Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology) [1 ed.] 9780199740536, 0199740534

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Empire of Souls

OXFORD STUDIES IN HISTORICAL THEOLOGY SERIES EDITOR David C. Steinmetz, Duke University Editorial Board Irena Backus, Université de Genève Robert C. Gregg, Stanford University George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn Susan E. Schreiner, University of Chicago John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame Geoffrey Wainwright, Duke University Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia GOD’S IRISHMEN Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland Crawford Gribben REFORMING SAINTS Saint’s Lives and Their Authors in Germany, 1470–1530 David J. Collins GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS ON THE TRINITY AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD In Your Light We Shall See Light Christopher A. Beeley THE JUDAIZING CALVIN Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms G. Sujin Pak REVIVING THE DEAD LETTER Johann David Michaelis and the Quest for Hebrew Antiquity Michael C. Legaspi ARE YOU ALONE WISE? Debates about Certainty in the Early Modern Church Susan E. Schreiner EMPIRE OF SOULS Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth Stefania Tutino

Empire of Souls Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth

STEFANIA TUTINO

2010

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tutino, Stefania. Empire of souls : Robert Bellarmine and the Christian commonwealth / Stefania Tutino. p. cm. — (Oxford studies in historical theology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–974053–6 1. Bellarmino, Roberto Francesco Romolo, Saint, 1542–1621. 2. Popes–Temporal power–History of doctrines. 3. Christianity and politics–Europe–History. 4. Europe–Kings and rulers–Deposition. 5. Counter-Reformation. I. Title. BX1810.T88 2010 262′.132092—dc22 2009049445

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the help, kindness, and competence of the staff of the libraries and archives where I have worked these past few years. I am especially grateful to Monsignor Alejandro Cifres and Dr. Daniel Ponziani, director and archivist, respectively, of the Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede; Professor Martín Morales, S.J., director of the Archivio della Pontificia Università Gregoriana; Dr. Mario Brunello and all the staff of the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu; and Dr. Giovanni Castaldo and all the staff of the Archivio Segreto Vaticano. I would also like to thank the staff of the Cambridge University Library, the British Library, and the Duke Humfrey’s Library at the Bodleian Library. While thinking about and working on this book, I have benefited from the suggestions and criticism of many colleagues and friends. I am especially grateful to Lori Anne Ferrell, Knud Haakonssen, Claudia Mancina, Arthur Marotti, Tom Mayer, Sears McGee, Anthony Milton, Adriano Prosperi, Debora Shuger, Johann Sommerville, Ann Taves, and Colleen Windham-Hughes. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers, Cynthia Read, and the editorial staff at Oxford University Press for their comments, suggestions, and support. Errors and omissions, of course, are my own. Finally, this book is dedicated to my husband, Tommaso Treu: ho sceso, dandoti il braccio, almeno un milione di scale. . . .

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Stepan Trofimovich was growing more and more excited, morbidly so, beyond his strength. “The one constant thought that there exists something immeasurably more just and happy than I, fills the whole of me with immeasurable tenderness and—glory—oh, whoever I am, whatever I do! . . . The whole law of human existence consists in nothing other than a man’s always being able to bow before the immeasurably great. If people are deprived of the immeasurably great, they will not live and will die in despair. The immeasurable and infinite is as essential to man as the small planet he inhabits” . . . Stepan Trofimovich died three days later, by then completely unconscious. —F. Dostoyevsky, Demons

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Contents

Abbreviations, xi Introduction, 3 1. The Foundations of Bellarmine’s Potestas Indirecta, 9 2. The Controversies over the Controversiae: 1580s–1590s, 49 3. The Controversy over the Interdetto and the Attacks against Bellarmine’s Theory, 81 4. Bellarmine and the Oath of Allegiance, 117 5. Robert Bellarmine and the Potestas Indirecta: Continental Repercussions, 159 6. The Making of a Scapegoat: The Case of Martin Becanus, 211 7. Robert Bellarmine and the Catholic Church: Questions of Power and Authority, 261 Notes, 293 Select Bibliography, 377 Index, 397

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Abbreviations

All the translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. All scriptural references in the text, unless otherwise noted, are from the King James version of the Bible. AB

ABSI

X. M. Le Bachelet, Auctarium Bellarminianum (Paris: Beauchesne, 1913) Archivum Britannicum Societatis Iesu, London

ACDF

Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, Rome

AHSI

Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu

APUG ARSI ASV BASC

BAV BL

Archivio della Pontificia Università Gregoriana, Rome Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Rome X. M. Le Bachelet, Bellarmin avant son Cardinalat: Correspondance et documents (Paris: Beauchesne, 1911) Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome British Library, London.

xii

ABBREVIATIONS

DBI

Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960–)

EB

Epistolae Bellarmini, APUG Ms 1601–1636, 8 vols., collected by X. M. Le Bachelet, and 1 supplementary volume collected by S. Tromp

MI, Epp.

Monumenta Ignatiana: Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Societatis Iesu fundatoris epistolae et instructiones, 12 vols. (Madrid: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1909–1911)

OO

Ven. Cardinalis Roberti Bellarmini Politiani SJ Opera Omnia, ed. J. Fèvre, 12 vols. (Paris: L. Vivès, 1870–1874)

STC

A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–1991)

Empire of Souls

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Introduction

Almost forty years ago Eric Cochrane, in his survey of recent and new historiography on post-Reformation Catholicism, reflected on the shortcomings of traditional ecclesiastical history in making sense of the phase of the history of the Catholic Church that began with the Council of Trent.1 More specifically, according to Cochrane, ecclesiastical history in the 1950s and 1960s at times assumed the characteristics of apologetics, at times hagiography, at times homiletics. In each case, this kind of scholarship seemed to fail to explain important social, cultural, and intellectual aspects of post-Tridentine Catholicism. The reasons for this failure were several, and among them Cochrane singled out a set of wrong assumptions made by ecclesiastical historians. Some of those assumptions had to do with the general understanding of the relationship between the secular and the sacred; others had to do with the “loaded” role attributed to the Counter-Reformation as a reactionary force to blame for the decadence experienced in Italy after the Renaissance ; still others had to do with wrong historical preconceptions regarding the ways in which the structure of post-Reformation Catholicism was shaped and organized. One of the assumptions of the latter kind, as Cochrane wrote, was that “the Church is and has always been organized according to the rule of Robert Bellarmine and that all effective action has always depended upon initiative from above.”2 For Cochrane, the way out of this historiographical impasse was in sight and already in hand in the works of, for instance,

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Hubert Jedin, Paolo Prodi, and Federico Chabod: the road that these scholars were traveling, and that according to Cochrane all new historiography on post-Tridentine Catholicism ought to travel, required both quantitative and qualitative efforts to explore the social and cultural dimensions of early modern Catholicism, which, in turn, would require an examination of people, topics, and material still largely neglected, as, for instance, “all the theological works of the age—and not just those of Lainez, Bellarmine, and the Conciliar periti.”3 From this brief and partial summary of Cochrane’s rich argument, I would like to single out two elements. First, when Cochrane invited future scholars to move away from a traditional (and flawed) view of Counter-Reformation Catholicism as a top-down institution, he agreed with the traditional scholars whom he otherwise criticized that Bellarmine was the paradigmatic representative of that top-down view of the Catholic Church. In other words, even though Cochrane thought that more work was needed on the bottom-up aspects of post-Tridentine Catholicism, he nevertheless did not seem to doubt that Bellarmine was an intrinsic part of that top-down approach from which he wished historians would move away. Second, and consequently, according to Cochrane new scholarship on post-Reformation Catholicism had to branch out and away from Bellarmine, to investigate instead other, noncanonical, theologians. This means that in 1570 Cochrane thought that people had already read and interpreted Bellarmine enough, if not, indeed, too much. If we fast-forward to William Hudon’s 1996 assessment of the state of current scholarship on post-Reformation Catholicism, many of Cochrane’s wishes seemed to have come true.4 According to Hudon, in fact, scholarship on post-Tridentine Catholicism showed encouraging signs of health: social and cultural history had finally started to engage more substantially the field of early modern Catholicism, and this richer and more profound way of writing “religious” history offered important insight into the historical significance of post-Tridentine Catholicism. One of the most relevant results achieved by this new kind of religious history, according to Hudon, is that it recovered the ambiguity and complexity of early modern Catholicism, which a series of oversimplifications starting with the traditional labels of “Catholic Reformation” and “Counter-Reformation” had contributed to erase. In contrast to an oversimplified and monolithic view of post-Tridentine Catholicism, Hudon praised the new studies of institutional, political, and cultural aspects of the Church of Rome, which contributed to a more complex and historically accurate picture of the Church’s leaders, members, and victims.5 According to Hudon, however, more work still needed to be done to overcome historical and historiographical assumptions that viewed post-Tridentine Catholicism,

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as he put it, as “little more than a fall from Renaissance ideas.”6 In other words, a more nuanced, sophisticated, and historically accurate account of the political, social, and cultural significance of post-Tridentine Catholicism could be achieved only by abandoning rigid categories of backwardness and progress and by concentrating instead on the complexities both within and outside the institutional boundaries of the Church of Rome. I have written this work to offer my contribution to this effort of recovering complexities, and I have chosen to write on Robert Bellarmine because, unlike Cochrane (and most of the existing scholarship on Bellarmine), I think that the Jesuit theologian was not simply an already well-known representative of the Counter-Reformation Church. By contrast, I think that Bellarmine is a splendid case study to show that once we focus on the complexities of post-Reformation Catholicism, the neat and oversimplified lines drawn by traditional scholarship between governors and governed, censors and censured, controllers and controlled, seem much less firm, useful, and meaningful. To be sure, traditional scholarship on Bellarmine seems to present many of the flaws that Cochrane identified as characteristic of the ecclesiastical historians he criticized. The two-volume biography of Bellarmine written by James Brodrick, for instance, is a perfect example of semiapologetic and semihagiographic ecclesiastical history (we should remember that Brodrick’s biography of Bellarmine was published in 1928, two years before Bellarmine was canonized by Pope Pius XI).7 Two other important contributions on Bellarmine were published in the first half of the twentieth century: Franz Xaver Arnold’s and Carlo Giacon’s studies of Bellarmine’s political theory.8 Both works, which were not informed by the same apologetic spirit that animated Brodrick’s scholarship, offer an accurate theological analysis of the political theory of Bellarmine insofar as it relates to the “internal” theological developments of Catholicism, but they both neglect to examine the repercussions of Bellarmine’s theory in the political and religious history of early modern Europe. In this sense, even though both works are still, to an extent, useful, they are nevertheless expressions of a certain specific kind of “canonical” ecclesiastical (and intellectual) history that, according to Cochrane, needed revision. Current scholarship on Bellarmine has started to show the healthy signs that Hudon identified in his account of the recent literature on post-Tridentine Catholicism. First of all, historians of early modern political thought have reconsidered the importance and significance of Catholic theories of state, starting with Quentin Skinner and his Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978).9 The most recent and insightful attempt to understand the political theory of the Society of Jesus against the background of the development of early modern theories of state is Harro Höpfl’s Jesuit Political

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Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630 (2004), which treats Bellarmine’s theory as a part of a complex, varied, and influential body of political thought.10 In parallel, as Hudon had noted already in 1996, historians of post-Tridentine Catholicism have started to analyze in more depth certain institutions, such as the Congregation of the Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index. Scholars working in this field have been aided in their endeavors by the opening to the public, in 1998, of the Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, which contains the archives of both the Inquisition and the Index. This surge of historiographical interest in the Inquisition and the Index has produced a number of works that concentrate on Bellarmine’s role as censor and inquisitor, and at times these works privilege the quasi-sensationalist aspect of archival findings at the expense of a coherent interpretation of Bellarmine’s thought.11 The historical paradigm of confessionalization and disciplinamento, also identified by Hudon as one of the recent categories that looked very promising in terms of offering novel accounts of the interaction between theological, political, cultural, and social aspects of post-Tridentine Catholicism, has also produced a reconsideration of the figure of Bellarmine. For instance, Franco Motta’s analysis of Bellarmine’s political theory is especially representative of this kind of scholarship. Motta sees Bellarmine as indeed a paradigmatic example of Counter-Reformation Catholicism: only, this Counter-Reformation Catholicism is analyzed within the framework of an intellectually, socially, and theologically confessionalized Europe.12 While my book takes into account these new developments offered by the scholarship on Jesuit political thought and on post-Reformation Catholicism, it presents a different (and complementary) picture with respect to this kind of scholarship, especially with regard to two points. First of all, I think that Bellarmine’s theology and political theory cannot be studied only in the theological context of post-Tridentine Catholicism or in the context of the political thought of the Society of Jesus. Indeed, the theoretical and political repercussions of Bellarmine’s theory on the political history of early modern Europe are, in my view, extraordinarily relevant not only for our understanding of Bellarmine’s views but also for our interpretation of the development of important political and religious concepts that are at the core of most of what we understand as political modernity. In other words, my book attempts to see Bellarmine’s theology and political theory not simply from the inside of the Catholic Church, so to speak. Rather, I seek to show that Bellarmine’s theory responded to, was influenced by, and modified substantially the terms of a series of political and historical developments that concerned not only

INTRODUCTION

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the intellectual and institutional shape of the Catholic Church but, indeed, the religious, political, and historical developments of early modern Europe. Second, once we take this wider historical context into account, I argue that we can no longer see Bellarmine as the paradigmatic representative of CounterReformation Catholicism, whether it be the top-down repressive intellectual machine mentioned by Eric Cochrane or the complex agent of, and respondent to, the process of confessionalization studied by Paolo Prodi and his students. More specifically, one of the aims of my book is to demonstrate a very simple point, that is, that Bellarmine’s theory was very controversial in post-Reformation Rome. Most scholars of early modern religious history are familiar with the hostility that Pope Sixtus V showed toward Bellarmine and his work; they usually tend to assume that this hostility ended with the death of the pope. My work demonstrates that this hostility did in fact continue well into the seventeenth century, in different forms and with different aims. This is because Bellarmine’s theory did not simply stir the anti-Jesuitical feelings of one pope. Instead, it challenged in very crucial ways some of the essential characteristics of the nature of post-Tridentine Catholicism. If we assume that one of the pivotal concerns of post-Tridentine Catholicism was the defense of the supremacy of the pope in a confessionally divided European context that was experiencing the progressive strengthening of the theoretical and political authority of the temporal sovereigns, then the reception of Bellarmine’s theory in Rome is proof that the Catholic leaders had widely different ideas on how to go about asserting and maintaining that supremacy. Indeed, they had widely different ideas on the very nature of that supremacy, which suggests that the idea of papal supremacy as a sort of minimum common denominator of post-Reformation Catholicism needs to be used with theoretical caution and historical accuracy. By the same token, if we assume that post-Tridentine Catholicism was mostly concerned with control, following the reception of Bellarmine’s theory will show that the leaders of the Church had widely different ideas on what exactly needed to be controlled and how the exercise of control needed to be negotiated with, and affirmed against, the agency of control represented by temporal authority. Once again, before we can see control as a common minimum denominator of post-Reformation Catholicism, we probably need to investigate in greater detail the various conceptual, theological, historical, and political debates about the subjects as well as the agents of this control. Our view of post-Tridentine Catholicism, I suspect, depends greatly on our view of modernity, and in this respect I hope that my study of Robert Bellarmine, by challenging some of our assumptions on the significance of his work in the history of early modern Europe, will also challenge some of our assumptions about political and religious modernity.

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In keeping with this agenda, my book starts with an examination of the theological and theoretical structure of Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta. Chapter 2 illustrates some of the challenges Bellarmine’s theory faced in the Roman Curia from the mid-1580s to the end of the sixteenth century. Chapters 3 through 5 insert Bellarmine’s theory in the political and religious history of early modern Europe. More specifically, these chapters show the central role that Bellarmine’s theory played in the crisis of the Venetian Interdetto, in the debate over the oath of allegiance, and in the context of the anti-Jesuitical polemics that arose in France in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Henri IV. Chapter 6 sheds some light on a mysterious and complex story: the reception in England, France, and Rome of a series of works written by a northern European Jesuit, Martin Becanus, in defense of Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta. Chapter 7, which analyzes some of the implications of Bellarmine’s theory in the development of the political, administrative, and intellectual structure of the Church of Rome, concludes this study with a theoretical assessment of the “modernity” of Bellarmine’s theory in light of Carl Schmitt’s territorial understanding of sovereignty and Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as a mode of exercising power.

1 The Foundations of Bellarmine’s Potestas Indirecta

The Controversiae: Structure, Form and Content If Leo Tolstoy is right and every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, then European Catholicism in the second half of the 1570s was unhappy in a distinctively engaging way. The Council of Trent had completed its deliberations roughly a decade earlier, and now it was time to implement them. Probably the most active of the new religious orders in carrying out the program of Trent, and the most suitable to embody the aggressive spirit of post-Tridentine Catholicism, was the Society of Jesus. In the 1570s the Jesuits had seen the number of their members grow considerably, they had colleges and seminaries throughout Catholic Europe, and they established missions all over the world, from the Far East to the Americas.1 The Jesuits were also at the forefront of the fight against the Protestants, which was one of the main concerns of post-Tridentine Catholicism, and that specific battle appeared more and more complex as the sixteenth century proceeded, characterized as it was by important victories and equally significant setbacks. By the 1570s the Protestant churches had consolidated their character of territorial churches and had strengthened their relationships to political sovereigns. For example, since the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, the German territories had seen their confessional boundaries fixed in a relatively stable configuration, and both the strength of the Protestant churches and the tendencies of

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the “imperial” traditional Catholicism to maintain the status quo offered considerable resistance to post-Tridentine Catholicism. In England the Elizabethan Church had consolidated its hold on the political and liturgical life of English subjects, and it was coming to a full-blown contest with Rome after Pope Pius V in 1570 excommunicated Elizabeth and declared her sovereignty over England illegitimate. Meanwhile, the English Catholics were getting ready for the offensive. In 1568 the seminary at Douai was founded, and it soon became first an educational institution for English Catholics who had been forced to leave their country, then a training camp for secular priests, and later on an important center for Jesuit missionaries; the first mission of the Society of Jesus to England was launched in 1580. The English regime was preparing the counterattack: over the 1570s a number of laws were passed to enforce church attendance and punish with increasingly harsh penalties manifestations of recusancy. In 1577 the first English Catholic priest ordained at Douai was executed by Elizabeth, and in 1581 every Catholic missionary on the soil of England was declared guilty of high treason and therefore was punished with the death penalty. The program of Catholic renewal that Trent had envisioned, moreover, encountered resistance from many sources, not only from the side of the heretics. For example, in France, shaken by the dramatic consequences of the St. Bartholomew Day’s Massacre, the strong Gallican tradition inherent in the French Catholic Church had prevented the decrees of the Council of Trent from being received and adopted, because they were thought of as an imposition on the part of Rome over the interest of the “national” Church. Also, many changes and adaptations had to be made in Rome, that is to say, in the heart of the Catholic world, in order to implement the great plan of centralization that the Council of Trent imposed on the structure of the Catholic Church. One of those adaptations, distinctively important for the present study, was the creation in 1572 of the Congregation of the Index, in charge of overseeing the operations of controlling, censoring, and prohibiting books. Before 1572, two preliminary drafts of an Index of Prohibited Books had been completed, respectively, by the Congregation of the Inquisition (1559) and by a commission established to revise that 1559 draft at the Council of Trent (1564). The creation of the Congregation of the Index coincided with and was itself part of a period of intense and aggressive persecutions, which culminated in great efforts to identify, punish, and ultimately eliminate from the Italian territory the presence of Protestantism and other forms of doctrinal deviations, and which was accompanied by a progressively more efficacious process of centralization of the repressive machine in the hands of the papal Curia.2 In this context the young Robert Bellarmine, nephew of Pope Marcellus II and rising academic star, arrived at the Roman College, in 1576, to teach the

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course on controversies. For Bellarmine this was a return to his alma mater after a brief but significant stint in Louvain, where he arrived, after some delay, in 1569. In Louvain, Bellarmine was supposed to practice and perfect his preaching style: the Latin conciones given by Bellarmine were immediately successful; indeed, his sermon on death given on All Souls’ Day in 1569 was met with so much admiration that those who were present “vigorously” insisted that the sermon be published.3 The other task that Bellarmine was assigned at Louvain was that of completing his theological studies, although very soon after his arrival he moved from the desk to the podium. He was put in charge of a course on Scholastic theology, in which he taught the first and third part of the Summa. Already in the summer of 1570, Juan de Polanco, the secretary to the general of the Jesuits, wrote to Bellarmine wishing him well for the beginning of his lectures, “which will be very appropriate to ground yourself well in, and better master, theology, besides the advantages for the audience.”4 The promotion of Bellarmine from student to teacher was a rather remarkable occurrence and a testimony to the precocity of his intellectual skills, since Bellarmine at that point had not completed the four years of training in theology requested by the Society of Jesus of its professors, and had not even made the profession of the fourth vow, which he would do in 1572.5 Bellarmine’s appointment is also a further indication of the importance of Thomism for the Jesuit College in Louvain and, more generally, for the theological formation of the Jesuit theorist. During the years of Bellarmine’s stay, two institutions dominated the academic life of Louvain: the University and the Seminary of the Society of Jesus, where Bellarmine taught. The Jesuit College was founded in 1565, and for the next three decades it remained the main center for those who wanted to learn Aquinas. A chair of Scholastic theology at the University of Louvain existed since 1546, but the textbook used was Lombard’s Sententiae, not Aquinas. The university established a course of Scholastic theology based on the Summa only in 1596.6 When Bellarmine arrived at Louvain, the Faculty of Theology had just witnessed a rather dramatic series of events involving the condemnation in the late 1560s of one of their members, Michel Baius or de Bay, who was the author of a number of tracts in which he presented a series of theological propositions affirming that original sin was a corruption of human nature itself, after which men could not accomplish anything good without the supernatural help of God’s grace.7 The issue of the relationship between grace and free will was crucially important for early modern Catholicism. First of all, it was one of the main theological points of contention between Catholics and Protestants. Also, and perhaps more interestingly in this context, it was a dramatically debated issue within the Catholic Church as well. Of course, the role of grace in men’s

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and women’s salvation has a profound root in the history of Catholic thought starting at least with Augustine. And the debate between those who privileged a stricter Augustinian reading of the condition of men after the fall as one of intrinsic corruption, and those who, especially after the Reformation, insisted on the centrality of free will and the capability of human nature to cooperate with God’s grace, was at the forefront of theological discussions during the entire early modern world. In this respect, the condemnation of Baius is but a chapter in a longer and much more complex story: the controversy de auxiliis, to which I will have occasion to return and in which Bellarmine participated actively, and also the developments of Jansenism later on, are all parts of the same story.8 Briefly put, in the second part of the sixteenth century the Catholic world was divided into two main camps. The first one was composed of those theologians, mainly Dominicans, who insisted on the interpretation given by Aquinas of Augustine’s doctrine of grace and on the validity of Aquinas’s notion of “physical premotion,” that is, the original “movement” which God imparts to all the creatures and which influences free will. The Dominican doctrine was, in a sense, a development of Aquinas’s compromise: following Augustine in giving a primary importance to the intervention of grace in human salvation without sacrificing the anthropological and theological importance of free will. At the opposite side of the controversy were those theologians, especially from the Society of Jesus, who, because of the need that they saw of fighting Protestantism and also because of their general theoretical attitude, which was moving progressively away from strict Scholasticism and into the realm of moral theology and casuistry, gave greater preeminence to the role of free will. Luis de Molina, whose Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, published in 1588, originated the controversy de auxiliis, can be considered as one of the most “extreme” expressions of this Jesuit “philo-Pelagian” trend. Probably the single most studied aspect of Bellarmine’s thought and of his theology is precisely the issue of where the Jesuit stood in such a debate: in this respect his position during the controversy de auxiliis, when the Jesuit Molinist position was pitted directly against the Dominican Thomist view, seems rather problematic. Bellarmine, while being very sensitive to the duty he felt to support his own order, nevertheless did not side with Molina completely. A rather well-established line of scholarship has explained this anomaly by tracing and identifying the Augustinian aspect of Bellarmine’s soteriology, more pronounced during his early theological elaborations, when Bellarmine was still free from the “public” obligations to which he was tied later on, when his high rank within the Society of Jesus and the Roman Curia obliged him to smooth out some of the more strictly Augustinian views that he had held, for example,

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during his years as a teacher in Louvain.9 I do not wish to come back to the question of Bellarmine’s soteriology here, but I would like to single out two elements from Bellarmine’s “Augustinian moment” and from his treatment of grace and free will during his years at Louvain, which I think are useful to understand his political theory and, more specifically, the Controversiae. First of all, since the beginning of his theoretical elaboration, Bellarmine was very aware of the polemical context in which theology had to be situated, but he was also aware of the novelty that his theology represented in that polemical context. In his 1613 autobiography,10 a text that is usually very laconic when it comes to theological debates, especially those that were controversial—and the topics of grace and free will were very controversial in the early seventeenth century because of the repercussions of the controversy over Molina’s position—Bellarmine rather interestingly made some remarks on the reasons that prompted him to lecture on grace. While at Louvain, Bellarmine wrote, “Since Michel Baius, a rather famous Doctor, followed many opinions which seemed to verge toward the new errors of the Lutherans and which were condemned by Pope Pius V in 1570, he [Bellarmine] realized that there were many who liked his opinions and he started to refute them not under the name of Doctor Michel Baius but under the name of old or new heretics.”11 Thus, as we can see from this passage, Bellarmine’s initial concern in lecturing on grace and free will was to find an effective strategy to oppose doctrines verging toward heresy while avoiding the creation of divisions within the Catholic camp, hence his decision to confute Baius’s “errors” without mentioning the Catholic theologian, even though he had already been condemned by the Catholic Church, and to attribute those “errors” to the heretics instead. Now, that Bellarmine, a Catholic theologian, wanted to confute the Protestants while strengthening, rather than weakening, the theological unity of the Catholic front might seem a rather obvious and tautological statement. However, the significance of Bellarmine’s anti-Protestant statements deserves some thought. The scholarship on Bellarmine, in fact, has always put Bellarmine’s role as an anti-Protestant champion at the center of its interpretation of the Jesuit’s theology. Indeed, Franco Motta has recently seen the antiheretical character of Bellarmine’s theology as the most relevant indicator of a “theology of persuasion,” a theology, that is, that through the fight against heretics managed to merge the “language of authority” and the “language of persuasion,” that is, the supernatural and the historical aspect of Catholic theology.12 The theological synthesis of such a dialectic process, for Motta, is represented by the reproposition of the authority of the supreme pontiff as the ultimate judge of controversy.

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While such a dynamic is surely apparent in Bellarmine’s work, I argue that it is indeed not the end of the story: rather, Bellarmine’s theology has to be seen within a larger project, whose nature is equally historico-political as theological. In other words, Bellarmine’s theology was not simply a means to ensure theological certainty against theological doubt, but served a functional purpose in the construction of a theo-political organism, the Catholic Church or respublica Christiana, which was surely a historical creature, born out of the confrontation with the Protestant churches, but was also a response to another historical development, the consolidation of the early modern state. This is why Bellarmine uses the term respublica Christiana to indicate both the Catholic Church as opposed to the secular commonwealths and the Catholic Church insofar as it incorporates and in certain cases rules over the various secular respublicae. And this is why, as Harro Höpfl has argued, the issue of judgment of controversy should be examined as part of the political theory of the Society of Jesus, and not only of its theology.13 Thus, the respublica Christiana as Bellarmine conceived it was supposed to be perfectly equipped to engulf and eliminate historical obstacles such as Lutheranism and the increasing strength of the early modern states, whose occurrence originated the need of revising the structure of this respublica with respect to medieval and late medieval elaborations.14 In this respect, then, Bellarmine’s position on grace and free will is an indication of the radical and all-encompassing nature of his theo-political elaboration, which was intended not only to persuade people of the truth of Catholicism against the falsehood of heresy but also to reconstruct from the ground up a new theo-political system, of which the antiheretical elements were but a part. Going back to the theological substance of his Louvain lectures, then, Bellarmine chose to refute Baius’s and the Protestants’ argument not by turning the “Pelagian way,” like Molina and other Jesuit theorists did, but by insisting on a strictly Augustinian reading of Aquinas. In a sense, Bellarmine subordinated the polemical and controversistical aim, which would have been more easily attained by going down the Molina route, to the more radical operation of reappropriation of Augustine through Aquinas, thus removing the theological ground from which the Protestant soteriology sprang. Thus, when Bellarmine confuted Baius’s doctrines “under the name of old or new heretics,” he did not intend simply to contrast the Catholic truth with the Protestant heresy, but indeed he sought to rethink the entire Catholic theological structure so as to make it completely impermeable to both heretics and Catholics whose opinions verged on heresy. The project of, in a sense, combining Augustine and Aquinas and snatching them away from the Protestants brings out the second element of Bellarmine’s

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early theological thought that I would like to emphasize, that is, his commitment to Thomism as both a mode of thinking and a theoretical basis. To a certain extent, it is not surprising for a Jesuit to adhere to Aquinas’s theological thought, since, as John O’Malley has convincingly argued, many factors contributed to make Thomism the system of reference for Jesuit theology since the middle of the sixteenth century.15 One of those factors, particularly significant in the context of the present study, is that Francisco de Toledo, who began to teach theology at the Roman College in 1559 and who was one of the most influential of Bellarmine’s teachers, had studied at the University of Salamanca, where he had experienced the theological vivacity and importance of the reinterpretation of Aquinas that Dominican theologians starting with Francisco de Vitoria were elaborating.16 On the other hand, as the sixteenth century progressed, the Jesuits found themselves more and more interested in developing certain specific aspects of moral theology, to which they probably gave some of the most original and influential contributions in early modern Europe, especially in two areas. The first is the elaboration and systematization of casuistry, or the art and science of solving cases of conscience, as a progressively more codified branch of moral theology. As O’Malley has explained, the need of setting down a system of rules and prescriptions regarding cases of conscience sprang from the Jesuits’ experience as confessors and their sensitivity toward and understanding of the individual character of this practice. In this respect casuistry is one of the clearest indicators of the theological flexibility and adaptability of the Society of Jesus.17 The second area of moral theology that the Jesuits developed, and the one that is more interesting in the context of the present study, is its application to political theory in the form of Jesuit reflection on reason of state. The Jesuit elaboration of the category of reason of state developed out of the criticism of Machiavelli and his arte dello stato, an art whose practitioners were advised to discard ordinary moral and religious constraints. By the mid-sixteenth century Machiavelli, as it is abundantly known, became the bête noire across the confessional board. The Jesuits, however, earlier and more profoundly than most understood that rather than simply condemning reason of state discourse, they should and could rework those discourses in order to theorize a “good” reason of state, which could be as “prudent” and useful as the “bad” kind. In this respect, for instance, one of the best results of such an operation was the treatise written by the Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneira in 1595, entitled Tratado de la religión y virtudes que debe tener el príncipe cristiano, in which he attacked Machiavelli’s immoral prince but at the same time granted to a prince the permission to dissimulate for reasons of state, provided that those reasons were carefully balanced against Christian morality.18

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Bellarmine did not have a central role in any of these developments in moral theology. That does not mean, of course, that he was not aware of or discarded the role of moral theology, both in terms of casuistry and in terms of reason of state discourses,19 nor does it mean that Bellarmine did not appreciate the historical and theoretical flexibility out of which those disciplines developed. It does mean, however, that for him Thomism had to remain the predominant theoretical and theological basis upon which to build the main structure of his respublica Christiana. As a testament to Bellarmine’s commitment to Thomism, let us recall briefly a debate that occurred within the Society over the curriculum of the Roman College. In 1580 Claudio Acquaviva, the newly elected provincial of Rome and soon-to-be elected general of the Society, proposed a change in the directions of studies at the college: the entire body of students, according to Acquaviva, should be geared toward moral theology and casuistry, and only very few should be granted permission to study Scholastic theology and philosophy. Bellarmine and some of his colleagues reacted strongly against this proposition. On 2 May 1580 they sent a letter—written by Bellarmine himself—to the general, Mercurian, asking him to reconsider the proposition, since a series of inconveniences would occur from the proposed shift in intellectual priorities.20 First of all, this shift would be inconvenient for the reputation of the college and of the entire Society of Jesus: because the good theologians were few and far between and tended to concentrate in Rome, discouraging the study of theology in Rome would mean that the college and the entire body of Jesuit theologians would shrink dramatically in numbers and quality. Moreover, the minimum amount of time requested to complete the studies in casuistry was two years, while for theology it was four years. Therefore, the best and brightest people always went into theology while those “of the most vile wit” usually chose casuistry. And since the casuistry curriculum was much less demanding than that of theology, because of “the much time at their disposal, [the casuists] are difficult to keep in check.”21 But gearing the students of the Roman College toward casuistry and away from Scholastic theology had other, more momentous, disadvantages, which did not simply concern the internal administration and intellectual profile of the Jesuits. To start with, Bellarmine wrote, downsizing the classes of theology would be inconvenient for the welfare of the Church: in Italy there were already too few good schools of theology, and that is why “there is no country which has more ignorant bishops and parishioners as Italy. We do not see anything but jurists and canonists, medical doctors and [natural] philosophers, who, however, have incurred many dangerous errors because at their time, like now, theology was not preeminent in the Italian schools.”22 What about the fight against heretics? Here the document becomes truly interesting:

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Germany and England still need many people who can withstand the heretics; but when those people are not well grounded, they easily vacillate. And it is not enough to hear controversies and cases of conscience, because controversies presuppose philosophy and Scholastic theology, and to form mere controversialists is to put them in a great confusion, as from experience we see that the mere controversialists whom we have now understand almost nothing, because they do not have the light of Scholastic theology, which is the surest and clearest in defining the truth, and that is why the Church governs itself with it [i.e., Scholastic theology] even now. To abandon it is to open the doors to heresies, as experience shows.23 One should remember that in 1580 Bellarmine had been teaching “controversies” at the Roman College for four years, and therefore his observations on the right approach to controversy are highly significant. In the passage, then, Bellarmine starts by distinguishing the “mere controversialists” (controversisti puri) from the others, who were better grounded in Scholastic theology and therefore were better controversialists. Bellarmine here blames the “mere” controversialists not because they are not effective against the heretics but because their effectiveness is in fact limited to the polemical contraposition to the Protestants and lacks the basic principles of truth in their surest and clearest form. Those who study only controversies, then, “understand almost nothing” of the core of the doctrinal body of the institution that they seek to defend; only Scholasticism can provide the understanding of that doctrinal core. The centrality of Thomism in Bellarmine’s thought, however, does not imply that the Jesuit theologian followed or advised his students to follow Aquinas’s philosophy uncritically. In a manuscript memo he wrote at the beginning of the 1580s in the context of the debates over the finalization of the Ratio Studiorum, he agreed that “St. Thomas be proposed as the author to be generally followed by the Society” but remarked that Thomas too could err, albeit in small points.24 For example, Aquinas’s doctrine on the adoration of the image of Christ, which Aquinas allowed cultu latriae, that is, with the highest liturgical modes of adoration, usually reserved for God alone, was “contrary to the councils, the fathers and the manners of speaking prescribed by the Church.” “In these and similar instances,” Bellarmine continued, “I do not see why our Society should not desert St. Thomas rather than the defense of the faith, not only in great matters, but also in small ones, and not only in the doctrines, but also in the words.”25 In other words, for Bellarmine Thomism was the most solid basis from which to start and without which an effective defense of the Church would not be possible. But the same aim of defending of the Church, for the sake of which Bellarmine proposed a firm grounding in Scholasticism against

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“mere controversies,” also allowed and indeed required some flexibility and critical attitude toward Aquinas’s theological statements. Thus, Bellarmine’s reservations on a style of controversy that simply attacks the enemy without being grounded in the basic principles of Catholic theology, or, in other words, a style of controversy that offers the pars destruens only, without providing the pars construens in addition, should be taken as an initial indication of the peculiar characteristics of Bellarmine’s Controversiae, which were not supposed to be “mere” controversies but something different. In general, the Catholic controversies of the post-Tridentine Church were sort of a new creature born out of a long and important tradition. Two features of that tradition appear to have been especially central in the formation of the genre of religious controversies as it was interpreted by post-Tridentine Catholicism. The first feature concerns the literary aspect of rhetoric, or the nature of rhetoric as a system of techniques elaborated to balance in the most effective way dispositio (i.e., the art of building and combining the parts of the discourse) and inventio (i.e., the capacity of finding the arguments that could convince the interlocutor). This literary dimension of rhetoric had been the object of an intense scholarly revival in the early sixteenth century because of the humanists’ interest in and debate over Ciceronian rhetoric. The Society of Jesus had absorbed that humanist concern with this literary expression of rhetoric and had included it as an integral part of the curriculum of its colleges. As a testament to the Jesuits’ interest in Ciceronian rhetoric, I will cite only the 1562 manual of rhetoric entitled De arte rhetorica libri tres, which was written by the Jesuit Cypriano Soares to explain the principles of classical rhetoric ad usum of Catholic preachers and polemists, but which became a sort of early modern best seller and was widely used as a textbook in schools and universities all over Europe, and not just in the colleges and seminaries of the Society.26 The second feature that shaped the genre of post-Reformation Catholic controversies was, of course, the dialectical aspect of rhetoric, or rhetoric as the art of persuasion. Post-Tridentine Catholic controversialists found this mode of expression especially suitable in a context in which the polemical aspect of the fight against heretics had a central role in Catholic discourses, but they modified that model by insisting on the value of the dichotomy between truth and rhetorical “artifice.” Post-Reformation Catholic controversialists were engaged not in a battle of opinions but in the fight for truth.27 While the Society of Jesus was immensely interested in the literary aspect of rhetoric since its inception because of the humanist influence that characterized its method of education from the time of Ignatius’s stint at the University of Paris, Bellarmine was one of the first and certainly one of the most influential members of the Jesuit order to combine the literary aspect of rhetoric with

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the other, “agonal” aspect, which before Bellarmine had been taken up by those controversialists active in the immediate aftermath of the Reformation, such as Johann Eck or Cochlaeus, and their heirs. The features of those controversialists were truly those of the first line of defense in an army: they were active in the hottest confessional areas, they moved back and forth between orality and print—Johann Eck debated with Luther at Leipzig in 1519 and then systematized his positions in numerous and extremely popular tracts and pamphlets— and that is why their written works had the flavor of the pulpit rather than that of academia. To that controversialistic model Bellarmine opposed his own variation: the polemical aspect remained central—after all, without the heretics there would be no need of controversy—but it was embedded into a wider and more profound framework that was firmly grounded in a solid theological nucleus. For Bellarmine’s model of controversies, then, the environment of the Roman College was much more suitable than the frontier of the Catholic world: while the “mere controversialists” were engaged in a debate with the Protestants, Bellarmine’s Controversiae were supposed to end for good the theological, polemical, and historical battle with the heretics old and new. Bellarmine’s Controversiae, one could say, were intended to be the controversies that ended controversy.28 The first element that I would like to single out to understand the structure and general organization of Bellarmine’s Controversiae is the complex relationship between their “oral” character—after all, they were born as lectures for a university course—and their written one. The first of the three volumes of the work was published in 1586, ten years after the beginning of Bellarmine’s tenure as chair at the Roman College. The manuscript notes of the controversies that Bellarmine delivered orally can be found at the Vatican Library,29 and by comparing the lectures notes with the order of the Controversiae as they were published, one notices a series of changes, the most important of which is the different order in which the controversies were set forth.30 Here, however, I would like to draw attention to the similarities between the lecture notes and the printed text in what concerns the skeleton of the work. Bellarmine’s first class was held in November 1576. The inaugural lecture was revised and printed at the beginning of the first volume of the Controversiae, but some manuscript notes taken by Bellarmine’s students during his lecture are still existent,31 and a comparison between the manuscript and the printed version reveals a very important common feature: Bellarmine’s lectures on the controversies were already thought of as the organic and systematic body that they would become in the printed Controversiae. When announcing his plans to the students, Bellarmine suggested that they think of the controversies not as topical and, to an extent, “contingent” debates between Catholics and Protestants but as a series

