Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume Ii Part 12

There had just come to the papal throne Camillo Borghese, Paul V.,--strong, bold, determined, with the highest possible theory of his duties and of his position. In view of his duty toward himself, he lavished the treasures of the faithful upon his family, until it became the richest which had yet risen in Rome; in view of his duty toward the Church, he built superbly, and an evidence of the spirit in which he wrought is his name, in enormous letters, still spread across the facade of St. Peter's.

As to his position, he accepted fully the theories and practices of his boldest predecessors, and in this he had good warrant; for St. Thomas Aquinas and Bellarmine had furnished him with convincing arguments that he was divinely authorized to rule the civil powers of Italy and of the world.[1]

[1] For details of these cases of the two monks, see Pascolato.

Fra Paolo Sarpi, Milano, 1893, pp. 126-128. For the Borghese avarice, see Ranke's Popes, vol. iii. pp. 9-20. For the development of Pope Paul's theory of government, see Ranke, vol.

ii. p. 345, and note in which Bellarmine's doctrine is cited textually; also Bellarmine's Selbstbiographie, herausgegeben von Dollinger und Rensch Bonn, 1887. pp. 181, et seq.

Moreover there was, in his pride, something akin to fanaticism.

He had been elected by one of those sudden movements, as well known in American caucuses as in papal conclaves, when, after a deadlock, all the old candidates are thrown over, and the choice suddenly falls on a new man. The cynical observer may point to this as showing that the laws governing elections, under such circ.u.mstances, are the same, whether in party caucuses or in church councils; but Paul, in this case, saw the direct intervention of the Almighty, and his disposition to magnify his office was vastly increased thereby. He was especially strenuous, and one of his earliest public acts was to send to the gallows a poor author, who, in an unpublished work, had spoken severely regarding one of Paul's predecessors.

The Venetian laws checking mortmain, taxing church property, and requiring the sanction of the Republic before the erection of new churches and monasteries greatly angered him; but the crowning vexation was the seizure of the two clerics. This aroused him fully. He at once sent orders that they be delivered up to him, that apology be made for the past and guarantees given for the future, and notice was served that, in case the Republic did not speedily obey these orders, the Pope would excommunicate its leaders and lay an interdict upon its people. It was indeed a serious contingency. For many years the new Pope had been known as a hard, pedantic ecclesiastical lawyer, and now that he had arrived at the supreme power, he had evidently determined to enforce the high mediaeval supremacy of the Church over the State. Everything betokened his success. In France he had broken down all opposition to the decrees of the Council of Trent. In Naples, when a magistrate had refused to disobey the civil law at the bidding of priests, and the viceroy had supported the magistrate, Pope Paul had forced the viceroy and magistrate to comply with his will by threats of excommunication. In every part of Italy,--in Malta, in Savoy, in Parma, in Lucca, in Genoa,--and finally even in Spain, he had pettifogged, bullied, threatened, until his opponents had given way. Everywhere he was triumphant; and while he was in the mood which such a succession of triumphs would give he turned toward Venice.[1]

[1] For letters showing the craven submission of Philip III. of Spain at this time, see Cornet, Paolo V. e la Republica Veneta, Vienna, 1859, p. 285.

There was little indeed to encourage the Venetians to resist; for, while the interests of other European powers were largely the same as theirs, current political intrigues seemed likely to bring Spain and even France into a league with the Vatican.

To a people so devoted to commerce, yet so religious, the threat of an interdict was serious indeed. All church services were to cease; the people at large, no matter how faithful, were to be as brute beasts,--not to be legally married,--not to be consoled by the sacraments,--not to be shriven, and virtually not to be buried; other Christian peoples were to be forbidden all dealings with them, under pain of excommunication; their commerce was to be delivered over to the tender mercies of any and every other nation; their merchant s.h.i.+ps to be as corsairs; their cargoes, the legitimate prey of all Christendom; and their people, on sea and land, to be held as enemies of the human race. To this was added, throughout the whole ma.s.s of the people, a vague sense of awful penalties awaiting them in the next world. Despite all this, the Republic persisted in a.s.serting its right.

Just at this moment came a diplomatic pa.s.sage between Pope and Senate like a farce before a tragedy, and it has historical significance, as showing what resourceful old heads were at the service of either side. The Doge Grimani having died, the Vatican thought to score a point by promptly sending notice through its Nuncio to Venice that no new election of a Doge could take place if forbidden by the Pope, and that, until the Senate had become obedient to the papacy, no such election would be sanctioned. But the Senate, having through its own Amba.s.sador received a useful hint, was quite equal to the occasion. It at once declined to receive this or any dispatch from the Pope on the plea, made with redundant courtesy and cordiality, that, there being no Doge, there was no person in Venice great enough to open it. They next as politely declined to admit the papal Nuncio on the ground that there was n.o.body worthy to receive him. Then they proceeded to elect a Doge who could receive both Nuncio and message,--a st.u.r.dy opponent of the Vatican pretensions, Leonardo Donato.

