Chapter X: Fra Paolo Sarpi (1)

Sarpi's Position in the History of Venice--Parents and
Boyhood--Entrance into the Order of the Servites--His Personal
Qualities--Achievements as a Scholar and Man of Science--His Life
among the Servites--In Bad Odor at Rome--Paul V. places Venice
under Interdict--Sarpi elected Theologian and Counselor of the
Republic--His Polemical Writings--Views on Church and State--The
Interdict Removed--Roman Vengeance--Sarpi attacked by Bravi--His
Wounds, Illness, Recovery--Subsequent History of the
Assassins--Further Attempts on Sarpi's Life--Sarpi's Political and
Historical Works--History of the Council of Trent--Sarpi's Attitude
toward Protestantism--His Judgment of the Jesuits--Sarpi's
Death--The Christian Stoic.

Fra Paolo was the son of Francesco Sarpi and Isabella Morelli, Venetians of the humbler middle class. He was born in 1552, christened Pietro, and nicknamed Pierino because of his diminutive stature. On entering the Order of the Servites he adopted the religious name of Paolo, which he subsequently rendered famous throughout Europe. Since he died in 1623, Sarpi's life coincided with a period of supreme interest and manifold vicissitudes in the decline of Venice. After the battle of Lepanto in 1571, he saw the nobles of S. Mark welcome their victorious admiral Sebastiano Veniero and confer on him the honors of the Dogeship. In 1606, he aided the Republic to withstand the thunders of the Vatican and defy the excommunication of a Pope. Eight years later he attended at those councils of state which unmasked the conspiracy, known as Bedmar's, to destroy Venice. In his early manhood Cyprus had been wrested from the hands of S. Mark; and inasmuch as the Venetians alone sustained the cause of Christian civilization against Turk and pirate in the Eastern seas, he was able before his death to anticipate the ruin which the war of Candia subsequently brought upon his country. During the last eighteen years of his existence Sarpi was the intellect of the Republic; the man of will and mind who gave voice and vigor to her policy of independence; the statesman who most clearly penetrated the conditions of her strength and weakness. This friar incarnated the Venetian spirit at a moment when, upon the verge of decadence, it had attained self-consciousness; and so instinctively devoted are Venetians to their State that in his lifetime he was recognized by them as hero, and after his death venerated as saint.

No sooner had the dispute with Paul V. been compromised, than Sarpi noticed how the aristocracy of Venice yielded themselves to sloth and political indifference. The religious obsequiousness to Rome and the 'peace or rather cowardice of slaves,' which were gradually immersing Italy in mental torpor and luxurious idleness, invaded this last stronghold of freedom. Though Sarpi's Christian Stoicism and practical sagacity saved him from playing the then futile part of public agitator, his private correspondence shows how low his hope had sunk for Italy. Nothing but a general war could free her from the yoke of arrogant Rome and foreign despotism. Meanwhile the Papal Court, Spain and the House of Austria, having everything to lose by contest, preserved the peace of Italy at any cost. Princes whose petty thrones depended on Spanish and Papal good-will, dreaded to disturb the equilibrium of servitude; the population, dulled by superstition, emasculated by Jesuitical corruption and intimidated by Church tyranny, slumbered in the gross mud-honey of slavish pleasures. From his cell in the convent of the Servites Sarpi swept the whole political horizon, eagerly anticipating some dawn-star of deliverance. At one time his eyes rested on the Duke of Savoy, but that unquiet spirit failed to steer his course clear between Spanish and French interests, Roman jealousies, and the ill-concealed hostilities of Italian potentates. At another time, like all lovers of freedom throughout Europe, he looked with confidence to Henri IV. But a fanatic's dagger, sharpened by the Jesuits, cut short the monarch's life and gave up France to the government of astute Florentine adventurers. Germany was too distracted by internal dissensions, Holland too distant and preoccupied with her own struggle for existence, to offer immediate aid. It was in vain that Sarpi told his foreign correspondents that the war of liberty in Europe must be carried into the stronghold of absolutism. To secure a victory over the triple forces of Spain, the Papal Court and Jesuitry, Rome had to be attacked in Italy. His reasoning was correct. But peoples fighting for freedom on their native soil could not risk an adventure which only some central power of the first magnitude like France might have conducted with fair prospect of success. In the meantime what Sarpi called the Diacatholicon, that absolutist alliance of Rome, Spain and Austria, supported by the Inquisition and the Jesuits, accepted by the states of Italy and firmly rooted in some parts of Germany, invaded even those provinces where the traditions of independence still survived. After 1610 the Jesuits obtained possession of France; and though they did not effect their re-entrance into Venice, the ruling classes of the Republic allowed themselves to be drugged by the prevalent narcotic. Venice, too, was fighting for her life in the Adriatic and the Levant, while her nobles became daily more supine in aristocratic leisure, more papalizing in their private sympathies. Thus the last years of Sarpi's life were overclouded by a deep discouragement, which did not, indeed, extinguish his trust in the divine Providence or his certain belief that the right would ultimately prevail, but which adds a tragic interest to the old age of this champion of political and moral liberty fallen on evil days.

I have thought it well to preface what I have to say about Sarpi with this forecast of his final attitude. As the Italian who most clearly comprehended the full consequences of the Catholic Revival, and who practically resisted what was evil for his nation in that reactionary movement, he demands a prominent place in this book. On his claims to scientific discoveries and his special service rendered to the Venetian Republic it will suffice to touch but lightly.