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of theological consequences springing from a theological nucleus that Bellarmine identified as the ninth and tenth articles of the creed, concerning the one, holy, and Catholic Church, the communion of saints, and the remission of sins. That is why Bellarmine announced that he would be lecturing first on the Church, and more specifically on the militant Church, the Church in purgatory, and the triumphant Church, and then on sacraments, because “the communion of saints is the participation and union in the sacraments.”32 As to the tenth article, Bellarmine announced that he would lecture on the doctrines of grace and free will and on the significance of good works, among other topics. Before lecturing on both sections, however, Bellarmine announced that he was going to start with the controversy over the word of God, “as we cannot dispute with the heretics unless we agree with them on something,” and both Protestants and Catholics agreed that the word of God is the foundation of faith. The conflict regarded the modes of interpreting the word of God, and that conflict needed to be addressed before any other.33 Now, this plan for the work was repeated in a virtually identical structure— with one modification, to which I will return—in the version of the 1576 lecture that Bellarmine prepared for publication, where we read that “since, then, almost all of the heresies of this time focus especially on the ninth and tenth articles of the Apostolic Creed, then we also will bring back all our controversies to the same two articles.” That is why even the printed version of the work was composed of a series of controversies first on the Church, then on the sacraments, and then on issues pertaining to the remission of sins, with all of those controversies preceded by discussion on the word of God.34 The systematic and organic character of Bellarmine’s lectures is further evidence of the original aspects of his controversies in the context of post-Tridentine Catholic controversialist tradition. In a sense, Bellarmine’s controversies were more similar to the Scholastic tradition of Aquinas’s Summa or Vitoria’s relectiones than they were to the anti-Lutheran German controversies, insofar as the antiheretical aspects of the Controversiae were organized around a systematic theological nucleus and the orality of the lectures was controlled and structured by a stable organizational principle, without the polemical contingencies that characterized the controversies of the pulpit. Bellarmine himself recorded some reflections on the interplay between the lectures and the printed work in the dedicatory epistle to the reader, written at the beginning of the first volume of the Controversiae. He explained that the occasion for his work was provided by the invitation he had received from the pope to teach controversies in Rome. After accepting the invitation, he decided to begin his work by choosing “that method of disputation by which I could embrace all controversies: sometimes I re-distributed the parts

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of some controversies, sometimes I joined some controversies with others, so that one was linked to the other and, in turn, depended on and originated from another, and out of all of them one whole and perfect and complete body of doctrine would come into existence.”35 This movement that Bellarmine imparted to his classes, the harmonic and organic operation of tying and sewing one part to the other until he reached a seamless and perfect entity, made the lectures perfectly suited for print: indeed, some of the people who read the notes that the students were taking “threatened to send them to print without our consent.”36 And since, as Bellarmine wrote in the same work, the invention of the printing press had changed the modes of talking about religion and especially the dynamics of the fight against heretics, enabling the heretics to spread their works faster and more efficiently, he decided to take advantage of the opportunity as well.37 The centrality of the theological nucleus as a unifying principle for his Controversiae is reiterated explicitly by Bellarmine in the printed version of the 1576 prolusion, where the Jesuit declared that the most important contribution of the work was that it “comprehends the best and most necessary part of the entire Theology. We do not deal with . . . metaphysical subtleties, which can be ignored without danger and even sometimes opposed with praise, but with God, Christ, the Church, the sacraments . . . and many other, most serious and difficult, questions, which pertain to the very foundations of the faith.”38 If one wants to dispute against the heretics, he must be “well versed” in all those questions, otherwise he would incur the risk of becoming a “mere” controversialist who “understands almost nothing” of Catholicism. Indeed, Bellarmine dedicated his printed Controversiae to Sixtus because the pope was “appointed by God himself through his extraordinary providence as both the supreme theologian and the one judge of all controversies,”39 which is another way of saying that the polemical element, disjoined from the understanding of the core doctrine of Catholicism, is not enough to guarantee an efficacious defense of the true Church. Thus Bellarmine himself recognized that the theological nucleus around which the controversies were organized, that “whole and perfect and complete body of doctrine” into which he made the controversies converge, rendered them a unique work in the context of antiheretical polemics, which were, in his own days, different from those in the past. How so? In the printed version of the 1576 prolusion Bellarmine sketched a history of the phenomenon of heresy in which his own work was properly situated. First of all, Bellarmine wrote, heresies had always existed in the history of the Christian Church, and some general lines of development could be traced along the sequence of the articles of the creed. In the first centuries of the Christian

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era the targets of the heretics were the first few articles of the creed, concerning Christ, and especially those concerning his divine nature. After orthodoxy won that battle, around the ninth century, heretics started to focus on subsequent articles, questioning the nature of the Holy Spirit and its relationship to the other persons of the trinity. Finally, in Bellarmine’s own time, heretics changed their aim once more to focus on the articles concerning the Church and the remission of sin. On the one hand, then, from a theo-historical point of view, the phenomenon of heresy had always characterized the history of the Christian Church: the focus of the heretics changed, but the danger of heresies remained, as each heresy, Bellarmine argued, presented two features that made it the worst kind of threat to the faith. Using a very common trope in the Catholic discourse on heresy, Bellarmine compared heresy to the plague, which acted “with the utmost rapidity” in spreading its poison through the heart of men. Second, every heresy was contagious: “As it kills one man, it infects another hundred. . . . and it spreads so quickly that if today it invades one household, in a short time it fills the whole city with corpses.”40 On the other hand, however, the modern-day heresies were, for Bellarmine, more dangerous than previous ones not because of theological reasons but because in his own day heresy had penetrated so deeply into the social and political body of the Christian Church. The early Church had understood how important it was to separate the wheat from the chaff, and the bishops and theologians of the early Church had successfully convinced the orthodox Christian people to cut off completely any contact with the heretics. For example, during the time of the Arian heresy, Theodoretus reported that the orthodox population of Samosata avoided the Arian bishop of their city at all costs: nobody went to his homilies, and when he went to the spa, nobody went in while he was there, and everybody waited until the spa was thoroughly washed and purified from the physical traces of the heretic before getting in again. The zeal of the primitive Church, Bellarmine wrote, was such that “if Germany, Bohemia, England, France, and the other populations had wanted to imitate it, we would have an entirely different commonwealth . . . certainly many members of the Church, of whose salvation we are already almost despairing, would remain healthy and incorrupt.”41 But the Christian people in Bellarmine’s time were not as zealous as those of the primitive Church; complete separation from the heretics was not enforced, and that is why the battle with the heretics of his own time was different and more difficult than the previous battles. Bellarmine reiterated the same point regarding the novelty of modern-day heresies in the dedicatory epistle to Pope Sixtus V, also included in the first volume of the printed Controversiae, in which the Jesuit remarked that “our predecessors, even

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among all the persecutions, held their ground vigorously against the gates of hell.” Those predecessors were the bishops but also the secular authorities that helped by exterminating heresies “with edicts, laws, and punishments.” In Bellarmine’s time, however, it was the pope who “seemed to have been chosen as the supreme general of the spiritual army,” possessing a strength and constancy “worthy of a supreme Prince.”42 At one level, then, the historical context in which the heresies of Bellarmine’s time took place had given the pope a preeminent role in the fight against heretics: because of the new historical synergy between the heretics and the social and political world into which they crept, the pope was left as the only one able to stand against the heresies. But looking at the same question from the other side, the pope, precisely because of his newly defined historical role in fighting against heretics for the sake of the whole Catholic Christendom, became one of the main specific targets of the heretics themselves, and Bellarmine declared that in his work “no disputation must be more diligently and copiously treated, no disputation is greater and better structured than that which asserts and defends the institution and authority of the supreme Pontificate.”43 This is the key point of the controversies, which were intended as a new chapter in a long tradition of heresies and heretics, centered around the authority and institution of the papacy as both a political and a theological authority. As Bellarmine realized that the defense of the papacy needed to be the theological and historical cornerstone of his work, he changed slightly the structure of the printed controversies with respect to his lectures. In the manuscript notes of the lectures, Bellarmine declared that the order of the controversies dedicated to the Church would start with a discussion “on the militant church, what this is, where this is, and whether it could err or be sometimes invisible; then, whether there is a governor, and who this might be, and whether he could err; thirdly, on the councils of bishops.”44 In the printed work the order changed: in the controversies over the Church the first point to be addressed was “Christ himself, who is the head and prince of the universal Church, then the part of the Church which works on earth, and the head of that visible Church, the supreme Pontiff, and all its members, that is, clergymen, monks and laymen.”45 Bellarmine’s Controversiae, then, were supposed to be an all-encompassing and final answer to the historical development of heresies, which, after having challenged the first points of the creed and after having been defeated, had now moved to attack the theological structure of the Church, and with that its head, the pope. The pope, in turn, because of the lack of help on the part of the secular authority, was the “supreme general” left in charge of the entire fight

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against heretics. Thus, while in the lectures the question of the supreme authority of the Church was posed in terms of a theological disputation to solve (“whether there is a governor, who this might be, whether he might err”), in the printed work Bellarmine changed the format from the question on authority to an affirmation of the prerogatives of the absolute prince of the universal Church, Christ, from whom the head of the visible Church on earth, that is, the pope, received his authority. Aside from the shift engineered by Bellarmine from the question of whether there was an authority in charge of the visible Church to the examination of the relationship between that authority and Christ’s, the other noteworthy element here is Bellarmine’s hint as to the nature of that relationship. Christ is defined as “prince and head of the Universal Church”; the pope is defined as just the “head” of the visible Church. We might remember that Bellarmine had called the constancy of Sixtus V worthy of a supreme prince in the dedicatory epistle to the pope, thus avoiding the need to address him directly as “prince,” and that later on in the same document he addressed him as “summus Sacerdos,” supreme Priest.46 Bellarmine’s reluctance in defining Sixtus V as “prince” is very significant of the doctrine of potestas indirecta and its implications for the question of the authority of the pope in temporal affairs, but in this context I would like to highlight how Bellarmine’s view of the pope and his authority not only over the Catholic Church but also over the entire Christian world is the fundamental part of the core doctrinal center that the Jesuit intended as a unifying principle of his controversies. It is now time to turn to Bellarmine’s theory on the authority of the pope in relation to Bellarmine’s theoretical framework.

The Power of the Pope: The Ecclesiological Theme The controversy De summo Pontifice was third in the order of the printed Controversiae, appearing after the one on Christ and the one on the word of God, but it was also the controversy that, by his own admission, Bellarmine considered to be the cornerstone of the entire work. In the preface to the controversy Bellarmine explained that when dealing with the pontiff’s primacy, one deals with the “core of Christianity” (summa rei Christianae).47 That is why the heretics of the past and of the present times, while being divided among themselves on many doctrinal points, are all unified in attacking “the see of the Roman Pontiff,” and, consequently, no heretic had ever existed who did not attack the primacy of that see. I see three main lines that Bellarmine develops in his defense of the papal institution, which I would define, for simplicity’s sake, as the ecclesiological,

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the historical-theological, and the political themes. The first refers to the complex set of arguments used by the heretics to challenge the primacy of the popes within the Christian Church. The story, wrote Bellarmine in the preface to the controversy De summo Pontifice, has two parts, one in the East and one in the West. As far as Eastern Christianity was concerned, attempts to challenge the pope’s authority started in the fourth century, when the Eastern Christians “wanted to put the Bishop of Constantinople, who before then was not even a Patriarch, above the three Eastern Patriarchs, and to appoint him as the second after the Roman Pontiff.”48 From this they moved on, first, to equate the pope with the patriarch of Constantinople, and then, with the Great Schism of 1054, to declare that the pope had “fallen from his dignity” and that the patriarch of Constantinople remained “the supreme and first of all bishops.”49 In the West the story is somewhat shorter: it began with the heresy of the Waldenses in 1170, continued with the fourteenth-century stances of Marsilius of Padua and his followers and then with Wycliff and Hus, and ended with Martin Luther and his followers, all of whom “tried to destroy the Roman Pontificate with all their strengths and hatred.”50 The Protestants’ doctrine in this matter, Bellarmine writes, can easily be summarized: they thought that “the Bishop of Rome used to be the Pastor and Preacher of the Roman Church, but one among, not above, the others. Now, however, he is nothing but the Antichrist.”51 The first part of the controversy De summo Pontifice, then, is dedicated to confute this specific claim made by the heretics and to construct the true Catholic doctrine on the subject. As the starting point of the discussion Bellarmine proposes to deal with the question of the form of government that is best suited to the Christian Church, and, since nobody can doubt that “our Savior Jesus Christ governs his Church with that rationale and method which is the best and most useful of all,” it remains to be seen what the best and most useful form of government is.52 The topic has a long history with a twofold ramification. On the one hand, there is the discussion over the best form of government in general started by the “princes of philosophers,” as Bellarmine puts it, Plato and Aristotle. On the other hand, there is the debate over the best form of government in the Church, especially evident in the clash between papalists and conciliarists—in this respect, the arguments used by Marsilius of Padua to deny the pope any “monarchical” power over his Church represented the fullest formulation of the antipapalist tradition up through Bellarmine’s time. Bellarmine’s proposed solution is a refinement of Vitoria’s interpretation of Aquinas’s doctrine. As Vitoria put it, Aquinas’s doctrine was “inconsistent,” for in certain passages of his works Aquinas seemed to assert that monarchy is the best form of government, while in others he indicated that the mixed form was a better solution. Vitoria solved this inconsistency by distinguishing

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between issues considered “simply and per se” and those “with regard to circumstances and persons.”53 Thus for Vitoria monarchy is, in principle, the best form of government, but, for instance, where the lack of a suitable monarch or other contingencies of this sort prevent monarchy from being implemented successfully, a mixed form of government should be implemented instead. Bellarmine gives to Vitoria’s theory/praxis distinction an interesting twist. It seems certain, the Jesuit declares, that if one looks at the issue in a purely theoretical manner, there is no doubt that the “Monarchia simplex” is “absolute et simpliciter” the best form of government, and even Calvin, says Bellarmine, must have agreed with this, for in the first edition of his Institutio he, too, admitted that monarchy was the best form of government in the abstract, while “hominum vitium vel defectus” makes a mixed constitution the most useful form, even though he changed his mind starting with the 1554 edition of his work.54 However, regarding the secular commonwealths, the best form of government is a mixed one, not because of “circumstances and persons” but because of the “corruption of human nature.”55 And by “corruption of human nature” Bellarmine did not mean simply to refer to some version of political Augustinianism but to a properly political argument. Bellarmine observed that in his own day there were many examples of absolute princes who needed deputies to administer a city or a province, and that those deputies acted as “true princes” and not simply as deputies, because, while they had to obey the sovereign, they nevertheless for the sake of efficiency administered jurisdiction over their city or province “as if it were their own.” Therefore, the resulting commonwealth was a mixture of monarchy and aristocracy.56 To this consideration, Bellarmine continues, one should add that a prince receives his appointment formally “ex universo populo,” hence introducing the democratic element.57 Where does the Church stand? Here Bellarmine introduces another distinction, that between the militant and the triumphant Church. As for the latter, there cannot be any doubt but that the Church of Christ is an absolute monarchy with Christ as its head: indeed, precisely the fact that Christ is the absolute monarch of the Church is the most compelling argument to demonstrate that absolute monarchy is theoretically the best form of government.58 The militant Church, however, is certainly the earthly expression of Jesus Christ’s absolute monarchy, but since it is composed of men, is also necessarily subject to that “corruption of human nature” that makes it necessary for human commonwealths to adopt a mixed form of government. The result, therefore, is that the Church is a monarchy “tempered” with some aristocratic and democratic elements. All Catholic teachers, Bellarmine says, concur with this opinion, and in particular he mentions Aquinas, Juan de Torquemada, and Nicholas Sander.59

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The choice of authors made by Bellarmine here is particularly interesting. Aquinas and Torquemada clearly point to the neo-Thomistic roots of Bellarmine’s political theory: Torquemada, a Dominican theologian active in the first half of the fifteenth century, was one of the main theorists of a sort of “moderate papalism” against conciliarist theories in the aftermath of the Council of Constance, and he was highly influential for Francisco de Vitoria and his pupils when they elaborated their own version of the pope’s indirect power.60 Nicholas Sander, by contrast, is an entirely different author. Not only had Sander, in his treatise De visibili monarchia, which was quoted by Bellarmine in this passage, argued more forcefully than had the Jesuit theorist for the monarchical character of the government of the Church and largely downplayed the role of the aristocratic and democratic elements that, for Bellarmine, “tempered” the monarchic aspect,61 but he had also pitted his own version of the Church’s “visible monarchy” directly against the monarchy of Elizabeth I. Indeed, Sander’s other works were less concerned with political theory or ecclesiological-theological disputations than with the kind of antiheretical polemics that Bellarmine would have termed “mere controversies” and that were focused on and aimed at the peculiar religiopolitical situation of England, where the queen of the realm was also supreme governor of the Church. Nicholas Sander also seemed more at ease in the trenches than in the university halls, as he died, in obscure circumstances, in Ireland, while taking part in a planned military invasion of England.62 By including Sander’s name together with Aquinas and Torquemada, Bellarmine was trying to accomplish a twofold aim. First, he wanted to include in his own works those “mere controversies” that his own Controversiae were meant to perfect and engulf as part of a larger theo-political project. Second, by mentioning Nicholas Sander, he wanted to point to the political implications of his own ecclesiological arguments not just in a general theoretical framework but in the specific historical circumstances that made the fight against heretics of his own time peculiarly dangerous, as he had written in the preface of the Controversiae. The English Reformation, which had put the temporal sovereign in charge of the Church, was a perfect example of that synergy between heresy and political authority that, according to Bellarmine, was absent in ancient times and that characterized the historical context in which Bellarmine’s work was to be put. Bellarmine, however, in this text did not dwell on the theoretical implications of the English Reformation,63 but used Sander to highlight the unique features of his own ecclesiological elaboration in response to this kind of political and theological challenges. Sander’s work was aimed at contrasting the “quasi-spiritual” English monarchy with the visible political monarchy of the pope and at demonstrating the political and theological superiority of the latter over the former; for Bellarmine, the first and foremost necessity in setting

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up his own theory was to underline the fundamental and substantial difference between the monarchy of the pope and that of the temporal sovereigns, a difference that made the pope’s authority superior to the sovereigns’. To put it differently, for Bellarmine the pope’s authority was of another kind with respect to the authority of any other temporal institution. Precisely the tension between the incommensurability of the two kinds of authorities and the superiority of one over the other in certain specific contexts is the key to understand the core of Bellarmine’s theory. Bellarmine seemed especially concerned with stating many times using different arguments that the government of the Church, albeit chiefly monarchical, is absolutely not like a temporal monarchy. Indeed, those who think that the monarchy of the Church is similar to that of the temporal sovereigns can incur the same error that Henry VIII, king of England, incurred, who “appointed himself head of the Church of England and in the same way he thought that the other princes should be supreme heads of the Church in their own territories.”64 This is a mistake, Bellarmine explains, because “the regime of the Church is supernatural,” meaning that it has a different origin and also a different aim with respect to the secular government, which “rules men insofar they are men,” while the pope “rules men insofar as they are Christians.”65 That does not mean that the monarchy of the Church cancels out temporal monarchies, for “kings are kings even in the Church, and to those kings Christian men must be subject as to their superiors. This is indeed true, but only in what pertains to the political condition, as the Christian kings rule Christian people not as Christians, but as political men.”66 Thus, while the monarchy of the pope leaves a precise space of autonomy to the political government because the two are not of the same kind, at the same time it can, precisely by virtue of its special status outside of the “political condition,” claim a different and larger role with respect to the political government. In this respect, Bellarmine explains, there is another objection to the doctrine that the government of the Church is monarchical, that stems from the same fundamental mistake of equating the pope’s monarchy with the temporal king’s monarchy. If the Church is indeed monarchical, why is the political commonwealth not also ordered as one great monarchy or, better still, as an empire, modeled upon the “imperial” Church of the pope? To this objection Bellarmine replies that “it is not necessarily required for the preservation of the political realms that all provinces maintain the same civil laws and rituals, as they can make use of different laws and institutions according to the variety of places and people, and therefore it is not required that there is one person who maintains them all in unity. But it is necessary for the preservation of the Church that all convene in the same faith, the same sacraments and the same precepts

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drawn from heaven, which cannot happen unless they form one people and they are maintained in unity by one person.”67 It would be desirable indeed, Bellarmine continues, that the political realms also were unified under one true supreme monarch, but this could not happen without many and bloody wars.68 This means that if one takes historical circumstances into consideration, one will realize that, while the times of political empire are gone, the only empire left is that of the Church, which is, Bellarmine writes, “one kingdom, one city, one household.” This empire, however, is a supernatural one, an empire of the consciences, outside of and beyond the boundaries of the political condition and within which the temporal kings and queens are still the supreme authorities. Once Bellarmine established this fundamental difference between the government of the Church and the government of the temporal commonwealth, which grants an autonomous space to both Church and state while at the same time opening up the way for a discussion on the superiority of the former over the latter, the Jesuit theorist went on to establish another important difference, this time between the government of the Church on earth and that of the Church in heaven. Against a set of objections voiced by Calvin in his Institutio, Bellarmine firms up the relationship between the pope and his vicar in order to show that while a monarch is needed to rule the visible Church, such monarch does not diminish, but indeed increases, the glory of Christ.69 The relationship between the pope and Christ, Bellarmine says, is similar to that between a king who cannot be present in his own kingdom and the “Prorex,” the vicar left by that king in charge of the kingdom in the absence of the ruler. In this respect, Bellarmine explains, one should not think of the Church as the “current spouse” of Christ, because while the Church dwells on earth, it needs to be considered as a self-contained organism that lives in history, and, as such, it needs a “head” to rule its limbs as it waits to be reconciled with the head and spouse in a time beyond history.70 Bellarmine’s insistence on the issue of temporality as a fundamental element to take into account when discussing matters of ecclesiology has important repercussions for the definition of the plenitudo potestatis accorded to the pope by the Catholic Church. Against Calvin’s objection that the plenitude of power in the Church should be granted to Christ only, Bellarmine replies by distinguishing the “a-historical” plenitude of power of Christ and the historical plenitude of power of the pope. Because Christ rules the Church, which is “in heaven, in purgatory, on earth and which existed from the beginning of the universe and will exist until the end,” his plenitude of power is truly such, as Christ can “at his own will” change and create new sacraments and bestow grace upon whomever he pleases. The pope, on the other hand, rules only the Church on

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earth “while he lives,” and that is why his plenitude of power is limited. Compared with the bishops, Bellarmine specifies, the pope has indeed an infinite power because the bishops’ authority is “finite,” confined and delimited by the boundaries of their own dioceses, while the pope’s extends through the entire Christian world.71 In other words, the theme of the Church as a spiritual empire living and developing in history comes back again as the conceptualization of the jurisdiction of the pope’s authority with respect to the temporal sovereign as well as the theological foundation of the relationship between Christ and his vicar. In this respect, the Church on earth as an empire of souls becomes, in Bellarmine’s theory, an autonomous entity with respect to both the triumphant Church and the temporal state, while at the same time maintaining an important link to both, for souls are citizens both of the temporal government, as long as they are housed in the body, and of the Church in heaven once they separate themselves from the body.

The Power of the Pope: The Historical-Theological Theme Once Bellarmine set down the ecclesiological reference points of the Church on earth as a special kind of imperial monarchy tempered with some aristocracy and democracy, whose limitations with respect to the Church in heaven are due to its being a creature of history living in history, and whose area of jurisdiction with respect to the temporal authority is the geographically unlimited territories of the souls of Christian men and women, the Jesuit theorist went on to establish the theological foundations of the papacy as the center of this empire. In other words, once Bellarmine established that the Church is indeed an imperial monarchy, he had to establish that the pope was indeed its head, and not, as Luther and some of his followers said, the Antichrist. In order to do that, Bellarmine’s controversy De summo Pontifice continues by firming up the theological basis of the primacy of Peter and of the historical and theological question of the uninterrupted succession of supreme pastors from Peter to Bellarmine’s own time against those who either questioned that Peter was the first among the other apostles, or that the pontiffs after Peter were his rightful and legitimate successors. One line of argument is easily and immediately dismissed by Bellarmine already in the preface to the Controversiae, that is, the polemics over specific examples of immoral behavior on the part of some of the men who occupied the chair of St. Peter, which could be used as proof of the theological illegitimacy of the institution of the papacy. Catholics should not, Bellarmine declares, deny those examples; rather, they should openly recognize that “the vices of the Popes were not few.”72 Indeed,

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for Bellarmine it is the existence of such examples of immorality on the part of some popes that demonstrates how the institution of the papacy, having survived despite the less-than-optimal behavior of its occupants, is truly not just the “lapis,” the rock on which the Church is built, but indeed the lapis angularis, the cornerstone that not only ensures unity within the institution but also contributes to keeping together the entire Christian commonwealth, as it did at the beginning of the Church, when it conjoined “Jews and Gentiles, as if they were two walls united in one and creating one Christian Church.”73 Bellarmine’s insistence on the need of separating the defense of the papacy from that of the individual popes was not simply a rhetorical and polemical tool but also a function of the intellectual effort that he was delivering in the Controversy De summo Pontifice, that is, a complex redefinition of the authority and jurisdiction of the papacy and not just a polemical defense of the popes against the Protestants. Also, the considerations that Bellarmine took into account on how to deal with the vices of the popes point to a larger issue in his theoretical production, that is, the relationship between theological and historical arguments. Bellarmine, in fact, showed the same zero-tolerance attitude with respect to covering up the vices of the popes on many occasions both before and during his tenure as a member of the Congregation of the Index. For example, in 1582 he was asked by the papal commission established to revise the Roman martyrology to check the chronology proposed by Onofrio Panvinio, a corrector of the Vatican Library who had prepared a series of annotations to Platina’s Vitae Pontificum, which Panvinio wanted to correct and continue (Panvinio, however, died in 1568, before he could finish the work and see it to print). Bellarmine’s notes on Panvinio’s chronology were highly critical: he charged the librarian with historical inaccuracies, poor or incomplete quotations of sources, and “false and temerarious opinions.”74 When Sixtus V ascended to the pontificate, he wanted to publish Panvinio’s biographies of the popes, and between 1588 and 1592 Bellarmine, then a member of the Congregation of the Index, delivered his censure on Panvinio’s and Platina’s works, in which he reiterated the same need to eliminate historical inaccuracies even if they served to paint a flattering picture of the popes. For example, replying to a criticism by Panvinio according to which Platina had written too much on the vices of the popes whose biography he was writing, Bellarmine replied that out of forty unflattering biographies, all but three or four should be corrected. As for the remaining popes, “it seems that they can be rightly reproached, as they are reproached by other historians in many points.”75 At stake here was the issue of historical accuracy, which Bellarmine considered not simply as a means to the theological end of defending the papacy but also as a sort of factual background on which his theo-political elaboration

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needed to lean, and because of this, it was necessary that such a background was sketched as accurately as possible. Thus historical events should not be twisted but should be interpreted in a coherent theoretical framework. If that theoretical framework is correct, then the historical data will fit perfectly, as happens in the case of the historically true vices of some popes, which become a historically sound proof of, not an argument against, the dogmatic thesis of the papacy as the center of Christianity. In his activity as censor Bellarmine read and commented on a number of historical works, and his insistence on accuracy comes back time and again not only with regard to Catholic historians such as Platina and Panvinio but also with regard to Protestant or Protestantleaning scholars. For instance, in his 1592 censure of the biographies of the popes written by Jean-Papire Masson, an ex-Jesuit humanist historian who had left the order amid a series of scandals and protests, Bellarmine bashed the work by insisting on its lack of coherence and accuracy. And while, as we saw, Bellarmine had no problem with historians who wrote on the vices of the popes if those vices were historically proved with substantial evidence, in the case of Masson, Bellarmine remarked that his calumnies of the popes were “sine ulla utilitate.” This is not because it is more “useful” to defend the popes against the truth but precisely because Masson did not write with the historical accuracy that is needed in treating such issues. Indeed, for Bellarmine, Masson “does not deserve the name of historian since he described the lives of the Pope neither exhaustively nor orderly.”76 By the same token, Bodin’s Methodus, which Bellarmine censored in 1587, “written with erudition and elegance seems to be rather useful” even if its author was “either a heretic or an atheist” because he praised both heretics and Catholics. Bellarmine’s censure continued by singling out the passages in which Bodin praised or referred to Protestant authors and suggesting that those passages should be eliminated.77 The key word in interpreting Bellarmine’s judgments on these works of history is “utility”: for Bellarmine history does not have an autonomous raison d’être as a discipline, for it must be “useful,” and it is indeed necessary, for a theology that investigates the Church on earth, which is a historical creature. That, however, does not mean that for Bellarmine history is simply an apologetic tool, or, if it is, the instrumentality of history in Bellarmine’s thought does not sacrifice the search for accuracy in historical works.78 Indeed, I think that posing Bellarmine’s historical arguments in terms of a dichotomy between facts and dogma with the latter prevailing over the former is doubly incorrect. First, as Arnaldo Momigliano has shown, the very nature of ecclesiastical history requires the impossibility of separating facts and dogma: as Momigliano put it, because “in the Church conformity with the origins is evidence of truth . . . the controversy [which the historian of the Church deals with] is never one

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of pure dogma or of pure fact—the two are interrelated.” And it is precisely this higher stake that demands that the ecclesiastical historian who “is challenged on facts . . . must produce evidence.” Therefore, historical accuracy, for historians of the Church, is not in opposition to but is rather vigorously reinforced by dogmatic concerns.79 Second, in order to understand Bellarmine’s use of historical arguments in his theological works, one should have in mind the specific context of the debate over the nature and aim of history as it developed in the second half of the sixteenth century. As Julian Franklin and Donald Kelley have shown, during the sixteenth century French humanist scholars of jurisprudence originated what Franklin has called a “revolution” in the method of understanding laws, which itself brought about another revolution in the way the past should be read and studied. To summarize Franklin’s and Kelley’s seminal arguments, for people like François Baudouin and Jean Bodin, interpreting laws required knowing how to put them into historical context, which in turn required the jurist to be able to read and understand works of history. This insistence on the utility, and not just the entertainment value, of history originated a shift from the mos italicus of the laus historiae genre to the mos gallicus of the methodus historias legendi genre, which was expressed in the form of a series of methodological discussions on how to consider and weigh historical works, that is, how to evaluate their reliability so as to recognize and eliminate historical frauds.80 This French humanist and juridical tradition of historical methodology also influenced the way ecclesiastical history was being thought of, and “made.” As Gregory Lyon has shown, the conceptualization and publication of the Magdeburg Centuries owed much to the collaboration between Matthias Flacius Illyricus, one of the leading Protestant historians of the sixteenth century, and François Baudouin, even though the two historians disagreed on fundamental methodological and ideological issues. While Flacius accepted and implemented Baudouin’s suggestions regarding the best ways to detect truth and fraud in historical sources, the Protestant theologian and the French humanist remained in very different ideological and hermeneutic positions regarding the meaning of history. For Baudouin the meaning of history was that of providing models for the present, while for Flacius history was the terrain on which the principle of doctrinal unity unfolded. This methodological difference, in turn, corresponded to the theological distance between the irenic perspective of Baudouin and the Protestant militant attitude of Flacius.81 In this respect, I think that Bellarmine represents another example of synergy between the new French methodology and the post-Reformation theological concerns. Bellarmine seriously considered the issue of evaluating historical sources, and not only in the censures he wrote to the historical works mentioned

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earlier. In the long section of his De summo Pontifice dedicated to establishing that Peter was bishop of Rome and died in Rome, he answered the objections presented in a text that appeared under the name of Ulrich Velenus and translated by Flacius Illyricus82 by orchestrating a complex and philologically accurate discussion of the sources, noting internal contradictions and cross-references between authors, matching the testimonies of the fathers of the Church and of the gospel with the testimonies of historians such as Josephus and Paulus Orosius, and also by making some “quasi-skeptical” considerations on the difficulties of dealing with facts that happened either in the distant past or in the closer past but without witnesses. Such facts can be difficult to date precisely but are easy to believe as true, “especially when aside from the testimonies of writers we also have monumental evidence of them.”83 In this perspective, Bellarmine’s judgment of Bodin’s Methodus as rather “useful” despite its author’s unorthodox beliefs acquires a distinctive significance. Of course Bellarmine was more similar to Flacius than to Baudouin in his view of history as the unfolding of the true Church and doctrine: for Bellarmine, theology and history were part of the same story. For instance, during his discussion of Peter’s stay in Rome, Bellarmine came across an issue relating the immediate successors of Peter and in particular some discrepancies over the dates of the papacy of Pope Anacletus. For Bellarmine, the reason for the confusion is that there were two popes with very similar names, one called “Anacletus” and the other “Cletus,” both active shortly after Peter’s death, and two are the proofs he adduced to prove his theory. The first is “the authority of the Catholic Church, as it celebrates two festival days in their memory, that is in April for Cletus and in July for Anacletus.” The second proof comes from the juxtaposition of different sources: some say that Anacletus came before Clement; some say the opposite. And since they are all reliable sources and it was a common mistake of the ancient historians to merge two people with a somewhat similar name into one (“often among the Greeks Novatus is confused with Novatian”), the most likely explanation is that there were indeed two popes with the same or a very similar names, one of whom came before Clement, and the other after.84 Aside from this specific example of Bellarmine’s juxtaposition of dogmas and facts, the whole question of the papal supremacy, the Jesuit argues, must necessarily contain both history and theology, for, as he wrote, there is a difference to be made between the ratio successionis and the successio: the latter is a theological problem, while the former is a historical one. As Bellarmine wrote, “The succession of the Roman Pontiff to Peter’s Pontificate stems from Christ’s institution, but the method [ratio] of the succession, that is, that the Pontiff of Rome, rather than that of Antiochia or any other, is Peter’s successor, began

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from Peter’s deed [factum].”85 Peter, in fact, did not have to pick Rome as his final and definitive residence; he could have picked another city to reside in, or no city at all, but because it is a factum, historically proved, that Peter did indeed choose Rome, then it is the bishop of Rome who should legitimately be considered Peter’s successor and head of the visible Church. The knot between history and theology is so tight as to originate a sort of hermeneutic virtuous circle and to avoid the risk of the vicious circle that using theology alone can lead to. For instance, as a further proof that the Roman pope is Peter’s successor, Bellarmine adduces the theological status of the pope as the supreme judge of theological controversies, whom nobody can judge. This argument, Bellarmine acknowledges, is an a priori statement that assumes what his work is trying to prove, since, in other words, the proof for the pope’s primacy is in fact that he is the supreme judge, and he is the supreme judge because he has the primacy over the Church. In order to avoid the vicious circle, Bellarmine writes, we must turn to the historical testimonies of the popes, emperors, and councils, which cannot but demonstrate the condition of the pope as the supreme judge and hence prove the initial thesis, that is, that the pope is the supreme head of the Church.86 The examples of this kind of circle between history and theology can be multiplied here, but the point I would like to underscore is that Bellarmine’s framing of the issue of the theological supremacy of the pope in this theohistorical way is functional to the specific argument he wants to make regarding the status of the pope as the supreme judge of the consciences, a central element not only for the definition of the Catholic theology but also for the definition of the jurisdiction of the Catholic empire of the souls, which is, as we have seen, a historical creature. When dealing with the authority of the pope in deciding theological controversies, Bellarmine writes at the beginning of his discussion that there are two main opinions among the Catholic theologians. The first, from the ultrapapalist camp, is the opinion according to which the pontiff “cannot in any way be a heretic or teach publicly a heresy, even if he decides some controversy by himself,” that is, without speaking ex cathedra and without the ratification of the general council. This opinion, according to Bellarmine, is not “certa,” but only “probabilis,” and that is why he wants to defend the other opinion, which is “certissima,” that is, that “the Pontiff, whether or not he can be a heretic, nevertheless cannot in any way establish anything heretical that should be believed by the whole Church.”87 In choosing to defend this opinion, Bellarmine switches his theoretical attention from the personal theological infallibility of the popes to the infallibility of their jurisdiction over theological matters. This juridical attention in the question of the pope as the only judge of the Christians’ consciences is further highlighted by the

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fact that as scriptural proofs Bellarmine uses many of the same biblical passages he used in the earlier section of his controversy, the one dedicated to the ecclesiological primacy of Peter.88 As for the discussion on the possibility of the individual pope’s personal falling into heresy, this should be put in terms of probability rather than certainty–indeed, by the same token, the opposite opinion, according to which the pope can be a heretic or teach a heretical opinion when he speaks by himself without the council, is not “proprie haeretica” but rather “omnino erronea et haeresi proxima.”89 Because, then, the question of the pope’s own heretical beliefs is to be put in the realm of probability, history is a necessary aid to prove the Catholic opinion because it shows that popes never actually fell into heresy from Peter onward. The faith in the providence of God helps us to interpret correctly the historical factum and turn it into a theological assertion: because no pope ever fell into heresy, then it is theologically probable that no pope can ever fall into heresy.90 Once Bellarmine establishes that the primacy of the pope within the Church both requires and proves that the pope’s judgment in theological controversies is infallible and that it is highly improbable that the pope himself can ever hold or teach heretical doctrines, the Jesuit theorist gets to the key point of this discussion for setting up his understanding of the papal empire of the souls, that is, the consequences of that theological supremacy of the pope for the question of the jurisdiction over the Christian commonwealth, or, in other words, the affirmation that the laws made by the pope in theological matters are binding in conscience for the entire Christian commonwealth. Bellarmine specifies immediately that the discussion does not involve the pope’s authority insofar as he is the head of a temporal state and therefore insofar as he can make laws that are binding for his subjects just as the other temporal sovereigns can. In this respect, Bellarmine says, the discussion is really around the issue of whether or not the pope can indeed be also a temporal sovereign, because if we establish that he can, then making and enforcing laws is part and parcel of that temporal authority. Those temporal issues will be discussed in the last part of the work; for “now we deal only with the Pontiff as Pontiff of the entire Catholic Church, and we investigate whether he has true authority over all the faithful in spiritual matters, as the kings have in temporal matters.”91 The proofs that the popes indeed have such authority come mainly from scripture, especially Matthew 16:18–19, Luke 22:31–32, and Deuteronomy 17:8–9, and they all follow a rather well-established line of Catholic arguments in support of the papal primacy. Especially interesting in this context is the tight polemical dialogue that Bellarmine constructs with Calvin on the issue of conscience, which occupies an entire chapter of the De summo Pontifice. The forum of the conscience, according to Calvin, pertains only to God, and therefore no man, not even the pope, can inflict a punishment on the conscience, since no man can either see into

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consciences clearly enough to judge them or carry out the punishment of the eternal death. To this Bellarmine replies that there are two ways in which one could say that the internal forum pertains to God alone. If we say that only God can see into the consciences of men and can judge the internal acts of one’s soul even if those are not visible externally, then Calvin is right, and God alone is in charge of souls. However, the internal forum, says Bellarmine, does not need to be seen in order to be regulated; instead, one can legitimately rule men’s consciences by commanding them to perform an external act, and if the external act is not performed, then the ruler of souls can see clearly that an evil deed is being committed and can punish the deed accordingly.92 In other words, just as from an ecclesiological point of view the Church on earth is a sort of imperfect example of the Church in heaven, but a more than perfect example of a secular commonwealth, so from a theological point of view the pope regulates the external part of men’s and women’s consciences, whose jurisdiction is completely removed from the temporal sovereign—even from the temporal sovereignty of the pope insofar as he is the head of a temporal realm. The task of judging the internal part of the internal forum is reserved to God alone.93 This insistence on the internal forum of the conscience as the proper area of jurisdiction of the Church is one of the key features of post-Tridentine Catholicism, as we learned from a certain line of recent scholarship and especially from the works of Adriano Prosperi.94 In this sense, Bellarmine, one can say, constructed the theological and ecclesiological structure of the system of post-Tridentine Catholicism, and elements such as the reforms and internalization of the sacrament of the confession, the reinforcement of the episcopal function of territorial control, and the widening and tightening of the net over books and opinions are all to a certain extent embedded in and originate from Bellarmine’s view of papal authority and jurisdiction. Also, the originality of Bellarmine’s intuition is to have identified the forum of the conscience as not simply the area of spiritual influence of the pope but a proper juridical area over which the theo-political authority of the pope can and indeed must legislate. As he wrote in response to Calvin, it is one thing to see into consciences and another thing to rule over consciences: the pope does not claim the former, and he does not even need it in order to claim the latter.