The Senate now gave itself entirely to considering ways and means of warding off the threatened catastrophe. Its first step was to consult Sarpi. His answer was prompt and pithy. He advised two things: first, to prevent, at all hazards, any publication of the papal bulls in Venice or any obedience to them; secondly, to hold in readiness for use at any moment an appeal to a future Council of the Church.

Of these two methods, the first would naturally seem by far the more difficult. So it was not in reality. In the letter which Sarpi presented to the Doge, he devoted less than four lines to the first and more than fourteen pages to the second. As to the first remedy, severe as it was and bristling with difficulties, it was, as he claimed, a simple, natural, straightforward use of police power. As to the second, the appeal to a future Council was to the Vatican as a red flag to a bull. The very use of it involved excommunication. To harden and strengthen the Doge and Senate in order that they might consider it as an ultimate possibility, Sarpi was obliged to show from the Scriptures, the Fathers, the Councils, the early Popes, that the appeal to a Council was a matter of right. With wonderful breadth of knowledge and clearness of statement he made his points and answered objections. To this day, his letter remains a masterpiece.[1]

[1] For Sarpi's advice to the Doge, see Bianchi Giovini, vol. i.

pp. 216, et seq. The doc.u.ment is given fully in the Lettere di F.

P. S., Firenze, 1863, vol. i. pp. 17, et seq.; also in Machi, Storia del Consiglio dei Dieci, cap. xxiv., where the bull of excommunication is also given.

The Republic utterly refused to yield, and now, in 1606, Pope Paul launched his excommunication and interdict. In meeting them, the Senate took the course laid down by Sarpi. The papal Nuncio was notified that the Senate would receive no paper from the Pope; all ecclesiasties, from the Patriarch down to the lowest monk, were forbidden, under the penalties of high treason, to make public or even to receive any paper whatever from the Vatican; additional guards were placed at the city gates, with orders to search every wandering friar or other suspicious person who might, by any possibility, bring in a forbidden missive; a special patrol was kept, night and day, to prevent any posting of the forbidden notices on walls or houses; any person receiving or finding one was to take it immediately to the authorities, under the severest penalties, and any person found concealing such doc.u.ments was to be punished by death.

At first some of the clergy were refractory. The head of the whole church establishment of Venice, the Patriarch himself, gave signs of resistance; but the Senate at once silenced him. Sundry other bishops and high ecclesiastics made a show of opposition; and they were placed in confinement. One of them seeming reluctant to conduct the usual church service, the Senate sent an executioner to erect a gibbet before his door. Another, having asked that he be allowed to await some intimation from the Holy Spirit, received answer that the Senate had already received directions from the Holy Spirit to hang any person resisting their decree. The three religious orders which had showed most opposition--Jesuits, Theatins, and Capuchins--were in a semi-polite manner virtually expelled from the Republic.[2]

[2] For interesting details regarding the departure of the Jesuits, see Cornet, Paolo V. e la Republica Veneta, pp. 277-279.

Not the least curious among the results of this state of things was the war of pamphlets. From Rome, Bologna, and other centres of thought, even from Paris and Frankfort, polemic tractates rained upon the Republic. The vast majority of their authors were on the side of the Vatican, and of this majority the leaders were the two cardinals so eminent in learning and logic, Bellarmine and Baronius; but, single-handed, Sarpi was, by general consent, a match for the whole opposing force.[3]

[3] In the library of Cornell University are no less than nine quartos filled with selected examples of these polemics on both sides.

Of all the weapons then used, the most effective throughout Europe was the solemn protest drawn by Sarpi and issued by the Doge. It was addressed nominally to the Venetian ecclesiastics, but really to Christendom, and both as to matter and manner it was Father Paul at his best. It was weighty, lucid, pungent, and deeply in earnest,--in every part a.s.serting fidelity to the Church and loyalty to the papacy, but setting completely at naught the main claim of Pope Paul: the Doge solemnly declaring himself "a prince who, in temporal matters, recognizes no superior save the Divine Majesty."