Sarpi's father was short of stature, brown-complexioned, choleric and restless. His mother was tall, pale, lymphatic, devoted to religious exercises and austerities. The son of their ill-assorted wedlock inherited something of both temperaments. In his face and eyes he resembled his mother; and he derived from her the piety which marked his course through life. His short, spare person, his vivid, ever-active intellect testified to the paternal impress. This blending of two diverse strains produced in him a singular tenacity of fiber. Man's tenement of clay has rarely lodged a spirit so passionless, so fine, so nearly disembodied. Of extreme physical tenuity, but gifted with inexhaustible mental energy, indefatigable in study, limitless in capacity for acquiring and retaining knowledge, he accentuated the type which nature gave him by the sustained habits of a lifetime. In diet he abstained from flesh and abhorred wine. His habitual weaknesses were those of one who subdues the body to mental government. As costive as Scaliger,[127] Sarpi suffered from hepatic hemorrhage, retention of urine, prolapsus recti, and hemorrhoids. Intermittent fevers reduced his strength, but rarely interfered with his activity. He refused to treat himself as an invalid, never altered his course of life for any illness, and went about his daily avocations when men of laxer tissue would have taken to their bed. His indifference to danger was that of the Stoic or the Mussulman. During a period of fifteen years he knew that restless foes were continually lying in wait to compass his death by poison or the dagger. Yet he could hardly be persuaded to use the most ordinary precautions. 'I am resolved,' he wrote, in 1609, 'to give no thought whatever to these wretchednesses. He who thinks too much of living knows not how to live well. One is bound to die once; to be curious about the day or place or manner of dying is unprofitable. Whatsoever is God's will is good.'[128] As fear had no hold upon his nature, so was he wholly free from the dominion of the senses. A woman's name, if we except that of the Queen of France, is, I think, not once mentioned in his correspondence. Even natural affections seem to have been obliterated; for he records nothing of his mother or his father or a sister who survived their deaths. One suit of clothes sufficed him; and his cell was furnished with three hour-glasses, a picture of Christ in the Garden, and a crucifix raised above a human skull.

[Footnote 127: We may remind our readers of Henri IV.'s parting words to Joseph Scaliger: 'Est-il vrai que vous avez ete de Paris a Dijon sans aller a la selle?']

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

His physical sensitiveness, developed by austerity of life, was of the highest acuteness. Sight, touch, and taste in him acquired the most exquisite delicacy. He was wont to say that he feared no poison in his food, since he could discriminate the least adulteration of natural flavors. His mental perspicacity was equally subtle. As a boy he could recite thirty lines of Virgil after hearing them read over once. Books were not so much perused by him as penetrated at a glance; and what he had but casually noticed, never afterwards escaped his memory. In the vast Venetian archives he could lay his hand on any document without referring to registers or catalogues. The minutest details of houses visited or places passed through, remained indelibly engraved upon his memory. The characters of men lay open to his insight through their physiognomy and gestures. When new scientific instruments were submitted to his curiosity, he divined their uses and comprehended their mechanism without effort. Thus endowed with a rare combination of physical and intellectual faculties, it is no wonder that Sarpi became one of the most learned men of his age or of any age. He was an excellent Greek, Latin, and Hebrew scholar; an adequate master of the French and Spanish languages; profoundly versed in canon and civil law; accomplished in the erudition of classical and scholastic philosophy; thoroughly acquainted with secular and ecclesiastical history. Every branch of mathematics and natural science had been explored by him with the enthusiasm of a pioneer. He made experiments in chemistry, mechanics, mineralogy, metallurgy, vegetable and animal physiology. His practical studies in anatomy were carried on by the aid of vivisection. Following independent paths, he worked out some of Gilbert's discoveries in magnetism, and of Da Porta's in optics, demonstrated the valves of the veins, and the function of the uvea in vision, divined the uses of the telescope and thermometer. When he turned his attention to astronomy, he at once declared the futility of judicial astrology; and while recognizing the validity of Galileo's system, predicted that this truth would involve its promulgator in serious difficulties with the Roman Inquisition. In his treatises on psychology and metaphysics, he originated a theory of sensationalism akin to that of Locke. There was, in fact, no field of knowledge which he had not traversed with the energy of a discoverer. Only to poetry and _belles lettres_ he paid but little heed, disdaining the puerilities of rhetoric then in vogue, and using language as the simplest vehicle of thought. In conversation he was reticent, speaking little, but always to the purpose, and rather choosing to stimulate his collocutors than to make display of eloquence or erudition. Yet his company was eagerly sought, and he delighted in the society, not only of learned men and students, but of travelers, politicians, merchants, and citizens of the world. His favorite places of resort were the saloons of Andrea Morosini, and the shop of the Secchini at the sign of the Nave d'Oro. Here, after days spent in religious exercises, sacerdotal duties, and prolonged studies, he relaxed his mind in converse with the miscellaneous crowd of eminent persons who visited Venice for business or pleasure. A certain subacid humor, combining irony without bitterness, and proverbial pungency without sententiousness, added piquancy to his discourse. We have, unfortunately, no record of the wit-encounters which may have taken place under Morosini's or Secchini's roof between this friar, so punctual in his religious observances, so scrupulously pure in conduct, so cold in temperament, so acute in intellect, so modest in self-esteem, so cautious, so impermeable, and his contemporary, Bruno, the unfrocked friar of genius more daring but less sure, who was mentally in all points, saving their common love of truth and freedom, the opposite to Sarpi.