The Power of the Pope: The Political Theme After establishing the realm of consciences as the theological jurisdiction over which the pope reigns as the supreme and infallible spiritual authority, Bellarmine dedicates the last part of his De summo Pontifice to a discussion of the

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political implications of this newly defined papal authority. Given that, as he argued throughout the controversy, the pope’s supremacy finds its historical and theological expression in spiritual matters that are aside from and beyond the political condition, it remains to be seen what the actual relationship between spiritual and political authority is. Already in the preface to the controversy De summo Pontifice Bellarmine anticipated the centrality of the political theme for his work when he listed, together with the pagan and Jewish opponent of the true Church and its true head, some “very powerful and Christian emperors” who “under the name of religion and piety often tried to attack and destroy that See thanks to which the scepters of the Roman Empire came to them.”95 Bellarmine’s mention of the antipapalist Christian emperors is significant for a number of reasons. In the dedicatory epistle to Sixtus V written at the beginning of the first volume of the Controversiae, Bellarmine, as we have seen, mentioned the early emperors and rulers as the allies of the popes in the struggle against heresy in the early history of the Christian Church and hinted that the new synergy between heretics and the sociopolitical forces of his own time was the reason modern heretics were more dangerous than ancient ones and the reason the pope remained the only “general” in the spiritual battle against heresy. Now that Bellarmine focuses more specifically on the political and theological institution of the papacy, he mentions the emperors and rulers who were open enemies of the pope so as to signal that the relationship between political and religious authority is itself a controversial part of his attempt to redefine the authority of the pope over the Christian Church and commonwealth. But in what terms should this relationship be posed? Bellarmine’s reference to the Christian emperors who received their authority and title from the popes seems at first sight a reiteration of the translatio imperii and the role of the popes in it, which was one of the loci classici used by medieval papalist theorists as a historical argument to support the superiority of the spiritual power over the temporal sovereign.96 On closer inspection, however, Bellarmine’s mention of the theme of the translatio imperii has a very different meaning. Bellarmine was very familiar with the issue of the translatio imperii before writing the controversy De summo Pontifice. In 1583 he had completed a treatise on the transfer of the empire, De Translatione Imperii Romani, against Matthias Flacius Illyricus, who in 1566 published a treatise entitled De translatione Imperii in which he denied the popes any authority in the appointment of Charlemagne. Bellarmine’s treatise, however, was not a standard “papalist” defense of the authority of the popes over the emperors, as the Jesuit theorist chose to emphasize the indirect character of the pope’s authority in temporal

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matters, with rather strong language. Replying to an objection by Flacius according to whom the popes were not entrusted by Christ with any temporal power, Bellarmine wrote: “And even if we admitted that the Roman Pontiff neither in fact has, nor can have, any political authority, nevertheless it would not mean that the empire could not have been transferred by the Roman Pontiff from the Greeks to the Germans . . . the Pope transferred the Western empire from the Greeks to the Franks not because he was the King of kings or a supreme temporal Monarch, like Augustus and Constantine were, but because he is the Pastor of the Universal Church.”97 Bellarmine’s choice of admitting the lack of direct temporal authority on the part of the popes in the context of a defense of the popes’ role in transferring the imperial authority from the Eastern Roman Empire to Charlemagne was not what the papacy and certain high-ranking members of the Roman Curia might have wanted to hear. In a letter to his fellow Jesuit and theologian Alfonso Salmerón written in the summer of 1584, Bellarmine wrote that he had completed the treatise against Illyricus the year before and had sent it to Rome. However, even if everybody praised his work, nevertheless Cardinal Sirleto, who was the prefect and the intellectual and political leader of the Congregation of the Index from 1572 until his death in 1585, had thought that “it was not expedient that this work be published in order not to seem that [Rome] wanted to put in question the authority that the Apostolic See has over the empire, since the said Apostolic See is now in possession of it, and so things came to nothing, as we commonly say.”98 Nobody dared to oppose Sirleto, Bellarmine continued, as “the Pope believes him more than all of us.” And since in 1584 he was preparing the Controversiae for publication, he had thought it better to slow down and not hurry the publication, so as to make sure to be able to polish and finesse them as much as possible.99 The finessing and polishing of the Controversiae, however, did not mean that Bellarmine had decided to drop the issue of the indirect power of the pope: indeed, in the fifth and last book of the controversy De summo Pontifice the language with which Bellarmine affirms the lack of direct temporal authority on the part of the pope is even stronger than in the treatise against Flacius. Three, Bellarmine writes, are the “sententiae” on the issue of the temporal authority of the pope: the first is the theocratic opinion of Agostino Trionfo and Alvaro Pelagio according to whom the pope has iure divino “the most ample authority over the whole world, both in ecclesiastical and in political matters.”100 The opposite opinion, “not so much an opinion as an heresy,”101 teaches that the popes do not have any temporal authority, and neither could nor can rule any temporal state or provinces. The third opinion, the middle way that Bellarmine defends as “Catholicorum Theologorum communis” is that “the Pope

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does not have directly and immediately any temporal authority but only a spiritual one; nevertheless, by reason of the spiritual authority, he has indirectly at least a certain supreme authority in temporal matters.”102 Following this initial affirmation, Bellarmine continues to state forcefully that the pope is not “dominus totius Mundi,” and he is not “dominus totius Orbis Christiani” and by divine law he has no direct jurisdiction in temporal matters whatsoever. Two key theoretical assumptions underpin Bellarmine’s defense of the indirect papal authority. The first is the granting of a distinctive and autonomous space to the temporal government with respect to the Christian Church. Since, as Bellarmine writes, “dominium is not founded in grace or faith, but in free will and reason, and it does not spring from the ius divinum, but from the ius gentium,” then the political government is always legitimate even if it is ruled by non-Christian governors. The pope, then, does not have any kind of authority over the non-Christians, and therefore we cannot say, Bellarmine concludes, that he is the head of the whole world. That does not mean that his empire does not extend throughout the whole world, for the jurisdiction of his spiritual empire covers all the Christians who are spread throughout the world.103 Thus, if the whole world converted to Christianity, this would not make the pope’s authority in temporal matters any greater, but it will increase the number of the souls subject to his spiritual authority. The doctrine according to which the legitimacy of the temporal authority is to be found in the law of nature rather than God’s grace, and therefore is in a certain sense disjoined from the Christian Church, is standard fare in neoThomist thought, and Bellarmine clearly and speedily acknowledges his debts to Vitoria by quoting the Dominican’s relectio on the power of the Church, especially question 5 in which it is stated that the pope is not “orbis Dominus.”104 As Quentin Skinner and other scholars have shown, the insistence of Vitoria and his pupils on the foundation of political government in the law of nature was functional to the need they saw of fighting the Protestants’ claim that the legitimacy of government resided in God’s grace. As a consequence of this statement, also pagan or heretical sovereigns for the neo-Thomist theorists were holders of a legitimate political authority, and hence the pope’s authority had to be reconfigured accordingly.105 But Bellarmine’s theory of the indirect power of the pope is not simply a reiteration of the neo-Thomist doctrine: in fact, this is one of those instances that prove that God (or the devil) is in the details. For even if Bellarmine’s theory of potestas indirecta was framed in neo-Thomist language, between the lines it downsized the political power of the pope in temporal affairs to a larger degree than any neo-Thomist theorists had done. It is useful to start by analyzing Bellarmine’s reflections on the most appropriate metaphor to describe the relationship between temporal and spiritual

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authority. Many people, Bellarmine writes, explain the distinctiveness and superiority of spiritual authority with respect to temporal authority by invoking the Aristotelian metaphor of the relationship between the art of riding horses and that of bridle making: “as those two arts are different, because they have distinct objects and subjects and actions, and nevertheless because the end of the latter is ordered to the end of the former, then one is superior to the other . . . so the ecclesiastical and political authority appear to be distinct authorities, and nevertheless one is subordinated to the other.” This metaphor, however, is not entirely appropriate, because the art of riding horses not only is superior to that of bridle making but also is its raison d’être, since “if there is no riding horses, then the art of making reins is superfluous.”106 For Bellarmine, by contrast, political authority exists in its full legitimacy even without the ecclesiastical authority, and hence the kind of subordination implied in the relationship between spiritual and political authority is substantially different from the case of the relationship between bridle making and horse riding. Significantly enough, a similar argument regarding the shortcomings of the Aristotelian metaphor had been used to argue for a different position, i.e., the theocratic opinion on the pope’s plenitude of power in both ecclesiastical and temporal matters. For instance, Giles of Rome, in a chapter dedicated to demonstrating that the terrena potestas is the “servant” (famulatur) of the spiritual authority, wrote that the metaphor of the subordination of one art to another, such as that of bridle making to warfare, is not an apt metaphor to describe the relationship between political and spiritual authority because the subordination in the latter case is more complete than in the previous one. When defining metaphorically the subordination of one thing to another, Giles wrote that there are three possible images that can be used: the subordinations between arts, that between natural elements, and that between “forms of knowledge,” or scientiae. The arts, such as bridle making with respect to warfare, are subordinated because one “prepares and disposes the material” for the other; regarding the natural elements, the forces of nature are subordinated to the forces of heaven because the latter are more general than the former—fire cannot generate fire, but the forces of heaven can generate fire and are therefore superior to the natural forces; metaphysics is superior to all other scientiae because it is the closest to the supreme good, that is, God. But the superiority of the spiritual authority with respect to the temporal contains all these three elements, and therefore political authority is indeed more completely subordinate to the spiritual one, or, in Giles’s words: “terrenam potestatem, tam secundum se quam secundum sua, potestati ecclesisticae debere esse subiectam.”107 For Bellarmine the best metaphor to describe the relationship between political and spiritual authority is really that of spirit and flesh as “they are

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almost two commonwealths that can be found both separate and joined.” They are separate, for example, in the brutes or in the angels, and joined in men, just as the political commonwealth is separate from the ecclesiastical one when it is ruled by pagans, but it is joined in the case of kingdoms ruled by Christian kings. And, as in men the spirit is more important than the flesh, so too in the Christian kingdom the ecclesiastical authority is more important than the temporal one, and therefore, precisely because it is spiritual, it can rule and command the temporal for the sake of the spiritual end.108 In this way the trite metaphor of sprit and flesh acquires a fresh aspect when we think of Bellarmine’s focus on souls as the juridical area of influence of the visible monarchy of the popes, the empire of the conscience, which is historical and “temporal,” as opposed to the eternal kingdom of Christ in heaven, and which is distinct from the secular commonwealth but it also encompasses it in this distinctively Bellarminian notion of respublica Christiana.109 Now, while Vitoria too stated that the pope’s authority in temporal matters comes from his spiritual authority, he felt the need to specify that the Church indeed retained “some” temporal power over the temporal sovereign, and that in ordine ad spiritualia the pope had the plenitudo potestatis over the temporal sovereigns.110 Suárez paid more attention than did Bellarmine to tempering the theory of the potestas indirecta according to the polemical implications that it might have. While in his Tractatus de legibus et Deo legislatore he followed Bellarmine closely in saying that “the opinion that the supreme Pontiff . . . does not have direct temporal authority in the whole world, but only in those realms and provinces of which he is the temporal sovereign, is true,” nevertheless in his Defensio fidei against James I, after confuting forcefully Marsilius of Padua’s heresy, which was the “foundation of the Anglican Schism,” the Jesuit theologian declared that “the Catholic truth is that in the Church it is given a spiritual authority of a true and proper jurisdiction, through which the Christian people can be governed appropriately in order to the salvation of the soul.”111 The same point is reiterated by Luis de Molina, who wrote that “the spiritual authority of the Supreme Pontiff for the supernatural end has added to itself almost as a consequence the supreme and most ample authority of the temporal jurisdiction over all princes.”112 Bellarmine was adamant in stating, as the title of one of his chapters attests, that “the Pope by divine law does not have any sheer temporal authority directly,”113 and he dedicated another entire chapter to demonstrating that even though certain Catholic authors such as Aquinas and Bonaventure seem to grant some temporal authority to the pope, in effect they refer only to the indirect temporal effects of the pope’s spiritual authority.114 Especially noteworthy in this context is Bellarmine’s downplaying of Bernard’s classic statement about

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the two swords. Even if, Bellarmine writes, Bernard affirms that the pope has both swords, nevertheless “in many passages of the same work he openly shows that the authority of the supreme Pontiff is properly spiritual, not temporal.”115 This, of course, does not mean that the pope cannot intervene in temporal matters, but it does mean that when he does, he does so only by virtue of his spiritual authority, without any “quasi-temporal” authority or any “true and proper jurisdiction,” as Vitoria, Suárez, and Molina wrote. This is certainly a subtle distinction, but the Roman Curia of Bellarmine’s time was very attentive to subtle distinctions, as Bellarmine discovered with the delay in the publication of his De translatione Imperii, and as he would soon realize even more forcefully with regard to the reception in Rome of his Controversiae. Also, it is significant that even at the beginning of the seventeenth century, although Bellarmine’s contributions to the debate over the oath of allegiance showed a somewhat stronger pro-papalist character, and although he and Suárez were read across Europe as adopting essentially the same position, they were treated very differently by the Roman Curia, with some of its members attacking, for example, Bellarmine’s treatise against Barclay, while leaving Suárez undisturbed.116 The same attention to distinctions and details must be applied when analyzing the second key theoretical point for Bellarmine’s defense of indirect papal authority, that is, the fact that the kingdom of Christ was not a temporal kingdom. Bellarmine stated clearly and repeatedly that Christ, while he was a man on earth, had no temporal kingdom. He was indeed a king, but of an “eternal and divine kingdom,” and as such he did not remove any authority from the temporal sovereigns of his time. That does not mean that he could have not received any kingly authority had he wanted to, but he did not want any because such authority was not necessary but rather “supervacanea et inutlis,” for Christ’s aim while he dwelled on earth was to achieve the redemption of mankind, and for this task spiritual authority was the only authority needed.117 The argument that Christ’s kingdom, because it was eternal, was also spiritual was fundamental to Bellarmine’s entire theoretical construction because it served as a means to tie the authority of the head of the Church on earth with that of the head of the Church in heaven along the ecclesiological lines that we have seen Bellarmine sketched already in the first part of the controversy.118 Precisely because the pope is the head of the Church on earth, it is both necessary and sufficient for him to claim the same power that Christ had while he lived as a man among men, which means that the temporal dimension of the sovereignty of the pope separates this sovereignty from the sovereignty that Christ has over the “a-temporal” Church in heaven, but at the same time establishes an important link between the pope and Christ insofar as the pope received directly from Christ the authority that he himself had as a man.

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Let us see, for instance, what Suárez does with the same argument. Like Bellarmine, he acknowledges that the kingdom of Christ is eternal and spiritual and, therefore, that the Church, which is the earthly expression of Christ’s spiritual kingdom, must be ruled by a spiritual authority. However, “this perpetual kingdom is not only in heaven, but also on earth, for as long as the world exists . . . therefore also the spiritual authority in charge of ruling it has been granted by Christ in such a way that it might last forever [in perpetuo], because a kingdom cannot be preserved without a governing authority [potestas gubernatrix] proportioned to it.”119 In other words, while Bellarmine used the historical dimension to distinguish the Church in heaven from the Church on earth, Suárez chose to insist on the point that the Church on earth also is engineered to last forever, with the result that the Church on earth and its head participate more intimately in that plenitudo potestatis that Christ enjoys in heaven. For both theorists, as for an entire Jesuit and Dominican school of theorists, the Church was a “perfect commonwealth,” and, as such, it needed to be endowed with the authority necessary to preserve itself. By the same token, the state also was a “perfect commonwealth,” and as such it was endowed with the authority and power necessary to achieve its goal, that is, temporal welfare. Moreover, for all these theorists, the authority needed by the Church to preserve itself was the supreme spiritual authority of the pope, which allowed him to intervene in temporal matters whenever the secular commonwealth obstructed the way to the pursuit of the spiritual, higher goal.120 The difference, then, between Suárez, Vitoria, Molina, and Bellarmine is in the nuances of this spiritual intervention, which for Bellarmine must remain spiritual, while for the others such intervention assumes a quasi-temporal character.121 Indeed, Bellarmine’s commitment to the absolutely spiritual nature of Christ’s kingdom and, consequently, of the pope’s authority, led him to argue in his controversy De Clericis that the exemption of the clergy from political authority in terms of property and people was granted not iure divino but iure humano, by the sovereigns and emperors to the popes. In 1599 Bellarmine was forced to change his opinion slightly on the exemption of the clergy and admitted that although there was no direct evidence in the New Testament of the fact that clergymen were exempted from the jurisdiction of the secular rulers by divine law, and although clerical exemption was not properly given iure naturali, there was enough evidence to state that clerical exemption was given iure gentium, which was “in a certain way natural law, and in a certain way positive law, and therefore it is a middle way between pure natural law and civil law.”122 Bellarmine’s change, which I will examine later in greater detail, was a response to a development that occurred during the 1580s and early 1590s

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within the Roman Curia, when the need for the papal state to consolidate and develop a bureaucratic and administrative apparatus controlled by the clergy provided an opportunity to post-Tridentine popes to refine and address a number of issues, including that of firming up the nature of clerical exemption. A bull issued by Gregory XIV in 1591, the Cum alias nonnulli, stated explicitly that “aside from specific exceptions the ecclesiastical immunity must be observed,” and a series of theologians including Francisco Peña and Francesco and Tommaso Bozio began to insist that the exemption of the clergy was iure divino. More specifically, they claimed that the exemption of the clergy was granted directly by Christ in his capacity as both temporal and spiritual supreme sovereign: because Christ was the temporal superior of the temporal sovereigns, the exemption of the clergy was not granted by human law and could not be revoked by human law.123 While Bellarmine was willing to change his position on clerical exemption so that it was posed in a less confrontational manner with respect to this latter position, he refrained from joining it completely, because stating that the exemption of the clergy was of divine law would undermine the key theoretical point of the spiritual nature of Christ’s kingdom, on which his potestas indirecta rested. For Bellarmine, as he put it in the first edition of De Clericis, “we are adopted children [of Jesus] with regard to the soul, not the body, and tributes are paid because of the body,” and since we are subjected to the supreme temporal authority of the princes insofar as our bodies are concerned, and Christ did not claim any authority over those princes, hence clergymen are exempted by the princes’ privileges, not by Christ’s authority.124 Once again, Suárez had none of Bellarmine’s scruples and declared that clerical exemption came from divine and natural law and was ratified by human positive law and by canon law; unlike Bellarmine, who felt the need to specify that by “divine law” he truly meant ius gentium, Suárez specified that “divine law” was to be understood as “immediate et cum omni proprietate.”125 Bellarmine’s insistence on the purely spiritual character of Christ’s kingdom and the pope’s authority singles him out with respect to other theorists such as Suárez and Molina, who, while defending the pope’s indirect power in temporal matters, nevertheless gave to the pope’s spiritual authority a properly temporal jurisdiction. Bellarmine, in fact, stressed more clearly than the others the substantial difference between the authority of the pope and that of the temporal sovereign because stressing the difference was necessary for him to argue for the substantial superiority of the former over the latter. At the same time, stressing that difference also allowed an autonomous conceptual and juridical space to the temporal sovereign: allowing such autonomy had become theoretically necessary because of the historical developments of the Protestant territorial churches and the strengthening of early modern states, as Vitoria

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and his followers were beginning to see clearly. In other words, the radical incommensurability of the political and spiritual authority required that both enjoy a certain autonomous space with respect to one another and, at the same time, made it possible for the spiritual authority to claim an absolute superiority over the temporal one.126 The centrality of the fundamental difference of the pope’s government with respect to the secular sovereigns’ returns forcefully when Bellarmine, at the very end of his controversy, deals rather briefly with the issue of the pope’s direct temporal government of his own territories, defending it from heretical claims, especially Calvin’s, according to which the pope’s possession of a temporal state is an indicator of the anti-Christian nature of his authority, which should be only spiritual. In response to this, Bellarmine argues that this aspect of the pope neither clashes with the other, more important, aspect of supreme spiritual leader nor is somehow connected to it as a necessary appendix. In other words, Bellarmine does not defend the temporal sovereignty of the pope over his territories as an integral part of the theological and ecclesiological definition of the Church and the pope;127 rather, he defends it as one of the historical developments that is made possible precisely because temporal and spiritual authority are in fact distinct. The most interesting reasons adduced by Bellarmine in defending the legitimacy of the pope’s sovereignty over Peter’s patrimony, aside from scriptural references to Moses and other religious leaders who were also political leaders, are two. First, because temporal and spiritual authority are both from God but are distinct from one another without being opposed to one another, the same person in certain specific circumstances can hold both. The second is the “malitia temporum”: it would have been preferable that, in keeping with the nature of their respective authority, the kings dealt only with the temporal realm and the pope only with the spiritual realm, but experience shows that because of the difficulties that arose in various historical circumstances, some territories were donated by the princes to the popes and to some bishops so that they might defend themselves better.128 In his study of the development of the papacy as a prototype of the early modern European state, Paolo Prodi has argued that those passages and especially the one on the “malitia temporum” are evidence of a growing sense on the part of the Catholic theologians of the historical legitimacy and indeed necessity of fusing spiritual and temporal power in the person of the pope. According to Prodi, however, Bellarmine was not fully aware of the implications of his own remarks or, better, did not use the historical argument as a way to reinforce the theoretical necessity of the two souls of the pope, but rather as a “reluctant” defense of the legitimacy of the pope’s temporal realm against the

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attacks of the heretics. According to Prodi, the reason Bellarmine did not explore the implications of his own remarks is that the Jesuit theorist “does not deal with . . . the interweaving between the two spheres [temporal and spiritual] in historical reality.”129 I think that the argument of the “malitia temporum” is indeed evidence that Bellarmine did not care much for that peculiar example of a modern state that the papacy was, but for a different reason than Prodi provides. In fact, Bellarmine thought that the most relevant characteristic of the papacy was precisely its existence as an empire of souls, and only insofar as the pope was the emperor of souls was he able to rule the other temporal sovereigns. In effect, Bellarmine had in mind perfectly clearly the issue of the modern state and the threat that it represented for the Church and for the supremacy of the spiritual authority over the Christian commonwealth, but he thought that the best and only way to respond to that threat was to emphasize one of the pope’s two souls, the one that made his authority both unique and supreme. The other soul, which was neither a necessary complement of the first nor an anti-Christian act of usurpation, but a theologically legitimate product of historical contingencies, would make the pope just like any other temporal sovereign.

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2 The Controversies over the Controversiae 1580s–1590s

By the second half of the 1580s, two of the three volumes of Bellarmine’s Controversiae were published and the third was on its way to being printed, but their author became the target of an increasingly sharp attack from several quarters: from fellow Jesuits, from memers of other orders, and from the pope himself. In general terms, what was at stake was the role of the pope both within the Church and outside of it. The definition of the role of the pope was one of the main concerns of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church, and Bellarmine’s new system represented one of the more complex attempts to redefine it in a way that would ensure, as I have argued in the previous chapter, the formation of a new kind of Christiana respublica as an empire of souls. In this respect, Bellarmine put pressure on a series of issues that were already at the center of the preoccupations of leaders in the Roman Church, but in the second half of the 1580s Bellarmine’s theories came to be seen as a danger to, rather than a way of strengthening, the theological and political authority of the popes. One of the reasons for the anti-Bellarmine campaign in the 1580s was the election of Sixtus V to the pontificate in 1585. Unlike his predecessor, Gregory XIII, Sixtus was peculiarly hostile to the Society of Jesus because he saw it as a possible source of conflict in his effort to assert the supreme authority of the pope. As it is abundantly known, Sixtus looked with suspicion at the structure of the Society, in between secular and regular clergy and organized in

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a strictly hierarchical manner that gave to the general of the Society unprecedented power and authority with respect to the other leaders of the religious orders. Even the fourth vow, special obedience to the pope, that Jesuits were required to make, was seen by Sixtus V as a dangerous way for the Jesuits to “escape” the usual chain of command that all the other Catholic institutions were supposed to maintain.1 In this respect, it seems almost natural that Sixtus’s hostility to the Society ended up being channeled against Bellarmine’s political theory, which, in a sense, was a perfect and influential expression in the realm of political theory of the theological, ecclesiological, and religious novelty represented by the Society of Jesus. However, two issues have to be kept in mind as I proceed. The first is that politics was but one of the features of the Society of Jesus that was seen as suspicious by the pope. Indeed, those were the years in which the controversy de auxiliis started to blow in its full might, and with the de auxiliis the peculiarly Jesuit soteriology appeared clearly as something “new” with respect to other Catholic traditions in its definition of the doctrines of grace and free will. Of course, it makes little sense to separate sharply theology from politics, but it is nevertheless useful to keep in mind the theological underpinnings of Bellarmine’s political theory, as well as the theological consequences of his political views. Second, it would be a mistake to give too much weight to Sixtus’s hostility to explain the role of the Society of Jesus, and of Bellarmine in particular, between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Surely, having an open enemy sitting on St. Peter’s Chair contributed greatly to bring to the fore anti-Jesuit stances that were circulating in certain sectors of the Roman Curia, but the troubles for the Society and for Bellarmine did not end with Sixtus’s death in 1590. Indeed, Bellarmine found himself having to defend his political and theological views many times after 1590. For example, Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta provoked a series of theoretical and political tensions of great importance during the pontificate of Clement VIII, who had chosen Bellarmine as his main theological adviser but who, as we will see, also saw clearly the possible dangers of Bellarmine’s political theory for the goal of strengthening of papal authority. With these two elements in mind, I will proceed to analyze a series of conflicts that opposed Robert Bellarmine to the papacy in the late 1580s and early 1590s, starting with two episodes that saw Bellarmine and his work indirectly opposed to Sixtus V and that paved the way, as I argue, for Sixtus’s attempt at putting the first volume of Bellarmine’s Controversiae on the Index of Prohibited Books. The first of these episodes was a controversy that pitted certain members of the Jesuit seminar in Louvain, and especially Leonardus Lessius,

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against some of the professors of the Faculty of Theology of the University of Louvain, especially Jacques Janson. The controversy was centered around the issue of the relationship between grace and free will, which had already been the subject of a vivacious and at times dramatic debate in the 1560s and 1570s, when Bellarmine himself was teaching in Louvain. The second episode concerned a series of accusations made to the Inquisition in 1587 by a member of the Society of Jesus, Julien Vincent, against the concept of “blind obedience” that Ignatius recommended in the Constitutiones. In both cases Bellarmine occupied a very central role: in the first case, he was both the theologian chosen by the general to sort out the controversy at Louvain and the member of the Society in charge of reporting the various positions to the Roman Curia; in the second case, he wrote the official documents with which the Society responded to the accusations of Vincent. However, the scholarship on those two episodes presents a rather different pattern. The controversy between Lessius and the Faculty of Theology at Louvain is, by far, the better studied of the two, both with respect to the history and development of theological studies at the University of Louvain,2 and with respect to the studies of Bellarmine’s theology and soteriology, especially with regard to the question of his early Augustinian tendencies.3 The fullest explanation of Bellarmine’s involvement in the 1587–1588 Louvain controversy is found in the work of Franco Motta, who inserts this episode in his larger discussion of the theological identity of the Society of Jesus, centered on the controversy de auxiliis.4 By contrast, Vincent’s attack against the Society’s conception of obedience has usually been mentioned as a minor piece of evidence of the tense relationship between the Society of Jesus and Pope Sixtus V.5 In the following pages I examine the two episodes side by side. Investigating the connections between the two and identifying Bellarmine’s role in them will serve two closely related purposes. First, I argue that we should see the Louvain controversy and the Vincent affair as part of the same history of adaptation and renewal of the Catholic Church, elaborated in response to the Protestant Reformation and its theological and also politico-ecclesiological consequences. Second, against this background of adaptation and renewal, it will appear clearly that it was not a coincidence that Bellarmine was a key protagonist in both controversies, because Bellarmine’s theo-political theory was in fact one of the most systematic (and controversial) attempts to restructure the theological, ecclesiological, and political frame of post-Tridentine Catholicism. In this respect, Bellarmine was uniquely situated to respond to the different positions that were being proposed; by the same token, his position, unlike any other, became itself the target of attack by the pope. Such attack came to the fore in its most aggressive expression in the attempt by Sixtus V to put the first

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volume of the Controversiae on the Index of Prohibited Books. The pope’s hostility toward Bellarmine’s Controversiae, then, will elucidate the novelty and importance of Bellarmine’s political and theological stances.

“Dolemus, quod Ista Controversia in Haec Tempora Inciderit” In the late spring of 1587, Bellarmine received a letter from Leonardus Lessius or Leys, who had been a pupil of his at the Roman College in the early 1580s and who had subsequently moved to Louvain, where he occupied the same chair of Scholastic theology that Bellarmine had occupied in the late 1560s and early 1570s.6 Lessius wrote to his former mentor that “after the death of the Apostolic Nuncio some people from this Faculty of Theology moved against us some controversies regarding certain doctrines that we taught last year on the issue of predestination.”7 The controversy started with a familiar name, Baius, whom Lessius was accused of having criticized too harshly in his lectures. Baius’s colleagues, and especially Jacques Janson, complained that Lessius had no business returning to Baius’s propositions, since they had already been censured by the pope for “non est insultandum victis.” In addition, the Louvain theologians collected some of the propositions taught by Lessius and decided to challenge their orthodoxy. In sum, Lessius wrote, “The whole issue depends on the question of the auxilium sufficiens, as they deny that it is given by God to everybody, and on the gratia efficax, which they pose very differently than we do.”8 In other words, the theologians at Louvain denied that the gratia efficax that God bestows upon his creatures is enough to make men and women choose the path of salvation by free will, which was the position held by Lessius. Instead, they affirmed that any person endowed with gratia efficax needs still a further intervention by God to attain salvation in the form of another kind of grace called “gratia Christi” or “gratia Novi Testamenti.” What was at stake, as Lessius acknowledged, was his interpretation of Augustine: the theologians at Louvain argued that Lessius “did not follow Augustine.” Lessius thought he did, and as evidence of his interpretation of the issue of grace he quoted a passage from Augustine’s Ad Simplicianum. His adversaries, however, remarked that that text “was written by Augustine while he was young, before the Pelagian heresy, and that Augustine in his later books taught something very different.”9 Lessius wanted Bellarmine to examine the theological issue and to report on the whole question to the pope. According to Lessius, there was no significant contradiction in Augustine’s basic doctrine of grace, even if he expressed it “durius,” in harsher terms, in his later works. But if there was indeed some discrepancy, Lessius asked how those discrepancies

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should be interpreted, especially since the Louvain theologians’ interpretation of Augustine, albeit more faithful to the later writings of the Church father, seemed at times very similar to that of Calvin.10 Aside from the specific theological debate over the issue of grace which Lessius’s letter identifies and which has already been extensively treated by previous scholars,11 I focus in particular on the hermeneutic issue, that is, on the question of the interpretation of Augustine’s texts and on the freedom that is allowed to the interpreter in his specific historical context. Maybe there were some discrepancies in Augustine’s texts, Lessius admitted to Bellarmine, but then the question was how he and his colleagues needed to handle those discrepancies in the geographic and historical context in which they lived, especially when this context was characterized by the presence of heretics and their insistence on the doctrine of grace. Awaiting Bellarmine’s, and possibly the pope’s, reply, Lessius sent to Bellarmine an excerpt of some of the propositions he presented to the theologians at Louvain as well as an extract of the propositions that Jacques Janson, the leading theologian of the opposing camp, was teaching in the university, submitting both to Bellarmine’s judgment.12 In July 1587 Bellarmine’s judgment arrived: regarding Lessius’s propositions, the judgment was positive but brief: “placent propositiones.”13 Regarding Janson’s doctrine, Bellarmine wrote that some of his propositions are “not only false, but also erroneous,” while some of them, “even if they could, in my opinion, be exposed in a correct manner, as the doctors usually expose the words of St. Augustine in the book De gratia et libero arbitrio, chapter 20, nevertheless all seem scandalous in these times, since in the manner of speaking they convene with the opinion of Calvin and Melanchton, which are condemned at the Council of Trent.”14 Bellarmine’s reply is in line with his entire theological elaboration and in line with his specific involvement in the issue of grace and free will while he was at Louvain: just like then, even now there could be a certain elasticity allowed in the interpretation of Augustine, which should be guided by the polemical context of the fight against heretics. However, that elasticity should not be extended too much, and not too much freedom should be used in dealing with Augustine’s writings; when in doubt, the tradition and the authority of the Church should be followed. Indeed, as Bellarmine wrote, some of Janson’s opinions were not erroneous from a theological point of view but just untimely, and the timing was not set by Lessius or by Bellarmine but by the Council of Trent. Moreover, Bellarmine did not see this controversy as something new and worthy of being proposed to the judgment of the pope. He concluded his censure by calling to mind that Janson, the author of those propositions, was an

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intimate friend of Baius, who had already been condemned by the Church.15 Therefore, even though Lessius had requested explicitly Bellarmine’s intervention to let the pope know about this controversy, neither Bellarmine nor the general of the Jesuits, Acquaviva, wanted to involve the papacy. Rather, they tried to keep the controversy within the confines of the Jesuit colleges.16 Thus Bellarmine and Acquaviva’s strategy was that of privileging an internal and speedy solution to the controversy: Bellarmine and the Roman hierarchy had already dealt with Baius; Janson is just another form of Baianism, already condemned by Rome. Case closed? In the fall of 1587 the Faculty of Theology of the University of Louvain returned to the attack, and this time it upgraded its targets: it was not just Lessius who was being charged with unorthodox doctrinal statements, but the entire body of the Jesuit seminary was accused of teaching “peregrina, offensiva, et periculosa quaedam dogmata” concerning grace and predestination. This was all the more offensive, the theologians said, because the legacy of Bellarmine, a Jesuit whose teaching was much more faithful to Augustine and therefore, as Janson and his colleagues thought, more consonant with Catholic orthodoxy, was still vivid in Louvain. Thus, the philo-Pelagian trend currently developed and fostered by the Jesuits seemed like a dangerous novelty to be condemned. As testimony to this accusation, the theologians of Louvain had drawn a list of philo-Pelagian propositions taught by the Jesuits, as well as some affirmations made by Lessius on sacred scripture: that it was not necessary to believe that every single word of the scripture was inspired by the Holy Spirit; nor was it necessary to believe that every single truth or opinion contained in the scripture was directly inspired by the Holy Spirit; and finally that there could be some books of the Bible, like the second book of Maccabees, that could have been written by men and without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, but which come have become sacred scripture nonetheless, if later the Holy Spirit in some public form attested that there was nothing false in them.17 These developments of the Louvain controversy are very relevant, for they demonstrate that the controversy was not limited to the issues of grace and free will and the correct interpretation of Augustine. Rather, the controversy extended also to the question of the interpretation of scripture, which in turn touched the core of the Jesuits’ understanding of theology. As Franco Motta has noted, with his propositions on the divine inspiration of sacred scripture, as well as with his interpretation of Augustine, Lessius was claiming a wider and more profound role for a historically inspired and theologically elastic method of interpreting scriptures and the writing of the fathers and, therefore, for a correspondingly elastic method of ratifying dogmas.18

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As he explained to Bellarmine, who had expressed some reservation on the third of Lessius’s propositions on the sacred scripture concerning the second book of Maccabees,19 Lessius insisted that what he wrote was not meant to be the declaration of theologically certain propositions. Rather, he was presenting the “possibility” that “if some book edited by human industry out of a special instinct of the Holy Spirit, without that infallible assistance of the Holy Spirit, were to be proved by a public testimony of the Spirit, that would become Sacred Scripture, certainly with regard to its infallible authority.”20 Thus, according to Lessius a more “elastic” view on what could be considered as having infallible authority could benefit Catholicism in its struggle against heretics, just as a more “Pelagian” reading of Augustine could benefit Catholics against the Protestants’ denial of free will. If we assume that the Church has the authority to recognize and ratify that “public testimony of the Spirit,” then we can have a more solid foundation of the principle of tradition against the Protestants’ sola Scriptura. At this point it is worth remembering that Lessius’s main theological production was in the realm of casuistry: his magnum opus, the treatise De iustitia et iure (1612), was a systematic work of moral theology in the vein of works by Domingo de Soto and Luis de Molina, whose titles it mirrored. In that work Lessius expressed some rather “radical” views on language, even if considered by the standard of other casuists. As Johann Sommerville has noted, on the issue of equivocation and mental reservation Lessius was among those casuists who rejected Domingo de Soto’s conservative casuist interpretation of language as something regulated by public convention, no matter the circumstances in which language was used. According to Soto and his followers, a speaker who cannot say the truth but nevertheless wants to avoid lying can use some form of ambiguous speech to deceive the hearer: as long as the statement uttered contained words or expressions conventionally ambiguous, the speaker was not to blame if her understanding of the statement in question did not match the hearer’s. By contrast, for Lessius and for other casuists such as Navarro and Suárez, language was a means of social communication only when such communication did not imply or encourage the performance of an unjust act. In this latter case, as for example when a man was unjustly questioned, there was no obligation to maintain the commonly codified meaning of words and language. Thus, if a man was unjustly questioned, it was not necessary that he uttered ambiguous words, but he could utter no words at all or any words he pleased, including false statements, which could be made true by mental reservation.21 Lessius’s approach in interpreting language, both human language and also the language of scripture and the fathers, is mirrored by the way in which

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he and other casuists approached politics from the angle of moral theology in the form of reason-of-state discourse. As Harro Höpfl has argued, the de iustitia et iure format of Lessius and the other casuists was not suitable to a systematic treatment of politics but was a manifestation of the freedom of interpretation allowed in moral theology by Jesuit theorists.22 Again, the same thread can be recognized in the Jesuit-Molinist position on soteriology, which is characterized by the same kind of freedom to interpret, in this case, Augustinian and Thomist traditions, as well as the freedom to use those traditions in the fight against Protestants. Bellarmine was different in this respect, as his intellectual focus was to create a systematic theo-political elaboration that responded to the historical and theological challenge of Protestantism but maintained a firm theological nucleus in the form of Scholastic theology. He certainly shared Lessius’s concerns regarding the Calvinist flavor of the Louvain theologians’ interpretation of Augustine, but he was also worried by the consequences that his brethren’s free interpretation of Catholic theology could have for maintaining the theological unity of the Christiana respublica, since he believed that “mere controversies” and concerns about heretics should not dictate the theological agenda of the Catholic Church at the expense of the coherence of the system. It is not a coincidence that Bellarmine’s political elaboration was focused on the concept of potestas, and not on that of iustitia, using Höpf’s terminology. Thus, on the question of the divine inspiration of scripture, while for Bellarmine it was perfectly aceptable to say that there were different degrees in which God could assist during the composition of the books of the Bible, to say that the Holy Spirit can make something into Sacred Scriptute by publicly endorsing it after its composition was indeed very dangerous. Not only could this argument support Calvin’s opinion that the second book of Maccabees was not canonical, but such public appearances of the Holy Spirit post eventum, as it were, could also open up the way to the Protestant doctrine according to which every person can be the interpreter of the Spirit, and thus the interpreter of the scriptures. In other words, if sacred scriptures are those inspired by the Holy Spirit, albeit in different ways, and if it is the job of the Church to identify and ratify such inspiration, then since the tradition of the Catholic Church has already included the second book of the Maccabees among the canonical books, there is no reason why these kinds of doubt can and should be raised. That is why Bellarmine disliked Lessius’s proposition on the second book of Maccabees: implying that the Holy Spirit could have publicly acknowledged a book to be sacred without having assisted in its composition was a double-edged sword, and because of this, Bellarmine did not see how “he could defend” Lessius’s proposition.23