The victory of the friar soon began to be recognized far and near. Men called him by the name afterward so generally given him,--the "terribile frate." The Vatican seemed paralyzed. None of its measures availed, and it was hurt, rather than helped, by its efforts to pester and annoy Venice at various capitals. At Rome, it burned Father Paul's books and declared him excommunicated; it even sought to punish his printer by putting into the Index not only all works that he had ever printed, but all that he might ever print. At Vienna, the papal Nuncio thought to score a point by declaring that he would not attend a certain religious function in case the Venetian Amba.s.sador should appear; whereupon the Venetian announced that he had taken physic and regretted that he could not be present,--whereat all Europe laughed.

Judicious friends in various European cabinets now urged both parties to recede or to compromise. France and Spain both proffered their good offices. The offer of France was finally accepted, and the French Amba.s.sador was kept running between the Ducal Palace and the Vatican until people began laughing at him also. The emissaries of His Holiness begged hard that, at least, appearances might be saved; that the Republic would undo some of its measures before the interdict was removed, or at least would seem to do so, and especially that it would withdraw its refusals before the Pope withdrew his penalties. All in vain. The Venetians insisted that they had committed no crime and had nothing to retract. The Vatican then urged that the Senate should consent to receive absolution for its resistance to the Pope's authority. This the Senate steadily refused; it insisted, "Let His Holiness put things as before, and we will put things as before; as to his absolution, we do not need it or want it; to receive it would be to acknowledge that we have been in the wrong." Even the last poor sop of all was refused: the Senate would have no great "function" to celebrate the termination of the interdict; they would not even go to the ma.s.s which Cardinal Joyeuse celebrated on that occasion. The only appearance of concession which the Republic made was to give up the two ecclesiastics to the French Amba.s.sador as a matter of courtesy to the French king; and when this was done, the Amba.s.sador delivered them to the Pope; but Venice especially reserved all the rights she had exercised. All the essential demands of the papacy were refused, and thus was forever ended the papal power of laying an interdict upon a city or a people. From that incubus, Christendom, thanks to Father Paul and to Venice, was at last and forever free.

The Vatican did, indeed, try hard to keep its old claim in being.

A few years after its defeat by Fra Paolo, it endeavored to rea.s.sert in Spain the same authority which had been so humbly acknowledged there a few years before. It was doubtless felt that this most pious of all countries, which had previously been so docile, and which had stood steadily by the Vatican against Venice in the recent struggle, would again set an example of submission. Never was there a greater mistake: the Vatican received from Spanish piety a humiliating refusal.

Next it tried the old weapons against the little government at Turin. For many generations the House of Savoy had been dutifully submissive to religious control; nowhere out of Spain had heresy been treated more cruelly; yet here, too, the Vatican claim was spurned. But the final humiliation took place some years later under Urban VIII.,--the same pontiff who wrecked papal infallibility on Galileo's telescope. He tried to enforce his will on the state of Lucca, which, in the days of Pope Paul, had submitted to the Vatican decrees abjectly; but that little republic now seized the weapons which Sarpi had devised, and drove the papal forces out of the field: the papal excommunication was, even by this petty government, annulled in Venetian fas.h.i.+on and even less respectfully.[1]

[1] The proofs--and from Catholic sources--that it was the Pope who condemned Galileo's doctrine of the earth's movement about the sun, and not merely the Congregation of the Index, the present writer has given in his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, vol. i. chap. iii.

Thus the world learned how weak the Vatican hold had become. Even Pope Paul learned it, and, from being the most strenuous of modern pontiffs, he became one of the most moderate in everything save in the enrichment of his family. Thus ended the last serious effort to coerce a people by an interdict, and so, one might suppose, would end the work of Father Paul. Not so. There was to come a second chapter in his biography, more instructive, perhaps, than the first,--a chapter which has lasted until our own day. A. D. White.

{February, 1904, number DLVI.} II.

The Venetian Republic showed itself duly grateful to Sarpi. The Senate offered him splendid presents and ent.i.tled him "Theologian of Venice." The presents he refused, but the t.i.tle with its duty, which was mainly to guard the Republic against the encroachments of the Vatican, he accepted, and his life in the monastery of Santa Fosca went on quietly, simply, laboriously, as before. The hatred now felt for him at Rome was unbounded. It corresponded to the grat.i.tude at Venice. Every one saw his danger, and he well knew it. Potentates were then wont to send a.s.sa.s.sins on long errands, and the arm of the Vatican was especially far-reaching and merciless. It was the period when Pius V, the Pope whom the Church afterwards proclaimed a saint, commissioned an a.s.sa.s.sin to murder Queen Elizabeth.[1]

[1] This statement formerly led to violent denials by ultramontane champions; but in 1870 it was made by Lord Acton, a Roman Catholic, one of the most learned of modern historians, and when it was angrily denied, he quietly cited the official life of Pope Pius in the Acta Sanctorum, published by the highest church authority. This was final; denial ceased, and the statement is no longer questioned. For other proofs in the line of Lord Acton's citation, see Bellarmine's Selbstbiographie, cited in a previous article, pp. 306, et seq.