Sarpi entered the Order of the Servi, or Servants of the Blessed Virgin, at the age of fourteen, renewed his vows at twenty, and was ordained priest at twenty-two.[129] His great worth brought him early into notice, and he filled posts of considerable importance in his Order. Several years of his manhood were spent in Rome, transacting the business and conducting the legal causes of the Fathers. At Mantua he gained the esteem of Guglielmo Gonzaga. At Milan he was admitted to familiar intimacy with the sainted Carlo Borromeo, who consulted him upon matters of reform in the diocese, and insisted on his hearing confessions. This duty was not agreeable to Sarpi; and though he habitually in after life said Mass and preached, he abstained from those functions of the priesthood which would have brought him into close relation with individuals. The bent of his mind rendered him averse to all forms of superstition and sacerdotal encroachments upon the freedom of the conscience. As he fought the battle of political independence against ecclesiastical aggression, so he maintained the prerogatives of personal liberty. The arts whereby Jesuits gained hold on families and individuals, inspired in him no less disgust than the illegal despotism of the Papacy. This blending of sincere piety and moral rectitude with a passion for secular freedom and a hatred of priestly craft, has something in it closely akin to the English temperament. Sarpi was a sound Catholic Christian in religion, and in politics what we should call a staunch Whig. So far as it is now possible to penetrate his somewhat baffling personality, we might compare him to a Macaulay of finer edge, to a Dean Stanley of more vigorous build. He was less commonplace than the one, more substantial than the other. But we must be cautious in offering any interpretation of his real opinions. It was not for nothing that he dedicated himself to the monastic life in boyhood, and persevered in it to the end of his long career. The discipline of the convent renders every friar inscrutable; and Sarpi himself assured his friends that he, like all Italians of his day, was bound to wear a mask.[130]

[Footnote 129: It was under the supervision of the Servites that Sarpi gained the first rudiments of education. Thirst for knowledge may explain his early entrance into their brotherhood. Like Virgil and like Milton, he received among the companions of his youthful studies the honorable nickname of 'The Maiden.' Gross conversation, such as lads use, even in convents, ceased at his approach. And yet he does not seem to have lost influence among his comrades by the purity which marked him out as exceptional.]

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

Be this as it may, Sarpi was not the man to work his way by monkish intrigue or courtly service into high place either in his Order or the Church. Long before he unsheathed the sword in defense of Venetian liberties, he had become an object of suspicion to Rome and his superiors. Some frank words which escaped him in correspondence, regarding the corruption of the Papal Curia, closed every avenue to office. Men of less mark obtained the purple. The meanest and poorest bishoprics were refused to Sarpi. He was thrice denounced, on frivolous charges, to the Inquisition; but on each occasion the indictment was dismissed without a hearing. The General of the Servites accused him of wearing cap and slippers uncanonical in cut, and of not reciting the _Salve Regina_. After a solemn trial, Sarpi was acquitted; and it came to be proverbially whispered that 'even the slippers of the incorruptible Fra Paolo had been canonized.' Being a sincere Catholic at heart, as well as a man of profound learning and prudent speech, his papalistic enemies could get no grip upon him. Yet they instinctively hated and dreaded one whom they felt to be opposed, in his strength, fearlessness and freedom of soul, to their exorbitant pretensions and underhand aggressions upon public liberties. His commerce with heretics both in correspondence with learned Frenchmen and in conversation with distinguished foreigners at Venice, was made a ground of accusation, and Clement VIII. declared that this alone sufficed to exclude him from any dignity in the Church.

It does not appear that Sarpi troubled his head about these things. Had he cared for power, there was no distinction to which he might not have aspired by stooping to common arts and by compromising his liberty of conscience. But he was indifferent to rank and wealth. Public business he discharged upon occasion from a sense of duty to his Order. For the rest, so long as he was left to pursue his studies in tranquillity, Sarpi had happiness enough; and his modesty was so great that he did not even seek to publish the results of his discoveries in science. For this reason they have now been lost to the world; only the memory of them surviving in the notes of Foscarini and Grisellini, who inspected his MSS. before they were accidentally destroyed by fire in 1769.

Though renowned through Europe as the _orbis terrae ocellus_, the man sought out by every visitor to Venice as the rarest citizen of the Republic, Sarpi might have quitted this earthly scene with only the faint fame of a thinker whose eminent gifts blossomed in obscurity, had it not been for a public opportunity which forced him to forsake his studies and his cell for a place at the Council-board and for the functions of a polemical writer. That robust manliness of mind, which makes an Englishman hail English virtues in Sarpi, led him to affirm that 'every man of excellence is bound to pay attention to politics.'[131] Yet politics were not his special sphere. Up to the age of fifty-four he ripened in the assiduous studies of which I have made mention, in the discharge of his official duties as a friar, and his religious duties as a priest. He had distinguished himself amid the practical affairs of life by judicial acuteness, unswerving justice, infallible perspicacity, and inexhaustible stores of erudition brought to bear with facility on every detail of any matter in dispute. But nature and inclination seemed to mark him out through early manhood for experimental and speculative science rather than for action. Now a demand was made on his deep fount of energy, which evolved the latent forces of a character unique in many-sided strength. He had dedicated himself to religion and to the pursuit of knowledge. But he was a Venetian of the Venetians, the very soul of Venice. After God, his Prince and the Republic claimed obedience; and when S. Mark called, Sarpi abandoned science for the service of his country. 'Singularly composed of active and contemplative energies was the life of our Father; yielding to God that which he was able, to his Prince that which duty dictated, and to the domain of Venice more than any law but that of love demanded.'[132]