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Once again, the debates between Lessius and Bellarmine over biblical interpretation and over grace and free will are expressions of the tension between Bellarmine’s way of systematically conceptualizing the theological structures of post-Tridentine Catholicism and Lessius’s “casuist” way of dealing with the Protestant challenge. The fact that such debate happened within the Jesuit order should serve as a reminder of the intellectual vitality of the Jesuit elaboration, but also of the centrality of the order in the context of the new post-Tridentine Church. Such centrality, however, posed many problems with respect to the dialectics between the theoretical and geopolitical center of the Catholic world— the papacy—and the periphery. Lessius was very concerned with the center/periphery issue, and time and again he reminded Bellarmine of the necessity of a papal statement as the only means to settle the controversy in Louvain. In January 1588, after receiving Bellarmine’s notes on his and his adversaries’ propositions, Lessius contacted Bellarmine, again telling him that the theologians of the university did not care for the judgment of members of the order of Ignatius and indeed had started to collect endorsements for their censure against Lessius’s teaching among the bishops and secular clergy. “Therefore,” Lessius wrote, “unless there is a judgment of the Apostolic See by which our dogmas are proved as sure . . . this controversy will not be put to rest.”24 But the center/periphery discourse was more complex than Lessius thought. It not only involved the tension between the Jesuits, the seculars, and theologians in Louvain and Rome but also concerned a moment of great difficulty within the Jesuit order between an important faction of Spanish Jesuits and the general. On the wave of Philip II’s attempt to consolidate the hold of the Spanish monarchy over the entire Catholic commonwealth, a faction of the Spanish Jesuits wanted Spanish supremacy within their order. After having lost the battle to appoint a Spanish general, between 1587 and 1588 the Spanish faction orchestrated a series of actions aimed to gain a great degree of freedom and independence from Rome for the Spanish province of the Society. The Spanish situation touched directly the controversy in Louvain because Spain was directly engaged in a war there and the imperial policy of Philip II reached new heights in those years: the year 1588 was also the year of the Invincible Armada against England.25 Moreover, this complex network of diverging interests within the Society of Jesus, of which the controversy in Louvain was but a part, could not be easily sorted out, as Lessius thought, by recurring to the Apostolic See, as the hostility of Sixtus V against the Society of Jesus had already manifested itself rather vigorously in 1587. In February of that year Sixtus had revoked the privileges of the Jesuits to absolve manifest heretics in foro conscientiae and had thereby strengthened the powers of the Inquisition, controlled directly by the pope, at the expense of the Jesuits’ authority.26

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Acquaviva, the general of the Society, was probably the man in the toughest spot at that moment: he was responsible for fending off the Spanish problems while keeping afloat a very difficult relationship with the pope.27 Despite his and Bellarmine’s preference to keep the matter out of the pope’s hands, and since the controversy, far from disappearing, kept growing, by the spring of 1588 Acquaviva was forced to involve the pope but entrusted Bellarmine with the role of trait d’union in the affair. Writing to Francis Coster, the provincial for Flanders, in March 1588, he announced that Bellarmine was in charge of dealing with the Roman Curia regarding the controversy of Louvain. In particular, Bellarmine was in contact with a member of the Inquisition, Cardinal Madruzzo, a friend of Bellarmine’s, to whom the Jesuit submitted his judgment on Lessius’s propositions. In the meantime, Acquaviva recommended prudence: as the matter was being sorted out, he asked Coster “to make sure our brethren and the others contain themselves, and await the decision of the Pontiff, to whom the matter has been deferred.”28 From the records of the Archive of the Inquisition, we have a letter from Sixtus V to the nuncio in Lower Germany, dated 15 April 1588, in which the pope ordered the diplomat to go to Louvain and to remind all the parties involved that “they must hold as most certain that it is allowed only to the Roman Pontiff, Peter’s successor, to define controversial things in matters of Christian doctrine.” For this reason, the nuncio was supposed to collect all the material related to the controversy—“all the questions and complaints that they have written, both the public and the classified ones”—and send them to Rome.29 The same day Sixtus wrote to the members and dean of the Faculty of Theology of Louvain, asking them to comply with the request that the nuncio would be making of them and to refrain from further controversies until the final decision from Rome had arrived.30 The general’s suggestion that both the Jesuits and their opponents “contain themselves” is an indicator of Acquaviva’s position of compromise between the more theologically and politically radical fringes of the Jesuits in the provinces of the Catholic world and the necessity to avoid highlighting the Jesuits’ theological novelties too much in the Roman context, where those novelties were looked upon with great suspicion. In this sense, Bellarmine’s theology, which was also a middle-way solution between the more “radically Jesuit” moral theology and the traditional Catholic elaboration, was the perfect ally for the strategy of the general. However, the feature of Bellarmine’s theory as a theology of compromise between the Jesuit-Molinist position and the traditional Thomist position was the fruit of the systematic redefinition of the political and theological structures of the Catholic Church, and an inseparable part of that system was the redefinition of the pope’s political and theological role within

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the Christian commonwealth. Bellarmine’s theory firmed up and strengthened the indirect power of the pope in temporal affairs and his direct theological sovereignty as judge of the consciences by redefining and limiting the pope’s power with respect to the plenitudo potestatis that papalist theorists granted him. In this respect, for instance, Bellarmine’s distinction between the pope’s right to rule consciences and the pope’s impossibility of seeing into consciences gave the pope theological and ecclesiological supremacy within the Christian Church and infallibility ex cathedra, but did not make the ruler of Church on earth an absolute monarch, for only the Church in heaven was an absolute monarchy, ruled by Christ.31 By the same theological token, during the Lessius affair and throughout the controversy de auxiliis, Bellarmine believed that a solution of theological compromise was better than either defending aggressively all of Lessius’s and Molina’s positions, or pushing for an “executive” decision on the part of the pope.32 All these factors could be, and in fact were, seen as suspicious and dangerous by a pope like Sixtus V, who wanted to highlight his role as absolute ruler of the Church. In effect, Acquaviva’s choice of Bellarmine to forge a compromise between the different theological “souls” of the Society of Jesus was problematic with respect to the Roman Curia and with respect to Sixtus V in particular. Some of those knots were already coming to the surface while the Lessius affair raged, when Acquaviva and Bellarmine found themselves needing to defend the interests of the Society in another, and potentially very dangerous, anti-Jesuit attack. Between the end of 1587 and 1588 a French Jesuit, Julien Vincent, whose life had been spent until that point rather obscurely in different seminaries and colleges of the Society in France, allegedly backed by some Spanish Jesuits, presented a complaint to the Holy Office regarding the famous letter by Ignatius Loyola on the Jesuit concept of obedience to superiors, accusing the doctrine of being unorthodox because it put the authority of the supreme pontiff in jeopardy.33 Vincent’s act did not fall on deaf ears with Sixtus V, who was eager to limit and possibly eliminate the characteristics of the Society of Jesus that made it so peculiar among the Catholic orders and therefore so difficult to control. Robert Bellarmine was put in charge of defending the orthodoxy of Ignatius’s letter on obedience and, with it, the orthodoxy of the concept of obedience in the entire Jesuit order. In February 1588 he prepared a response to the censures of Vincent on Ignatius’s work,34 and in the spring of the same year he wrote a treatise on blind obedience, to be presented to Sixtus V in defense of the Jesuits.35 Again at the beginning of the following year Bellarmine prepared a short summary of the defense to be presented to the cardinals of the Inquisition in charge of dealing with Vincent’s censures and revising the entire constitutions and rules of the order of St. Ignatius.36

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From Bellarmine’s response to Vincent’s censures we can immediately see that Bellarmine understood where the problem was, that is, in the exact definition of the relationship between the kind of obedience required of the members of the Society to their superiors and the kind of obedience required of all Jesuits, and indeed of all Catholics, to the pope. Among the accusations made by Vincent one was particularly dangerous: Ignatius prescribed that every Jesuit be obedient to his superior “not as a superior, but as Christ’s Vicar,” and this proposition, Vincent remarked, contained dangerous novelties, “since anybody who is a superior can be not just that, but also Christ’s Vicar.”37 Bellarmine immediately attacked the core of the argument: “As only the Supreme Pontiff, with respect to the whole Church, can be called the Vicar of Christ since only he rules over the Church in place of Christ, so any superior, with respect to his subjects, is rightly called the vicar of Christ, as he rules his subjects in place of Christ.”38 Once again, then, the question of jurisdiction returns: the legitimacy of the definition of a superior as vicar of Christ, Bellarmine says, does not depend on the kind of superiority held, but on the jurisdiction of the superior. All superiors are vicars of Christ with respect to their specific jurisdictions, but only the pope is the vicar of Christ over the Church because only he is the ruler of the universal Church. In a sense, the pope’s superiority insofar as he is a ruler is not greater than that of the general of the Jesuits or a king of a realm; it is the spiritual nature of his jurisdiction, the Universal Church as an empire of souls, that makes the pope’s superiority “superior” to the others’. This is a key point of Bellarmine’s defense of Ignatius’s concept of obedience, but it is also a key point of Bellarmine’s entire politico-theological theory, and the Jesuit returned to it often in his discussion of Vincent’s censure. Continuing his discussion on Vincent’s accusation, Bellarmine clarified this point by declaring that there are two ways in which we can say that Christ speaks through a superior. The first is when we imply that any superior as such speaks out of the same authority that Christ had; the second is when we imply that a superior speaks out of inspiration coming directly from Christ: “Christ speaks in those people who rule legitimately in the first sense, as long as they do not command anything against him, while in the second sense he speaks in the prophets and in all those to whom he deems worthy to reveal his secrets.”39 Thus, any legitimate superior can be said to act in place of Christ insofar as the authority by which he rules is legitimate. The pope, however, shares with the prophets the prerogative of acting in place of Christ in the second sense; that is, the pope can be said to be almost directly inspired by Christ, and therefore only the pope can claim infallibility ex cathedra, while the other kind of superiority, which is proper to superiors of religious orders such as the general of the Society

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of Jesus, but also to temporal sovereigns whose authority is legitimate, does not involve any infallibility but nevertheless commands the same obedience as does the authority of the pope. Therefore, Vincent’s accusations, according to which the Jesuits’ understanding of blind obedience to their superiors hinders the supreme prerogative of the Apostolic See because it makes the general of the Society as infallible as the pope, is completely unfounded. Bellarmine’s response to Vincent’s arguments hinges on two points. On the one hand, Bellarmine defended the orthodoxy of the Jesuits’ concept of blind obedience by claiming that it added nothing new to the traditional Catholic concept of obedience. When recommending obedience to one’s superior, Ignatius was not arguing that the superior in question was, in fact, infallible, but simply that his authority required the same perfect obedience that any other authority, if legitimate, requires. Infallibility pertains only to the pontiff, and thus Ignatius’s letter did not contain anything erroneous on that issue. The message that Bellarmine wanted to send to the pope was that the Society’s doctrines were not new and, therefore, that they were not dangerous for the Roman hierarchy. In a sense, this is the same aim he sought to accomplish in the Lessius controversy by smoothing out the “extremely Jesuit” propositions of Lessius’s theology, such as the one on the second book of Maccabees, without compromising the validity of the Jesuit’s teaching in the polemical context of the fight against heretics. On the other hand, and more profoundly, Bellarmine’s arguments on the double meaning of Christ’s primacy were tightly linked to the manner in which he set up the legitimacy of political authority and its relationship to the spiritual authority of the pope in his De summo Pontifice. To say that every legitimate authority, that of the general of the Jesuits as well as that of any legitimate secular prince, commands obedience is to say that authority is legitimate per se, and it does not need the pope’s blessing. The authority of the pope is certainly “special” and unique, but that uniqueness comes from the special spiritual nature of the pope’s role, and it is only in this sense that the pope participates more intimately than any other kind of superior in Christ’s authority. It is not a coincidence, in fact, that in the treatise De obedientia quae caeca nominatur, written to be presented specifically to Sixtus V, Bellarmine made no mention of the double meaning of the superior as Christ’s vicar. Rather, the treatise is a defense of Ignatius’s concept of obedience as something that, far from being a Jesuit novelty, is very well known and approved by the Church. “Blind obedience,” Bellarmine argued, “is nothing but that obedience which is pure, perfect and simple,” to be performed by any Christian with the caveat, obviously, that whatever is commanded is not a sin.40 The rest of the treatise consists of a series of testimonies taken from scripture and from the writing of

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the fathers that were meant to demonstrate that the insistence on obedience had always been emphasized as a Christian virtue, and to show that Ignatius was not original in emphasizing obedience.41 By contrast, in the memo that Bellarmine composed for the cardinals of the Inquisition in charge of examining Vincent’s statements, the theme of the relationship between the authority of the general and that of the pope constitutes the bulk of the discussion. The main charge of Vincent against Ignatius’s epistle is that it makes the authority of the general “infallible” so as to require a special kind of blind obedience. For Bellarmine this was not the meaning that Ignatius gave to obedience, nor was this the way in which the Society intended it to be taken. One thing, Bellarmine argued, is the legitimate obedience owed to any legitimate authority, either political or ecclesiastical; another thing is infallibility, which is a prerogative that only the pope, insofar as he is the supreme judge of the consciences, can claim. The superiority of the authority of the pope originates in his special spiritual status as supreme spiritual ruler; this superiority manifests itself in the theological notion of infallibility. Obedience, by contrast, depends not on that unique feature of the pope as vicar of Christ but on the condition of superiority that all rulers share, and that is why the pope should not feel diminished by Ignatius’s attempt to reinforce it.42 Indeed, in this document Bellarmine turns the pro-papacy arguments of Vincent upsisde down: if Ignatius’s doctrine of obedience, which was expressed in the epistle but confirmed by the Constitutiones of the Society, was not completely orthodox because it challenged the primacy of the pope, then the Apostolic See “would have erred in confirming the constitutions of the Society, which cannot happen.”43 In other words, if one believed Vincent’s arguments that Ignatius’s special obedience was erroneous because it made the general of the Society as infallible as the pope, then one would have to admit that the pope is not infallible after all, as it was the pope who had in fact confirmed and publicly approved the Constitutiones of the Society. To summarize what we have seen so far, in 1588 the situation for the Society of Jesus and for Bellarmine was extraordinarily tense. The Vincent affair was just coming to the fore, and there was no indication that the controversy in Louvain was going to wind down despite the advice of moderation that Acquaviva gave. Indeed, in the spring of 1588 Lessius sent another letter to Bellarmine, acknowledging the difficult time in which the controversy happened: “I am sorry that this controversy happened at this time, but I do not see how we could have avoided it.”44 Lessius realized that the pope was not on the Society’s side; what was worse, the theologians at Louvain also knew it, and that is one of the reasons they would not settle down: “They openly say that we have no Gregory anymore.”45 Because they would not refrain from

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attacking, the Jesuits in Louvain could not refrain from defending themselves, and now, more than ever, it was necessary that the matter was sorted out and that from Rome a decision on the right doctrine could be reached to silence the theologians. That is why Lessius sent Bellarmine yet another summary of the contested proposition regarding grace and free will, to be submitted for judgment to Rome.46 In Rome, meanwhile, the pope was working not so much to defend the Jesuits in Louvain but to weigh Vincent’s accusations and to put the entire Society under scrutiny, both in its doctrinal stances and in its ecclesiological structure. The controversy over grace and free will would not be sorted out as Lessius hoped it would, for in the year 1588 Molina’s Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis was published, and with it the controversy grew immensely, to the point of occupying the papacy, the Inquisition, and leading theologians of the Society of Jesus and the Dominican order for the next two decades. Between the end of the 1580s and the very beginning of 1590s, the debate over the right interpretation of Augustine moved slowly away from Louvain; by 1591, it became increasingly clear that the controversy over grace and free will involved the grounds of the theological elaborations of two of the most influential orders in the history of the Catholic Church; thus the epicenter of the controversy was no longer Louvain but Rome. Meanwhile, the Vincent affair, too, was coming to an end, but the consequences it had were momentous. By the end of 1588 it was clear that the accusations against Ignatius’s letter had no grounds, so Vincent found himself devoid of any support from the Roman cardinals of the Inquisition to whom he had brought his complaints and from his brethren in the Society of Jesus. In 1590 he died, poor and alone, in Rome.47 But the fact that Vincent’s accusations had no grounds did not mean that Sixtus V was convinced of the orthodoxy of the Society of Jesus. Indeed, in November 1588 Sixtus V ordered that a commission be formed to examine the entire Constitutiones and rules of the Society of Jesus to check on doctrinal errors.48 Moreover, buried in a folder of dubia varia at the Archive of the Inquisiton, we find a series of documents, possibly the ones prepared for use by the commission established in November 1588, that contain a series of passages of Lessius’s Apologia, a couple of letters from Acquaviva to the pope and to the Inquisition regarding the affair of Vincent, as well as a copy of Bellarmine’s Responsio and Tractatus de Obedientia Caeca,49 thus demonstrating that the Louvain controversy and the Vincent affair were seen by some of the leaders of the Roman Church as strictly interconnected. Also, by the end of 1588 it was clear that Bellarmine had been chosen as the theological and political representative of the Society and that his theory was in fact the basis, as we have seen, for the Society’s “official” position both in the

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debate about grace and free will and in the defense of the Society’s orthodoxy. Sixtus, too, understood Bellarmine to be at the center of the Jesuit elaboration, and that is why his next move against the Society was a direct and personal attack on Bellarmine himself.

“De R. P. Belarminio Non Reponendo ex Omnium Fere Sententia in Indice” In the fall of 1589, Sixtus V sent Bellarmine to France on a diplomatic mission led by Cardinal Caetani, the apostolic legate. The timing of the mission was very delicate: in September 1589 Henri of Navarre defeated the army of the Catholic League led by Charles de Mayenne, brother of the duc de Guise, and soon after he decided to strike a decisive blow against the League’s headquarters by seizing Paris. At that uncertain moment the French Catholic bishops were pressed by both the League and the royalist party: Sixtus and Caetani’s intent was to avoid desertion among the episcopate into Navarre’s camp.50 Before his departure to France, Bellarmine had been following the developments of the French wars of religion and the Gallican arguments put forth in defense of Henri of Navarre’s rights to the throne, especially after 1585, when Sixtus V excommunicated Navarre and Condé and thus declared their right to reign invalid. Indeed, Bellarmine wrote a reply to Pierre de Belloy’s Apologie Catholique, published in French in 1585 and immediately translated into English the same or the following year.51 Belloy’s defense of Navarre was based on the divine right of kings to reign, which does not depend on the ruler’s religious beliefs. In the case of France, then, the French Catholics should not oppose Henri of Navarre, because even though he was a Protestant, Belloy wrote, there was no reason “to feare that he would endevour to force you to live in any other Religion then the same wherein he find you.”52 When discussing the intervention of the papacy, Belloy denied that the popes had any ground to intervene in temporal matters whatsoever: the temporal and spiritual realms are separate, the ruler of the former has no superior in temporal matters, while the clergymen, in charge of the latter, are not “constituted Judges,” but simply “phisitions to the soule,” and as such they have no rights to intervene in temporal affairs, not even in imposing temporal punishments on the heretics, which is in the charge of the king.53 In his response to Belloy, written under the pseudonym of Franciscus Romulus in 1586 and reprinted in 1591, Bellarmine challenged the sharp separation between secular and religious commonwealth by reproposing his doctrine of potestas indirecta. Even if the spiritual authority of the pope and the temporal authority of kings and princes are “not only two

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different ones . . . but are sometimes found separate,” nevertheless in the Christian commonwealth those two authorites “are joined together to the extent that they form one commonwealth, one kingdom, one household, indeed one body.” Therefore, while the authority of the pope as such is not of a temporal nature, it can nevertheless rule the temporal authority in the matters that pertain to the obtainment of the eternal life.54 Bellarmine’s interest in the French wars of religion at this date was primarily of a theoretical nature, and he reacted to French Gallican arguments only insofar as they challenged his understanding of the pope’s potestas indirecta, leaving aside the more properly ecclesiological and political repercussions of Gallicanism. For example, in his Responsio, when dealing with Belloy’s remark that the decrees of the Council of Trent were never accepted in France because they infringed upon the liberties of the Gallican Church, Bellarmine declared that he wanted to pass over the question of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in order to concentrate solely on questions of faith. Even if there were some tensions in France regarding the ecclesiological aspects of the Tridentine decrees, from a theological point of view, he wrote, the principles of the Council of Trent regarding matters of faith were accepted and respected in France just as in the rest of the Catholic world.55 In fact, when Bellarmine went to France in 1589, his role in Caetani’s mission was limited to that of theological and intellectual counselor, and the Jesuit theologian seemed to have avoided any direct participation in the more properly political aspects of the mission. That does not mean that Bellarmine had no sympathy for some of the arguments of the Catholic League, but that in the complex political scenario characterized by Sixtus V’s hostility to Henri of Navarre, the sharp opposition of Caetani to any possible form of accommodation on the part of the Catholic bishops toward Henri should he convert to Catholicism, and the political interest of Spain in opposing a Protestant king on the throne of France, Bellarmine did not seem to play any significant part. When recollecting his mission to France in his 1613 autobiography, the first element that Bellarmine singled out was his scholarly reputation: “In France my name began to be famous, because of the books of the controversies, which had been published. Therefore many wanted to see me and often visited me.”56 He continued by remarking that his main job was that of Caetani’s ghostwriter: in particular Bellarmine mentioned the letter written by himself “nomine Cardinalis legatis” addressed to the French bishops who had been invited to congregate in Tours to discuss Henri’s conversion. The cardinal legate, interested in preventing any form of alliance between the Catholic bishops and the French crown, worked to cause the meeting to fail.57

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Overall Bellarmine’s sojourn in France was not pleasant: the journey from Rome to Paris was almost four months long—Bellarmine left in October 1589 and arrived in Paris in January of the following year—and it was characterized by bad weather and much rain, which were very upsetting for Bellarmine’s constantly unstable health.58 Moreover, the limited responsibility that Bellarmine was given in France left the Jesuit with much time to kill and not enough concentration to be productive. In February 1590 Bellarmine wrote to Joseph Creswell from Paris. Creswell sent Bellarmine a copy of the Breve relatione del martirio di doi Reverendi Sacerdoti et doi laici, seguito l’anno MDLXXXIX, an account of the martyrdom of four English Catholics executed in Oxford in 1589, and asked Bellarmine how his final revisions of the third and final volume of the Controversiae were proceeding, to which Bellarmine replied that he wished he could finish the work, “but nevertheless I am going slowly for many reasons, and I have wasted four months on the road.”59 Many years after his French mission, in a letter written to his fellow Jesuit Jean Arnoux, the confessor of Louis XIII, to thank him for having sent a copy of one of his works, Bellarmine excused himself for not reading French and wrote that “even when I was in Paris and I had almost nothing to do in the long siege with which King Henri IV was oppressing us, I tried to learn French but I could not, because I was already too close to being old, while, on the other hand, while I was young in Louvain I learnt Hebrew even without a teacher.”60 While Bellarmine’s time in France was seemingly spent mostly in relative idleness, between the end of 1589 and the beginning of 1590 the Jesuit theologian was much talked about in Rome, and not favorably. Sometime before February 1590 the first volume of Bellarmine’s Controversiae was denounced to the pope, who then decided to submit the work to the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books. Sixtus was personally very invested in revising the Index— Vittorio Frajese has defined the Index proposed by Sixtus as “the harshest Index in the history of the Church.”61 Taking advantage of Bellarmine’s absence from Rome, Sixtus seized the occasion to send a strong signal against the Society of Jesus and against one of its highest and most esteemed members.62 We do not know exactly who denounced Bellarmine to the pope.63 The first documentary evidence we have of this affair is dated to 19 February 1590, when Acquaviva wrote to Bellarmine in Paris to acquaint him with the new developments: “Your Reverence will have been informed from some other source of the clamor raised with Our Lord because of the opinion that you hold in your works that the pope in temporal affairs is not the lord of the world [Dominus Mundi].”64 When Acquaviva heard of those rumors, he immediately contacted some influential cardinals, including Giovanni Antonio Facchinetti (the future Pope Innocent IX) and the Cardinal Giulio Santoro (a member of

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the Inquisition) and managed to bring them to Bellarmine’s side. In the meantime, however, Sixtus V had received a book from “a Franciscan friar” written in support of the pope’s plenitudo potestatis, and this “refreshed the clamor,” so much so that Sixtus V decided to turn the whole affair over to the Congregation of the Index. “Thank God,” Acquaviva wrote, “[the Cardinals of the Index] are favorable to the Society of Jesus.” He had already spoken with a number of them, all great admirers of Bellarmine’s works, and he intended to speak with the remaining cardinals.65 Acquaviva ended his letter by reassuring Bellarmine of a positive resolution of the affair: all the cardinals he spoke with “are intelligent and as such they are on our side, and we hope that once His Holiness is informed that [your theory] is the common opinion of the theologians he will accept it.”66 Acquaviva’s optimism that Sixtus’s hostility might be soothed by hearing the positive comments of other theologians on Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta seemed at first justified: on 22 February 1590 the Congregation of the Index met to deal with Bellarmine’s work and decided “that it should not be put on the Index by the judgment of almost everybody.”67 The next day Acquaviva wrote to Bellarmine communicating the good news: the matter was proceeding smoothly, and the cardinals of the Index had decided not to censure the Controversiae and to remit their judgment to Sixtus “in a manner in which he will be satisfied.” The worst that could happen, Acquaviva says, is that “in the next edition some small words should be changed”: for example, Bellarmine’s affirmation that the opinion according to which Christ was a temporal sovereign was an “error” could be “moderated.”68 But Sixtus must not have been easily satisfied, and the matter of Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta was not set aside. Indeed, Sixtus evidently realized the important political and theological implications of the theory of potestas indirecta for the redefinition of the role and nature of the authority of the pope in the post-Tridentine Church, and he was not willing to let the matter go. This is why he renewed his attack against Bellarmine, and why this time he included as a target the theory that he correctly saw as one of the most important points on which Bellarmine’s elaboration leaned, that is, the issue of the autonomy of political authority with respect to papal authority. In fact, in the late winter or early spring of 1590 he presented to the Congregation of the Index the first book of Bellarmine’s Controversiae and the printed relectiones by Francisco de Vitoria, pushing to have both theorists censured. On 5 April 1590 another meeting of the Index was held, at which the cardinals decided to acquire more information on the proposal of putting Bellarmine and Vitoria on the Index.69 Very soon after that meeting, Acquaviva informed Bellarmine of these latest developments and reassured him that the cardinals with whom he was in contact, both from the Inquisition and from the Index, were on Bellarmine’s side. Regarding

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the Index, the cardinals of that congregation were confident they would be able to drop Bellarmine’s and Vitoria’s names from the Index and to negotiate a suitable solution with the pope. More specifically, Acquaviva wrote that “the issue can be solved by changing the titles in the next edition so that they are not in a negative format, but in the format of a question.” For example, instead of having a chapter entitled Papam non habere dominium temporale, Acquaviva suggested the title Utrum Papa habeat, and so forth; that is to say, instead of posing his opinion as a certain and established doctrine (“the Pope is not Lord of the world” and “the Pope does not have temporal authority”), Bellarmine could pose his theory in terms of a still-open question: “whether or not the Pope has temporal authority,” or “whether or not the Pope is the Lord of the world.”70 Apart from modifying the form in which Bellarmine’s theory was expressed, it was necessary to smooth out one of the key theoretical points of the potestas indirecta: as Acquaviva wrote to Bellarmine, “The opinion that Christ had some temporal authority should not be called an error, because here this is taken very badly.”71 At this point it might be useful to step back and insert these events in a wider context. Between 1588 and 1590 the pope had many occasions to see the theological and ecclesiological implications of Bellarmine’s elaboration. During the controversy in Louvain, Bellarmine’s theology became a way to defend the Jesuit view of grace and free will by inserting it in a solid Scholastic theological nucleus; during the Vincent affair, Bellarmine defended the ecclesiological role of the Society of Jesus in the Catholic Church led by a supreme judge of consciences who, while being the only vicar of Christ insofar as his spiritual jurisdiction was concerned, nevertheless shared part of his prerogatives as leader with other spiritual and temporal leaders. Now Sixtus saw that all those theological and ecclesiological features sprang from Bellarmine’s redefinition of the authority of the pope both within the Church and outside of it, and he decided to hit at the more properly political aspects of Bellarmine’s theory. In order to do this, Sixtus identified the two main theoretical points on which Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta rested, that is, the autonomy of political authority with respect to the Christian Church and the denial that Christ had any temporal authority while he lived as a man, which brought the consequence that his vicar also should have no temporal authority. So, on the one hand, by adding Vitoria’s name to Bellarmine’s among the authors he proposed to censure in the Index, Sixtus implicitly condemned the first of Bellarmine’s grounds, while, on the other hand, by insisting that Christ’s lack of temporal authority should have been expressed only as an opinion, not as a certainty, Sixtus condemned the other. In the meantime, a copy of Sixtus’s Index, with Bellarmine’s name on it, was already in print by May 1590.72 Bellarmine reacted to these latest developments. From another letter of Acquaviva, written in May 1590, we know that Bellarmine wrote to the cardinals

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of the Index and to the general declaring himself willing to amend some controversial passages but also defending the core of his theory: as Acquaviva wrote, “Your Reverence should rest assured that the reasons which Your Reverence now writes and that we have already collected before, with the antiquity of the theologians who are of the same opinion as you, are here properly understood.”73 Indeed, in the late spring of 1590 a memorandum in defense of Bellarmine and Vitoria was elaborated by the Society of Jesus, possibly drawing from some of the points Bellarmine had made in his own defense of his theory. The memorandum, presented to the Congregation of the Index on 2 July 1590,74 defends Bellarmine and Vitoria with three main arguments. First of all, the doctrines exposed in Vitoria’s and Bellarmine’s work are not erroneous, “since nothing has ever been determined by the Apostolic See contrary [to what they wrote on the temporal authority of the pope].”75 Indeed, while after they wrote other theologians expressed different opinions, never before had either the schools of theology or the clergymen involved in the debates complained about the unorthodox nature of Bellarmine’s and Vitoria’s positions; therefore the pope should “let them hold the opinion which they have been allowed to hold so far.”76 In other words, Catholic theologians hold different opinions on the nature and scope of the authority of the pope in temporal matters; since neither Vitoria’s nor Bellarmine’s opinion contains anything unorthodox with respect to the Catholic truth, they should be left free by the papacy to continue their theological debates undisturbed. One cannot but hear an echo of Bellarmine’s and Acquaviva’s positions on the theological controversy over the issue of grace and free will: the debate should not be settled from above with a decision of the papacy, but both camps should be free to defend their positions within the area of doctrinally acceptable theological debates. The second point, directly mentioned in the correspondence between Acquaviva and Bellarmine, is that the doctrine of potestas indirecta not only is not erroneous but also has been supported by many authoritative theologians “for more than two hundred years,” and therefore condemning or opposing Bellarmine’s theory will be “more than a tacit condemnation of many very important doctors.” Such condemnation would be a great scandal for the Catholic schools in which those doctors have taught and for the religious orders, Jesuits and Dominicans, of which they were a part.77 The reference to the repercussions that an open condemnation of Bellarmine’s and Vitoria’s doctrines could have on the Catholic world introduces the third argument used in the Jesuit memorandum: besides the fact that those doctrines were ancient and not erroneous, they were also useful against the heretics, and therefore their condemnation would be extremely untimely. Because both Vitoria and Bellarmine had worked so hard to oppose the heretics, condemning them would “discourage other doctors from working so hard to

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write in support of the extirpation of heresies and to bring back the peoples affected by those heresies.”78 The memorandum continues by reminding the cardinals of the Index that the condemnation or approbation of theological doctrines on the basis of their utility in the fight against heretics, and not only on the basis of their doctrinal purity, has always been a feature of the Catholic Church: “From a very ancient habit we can see that the Holy Church has always judged it better to tolerate some blemish in good writers than to prohibit their works with much shame, for the works are useful and fruitful for the people’s edification.”79 After laying out the basic ground of the defense of the doctrine of potestas indirecta as a doctrine neither new nor erroneous and very useful in the fight against heretics, the memo briefly considers the cases of Vitoria and Bellarmine separately. As to the first, although Vitoria was already dead, his academic influence was still very much alive, especially in Spain, which was full of Vitoria’s pupils, among them many famous theologians and influential bishops. Condemning Vitoria, the memorandum implicitly argues, meant condemning an entire and vivacious school of theologians. Moreover, condemning Vitoria could upset the relationship between the papacy and Spain, since, as the memorandum reminds the Congregation of the Index and the pope, in his other works on the Indies, Vitoria “proves that the authority that the king of Spain has over those territories is derived from the authority of this Holy See.”80 Regarding Bellarmine, the scene moves from Spain to the northern parts of the Catholic world, the contested boundaries in which the battle against heretics was fought. Bellarmine had spent all his life confuting the heretics in teaching and writing, and “his works have been printed over and over throughout almost all the northern regions with a very great scorn for the heretics and praise and utility for the Catholics.” Moreover, Bellarmine was the nephew of a pope and dedicated his first volume to another pope, Sixtus himself, which should serve as an indication of his good will toward the Apostolic See.81 Finally, unlike Vitoria, Bellarmine was still alive and “ready to give every satisfaction either in the second edition or in the new works which he is currently writing, according to what His Holiness will order.”82 Acquaviva felt very confident about the success of the memorandum, combined with the continued lobbying he was doing with the cardinals in Rome: writing to Bellarmine on 6 July 1590, he affirmed that “regarding the affair of your book, Your Reverence should know that the issue now is going fully ahead. We made every effort we could, and we will make another one of greater importance, which we hope will have a successful outcome.”83 Acquaviva was referring to the successful attempt to get all the cardinals of the Index fully on board: indeed, in two meetings in the course of July, one held on the tenth and the other on the twenty-third, the cardinals worked hard to “moderate” the memo to be presented to Sixtus V so as to make it more effective.84 On 5 August Acquaviva

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updated Bellarmine on the situation for the last time: the cardinals were all solidly on Bellarmine’s side, and even the pope had started to give some “good signs.”85 The best sign that the pope could give, however, was his death, which occurred on 27 August 1590; with it, the pope’s Index, which included the names of Bellarmine and Vitoria, was never circulated or implemented. Bellarmine would very soon have the possibility of taking a form of posthumous revenge on Sixtus V: in 1592, when after the brief pontificates of Urban VII, Gregory XIV, and Innocent IX, Pope Clement VIII started to plan a revision of the Tridentine Index, Bellarmine, now a member of the Congregation of the Index, expressed a very harsh and influential judgment on the rationale of Sixtus’s Index. In July 1592 Bellarmine declared that in the Sistine Index there were “many things superfluous, useless, harmful, too rigid.” For example Sixtus’s Index was full of inconsistencies and repetitions; it censured some propositions out of the writings of the fathers of the Church, which could create a great scandal among the Catholics and give an advantage to the heretics; it was too rigid in prohibiting books that either did not deal with religion or did not contain any error but were written by heretics.86 On 25 July the Congregation of the Index met, and Bellarmine’s observations on the Sistine Index were read and considered. The final decision was that “in order to avoid so many difficulties [illustrated by Bellarmine] it was concluded to retain the Index of Pius IV with its rules.”87 In the fall of 1592, when the Congregation of the Index was at work to update the Tridentine Index, Bellarmine suggested that the authors added by Sixtus to the Index should be included in the updated version, with the exclusion of some names, among them Francisco de Vitoria and Robert Bellarmine: “Those authors should be removed from this Index both because they are truly Catholic authors and their works are very useful, and because it would be a personal discrimination if these were put on the Index and many other authors, who did not err less than they did, were not, as Alphonsus de Castro, Albertus Pighius, Jacques Almain, Jean Gerson, Durandus, Scotus.” Bellarmine had it his way, and his name was dropped from the list of the authors whom Clement VIII was considering including in his own version of the Index.88

“De Bellarmini Controversiis Ea Est Doctorum Praelatorum hic, Plus Illas Nocuisse Ecclesiae, quam Profuisse” Thus, Bellarmine won the battle with Sixtus, both because the death of the pope prevented the version of the Index that contained the Jesuit theologian’s name from being circulated, and because during the entire affair, as we have seen, Bellarmine could count on the almost unanimous support of the members of

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the Index and of important factions of the Congregation of the Inquisition. However, his Controversiae and especially the implication of his theory of potestas indirecta remained very controversial even during the tenures of Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605) and Paul V, who succeeded to the pontifical throne after the brief pontificate of Leo XI and remained in charge of the Catholic Church until 1621, the year in which Bellarmine died. During the 1590s, in fact, Bellarmine’s Controversiae would be the object of a series of objections and censures from within the Catholic camp. While none of those episodes represented a threat against Bellarmine’s reputation comparable to the Sistine Index, they are, in my view, a useful piece of evidence for two arguments. The first, general, argument concerns the profoundly “upsetting” nature of the theories proposed by Bellarmine and the structure in which they were proposed, which is another way of saying that Bellarmine’s revision to the main theological and political tenets of post-Reformation Catholicism was so profound as to provoke a series of reactions from different Catholic voices in different contexts, and not simply in the Rome of Sixtus V. The second, more specific, point is that the criticism directed toward Bellarmine’s theory in the 1590s, albeit in different ways, originated from a perceived threat that those Catholics authors saw in the actual effectiveness of Bellarmine’s theory against the heretics. In other words, while the Controversiae originated out of the need to win the fight against heretics once and for all, they came to be seen as almost advantageous for the heretics, who could take advantage of Bellarmine’s redefinition of the authority of the pope and use it to argue against the Catholic Church. In the following pages I show why that happened, and what it means. Around the middle of 1591, when Bellarmine, now back in Italy, was busy in his work as consultor of the Congregation of the Index and was still trying to sort out the controversy over grace and free will, a rather upsetting letter reached Acquaviva. The sender was another Jesuit, István Szántó, or Arator, his Latinized name, who was active in the difficult operation of implementing Counter-Reformation Catholicism in Hungary, where Protestantism had become especially strong.89 Arator was one of the main promoters of an aggressive Catholic action in Hungary, and in the 1570s he lobbied Pope Gregory XIII to institute a college especially devoted to the education of young Hungarian Catholics, which was finalized in 1579. In 1580, however, the Collegium Hungaricum was merged with the Germanicum, and Arator, disappointed, left Rome and returned to Vienna, to continue his battle in relative isolation.90 From Hungary he found reasons to complain to the general about Bellarmine’s work: “On Bellarmine’s Controversiae the opinion of the learned clergymen here is that they hindered rather than helped the Church, that they offered, rather than removed, weapons for the heretics, as never before

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the Lutherans and the Calvinists knew how to construct so many and so firm arguments to defend their sects like those that they find in Bellarmine: his [Bellarmine’s] volumes are sought by them more than by the Catholics.”91 Arator continued his letter by mentioning, as an example, the issue of purgatory: “Bellarmine weakens the arguments of the Catholics and he shows to the heretics the method to confute them: he rejects the very solid reasons that Catholics had and offers other reasons, rather futile, which he gets from the books of Kings on the funeral of Saul, Joab, etc. He presents many and strong arguments by the heretics, and he solves those weakly.”92 In Arator’s opinion Bellarmine’s fault was twofold. On the one hand, Bellarmine was too thorough in reproducing the arguments of the heretics, which could become a way to spread those heretical beliefs even further. On the other hand, Arator accused Bellarmine of not being forceful enough to counter the heretics’ arguments and of introducing “futile” reasons, such as those drawn out of complex biblical exegesis, instead of accepting the traditional “solid” reasons in favor of purgatory. By the end of the year, Arator prepared and sent over to Rome a more detailed censure of Bellarmine’s work. Reading Arator’s censures to Bellarmine’s controversies, one can appreciate how great the distaste of a first-line combatant must have been toward what he perceived as subtleties more suitable for academic discussions than for the battle that was being fought in Hungary.93 For example, Arator took issue with Bellarmine’s specification that while it was lawful to erect basilicas to honor saints, it was not lawful to erect temples in their honor: are not basilicas and temples the same thing? And if so, what is the use of creating “confusio magna” about what kind of building can be erected to worship saints while the heretics are denying the legitimacy of the cult of saints tout court?94 Some of Arator’s censures directly addressed the issue of the authority of the pope both within and outside the Church. For instance, Arator identified a contradiction in Bellarmine’s works on the issue of the authority of the popes in temporal affairs. In his Controversia de Clericis, Arator complained, Bellarmine wrote about the temporal “principatus” that the popes received by Pippin and Charlemagne; in the Controversia de summo Pontifice, Bellarmine denied that the popes had any direct temporal authority: so why was it that the popes received a temporal realm in the times of Pippin and Charlemagne?95 In sum, according to Arator, in Bellarmine’s work there were “too many of the heretics’ arguments,” almost as many as those of the Catholics, and they were presented in such a way that “if anybody who is badly versed in matters of faith reads both, he will easily be able to doubt which side he should follow, especially since the arguments of the heretics are more plausible and seem easier to understand.” The heretics already have plenty of copies of the books of Calvin and Luther, Arator continues, and