But there was in Father Paul a trust in Providence akin to fatalism. Again and again he was warned, and among those who are said to have advised him to be on his guard against papal a.s.sa.s.sins was no less a personage than his greatest controversial enemy,--Cardinal Bellarmine. It was believed by Sarpi's friends that Bellarmine's Scotch ideas of duty to humanity prevailed over his Roman ideas of fealty to the Vatican, and we may rejoice in the hope that his n.o.bler qualities did really a.s.sert themselves against the casuistry of his brother prelates which sanctioned a.s.sa.s.sination.

These warnings were soon seen to be well founded. On a pleasant evening in October, 1607, a carefully laid trap was sprung.

Returning from his day's work at the Ducal Palace, Father Paul, just as he had crossed the little bridge of Santa Fosca before reaching his convent, was met by five a.s.sa.s.sins. Two of his usual attendants had been drawn off by the outburst of a fire in the neighborhood; the other two were old men who proved useless. The place was well chosen. The descent from the bridge was so narrow that all three were obliged to march in single file, and just at this point these ruffians from Rome sprang upon him in the dusk, separated him from his companions, and gave him, in a moment, fifteen dagger thrusts, two in his throat and one--a fearful gash --on the side of his head, and then, convinced that they had killed him, escaped to their boats, only a few paces distant.

The victim lingered long in the hospital, but his sound const.i.tution and abstemious habits stood him in good stead. Very important among the qualities which restored him to health were his optimism and cheerfulness. An early manifestation of the first of these was seen when, on regaining consciousness, he called for the stiletto which had been drawn from the main wound and, running his fingers along the blade, said cheerily to his friends, "It is not filed." What this meant, any one knows who has seen in various European collections the daggers dating from the "ages of faith" cunningly filed or grooved to hold poison.[1]

[1] There is a remarkable example of a beautiful dagger, grooved to contain poison, in the imperial collection of arms at Vienna.

As an example of the second of these qualities, we may take his well-known reply when, to the surgeon dressing the wound made by the "style" or stiletto,--who spoke of its "extravagance,"

rudeness, and yet ineffectiveness,--Fra Paolo quietly answered that in these characteristics could be recognized the style of the Roman Curia.

Meantime the a.s.sa.s.sins had found their way back to Rome, and were welcomed with open arms; but it is some comfort to know that later, when such conscience as there was throughout Italy and Europe showed intense disgust at the proceeding, the Roman Court treated them coldly and even severely.

The Republic continued in every way to show Sarpi its sympathy and grat.i.tude. It made him many splendid offer, which he refused; but two gifts he accepted. One was full permission to explore the Venetian archives, and the other was a little doorway, cut through the garden wall of his monastery, enabling him to reach his gondola without going through the narrow and tortuous path he had formerly taken on his daily journey to the public offices.

This humble portal still remains. Beneath few triumphal arches has there ever pa.s.sed as great or as n.o.ble a conqueror.[2]

[2] The present writer has examined with care the spot where the attack was made, and found that never was a scoundrelly plot better conceived or more fiendishly executed. He also visited what was remaining of the convent in April, 1902, and found the little door as serviceable as when it was made.

Efforts were also made to cajole him,--to induce him to visit Rome, with fine promises of recognition and honor, and with solemn a.s.surances that no harm should come to him; but he was too wise to yield. Only a few years previously he had seen Giordano Bruno lured to Rome and burned alive on the Campo dei Fiori. He had seen his friend and correspondent, Fra Fulgentio Manfredi, yield to similar allurements and accept a safe conduct to Rome, which, though it solemnly guaranteed him against harm, proved as worthless as that of John Huss at the Council of Constance; the Inquisition torturing him to death on the spot where, six years earlier, it had burned Bruno. He had seen his friend, the Archdeacon Ribetti, drawn within the clutch of the Vatican, only to die of "a most painful colic" immediately after dining with a confidential chamberlain of the Pope, and, had he lived a few months longer, he would have seen his friend and confidant, Antonio de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalato, to whom he had entrusted a copy of his most important work, enticed to Rome and put to death by the Inquisition. Though the Vatican exercised a strong fascination over its enemies, against Father Paul it was powerless; he never yielded to it, but kept the even tenor of his way.[3]