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

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

Paul V. assumed the tiara with the fixed resolve of making good the Papal claims to supremacy. Between Venice and the Holy See numerous disputed points of jurisdiction, relating to the semi-ecclesiastical fief of Ceneda, the investiture of the Patriarch, the navigation of the Po, and the right of the Republic to exercise judgment in criminal cases affecting priests, offered this Pope opportunities of interference. The Venetians maintained their customary prerogatives; and in April 1606 Paul laid them under interdict and excommunication. The Republic denied the legitimacy of this proceeding. The Doge, Leonardo Donato, issued a proclamation to the clergy of all degrees within the domain, appealing to their loyalty and enjoining on them the discharge of their sacerdotal duties in spite of the Papal interdict. Only Jesuits at first disobeyed the ducal mandate. When they refused to say Mass in the excommunicated city, they were formally expelled as contumacious subjects; and the fathers took ship amid the maledictions of the populace: '_Andate in malora_.' Their example was subsequently followed by the reformed Capuchins and the Theatines. Otherwise the Venetian clergy, like the people, remained firm in their allegiance to the state. 'We are Venetians first, Christians afterwards,' was a proverb dating from this incident. Venice, conscious of the justice of her cause, prepared to resist the Pope's arrogant demands if need were with arms, and to exercise religious rites within her towns in spite of Camillo Borghese's excommunication. The Senate, some time before these events happened, had perceived the advantage which would accrue to the Republic from the service of a practised Canonist and jurisprudent in ecclesiastical affairs. Sarpi attracted their attention at an early stage of the dispute by a memorial which he drew up and presented to the Doge upon the best means of repelling Papal aggression. After perusing his report, in the month of January 1606, they appointed him Theologian and Canonist to the Republic, with a yearly salary of 200 ducats. This post he occupied until his death, having at a later period been raised to the still more important office of Counselor of State, which eventually he filled alone without a single coadjutor.

From the month of January 1606, for the remaining seventeen years of his life, Sarpi was intellectually the most prominent personage of Venice, the man who for the world at large represented her policy of moderate but firm resistance to ecclesiastical tyranny. Greatness had been thrust upon the modest and retiring student; and Father Paul's name became the watchword of political independence throughout Europe.

The Jesuists acting in concert with Spain, as well-informed historians held certain, first inspired Camillo Borghese with his ill-considered attempt upon the liberties of Venice.[133] It was now the Jesuits, after their expulsion from the Republic, who opened the batteries of literary warfare against the Venetian government. They wrote and published manifestoes through the Bergamasque territory, which province acknowledged the episcopal jurisdiction of Milan, though it belonged to the Venetian domain. In these writings it was argued that, so long as the Papal interdict remained in force, all sacraments would be invalid, marriages null, and offspring illegitimate. The population, trained already in doctrines of Papal supremacy, were warned that should they remain loyal to a contumacious State, their own souls would perish through the lack of sacerdotal ministrations, and their posterity would roam the world as bastards and accursed. To traverse this argument of sarcerdotal tyranny, exorbitant in any age of the Latin Church, but preposterous after the illumination of the sixteenth century in Europe, was a citizen's plain duty. Sarpi therefore supplied an elegant Italian stylist, Giambattista Leoni, with material for setting forth a statement of the controversy between Venice and Rome. It would have been well if he had taken up the pen with his own hand. But at this early period of his career as publicist, he seems to have been diffident about his literary powers. The result was that Leoni's main defense of the Republic fell flat; and the war was waged for a while upon side issues. Sarpi drew a treatise by Gerson, the learned French champion of Catholic independence, forth from the dust of libraries, translated it into Italian, and gave it to the press accompanied by an introductory letter which he signed.[134] Cardinal Bellarmino responded from Rome with an attack on Sarpi's orthodoxy and Gerson's authority. Sarpi replied in an Apology for Gerson. Then, finding that Leoni's narrative had missed its mark, he poured forth pamphlet upon pamphlet, penning his own _Considerations on the Censures_, inspiring Fra Fulgenzio Micanzi with a work styled _Confirmations_, and finally reducing the whole matter of the controversy into a book entitled a _Treatise on the Interdict_, which he signed together with six brother theologians of the Venetian party. It is not needful in this place to institute a minute investigation into the merits of this pamphlet warfare. In its details, whether we regard the haughty claims of delegated omnipotence advanced by Rome, or the carefully studied historical and canonistic arguments built up by Sarpi, the quarrel has lost actuality. Common sense and freedom have so far conquered in Europe that Sarpi's opinions, then denounced as heresies, sound now like truisms; and his candid boast that he was the first to break the neck of Papal encroachments upon secular prerogative, may pass for insignificant in an age which has little to fear from ecclesiastical violence.

[Footnote 133: Fra Fulgenzio's _Vita di F. Paolo_, p. 42. Venetian Dispatches in Mutinelli's _Storia Arcana_, vol. iii. p. 67.]

[Footnote 134: The treatise which Sarpi translated was Gerson's _Considerations upon Papal Excommunications_. Gerson's part in the Council of Constance will be remembered. See Creighton's _History of the Papacy_, vol. i. p. 211.]

