CHAPTER IX.

GIORDANO BRUNO.

Scientific Bias of the Italians checked by Catholic Revival--Boyhood of Bruno--Enters Order of S. Dominic at Naples--Early Accusations of Heresy--Escapes to Rome--Teaches the Sphere at Noli--Visits Venice--At Geneva--At Toulouse--At Paris--His Intercourse with Henri III.--Visits England--The French Ambassador in London--Oxford--Bruno's Literary Work in England--Returns to Paris--Journeys into Germany--Wittenberg, Helmstädt, Frankfort--Invitation to Venice from Giovanni Mocenigo--His Life in Venice--Mocenigo denounces him to the Inquisition--His Trial at Venice--Removal to Rome--Death by Burning in 1600--Bruno's Relation to the Thought of his Age and to the Thought of Modern Europe--Outlines of his Philosophy.

The humanistic and artistic impulses of the Renaissance were at the point of exhaustion in Italy. Scholarship declined; the passion for antiquity expired. All those forms of literature which Boccaccio initiated--comedy, romance, the idyl, the lyric and the novel--had been worked out by a succession of great writers. It became clear that the nation was not destined to create tragic or heroic types of poetry. Architecture, sculpture and painting had performed their task of developing mediaeval motives by the light of classic models, and were now entering on the stage of academical inanity. Yet the mental vigor of the Italians was by no means exhausted. Early in the sixteenth century Machiavelli had inaugurated a new method for political philosophy; Pompanazzo at Padua and Telesio at Cosenza disclosed new horizons for psychology and the science of nature. It seemed as though the Renaissance in Italy were about to assume a fresh and more serious character without losing its essential inspiration. That evolution of intellectual energy which had begun with the assimilation of the classics, with the first attempts at criticism, with the elaboration of style and the perfection of artistic form, now promised to invade the fields of metaphysical and scientific speculation. It is true, as we have seen, that the theological problems of the German Reformation took but slight hold on Italians. Their thinkers were already too far advanced upon the paths of modern rationalism to feel the actuality of questions which divided Luther from Zwingli, Calvin from Servetus, Knox from Cranmer. But they promised to accomplish master-works of incalculable magnitude in wider provinces of exploration and investigation. And had this progress not been checked, Italy would have crowned and completed the process commenced by humanism. In addition to the intellectual culture already given to Europe, she might have revealed right methods of mental analysis and physical research. For this further step in the discovery of man and of the world, the nation was prepared to bring an army of new pioneers into the field--the philosophers of the south, and the physicists of the Lombard universities.

Humanism effected the emancipation of intellect by culture. It called attention to the beauty and delightfulness of nature, restored man to a sense of his dignity, and freed him from theological authority. But in Italy, at any rate, it left his conscience, his religion, his sociological ideas, the deeper problems which concern his relation to the universe, the subtler secrets of the world in which he lives, untouched.

These novi homines of the later Renaissance, as Bacon called them, these novatori, as they were contemptuously styled in Italy, prepared the further emancipation of the intellect by science. They asserted the liberty of thought and speech, proclaimed the paramount authority of that inner light or indwelling deity which man owns in his brain and breast, and rehabilitated nature from the stigma cast on it by Christianity. What the Bible was for Luther, that was the great Book of Nature for Telesio, Bruno, Campanella. The German reformer appealed to the reason of the individual as conscience; the school of southern Italy made a similar appeal to intelligence. In different ways Luther and these speculative thinkers maintained the direct illumination of the human soul by God, man's immediate dependence on his Maker, repudiating ecclesiastical intervention, and refusing to rely on any principle but earnest love of truth.

Had this new phase of the Italian Renaissance been permitted to evolve itself unhindered, there is no saying how much earlier Europe might have entered into the possession of that kingdom of unprejudiced research which is now secured for us. But it was just at the moment when Italy became aware of the arduous task before her, that the Catholic reaction set in with all its rigor. The still creative spirit of her children succumbed to the Inquisition, the Congregation of the Index, the decrees of Trent, the intellectual submission of the Jesuits, the physical force of Spanish tyranny, and Roman absolutism. Carnesecchi was burned alive; Paleario was burned alive; Bruno was burned alive: these three at Rome. Vanini was burned at Toulouse. Valentino Gentile was executed by Calvinists at Berne. Campanella was cruelly tortured and imprisoned for twenty-seven years at Naples. Galileo was forced to humble himself before ignorant and arrogant monks, and to hide his head in a country villa. Sarpi felt the knife of an assassin, and would certainly have perished at the instigation of his Roman enemies but for the protection guaranteed him by the Signory of Venice. In this way did Italy--or rather, let us say, the Church which dominated Italy--devour her sons of light. It is my purpose in the present chapter to narrate the life of Bruno and to give some account of his philosophy, taking him as the most illustrious example of the school exterminated by reactionary Rome.

Giordano Bruno was born in 1548 at Nola, an ancient Greek city close to Naples. He received the baptismal name of Filippo, which he exchanged for Giordano on assuming the Dominican habit. His parents, though people of some condition, were poor; and this circumstance may perhaps be reckoned the chief reason why Bruno entered the convent of S. Dominic at Naples before he had completed his fifteenth year. It will be remembered that Sarpi joined the Servites at the age of thirteen, and Campanella the Dominicans at that of fourteen. In each of these memorable cases it is probable that poverty had something to do with deciding a vocation so premature. But there were other inducements, which rendered the monastic life not unattractive, to a young man seeking knowledge at a period and in a district where instruction was both costly and difficult to obtain. Campanella himself informs us that he was drawn to the order of S. Dominic by its reputation for learning and by the great names of S. Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. Bruno possibly felt a similar attraction; for there is nothing in the temper of his mind to make us believe that he inclined seriously to the religious life of the cloister.

During his novitiate he came into conflict with the superiors of his convent for the first time. It was proved against him that he had given away certain images of saints, keeping only the crucifix; also that he had told a comrade to lay aside a rhymed version of the Seven Joys of Mary, and to read the lives of the Fathers of the Church instead. On these two evidences of insufficient piety, an accusation was prepared against him which might have led to serious results. But the master of the novices preferred to destroy the document, retaining only a memorandum of the fact for future use in case of need.[84] Bruno, after this event, obeyed the cloistral discipline in quiet, and received priest's orders in 1572.