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therefore they do not need to read Calvin’s and Luther’s arguments again in a Catholic’s work, even if the Catholic author collected all these arguments for a good cause, that is, to oppose and confute them.96 Arator is here implicitly accusing Bellarmine of not quite knowing what he and his colleagues were up against in the dangerous periphery of the Catholic world far away from the safe haven of the Roman College. The kind of confutation that was required in the contested lands of Hungary was not strengthened by the academic style of Bellarmine’s Controversiae; indeed, according to Arator, Bellarmine did not even know the geography, let alone the strategy, of the fight against heretics in the northern parts of Europe: “In the Preface [of the first volume of the Controversiae] [Bellarmine] distinguishes Pannonia and Hungary, which are now considered as the same province.”97 Bellarmine was extremely annoyed when Acquaviva forwarded him Arator’s censure: on 27 December 1591, he wrote that the censures of Arator not only were wrong, but “they could be dangerous and at some point harmful for the Society.” In the letter Bellarmine briefly went over the contradictions that Arator alleged were present in his work, dwelling a little on Arator’s accusation that Bellarmine reported too many of Calvin’s and Luther’s opinions: “If I had not done it, I would have given to the enemies of the faith some grounds to boast that their arguments are unsolvable.”98 Bellarmine was not so much worried about the substance of the arguments, given that many much more learned theologians had already seen his work and had approved of it, but he was rather preoccupied by the repercussions that Arator’s censure might have on his reputation. Bellarmine worried that “Father Stephen would have spread the rumor in Vienna that by your order my work is being revised as suspect or dangerous.”99 Such action should be stopped both because Bellarmine did not want any stain on his reputation and because the Society of Jesus should not appear divided in itself. Even if Acquaviva reassured Bellarmine that many other theologians had seen the censures of Arator and had decided that they were of no value, still Bellarmine decided not to drop the affair immediately. In January 1592 he wrote to the general saying that despite knowing Arator since the days in which he was Bellarmine’s student at the Roman College, and despite knowing that even as a student Arator “had not much excellence, to say the least,” Bellarmine was nevertheless offended by his censure, especially the one concerning the advantage that his Controversiae represented for the heretics, “because it looks like I wanted to favor the enemies of the faith.”100 Bellarmine not only defended the erudition and intellectual rigor of his work against the alleged contradictions noted by Arator but also defended the controversistic and argumentative force of the Controversiae: if Arator found some faults in a thorough exposition of the

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arguments of the adversaries, which is a necessary step to confute them, then he should also wish to prohibit the works of other controversialists, for example, Nicholas Sander, whom nobody blamed for being a friend of the heretics.101 Less than a month later Bellarmine wrote again to Acquaviva, and this time he sent a reply to Arator’s censure together with the letter. Bellarmine’s reply was vigorous: he not only noted Arator’s mistakes and the many things “falsa and perinepta” written by his fellow Jesuit, but he turned the antiheretical arguments against him. Time and again Bellarmine wrote that it was Arator’s opinion, and not his, that came closer to the opinions of the heretics. For example, on the issue of the supposed contradiction between the pope not having any temporal authority and the pope’s legitimate sovereignty over St. Peter’s patrimony, Bellarmine replied that when he wrote that the pope had no temporal authority, he did not mean that he did not have it “in any way,” but only that he did not have authority “from divine institution,” which did not mean that the pope would be prohibited by divine institution from having sovereignty over the territories that other princes decided to donate. To infer this, as Arator did, is to follow an error of “the heretics of this present time.”102 On the censure according to which Bellarmine’s work was beneficial to the heretics, Bellarmine repeats that this could have been the case if he, after reporting the heretics’ arguments, failed to confute them. But since he did successfully confute them, what, then, was the question? Besides, Innocent IX—Sixtus’s successor—read the first volume of the Controversiae attentively and praised the way in which the Jesuit confuted the heretics’ argument: “I think I will be allowed to oppose the judgment of such a great Pontiff to that of this censor.”103 In sending all this material to Acquaviva, Bellarmine gave the general a warning: either he obliged Arator to retract his opinion on the Controversiae, or Bellarmine would have Arator denounced to the Holy Office “as a dangerous man in these present times and in those regions.”104 Bellarmine did not have to follow through with his threat because Acquaviva had no intention of letting this matter continue; in fact, he buried the file containing both Arator’s censure and Bellarmine’s letters and reply under the rubric of Censurae Librorum, the internal comments on the part of members of the Society of Jesus over their brethren’s works, where the material remains. The Arator episode, brief and without long-term consequences, is nevertheless important for seeing some of the implications of Bellarmine’s Controversiae. Current scholarship has focused mainly on the theological and strategic gap that the Arator-Bellarmine controversy highlights in the context of the post-Tridentine fight against heretics. More specifically, Thomas Dietrich has analyzed the contrast between Arator and Bellarmine

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as an expression of the contrast between the militant style of controversy and the academic milieu, while Franco Motta has focused on the theological and polemical differences that the methodological contrast between Arator and Bellarmine highlights: on Arator’s side there is a theology that “negates the possibility of the confrontation with the adversary,” while Bellarmine’s theology is a theology of acceptance of such confrontation.105 While I think that both Dietrich and Motta identify some important issues in the debate between Arator and Bellarmine, I also think that the reason Bellarmine’s work was “suspicious” insofar as its effectiveness against heretics was concerned cannot be reduced to the issues of geographic or polemical context. In other words, when Arator noted that in the Controversiae Bellarmine was giving too much space to the heretics, he touched, albeit without being aware of it, an important feature of Bellarmine’s work, and not just from the perspective of a theologian engaged in the front line of battle against heretics in the periphery of the Catholic world. Indeed, the same complaint that the heretics could benefit from, rather than be harmed by, Bellarmine’s work was voiced again a few years after Arator’s censure, by a very different figure in a very different context and for very different reasons. This other controversy took place in 1595, and Bellarmine, who since 1592 had been appointed rector of the Roman College and was seeing his profile rise higher and higher with Pope Clement VIII, was revising his Controversiae for a second edition. Before Bellarmine completed the revisions, however, Acquaviva alerted him that some censures on his work had been made and presented to Clement VIII; therefore, the matter should be sorted out before proceeding with the revisions.106 The censure came from a Spanish Dominican, Juan Vincentius. Bellarmine replied quickly, and Acquaviva sorted the matter out: in March 1596 he wrote to Giulio Santoro, cardinal of Santa Severina, a member of the Inquisition who had supported Bellarmine during the difficult times when Sixtus wanted to put the first volume of the Controversiae on the Index, alerting him that in Spain there might be pressures to put Bellarmine’s Controversiae on the Spanish Index, and that such an action should be avoided because of the “universal scandal” that this would provoke. To this effect, Acquaviva asked Santoro to write to the nuncio in Spain to communicate that no revision had been ordered by the pope to Bellarmine, and that the censures from Spain had been dealt with and Bellarmine had already sent the second edition to print.107 The cardinal wasted no time, and in June of the same year the nuncio in Spain wrote to Santoro, reassuring him that even before receiving his letter he had already spoken with some Spanish Inquisitors to defend Bellarmine’s work, but “I found that they did not note anything, nor do they think about doing it.”108

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When, some years later, Bellarmine was summarizing to Antonio Possevino the corrections made to the second edition of the Controversiae, Bellarmine confessed to him that while he was doing the revisions for the second edition, some of his enemies had made a censure of his work “so exact that we could see that they had studied it very well in order to calumniate every small thing, which is easy to do in every work, and I hardly read a book that I do not feel like writing a nice censure over it.”109 Bellarmine told Possevino that he had replied to the censure and that the matter had been briefly considered and set to rest. Bellarmine also wrote that he had offered to write a “correttorio” of all his work, but that neither the pope nor the Jesuit theologians thought it was a good idea, because “the world could have thought that I was obliged to write a sort of retraction.”110 All this information, Bellarmine said, had to remain confidential because the pope wanted the matter to remain secret, especially in Spain, so as not to stir the anti-Dominican feelings of the Spanish Jesuits: “so if in your work you want to quote my controversies, I pray you not to mention either censures or apologies, especially in Spain.”111 One can understand Bellarmine’s caution in the second half of the 1590s: he certainly did not want his books touched again by the stain of a condemnation, this time on the part of the Spanish Inquisition, and even though this time the censure came from a Dominican, and not a Jesuit, still the fact that the controversy de auxiliis was in its central phases suggested to Bellarmine that the fracture between Jesuits and Dominicans, especially in Spain, should be mended rather than exacerbated further. Clement VIII, as we have seen, supported Bellarmine, and in this specific instance he aided him directly by keeping the censure of the Spanish Dominican and the reply of Bellarmine confined among his own files without involving either the Index or the Inquisition.112 Nevertheless, Clement showed his impatience with the Jesuit Order and the breach it caused with Molina. For example, in 1601, during the extenuating phase of the debates between Dominican and Jesuit theologians over the controversy de auxiliis, he voiced his frustration and said: “Because of the Jesuits’ arrogance and because of the fact that they think nothing of the other Orders and theologians, they have fallen in these predicaments thinking that everybody else is ignorant.”113 Going back to the content of Juan Vincentius’s censure, the Dominican theologian organized his remarks on Bellarmine’s Controversiae along two general lines. The first is the accusation that the Jesuit theologian did not show sufficient competence in Thomist theology. Indeed, Bellarmine, according to Vincentius, was often inaccurate or sloppy when interpreting Aquinas, and, “almost dissimulating, he says he is going to pass over things, even though an accurate exposition of those things is necessary to confirm what he adduces in

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support of the dogmas of the Church against the heretics.” Along this line, a number of points are noted in which, according to Vincentius, Bellarmine did not follow Aquinas correctly, as, for example, on a series of propositions on the essentia and substantia of Christ’s divinity.114 While it is not surprising that a Dominican theologian would attack a Jesuit’s competence in Thomism, especially during the controversy de auxiliis, the second general qualm that Vincentius voiced against Bellarmine is more surprising: “Bellarmine does not care so much to consider and explain the testimonies of the sacred scriptures and the Fathers, but rather he accumulates them. Therefore many of the arguments he adduces to confirm the dogmas can easily be turned against the Catholics, or at least weakened by the heretics.” Moreover, when directly confuting the heretics, Bellarmine does so with sarcastic insults so that “he irritates” them rather than bringing them to the truth and “almost invites them to indulge themselves more in insulting Catholics.”115 This time the accusation is slightly different in structure from that of Arator, but it is similar in its content: Arator said that Bellarmine quoted too much from the heretics, Vincentius said that Bellarmine gave the heretics too much ammunition without defending the Catholic Church strongly enough. For example, Vincentius took issue once again with Bellarmine’s denial of the temporal nature of Christ’s kingdom, which, according to the Dominican, Bellarmine defended “with a very weak argument, that is, that Christ did not get any temporal kingdom either by hereditary succession, or by election, or by the law of war, or by a special gift of God,” whereas, in reality, Christ can be said to be a temporal sovereign because of his hypostatic union with the Father, which is the reason he acquired all the other powers he had.116 Thus both Arator and Vincentius, despite the different nature and aim of their accusations and the different contexts out of which the censures originated, remarked that Bellarmine’s Controversiae could actually be useful for heretics and did not defend the Catholic truths strongly enough. I think that we should take those claims seriously, in the sense that they point to a fundamental feature of Bellarmine’s work. In a way, the Controversiae conceded something important to the heretics, that is, the fact that the heretics of Bellarmine’s own time existed in such a way that obliged post-Tridentine Catholicism to change something fundamental in its theological and political structure. Bellarmine, in fact, took seriously the charges of the Protestants against the Catholics, and for this reason his Controversiae could not just acknowledge the adversaries’ existence and juxtapose the Catholic truth against the Protestant error, but they were constructed to modify the theo-political structure of Catholicism so as to engulf completely the objections of the heretics. Consequently, when the Protestants attacked the primacy of the pope within the Church, for instance, for

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Bellarmine one could not win that battle just by reaffirming the pope’s role as Peter’s successor and Christ’s vicar, but one had to refine the terms of that primacy so as to make it necessary for the very existence of the Christian Church. By the same token, when the Protestants attacked the authority of the pope in temporal matters, the strategy to adopt should not be simply to reaffirm it but to defend the uniqueness of the pope’s spiritual supremacy, which, on the one hand, required granting a space of autonomy to the political authority, and, on the other hand, would snatch away from the Protestants any political argument against the pope’s right to intervene in politics for the sake of the souls. On this last point, going back to Vincentius’s note that Bellarmine should have defended the authority of Christ in temporal matters on the basis of his hypostatic union with the Father, the Jesuit theologian responded that the union of Christ with the Father is the origin of Christ’s distinctive authority over both angels and men, but it cannot be the origin of a properly temporal dominion, of the same kind that temporal princes and kings hold.117 Once again, for Bellarmine one needed to distinguish between Christ’s plenitude of power, the pope’s supreme spiritual authority, and the temporal sovereigns’ political authority. The scope of the grandiose project of the Controversiae required an immense effort to rethink the theo-political structures of the Catholic Church, and it is no wonder that it provoked a series of reactions not only from an antiJesuit pope such as Sixtus V or from a militant controversialist such as the Hungarian Arator, but also from a Dominican theologian who saw Bellarmine as the most influential example of the theological novelty of the Society of Jesus and even from Pope Clement VIII, who had defended Bellarmine’s theory on many occasions in the 1590s and who in 1599 had appointed him cardinal. We have seen already the pope’s anti-Jesuit rant during the debates over Molina’s book, and soon after that episode Clement showed that he, too, had some troubles digesting Bellarmine’s theory, despite having defended it against a number of attacks. At the beginning of 1602, again during the long theological debates over the doctrine of grace and free will, Bellarmine intervened, suggesting, as he had done on several occasions, that the pope should refrain from making an official decision by himself without the help of the council. To the pope, who was irritated by Bellarmine’s remarks, the Jesuit specified that he was not denying the authority of the pope to decide theological matters but only suggesting that it was more “convenient” and consonant with the practices of the Church to make those kinds of decisions in consultation with the council. The pope replied angrily: “And it would be wonderful indeed if you denied that authority! You should watch what you say.”118 In conclusion, Bellarmine’s theory touched a very sensitive nerve for the Catholic world because it put up for discussion the political and theological role

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of the pope in the Church by engaging the arguments of the heretics in a novel manner. In this respect, Bellarmine’s theory had important repercussions for the relationship between the papacy and the Jesuits, on the political and ecclesiological dynamics within the Catholic Church, and on the political role of the pope with respect to the political and religious institutions of early modern Europe. So far I have sought to shed some light on the reactions provoked by Bellarmine’s theory within the Roman Curia and the Catholic clergy; it is now time to turn to the impact of Bellarmine’s theory among the political and religious enemies of Rome.

3 The Controversy over the Interdetto and the Attacks against Bellarmine’s Theory

The beginning of the seventeenth century marked the start of a new phase for Bellarmine, a phase of relative calm insofar as his position in Rome was concerned, and a phase of great instability regarding the international political scene. On the one hand, his reputation and status in Rome appeared consolidated after the difficult years of the pontificate of Sixtus V, and by 1599 Bellarmine was consultor of the Congregation of the Index and the Congregation of the Inquisition and cardinal of Santa Maria in via. On the other hand, the implications of his theory of the potestas indirecta were being discussed outside of the Roman Curia and the Catholic religious orders, and they emerged at the forefront of some of the most dramatic political and religious controversies in early modern Europe. The first time in which Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta appeared as a new, significant, and controversial reconfiguration of the structure of post-Tridentine Catholicism that could change dramatically the European political and religious equilibrium was the controversy over the Venetian Interdetto, in 1605–1607. That controversy started out as a conflict over the question of clerical exemption, but it soon escalated to the point of creating a dramatic crisis throughout Europe. Before examining the specific role of Bellarmine’s theory in the controversy, I return to his treatment of the question of clerical exemption, which even before the Interdetto had proved to be, to a certain extent, problematic.

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The Question of Clerical Exemption Bellarmine dealt with the issue of clerical exemption in the twenty-eighth and last chapter of the first edition of the Controversia de Clericis, published in the second volume of the 1586 Ingolstadt edition of the Controversiae. In this chapter Bellarmine explicitly framed the question of clerical exemption as a corollary of his political theory. As Bellarmine argued in De summo Pontifice and in De Laicis, political authority enjoyed a degree of autonomy with respect to the ecclesiastical authority, even though ecclesiastical authority over souls was in fact superior to temporal authority over bodies. From the principle of autonomy of political and ecclesiastical authority it follows that clergymen, insofar as they are citizens of the political commonwealth, are not exempted from the obligation to follow the civil laws issued by the temporal princes. As Bellarmine explained, “Clergymen, together with being clergy, are also citizens, and parts of the political commonwealth, and therefore as such they have to live according to the civil laws.”1 But because of the fact that spiritual authority is superior to temporal authority, it follows also that, while it is true that clergymen must observe civil laws, it is equally true that if they do not observe them, they should not be treated like the other citizens: for instance, they cannot be judged and punished by the civil magistrate, for “it seems absurd that the sheep judge the shepherd . . . and that the earthly judge seize or punish men who are servant and consecrated to the Supreme Judge.”2 In other words, clergymen occupy a complex middle ground, which reflects the status of the relationship between ecclesiastical and political authority: just as the latter two are, to a certain extent, separate from one another, so clergymen also enjoy a sort of split status. They are citizens of the earthly commonwealth, and as such they have a number of obligations, including that of following civil laws. But they are also citizens of the other, superior, commonwealth of the Christian Church, and as such they enjoy a number of privileges, such as not being punished by the secular authority and enjoying exemption from the jurisdiction of temporal princes over their goods. But once we grant that clergymen are indeed entitled to a series of exemptions and privileges, it remains to be seen by what right and by whom those privileges are bestowed upon them. For the people whom Bellarmine refers to as the “canonists” and those who argued for the papal plenitudo potestatis in temporal and spiritual matters, clerical exemption was granted iure divino, expressly from the words of Jesus. Those theologians and canonists argued that Christ, while on earth, directly and openly exempted clergymen from the jurisdiction of the political authority when he said, in Matthew 17:26, “then are the children free” from paying tribute to Caesar.

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Bellarmine opposed to this opinion his own, that is, that “clerical exemption in political matters, both with regard to persons and with regard to goods, was introduced iure humano, not iure divino,”3 meaning that clerical exemption was granted by the favor of the princes and by the decrees of the popes and the councils, not by Christ. This conclusion stemmed from Bellarmine’s insistence that Christ, while he lived as man, did not exercise any form of temporal authority: he could not exempt his children from the subjection to the temporal authority, since he had no temporal authority himself. So when Jesus declared his children “free,” he meant that they were free from the slavery of sin, not from the jurisdiction of the temporal ruler.4 Defending his view on clerical exemption, Bellarmine navigates the dangerous seas of the definition of papal authority and of the nature of the Christian commonwealth by attentively trying to avoid the Scylla of the ultrapapalist camp and the Charybdis of Marsilius of Padua’s antipapalist theory. As for the former, the explicit link between clerical exemption and the nature of the Christian commonwealth had been made very forcefully by Francisco Peña, a canonist and jurist who opposed Bellarmine on a number of occasions and to whom I will have occasion to return. In his work entitled De universali Dominio et Regno Domini et Redentoris Nostri Iesu Christi,5 he argued that Christ was indeed supreme temporal and spiritual king and that his kingdom was the Church. Such kingdom, however, could not be simply spiritual because, borrowing and refining Bartolus of Sassoferrato’s definition, Peña wrote that every kingdom, in order to be such, must have a dominion, that is, “the right to dispose of a . . . corporeal thing, since the domination of incorporeal things is not properly dominion.”6 There are three kinds of dominion: the dominium directum, which is the kind of dominion an owner has in possession of something or somebody; the dominium utile, which is the dominion of vassals, who do not own the land but enjoy the fruits of it; and the dominium iurisdictionis, that is, the right of obtaining obedience from subjects in exchange for protecting them, without having any right of possessing the subjects’ personal goods. For Peña, God was entitled to all three kinds of dominion because he created every spiritual and corporal being. Hence Christ’s dominion was also a perfect dominion: he exercised it over all the kings and princes of the earth and passed it on to the Church and its leader. The temporal princes, by contrast, could have only the third kind, the dominium iurisdictionis, granted by Christ, who simply delegated it to the temporal rulers as to his vassals.7 The upshot of this framework is that the issue of clerical exemption becomes, on the one hand, a direct consequence and indeed one of the manifestations of the definition of papal authority as both a spiritual and a temporal authority.8 On the other hand, however, the question of clerical exemption as framed by Peña is completely turned upside down: it is

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the clergy who properly “own” everything, and one should speak rather of the lay exemption that the Church, the holder of the true and direct dominion, granted to princes as kings, along with the authority to exercise dominium iurisdictionis.9 From the other side of the spectrum, there were the Marsilian arguments according to which it was true that Christ, as man, had no temporal power over secular princes and kings, so much so that he was indeed subject to them like any other man. Therefore he was obliged to pay the tribute, since only the supreme temporal authorities could exempt anybody from paying it. So if Christ had no temporal authority to the point of being obliged to pay the tribute, the clergy, too, should be held under the same obligation: the pope could not exempt them, since he could not claim any temporal authority whatsoever. Against both lines of argument, Bellarmine responds by differentiating between Christ’s own jurisdictional authority and Christ’s own spiritual condition in an Augustinian fashion. It is true that Christ was both God and man, but the human component of Christ’s nature did not make him “servus” of the temporal authorities because his human nature was not flawed. Hence, the reason that he was indeed exempt from the jurisdiction of the secular authorities was not his temporal authority but his divine spiritual condition and status. Consequently, the members of the Church are the “adoptive children” of Christ insofar as they were spiritually adopted because they were “renovated in spirit.” But this adoption did nothing to change their human condition on earth, because it did not touch the bodies of Christians, which remained flawed, unlike their Savior’s, by original sin. Hence, even after Christ’s resurrection, all Christians are bound to pay the tribute, just as even after Christ’s resurrection Christians are still waiting for the resurrection of their bodies.10 From this perspective, it is easy to see that the issue of clerical exemption, or rather, the issue of the origin and nature of clerical exemption, is theoretically tightly linked with the issue of the nature of papal authority, and indeed with the nature of the respublica Christiana. If the Church was, as Peña and other canonists were arguing, a proper kingdom endowed with direct dominium, then it would need the authority to own and dispose of temporal people and goods, and its ruler, the pope, would be endowed with the direct authority to intervene in temporal matters as in his proper and immediate area of jurisdiction. For Bellarmine, by contrast, the Church was properly a spiritual kingdom, an empire of souls, and as such it did not have the authority to dispose of temporal matters as an integral component of its essential nature. Of course, the Church and the pope could intervene in temporal affairs indirectly, for the sake of the souls, for which they did not need the ownership and dominium of

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temporal things. They had the ownership of some temporal possessions, as, for example, Peter’s patrimony, and enjoyed some exemptions. All these, however, were the result of historical developments that turned out to be necessary for the preserving of the Church, not intrinsic and connatural aspects of the Church’s and the pope’s authority. Between the end of the 1580s and the beginning of the 1590s, however, the question of clerical exemption was slowly disconnected from the larger theoretical discussion over the nature of papal authority and became, instead, an issue of policy and administration. When, after Trent, the Catholic Church increasingly strengthened its bureaucratic apparatus, it needed the clerical exemption to be granted iure divino because it needed to firm up more strongly the privileges and status of the clergymen involved in ruling the papal state. To claim that exemptions were granted iure humano was tantamount to saying that clergy owed their privileges to the favor of princes, which introduced a measure of historical instability that the Roman Curia did not want: What if some princes decided to revoke the privileges once granted? On what grounds could Rome be assured that this could never happen? By contrast, to affirm that the clergy were exempted iure divino meant to defend and protect clerical privileges from any possible theoretical and historical attack. To be sure, Bellarmine, in the last chapter of De Clericis, had specified that clerical exemption iure humano did not mean that clerical privileges could be revoked by the princes ad libitum, because those privileges were confirmed by the popes and the general councils and also by the consensus of “orbis terrae,” the people of the world, “who conferred to the kings the authority they have.”11 Nevertheless, he, too, felt the pressure to strengthen the foundation of clerical exemption; thus he decided to change slightly his opinion on it in his 1599 revised version of the Controversia de Clericis.12 While, then, Bellarmine decided to express his opinion on clerical exemption in a less controversial manner than in 1586, he nevertheless remained committed to certain tenets of his previous views, the ones more tightly linked with his theory of papal authority. In the new version, chapter 28 is no longer the last chapter of the controversy: two more chapters are added. Moreover, the proposition that in the previous version affirmed clerical exemption to have been introduced only iure humano, and not iure divino, is changed and now reads: “The exemption of the clergy in political matters both with respect to persons and with respect to goods was introduced equally by iure humano and iure divino.”13 However, immediately afterward Bellarmine specifies that “by ius divinum we do not mean a precept of God properly uttered which is expressly in the sacred scripture, but a precept that could be deduced by a certain similitude from examples and testimonies in the Old and New Testament. Hence perhaps

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the opinions of the Theologians and of the Jurists could be reconciled.”14 Among those examples that suggest, “by similitude,” the exemption of the clergy Bellarmine quotes a series of episodes from the Old Testament (Numbers 3, Genesis 47) in which the Levite priests were exempted from a number of obligations to the political ruler, and also the passage from Matthew 17:24–26, “Then the children are free.” It is very important to notice that such a passage is not taken by Bellarmine as an example of a precept expressly given by Jesus to exempt clergymen from political authority but as a form of analogy: as the children of kings are usually freed from paying the tribute, so are the children of Jesus, “for God’s honor,” free from paying the tribute.15 After having conceded that the exemption of the clergy was iure divino positivo, that is, of positive divine law, only by analogy but not by express precept of Jesus, in the following chapter Bellarmine deals with the other possibility by which clerical exemption could be of divine law, that is, iure divino naturali, divine natural law, since, as he writes, “It cannot be called in doubt that natural law is divine, because natural law is that which has been impressed in our souls by the Author of nature.”16 There are three degrees of natural law, Bellarmine explains. The first is the one encompassing the precepts impressed in human minds so clearly that “by the light of reason only, without any discipline or art, indeed without a novel process of reason, are judged by all to be just,” as, for example, that God must be worshiped.17 The second concerns the precepts that are deduced from those first principles “as close conclusions which almost naturally flow from them through an easy, evident and necessary consequence,” as, for example, the precepts of the Decalogue, that descend from the principle that God must be worshiped.18 Clerical exemption is included not in either of those two categories but in the third, the one that refers to the precepts following from the first and second set of principles, “but through a consequence which is not absolute and necessary, nor absolutely evident, and therefore they need a human decree,” which is what, according to Bellarmine, the theologians understand as ius gentium.19 Bellarmine’s definition of ius gentium as something both of positive law and of natural law,20 and his application of this category to the issue of clerical exemption, accomplished a twofold task. On the one hand, Bellarmine was able to firm up clerical exemption as the Roman Curia wanted. Because ius gentium is a part of the divine law, it follows that its precepts cannot be abrogated by civil magistrates in the same way as precepts of civil and human law can be. Hence, clerical exemption, even though it was not expressly granted by Jesus and therefore is not fully of divine law, nevertheless cannot be abolished or modified by temporal rulers. In this manner, Bellarmine was also able to present a theory that could unify the opposing camps of

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theologians and canonists. Those theologians who denied that clerical exemption was iure divino or iure naturali, as did Soto and Vitoria, according to Bellarmine did so because by natural and divine law they understood only the first degree, the canonists who affirmed that clerical exemption was of divine law and whom Bellarmine had opposed in the first version of his work could also be satisfied by Bellarmine’s notion of ius gentium, which was a form of natural and divine law.21 On the other hand, however, by remaining firm in denying that Christ expressly ordered clergymen to be exempted, and by including clerical exemption in the category of precepts iure gentium, Bellarmine was able to maintain the cornerstone of his theo-political theory, that is, the difference and incommensurability of the nature of political and ecclesiastical authority, intact. In fact, the modifications of his opinion on clerical exemption did not undermine his notion that the authority that Jesus had on earth and, consequently, the ecclesiastical authority, are fully and properly spiritual, not temporal. In fact, explaining his opinion on clerical exemption with an example, Bellarmine was able to pick, once again, his metaphor of soul and body: just as the soul is radically different than the body, and yet it can rule and direct it when the soul’s salvation is in jeopardy, so ecclesiastical authority, “naturaliter” spiritual, can rule and direct political authority, when eternal salvation is at stake. To say that clerical exemption is iure gentium maintains this balance: just as clerical exemption is not of divine law in the strictest sense of the term, it still partakes in it enough so that princes and rulers cannot abrogate it, even though they must not consider it at the same level as the precept of worshiping God or following the Ten Commandments.22 Also, Bellarmine’s middle way of treating the issue of clerical exemption was very apt to defend his central point that the Christian Church and the political commonwealth are neither fully separate, as Marsilius would have wanted, nor fully combined, as Peña would have wanted. As Bellarmine explained at the end of the revised version of De Clericis: “The Church is only one, and in no way is it two, but the city is one materialiter, and two formaliter, as the Church contains all Christians and Catholics, whether they be clergymen or laymen. But if somebody considered the community of the laymen, not as Christians, but as citizens, or in any other manner, that community cannot be called the Church . . . the community of the laymen and that of the clergymen formaliter can be called two cities . . . and yet materialiter they also form one city.”23 In the same manner, to say that the exemption of the clergy from temporal authority is of both divine and humane law respects this duplicity. On the one hand, it was granted by men’s favor insofar as temporal rulers have the authority to bestow upon

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their subjects some exemptions and some obligations; on the other hand, it was consonant with the divine law insofar as within the Christian Church the clergy are recognized as superior to the laity.

The Venetian Interdetto: Paolo Sarpi against Robert Bellarmine The case of the Venetian Interdetto put Bellarmine’s view of clerical exemption to the test in a dramatic way, and it also exposed the profound dissension within the body of Catholic theologians over both the nature of such exemption and the larger theoretical question of the nature of papal authority. Between 1604 and 1605, the Senate of the Republic of Venice issued two laws forbidding the building of churches and the alienation of ecclesiastical property without the Senate’s approval, and in the fall of 1605 it issued two decrees ordering that two clergymen, accused of common crimes, be put on trial in front of the secular magistrate. Paul V, who had just been elected pope, decided to give Venice an ultimatum at the end of 1605: if the republic did not repeal the laws issued, the Church of Rome would excommunicate the republic and put it under an interdict. The republic refused to repeal its laws, and Paul fulminated the excommunication in the spring of 1606. The Interdetto remained in effect for one year. The Society of Jesus paid a steeper price for the Venetian crisis, as it was expelled from the territories of the republic during the Interdetto and was not allowed to return for the following fifty years.24 Initially, Bellarmine was not enthusiastic about the decision of the pope to use force instead of diplomacy to solve the crisis. In his history of the Interdetto, Paolo Sarpi reported that while the Venetian ambassador in Rome was canvassing the Roman Curia trying to convince the cardinals to lobby the pope to avoid excommunication, Bellarmine said that “the Pope did not speak with him about these jurisdictional matters, because he [Bellarmine] understood them in a wider scope, and he would have exhorted the Pontiff to put more care into the question of the residence of the Prelates in their own church.”25 Nevertheless, once the Interdetto had been declared, Bellarmine participated actively in the controversy, which touched his own theory more closely than he had probably anticipated. In fact, Sarpi, one of the most influential theologians of his generation,26 appointed in 1606 as consultore, that is, as a theological and juridical adviser to the republic during the years of the crisis, and author of a series of works in defense of Venice, had perfectly understood that the issues at stake in the controversy over the Interdetto were not limited to questions of clerical exemption and secular jurisdiction but were closely linked to the larger question of the nature of the authority of the pope and of the structure and theoretical

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foundations of the post-Tridentine Church. From his work it is evident that Sarpi also understood that Bellarmine was potentially the most relevant theoretical enemy of Venice, but that he could also become its most important ally. Sarpi defended the Venetian positions in two ways. In his role as consultore, Sarpi exerted a great deal of effort to explain and defend the legitimacy of the Venetian laws against the clergymen, in order to challenge the validity of the excommunication and to give the Venetian Senate theological and juridical ammunition to use in the political battle against Rome. At a different level, Sarpi was the protagonist of a very public polemical battle of libels and pamphlets. This started with the edition and translation in Italian, published anonymously by Sarpi in 1606, of two treatises of Jean Gerson on the unjust excommunication and on the limitations of papal authority within the Church. Gerson’s treatises set the tone, at a theoretical level, for the kind of debates Sarpi wanted to have publicly, debates that would not be limited to the discussion of the Venetian laws or even of the issue of ecclesiastical exemption but that would situate the specific Venetian crisis within larger theoretical and political issues regarding the nature of the political and ecclesiological authority of the pope, thus linking the Venetian complains and requests to Rome with those of the Gallicans in France.27 Both in the “private” consulti and in the public debates, the name of Bellarmine returned frequently in Sarpi’s works. Prior to the Interdetto, Sarpi and Bellarmine had met in Rome in the second half of the 1580s, when Sarpi was procurator general of his own order, the Servites, and Bellarmine was finishing up his Controversiae while dealing with the Louvain controversy. Sarpi and Bellarmine seemed to have important theological and ecclesiological affinities. As Fulgenzio Micanzio wrote in his biography of Sarpi, one time during a meeting at which both Sarpi and Bellarmine were present, a discussion started, and some of the participants, those who “wanted to flatter” the pope, said “many exorbitant things on the unlimited power, indeed omnipotence, of the Pope, so much so that Father Bellarmine with a low voice said to Father [Sarpi]: ‘These are the things that made Germany revolt, and the same will happen in France and other realms.’”28 But the less-than-friendly attitude of Bellarmine toward Sixtus V and his flatterers was not the only thing that Sarpi found congenial: indeed, Bellarmine’s theory of papal authority seemed to the Venetian friar especially useful in his battle, particularly on two issues. First, Sarpi used Bellarmine’s denial of the divine-law origin of clerical exemption as an argument to prove that, since clerical privileges were given by human law and the favor of princes, the Republic of Venice had the right to remove some of those privileges, including the right to alienate ecclesiastical property, build churches, and escape secular trials,

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whenever such removal was convenient to the good of the commonwealth. In his Consulti, texts written for the sake of the Senate of Venice without intent for publication and therefore free from the polemical edge of Sarpi’s pamphlets, the name of Bellarmine occurs often as one of the theologians who supported the correct view of clerical exemption, either listed together with other like-minded Catholics such as Soto and Vitoria or singled out specifically. For instance, in his Consulto number 5, written in February 1606, Sarpi wrote that the canonists who wrote in support of the exemption iure divino usually cited as supporting evidence a passage of Boniface VIII in the canon “Quamquam,” in which the pope defined clerical exemption as not only of human, but also of divine law. However, Sarpi wrote, “To the authority of Boniface Cardinal Bellarmine responds . . . that Boniface held the opinion of the canonists but that he did not decree things that needed to be believed, he only explained his opinion, an opinion that Bellarmine does not share, and believes should not be shared.”29 When Sarpi wrote for publication, and for a wide spectrum of readers (both he and Bellarmine wrote in Italian, as did virtually all the other participants to the debate with few, if notable, exceptions) to defend Venice after the excommunication, he embedded his thesis of clerical exemption in a wide theoretical framework, anchored to a discussion of the authority of the pope both within the Church and outside of it with respect to the political authority. Even then, he found Bellarmine’s arguments very congenial to his own. In the so-called Trattato dei sette teologi, Sarpi argued that the entire crisis of the Interdetto stemmed from a dramatic equivocation on the nature of the authority of the pope, which in turn had given a distorted meaning of the legitimacy of the pope’s intervention in the politics of the Republic of Venice. The power of the pope, Sarpi said, is not infinite, but limited to “the public utility of the Church and has the divine law as its rule.” Those who claim that papal power is, in fact, unlimited, do so on the basis of the fact that he is the Vicar of Christ. But, first of all, “Christ did not hand over to them his authority as God, but as a Man. The former authority extends itself universally over everything, while he confines the latter to the Heavenly Kingdom, and for this reason the Lord said ‘Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo.’”30 Another proof that the authority of the pope is much more limited than that of Christ is that he, unlike Christ, cannot change sacraments or do anything against the dictates of the gospel. And as for the superiority of the pope over the council, Catholic theologians are still discussing exactly the terms of this superiority. It is true that the pope is the supreme judge of the consciences, but that does not mean that a pope could not occasionally err.31 If all this sounds familiar, it did to Paolo Sarpi as well, who was a controversialist intelligent enough to understand that simply plagiarizing Bellarmine

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was much less helpful than recognizing him as his source. In fact Sarpi quoted the Jesuit theorist constantly, in order to take full advantage of the similarities that he saw between his and Bellarmine’s doctrine not only to strengthen the position of the Republic of Venice against the pope, as he did in the Consulti, but also to strike a polemical victory against his ally/enemy Bellarmine. Sarpi succeeded in this, for in the numerous replies that Bellarmine wrote against the Venetian friar one could almost feel the cardinal more and more defensive, more and more engulfed by the polemical swamp in which Sarpi was putting him. He responded to Sarpi’s Trattato immediately, and in that response he seemed to want to avoid putting his own doctrine in the polemical spotlight. Already in the preface to his Risposta al trattato delli sette teologi, he said that many people were surprised that he decided to reply “to certain vulgar booklets which seem, and indeed are, of little substance and less doctrine,” compared with “the authority of the Latin works that at a different time I sent to print.”32 Bellarmine needed to defend the cause of the Church, but he also needed to defend himself; therefore, he decided to throw himself, albeit reluctantly, into the arena. However, he glossed over some of the most controversial issues raised by Sarpi, as, for instance, that Christ had no temporal authority. In fact, when responding to Sarpi’s argument that the authority of the pope is limited because Christ’s authority was purely spiritual, Bellarmine reported Sarpi’s text but omitted Sarpi’s comments on the biblical passage “My kingdom is not of this world.” As to Sarpi’s proposition, Bellarmine admitted that “we will easily agree with this passage” if the right distinctions are made. In fact, the authority of the pope is “unlimited” with respect to that of bishops or princes, because “the bishops have authority restricted to their dioceses and the princes have it restricted to their particular dominion, while the supreme Pontiff has authority in the whole world”; compared with God, however, the authority of the pope is certainly limited, “but all this has nothing to do with the present controversy, and it does not seem fit to us to waste time without necessity.”33 Also, regarding the conciliarist issue, Bellarmine remarked that the pope is indeed superior to the council, and saying otherwise was “the argument of the heretics.” As to his own testimony, quoted by Sarpi, he replied, “I said only that the question [of the Fifth Lateran Council] is still open among the Catholics, as some of us do not admit that it was truly a general council.” Bellarmine mentioned that Council, he continued, because he wanted “to establish the truth [of the superiority of the pope] perfectly, solving all the arguments not only of the heretics, but also of the Catholics who argued the contrary, such as Jean Gerson,” or, in other words, because he wanted to clarify the truth of a historical statement, thereby strengthening, not undermining, the force of his theological assertion.34 Bellarmine’s impatience is very evident in this quotation and