Yet we must not forget that, during the first years of the seventeenth century, the Venetian conflict with Papal absolutism, considered merely as a test-case in international jurisprudence, was one of vitally important interest. When we reflect how the Catholic Alliance was then engaged in rolling back the tide of Reformation, how the forces of Rome had been rallied by the Tridentine Council, and how the organism of the Jesuits had been created to promulgate new dogmas of Papal almightiness in Church and State, this resistance of Venice, stoutly Catholic in creed, valiant in her defense of Christendom against the Moslem, supported by her faithful churchman and accomplished canonist, was no inconsiderable factor in the European strife for light and liberty. The occasion was one of crucial gravity. Reconstituted Rome had not as yet been brought into abrupt collision with any commonwealth which abode in her communion. Had Venice yielded in that issue, the Papacy might have augured for itself a general victory. That Venice finally submitted to Roman influence, while preserving the semblance of independence, detracts, indeed, from the importance of this Interdict-affair considered as an episode in the struggle for spiritual freedom. Moreover, we know now that the presumptuous pretensions of the Papacy at large were destined, before many years had passed, to be pared down, diminished and obliterated by the mere advance of intellectual enlightenment. Yet none of these considerations diminish Sarpi's claim to rank as hero in the forefront of a battle which in his time was being waged with still uncertain prospects.[135] In their comparatively narrow spheres Venice and Sarpi, not less than Holland, England, Sweden and the Protestants of Germany, on their wider platform at a later date, were fighting for a principle upon which the liberty of States depended. And they were the first to fight for it upon the ground most perilous to the common adversary. In all his writings Sarpi sought to prove that men might remain sound Catholics and yet resist Roman aggression; that the Roman Court and its modern champions had introduced new doctrine, deviating from the pristine polity of Christendom; that the post-Tridentine theory of Papal absolutism was a deformation of that order which Christ founded, which the Apostles edified, and which the Councils of a purer age had built into the living temple of God's Church on earth.

[Footnote 135: Sarpi's correspondence abundantly proves how very grave was the peril of Papal Absolutism in his days. The tide had not begun to turn with force against the Jesuit doctrines of Papal Supremacy. See Ranke, vol. ii. pp. 4-12, on these doctrines and the counter-theories to which they gave rise. We must remember that the Papal power was now at the height of its ascension; and Sarpi can be excused for not having reckoned on the inevitable decline it suffered during the next century.]

A passage from Sarpi's correspondence may be cited, as sounding the keynote to all his writings in this famous controversy. 'I imagine,' he writes to Jacques Gillot in 1609, 'that the State and the Church are two realms, composed, however, of the same human beings. The one is wholly heavenly, the other earthly. Each has its own sovereignty, defended by its own arms and fortifications. Nothing is held by them in common, and there should be no occasion for the one to declare war upon the other. Christ said that he and his disciples were not of this world. S. Paul affirms that our city is in the heavens. I take the word Church to signify an assembly of the faithful, not of priests only; for when we regard it as confined to those, it ceases to be Christ's kingdom, and becomes a portion of the commonwealth in this world, subject to the highest authority of State, as also are the laity.[136] This emphatic distinction between Church and State, both fulfilling the needs of humanity but in diverse relations, lay at the root of Sarpi's doctrine. He regarded the claim of the Church to interfere in State management, not only as an infringement of the prince's prerogative, but also as patent rebellion against the law of God which had committed the temporal government of nations in sacred trust to secular rulers. As the State has no call to meddle in the creation and promulgation of dogmas, or to impose its ordinances on the religious conscience of its subjects, so the Church has no right to tamper with affairs of government, to accumulate wealth and arrogate secular power, or to withdraw its ministers from the jurisdiction of the prince in matters which concern the operation of criminal and civil legislature. The ultramontanism of the Jesuits appeared to him destructive of social order; but, more than this, he considered it as impious, as a deflection from the form of Christian economy, as a mischievous seduction of the Church into a slough of self-annihilating cupidity and concupiscence.

Sarpi's views seemed audacious in his own age. But they have become the commonplaces of posterity. We can therefore hardly do justice to the originality and audacity which they displayed at an epoch when only Protestants at war with Rome advanced the like in deadly hatred--when the Catholic pulpits of Europe were ringing with newly-promulgated doctrines of Papal supremacy over princes and peoples, of national rights to depose or assassinate excommunicated sovereigns, and of blind unreasoning obedience to Rome as the sole sure method of salvation. Upon the path of that Papal triumph toward the Capitol of world-dominion, Sarpi, the puny friar from his cell at Venice, rose like a specter announcing certain doom with the irrefragable arguments of reason. The minatory words he uttered were all the more significant because neither he nor the State he represented sought to break with Catholic traditions. His voice was terrible and mighty, inasmuch as he denounced Rome by an indictment which proclaimed her to be the perturbing power in Christendom, the troubler of Israel, the whore who poured her cup of fornications forth to sup with princes.

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

After sixteen months, the quarrel of the interdict was compromised. Venice, in duel with Islam, could ill afford to break with Rome, even if her national traditions of eight centuries, intertwined with rites of Latin piety, had not forbidden open rupture. The Papal Court, cowed into resentful silence by antagonism which threatened intellectual revolt through Europe, waived a portion of its claims. Three French converts from Huguenot opinions to Catholicism, Henri IV., the Cardinal du Perron, and M. de Canaye, adjusted matters. The interdict was dismissed from Venice rather than removed--in haughty silence, without the clashing of bells from S. Pietro di Castello and S. Marco, without manifestation of joy in the city which regarded Papal interdicts as illegitimate, without the parade of public absolution by the Pope. Thus the Republic maintained its dignity of self-respect. But Camillo Borghese, while proclaiming a general amnesty, reserved _in petto_ implacable animosity against the theologians of the Venetian party. Two of these, Marsilio. and Rubetti, died suddenly under suspicion of poison.[137] A third, Fulgenzio Manfredi, was lured to Rome, treated with fair show of favor, and finally hung in the Campo di Fiora by order of the Holy Office.[138] A fourth, Capello, abjured his so-called heresies, and was assigned a pittance for the last days of his failing life in Rome.[139] It remained, if possible, to lay hands on Fra Paolo and his devoted secretary, Fra Fulgenzio Micanzi, of the Servites.