At this epoch of his life, when he had attained his twenty-fourth year, he visited several Dominican convents of the Neapolitan province, and entered with the want of prudence which was habitual to him into disputations on theology. Some remarks he let fall on transubstantiation and the Divinity of Christ, exposed him to a suspicion of Arianism, a heresy at that time rife in southern Italy. Bruno afterwards confessed that from an early age he had entertained speculative doubts upon the metaphysics of the Trinity, though he was always prepared to accept that dogma in faith as a good Catholic. The Inquisition took the matter up in earnest, and began to institute proceedings of so grave a nature that the young priest felt himself in danger. He escaped in his monk's dress, and traveled to Rome, where he obtained admittance for a short while to the convent of the Minerva.

[Footnote 84: The final case drawn up against Bruno as heresiarch makes it appear that his record included even these boyish errors. See the letter of Gaspar Schopp in Berti.]

We know very little what had been his occupations up to this date. It is only certain that he had already composed a comedy, _Il Candelajo_: which furnishes sufficient proof of his familiarity with mundane manners. It is, in fact, one of the freest and most frankly satirical compositions for the stage produced at that epoch, and reveals a previous study of Aretino. Nola, Bruno's birthplace, was famous for the license of its country folk. Since the day of its foundation by Chalkidian colonists, its inhabitants had preserved their Hellenic traditions intact. The vintage, for example, was celebrated with an extravagance of obscene banter, which scandalized Philip II.'s viceroy in the sixteenth century.[85] During the period of Bruno's novitiate, the ordinances of the Council of Trent for discipline in monasteries were not yet in operation; and it is probable that throughout the thirteen years of his conventual experience, he mixed freely with the people and shared the pleasures of youth in that voluptuous climate. He was never delicate in his choice of phrase, and made no secret of the admiration which the beauty of women excited in his nature. The accusations brought against him at Venice contained one article of indictment implying that he professed distinctly profligate opinions; and though there is nothing to prove that his private life was vicious, the tenor of his philosophy favors more liberty of manners than the Church allowed in theory to her ministers.[86]

[Footnote 85: See 'Vita di Don Pietro di Toledo'_ (Arch. Stov._ vol. ix. p. 23)]

[Footnote 86: See the passage on polygamy in the Spaccio della Bestia. I may here remark that Campanella, though more orthodox than Bruno, published opinions upon the relations of the sexes analogous to those of Plato's Republic in his Citta del Sole. He even recommended the institution of brothels as annexes to schools for boys, in order to avoid the worse evil of unnatural vice in youth.]

It is of some importance to dwell on this topic; for Bruno's character and temper, so markedly different from that of Sarpi, for example, affected in no small measure the form and quality of his philosophy. He was a poet, gifted with keen and lively sensibilities, open at all pores to the delightfulness of nature, recoiling from nothing that is human. At no period of his life was he merely a solitary thinker or a student of books. When he came to philosophize, when the spiritual mistress, Sophia, absorbed all other passions in his breast, his method of exposition retained a tincture of that earlier phase of his experience.

It must not be thought, however, that Bruno prosecuted no serious studies during this period. On the contrary, he seems to have amassed considerable erudition in various departments of learning: a fact which should make us cautious against condemning conventual education as of necessity narrow and pedantic. When he left Naples, he had acquired sufficient knowledge of Aristotle and the Schoolmen, among whom he paid particular attention to S. Thomas and to Raymond Lully. Plato, as expounded by Plotinus, had taken firm hold on his imagination. He was versed in the dialectics of the previous age, had mastered mediaeval cosmography and mathematics, and was probably already acquainted with Copernicus. The fragments of the Greek philosophers, especially of Pythagoras and Parmenides, whose metaphysics powerfully influenced his mind, had been assimilated. Perhaps the writings of Cardinal Cusa, the theologian who applied mathematics to philosophy, were also in his hands at the same period. Beside Italian, he possessed the Spanish language, could write and speak Latin with fluency, and knew something of Greek. It is clear that he had practiced poetry in the vernacular under the immediate influence of Tansillo. Theological studies had not been wholly neglected; for he left behind him at Naples editions of Jerome and Chrysostom with commentaries of Erasmus. These were books which exposed their possessors to the interdiction of the Index.

It seems strange that a Dominican, escaping from his convent to avoid a trial for heresy, should have sought refuge at S. Maria Sopra Minerva, then the headquarters of the Roman Inquisition. We must, however, remember that much freedom of movement was allowed to monks, who found a temporary home in any monastery of their order. Without money, Bruno had no roof but that of a religious house to shelter him; and he probably reckoned on evading pursuit till the fatigues of his journey from Naples had been forgotten. At any rate, he made no lengthy stay in Rome. News soon reached him that the prosecution begun at Naples was being transferred to the metropolis. This implied so serious a danger that he determined to quit Rome in secret. Having flung his frock to the nettles, he journeyed--how, we do not know--to Genoa, and thence to Noli on the Riviera. The next time Bruno entered the Dominican convent of S. Maria sopra Minerva, it was as a culprit condemned to death by the Inquisition.

At Noli Bruno gained a living for about five months by teaching grammar to boys and lecturing in private to some gentlefolk upon the Sphere. The doctrine of the Sphere formed a somewhat miscellaneous branch of mediaeval science. It embraced the exposition of Ptolemaic astronomy, together with speculations on the locality of heaven, the motive principle of the world, and the operation of angelical intelligences. Bruno, who professed this subject at various times throughout his wanderings, began now to use it as a vehicle for disseminating Copernican opinions. It is certain that cosmography formed the basis of his philosophy, and this may be ascribed to his early occupation with the sphere. But his restless spirit would not suffer him to linger in those regions where olive and orange and palm flourish almost more luxuriantly than in his native Nola. The gust of travel was upon him. A new philosophy occupied his brain, vertiginously big with incoherent births of modern thought. What Carlyle called 'the fire in the belly' burned and irritated his young blood. Unsettled, cast adrift from convent moorings, attainted for heresy, out of sympathy with resurgent Catholicism, he became a Vagus Quidam--a wandering student, like the Goliardi of the Middle Ages. From Noli he passed to Savona; from Savona to Turin; from Turin to Venice. There his feet might perhaps have found rest; for Venice was the harbor of all vagrant spirits in that age. But the city was laid waste with plague. Bruno wrote a little book, now lost, on 'The Signs of the Times,' and lived upon the sale of it for some two months. Then he removed to Padua. Here friends persuaded him to reassume the cowl. There were more than 40,000 monks abroad in Italy, beyond the limits of their convent. Why should not he avail himself of house-roof in his travels, a privilege which was always open to friars? From Padua he journeyed rapidly again through Brescia, Bergamo and Milan to Turin, crossed Mont Cenis, tarried at Chambéry, and finally betook himself to Geneva.