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throughout the text. It was the impatience of a scholar witnessing his own statements used to support the Venetian cause and trying to attribute this (mis) application of his thought to the rough simplification of his complex web of arguments on the part of the adversary. For example, when Sarpi, again quoting Bellarmine, claimed that one does not have to be obedient to the pope on all occasions, Bellarmine specified that while it is certainly true that the pope cannot command everything, nevertheless one needs to be very precise in making this kind of statement. While the pope cannot command “i moti interiori in se stessi,” that is, what is properly the interior sphere of the conscience, he can nevertheless command exterior manifestations of the interior sphere, which is another version of what Bellarmine had said regarding the pope’s jurisdiction, which had to be limited to the exterior manifestation of the interior forum of the consciences, the direct insight into which is reserved to God alone. Without these specifications, Bellarmine cried out, true propositions become heretical statements!35 Sarpi understood that Bellarmine was in a corner, and he decided to keep hitting in the same spot. In his Apologia per l’oppositioni fatte dall’illustrissimo & Reverendissimo Signor Cardinale Bellarmino, Sarpi kept Bellarmine on the ropes. While defending his theory of the potestas indirecta in his responses to the Venetian pamphlets, Sarpi wrote, Bellarmine had used an equivocation. He could not say that the pope was a temporal superior of the king, but instead of specifying that the pope was superior only in spiritual matters, he used the word “superior” without further qualifications: “But we have to beware of this way of doing theology, with which one disfigures and confuses the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the world: the simple people are deceived and they are induced to believe that they should obey the pope in everything.”36 If Bellarmine had been less murky and confused, he would have had to admit that clerical exemption was not of divine law as he himself had proved on several occasions;37 he would have had to admit that the issue of the superiority of the pope over the council was still open, as he wrote in his Controversiae;38 he would have affirmed as a sound and Catholic doctrine that the Church is not a commonwealth “like Venice or Genoa,” nor a kingdom like France, since its realm is “invisible, spiritual, interior”;39 he would have admitted all the things that theologians such as Soto and Vitoria had argued and that he himself had affirmed in his Controversiae, especially the one on the pope, which was written “when this controversy was not yet born and Bellarmine judged things without passion.”40 Finally, responding to Bellarmine’s point that in case of theological doubts it was better to sin in excess rather than defect in defending the authority of the pope, Sarpi remarked that “Cardinal Bellarmine in his work De romano pontifice [sic] wrote a long discussion limiting the authority of the supreme Pontiff and mentioned several

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things that the same Pontiff cannot do, and his discussion would be useless if there was not some excess in such authority.”41 In sum, Sarpi kept pushing the buttons of Bellarmine’s inconsistency within his own opinions and of the congruence of his previous opinions with the cause of Venice. Bellarmine, for his part, kept responding, but he seemed more and more defensive. His reply to the Trattato dei sette teologi is built as an attempt to set his own record straight by stating and explaining his own statements, and by demonstrating how they had been victims of Sarpi’s cavils. Seeing Bellarmine’s manuscript copy of the work, one can appreciate the enormous labor Bellarmine exerted to constantly refine not so much Sarpi’s arguments but his own.42 For example, on the issue of clerical exemption, Bellarmine decided that he needed to defend himself by referring the readers to the later, post-1599 edition of De Clericis. Initially, however, he thought that he could also defend his previous opinion, and in the manuscript he started to write that even if in the first edition he had stated that clerical exemption was not of divine law, he had written only “that there was no direct and express mention in the words, not that. . . .” Evidently frustrated by this attempt at saving his own opinion, he left the phrase hanging and canceled the addition. Instead, he added only that in the post-1599 edition of the De Clericis he had confirmed that clerical exemption was of both divine and human law: “I tried to interpret in a good sense the scriptures that at first glance seem not to admit the exemption by divine law.”43 He had to go back again and again to this issue of clerical exemption. Later in the work he again referred to his 1599 version of De Clericis, and there he called that second version “a declaration, not a mutation or contradiction.” But Bellarmine must have thought that “contradiction” was a dangerous word given the polemical tone that Sarpi had set, and that was centered upon the thesis that Bellarmine had contradicted himself in his writings against Venice with respect to what he had written in the Controversiae, and so changed “contradiction” to “correction.”44 In the Risposta Bellarmine did not avoid the issue of Jesus’ temporal authority, the “My kingdom is not of this world” passage, but one can see very clearly the impatience with which he faced the difficulty. He introduced the discussion by showing himself almost exhausted by the continuous need to restate his own propositions on the matter; thus he declared that the only thing he ever said was that Jesus handed over to his vicar “the most ample authority not absolutely, but insofar as it was possible to hand over this authority to a mortal man. Otherwise whoever would want to use slanders and cavils will also be able to say that it is not true that the past is past, and that man is irrational, and that a beast is rational.”45 As to the “My kingdom is not of this world” passage, Bellarmine wrote that Sarpi should have quoted, together with this passage, also that in

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which Jesus said, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matthew 28:18). Thus for Bellarmine the correct way of stating the question is that the vicar of Christ, endowed with no more and no less than the most ample authority that he can have as a man, “does not want to seize, to use his [Sarpi’s] expression, the temporal things of the laymen, and this is not the [added: true] cause, but a [added: false] pretext for the separation of the heretics from the Church.”46 This false pretext is used by the heretics but also by Christian princes, “when they go out of the way of salvation misusing their [erased: political] authority or usurping the [erased: ecclesiastical] one that is not theirs.”47 Once again, it is easy to see in this passage the attempt by Bellarmine to strengthen his argument as much as possible by adding the adjectives “true” and “false” to emphasize strongly the difference between sound arguments and heretical or heretical-sounding statements, while trying to avoid exposing his own arguments to further contention by erasing the adjectives “political” and “ecclesiastical” so as not to give Sarpi further occasion to insist on the separation between the ecclesiastical nature of the pope’s authority and the political nature of the temporal ruler’s. Certainly, this is the stuff that makes for a great academic writer: attentive, thorough, weighing every word to make sure that it is as specific as possible and avoids ambiguity. But this is not the stuff that makes for the kind of aggressive controversy that some members of the Roman Curia thought was needed against Sarpi.48 For example, Cardinal Cesare Baronio, the other high-profile Roman author who participated in the anti-Venetian polemical battle, had none of Bellarmine’s scruples because he had no need to defend himself, and thus he was free to attack Sarpi unapologetically. His Paraenesis against the Republic of Venice is a strong text with a clear thesis: if we are looking for somebody guilty of mixing temporal and spiritual authority, the culprit is Venice and its defenders. Moreover, since this kind of mistake is usually done by heretics, the Venetians should pay attention and return to their senses if they want to be called Catholics. As Baronio put it, “the sacred has to be distinguished from the profane by human and divine law,” and that is why, for instance, in the Old Testament kings were not even allowed to enter into God’s temples without the permission of the priest. Thus, how does Venice dare to mix what God wanted to be separate by issuing laws against ecclesiastical rights when laymen are not even allowed to issue laws in support of them?49 All the laws issued by the Venetian Senate, as well as all the arguments put forth to defend them, are simply heretical, and they are worthy of an “Anglicanus conventus” rather than a pious and religious Catholic government.50 If Venice was worried about its political welfare, it should have avoided the heretics who lived among its people rather than having joined them to provoke scandal and conflict in the Church: “Let your

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danger warn you, let your perdition terrify you.”51 Baronio closed his pamphlet saying that he was sure to have done all that he possibly could, not so much to defend the Roman cause but rather to admonish the Venetians of the danger of heresy that they were incurring, and to exhort Venice to return to communion with Rome,52 thus accomplishing a twofold polemical and strategic aim: reinforcing the accusation of heresy against the defenders of the republic and paving the way for possible dissensions within the Venetian camp. The voice of Cardinal Baronio was not the only strong one against Venice, and there was no lack of aggressive attacks on Sarpi and his associates coming from men of Bellarmine’s own religious order. A particularly interesting example is a pamphlet written by Benedetto Giustiniani, a Jesuit father and a consultor of the Congregation of the Inquisition, addressed not to Sarpi but to Marc’Antonio Cappello, a Franciscan friar, former friend of the Jesuit Antonio Possevino, and author of a pamphlet against Robert Bellarmine entitled Delle controversie tra il sommo pontefice Paolo Quinto, et la serenissima republica di Venetia (Venice, 1606).53 Giustiniani did not have the luxury Baronio had, to avoid completely the doctrine of the potestas indirecta and to concentrate simply on the attack on the cause of Venice. Bellarmine was, after all, a fellow Jesuit, and the Jesuits in general were targeted especially by the defenders of the cause of the republic, and indeed they were expelled from the territories of Venice, unlike the other religious orders. Moreover, Cappello’s book was not a generic defense of Venice, but it was specifically against Bellarmine’s theory. So how could Giustiniani attack Cappello effectively and effectively defend Bellarmine at the same time? The solution was to apply a twofold strategy: on the one hand, he insisted that Cappello had understood nothing of Bellarmine’s theory; on the other hand, he forced his own interpretation of Bellarmine’s theory so as to make it more papalist and less vulnerable to the arguments in favor of Venice. Cappello had done his theological homework well and had studied Bellarmine’s Controversiae profoundly, which is why he began his argument by relating Bellarmine’s theory of the autonomy of political government with respect to the ecclesiastical government and by quoting Bellarmine (and Aristotle) on the necessity of men to live in a society ordered by a political government, because they were neither gods nor beasts. Ecclesiastical people, insofar as they are men, are no exception to this law of nature, and therefore they also have to be ruled by a political government. Giustiniani responded by downplaying Bellarmine’s insistence that clergymen were part of the political commonwealth: while it was true that Bellarmine stated that men have to be ruled by a political government, it must also be said that, according to the Cardinal, “clergymen . . . can be called more than men, indeed gods.” Once Giustiniani

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touched up Bellarmine’s discussion of the double status of the clergy so as to highlight their condition of superiority and the quasi-divine character of their condition, it is easy to argue that “hence, necessarily, the consequence [of Cappello] is flawed and it is deduced by premises that have no universal truth, therefore all the following statements that the author makes on this point are useful only to waste time and fill the pages with pungent words that have nothing to do with the issue at stake.”54 Even more conspicuous is Giustiniani’s distortion of Bellarmine’s views on the separation of political and ecclesiastical authority and on the autonomy of political government with respect to the pope’s. For Giustiniani, surely Bellarmine meant that though the two have different aims, those aims are indeed subordinated to one another: “As the art of riding horses, which has as its aim ruling and handling the horse well, has a necessary connection with the art of bridle making . . . so the ecclesiastical authority is necessarily joined with the Christian political authority, and, as the bridle would be idle and useless if it could not be used to ride a horse, so the political life of Christians would be completely idle and useless if it did not serve to acquire the eternal blessing.”55 Now, in De summo Pontifice Bellarmine had invoked the same metaphor and had argued expressly that it was not “omnino conveniens” precisely because it denied the autonomy of political authority with respect to the pope’s authority. That is why for Bellarmine the best metaphor to describe the relationship between secular and religious authority remained that of the spirit and the flesh.56 As to the issue of clerical exemption, Cappello argued, based on Bellarmine’s theory of the exemption iure gentium in the 1599 revised version of De Clericis, that the clergymen are not completely exempt from the authority of the temporal authority, since insofar as they are citizens of the political commonwealth they remain bound to follow some of the prince’s precepts, among which there were those issued by the Senate of Venice. For Giustiniani this was nothing by “metafisicare,” that is, making useless and murky metaphysical distinctions to calumniate Bellarmine. The truth is indeed simple, as for every doctor of the Church the exemption of the clergy is “for a natural reason, partly for the dignity of their condition, partly for the duties and offices that they are bound to fulfill.” Bellarmine is no different: he said only that even if “it cannot be proved out of clear testimony from Scripture, it is nevertheless founded on ius divinum.” It is no wonder that Cappello did not get this, because he was not a good enough theologian: if he had been, he would have understood what Bellarmine’s notion of ius gentium meant.57 In conclusion, Giustiniani wrote, Cappello’s and the other Venetians’ campaign against Bellarmine had to stop: everybody noticed, the Jesuit wrote, despite some “dissimulatione, e galantaria di parole,”

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that “sometimes they [i.e., the Venetians] note him as being too harsh against the Republic, sometimes they try to show him to be against the pope’s authority, to make him equally odious to both parties.”58 Giustiniani’s aim in this pamphlet is clear: with a certain degree of the same “galantaria di parole,” or rhetorical twists, of which he had accused his adversary, he tried to eat his cake, that is, to attack the arguments of the Venetian theologians, and to have it too, that is, to defend Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta as a victim of the attack, rather than as a possible way to strengthen the arguments of the enemies of Rome. There were people like Baronio who did not have to worry about having their cake but could concentrate on just eating it. Baronio was not a Jesuit, and even though he was linked to Bellarmine by a long-lasting personal friendship and a deep scholarly affinity,59 the defense of Bellarmine’s theory in the context of his work against the Venetians was not his problem, and that is why he did not need to be apologetic about, and indeed did not even need to mention, the potestas indirecta. But there were also people in Rome who seemed uninterested in the cake at all, in the sense that they thought that the Venetian arguments were not the problem: instead, it was Bellarmine’s theory that had to be censured and attacked, because it was from theories such as Bellarmine’s that Sarpi and his associates drew their strength. One of those from the latter group was Francisco Peña. We have already encountered his name, first as the man who allegedly incited Sixtus V to attempt to have the first volume of Bellarmine’s Controversiae put on the Index of Prohibited Books in the late 1580s, and, later on, as a theorist of clerical exemption granted iure divino. It should be said that those episodes were not single cases of personal antipathy for Bellarmine but were manifestations of an intellectual trajectory that put Peña distinctively at odds not only with the theory of potestas indirecta but also with some of the highest ranking members of the Roman Curia, for which Peña’s career paid a relatively steep price. Peña was born in Spain in 1540 and was trained as a jurist. As such he acquired a great reputation: he was among the members of the commission that prepared the definitive edition of the Corpus iuris canonici, published in 1582. He spent most of his career in Rome, as auditor and then as dean of the Sacra Rota, and he was a consultor of the Congregation of the Inquisition and Congregation of the Index. His best-known work was his edition of and commentary on the Directorium Inquisitorum, a manual for inquisitors written in the 1370s by Nicolas Eymerich, which Peña’s commentary updated so as to make it one of the most influential textbooks for the members of the Roman Inquisition. Such effort made Peña probably the most respected authority in terms of Inquisition procedure in Rome during the second half of the sixteenth century.60

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Already from this work, which by no means dealt with the issue of papal authority, we can see a certain evolution in Peña’s elaboration on the question of the authority of the pope in temporal matters, which later would be developed more fully. The first edition of the work was published in 1578; in 1585 Peña significantly modified and enlarged his commentary, and this last version was reprinted several times during his life and also after his death. At some point in the manual Eymerich mentioned the Unam Sanctam by Boniface VIII when dealing with the role of secular authority in aiding the papacy to exterminate heresies, and Peña’s commentary on it in his 1578 edition briefly touched upon the passage on the two swords of the pope by referring the reader who might have wanted to know more about the meaning of the double swords to Domingo de Soto, and specified that “[the pope] has the temporal sword in order to the spiritual sword, as kingdoms are never changed by the Pontiff unless for reason of faith.”61 During the 1580s Peña evidently had occasion to rethink the issue and to assume a more pro-papalist position, so that in 1585—the first year of the pontificate of Sixtus V—he decided to change the comment he made on the Unam Sanctam. The phrase about the fact that the pope had the temporal sword in order to the spiritual sword disappears and is replaced with “It is not allowed to say that the Roman Pontiff does not have both swords, or both jurisdictions, that is, the spiritual and the temporal.” While in the 1578 edition Soto was the only author quoted, this time the list is much longer: it starts with the canonists who commented on the Unam Sanctam and on several other canons, and it also includes ultrapapalist authors such as Agostino Trionfo. In the list there are also theorists who limited the authority of the pope, as did the aforementioned Domingo de Soto, Juan de Torquemada, and Navarro, but those names appear with a caveat: “I shall warn here that it is not easy to understand the opinion of the above-mentioned authors or other authors who discuss this issue (and I have not referred to them with the intention of approving them), but it is necessary to have discernment.”62 While Peña’s newly sharpened pro-papalist position might have pleased Sixtus V, it did not please Clement VIII, Sixtus’s successor. The clash between Peña and Clement VIII involved the manner in which to deal with Henri of Navarre’s conversion and the possibility that the pope could lift the excommunication against Henri that Sixtus V had issued, and thus the possibility of reconciling Henri with the Holy See. Peña had been involved in the matter since 1594, when he wrote a Censura against the arrêt of the Parlement of Paris, which condemned Jean Chastel, the Catholic who attempted to murder Henri of Navarre, of leasa maiestas and thus condemned him to death. Peña’s text, published in 1595, was a sharp defense of Chastel’s act and a defense of the

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doctrine of tyrannicide: because Henri was not only a political tyrant but also a heretic, he deserved to be eliminated. According to Peña, there are two types of tyrants, the ones whose title to rule is illegitimate, and those who, though legitimate, are nevertheless evil princes. Since the Catholic Church prohibits tyrannicide in the second case only, and Henri’s excommunication made his claim to the throne illegitimate, it therefore made him a tyrant of the first kind, meaning that he should have been eliminated and that Chastel was therefore innocent.63 Peña’s position was in line with the Spanish position, which was to oppose any form of rehabilitation of Henri IV, so that when Clement VIII decided to pardon him and lift the ban of excommunication, Peña and the Spanish faction in Rome made a last attempt to avoid the pacification between France and Rome. In the summer of 1595, Peña asked for and obtained an audience with the pope and gave him a memorandum in which he argued forcefully that Henri should not have been pardoned. His conversion was insincere, and, besides, the many acts he committed after his conversion with which he granted a form of religious liberty in France made him at least a politique, which, for Peña, was a kind of heresy. And because, when dealing with matters of heresy, neither reason of state nor “reason of Church” should be valid, the pope can never refrain himself from persecuting heretics, even if by pardoning one of them he could help maintain peace in the Catholic world.64 Clement VIII did not like Peña’s text, both because politically he was now convinced of the necessity to establish a peaceful relationship between France and the Holy See,65 and because theologically Peña’s position left no room for any state of exception, in Schmittian terms, in cases of heresy, and consequently denied authority for the pope and the Church to decide, for example, to rehabilitate a heretic even if the procedural conditions to lift the ban of heresy were not present. In fact, the pope had Baronio and other cardinals, already favorable to a peaceful resolution of the French affair, censure Peña’s De veris et falsis remediis. When the theologians reported to the pope that the Spanish jurist’s work was not only erroneous but even contained some heretical propositions, the pope reacted by considering the French case definitely closed and by punishing Peña: while he did not accuse him of heresy formally, he continued to sideline him for promotion to cardinal, which Peña never received.66 However, times were going to get much better for the Spanish jurist with Paul V, whose militant Catholicism made him appreciate Peña’s muscular attitude against the enemies of the faith and in support of the vicar of Christ. This affinity between them was immediately relevant during the crisis of the Interdetto, when Paul V considered him to be his main adviser. The pope passed on to Peña most of the writings of the defenders of Venice; he also sought his

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advice repeatedly on how best to proceed: Paul asked Peña’s opinion on whether or not a military solution against Venice was feasible, and on whether or not a peaceful solution, especially favored by the French, was to be preferred. All through the crisis, Peña continued to preach against any form of compromise and for a Spanish-friendly policy of intransigence against the French requests for peace.67 He also participated in the other battle, that of writings and pamphlets, between Rome and Venice, with a short treatise in reply to the Rispsta di un dottore di teologia, by Giovanni Marsilio, a theologian and collaborator of Sarpi’s.68 Peña’s text, entitled Assertio regni Christi, Pontificiae auctoritatis et ecclesiasticae immunitatis, adversus Novum Marsilium, was a brief and hasty pamphlet whose main thesis was that since Giovanni Marsilio argued that the political government was independent from the pope, he was truly another Marsilius of Padua. Thus his and the previous Marsilius’s mistake, which was the same mistake that all the defenders of Venice made, was to assume that the kingdom of Christ was purely spiritual.69 Against both Marsilius and Marsilio, Peña argued that Christ was a temporal sovereign while he lived on earth, and indeed the supreme temporal sovereign as well as the supreme spiritual sovereign; thus not only was he not subject in any way to the temporal ruler, but his kingdom, that is, his Church, was not subject in any way to any temporal power, and instead it was a perfect spiritual and political kingdom.70 In sum, this pamphlet contained a brief version of the theory Peña developed more fully in his De universali Dominio, and, as in the case of the later text, it seemed aimed more against Bellarmine than the Venetian writers. Of course, the anti–Marsilius of Padua theme was very much present in other Roman writings against the Interdetto, including Bellarmine’s own. However, in the other antiVenetian works this argument was used either together with other arguments as examples of the heretical or heretical-leaning tendencies of the Venetians, as in the case of Baronio; or it was used along with a firm defense of Bellarmine’s theory of potestas indirecta as something very different from, and in fact opposite to, the kind of separation between ecclesiastical and political jurisdiction that Marsilius argued for, as in the case of Giustiniani’s pamphlet. By contrast, in the Assertio there was no word of defense for Bellarmine’s theory, and the issue of the temporal kingdom of Christ was treated as the origin of the entire question. In this context, it is not a coincidence that Peña’s Assertio was never published: while Paul V was very much in line with the jurist’s position on the Interdetto, and while he also, to an extent, sympathized with Peña’s general theoretical view so as to allow the publication of De universali Dominio, he and other members of the Roman Curia must have thought that in the heated phase of the debate and with Bellarmine and the Jesuit order under fire from Venice, Peña’s contribution was untimely and potentially detrimental for the unity of the Catholic front.71

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Thus, while on the surface the battle of words over the Interdetto seemed to pit Venice against the Holy See, underneath it there was another battle going on, which concerned the theoretical significance of Bellarmine’s theory of the potestas indirecta. Bellarmine denied that the pope had any direct authority in temporal matters by claiming that his supremacy was in the spiritual nature of his office, and he also argued for a degree of autonomy of the political commonwealth with respect to the Church. But how did Bellarmine’s theory translate into the practical political dynamics of early modern Europe? In this controversy-within-a-controversy the battle lines were less sharply drawn than one might suppose. Francisco Peña considered Giovanni Marsilio as much an enemy as Robert Bellarmine; Paolo Sarpi felt, for both politico-theological and polemical reasons, that Bellarmine might, in fact, support the Venetian cause more than the Roman cause; Benedetto Giustiniani thought that Bellarmine, not the pope or Venice, was potentially the most important and dangerous casualty of the war of pamphlets. Also, the question of the Interdetto did not only oppose the interests of the Roman Curia against those of the republic but also exposed many issues that made the situation much more complex. First of all, what kind of Roman Church was to prevail over Venice? Was it the political and military papacy of Paul V, or was it the spiritual empire of souls of Robert Bellarmine? Also, what kind of political equilibrium was Rome supposed to foster: Should it be French-centered or Spanish-centered? Moreover, there was the old question of the role of the Society of Jesus within the postTridentine Catholic Church and also in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European political scenario. Just as in the times of Sixtus V, the Jesuits appeared as a suspicious novelty on the theological issue of grace and free will, now with the Interdetto their status as a quasi-separate entity within the Catholic Church was again highlighted, but the nature of that status was not clear. On the one hand, the Venetian government considered them as the front line of post-Tridentine Catholicism and the right arm of the pope, and, as such, they were expelled from Venice. On the other hand, for Sarpi and many of his associates Bellarmine, one of the most respected members of the Society of Jesus, was the theorist of potestas indirecta and therefore much more Venice-friendly than Baronio or Peña.72

The Venetian Interdetto: The Internal Battle in Rome Rome tried to keep this internal controversy over Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta outside of the spotlight. In this sense, the fact that Peña’s Assertio remained unpublished is very indicative of the attempt on the part of the papacy to avoid sharpening and intensifying the polemic. However, the internal contrasts continued behind the closed doors of the Curia and, in particular, in the Congregation

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of the Inquisition. The official instruments of repression that Rome had at its disposal were immediately at work on the Venetian case: the Congregation of the Index seemed to move quickly and effectively to condemn almost immediately the works by Sarpi and his associates, and to control the spread of Venetian books by alerting the papal nuncios in Venice and in the rest of Europe to make sure that the prohibition to buy and sell the forbidden books was respected.73 And, to strengthen the repression of books and ideas, the Congregation of the Inquisition was also called to issue edicts in which the Venetian works were prohibited and which were supposed to accompany the prohibitions from the Index.74 Usually, the official and final edict of condemnation of a book is the only document we have, and from its dry and sharp language one gets the impression of a united, coordinated, and efficient repressive machine at work. But in certain cases we are lucky enough to see the minutes of the specific discussions that the Inquisitors had, and in those cases the picture that appears is very different. One such case is the discussion that the members of the Inquisition had over some specific propositions in Sarpi’s Trattato dei sette teologi.75 In this document, the image of unity is shattered, and dissension appears to creep in. Unsurprisingly, the Inquisitors were compact in condemning as “iniuriosae” and “hereticae” Sarpi’s propositions touching the obedience that the pope and the Church owed to the secular authority. They were also compact but diplomatic in condemning Sarpi’s proposition on the spiritual nature of the kingdom of Christ because “it takes away from Christ, and therefore from the pope, any authority over temporal matters”76—notice the lack of specificity on the nature of the authority (i.e., direct or indirect) that Sarpi had taken away from the pope. But where the dissension could not be contained was on the issue of clerical exemption. In dealing with Sarpi’s affirmation that clerical exemption was not of divine law, but from the favor of the princes, the Inquisitors split. Some of them, including the Jesuit Benedetto Giustiniani, said that if one intended the proposition to mean that “it must be judged that the exemption is not of divine law,” then the proposition did not deserve any censure. If, however, the proposition had to be taken in the sense in which the author took it, that is, clerical exemption “comes only from the concession of the secular prince, then it is erroneous in faith.” Giustiniani and like-minded Inquisitors expressed these two possibilities regarding that proposition because they wanted to avoid condemning it tout court, for this meant condemning Bellarmine also. The members of the Inquisition did realize that some word of condemnation had to be uttered; that is why in a marginal note we find “it is more true that it deserves a censure,” but the document leaves also the other opinionas a testament to the fact that the interpretation of clerical exemption needed some room for discussion.77 Other

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Inquisitors, including the commissary general of the Holy Office, the Dominican Agostino Galamino, did not have any such scruples and “said that the whole proposition is simply erroneous.”78 More evidence of the contrast within the Congregation of the Inquisition can be gathered from the manner in which it dealt with people, not just books. Immediately before and after the Interdetto was lifted, when the hot political phase of the Venetian crisis seemed to be winding down, the Roman Inquisition, with the help of the nuncio in Venice and the occasional collaboration of local Inquisitors in central and northeastern Italy, began to contact some of those who had written in favor of the Interdetto. Of course Paolo Sarpi and also Fulgenzio Micanzio, who had started to assume a very high-profile role after 1607, were out of the question because of their public roles and powerful supporters. But the Inquisition started to target other people, and not simply for punishment. As Baronio had already hinted at in his pamphlet, the way back to unity with Rome was open to the supporters of the cause of the republic. In particular, those who held some form of clerical appointment decided, for a variety of reasons, to change their minds after the lifting of the excommunication. In this respect, the nature of the Inquisition as an instrument of repression but also of correction and control was perfectly suited to organize the procedural steps of the recantations, to issue the appropriate punishment, and to organize the public moment of reconciliation so as to gain as much political capital as possible out of the dissension from the adversaries’ camp.79 But, once again, slipping through the crack of the organized and compact action, the documents betray a certain degree of discomfort in dealing with the potestas indirecta. An especially interesting case is that of a man we already know, Marc’Antonio Cappello, the Franciscan friar who wrote against Bellarmine and whose work was specifically targeted in Giustiniani’s pamphlet. With the intervention of his former friend Possevino and that of Monsignor Berlinghiero Gessi, nuncio in Venice, just before the official repeal of the Interdetto, Cappello was convinced to abjure his writing in support of Venice and was aided to escape Venice to go to Rome.80 In April 1607 Cappello had stopped in Bologna on his way from Venice to Rome, and he decided to write to the pope and to the members of the Inquisition to make sure he apologized in writing before facing the Inquisitors. His patron on that occasion was Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, papal legate in Bologna,81 who wrote to Cardinal Scipione Borghese that Cappello was ready to ask for forgiveness, but that he asked that his recantation be treated in such a way as to spare him from “a perpetual stain.”82 To show the Franciscan’s good will, Giustiniani added Cappello’s own letter to the pope, in which the friar offered many apologies and some justifications

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for his opinions.83 Cappello started by admitting he made a mistake: even if “erring is a human thing, and the most learned, most holy and most dear to God have sometimes fallen in most grave errors,” nevertheless Cappello was ready to “recur to this Holy See and ask humble forgiveness for my faults, while I show myself ready to correct my mistakes with the pen, and (if it pleases Your Beatitude) make ink out of my blood.”84 Cappello was a theologian, and even when pleading for forgiveness he could not refrain from making some theological arguments to justify his positions. More specifically, he wrote that he recognized that his main fault was to say that the pope made a mistake in issuing the excommunication against Venice, but the reason for this was that “some of those who defend the cause of Your Beatitude” make some confusion on the infallibility of the pope. Instead of defending the pope’s infallibility ex cathedra, they “allow the distinction that some precepts and decrees issued from this cathedra are dubious, some clear,” and some of those that are dubious are just, some unjust. Therefore, one must obey only the former, and not the latter.85 Cappello continued by stating that he understood the falsity of that principle, which stirred him and many others to argue that the Interdetto was invalid and that Venice was right, and now he had nothing left but asking for forgiveness. The pope forwarded the letter to the Holy Office. The Inquisition met on 9 May 1607 to read Cappello’s “spontaneous apology” and decided to censure his book and to eliminate some of its propositions.86 The propositions in question were identified, censures were made, and the document was shown to Cappello between May and the beginning of June 1607. After seeing the censures, however, Cappello felt that he could not just accept them without some complaints, which he voiced in a letter he sent to the Inquisition on 11 June 1607.87 Cappello of course knew he was not in a position to negotiate or discuss the terms of the censures, but still his pride as a theologian did not let him ignore them. He wrote a long letter, in Latin—his previous letter of apology was written in Italian—to explain that, while he was not defending his writings, for which he had already apologized, he wanted to clarify his position so that the sentence against his writing could be carried out “more justly and more piously” once his intention and arguments had been known.88 The surprising thing for Cappello was that most of the censures did not concern the issue of papal infallibility. Rather, most of the propositions referred to the parts of his book in which he laid out his view that political authority was distinct from the ecclesiastical one and that this distinction was instituted by divine law. Cappello’s surprise, as he expressed in his lengthy and theologically complex response, came from the fact that virtually everything he said came not from Sarpi or from the heretics but from Aquinas, from the neo-Thomist theologians, and, of course, from Bellarmine. It was Vitoria, Cappello wrote,

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together with Aristotle, Aquinas, and Navarro, who affirmed that the political authority was of natural law as it “follows men’s natural weakness.” Out of this principle Cappello deduced that the clergymen were subject to the princes in temporal matters: if he had made a mistake, then all those “tanti vires” made the same mistake also.89 After all, Bellarmine had said that Christ and Paul were de facto subject to the temporal judges, and if it this is true, “it will be much less impious to say the same about clergy.”90 Moreover, regarding the authority Cappello attributed to the temporal princes over the clergy, he elaborated his arguments not out of his own personal interpretation or with the intent of giving to the princes any spiritual authority but in the sense in which neo-Thomist theologians expressed them, “duce Victoria Catholico”: “If those propositions are not condemned as heretical, indeed they are rather permitted and approved, I trust that once I made clear what I meant, those propositions might be spared the rigor of the censure.”91 Probably Cappello was expecting some form of theological discussion over the censures and his replies, but assuming this was the case, he was sorely disappointed. Cappello’s letter was discussed in the Inquisition and examined by Bellarmine, together with the rest of the Inquisitors, on 16 June 1607. The final decision taken at that meeting, however, was to avoid further discussion on the issues raised by the Franciscan and to close the case quickly: “They unanimously said that his responses do not stand in the way of the censures, but every single proposition of those above-mentioned is truly found in his book, and the censures made upon them are excellent.”92 On 28 June the pope and the Inquisitors decided Cappello’s punishment, which was to abjure de vehementi in front of the congregation, and to condemn in writing the doctrines expressed in his own books. The Inquisitors reserved to themselves some more time to decide on his rehabilitation.93 Cappello was finally pardoned, even though his abjuration and recantation did not happen as publicly as Rome initially wanted, probably because of Cappello’s insistence on the proximity of the theses supported in his book with Vitoria’s and Bellarmine’s theories. When, in the fall of 1607, Robert Bellarmine responded to his fellow Italian Jesuit Paolo Comitolo, who had himself participated in the battle of pamphlets during the Interdetto and who had asked Bellarmine about the Cappello affair, Bellarmine said that “we cannot talk about the way in which Marc’Antonio Cappello retracted, because everything went through the Holy Office secretly, hence I pray Your Reverence to excuse me if I do not say anything.”94 Bellarmine mentioned also the “writing” that Cappello sent to Rome to defend his book and said that “it did much harm, and when it is known of by the people who should know here, I do not know how it could be taken.”95 The people in Rome of whom Bellarmine was afraid were his enemies,

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people like Francisco Peña, who thought that the entire affair of the Interdetto was, if not originated, at least strengthened by Bellarmine’s theory of the indirect authority of the pope. In order to avoid this, Bellarmine thought that it might be good that the Inquisitor of Bologna, Comitolo’s local contact (he was residing in Perugia), got a copy of Cappello’s censure and sent it over to the Inquisition in Rome. Bellarmine, however, specified that the Bolognese Inquisitor’s action should seem to come out of his own inspiration, and not from the suggestion of Comitolo.96 Evidently Bellarmine wanted to show the Roman Inquisition the dangerous nature of Cappello’s reply and the fact that this text was spreading into central Italy, without wanting to show that this anti-Cappello campaign was orchestrated by a member of Bellarmine’s own order, which had already defended Bellarmine on several occasions. In any case, Bellarmine did not come back to this issue in his correspondence. Cappello did produce his written abjuration, a text entitled De absoluta rerum sacrarum immunitate a potestate principum laicorum, but the text was not published. In fact, still in the spring of 1608, Cardinal Borghese, replying to the nuncio in Venice who had asked whether he could publish Cappello’s recantation, wrote that the abjuration could not be published because the Holy Office wanted the affair to remain secret. Of course if there was an “urgenza,” as, for instance, the urgent need to convince somebody else to recant, the nuncio was permitted to show the abjuration to that particular person, without publicizing it. “It is most true,” Borghese continued, “as you say, that it would be convenient that the emendation of such a public mistake should be also public, but we must comply with human infirmities.”97 The abjuration never saw light, and in the meantime Cappello started to rebuild his reputation as a sound Catholic author by taking up the defense of the pope in other controversies: in 1610 his treatise Adversus praetensum primatum ecclesiasticum Regis Angliae, against James I and dedicated to Cardinal Giustiniani, his protector, was published in Bologna. Cappello continued to publish polemical works, most notably against Marc’Antonio De Dominis, and he died in Rome in 1625.98 The case of Cappello’s writings and the Roman reaction to them was like the muffled cry of a large elephant in the papal room: What should Rome do with Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta? The arguments that Cappello drew from Vitoria and Bellarmine were the same that prompted Sixtus V to put the work of both theologians on the Index of Prohibited Books. The Sistine rage had passed, and Bellarmine was safely installed in Rome, holding many prestigious offices, but Sarpi kept repeating that the case of Venice was supported rather than opposed by Bellarmine, and now Cappello, even after deciding to switch sides, was saying the same thing. In the case of Cappello, the Inquisition refused to deal with the issue: his abjuration happened in secret, his written

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recantation was never published, and the next time Cappello’s voice was heard through a printed work was in his 1610 work against James I. Soon afterward, however, the same problem manifested itself again, in the case of another theologian who wrote to support the cause of Venice, Gaspare Lonigo. Lonigo was a Venetian priest and jurist, brother of Michele, who during the years of the Interdetto was working as a librarian in the Vatican Archive, of which he became praefectus in 1610.99 In 1606 Gaspare wrote a pamphlet in support of the republic under the pseudonym of Ventura Vicentino.100 Because the author was a jurist, the pamphlet contains a long and erudite defense of the legitimacy of the laws issued by Venice against ecclesiastical privileges, which dealt with technical questions such as the origin of the laws, the precedents, and an examination of each part of each law, and also of the juridical legitimacy of the pope’s Interdetto.101 The very first part of the book, however, is dedicated to setting up the technical discussion in a wider theological framework, and it starts with a discussion of the nature of papal authority. Quoting theologians and canonists such as Aquinas, Vitoria, Soto, and Bellarmine, Lonigo starts by declaring boldly that it is so evident that the pope has no direct dominion in temporal matters that his own discussion is almost superfluous, and is justified only by the need to set the record straight before proceeding.102 His arguments follow rather closely the line of arguments of the neo-Thomist theologians and Bellarmine in particular, to whom Lonigo often refers. For example, if the pope had any direct temporal authority, he would have also some political authority over the infidels, which he does not. He has temporal authority only over Peter’s patrimony, but that is because those possessions and territories were donated by the emperors, “since Christ, while he lived on earth as a man, did not accept nor want any temporal authority. The pope is the Vicar of Christ and the representation, for us, of Christ as he was while he lived among men, and therefore the pope, as the Vicar of Christ and Supreme Pontiff, does not have such authority.”103 In fact, temporal authority, Lonigo continued, was neither necessary nor useful for Christ because his aim was “the redemption of humankind,” and for that aim there was no need of such authority. Lonigo’s conclusion was that the pope’s jurisdiction in temporal matters is only indirect, for the sake of the spiritual end.104 After having set up the spiritual nature of papal authority, Lonigo continued by stating that the spiritual and temporal authority are therefore both of divine law and “omnino distinctae” from one another, so that the pope is the supreme spiritual authority and the king the supreme temporal authority.105 In other words, Lonigo restated and “stretched” Bellarmine’s theory of the degree of separation between secular and spiritual authority to the point of arguing that the Church and the state were two completely separate commonwealths.

