and how those hopes were frustrated by Roman intrigues and the jealousy

of Italian despots, is matter of history. Yet the student may observe

with interest that the most penetrating minds of the sixteenth century

already discerned the power by means of which, after the lapse of nearly

three hundred years, the emancipation of Italy has been achieved.

In 1574 Guarini was sent to Poland, to congratulate Henri III. upon his

election to that monarchy. He went a second time in the following year

to conduct more delicate negotiations. The crown of Poland was now

thrown open to candidature; and more than one of the Italian Princes

thought seriously of competing for this honor. The Grand Duke of Tuscany

entertained the notion and abandoned it. But Alfonso II. of Ferrara, who

had fought with honor in his youth in Hungary, made it a serious object

of ambition. Manolesso, the Venetian envoy in 1575 at Ferrara, relates

how the duke spent laborious hours in acquiring the German language,

'which no one learns for pleasure, since it is most barbarous, nor

quickly, but with industry and large expenditure of time.' He also

writes: 'The duke aspires to greatness, nor is satisfied with his

present State; and therefore he has entered into the Polish affair,

encouraged thereto by his brother the Cardinal and by his ambassador in

Poland.'[178]

These embassies were a serious drain upon Guarini's resources; for it

appears certain that if he received any appointments, they were

inadequate to the expenses of long journeys and the maintenance of a

becoming state. He therefore returned to Ferrara, considerably burdened

with debts; and this was just the time at which Tasso's mental

derangement began to manifest itself. Between 1575 and 1579, the date of

Tasso's imprisonment at Sant' Anna, the two men lived together at the

Court. Guarini's rivalry induced him at this period to cultivate poetry

with such success that, when the author of the _Gerusalemme_ failed,

Alfonso commanded him to take the vacant place of Court poet. There is

an interesting letter extant from Guarini to his friend Cornelio

Bentivoglio, describing the efforts he made to comply with the Duke's

pleasure. 'I strove to transform myself into another man, and, like a

playactor, to reassume the character, manners and emotions of a past

period. Mature in age, I forced myself to appear young; exchanged my

melancholy for gayety: affected loves I did not feel; turned my wisdom

into folly, and, in a word, passed from philosopher to poet.'[179] How

ill-adapted he was to this masquerade existence may be gathered from

another sentence in the same letter. 'I am already in my forty-fourth

year, burdened with debts, the father of eight children, two of my sons

old enough to be my judges, and with my daughters to marry.'

[Footnote 178: Alberi, _Relazioni_, series 2, vol. ii. pp. 423-425.]

At last, abandoning this uncongenial strain upon his faculties, Guarini

retired in 1582 to the villa which he had built upon his ancestral

estate in the Polesine, that delightful rustic region between Adige and

Po. Here he gave himself up to the cares of his family, the nursing of

his dilapidated fortune, and the composition of the _Pastor Fido_. It is

not yet the time to speak of that work, upon which Guarini's fame as

poet rests; for the drama, though suggested by Tasso's _Aminta_, was not

finally perfected until 1602.[180] Yet we may pause to remark upon the

circumstances under which he wrote it. A disappointed courtier, past the

prime of manhood, feeling his true vocation to be for severe studies and

practical affairs, he yet devoted years of leisure to the slow

elaboration of a dramatic masterpiece which is worthy to rank with the

classics of Italian literature. During this period his domestic lot was

not a happy one. He lost his wife, quarreled with his elder sons, and

involved himself in a series of lawsuits.[181] Litigation seems to have

been an inveterate vice of his maturity, and he bequeathed to his

descendants a coil of legal troubles. Having married one of his

daughters, Anna, to Count Ercole Trotti, he had the misery of hearing in

1596 that she had fallen an innocent victim to her husband's jealousy,

and that his third son, Girolamo connived at her assassination. In the

midst of these annoyances and sorrows, he maintained a grave and robust

attitude, uttering none of those querulous lamentations which flowed so

readily from Tasso's pen.

[Footnote 179: _Lettere_, p. 195.]

[Footnote 180: In this year it was published with the author's revision

by Ciotto at Venice. It had been represented at Turin in 1585, and first

printed at Venice in 1590.]

Tasso had used the Pastoral Drama to idealize Courts. Guarini vented all

the bitterness of his soul against them in his _Pastor Fido_. He also

wrote from his retirement: 'I am at ease in the enjoyment of liberty,

studies, the management of my household.'[182] Yet in 1585, while on a

visit to Turin, he again accepted proposals from Alfonso. He had gone

there in order to superintend the first representation of his Pastoral,

which was dedicated to the Duke of Savoy. Extremely averse to his old

servants taking office under other princes, the Duke of Ferrara seems to

have feared lest Guarini should pass into the Court of Carlo Emmanuele.

He therefore appointed him Secretary of State; and Guarini entered upon

the post in the same year that Tasso issued from his prison. This

reconciliation did not last long. Alfonso took the side of Alessandro

Guarini in a lawsuit with his father; and the irritable poet retired in

indignation to Florence. The Duke of Ferrara, however, was determined

that he should not serve another master. At Florence, Turin, Mantua and

Rome, his attempts to obtain firm foothold in offices of trust were

invariably frustrated; and Coccapani, the Duke's envoy, hinted that if

Guarini were not circumspect, 'he might suffer the same fate as Tasso.'

To shut Guarini up in a madhouse would have been difficult. Still he

might easily have been dispatched by the poniard; and these words throw

not insignificant light upon Tasso's terror of assassination.

[Footnote 181: Guarini may be compared with Trissino in these points of

his private life. See _Renaissance in Italy_, vol. v. 303-305.]

[Footnote 182: _Lettere_, p. 196.]

The Duke Alfonso died in 1597, and Ferrara reverted to the Holy See.

Upon this occasion, Guarini was free to follow his own inclinations. He

therefore established himself at the Court of the Grand Duke, into whose

confidence he entered upon terms of flattering familiarity. Ferdinando

de'Medici 'fell in love with him as a man may with a fine woman,' says

his son Alessandro in one of his apologetic writings. This, however,

meant but little; for compliments passed freely between princes and

their courtiers; which, when affairs of purse or honor were at stake,

soon turned to discontent and hatred. So it fared with Guarini at

Florence. His son, Guarino, made a marriage of which he disapproved, but

which the Grand Duke countenanced. So slight a disagreement snapped the

ties of friendship, and the restless poet removed to the Court of

Urbino. There the last duke of the House of Rovere, Francesco Maria II.,

Tasso's schoolfellow and patron, was spending his widowed years in

gloomy Spanish pride. The mortmain of the Church was soon to fall upon

Urbino, as it had already fallen on Ferrara. Guarini wrote: 'The former

Court in Italy is a dead thing. One may see the shadow, but not the

substance of it nowadays. Ours is an age of appearances, and one goes

a-masquerading all the year.' A sad but sincere epitaph, inscribed by

one who had gone the round of all the Courts of Italy, and had survived

the grand free life of the Renaissance.