Geneva was no fit resting-place for Bruno. He felt an even fiercer antipathy for dissenting than for orthodox bigotry. The despotism of a belligerent and persecuting sectarian seemed to him more intolerable, because less excusable, than the Catholic despotism from which he was escaping. Galeazzo Caracciolo, Marquis of Vico, who then presided over the Italian refugees in Geneva, came to visit him. At the suggestion of this man Bruno once more laid aside his Dominican attire, and began to earn his bread by working as a reader for the press--a common resort of needy men of learning in those times. But he soon perceived that the Calvinistic stronghold offered no freedom, no security of life even, to one whose mind was bent on new developments of thought. After two months' residence on the shores of Lake Leman he departed for Toulouse, which he entered early in 1577.

We cannot help wondering why Bruno chose that city for his refuge. Toulouse, the only town in France where the Inquisition took firm root and flourished, Toulouse so perilous to Muret, so mortal to Dolet and Vanini, ought, one might have fancied, to have been avoided by an innovator flying from a charge of heresy.[87] Still it must be remembered that Toulouse was French. Italian influence did not reach so far. Nor had Bruno committed himself even in thought to open rupture with Catholicism. He held the opinion, so common at that epoch, so inexplicable to us now, that the same man could countermine dogmatic theology as a philosopher, while he maintained it as a Christian. This was the paradox on which Pomponazzo based his apology, which kept Campanella within the pale of the Church, and to which Bruno appealed for his justification when afterwards arraigned before the Inquisitors at Venice.

[Footnote 87: On the city, university and Inquisition of Toulouse in the sixteenth century see Christie's _Etiennne Dolet_--a work of sterling merit and sound scholarship.]

It appears from his own autobiographical confessions that Bruno spent some six months at Toulouse, lecturing in private on the peripatetic psychology; after which time he obtained the degree of Doctor in Philosophy, and was admitted to a Readership in the university. This post he occupied two years. It was a matter of some moment to him that professors at Toulouse were not obliged to attend Mass. In his dubious position, as an escaped friar and disguised priest, to partake of the Sacrament would have been dangerous. Yet he now appears to have contemplated the possibility of reconciling himself to the Church, and resuming his vows in the Dominican order. He went so far as to open his mind upon this subject to a Jesuit; and afterwards at Paris he again resorted to Jesuit advice. But these conferences led to nothing. It may be presumed that the trial begun at Naples and removed to Rome, combined with the circumstances of his flight and recusant behavior, rendered the case too grave for compromise. No one but the Pope in Rome could decide it.

There is no apparent reason why Bruno left Toulouse, except the restlessness which had become a marked feature in his character. We find him at Paris in 1579, where he at once began to lecture at the Sorbonne. It seems to have been his practice now in every town he visited, to combine private instruction with public disputation. His manners were agreeable; his conversation was eloquent and witty. He found no difficulty in gaining access to good society, especially in a city like Paris, which was then thronged with Italian exiles and courtiers. Meanwhile his public lectures met with less success than his private teaching. In conversation with men of birth and liberal culture he was able to expound views fascinating by their novelty and boldness. Before an academical audience it behoved him to be circumspect; nor could he transgress the formal methods of scholastic argumentation.

Two principal subjects seem to have formed the groundwork of his teaching at this period. The first was the doctrine of the Thirty Divine Attributes, based on S. Thomas of Aquino. The second was Lully's Art of Memory and Classification of the Sciences. This twofold material he worked up into a single treatise, called De Umbris Idearum, which he published in 1582 at Paris, and which contains the germ of all his leading speculations. Bruno's metaphysics attracted less attention than his professed Art of Memory. In an age credulous of occult science, when men believed that power over nature was being won by alchemy and magic, there was no difficulty in persuading people that knowledge might be communicated in its essence, and that the faculties of the mind could be indefinitely extended, without a toilsome course of study. Whether Bruno lent himself wittingly to any imposture in his exposition of mnemonics, cannot be asserted. But it is certain that the public were led to expect from his method more than it could give.

The fame of his Art of Memory reached the king's ears; and Henri III. sent for him. 'The king, says Bruno, 'had me called one day, being desirous to know whether the memory I possessed and professed, was natural or the result of magic art. I gave him satisfaction; by my explanations and by demonstrations to his own experience, convincing him that it was not an affair of magic but of science.' Henri, who might have been disappointed by this result, was taken with his teacher, and appointed him Reader Extraordinary--a post that did not oblige Bruno to hear Mass. The Ordinary Readers at Paris had to conform to the usages of the Catholic Church. On his side, Bruno appears to have conceived high admiration for the king's ability. In the Cena della Ceneri and the _Spaccio della Bestia Trionfante,_ composed and published after he had left France, he paid him compliments in terms of hyperbolical laudation. It would be vain to comment on these facts. No one conversant with French society at that epoch could have been ignorant of Henri's character and vicious life. No one could have pretended that his employment of the kingdom's wealth to enrich unworthy favorites was anything but dishonorable, or have maintained that his flagrant effeminacy was beneficial to society. The fantastic superstition which the king indulged alternately with sensual extravagances, must have been odious to one whose spiritual mistress was divine Sophia, and whose religion was an adoration of the intellect for the One Cause. But Henri had one quality which seemed of supreme excellence to Bruno. He appreciated speculation and encouraged men of learning. A man so enthusiastic as our philosopher may have thought that his own teaching could expel that Beast Triumphant of the vices from a royal heart tainted by bad education in a corrupt Court. Bruno, moreover, it must be remembered, remained curiously inappreciative of the revolution effected in humanity by Christian morals. Much that is repulsive to us in the manners of the Valois, may have been indifferent to him.