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And, because in the temporal commonwealth the rulers are supreme sovereigns and do not recognize any superior, and because it is their duty to issue laws that could ensure the welfare of their state, it follows that when one discusses the laws that the Senate of Venice issued against the clergy, the only thing to evaluate is whether those laws are in fact useful to the commonwealth, since it is already well established that those laws regulate matters of political, not ecclesiastical, competence.106 On the issue of the nature of clerical exemption, Lonigo offers an interesting twist: he was not interested in proving that it was of human law only—in fact his numerous quotations of Bellarmine come from his De summo Pontifice, not his De Clericis. Even if clerical exemption was of divine law, Lonigo wrote, it would have an effect only if the prince deprived the Church of things necessary to its purely spiritual aim. And, because real estate and temporal goods are not necessary to the spiritual kingdom, but are indeed necessary to the temporal commonwealth, then the Senate of Venice has full right to dispose of those things as it sees fit without damaging the Church and, consequently, without deserving the punishment of excommunication.107 After this point, the following 150 pages of the book are taken up by a juridical discussion of all the juridical steps taken during the controversy by both the Roman Curia and the Senate of Venice. The Roman Inquisition had already set its eyes on Lonigo’s book, which was quoted by many other pro-Venetian writers as a source of inspiration at the same level as the writings of Paolo Sarpi, and it had already met to discuss the book and noted the propositions to be censured. Meanwhile, Lonigo must have had a change of heart: seeing that the Interdetto had been lifted and therefore that the republic and Rome were not at war anymore, he thought that his clerical appointment—he was the priest in charge of overseeing and collecting the revenues from the parish of San Giovanni Decollato—could be jeopardized by some act of retaliation, since his status was not as publicly well defended as Sarpi. Thus, he agreed to recant his defense of Venice. The Roman Inquisition was immediately on his case. We know this because the Archive of the Inquisition contain a folder dedicated to collecting the documents of the Lonigo case,108 and the first of those is a letter from Monsignor Gessi, the nuncio in Venice, sent to the Inquisition in the summer of 1608, in which the papal diplomat informed the Inquisitors that Lonigo had seen the censures against his book and was willing to write an abjuration of everything and to present it to the Inquisitor of Ferrara in exchange for pardon and absolution. What he was not willing to do was go to Rome, because he was worried of possible acts of retaliation on the part of the Venetians, and for this reason he wanted “to be promised secrecy and to be sent

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there [i.e., to Ferrara] quickly in order not to give suspicion with his long absence when he will have to present himself to the Inquisitor.”109 The censures of the Roman Inquisition to Lonigo’s book are enclosed with the nuncio’s letter, and so we can, once again, get a better idea of the kind of discussions the consultores of the Inquisition in charge of Lonigo’s book—this time, together with the Jesuit Benedetto Giustiniani, also Francisco Peña—had on it. They censured thirty-two propositions out of Lonigo’s Consilium, the vast majority of which concerned the first thirty pages of the book, which dealt with the larger theoretical question of the nature of papal authority. As would be expected, the Inquisitors were unanimous in censuring the propositions in which Lonigo expressed his view on the complete separation on the spiritual and ecclesiastical commonwealth, as well as those in which he insisted on the condition of primacy of the prince and on the fact that in temporal matters he did not recognize any superior. Most of those propositions were censured as heretical “in sensu Auctoris,” taken in the context in which the author inserted them, that is, in order to argue that the Venetian laws were legitimate and that the papal excommunication was not. However, there was one proposition over which consensus could not be reached, and that was the one in which Lonigo said that Christ had no temporal authority and, therefore, that the pope, as the Vicar of Christ, had none either. All the Inquisitors said that if the author meant that Christ did not have plenitudo potestatis, and thus that he could not have had any temporal power, then the proposition was heretical. But what if the author meant that Christ did not have any actual dominion or kingdom of a temporal nature? Some of the Inquisitors, including Francisco Peña, said that the proposition was still an “error in fide.” Other members did not comment on this possibility at all, while one man only, Benedetto Giustiniani, said that such proposition was “not worthy of censure.”110 And Giustiniani’s judgment was not on the spur of the moment: he received in the fall of the previous year a long list of propositions out of Lonigo’s book and took some preparatory notes on what he thought of them. On the proposition regarding Christ’s temporal kingdom he wrote: “It is a heretical proposition, like the others, if it denies the temporal dominion insofar as it refers to the spiritual good and end,” which means that insofar as the proposition concerned only Christ’s properly temporal dominion, it was not heretical because Christ did not have any.111 The case of Lonigo was soon after resolved. In October 1608 a copy of the censure was sent to the Inquisitor of Ferrara, and in November of the same year Lonigo told the nuncio in Venice that he was afraid of going to Ferrara “for fear of being discovered and ruined, together with his household,” and he asked for permission to abjure in Venice, in front of the same nuncio, so as to minimize the risk of being discovered. On 4 December 1608 the Congregation of

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the Inquisition and the pope gave their permission, and Lonigo abjured in Venice.112 However, the problems provoked by Bellarmine’s theory and its implications were far from being resolved. In the summer of 1608, Giustiniani was still firm in his position of denying Christ’s temporal authority, as Bellarmine had done. Peña strongly opposed this position, and we should remember that 1608 was the year in which he was writing De universali Dominio, in which he argued that Christ’s (and the Church’s) kingdom was both spiritual and temporal. The tension here is clear: for theologians like Peña it was useless to fight against anti-Roman works such as the Venetian ones without fighting also against Bellarmine’s thesis of the indirect power of the pope. For him the real enemy was inside, and as long as this enemy was not openly condemned, the Church would never get rid of its other enemies. For Giustiniani, once again, a compromise was possible: to say that the pope has only an indirect temporal authority was not the same as saying that he had none at all.

The Venetian Interdetto: The International Context In a sense, Peña understood better than others that Venice was not the cause but only the symptom of a very dangerous infectious disease that was bound to spread unless it was treated radically. And he was right, for the disease did spread quickly and on a large scale. It is well established in the scholarship on Sarpi and the Interdetto that the Venetian theologian intended the controversy over the Interdetto to be something that embraced a much wider context, both geographically and theoretically, than just the Republic of Venice. Already from the translation of Jean Gerson’s treatises, it is clear that Sarpi wanted to frame the Venetian crisis in the context of the theoretical debate over the ecclesiological and theological role of the pope within the Church, and in that context Sarpi was touching on issues that were at the center of the elaboration of the French Gallican theologians and also of a part of Huguenot theologians.113 Also in his other published pamphlets Sarpi returned constantly to the fact that Venice’s complaints against the pope were shared by the Gallican Church, and that to oppose the legitimate requests of the Venetian Senate meant to oppose the same principles on which the liberty of the Gallican Church was founded. For example, in the Considerationi Sarpi insisted that the laws issued by the Republic of Venice against clerical exemption are neither new nor particularly original, but in fact “all Europe has similar laws,”114 and in the Trattato dei sette teologi Sarpi often referred to “the Parisian Doctors,” together with Bellarmine and other neo-Thomist theologians, as examples of theorists who limited the authority of the pope both with respect to the Church and with respect to the temporal authority.115

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Bellarmine of course saw that Sarpi was trying to enlarge the scope of the Venetian affair by including the Gallican Church, and he tried to oppose Sarpi’s strategy by avoiding the topic. In his Risposta against Gerson’s translation, Bellarmine already reacted to Gerson’s attempt to link the issue of the invalidity of certain kinds of excommunication to the issue of the defense of Gallican liberties. Bellarmine said that “it is not necessary to discuss this at this point” because, first of all, it did not apply to Gerson’s arguments, for Gallican liberty had nothing to do with the affirmation made by Gerson that the pope could never modify any canon or decree issued by a council. Second, even if Gerson was indeed talking about Gallican liberty, such liberty “has nothing to do with the liberty to which now the Venetian commonwealth pretends, because the former was founded on ancient canons, while the latter is contrary to both ancient and modern canons.”116 Sarpi noticed Bellarmine’s move, and he decided not to let him off the hook: in his Apologia he wrote that Bellarmine was wrong on both issues. First, Gallican liberty was founded upon the principle that the council is above the pope and, therefore, Gerson was right to link the issue of the lack of authority on the part of the pope to abolish the decrees of the council to the defense of the liberties of the Gallican Church. Second, the cause of Venice was very much like the cause of the Gallican Church, and for this reason Sarpi added a long list of excerpts from Pierre Pithou’s treatise Les libertés de l’Eglise Gallicane (Paris, 1594) to show that the very same principles on which the liberties of the Gallican Church were founded (i.e., that the pope is inferior to the council and that he does not have any temporal authority and is indeed inferior to the king in temporal matters) are the same as those upon which the liberties of the Venetian commonwealth are founded.117 Again, Bellarmine did not pick the fight on Sarpi’s Gallican terms: in his Risposta alle oppositioni di F. Paolo Servita, Bellarmine explicitly refused to answer to the Gallican theme and declared that he had decided to “pass over what Fra’ Paolo adds on the liberty of the Gallican Church because I did not take it upon myself to discuss any matter but only to discover the falsity and calumny of Fra’ Paolo against my writing.”118 The terms of the polemical battle are clear: Sarpi wanted to strengthen the theoretical legitimacy of the cause of Venice by linking it to a wider theoretical scenario; Bellarmine and the Roman Curia wanted to keep the controversy confined. Sarpi, however, was very invested in his pan-European project: together with referring to the Parisian theologians in his writings, he was also in close correspondence with important members of the French Gallican party as well as with important Huguenot figures such as Henri Hotman and Philippe Du PlessisMornay, and with them he discussed at length issues of politics and ecclesiology while trying to gain support for the cause of Venice.119 Many French theologians

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and jurists did not limit their contact with Sarpi to private letters but also publicly sympathized with the cause of Venice: in 1606 Louis Servin published his Pro libertate status et reipublicae Venetorum Gallofranci ad Philenetum epistola, and Jacques Leschassier published Consultatio Parisiis cujusdam de controversia inter sanctitatem Pauli V et serenissimam Rempublicam Venetam.120 Moreover, even if Henri IV’s official policy on the Interdetto was one of strict neutrality, in Rome the papacy was receiving upsetting news that the king was leaning in Sarpi’s favor. In November 1607, Giovanni degli Effetti, one of Cardinal Borghese’s agents in France, sent a report to Rome saying that there was a lot of effort on the part of the Venetian ambassador in France to stir antiRoman feelings, and especially to take advantage of the recent murder attempt on Sarpi. The Venetian ambassador publicly said that the organizers of the murder attempt were the pope and the Jesuits, and he repeated “all the merits, goodness, doctrine and innocence of Fra’ Paolo.” The ambassador’s story was not only relatively well received in the circle of French nobility, but “people were talking about the pope with little respect.”121 The same frustration with France’s sympathies was voiced in the upper echelon of European diplomacy. The papal nuncio in France, Monsignor Ubaldini, complained often of the lack of zeal, on the part of Henri, to take care of the problems coming from Venice, from the immediate aftermath of the Interdetto up to the murder of the king. Ubaldini saw the works of Sarpi circulating widely in France despite the official condemnation,122 the sermons of Fulgenzio Micanzio known and well respected in France,123 and the constant lack of will on the part of Henri to repress those incidents.124 At some point Ubaldini asked for and obtained an audience with the king, but the outcome was disappointing: To the great complaint I made again to the king about the Venetians’ way of proceeding, about Fra’ Fulgentio’s sermons, about the heretical books that from the most corrupt places are introduced into Venice through their very same ambassadors, about the relations and correspondence that Fra’ Paolo and his associates have with the most pestilent Huguenots not only with the knowledge, but also with the help and praise of the government [Signoria], His Majesty replied nothing but that the disorders of which I complained were for the most part true, but that he did not see how he could fix them now, because the souls of people were more and more stirred against His Holiness because they attributed to him the plots discovered against the life of Fra’ Paolo.125 Moreover, the king said, “The world does not believe that in Fra’ Paolo’s writings there are heresies, rather, that they do not contain anything but a defense of the temporal authority of Princes.” The nuncio replied by ensuring the king

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that Sarpi’s writings were indeed heretical, and he offered to the king to have some Catholic theologians come and talk with him about those. And with the king’s nodding, the meeting was over.126 France was not the only foreign country with which Paolo Sarpi had contact, as even the relationship between the Venetian theologian and England was rather tight. Sarpi and many of his associates had friendly and collaborative relationships with Henry Wotton, English ambassador in Venice, and the nature of such collaboration was both scholarly (some forbidden books circulated through the residence of the English ambassador and from there made their way into the hands of Sarpi and Micanzio) and politico-theological (in 1607 Wotton wrote to Giovanni Diodati in Geneva to invite him, on Sarpi’s behalf, to lay the foundation of a Protestant church there).127 Also, Sarpi and the Venetian government showed great interest in James’s oath of allegiance, both for its political implications in the battle against the papacy and for its theoretical and theological significance.128 Moreover, Sarpi’s writings against the Interdetto were immediately translated into English: the Considerations upon the Censures of Pope Paul the Fifth came out in 1606, the Apology in 1607.129 In 1620 his History of the Council of Trent was published in the translation of Nathaniel Brent. While all of Sarpi’s contacts with members of the English and French Protestant establishment are relatively well documented, current historiography is still debating what those contacts mean for our interpretation of Sarpi’s religious and ecclesiological views.130 I intend to leave this question aside, for I am interested in underscoring that Sarpi understood the necessity to widen the context of his discussion on the specific claims of the Republic of Venice because he understood that issues such as the nature of the spiritual commonwealth and its relationship with the temporal one were at the center of many European debates, aside from questions of confessional allegiance. In this sense, Sarpi understood also that Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta had implications in all those debates, once again aside from questions of confessional allegiance, and this is why he insisted on calling Bellarmine to respond to that wider context, for both polemical and theoretical reasons. Bellarmine, too, understood that his theory had important implications in larger scenarios than just Venice, and while he refused to open the can of Gallican worms in his public responses to Sarpi, he thought that he still needed to refine certain points of his theory, so as to make it less vulnerable to future attacks. That is why in 1607 he decided to publish, at his own expense, a Recognitio of his own published works, reprinted the year after in Ingolstadt, added as a sort of preface to the 1610 edition of the Controversiae published by Pillehotte in Louvain and reprinted at the beginning of all the editions of the Controversiae published after 1610.131

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The text of the Recognitio is interesting because it confirms, on the one hand, that Bellarmine had learned from the Venetian Interdetto that it was dangerous to insist on the separation between spiritual and temporal authority without also underscoring forcefully the fundamental differences between those two authorities, as well as the point at which they merged, for otherwise one could end up with Sarpi’s kind of argument that each authority is sovereign in its own realm and that there cannot be any area of intersection between them. At the same time, however, Bellarmine was not willing to modify the core of his theory, that is, that there was indeed a degree of separation between the two, because it was one of the key principles from which Bellarmine could argue for the incommensurability and, consequently, the superiority of the spiritual authority of the pope with respect to the temporal authority of the sovereign. For example, on the issue of the nature of clerical exemption, Bellarmine did not make any correction to his De Clericis because he evidently thought that the post-1599 version of his argument did not need to be further modified. However, he touched up the part of the second book of De summo Pontifice in which he had written that St. Paul appealed to Caesar as to his legitimate sovereign, following Albert Pighius. Bellarmine changed that part because “if the reason for the exemption of the clergy is that they are ministers of Christ, who is the Prince of the Kings of the Earth and the King of Kings, certainly clergymen are exempted de iure not only from the authority of the Christian princes, but also from that of the pagan rulers.” This does not mean that St. Paul was completely exempt from the authority of the Roman ruler because he was expressly declared so by Christ, but it does mean that Paul was subject to Caesar only de facto, not de iure.132 Regarding the theory of the potestas indirecta, in correcting his Controversia de Laicis, Bellarmine left untouched the chapters dedicated to the development of the neo-Thomist doctrine that political authority comes from natural law and therefore enjoys a degree of autonomy with respect to the Christian commonwealth. However, he noted that some people had forced this interpretation so as to say that “the political power of kings comes not less immediately from God than that of the Pope,” and therefore he thought it necessary to stress that political authority is mediated through the consent of the people. To this effect, he added a series of historical arguments (Rome used to have kings at first, but then the people removed them and substituted magistrates elected annually), scriptural arguments (in the Old Testament God wanted the people to appoint a king rather than appointing one himself ), and references from ancient and modern theologians, such as Aquinas, Domingo de Soto, and Navarro.133

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Bellarmine remained committed to the central tenets of his potestas indirecta also in his other revisions to De summo Pontifice: indeed, in his Recognitio he added further references for the distinction between direct and indirect authority, and he specified that “as indirect jurisdiction we understand the jurisdiction that the supreme Pontiff has over temporal matters in order to spiritual matters, and his jurisdiction properly and per se concerns those spiritual matters.”134 Bellarmine remained firm also in his view that Christ had no temporal kingdom. On this point Bellarmine stated forcefully: “I wrote what I thought was true and what I still think is true.”135 However, since some authors “bitterly discussed” this issue, he thought he should give some specifications. The kingdom of Christ is mentioned in the scriptures in three different senses. The first, the proper kingdom of Christ, is the purely spiritual kingdom over which Christ presided during his mortal life. This spiritual kingdom, which extends itself also to temporal matters insofar as they concern spiritual matters, was the one that Christ passed on to the pope as his vicar.136 The second sense of the expression “kingdom of Christ” is what Bellarmine called “the universal divine kingdom,” that is, the supreme authority to rule over everything that Christ gained insofar as he was the Son of the Father, not insofar as he was a man. Such a universal kingdom did not remove the temporal kingdoms of Christ’s time, although “Christ, if he had wanted it, could have assumed on him all kingdoms.” Such kingdom cannot be communicated to any human creature, precisely because it belonged to Christ insofar as he was God, and it cannot be thought of as a threat to temporal sovereigns, since Christ himself preferred to leave temporal kingdoms alone rather than attributing to himself the supreme temporal authority.137 Finally, the third meaning of the kingdom of Christ refers to the “kingdom of glory,” that is, the perfect beatitude and authority over all creatures that Christ assumed after his resurrection. Not even this kingdom can be called a temporal one because it is so far superior to any temporal realm that at the end of time it will indeed destroy all temporal realms.138 “In addition to these kingdoms,” Bellarmine says, “we do not find, either in Scripture or in the writings of the Fathers, a fourth one, which should be called properly temporal, such as the kingdoms of the earthly princes are: indeed we think such a kingdom is repugnant to Christ’s poverty and smells of the error of the Jews and the heretics.”139 After this statement, Bellarmine adds a long list of passages from the Bible and from the writings of the Fathers, which prove the absolutely spiritual character of the kingdom of Christ.140 In sum, even in 1607, after the experience of the controversy over the Interdetto, in which he had seen his theory used (or misused) to support the cause of Venice, Bellarmine remained convinced that his theory of the potestas

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indirecta was the right way to defend the papacy both from the doctrine of the Protestants and from the claims of the temporal rulers. He remained committed to his core intuition that the jurisdiction over souls was the proper and unique area of competence of the pope and that this area of jurisdiction constituted the only theoretical argument that allowed him to connect temporal and spiritual commonwealth while, at the same time, leaving each a degree of autonomy from the other. For Bellarmine, the mistake that Sarpi and the others made was to forget that the jurisdiction over souls, while properly spiritual, extended itself to political matters insofar as men’s and women’s souls were implanted in their bodies for the duration of their mortal life. But the remedy that people like Francisco Peña were suggesting in order to oppose that mistake was potentially worse than the disease: to insist that the Church was just like a secular commonwealth, only more powerful, was to deny its radical incommensurability with respect to human commonwealth, which was the root of its radical superiority. Thus, Bellarmine thought that once he firmed up his argument that the secular and ecclesiastical commonwealths were neither completely separate nor completely joint in the Christian commonwealth, his theory would be safe from the attacks of both Sarpi and Peña. He was wrong, and the Interdetto was just the beginning of a wide debate in which both Catholics and Protestants continued to discuss, at times dramatically, the political and theological implications of his theory. In order to illustrate some of these implications, the next two chapters examine the repercussions of the debate opened by Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta and fueled by the Venetian crisis first in Protestant England, then in Catholic France.

4 Bellarmine and the Oath of Allegiance

Robert Bellarmine and Elizabethan England Robert Bellarmine did not care much for Elizabethan England, and the majority of Protestant writers and controversialists of Elizabethan England did not care much for him. As I have argued elsewhere, in the 1580s and 1590s the bulk of anti-Catholic writings by Elizabethan Protestants was not directed against Bellarmine’s works for a number of reasons.1 First, the structure and language of the Controversiae made them more fit for academic discussion rather than polemical battles of pamphlets. Especially after 1580 and the first mission of the Society of Jesus in England, Catholicism was increasingly portrayed as an issue of national security; thus anti-Catholic writings required a specific kind of polemical strategy, and the academic tone of Bellarmine’s arguments did not lend itself well to this kind of task. Moreover, the intellectual profile of Robert Bellarmine, that is, his image as an esteemed university professor lecturing and writing against all the heretics of his time from the ivory tower of the Roman College, singled him out, with respect to other Catholics and Jesuits, in the polemical imagery of Elizabethan England. While Robert Persons and Nicholas Sander were the traitors who, in their words and deeds, tried to destroy the peace of the English state, Bellarmine was the learned scholar who needed to be confuted at a scholarly level. As a result, there is a conspicuous absence in Elizabethan England of works that take on Bellarmine’s doctrines, and the few

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exceptions confirm this pattern. William Whitaker, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, taught courses confuting Bellarmine’s ecclesiological and theological arguments but left aside the political ones—his lectures against the Controversia de Ecclesia and Controversia de Conciliis were collected and published posthumously by John Allenson in 1599 and 1600, respectively.2 Matthew Sutcliffe, the moderate Calvinist divine, wrote in English against Robert Persons, and in Latin against Robert Bellarmine.3 While Bellarmine was not, generally speaking, a household name in the polemical landscape of Elizabethan England, the Jesuit theorist, for his part, in the 1580s and 1590s seemed relatively uninterested in the theological and political implications of the English Reformation. In the fifth book of his Controversia de summo Pontifice, the one dedicated to firming up his doctrine on the pope’s authority in temporal matters, Bellarmine does not mention the English Reformation at all. The only place in that controversy where England is mentioned is in the first book, the one dedicated to discussing the most apt form of government for the Church. One chapter of that book argued that secular princes have no part in the government of the Church because the ecclesiastical and political governments are radically different. The former was instituted directly by God to rule the people’s souls, and the latter was instituted by God through the mediation of the people’s consent to govern bodies. Thus, the temporal ruler cannot perform the function of a spiritual ruler, as the many examples of kings and emperors who have subjected themselves to the priests for spiritual matters prove.4 At the beginning of this chapter Bellarmine wrote that many people had made the error of attributing spiritual functions to the temporal ruler, including Henry VIII, who “appointed himself head of the Church of England and in the same way he thought that the other princes should be supreme heads of the Church in their own territories.”5 Virtually no mention is made of any Henrician or Elizabethan Protestant after this brief note.6 Bellarmine’s treatment (or lack thereof) of the English Reformation in this text suggests that, first of all, Bellarmine did not register its political implications as theoretically relevant for the question of the temporal authority of the pope. If he had wanted to explore the implications of the English Reformation for the question of the relationship between temporal and spiritual authority, he would have engaged with them in the fifth book of his De summo Pontifice, or even in his Controversia de Laicis, in which he discussed the nature and limitations of temporal authority without any reference to either the Henrician or the Elizabethan Reformation. The manner in which Bellarmine cited Henry VIII as one who thought that every prince should become the head of the Church in his own territories,

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moreover, is a further indication that the Jesuit saw the Church of England as a rather sectarian attempt to strengthen the authority of the temporal sovereign, which was concerned neither with the theoretical question of the nature of secular authority and its relationship with the ecclesiastical authority nor with establishing the theological foundations of a Christian Church in opposition to the Church of Rome. Thus, Bellarmine did not think that the English Protestants deserved nearly as much theoretical attention as Luther and especially Calvin. Of course, Bellarmine paid some attention to some English Reformers and their works. For example, in 1592, when Bellarmine was deeply involved in the discussions over the revisions to be made to the Index of Prohibited Books, he proposed that the works of Henry VIII be moved from the second to the first class of works to be prohibited, which would classify his works among those for which no correction or amendment could be made. The proposal, however, was not accompanied by any detailed censure of the work: the only rationale that Bellarmine offered was that Henry was a heretic, and, as such, his works deserved to be punished as harshly as possible.7 Bellarmine’s correspondence in those years confirms the impression that England was largely outside of his intellectual horizon. In 1582, Robert Persons, who had escaped England after the martyrdom of his fellow Jesuit Edmund Campion and had moved to Rome, started to plan the initial phases of the so-called Scottish strategy. This was a plan to convert James VI to Catholicism, his mother’s religion, and then use James’s influence, once he had become a Catholic, to foster the conversion of England to the Roman religion with a variety of political, spiritual, and, in some cases, military means. The first necessary step to bring about James’s conversion was to surround him with Catholics, and especially to provide a Catholic—possibly Jesuit—learned man who could instruct the young prince in literature and language and, in the meantime, stir and nourish the prince’s zeal for Catholicism.8 So in 1582 Persons wrote to Acquaviva reminding him of the need to pick a Jesuit who would be up for the task. Because the Scottish Catholics wanted an Italian, and because it was necessary for the chosen man to be an excellent intellectual, since “a mediocre man cannot suffice in these matters,” Persons suggested Achille Gagliardi, a professor of philosophy and well-known scholar of Aristotle. Of course, the perfect man would have been Bellarmine, but Persons “did not dare to ask for him.”9 Persons was right on two accounts:. First, he recognized already in 1582 that Bellarmine’s reputation in matters of learning was considerable, even before the publication of the first volume of the Controversiae. Second, he was right in thinking that Bellarmine was out of the question as a possible preceptor for James, for, as far as I know, Bellarmine was not even consulted about the possibility of going to Scotland.

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That does not mean that Bellarmine was unaware of Persons’s role in the many fights against the English heretics; indeed, he became more aware over the course of the 1580s. In fact, sometime before 1583 Robert Bellarmine had completed a list containing a catalogue of names of “authors who wrote on the controversies of these times.” Bellarmine gave the list to Possevino, and subsequently the list appeared first as an appendix to Possevino’s Responsiones ad nobilissimi viri septentrionalis interrogationes, published in 1583, and then in other works by Possevino, published later. In Bellarmine’s manuscript copy of the list, however, there are additions that the Jesuit made before giving it to Possevino. In the first draft the only English author mentioned was Nicholas Sander. In particular, Bellarmine mentioned De visibili monarchia ecclesiae, De cultu imaginum, De incruento Missae sacrificio—notice the omission of De schismate Anglicano from this list. As Bellarmine revised the list, he decided to add the name of Robert Persons.10 In the late 1580s and 1590s, when Robert Persons was the rector of the English College in Rome, the relationship between him and Bellarmine intensified, and the two Jesuits corresponded regularly on certain Anglo-Roman affairs, especially regarding the archpriest controversy. More specifically, Persons informed Bellarmine that William Bishop and Robert Charnock were about to go to Rome on behalf of the English secular clergy, to appeal to the pope against the appointment of George Blackwell as archpriest. The English Jesuit asked Bellarmine to refer the matter to the pope, and the two of them seem to have consulted frequently with each other on the actions to take. For example, in November 1598 Bellarmine wrote to Persons from Ferrara, where he had accompanied Clement VIII, thanking him for the updates on the anti-Blackwell campaign. He said that Bishop and Charnock had not yet gotten to Rome (they would arrive on 11 December 1598), and that he had not had any occasion yet to speak with the pope about the matter. He closed the letter quickly, explaining: “I do not need to write anymore, since we are going to see each other soon.”11 The end of the 1590s was a difficult time for England and for English Catholicism, and not only because of the breach in the Catholic camp provoked by the conflict between secular clergy and the Society of Jesus. Those were the years in which the question of Elizabeth’s succession appeared at the forefront of the political debate in England, and the stakes for English and European Catholics were high. In 1595, Robert Persons published his Conference about the next succession to the crowne of England, in which he demolished some of the arguments in favor of the candidacy of James Stuart, who did not seem to be willing to convert to Catholicism, and offered an implicit endorsement of the Spanish infanta. This put Persons at odds with another faction of English and Scottish Catholics, who opposed the strategy of Persons and other English Jesuits and

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thought that supporting James’s candidacy offered more opportunities to see Catholicism strengthened in both Scotland and England. Such debate was followed closely in Rome, where, between 1596 and 1597, there was a great deal of interest in Persons’s plan. This interest cooled off in 1598, when Pope Clement VIII aligned the foreign policy of the Roman Curia with the French side against Spain and especially after the treatise of Vervins, signed under the aegis of the pope, which sealed the definitive end of Spanish imperial strategy and European hegemony.12 The consequence of this readjustment of the European political equilibrium for the question of the succession to Elizabeth’s throne and for the future of English Catholicism was that the Roman Curia resumed contact with James Stuart and started to press the king of Scotland to convert. Between 1599 and 1603 a series of diplomatic efforts were made to this effect.13 Bellarmine, now a cardinal of the Roman Church, participated in those efforts by writing a letter to James on 1 June 1600, which started with the hope, on the part of Bellarmine, that “Your Majesty at some point would apply your mind truly to what is necessary above all things, that is, to know the true Church.” The letter continued in the form of a short essay to prove that the Roman Church was the only true Church of Christ, despite the calumnies of the Calvinists, and concluded with a final invitation to James to follow in his mother’s footsteps and return to Catholicism.14 Robert Persons eventually also agreed to participate in the Roman effort to convert James, especially after James became, in fact, Elizabeth’s successor to the throne of England. Persons, however, remained suspicious of the Stuart king and, at least during the year 1603, tried to maintain a balance between helping out for the strategy of converting James and reporting to Rome whenever the sovereign did something to disappoint the Catholic hopes. In this respect, Persons became a sort of trait d’union between Rome and London, and he made much effort to make the Roman Curia aware of the theoretical arguments put forth by James to strengthen his political authority. For instance, in the summer of 1603 Persons wrote to Borghese to tell him that he had gotten a copy of James’s book The true lawe of free monarchies, which “deals with a free and absolute monarchy, and it proves that a King is not subject to any law but is absolute dominus.” The book, Persons wrote, is “small but pestilent,” and for this reason he thought that a translation should be made, so that the book could be circulated in Rome.15 That was not the first time that Persons had monitored James’s writings on behalf of the Roman Curia, for in that same year Persons had sent to the pope a Latin translation of another work by James, the Basilikon Doron. In the letter enclosed with the work Persons assured the pope that “the Father who has translated it is a learned and trustworthy man, and he has tried

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to express the author’s true opinion.”16 Regarding James’s opinion, Persons’s judgment was much more positive than on The true lawe, as the Jesuit said in conclusion to his letter: “We have nothing left except to pray to God (as we do) that he may inspire His Majesty to implement in his government the things that were well said and written in this book, and to correct those for which, because of his education, God has not given him enough clarity.”17 Persons’s efforts to make James’s Basilikon Doron known in Rome were successful not only in keeping the Curia informed of the latest intellectual elaborations of the king but also in catching, finally, the intellectual attention of Robert Bellarmine, who decided to reply to the Basilikon Doron by composing a work entitled Hieratikon Doron, written and revised once between 1604 and 1605 but never published.18 Bellarmine’s decision to engage with James’s arguments in the Basilikon Doron, however, was not an indication that he had decided to engage with the English Catholic question or with the Henrician and Elizabethan Reformation. For example, in 1604 Bellarmine still had no interest in replying to Whitaker’s lectures against his Controversiae. Replying to Borghese, who had asked him who was in charge of answering Whitaker, Bellarmine replied that this task had been entrusted to an Italian Jesuit by the name of Ludovico Ruggeri, but since Ruggeri had died before he could finish the work, Bellarmine found another candidate, Andreas Eudaemon-Ioannis, a Jesuit from Crete and professor of philosophy in Rome, who, Bellarmine said, had a reputation for being learned and morally sound.19 In February 1604 Bellarmine wrote to Acquaviva confirming that Eudaemon-Ioannis appeared to many to be the best candidate to reply to Whitaker. Bellarmine had some doubts, however, as he thought that “some German or French Fathers” would be better suited for the job, “for they have more abundance of such [heretical] books.” Maybe, Bellarmine said, “the opinion of some, who say that it is not necessary to reply at all, is not bad, because whoever reads the books easily realizes who is right and who is wrong.” Either way, Bellarmine said, Acquaviva should feel free to choose whomever he wanted, for Bellarmine did not have any strong feelings one way or another.20 Acquaviva took Bellarmine’s first suggestion seriously: in the spring of 1604 he informed Bellarmine that he decided to entrust the task of replying to Whitaker to a German Jesuit, Jacob Gretser.21 Thus, while Bellarmine evidently had no personal intellectual interest in replying to Whitaker and, to a certain extent, did not even see why a reply should be made at all, he composed a lengthy treatise in reply to James’s Basilikon Doron. The reasons Bellarmine decided to write his Hieratikon Doron are several. First of all, as Le Bachelet argues in his edition of this text, Bellarmine’s work has to be put in the context of the attempt on the part of Clement VIII to

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try to move James into the Catholic camp.22 For this reason, the original text was revised so that in the second version we find a number of modifications that smooth out or tone down some of the harshest polemical tones and arguments. For instance, in the first version of the preface Bellarmine had made reference to James’s interest in the Bible, saying: “Your Majesty, who is said to be assiduously studying the sacred Scriptures.” In the second version this passage became: “You, who assiduously study the holy Scriptures.”23 Also, the third chapter of the Hieratikon Doron was dedicated to confute James’s declaration that Elizabeth was the legitimate ruler of England. In the initial version of the work Bellarmine had included a long passage in which he compared the chastity and purity of Mary’s life to Elizabeth’s very public and obnoxious sexual affairs. That comparison was entirely canceled in the final version.24 Finally, in the first version there was a chapter dedicated to games of hazard, which James had defended as a suitable practice for a king, if done “modeste,” in a moderate way. Drawing support from the testimonies of Church fathers and Church decrees, from the opinion of Aristotle, and from examples taken from ancient history, Bellarmine’s chapter attacked James’s arguments by demonstrating how pernicious gambling was for a king and for his subjects, even if done in moderation. In the second and final version, this chapter disappeared, possibly to avoid crossing James, whose passion for gambling was notorious.25 As Le Bachelet argues, the fact that the text was never published is an indication that it was composed and revised to please rather than to antagonize James, and as a part of Clement’s strategy of appeasement. Since the Hieratikon Doron was completed in 1605, right when Clement died and Paul V took over and around the time of the Gunpowder Plot, the circumstances had changed in such a way that a conciliatory position from Rome toward James was no longer appropriate, at least in the terms in which it seemed appropriate before 1605.26 Moreover, much of the content of the text seems to corroborate the thesis that the Hieratikon Doron was part of Clement’s strategy of pacification, as the treatise reads, at times, like a longer version of Bellarmine’s 1600 letter to James. In the Hieratikon Doron Bellarmine greatly praises James’s “eruditio, sapientia et eloquentia” and attributes the “maculae,” the small slips that can be found in his book, to the fact that James’s court lacked the presence of good, learned friends with solid judgment and was instead full of flatterers who did not dare to “advise with modest liberty in those matters.”27 Bellarmine did not waste any time in disclosing the identity of the said flatterers: they were the “Protestantes tui et Calviniani” who lived in England and Scotland, and it was their fault if James appeared theologically confused on issues such as the distinction between venial and mortal sins, the doctrine of grace and its right interpretation, the real list of canonical books of the Bible, and the fundamental importance of the

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Church tradition against the Protestant sola Scriptura.28 Instead of following these heretical statements, James should, according to Bellarmine, realize that the Roman Church, far from being a perverted shadow of the primitive Church, was still the only true Church, and thus he should advise his son to follow the sound Catholic doctrine on, for instance, the intercession of saints, the doctrine of the Mass, and the monastic orders. All these were not examples of “Papismus,” as James called them, but manifestations of the only true teaching of Christ.29 However, I believe that the Hieratikon Doron was not simply a series of friendly theological corrections of the statements of a king whom Rome thought could be brought back to unity with the Catholic Church. In fact, two chapters in the book do not follow the mold of the rest of the text. The first is the twelfth chapter, entitled “On the Honor That Kings Owe to Priests,” written in response to James’s declaration to his son that, while clergymen have to be treated “omni reverentia et debita obedientia,” nevertheless, when they transgress their limits and start to teach things contrary to the words of God, a prince needs to coerce them, all the more vigorously because of the duties that a prince has to fulfill.30 Bellarmine responded to this issue in a twofold manner. First, and in line with the tone of the rest of the text, Bellarmine explained to James that his mistake stemmed, once again, from following the Protestants, who believed that scripture was to be regarded as the only source of Christian doctrine. Instead, both in the gospel and in the writings of the fathers, especially Augustine, the Church is declared as “saluberrima auctoritas,” whose mandates touching doctrine have to be followed as respectfully as those of the gospel. Thus, if James found himself doubting whether the teaching of his clergymen was different from scripture, he should have reminded himself that scripture was not the only source of authority for Christians.31 But, Bellarmine added, James’s passage touched on another issue: admitting that clergymen could indeed err in doctrinal matters, could or should the prince, because of the nature of his authority, legitimately correct and direct them? This was not simply a question of Protestant versus Catholic doctrine but a more general politico-theological issue, and therefore Bellarmine responded by briefly explaining the nature and scope of the political authority with respect to the ecclesiastical one. First of all, Christ granted the power of binding and loosing, that is, the power of directing people in matters of faith, not to the kings but to the apostles. Thus in matters of faith kings are really not different from their subjects, and, like the subjects, they are obliged to obey the mandates of the apostles’ successors, that is, the bishops and the pope. Second, when the apostle Paul declared that every authority comes from God, he was not stating that princes and kings owe their authority directly to God. Rather,

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“Paul was talking about authority in general, that is, not only about regal authority.”32 Consequently, when the same Paul commanded that everybody should be obedient to the “potestates sublimiores,” he did not mean to endorse the superiority of the power of the king above every other power. Instead, Paul said that everybody should be obedient to his superior. Thus, just as the subjects should be obedient to their temporal sovereigns, so the temporal sovereigns, together with their subjects, should be obedient to the bishops, “as the bishops are the more sublime authorities, to which even Christians kings must be subjected.”33 Bellarmine resumed his effort to respond to James’s attempts to strengthen his temporal authority, and not only to the king’s theological and Protestantinfluenced mistakes, more forcefully in the sixteenth chapter of the Hieratikon Doron, on the duty of the king in matters of religion. Bellarmine started by declaring that James’s recommendation to his son to study theology because it was necessary not only for the salvation of his soul but also “to be able to control your clergymen in their office” was a “most grave and most dangerous” kind of advice.34 The danger of James’s statements in this issue did not come from the fact that they were variations of Protestant-sounding doctrines but from the fact that they represented a unique political and theological position with respect to the rest of Continental Protestantism, one that conflicted with some of the most central tenets of Bellarmine’s political theology. That is why, in replying to James, Bellarmine decided that he had to tackle the issue of the origin and nature of temporal authority, and its relationship with ecclesiastical authority, without touching the doctrinal differences between Protestants and Catholics, which in this chapter never appear. Thus, Bellarmine wrote that, on the one hand, thinking that a king could exercise any spiritual function was wrong because spiritual authority was superior to temporal authority, as he had already explained in the twelfth chapter of his work. On the other hand, mixing temporal and spiritual authority as James seemed to want to do went against the structure of the Christian commonwealth, in which “the earthly city and the heavenly city are distinct, and just like the heavenly city, that is, the Christian Church, existed at some point without any king and yet did not lack its own magistrates, that is, the bishops; likewise the earthly city existed at some point and still exists in many places without bishops and yet does not lack its own magistrates, that is, kings.”35 Thus, since kings are not necessary for the Church to exist, and bishops are not necessary for the political commonwealth to exist, the Church and the political commonwealth are two different entities, governed according to two different sets of principles and by two different sets of magistrates. Therefore, since the bishops rule men and women insofar as they are Christians, while the kings rule men and women insofar as they are citizens

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and subjects, kings have no jurisdiction over their lay subjects in matters of religion, let alone over the clergy. In sum, Bellarmine concluded, the king is the head of the political state but just a member, and not the head, of the Christian Church.36 This passage, I argue, is crucially important for two reasons. First, it represents the first time in which Bellarmine engaged with the politico-theological implications of the English Reformation. While Bellarmine evidently considered neither the Henrician nor the Elizabethan Reformers to be relevant in this respect, he understood that James’s text mixed a selection of theological Protestant themes with a distinctive interpretation of the political aspects of the English Reformation as a means to strengthen the sovereign’s spiritual, not just temporal, authority. Such mixture constituted a potential new brand of heresy, one in which some Protestant doctrines were embedded into a political project that aimed at strengthening the authority of the sovereign at the expense of the ecclesiastical authority, a project that, in a sense, went beyond the ProtestantCatholic divide.37 Second, the passage illustrates the nature of the challenge that James’s theo-political statements presented to Bellarmine’s doctrine, a very different challenge with respect to the kinds of arguments presented by Paolo Sarpi and his followers—we should remember that the controversy over the Interdetto would explode only few months after Bellarmine wrote the Hieratikon Doron. The main argument that Sarpi used against Bellarmine was that the Jesuit tried to keep united what he himself had in fact separated. In other words, Sarpi attacked Bellarmine by reminding him that his own theory was based on a degree of separation between ecclesiastical and political authority and that, as a consequence, it supported rather than weakened the case of Venice, since what Venice wanted was nothing more than reclaiming control of purely temporal matters that were outside the jurisdiction of the Church. The ultrapapalist theorists who opposed the Interdetto, such as Francisco Peña, in a sense also shared Sarpi’s position toward Bellarmine’s theory. In fact, Peña attacked Bellarmine because he thought that Bellarmine’s theory had separated what in effect should have been kept united. For Peña the Christian commonwealth was only one, not two. The head of the Christian commonwealth, endowed with the fullest spiritual and temporal authority, was only one, that is, the pope, and secular princes were to be considered more like vassals than like collaborators (albeit inferior) of the pope. Thus, against Sarpi Bellarmine admitted that there was indeed a degree of separation, but insisted on the importance of the element that unified the political and ecclesiastical commonwealth, that is, the subjects’ consciences, which was the proper area of jurisdiction of the supreme spiritual authority of the pope and the justification for the pope’s

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indirect intervention in political matters. Against Peña, who had denied any form of separation, Bellarmine argued the other way around. In a sense, James united what Sarpi wanted to be divided and turned Peña’s argument on its head, for in the previously quoted passages James strengthened the authority of the temporal sovereign over the pope’s neither by attacking the pope’s legitimacy as spiritual leader using traditional Protestant theological arguments such as that of the pope as the Antichrist nor by arguing that certain matters, like clerical exemption, were really temporal matters, as Sarpi did. Instead, James claimed that the temporal sovereign enjoyed a degree of spiritual authority, not only full temporal authority over the temporal goods of his subjects, within his own territories. Thus, the sovereign’s territories became a domain in which religious and political matters were, to a certain extent, unified under the same institution, just as for Peña the Christian commonwealth was a unified institution that merged political and spiritual authority. Indeed, James did not advise his son to study law so as to be able to exercise his temporal authority against the Church’s attempts to usurp it: rather, Prince Henry was to study theology, so as to be able to keep an eye on, and if need be correct, the clergy’s doctrinal and spiritual duties.