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

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

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

Neither threats nor promises availed to make these friends quit Venice. During the interdict and afterwards, Fulgenzio Micanzi preached the gospel there. He told the people that in the New Testament he had found truth; but he bade them take notice that for the laity this book was even a dead letter through the will of Rome.[140] Paul V. complained in words like these: Fra Fulgenzio's doctrine contains, indeed, no patent heresy, but it rests so clearly on the Bible as to prejudice the Catholic faith.[141] Sarpi informed his French correspondents that Christ and the truth had been openly preached in Venice by this man.[142] Fulgenzio survived the troubles of those times, steadily devoted to his master, of whom he has bequeathed to posterity, a faithful portrait in that biography which combines the dove-like simplicity of the fourteenth century with something of Roger North's sagacity and humor.[143] Of Fulgenzio we take no further notice here, having paid him our debt of gratitude for genial service rendered in the sympathetic delineation of so eminent a character as Sarpi's. A side-regret may be expressed that some such simple and affectionate record of Bruno as a man still fails us, and alas, must ever fail. Fulgenzio, by his love, makes us love Sarpi, who otherwise might coldly win our admiration. But for Bruno, that scapegoat of the spirit in the world's wilderness, there is none to speak words of worship and affection.

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

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

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

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

The first definite warning that his life was in danger came to Sarpi from Caspar Schoppe, the publicist. Scioppius (so his contemporaries called him) was a man of doubtful character and unsteady principles, who, according as his interests varied, used a fluent pen and limpid Latin style for or against the Jesuit faction. History would hardly condescend to notice him but for the singular luck he had of coming at critical moments into contact with the three chief Italian thinkers of his time. We know already that a letter of this man is the one contemporary testimony of an eye-witness to Bruno's condemnation which we possess. He also deserves mention for having visited Campanella in prison and helped to procure his liberation. Now in the year 1607, while passing through Venice, Schoppe sought a private interview with Sarpi, pointed out the odium which Fra Paolo had gained in Rome by his writings, and concluded by asserting that the Pope meant to have him alive or to compass his assassination. If Sarpi wished to make his peace with Paul V., Schoppe was ready to conduct the reconciliation upon honorable terms, having already several affairs of like import in his charge. To this proposal Sarpi replied that the cause he had defended was a just one, that he had done nothing to offend his Holiness, and that all plots against his liberty or life he left within the hands of God. To these words he significantly added that, even in the Pope's grasp, a man was always 'master over his own life'--a sentence which seems to indicate suicide as the last resort of self-defense. In September of the same year the Venetian ambassador at Rome received private information regarding some mysterious design against a person or persons unknown, at Venice, in which the Papal Court was implicated, and which was speedily to take effect.[144] On October 5 Sarpi was returning about 5 o'clock in the afternoon to his convent at S. Fosca, when he was attacked upon a bridge by five ruffians. It so happened that on this occasion he had no attendance but his servant Fra Marino; Fra Fulgenzio and a man of courage who usually accompanied him, having taken another route home. The assassins were armed with harquebusses, pistols and poniards. One of them went straight at Sarpi, while the others stood on guard and held down Fra Marino. Fifteen blows in all were aimed at Sarpi, three of which struck him in the neck and face. The stiletto remained firmly embedded in his cheekbone between the right ear and nose. He fell to the ground senseless; and a cry being raised by some women who had witnessed the outrage from a window, the assassins made off, leaving their victim for dead. It was noticed that they took refuge in the palace of the Papal Nuncio, whence they escaped that same evening to the Lido _en route_ for the States of the Church. An old Venetian nobleman of the highest birth, Alessandro Malipiero, who bore a singular affection for the champion of his country's liberty, was walking a short way in front of Sarpi beyond the bridge upon which the assault was perpetrated. He rushed to his friend's aid, dragged out the dagger from his face, and bore him to the convent. There Sarpi lay for many weeks in danger, suffering as much, it seems, from his physicians as from the wounds. Not satisfied with the attendance of his own surgeon, Alvise Ragoza, the Venetians insisted on sending all the eminent doctors of the city and of Padua to his bedside. The illustrious Acquapendente formed one of this miscellaneous _cortege_; and when the cure was completed, he received a rich gold chain and knighthood for his service. Every medical man suggested some fresh application. Some of them, suspecting poison, treated the wounds with theriac and antidotes. Others cut into the flesh and probed. Meanwhile the loss of blood had so exhausted Sarpi's meager frame that for more than twenty days he had no strength to move or lift his hands. Not a word of impatience escaped his lips; and when Acquapendente began to medicate the worst wound in his face, he moved the dozen doctors to laughter by wittily observing, 'And yet the world maintains that it was given _Stilo Romanae Curiae_.'[145] His old friend Malipiero would fain have kept the dagger as a relic. But Sarpi suspended it at the foot of a crucifix in the church of the Servi, with this appropriate inscription, _Dei Filio Liberatori_. When he had recovered from his long suffering, the Republic assigned their Counselor an increase of pension in order that he might maintain a body of armed guards, and voted him a house in S. Marco for the greater security of his person. But Sarpi begged to be allowed to remain among the friars, with whom he had spent his life, and where his vocation bound him. In the future he took a few obvious precautions, passing in a gondola to the Rialto and thence on foot through the crowded Merceria to the Ducal Palace, and furthermore securing the good offices of his attendants in the convent by liberal gifts of money. Otherwise, he refused to alter the customary tenor of his way.