Bruno had just passed his thirtieth year. He was a man of middling height, spare figure, and olive complexion, wearing a short chestnut-colored beard. He spoke with vivacity and copious rhetoric, aiming rather at force than at purity of diction, indulging in trenchant metaphors to adumbrate recondite thoughts, passing from grotesque images to impassioned flights of declamation, blending acute arguments and pungent satires with grave mystical discourses. The impression of originality produced by his familiar conversation rendered him agreeable to princes. There was nothing of the pedant in his nature, nothing about him of the doctor but his title.

After a residence of rather less than four years in Paris, he resolved upon a journey to England. Henri supplied him with letters of introduction to the French ambassador in London, Michel de Castelnau de la Mauvissière. This excellent man, who was then attempting to negotiate the marriage of Elizabeth with the Duke of Anjou, received Bruno into his own family as one of the gentlemen of his suite. Under his roof the wandering scholar enjoyed a quiet home during the two years which he passed in England--years that were undoubtedly the happiest, as they were the most industrious, of his checkered life. It is somewhat strange that Bruno left no trace of his English visit in contemporary literature. Seven of his most important works were printed in London, though they bore the impress of Paris and Venice--for the very characteristic reason that English people only cared for foreign publications. Four of these, on purely metaphysical topics, were dedicated to Michel de Castelnau; two, treating of moral and psychological questions, the famous Spaccio della Bestia and Gli eroici Furori, were inscribed to Sidney. The Cena delle Ceneri describes a supper party at the house of Fulke Greville; and it is clear from numerous allusions scattered up and down these writings, that their author was admitted on terms of familiarity to the best English society. Yet no one mentions him. Fulke Greville in his Life of Sidney passes him by in silence; nor am I aware that any one of Sidney's panegyrists, the name of whom is legion, alludes to the homage paid him by the Italian philosopher.

On his side, Bruno has bequeathed to us animated pictures of his life in London, portraying the English of that period as they impressed a sensitive Italian.[88] His descriptions are valuable, since they dwell on slight particulars unnoticed by ambassadors in their dispatches. He was much struck with the filth and unkempt desolation of the streets adjacent to the Thames, the rudeness of the watermen who plied their craft upon the river, and the stalwart beef-eating brutality of prentices and porters. The population of London displayed its antipathy to foreigners by loud remarks, hustled them in narrow lanes, and played at rough-and-tumble with them after the manners of a bear-garden. But there is no hint that these big fellows shouldering through the crowd were treacherous or ready with their knives. The servants of great houses seemed to Bruno discourteous and savage; yet he says nothing about such subtlety and vice as rendered the retainers of Italian nobles perilous to order. He paints the broad portrait of a muscular and insolently insular people, untainted by the evils of corrupt civilization. Mounting higher in the social scale, Bruno renders deserved homage to the graceful and unaffected manners of young English noblemen, from whom he singles Sidney out as the star of cultivated chivalry.[89]

[Footnote 88: The 'Cena delle Ceneri,' _Op. It._ vol. i. pp. 137-151].

[Footnote 89: Signor Berti conjectures that Bruno may have met Sidney first at Milan. But Bruno informs us that he did not become acquainted with him till he came to London: 'Tra' quali è tanto conosciuto, per fama prima quanbo eravamo in Milano et in Francia, e poi per experienza or che siamo ne la sua patria' (_Op. It._ vol. i. p. 145).]

What he says about the well-born youth of England, shows that the flower of our gentlefolk delighted Southern observers by their mixture of simplicity and sweetness with good breeding and sound sense. For the ladies of England he cannot find words fair enough to extol the beauties of their persons and the purity of their affections. Elizabeth herself he calls a goddess, diva, using phrases which were afterwards recited in the terms of his indictment before the Inquisition. What pleased him most in England, was the liberty of speech and thought he there enjoyed.[90] Society was so urbane, government was so unsuspicious, that a man could venture to call things by their proper names and speak his heart out without reserve. That Bruno's panegyric was not prompted by any wish to flatter national vanity, is proved by the hard truths he spoke about the grossness of the people, and by his sarcasms on Oxford pedants. He also ventured to condemn in no unmeasured terms some customs which surprised him in domestic intercourse. He drew, for instance, a really gruesome picture of the loving-cup, as it passed round the table, tasted by a mixed assemblage.[91]

A visit paid by Bruno to Oxford forms a curious episode in his English experiences. He found that university possessed by pedants and ignorant professors of the old learning. 'Men of choice,' he calls them, 'trailing their long velvet gowns, this one arrayed with two bright chains of gold around his neck, that one, good heavens! with such a valuable hand--twelve rings upon two fingers, giving him the look of some rich jeweler.'[92] These excellent dons, blest in the possession of fat fellowships, felt no sympathy for an eccentric interloper of Bruno's stamp. They allowed him to lecture on the Soul and the Sphere.

[Footnote 90: Preface to 'Lo Spaccio della Bestia' (_Op. It._ vol. ii. p. 108).]

[Footnote 91: _Op. It._ vol. i. p. 150.]

[Footnote 92: _Op. It._ vol. i. p. 123.]

They even condescended to dispute with him. Yet they made Oxford so unpleasant a place of residence that after three months he returned to London. The treatment he experienced rankled in his memory. 'Look where you like at the present moment, you will find but doctors in grammar here; for in this happy realm there reigns a constellation of pedantic stubborn ignorance and presumption mixed with a rustic incivility that would disturb Job's patience. If you do not believe it, go to Oxford, and ask to hear what happened to the Nolan, when he disputed publicly with those doctors of theology in the presence of the Polish Prince Alasco.[93] Make them tell you how they answered to his syllogisms; how the pitiful professor, whom they put before them on that grave occasion as the Corypheus of their university, bungled fifteen times with fifteen syllogisms, like a chicken in the stubble. Make them tell you with what rudeness and discourtesy that pig behaved; what patience and humanity he met from his opponent, who, in truth, proclaimed himself a Neapolitan, born and brought up beneath more genial heavens. Then learn after what fashion they brought his public lectures to an end, those on the Immortality of the Soul and those on the Quintuple Sphere.'[94] The Soul and the Sphere were Bruno's favorite themes. He handled both at this period of life with startling audacity.

[Footnote 93: See Wood, _Ath. Oxon._ p. 300.]

[Footnote 94: _Op. It._ vol. i. p. 179.]

They had become for him the means of ventilating speculations on terrestrial movement, on the multiplicity of habitable worlds, on the principle of the universe, and on the infinite modes of psychical metamorphosis. Such topics were not calculated to endear him to people of importance on the banks of Isis. That he did not humor their prejudices, appears from a Latin epistle which he sent before him by way of introduction to the Vice Chancellor.[95] It contains these pompous phrases: 'Philotheus Jordanus Brunus Nolanus magis laboratae theologiae doctor, purioris et innocuae sapientiae professor. In praecipuis Europae academiis notus, probatus et honorifice exceptus philosophus. Nullibi praeterquam apud barbaros et ignobiles peregrinus. Dormitantium animarum excubitor. Praesuntuosae et recalcitrantis ignorantiae domitor. Qui in actibus universis generalem philantropiam protestatur. Qui non magis Italum quam Britannum, marem quam foeminam, mitratum quam coronatum, togatum quam armatum, cucullatum hominem quam sine cucullo virum: sed ilium cujus pacatior, civilior, fidelior et utilior est conversatio diligit.' Which may thus be Englished: 'Giordano Bruno of Nola, the God-loving, of the more highly-wrought theology doctor, of the purer and harmless wisdom professor. In the chief universities of Europe known, approved, and honorably received as philosopher. Nowhere save among barbarians and the ignoble a stranger. The awakener of sleeping souls. The trampler upon presuming and recalcitrant ignorance. Who in all his acts proclaims a universal benevolence toward man. Who loveth not Italian more than Briton, male than female, mitred than crowned head, gowned than armed, frocked than frockless; but seeketh after him whose conversation is the more peaceful, more civil, more loyal, and more profitable.' This manifesto, in the style of a mountebank, must have sounded like a trumpet-blast to set the humdrum English doctors with sleepy brains and moldy science on their guard against a man whom they naturally regarded as an Italian charlatan. What, indeed, was this more highly-wrought theology, this purer wisdom? What call had this self-panegyrist to stir souls from comfortable slumbers? What right had he to style the knowledge of his brethren ignorance? Probably he was but some pestilent fellow, preaching unsound doctrine on the Trinity, like Peter Martyr Vermigli, who had been properly hissed out of Oxford a quarter of a century earlier. When Bruno arrived and lectured, their worst prognostications were fulfilled. Did he not maintain a theory of the universe which even that perilous speculator and political schemer, Francis Bacon, sneered at as nugatory?

[Footnote 95: Printed in the Explicatio triginta Sigillarum.]

In spite of academical opposition, Bruno enjoyed fair weather, halcyon months, in England. His description of the Ash Wednesday Supper at Fulke Greville's, shows that a niche had been carved out for him in London, where he occupied a pedestal of some importance. Those gentlemen of Elizabeth's Court did not certainly exaggerate the value of their Italian guest. In Italy, most of them had met with spirits of Bruno's stamp, whom they had not time or opportunity to prove. He was one among a hundred interesting foreigners; and his martyrdom had not as yet set the crown of glory or of shame upon his forehead. They probably accepted him as London society of the present day accepts a theosophist from Simla or Thibet. But his real home at this epoch, the only home, so far as I can see, that Bruno ever had, after he left his mother at the age of thirteen for a convent, was the house of Castelnau. The truest chords in the Italian's voice vibrate when he speaks of that sound Frenchman. To Mme. de Castelnau he alludes with respectful sincerity, paying her the moderate and well-weighed homage which, for a noble woman, is the finest praise. There is no rhetoric in the words he uses to express his sense of obligation to her kindness. They are delicate, inspired with a tact which makes us trust the writer's sense of fitness.[96] But Bruno indulges in softer phrases, drawn from the heart, and eminently characteristic of his predominant enthusiastic mood, when he comes to talk of the little girl, Marie, who brightened the home of the Castelnaus. 'What shall I say of their noble-natured daughter? She has gazed upon the sun barely one luster and one year; but so far as language goes, I know not how to judge whether she springs from Italy or France or England! From her hand, touching the instruments of music, no man could reckon if she be of corporate or incorporeal substance. Her perfected goodness makes one marvel whether she be flown from heaven, or be a creature of this common earth. It is at least evident to every man that for the shaping of so fair a body the blood of both her parents has contributed, while for the tissue of her rare spirit the virtues of their heroic souls have been combined.'[97]

[Footnote 96: _Op. It._ vol. i. p. 267.]

[Footnote 97: _Loc. cit._ p. 267.]

It was time to leave these excellent and hospitable friends. 'Forth from the tranquil to the trembling air' Bruno's unquiet impulse drove him. He returned to Paris at the end of 1585, disputed before the Sorbonne with some success of scandal, and then, disquieted by the disorders of the realm, set out for Germany. We find him at Marburg in the following year, ill-received by the University, but welcomed by the Prince. Thence we follow him to Mainz, and afterwards to Wittenberg, where he spent two years. Here he conceived a high opinion of the Germans. He foresaw that when they turned their attention from theology to science and pure speculation, great results might be expected from their solid intellectual capacity. He seems in fact to have taken a pretty accurate measure of the race as it has subsequently shown itself. Wittenberg he called the German Athens. Luther, he recognized as a hero of humanity, who, like himself, defied authority in the defense of truth. Yet he felt no sympathy for the German reformers. When asked by the Inquisitors at Venice what he thought about these men, he replied: 'I regard them as more ignorant than I am. I despise them and their doctrines. They do not deserve the name of theologians, but of pedants.' That this reply was sincere, is abundantly proved by passages in the least orthodox of Bruno's writings. It was the weakness of a philosopher's position at that moment that he derived no support from either of the camps into which Christendom was then divided. Catholics and Protestants of every shade regarded him with mistrust.

A change in the religious policy of Saxony, introduced after the death of the Elector Augustus, caused Bruno to leave Wittenberg for Prague in 1588. From Prague he passed to Helmstädt, where the Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel received him with distinction, and bestowed on him a purse of eighty dollars.[98] Here he conceived two of his most important works, the De Monade and De Triplici Minimo, both written in Latin hexameters.[99] Why he adopted this new form of exposition is not manifest. Possibly he was tired of dialogues, through which he had expressed his thought so freely in England. Possibly a German public would have been indifferent to Italian. Possibly he was emulous of his old masters, Parmenides and Lucretius.