[Footnote 144: Dispatch to Fr. Contarini under date September 25, 1607, quoted in Campbell's _Life of Sarpi_, p. 145.]

[Footnote 145: Fulgenzio's _Life_, p. 61. A.G. Campbell asserts that this celebrated _mot_ of Sarpi's is not to be found in Fulgenzio's MS. It occurs, however, quite naturally in the published work. The first edition of the _Life_ appeared in 1646, eight years before Fulgenzio's death. The discrepancies between it and the MS. may therefore have been intended by the author.]

The State of Venice resented this attack upon their servant as though it had been directed against the majesty of the Republic. A proclamation was immediately issued, offering enormous rewards for the capture or murder of the criminals, especially so worded as to insinuate the belief that men of high position in Rome were implicated. The names of the chief conspirators were as follows: Ridolfo Poma, a broken Venetian merchant; Alessandro Parrasio of Ancona, outlawed for the murder of his uncle; a priest, Michele Viti of Bergamo; and two soldiers of adventure, Giovanni di Fiorenza and Pasquale di Bitonto. Having escaped to the Lido, they took ship for Ravenna and arrived in due course at Ancona, where they drew 1000 crowns from the Papal Camera, and proceeded to make triumphal progress through Romagna. Their joy was dashed by hearing that Fra Paolo had not been killed. The Venetian _bando_ filled them with fears and mutual suspicions, each man's hand being now set against his comrade, and every ruffian on the road having an interest in their capture. Yet after some time they continued their journey to Rome, and sought sanctuary in the palace of Cardinal Colonna. Here their reception was not what they had anticipated. Having failed in the main object and brought scandal on the Church, they were maintained for some months in obscurity, and then coldly bidden to depart with scanty recompense. All this while their lives remained exposed to the Venetian ban. Under these circumstances it is not strange that the men were half-maddened. Poma raged like a wild beast, worshiping the devil in his private chamber, planning schemes of piracy and fresh attacks on Sarpi, even contemplating a last conspiracy against the person of the Pope. He was seized in Rome by the _sbirri_ of the government, and one of his sons perished in the scuffle. Another returned to Venice, and ended his days there as a vagrant lunatic. Poma himself died mad in the prison of Civita Vecchia. Viti also died mad in the same prison. Parrasio died in prison at Rome. One of the soldiers was beheaded at Perugia, and the other fell a victim to cut-throats on the high road. Such was the end of the five conspirators against Fra Paolo Sarpi's life.[146] A priest, Franceschi, who had aided and abetted their plot, disappeared soon after the explosion; and we may rest tolerably assured that his was no natural removal to another world.

It is just to add that the instigation of this murderous plot was never brought home by direct testimony to any members of the Papal Court. But the recourse which the assassins first had to the asylum of the Nuncio in Venice, their triumphal progress through cities of the Church, the moneys they drew on several occasions, the interest taken in them by Cardinal Borghese when they finally reached Rome, and their deaths in Papal dungeons, are circumstances of overwhelming cumulative evidence against the Curia. Sarpi's life was frequently attempted in the following years. On one occasion, Cardinal Bellarmino, more mindful of private friendship than of public feud, sent him warning that he must live prepared for fresh attacks from Rome.

[Footnote 146: A full account of them is given by Bianchi Giovini in his _Biografia_, chap. xvii.]

Indeed, it may be said that he now passed his days in continual expectation of poison or the dagger. This appears plainly in Fulgenzio's biography and in the pages of his private correspondence. The most considerable of these later conspiracies, of which Fra Fulgenzio gives a full account, implicated Cardinal Borghese and the General of the Servite Order.[147] The history seems in brief to be as follows. One Fra Bernardo of Perugia, who had served the Cardinal during their student days, took up his residence in Rome so soon as Scipione Borghese became a profitable patron. In the course of the year 1609, this Fra Bernardo dispatched a fellow-citizen of his, named Fra Giovanni Francesco, to Padua, whence he frequently came across to Venice and tampered with Sarpi's secretary, Fra Antonio of Viterbo. These three friars were all of them Servites; and it appears that the General looked with approval on their undertaking. The upshot of the traffic was that Fra Antonio, having ready access to Sarpi's apartments and person, agreed either to murder him with a razor or to put poison in his food, or, what was finally determined on, to introduce a couple of assassins into his bedchamber at night. An accident revealed the plot, and placed a voluminous cyphered correspondence in the hands of the Venetian Inquisitor of State. Fra Fulgenzio significantly adds that of all the persons incriminated by these letters, none, with the exception of the General of the Servites, was under the rank of Cardinal. The wording of his sentence is intentionally obscure, but one expression seems even to point at the Pope.[148]

[Footnote 147: _Vita di F. Paolo_, pp. 67-70.]

At the close of this affair, so disgraceful to the Church and to his Order, Fra Paolo besought the Signory of Venice on his bended knees, as a return for services rendered by him to the State, that no public punishment should be inflicted on the culprits. He could not bear, he said, to be the cause of bringing a blot of infamy upon his religion, or of ruining the career of any man. Fra Giovanni Francesco afterwards redeemed his life by offering weighty evidence against his powerful accomplices. But what he revealed is buried in the oblivion with which the Council of Ten in Venice chose to cover judicial acts of State-importance.