[Footnote 98: It is a curious fact that the single copy of Campanella's poems on which Orelli based his edition of 1834, came from Wolfenbüttel.]

[Footnote 99: They were published at Frankfort, and dedicated to the friendly Prince of Wolfenbüttel.]

At Helmstädt he came into collision with Boetius, the rector of the Evangelical church, who issued a sentence of excommunication against him. Like a new Odysseus, he set forth once again upon his voyage, and in the spring of 1590 anchored in Frankfort on the Main. A convent (that of the Carmelites) sheltered him in this city, where he lived on terms of intimacy with the printers Wechel and Fischer, and other men of learning. It would appear from evidence laid before the Venetian Inquisitors that the prior of the monastery judged him to be a man of genius and doctrine, devoid of definite religion, addicted to fantastic studies, and bent on the elaboration of a philosophy that should supersede existing creeds.[100] This was a not inaccurate portrait of Bruno as he then appeared to conservatives of commonplace capacity. Yet nothing occurred to irritate him in the shape of persecution or disturbance. Bruno worked in quiet at Frankfort, pouring forth thousands of metaphysical verses, some at least of which were committed to the press in three volumes published by the Wechels.

[Footnote 100: Britanno's Deposition, Berti's _Vita di G.B._ p. 337.]

Between Frankfort and Italy literary communications were kept open through the medium of the great fair, which took place every year at Michaelmas.[101] Books formed one of the principal commodities, and the Italian bibliopoles traveled across the Alps to transact business on these important occasions. It happened by such means that a work of Bruno's, perhaps the De Monude, found its way to Venice.[102] Exposed on the counter of Giambattista Ciotto, then plying the trade of bookseller in that city, this treatise met the eyes of a Venetian gentleman called Giovanni Mocenigo. He belonged to one of the most illustrious of the still surviving noble families in Venice. The long line of their palaces upon the Grand Canal has impressed the mind of every tourist. One of these houses, it may be remarked, was occupied by Lord Byron, who, had he known of Bruno's connection with the Mocenighi, would undoubtedly have given to the world a poem or a drama on the fate of our philosopher. Giovanni Mocenigo was a man verging on middle life, superstitious, acknowledging the dominion of his priest, but alive in a furtive way to perilous ideas. Morally, he stands before us as a twofold traitor: a traitor to his Church, so long as he hoped to gain illicit power by magic arts; a traitor to his guest, so soon as he discovered that his soul's risk brought himself no profit.[103] He seems to have imagined that Bruno might teach him occult science or direct him on a royal way to knowledge without strenuous study. Subsequent events proved that, though he had no solid culture, he was fascinated by the expectation of discovering some great secret. It was the vice of the age to confound science with sorcery, and Bruno had lent himself to this delusion by his whimsical style. Perhaps the booksellers, who then played a part scarcely less prominent than that of the barbers in diffusing gossip, inflamed Mocenigo's curiosity by painting the author of the puzzling volume in seductive colors. Any how this man sent two letters, one through Ciotto, and one direct to Bruno, praying him to visit Venice, professing his desire for instruction, and offering him an honorable place of residence.

[Footnote 101: Sarpi mentions the return of Ciotto from the fair (Lettere, vol. i. p. 527).]

[Footnote 102: Ciotto, before the Inquisition, called the book De Minimo Magno et Mensura. It may therefore have been the De Triplici Minimo et Mensura, and not the De Monade (_Vita di G.B._ p. 334).]

[Footnote 103: Mocenigo told Ciotto: I wish first to see what I can get from him of those things which he promised me, so as not wholly to lose what I have given him, and afterwards I mean to surrender him to the censure of the Holy Office' (Berti, p. 335).]

In an evil hour Bruno accepted this invitation. No doubt he longed to see Italy again after so many years of exile. Certainly he had the right to believe that he would find hospitality and a safe refuge in Venice. Had not a Venetian noble pledged his word for the former? Was not the latter a privilege which S. Mark extended to all suppliants? The Republic professed to shield even the outlaws of the Inquisition, if they claimed her jurisdiction. There was therefore no palpable imprudence in the step which Bruno now took. Yet he took it under circumstances which would have made a cautious man mistrustful. Of Mocenigo he knew merely nothing. But he did know that writs from the Holy Office had been out against himself in Italy for many years, during which he had spent his time in conversing with heretics and printing works of more than questionable orthodoxy.[104] Nothing proves the force of the vagrant's impulse which possessed Bruno, more than his light and ready consent to Giovanni Mocenigo's proposal.

He set off at once from Frankfort, leaving the MS. of one of his metaphysical poems in Wechel's hands to print, and found himself at the end of 1591 a guest of his unknown patron. I have already described what Mocenigo hoped to gain from Bruno--the arts of memory and invention, together with glimpses into occult science.[105] We know how little Bruno was able to satisfy an in satiable curiosity in such matters. One of his main weaknesses was a habit of boasting and exaggerating his own powers, which at first imposed upon a vulgar audience and then left them under the impression that he was a charlatan. The bookseller Ciotto learned from students who had conversed with him at Frankfort, that 'he professed an art of memory and other secrets in the sciences, but that all the persons who had dealt with him in such matters, had left him discontinued.'[106]

[Footnote 104: Mere correspondence with heretics exposed an Italian to the Inquisition. Residence in heretical lands, except with episcopal license, was forbidden. The rules of the Index proscribed books in which the name of a heretic was cited with approval.]

[Footnote 105: Bruno speaks himself of 'arte della memoria et inventiva' (_op. cit._ p. 339). Ciotto mentions 'la memoria et altre scientie' (_ib._ p. 334).]

[Footnote 106: _Op. cit._ p. 335.]

Another weakness in his character was extraordinary want of caution. Having lived about the world so long, and changed from town to town, supporting himself as he best could, he had acquired the custom of attracting notice by startling paradoxes. Nor does he seem to have cared to whom he made the dangerous confidence of his esoteric beliefs. His public writings, presumably composed with a certain circumspection--since everybody knows the proverb _litera scripta manet_--contain such perilous stuff that--when we consider what their author may have let fall in unguarded conversation--we are prepared to credit the charges brought against him by Mocenigo. For it must now be said that this man, 'induced by the obligation of his conscience and by order of his confessor,' denounced Bruno to the Inquisition on May 23, 1592.