It is worth considering that in all the attempts upon Sarpi's life, priests, friars, and prelates of high place were the prime agents.[149] Poor devils like Poma and Parrasio lay ready to their hands as sanguinary instruments, which, after work performed, could be broken if occasion served. What, then, was the religious reformation of which the Roman Court made ostentatious display when it secured its unexpected triumph in the Council of Trent?

[Footnote 148: _Vita di F. Paolo_, p. 68: 'Le cose che vennero a pubblica notizia e certe sono: che molte persone nominate in quella cifra, di _Padre_, fratelli, e cugini, per le contracifre consto, dal Generale de' Servi in fuori, niuna esser di dignita inferiore alia Cardinalizia.']

[Footnote 149: Sarpi says that no crime happened in Venice without a friar or priest being mixed in it (_Lettere_, vol. i. 351).]

We must reply that in essential points of moral conduct this reformation amounted to almost nothing, and in some points to considerably less than nothing. The Church of God, as Sarpi held, suffered deformation rather than reformation. That is to say, this Church, instead of being brought back to primitive simplicity and purged of temporal abuses, now lay at the mercy of ambitious hypocrites who with the Supreme Pontiff's sanction, pursued their ends by treachery and violence. Its hostility to heretics and its new-fangled doctrine of Papal almightiness encouraged the spread of a pernicious casuistry which favored assassination. Kings at strife with the Catholic Alliance, honest Christians defending the prerogatives of their commonwealth, erudite historians and jurists who disapproved of substituting Popes in Rome for God in heaven, might be massacred or kidnapped by ruffians red with the blood of their nearest relatives and carrying the condemnation of their native States upon their forehead. According to the post-Tridentine morality of Rome, that morality which the Jesuits openly preached and published, which was disseminated in every prelate's ante-chamber, and whispered in every parish-priest's confessional, enormous sins could be atoned and eternal grace be gained by the merciless and traitorous murder of any notable man who savored of heresy. If the Holy Office had instituted a prosecution against the victim and had condemned him in his absence, the path was plain. Sentence of excommunication and death publicly pronounced on such a man reduced him to the condition of a wild beast, whose head was worth solid coin and plenary absolution to the cut-throat. A private minute recorded on the books of the Inquisitors had almost equal value; and Sarpi was under the impression that some such underhand proceeding against himself had loosed a score of knives. But short of these official or semi-judicial preliminaries, it was maintained upon the best casuistical authority that to take the life of any suspected heretic, of any one reputed heterodox in Roman circles, should be esteemed a work of merit creditable to the miscreant who perpetrated the deed, and certain, even should he die for it, to yield him in the other world the joys of Paradise. These joys the Jesuits described in language worthy of the Koran. Dabbled in Sarpi's or Duplessis Mornay's blood, quartered and tortured like Ravaillac, the desperado of so pious a crime would swim forever in oceans of ecstatic pleasure. The priest, ambitious for his hierarchy, fanatical in his devotion to the Church, relying upon privilege if he should chance to be detected, had a plain interest in promoting and directing such conspiracies. Men of blood, and bandits up to the hilts in crimes of violence, rendered reckless by the indiscriminate cruelty of justice in those days, allured by the double hope of pay and spiritual benefit, rushed without a back-thought into like adventures. Ready to risk their lives in an unholy cause, such ruffians were doubly glad to do so when the bait of heaven's felicity was offered to their grosser understanding. These considerations explain, but are far indeed from exculpating, the complicity of clergy and cut-throats in every crime of violence attempted against foes of Papal Rome.

Sarpi's worst enemies could scarcely fix on him the crime of heresy. He was a staunch Catholic; so profoundly versed both in dogmatic theology and in ecclesiastical procedure, that to remain within the straitest limits of orthodoxy, while opposing the presumption of the Papal Court, gave him no trouble. Yet at the time in which he lived, the bare act of resistance to any will or whim of Rome, passed with those doctors who were forging new systems of Pontifical supremacy, for heretical. In this arbitrary and uncanonical sense of the phrase Sarpi was undoubtedly a heretic. He had deserved the hatred of the Curia, the Inquisition, the Jesuits, and their myrmidons. Steadily, with caution and a sober spirit, he had employed his energies and vast accumulated stores of knowledge in piling up breakwaters against their pernicious innovations. In all his controversial writings during the interdict Sarpi used none but solid arguments, drawn from Scripture, canon law, and the Councils of the early Church, in order to deduce one single principle: namely that both secular and ecclesiastical organisms, the State and the Church, are divinely appointed, but with several jurisdictions and for diverse ends. He pressed this principle home with hammer-strokes of most convincing proof on common sense and reason. He did so even superfluously to our modern intellect, which is fatigued by following so elaborate a chain of precedents up to a foregone conclusion. But he let no word fall, except by way of passing irony, which could bring contempt upon existing ecclesiastical potentates; and he maintained a dispassionate temper, while dealing with topics which at that epoch inflamed the fiercest party strife. His antagonists, not having sound learning, reason, and the Scripture on their side, were driven to employ the rhetoric of personal abuse and the stiletto. In the end the badness of their cause was proved by the recourse they had to conspiracies of pimps, friars, murderers, and fanatics, in order to stifle that voice of truth which told them of their aberration from the laws of God.