When the two men, so entirely opposite in their natures, first came together, Bruno began to instruct his patron in the famous art of memory and mathematics. At the same time he discoursed freely and copiously, according to his wont, upon his own philosophy. Mocenigo took no interest in metaphysics, and was terrified by the audacity of Bruno's speculations. It enraged him to find how meager was Bruno's vaunted method for acquiring and retaining knowledge without pains. In his secret heart he believed that the teacher whom he had maintained at a considerable cost, was withholding the occult knowledge he so much coveted. Bruno, meanwhile, attended Andrea Morosini's receptions in the palace at S. Luca, and frequented those of Bernardo Secchini at the sign of the Golden Ship in the Merceria. He made friends with scholars and men of fashion; absented himself for weeks together at Padua; showed that he was tired of Mocenigo; and ended by rousing that man's suspicious jealousy. Mocenigo felt that he had been deceived by an impostor, who, instead of furnishing the wares for which he bargained, put him off with declamations on the nature of the universe. What was even more terrible, he became convinced that this charlatan was an obstinate heretic.

Whether Bruno perceived the gathering of the storm above his head, whether he was only wearied with the importunities of his host, or whether, as he told the Inquisitors, he wished to superintend the publication of some books at Frankfort, does not greatly signify. At any rate, he begged Mocenigo to excuse him from further attendance, since he meant to leave Venice. This happened on Thursday, May 21. Next day, Mocenigo sent his bodyservant together with five or six gondoliers into Bruno's apartment, seized him, and had him locked up in a ground-floor room of the palace. At the same time he laid hands on all Bruno's effects, including the MS. of one important treatise On the Seven Liberal Arts, which was about to be dedicated to Pope Clement VIII. This, together with other unpublished works, exists probably in the Vatican Archives, having been sent with the papers referring to Bruno's trial from Venice when he was transported to Rome. The following day, which was a Saturday, Mocenigo caused Bruno to be carried to one of those cellars (_magazzeni terreni_) which are used in Venice for storing wood, merchandise or implements belonging to gondolas. In the evening, a Captain of the Council of Ten removed him to the dungeons of the Inquisition. On the same day, May 23, Mocenigo lodged his denunciation with the Holy Office.

The heads of this accusation, extracted from the first report and from two subsequent additions made by the delator, amount to these. Though Bruno was adverse to religions altogether, he preferred the Catholic to any other; but he believed it to stand in need of thorough reform. The doctrines of the Trinity, the miraculous birth of Christ, and transubstantiation, were insults to the Divine Being. Christ had seduced the people by working apparent miracles. So also had the Apostles. To develop a new philosophy which should supersede religions, and to prove his superiority in knowledge over S. Thomas and all the theologians, was Bruno's cherished scheme. He did not believe in the punishment of sins; but held a doctrine of the transmigration of souls, and of the generation of the human soul from refuse. The world he thought to be eternal. He maintained that there were infinite worlds, all made by God, who wills to do what he can do, and therefore produces infinity. The religious orders of Catholicism defile the earth by evil life, hypocrisy, and avarice. All friars are only asses. Indulgence in carnal pleasures ought not to be reckoned sinful. The man confessed to having freely satisfied his passions to the utmost of his opportunities.

On being questioned before the Inquisitors, Mocenigo supported these charges. He added that when he had threatened Bruno with delation, Bruno replied, first, that he did not believe he would betray his confidence by making private conversation the groundwork of criminal charges; secondly, that the utmost the Inquisition could do, would be to inflict some penance and force him to resume the cowl. These, which are important assertions, bearing the mark of truth, throw light on his want of caution in dealing with Mocenigo, and explain the attitude he afterwards assumed before the Holy Office.

Mocenigo's accusations in the main yield evidences of sincerity. They are exactly what we should expect from the distortion of Bruno's doctrines by a mind incapable of comprehending them. In short, they are as veracious as the image of a face reflected on a spoon. Certain gross details (the charges, for example, of having called Christ a tristo who was deservedly hung, and of having sneered at the virginity of Mary) may possibly have emanated from the delator's own imagination.[107]

[Footnote 107: They remind us of the blasphemies imputed to Christopher Marlowe.]

Bruno emphatically repudiated these; though some passages in his philosophical poems, published at Frankfort, contain the substance of their blasphemies. A man of Mocenigo's stamp probably thought that he was faithfully representing the heretic's views, while in reality he was drawing his own gross conclusions from skeptical utterances about the origin of Christianity which he obscurely understood. It does not seem incredible, however, that Bruno, who was never nice in his choice of language, and who certainly despised historical Christianity, let fall crude witticisms upon such and other points in Mocenigo's presence.

Bruno appeared before the Venetian Inquisition on May 29. His examination was continued at intervals from this date till July 30. His depositions consist for the most part of an autobiographical statement which he volunteered, and of a frank elucidation of his philosophical doctrines in their relation to orthodox belief. While reading the lengthy pages of his trial, we seem to overhear a man conversing confidentially with judges from whom he expected liberal sympathy. Over and over again, he relies for his defense upon the old distinction between philosophy and faith, claiming to have advocated views as a thinker which he does not hold as a Christian. 'In all my books I have used philosophical methods of definition according to the principles and light of nature, not taking chief regard of that which ought to be held in faith; and I believe they do not contain anything which can support the accusation that I have professedly impugned religion rather than that I have sought to exalt philosophy; though I may have expounded many impieties based upon my natural light.'[108] In another place he uses the antithesis, 'speaking like a Christian and according to theology'--'speaking after the manner of philosophy.'[109] The same antithesis is employed to justify his doctrine of metempsychosis: 'Speaking as a Catholic, souls do not pass from one body into another, but go to paradise or purgatory or hell; yet, following philosophical reasonings, I have argued that, the soul being inexistent without the body and inexistent in the body, it can be indifferently in one or in another body, and can pass from one into another, which, if it be not true, seems at any rate probable according to the opinion of Pythagoras.'[110]

[Footnote 108: _Op. cit._ p. 352.]

[Footnote 109: _Ibid._ p. 355.]

[Footnote 110: _Ibid._ p. 362.]

That he expected no severe punishment appears from the terms of his so-called recantation. 'I said that I wished to present myself before the feet of his Holiness with certain books which I approve, though I have published others which I do not now approve; whereby I meant to say that some works composed and published by me do not meet with my approbation, inasmuch as in these I have spoken and discussed too philosophically, in unseemly wise, not altogether as a good Christian ought; in particular I know that in some of these works I have taught and philosophically held things which ought to be attributed to the power, wisdom and goodness of God according to the Christian faith, founding doctrine in such matters on sense and reason, not upon faith.'[111] At the very end of his examination, he placed himself in the hands of his judges, 'confessing his errors with a willing mind,' acknowledging that he had 'erred and strayed from the Church,' begging for such castigation as shall not 'bring public dishonor on the sacred robe which he had worn,' and promising to 'show a noteworthy reform, and to recompense the scandal he had caused by edification at least equal in magnitude.'[112] These professions he made upon his knees, evincing clearly, as it seems to me, that at this epoch he was ready to rejoin the Dominican order, and that, as he affirmed to Mocenigo, he expected no worse punishment than this.

In attempting to estimate Bruno's recantation, we must remember that he felt no sympathy at all for heretics. When questioned about them, he was able to quote passages from his own works in which he called the Reformation a Deformation of religion.[113] Lutheran and Calvinist theologians were alike pedants in his eyes.[114] There is no doubt that Bruno meant what he said; and had he been compelled to choose one of the existing religions, he would have preferred Catholicism. He was, in fact, at a period of life when he wished to dedicate his time in quiet to metaphysical studies. He had matured his philosophy and brought it to a point at which he thought it could be presented as a peace-offering to the Supreme Pontiff. Conformity to ecclesiastical observances seemed no longer irksome to the world-experienced, wide-reaching mind of the man. Nor does he appear to have anticipated that his formal submission would not be readily accepted. He reckoned strangely, in this matter, without the murderous host into whose clutches he had fallen.

[Footnote 111: _Op. cit._ p. 349]

[Footnote 112: _Ibid._ p. 384]

[Footnote 113: _Ibid._ p. 364]

[Footnote 114: _Ibid._ p. 363]

Searching interrogations touching other heads in the evidence against him, as blasphemous remarks on sacred persons, intercourse with heretics, abuse of the religious orders, dealings in magic arts, licentious principles of conduct, were answered by Bruno with a frank assurance, which proves his good conscience in essentials and his firm expectation of a favorable issue to the affair. Mocenigo had described him as _indemoniato_; and considering the manifest peril in which he now stood, there is something scarcely sane in the confidence he showed. For Mocenigo himself he reserved words of bitterest scorn and indignation. When questioned in the usual terms whether he had enemies at Venice, he replied: 'I know of none but Ser Giovanni Mocenigo and his train of servants. By him I have been grievously injured, more so than by living man, seeing he has murdered me in my life, my honor and my property, having imprisoned me in his own house and stolen all my writings, books, and other effects. And this he did because he not only wished that I should teach him everything I know, but also wished to prevent my teaching it to any one but him. He has continued to threaten me upon the points of life and honor, unless I should teach him everything I knew.'[115]

The scene closes over Bruno in the Venetian Inquisition on July 30, 1592. We do not behold him again till he enters the Minerva at Rome to receive his death-sentence on February 9, 1600. What happened in the interval is almost a blank. An exchange of letters took place between Rome and Venice concerning his extradition, and the Republic made some show of reluctance to part with a refugee within its jurisdiction. But this diplomatic affair was settled to the satisfaction of both parties, and Bruno disappeared into the dungeons of the Roman Inquisition in the month of January 1593.

Seven years of imprisonment was a long period.[116]

[Footnote 115: _Op. cit._ p. 378.]

[Footnote 116: These years were not all spent at Rome. From the Records of the Inquisition, it appears that he arrived in Rome on February 27, 1598, and that his trial in form began in February 1599. The Pope ratified his sentence of death on January 20, 1600; this was publicly promulgated on February 8, and carried into effect on the subsequent 17th. Where Bruno was imprisoned between January 1593, and February 1598 is not known.]

We find it hard to understand why Bruno's prosecution occupied the Holy Office through this space of time. But conjectures on the subject are now useless. Equally futile is it to speculate whether Bruno offered to conform in life and doctrine to the Church at Rome as he had done at Venice. The temptation to do so must have been great. Most probably he begged for grace, but grace was not accorded on his own terms; and he chose death rather than dishonor and a lie in the last resort, or rather than life-long incarceration. It is also singular that but few contemporaries mention the fact of his condemnation and execution. Rome was crowded in the jubilee year of 1600. Bruno was burned in open daylight on the Campo di Fiora. Yet the only eye-witness who records the event, is Gaspar Schoppe, or Scioppius, who wrote a letter on the subject to his friend Rittershausen. Kepler, eight years afterwards, informed his correspondent Breugger that Bruno had been really burned: 'he bore his agonizing death with fortitude, abiding by the asseveration that all religions are vain, and that God identifies himself with the world, circumference and center.' Kepler, it may be observed, conceived a high opinion of Bruno's speculations, and pointed him out to Galileo as the man who had divined the infinity of solar systems in their correlation to one infinite order of the universe.[117]

[Footnote 117: Doubts have recently been raised as to whether Bruno was really burned. But these are finally disposed of by a succinct and convincing exposition of the evidence by Mr. R.C. Christie, in _Macmillan's Magazine_, October 1885. In addition to Schoppe and Kepler, we have the reference to Bruno's burning published by Mersenne in 1624; but what is far more important, the Avviso di Roma for February 19,1600, records this event as having occurred upon the preceding Thursday. To Signor Berti's two works, _Documenti intorno a G. Bruno_ (Roma, 1880), and Copernico e le vicende, etc. (Roma, 1876), we owe most of the material which has been lucidly sifted by Mr. R.C. Christie.]

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 _naïf_ 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 été de Paris à Dijon sans aller à 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 _cortège_; 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 Cività 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 constò, dal Generale de' Servi in fuori, niuna esser di dignità 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, Helmstädt, 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.