The Debate over the Oath of Allegiance: English and European Theological Implications Bellarmine’s intuition regarding James’s text, which for the Jesuit was not only a collage of Protestant-sounding doctrines that needed to be corrected but also a novel manner of mixing spiritual and temporal authority with respect to Continental Protestantism, was soon to be confirmed, when the king issued, in January 1606, an oath of allegiance to be imposed on his Catholic subjects. The act was issued in the immediate aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, and its aim was twofold. On the one hand, the oath was intended to separate the good and loyal Catholics from the traitors who, under pretense of religion, were trying to subvert the peace of the English state. This was the official explanation for the oath, to which James and his strictest collaborators, such as Lancelot Andrewes, remained committed when they defended it in the long controversy that followed its proclamation. Together with the oath’s political nature, however, there is also an important theological component that cannot be overlooked. According to the formula of the oath prescribed by James, in fact, an English recusant not only had to swear his or her political allegiance to the English Crown but also had to renounce as “impious” and “heretical” the doctrine according to which the pope could declare a temporal sovereign illegitimate on the grounds

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of the sovereign’s heretical belief, thus absolving that sovereign’s subjects from their duty of obedience. Current scholarship is still debating the significance of the theological elements of the oath. For instance, W. B. Patterson inserts the theological statements of the oath and the theological issues at the center of the debate into James’s wider ecumenical theological project, in which the Catholic Church was at once a potential ally in the king’s project of unifying the Western Church and a potential enemy insofar as it challenged the political primacy of his rule.38 For historians like Michael Questier, the theological positions expressed in the oath are the proof that James did not want to issue simply a political document but indeed wanted to find further reasons to persecute the English Catholic community, which would find itself forced, in taking the oath, to swear something doctrinally contrary to Catholicism.39 By contrast, Johann Sommerville has argued that the oath was not meant to be a religious weapon against the English Catholics but a politico-theological weapon against the doctrine of the pope’s authority in deposing temporal princes, and as such it was an instrument of political, not religious, nature, “well-designed to ferret out people who adhered to this set of ideas,” that is, to the idea that the pope’s power to depose illegitimate sovereigns was a central tenet of Catholic faith.40 As I have argued elsewhere, while I do not deny that James and the English Protestant regime might have welcomed the opportunity to level a further blow to the English Catholics by making it as difficult as possible for them to swear the oath, I do think that the primary aim of James was not to persecute Catholics. Rather, I think that the oath was a politico-theological weapon, the scope of which was not limited to attacking the doctrine of the pope’s deposing power. Indeed, I believe that in issuing the oath James was aiming to modify the boundaries between spiritual and temporal authority by giving to the sovereign a form of spiritual, and not just temporal, supremacy.41 On the question of the relationship between secular and religious authority, then, the oath of allegiance has to be put into a pan-European context, insofar as it dealt with many of the same issues that Paolo Sarpi, for instance, was dealing with in Venice. However, while Sarpi was on the defensive side, so to speak, as he thought that the government of Venice had to defend itself from the attempted usurpation on the part of the pope in matters that were entirely temporal, James moved to the offensive side, claiming that the nature of temporal authority provided the sovereign not only with full temporal authority but also with some spiritual authority over his subjects. James’s position went beyond the doctrinal contrast between Catholics and Protestants, or, better, it represented a new brand of heresy, which was Protestant insofar as one of the most important results of the Protestant Reformation was to tighten the bond between territorial churches and territorial states, as Paolo Prodi and others

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have argued. From this perspective, in fact, the English Reformation became, as Prodi wrote, the “manifestation, in a certain sense in a purer state . . . of the inevitability of the formation of territorial churches.”42 In other words, as seen from the perspective of the relationship between church and state, the English Reformation was the purest form of Reformation, which remained distinguished doctrinally in many ways from the rest of Continental Protestantism. When it came to defending the oath, in fact, James continued to mix political and theological arguments to justify his act to enlarge the authority of the sovereign. For instance, in his Triplici nodo triplex cuneus we have passages in which James defended the oath as a legitimate political act insofar as it related simply to the temporal jurisdiction of any temporal sovereign, whether he was Catholic or Protestant. Consequently, James treated the pope’s refusal to allow Catholics to swear as a political position taken by a foreign sovereign against another foreign sovereign: “Although disparitie of Religion (the pope being head of the contrary part) can permit no intelligence nor intercourse of messengers betweene mee and the pope: yet there being no denounced warre beyweene is, he hath by this action broken the rules of common civilitie and iustice betweene Christian Princes . . . by so straitly commanding all those of his profession in England, to refuse the taking of this Oath; thereby refusing to professe their naturall obedience to me their Soveraigne. For . . . why does he [the pope] mittere falcem in alienam messem, to meddle betweene me and my Subiects, especially in matters that meerely and onely concerne civill obedience?”43 Together with passages such as this one, however, there are also passages in which James defended his right of imposing an oath not as a purely political right but as a manifestation of the divine character of the king’s authority, which implied not only the full command of his subjects’ bodies but also a space of action into his subjects’ conscience. To claim that political allegiance and profession of faith could be opposed to one another, as the pope said, “is so farre beyond my simple reading in Divinitie, as I must think it a strange and new Assertion, to proceede out of the mouth of that pretended generall Pastor of all Christian soules,” whereas James himself found “not in one, or two, or three places of Scripture, that Subiects are bound to obey their Princes for conscience sake, whether they were good or wicked Princes.”44 In this passage, James did not position himself toward the pope as one temporal sovereign toward another, but as one interpreter of scripture fighting with another over the nature and scope of temporal authority, which for James came directly from God and extended into the realm of the consciences of the subjects insofar as the obedience owed to secular princes was, according to James’s interpretation of scripture, a matter of conscience for Christians.

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Indeed, it is not a coincidence that this mixture of political and theological arguments was worrisome not only for Bellarmine but also, somewhat surprisingly, for another protagonist of the political debates in those years. Paolo Sarpi, who, as we have seen, was relatively sympathetic to, and was treated with respect by, the English Protestant establishment, in writing to Jacques Leschassier about the oath, declared: If the English Oath had come to us plain [nudum], and not mixed with the controversies of these times, it would have been approved by the more experienced men. But since the king and others who wrote on it exceeded the limits of the oath, it happens that he who approves its articles, is reputed to accept their entire doctrine, and therefore is badly spoken of. I wish the king had treated only regal matters, and had abstained himself from theological matters! I think he acted prudently, maybe because he used to deal with his affairs in this way, and he had to deal in this way with his subjects; but we must act differently in our matters. We do not want to mix heaven and earth, human and divine matters.45 In this letter Sarpi does not condemn the oath, which, he thinks, given the English situation, might have been the necessary way to frame the sovereign’s authority, but he definitely differentiates between James’s project of mixing heaven and earth in order to strengthen his authority and the Venetian project of sticking with political issues in trying to fight attempts on the part of the pope to usurp the legitimate authority of the Venetian republic. The issue at stake, Sarpi says, is the same, that is, to fight the (presumed) political authority of the pope, but the way to go about solving it in Venice is different from that used in London. The difference is precisely the theological connotation of James’s fight, which Sarpi did not share. Moreover, the fact that Sarpi was writing to Leschassier, the author of the treatise De la liberté ancienne et canonique de l’Eglise gallicane (1606), is a further indication of the complex pan-European implications of the common issues at stake between London, Venice, and Paris.46 Since the oath of allegiance was both a political act and a theological statement, and, as such, addressed both the political role of the English Catholics in the English state and the pan-European politico-theological issue of the relationship between political and religious authority, it is not surprising that in examining the Catholic response to the oath we can see that it was framed in two different ways. On the one hand, the Catholic response to the oath needed to take into account the meaning of the king’s act for the English Catholic community. In order to avoid splitting the community around the political question of loyalty to the English Crown, the Catholics needed to picture the oath as an instrument of religious persecution by a heretical king, just like other forms of religious persecution against English Catholicism orchestrated

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by James’s Protestant predecessors. On the other hand, Rome realized that the implications of the oath were far wider than just the future of the English Catholic community. Indeed, the principles underlined in the oath represented a dangerous precedent for many European sovereigns, both Catholics and Protestants, who could follow in James’s footsteps and start to mix political and spiritual issues to strengthen their authority. That is why some of the Catholic replies against the oath needed to emphasize that it was aimed against the spiritual, not temporal, authority of the pope, and, therefore, that the oath was itself a manifestation of a political sovereign’s stepping out of his temporal boundaries, which was a European, and not simply an English, problem. In the following pages I will show that Robert Bellarmine was in charge of the latter aspect, while Robert Person was in charge of the former. Moreover, this double strategy was coordinated from the center, that is to say, from Rome, and Bellarmine himself had a central role in devising this strategy. First of all, Bellarmine was very much involved in the immediate official condemnation of the oath through Paul V’s two brevi issued against it, one in October 1606 and one in September of the following year.47 As Thomas Fitzherbert testifies, the pope formed a commission of Cardinals of the Holy Office, including Bellarmine, to be in charge of assessing and eventually condemning the oath.48 From different sources we can also gather that Bellarmine was not simply a member of that commission but was indeed among its leaders. When, in May 1606, William Harrison (possibly with the support of, or even inspired by, Robert Persons), then in Rome as the agent of the archpriest Blackwell, decided to contact the members of the Holy Office in charge of dealing with the oath to let them know that “this pernicious Oath has been drawn from the doctrine of the Appellants in their printed books,” and therefore to suggest an official condemnation of the appellant doctrine together with the oath, he decided to contact Bellarmine personally to ask him to inform the pope about the link with the appellants.49 Evidently, then, many people in Rome knew that Bellarmine was important enough in that committee that if one had a sensitive message to pass, it would have to go through him. Also, in December 1607 Pope Paul V asked, probably the same committee formed by members of the Inquisition to deal with the oath, to formulate another breve on it, this time addressed to the Scottish, not the English, Catholics. A draft of this document can be found in the Archive of the Inquisition, and in it the pope condemned the oath as a tool devised to oblige the Catholics to “desert Our Lord Jesus Christ in his Vicar, and to oppose his command and laws.” Indeed, Christ gave the power of binding and loosing not to the “king of Britain, or to any political prince, but to the Apostle himself.” Since no king can

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thus exercise any authority in spiritual matters, because “the secular princes . . . are in the church, not above the church,” and since the oath was not a political act but a theological aberration with respect to the Christian doctrine, the pope urged the Scottish Catholics to refuse to swear it.50 The fact that the language of this breve seems to echo the language of Bellarmine’s Hieratikon Doron should not be surprising, because at the end of the draft we find: “On 20 December 1607, after having read the above-cited minute done by Cardinal Bellarmine of the breve to be written to the Catholics of the Kingdom of Scotland, the pope approved of it.”51 In his role as a sort of spokesman for the Roman position, Bellarmine was also in charge of replying to George Blackwell, the archpriest of England who had decided to swear the oath. Blackwell’s act was a dangerous sign of the potential split between the English Catholic clergymen and laymen over their political loyalty to the English regime, but Bellarmine wanted to maintain his theoretical position, that is, that the oath did not discuss matters of policy but matters of religion that were outside of the competence of the temporal sovereign. Thus Bellarmine did not engage Blackwell’s decision to swear as a political act but chose to label it as a moment of “slip and fall of your constancie,” and he suggested that the archpriest resume his constancy and continue on his road to martyrdom for the true faith rather than give in to the “sleights and subtilties of Satan.” For the oath was nothing but a heretical stratagem to transfer, as Bellarmine puts it, “the Authorities of the head of the Church in England . . . from the successour of St. Peter, to the successour of King Henry the Eighth.” Politics, Bellarmine continues, are but an excuse: the reason James seems to fear the Catholics is simply because they see his heretical beliefs. From this perspective, Bellarmine says, there is no difference between James and Henry or Elizabeth; thus Blackwell should come back to his senses and to the glorious route of martyrdom of his predecessors, men like John Fisher and Thomas More.52 Bellarmine must have been aware of the importance of Blackwell’s decision for the political equilibrium and unity of the English Catholic community, and that is why he decided to run the letter by Robert Persons and to wait for his approval.53 Also, because of the potentially destructive political effect that Blackwell’s acceptance of the oath could have had on the English Catholics, while Bellarmine was writing to Blackwell to ask him to repent from his religious mistake, Robert Persons was working with other means to solve the problems caused by Blackwell’s slip: between September 1607 and January 1608, Persons wrote at least three times to the Holy Office to ask that Blackwell be removed from his position as archpriest and that somebody be appointed in his place.54

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After the moment for institutional and semiofficial responses had passed, and it was time to enter the polemical debate over the oath, Bellarmine and Persons continued to work as a team, splitting their job: while the former took care of the European and theological side of the question, the latter took care of the political implications of it for the English Catholic community. This double strategy is very evident in Bellarmine’s and Persons’s replies to James’s Triplici nodo, in which the king had defended the oath of allegiance and had taken issue both with Bellarmine’s letter to Blackwell and with the pope’s brevi. Bellarmine’s text, written under the pseudonym Matthaeus Tortus, begins by saying immediately that the oath had nothing to do with the perceived threat that Catholics in England or in Rome could represent to the English Crown, and that, in fact, the oath had nothing to do with the political authority of the sovereign at all. The author of the work, Bellarmine wrote, “affirms that civil obedience only is contained in the oath of allegiance which the king of England proposed be sworn by his Catholic subjects. He adds that civil obedience is prohibited by the pope’s brevi and the Cardinal’s Epistle. Neither is true.”55 The way that Bellarmine went about disproving both assumptions took the cardinal into the familiar territories of his own elaboration on the relative separation between spiritual and ecclesiastical authority. If we examine, Bellarmine says, the wording of the oath, it will be clear that the oath was not supposed “to disclose and repress rebels” but “to disclose and repress Papists.”56 And the part of Catholic doctrine that the oath attacked was not the temporal power of the pope but his role as supreme spiritual authority. This is because, in Bellarmine’s elaboration, the oath required Catholics to renounce the pope’s potestas deponendi, which was not an expression of the pope’s political authority but a consequence of his theological role as supreme spiritual authority, which all the supreme temporal authorities must recognize in order to be admitted in the Christian Church. Thus, since it is impossible to reject the pope’s potestas deponendi without also denying his potestas excommunicandi, and since denying the pope’s authority in deciding in matters of heresy means denying the pope the authority of binding and loosing, the oath is not a legitimate political act but an attempt on the part of James to take away from the pope the charge of feeding the sheep of God, a spiritual task entrusted by Jesus to the spiritual, and not the political, leader. In a nutshell, Bellarmine says, the oath “simultaneously denies the power to excommunicate the king and the Apostolic primacy in the universal Church, and it opens up the way to build the king’s primacy in spiritual matters.”57 Keeping with this basic theoretical position, in this long text Bellarmine replies to the Triplici nodo with painstaking details, insisting that the pope’s condemnation of the oath was not a usurpation of the king’s temporal authority

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but remained within the boundaries of his spiritual authority. For example, when James complained that the pope “falcem suam immisit in messem alienam” because he pretended to judge matters over which the king had complete jurisdiction, Bellarmine responded that the pope did not intend to meddle in politics because he did not judge it a political act, but a spiritual act, which had been issued by a merely temporal authority. In this perspective, “When the question is whether an oath is licit or illicit, one cannot conceive a more competent judge than the supreme Pontiff, because we deal with a sacred matter, a spiritual matter, a matter which pertains to the salvation or perdition of the soul.”58 Also, when James brought up the dissension among Catholic theologians over the pope’s authority, Bellarmine once again reiterated that the issue theologians discussed was the temporal authority of the pope, and he was not interested in defending this temporal authority because the oath did not refer to it. By contrast, on the spiritual authority of the pope, which was what was really at stake in the oath, there was absolutely no controversy among the Catholics, for all agree that it is the pope’s spiritual, not political, prerogative to decide whether a king was a heretic and, as such, an illegitimate member of the Christian commonwealth.59 The same theme returns when Bellarmine defends the comparison he had made between James and Julian the Apostate: while James rejected the comparison because the oath of allegiance was a political means while Julian wanted to divert the faithful from the true Church, Bellarmine repeated that the comparison was indeed correct, for, just as Julian, “under color of civil honor owed to an emperor, . . . was leading Christians . . . to idolatry,” likewise James “proposed an oath in which under color of civil obedience owed to the temporal sovereign in temporal matters, a sacred obedience would be sworn to the same king as a superior in spiritual matters.”60 While Bellarmine was very comfortable with his theoretical leitmotif in this text, that is, that the oath was not a political statement against the pope’s political authority but a theological statement against the pope’s spiritual authority, he nevertheless realized that at a certain point in the text he would have to engage James’s remarks on the Gunpowder Plot and the long history of treacheries perpetrated by the Catholics against his and his predecessors’ regime. He certainly did not want to get into a long discussion over the political reliability of the English Catholics, which would have undermined the entire backbone of his reply to James, based as it was on the assumption that the oath was not about politics. Also, Bellarmine was fully aware that the history of the English Catholic community was not his strongest intellectual suit, and that is why he wrote to Robert Persons to ask for advice: “My reverend Father, I have started to write the reply. But since the author of the Apology says that this present king has not persecuted Catholics on account of religion, it would be very

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important for me if your Reverence could send me something to prove that both before and after the Plot he confirmed the Queen’s laws against the Catholics, and that he sent to jail the recusants, or robbed them from their lands. Likewise, I would like to know whether in that plot, for which good Father Garnet died, there were only Catholics, or also heretics, since this author says that it was orchestrated under pretext of the Catholic religion.”61 Evidently Persons gave Bellarmine the information he needed, and he also told him that no Protestant was officially found among the participants to the plot, for in the brief part of his text dealing with the treacherous nature of the English Catholics’ attitude toward the English monarchy, Bellarmine listed a number of instances in which James and his predecessors persecuted all Catholics for reason of religion, without differentiating between traitors and loyal subjects, starting with the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, and he made no mention of the specific circumstances of or participants in the Gunpowder Plot.62 Thus, Bellarmine’s Responsio ended up being a text with remarkable intellectual coherence: it constantly refused to engage in the political terms in which James wanted to push the discussion, and it constantly avoided discussing the issue of the pope’s indirect authority in temporal matters in order to concentrate over and over again on the pope’s direct spiritual authority. This text also served the purpose of addressing the pan-European implications of the oath of allegiance: by constantly stating its theological, and not its political, nature, Bellarmine aimed to make the oath less welcome to other European sovereigns, who might have been tempted—and, in fact, soon enough were very tempted—to use James’s argument to strengthen their own authority at the expense of the pope’s. In a sense, Bellarmine was cashing in on the kind of considerations that Paolo Sarpi had made in the previously quoted letter to Leschassier, in which the Venetian friar criticized the mixture of theology and politics in the oath. However, while Bellarmine engaged the European and theological dimensions of the question, the political future of the English Catholic community was still very much at stake in the debate over the oath, and Robert Persons was in charge of taking care of that. In the same months in which Bellarmine was working on his Responsio, Persons was working on another response of his own, the book The Iudgment of a Catholicke English-man, published in St. Omer in 1608. The book is rhetorically constructed as a series of conciliatory reflections on the part of a Catholic Englishman who, in principle, found no contradiction between his political allegiance and his religious profession. Thus, the author of the book showed himself unwilling to believe that the author of the Triplici nodo could really be James, for the king

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could not have mistaken so blatantly the pope’s brevi and Cardinal Bellarmine’s arguments. “I can not imagine that the equity, and gravity of his Maiestie,” Persons wrote, would have allowed the book to claim that Catholic doctrine was intrinsically opposed to the authority of the temporal sovereign, since Bellarmine himself in his Controversiae had declared openly “that temporall Princes have their Authority from God, are Gods substitutes and Vicars, in all temporall affayres of their States and Kingdomes.”63 Bellarmine, together with the entire English Catholic community, according to Persons, was more than willing “to sweare all cyvill obedience that he oweth to his Maiesty, or that any subiect hath ever in former Catholicke times worne to their liege Lords or Princes.”64 But because English Catholics were not less loyal to their temporal sovereign than they were committed to their religious profession, when the oath was proposed and they realized that it contained not just matters of political allegiance but also matters of conscience, they, “according to their rule of Subordination, and spirituall Obedience in such affayres,” referred the matter “to the iudgment and consultation of their Supreme Pastour.” The judgment of the pope was that the parts of the oath “appertaining to the promise of Civill and Temporall Obedience” were lawful, while the parts touching doctrine were not.65 Thus, once Persons had set up both the absolute loyalty that the English Catholics felt toward their sovereign, even though they had been vexed in many cruel ways for their religion, and their spiritual commitment and constancy in matters of conscience, the Jesuit’s position in this text was that both commitments could be reconciled provided that James allowed his Catholic subjects “liberty of Conscience, and equality with other Subiects (in this point at least of freedome of soul).” In such a way, English Catholics would be able to be secure in their faith and also “most loyall in hart & affection, & never meaning otherwise, but to live in most orderly and dutifull Subiection and Obedience to his Highnes.”66 A certain strand of scholarship on English Catholicism has always considered this text a moderate turn in Persons’s attitude toward the English Crown. For instance, for Thomas Clancy The Iudgment was, to a certain extent, the expression of the defeat of the Allen-Persons party, after the failure of the militant and military plans aimed at changing religion in England with the help of Spain. For Clancy, Persons’s text represents the attempt on the part of the Jesuit to join parts of the appellant faction: appealing to liberty of conscience for the English Catholics was, as Clancy put it, “a rallying cry of the Appellants,” and a part of their minimalist strategy. Persons, who in the last years of his life had seen his maximalist plan for a Catholic England fail, decided to make some concessions to the adversary.67 More recently, Victor Houliston has revisited the

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centrality of the theme of liberty of conscience in The Iudgment, which he interprets as a part of Persons’s intrinsically spiritual project to solidify the English Catholic community in its theological commitment and to defend the spiritual space of the Catholic conscience against the English Protestants’ attack.68 I argue, instead, that this text was part of a strategy coordinated jointly by Persons and Bellarmine to cover all the theological and religio-political bases in the immediate polemical battle originated by the oath: while Bellarmine was writing against the larger theo-political implications of the oath for a European audience, Persons took care of solidifying the English Catholic community and avoiding a split on the question of loyalism. Thus, The Iudgment was written less to convince James to grant a measure of toleration to the English Catholics than to convince the English Catholics that swearing the oath was not a doctrinally legitimate way to demonstrate their political loyalty. In a sense, then, Persons attempted to eliminate all the possible arguments that English Catholics could use to justify their taking of the oath, and in this respect The Iudgment is an expression of the same strategy that made Persons insist vigorously for the removal of Blackwell. There is a great deal of evidence to prove this argument. First, Bellarmine was very aware of what Persons was writing, just as Persons was aware of Bellarmine’s work. In a letter sent by Bellarmine to Persons at the end of May 1608, the Jesuit cardinal informed the rector of the English College that he had almost finished his Responsio. Bellarmine had showed it to the pope, who had suggested “that some other Englishman saw it” before publication. Thus, Bellarmine sent to Persons what he had written so far and promised to “send the rest in two days. Also, I am sending back your writings, and also the copy of the Brevi.”69 Moreover, Bellarmine also collaborated with Persons on the composition of Persons’s Discussion of the answere of M. William Barlow, a text written in response to Barlow’s reply to The Iudgment, which Persons died before finishing and which was completed by Thomas Fitzherbert and published posthumously in 1612. Edward Coffin, an English Jesuit who from 1604 had moved to the English College in Rome and had become Persons’s secretary, wrote a long preface to that work. During the composition of this text, then, Persons was in close correspondence with Bellarmine. At one point he wrote to Bellarmine to show him “my reasoning about the predecessors of our king James”: this was a short composition, in Latin, on the good Christian and Catholic kings of England from King Ina up until the time of Henry VIII. Persons must have already sent some parts of his and Coffin’s work to Bellarmine, who had probably expressed some criticism, which is why in the same letter Persons wrote that “Father Coffin still sends his apologies for his writing . . . both of us are really busy.”70

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Also, the fact that Bellarmine and Persons were on the same page on the oath and that they coordinated their responses with one another appears clearly from the documents concerning a brief inquisitorial procedure against Persons started in 1610, right before Persons’s death, and stirred by William Alabaster’s accusation against the moderate tone of The Iudgment. The Archive of the Inquisition contains a copy of the dossier assembled against Persons between 1610 and 1613. At the beginning of the dossier there is an introductory summary that related the affair after its conclusion, in favor of Robert Persons; the last document in that dossier is a letter by Bellarmine, dated 6 September 1613, in which the Italian Jesuit asked for all this documentation to be sent to him so that he could show it to the pope. Thus, presumably Bellarmine gave or convinced the pope to give the final word on the case against Persons soon after that letter.71 As we can learn from the summary of the case, Alabaster, with the complicity of Richard Smith,72 denounced Persons’s book for being too accommodating toward the oath. According to Alabaster, Persons had written “that he was willing to offer allegiance to the king even without the consent of the pope, and to fight for the king against the pope with swords and teeth,” that the pope’s authority to depose princes was not de fide, and that Persons did not condemn the oath strongly enough because he admitted that parts of it were legitimate.73 Since Persons was still alive when the accusations were made, he got to defend his own text in a declaration that was included in the dossier. Persons wrote that in the dangerous and confused times following the oath, after James had published his Triplici nodo in which he declared that the oath was nothing but a political statement, and after “a great number of Catholics both Priests and Laymen had taken it as a licit act,” thus forcing those who refused to take it even more, Persons decided to write a book quickly, in English, “to firm up the mind of the dubious Catholics waiting for Cardinal Bellarmine and the others to complete their Latin works.” The book, Persons continued, was successful in convincing English Catholics not to swear, and once Bellarmine’s book came out, “we obtained the effect that we could wish to obtain.”74 Persons then went into more detail regarding the kind of effect that the combination of his and Bellarmine’s books was supposed to achieve. Persons said that he was well aware that the oath was centered on the question of papal authority, but he also firmly believed that the English priests and laymen who were taking the oath did not mean to deny the spiritual authority of the pope but simply to offer their political loyalty to the sovereign: “As to the general question, to deny simply and absolutely that the pope as supreme Pastor of the Catholic Church has any authority given to him directly or indirectly by

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Christ . . . to proceede against any prince . . . this, I suppose, was not the feeling of the Catholics who took the oath.”75 Because of this, Persons continued, his task was not that of offering a theological condemnation of the oath, but that of reassuring the Catholics that they were indeed allowed to show their temporal loyalty to the king, but that the oath was not the right way to do it. For this reason he wrote that the parts of the oath concerning temporal obedience were licit and that the pope did “not prohibit natural obedience in licit things.” However the oath did not contain only those licit parts but contained “also many other points that touch matters of Catholic doctrine, and since these points are so conjoined and mixed with the others that one cannot take the oath without also swearing them, they make the whole oath, in the proposed formula, illicit.”76 In other words, Persons declared to the Inquisitors that The Iudgment was not supposed to be an official Catholic position on the oath because that task, as he well knew, was entrusted to Bellarmine, who, indeed, provided a perfect theological attack on the oath. Persons’s job was simply to put a patch, so to speak, on the wound caused by the act within the English Catholic community. Insofar as Persons’s Iudgment reassured the English Catholics that refusing the oath did not mean refusing the legitimacy of the sovereign, the text was completely successful in taking care of things locally in the English Catholic community, leaving Bellarmine to concentrate on the European and theological implications of the oath. The fact that Persons defended himself by putting his text clearly in the context of this strategy and that it was Bellarmine who assumed the responsibility of definitely closing the case show that the two Jesuits were in full agreement on this way of proceeding. From this analysis two important elements emerge. First, Bellarmine, together with an important part of the Roman Curia, seemed to be well aware that the oath of allegiance had important implications in both the English and the European contexts. This is why Bellarmine’s and Persons’s responses were part of a unified strategy, one aimed at refuting the oath in both those contexts. Second, Bellarmine was greatly intellectually invested in the European implications of the oath because they were directly linked with his theoretical concerns regarding the nature of temporal authority and its relationship with the spiritual authority. While Bellarmine’s doctrine of the potestas indirecta was intended to provide the pope with the complete and absolute sovereignty over the consciences of Christian men and women, and, through that, to offer him a space in the political realm, James’s oath attacked it by granting to the political ruler a form of spiritual authority and jurisdiction over the consciences of his subjects, which would strengthen the political authority of the sovereign not only against the pope insofar as he was a foreign ruler but also against the pope as the head of a universal, spiritual institution. That is why Bellarmine entered the

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debate over the oath of allegiance with a theoretical intensity that he had never shown before in dealing with the English Reformation.

The Debate over the Oath of Allegiance: Secular Politics and the European Context After 1608, James seemed more and more aware of the theoretical implications of the oath of allegiance in a European context, and he decided to take full advantage of them by upgrading, so to speak, the scope of the debate. The controversy over the oath between 1609 and 1610 was indeed enlarged to the point of becoming a pan-European discussion over the nature of temporal and spiritual authority, and, from the point of view of the Church of Rome and of Bellarmine in particular, a pan-European crisis. Many events and historico-political European contingencies contributed to this enlargement, but it seems to me that at a theoretical level two sparks ignited the fire: the publication, in 1609, of another edition of James’s Triplici nodo, with the addition of a “Premonition of his Maiesties, to all most Mightie Monarches, Kings, free Princes and States of Christendome”; and the publication, also in 1609, of William Barclay’s De potestate Papae. James’s “Premonition” was composed with the intent to make the political implications of the oath very explicit to all European rulers, without regard for their confessional allegiance or the confessional configuration of their territories. For, as James put it, “the cause is generall, and concerneth the Authoritie and Priviledge of Kings in generall, and all supereminent Temporall powers.”77 The reason, according to James, that all temporal rulers, “whom God hath placed in the highest thrones upon earth, made his Lieutenants & ViceRegents, and even seated . . . upon his owne throne to execute his Iudgements,” had to be concerned about the Catholic reaction against the oath of allegiance was twofold. First, the oath concerned “the civil and temporal obedience, due by Subjects to their naturall Soveraignes”78; as such, it was a perfectly legitimate political act issued by a political ruler. Second, such obedience is imposed by God, and thus the pope, in moving to attack it, was going “against the rule of all Scriptures, ancient Councels and Fathers.”79 Thus, insofar as the oath was an expression of the God-given right of the kings to enjoy their subjects’ obedience, it was an expression of a theologically correct interpretation of scriptures. In this sense, despite Bellarmine’s attempts to paint the king of England as a heretic, James insisted that he was instead “a Catholike Christian” who believed in the Apostolic Creed and the general councils, respected the ecclesiastical hierarchy more than the Puritans and the Jesuits did, and was even willing to

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“give my consent that the Bishop of Rome should have the first Seate [among Bishops]: I being the Westerne King would go with the Patriarch of the West.” However, what James, as a Christian and as a king, was not willing to admit, was that the pope, far from being simply the spiritual patriarch of the West, was also the Church’s earthly monarch and as such both an infallible spiritual head and a supernational political authority in charge of disposing of the earthly kingdoms, entrusted by God to the temporal, and not the spiritual, authorities.80 James’s mixture of politics and theology in this text is very evident from the long discussion of Bellarmine’s interpretation of the “Pasce oves meas” and “Tibi dabo claves.” According to James, Bellarmine had used those scriptural testimonies to prove not just the spiritual supremacy of the pope but also his right to intervene in temporal matters. By contrast, James argued that Bellarmine’s interpretation was incorrect from the point of view of scriptural exegesis,81 and also that Bellarmine’s portrait of the pope as a religio-political supreme Lord almost convinced him to prove that the pope was the Antichrist : “Thus hath the Cardinals shamelesse wresting of those two places of Scripture . . . for prooving of the popes supreme temporal Authoritie over Princes; animated me to prove the pope to be the Antichrist . . . so to pay him in his owne money againe. And this opinion no pope can ever make me to recant; except they first renounce any further medling with Princes, in any thing belonging to their temporall Iurisdiction.”82 Once James paid Bellarmine back “in his owne money” by showing the theological, and not just the political, arguments in support of the oath and against the pope’s monarchy, he closed his address to the princes by reiterating that what Bellarmine and the pope were trying to accomplish was not simply a condemnation of a heretical belief but the condemnation of a Catholic and right way of interpreting the role that God set up for temporal kings. In this respect, there was no difference between England and the rest of Europe because all sovereigns were equally affected by Bellarmine’s attempt to deny the God-given preeminence of the princes in temporal matters, which implied the equally sacred right of the princes to rule over their subjects. As the Gunpowder Plot had demonstrated, Bellarmine’s doctrine offered ample room to the clergymen to “hatch or foster any treasonable attempts against Princes.”83 Precisely because obedience to a natural sovereign was not only a political but also a Christian duty, James urged his fellow rulers to realize that “wee are bound in conscience” to act “for the planting and spreading the true worship of God . . . in all our Dominion,” which means to stand up to the “Babylonian Monarch,” a threat to both religion and politics because it is both a manifestation of the Antichrist and the biggest threat to the “temporall securities” of the kingdoms.84 Thus, all

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kings and princes, according to James, should join him against the pope not only because the pope threatened their temporal power but also because the pope, in denying to temporal sovereigns their right to subjects’ obedience, vilified the true commands of Jesus Christ. Responding to James’s attempt to make the debate over the oath something that every sovereign, both as a temporal ruler and as a follower of the true Christian Church, should defend, Bellarmine insisted, once again, that the oath of allegiance had nothing to do with politics and argued that the kind of religious doctrine that underpinned the oath, far from being expression of the true Christian Church, was indeed an isolated and novel form of heresy, which put James at odds with both the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches.85 Out of the eighteen chapters of which Bellarmine’s Apologia is composed, only two are dedicated specifically to argue against James’s claim that the oath was intended to test the political loyalty of subjects and his claim that Bellarmine and the pope opposed it because they wanted to defend the pope’s temporal authority. Since, as Bellarmine had already argued in Matthaeus Tortus’s Responsio, it was clear that James intended for the oath to repress “Papists,” not “Rebels”; and since, on the other hand, the other European sovereigns, who were truly Christian, had no trouble reconciling the political obedience they demanded from their subjects with the due reverence toward the vicar of Christ, it was clear that if James wanted to advance the common cause of temporal obedience to political sovereigns he should have truly joined the other Catholic sovereigns who were able to maintain and protect their sovereignty by understanding correctly Christ’s command to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.86 The bulk of the text is dedicated to demonstrate that not only James’s oath but also the entirety of his theological opinions were both heretical and unique. Bellarmine started with James’s attribution of certain spiritual functions to the temporal sovereign. Focusing just on that specific point, Bellarmine wrote, everybody could see most clearly that it was not consonant with the Christian doctrine, and, as such, was far from constituting a common front on which, according to James, all the Christian kings should fight. Instead, it set the king of England apart from the Christian world, including Protestant England. If the Catholic faith is what has been believed in all times and in all places, then James’s doctrine regarding the spiritual functions of kings is definitely not Catholic, since it started only with Henry VIII. Moreover, it is so far from being universal that it is not even the faith of the entire island, “since in Britain itself there is a multitude of Puritans, who, following Calvin, argue that the ecclesiastical primacy pertains not to the king, but to the synod of ministers.”87 But what was heretical about James’s belief was not limited to his view of the role

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of the temporal king; his opinions on ceremonies, on scripture, on the worship of saints, and on the Eucharist were nothing but an idiosyncratic collage of theological novelties that James wanted to pass off as Catholic. Among those idiosyncratic opinions Bellarmine counted also James’s conjectures about the identity of the Antichrist, on the refutation of which Bellarmine spent a great deal of his work.88 Even in this latest exchange, then, Bellarmine and James remained firm in their respective theoretical positions. For James the oath denied the temporal authority of the pope, which was both politically dangerous for any king and prince and religiously impious for any Christian. And, since the temporal prince, as God’s lieutenant, had the right and duty to protect both his temporal security and the profession of the true faith, it was James’s—and every other sovereign’s—political and religious right and duty to fight the pope’s usurpation. Bellarmine refused to engage in a discussion of the pope’s political authority and remained committed to frame the question as a theological usurpation, on the part of a heretic, of some of the spiritual prerogatives of the pope. What was different about this phase of the debate, however, was that James showed himself to be very proactive, and not just at a theoretical level, in looking for approval and support from other European sovereigns. In fact, through his ambassadors James presented the text of the “Premonition” to the European courts and also to the Venetian Senate. Bellarmine’s theoretical strategy was devised precisely to isolate James’s position with respect to the other European sovereigns, but the Court of Rome did not take any chances. That is why, beginning in the spring of 1609, all the papal nuncios living in Catholic countries were alerted to the new moves of James, and the sovereigns’ reactions to his text and arguments were monitored closely. Unfortunately for the pope, the periphery of the Catholic world did not respond as the Curia might have liked. In May 1609 Cardinal Borghese wrote to Monsignor Gessi, the papal nuncio in Venice, to alert him that James’s new edition of the Triplici nodo containing the “Premonition” was about to be published: “since that king shows every day a greater hatred against the Catholic Religion, so we think we should believe that he will not refrain from exercising this hatred with the publication of that book.” As more news of the book was expected from France and Flanders, Borghese advised the nuncio to keep his ears open and to be alert and ready to deal with the matter with the Venetian Senate.89 In July 1609 the book was finally in the hands of the pope, and it was deemed “pestilent and seditious.” The nuncio was informed that the pope had asked the Venetian ambassador for a meeting, in which only the ambassador’s secretary, however, participated. The secretary was told how heretical the doctrines contained in the books were, and the Catholic

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hierarchy made it very clear “how greatly inconvenient it would be if such a book, utterly contrary to the truth of the Catholic faith, were to be accepted by Catholic princes.” Thus, the nuncio should maintain the same position, continue to speak about the heretical nature of the king’s book, and push the Venetian Senate not to accept it.90 While the doge of Venice complied with the requests coming from Rome and did not formally accept the “Premonition,” the Venetian government was far from holding the kind of clear anti-James position that Rome wanted. Thus, over the course of the summer of 1609, the nuncio was asked to lobby the local Venetian Inquisition to put James’s book on the list of prohibited books and to see to it that no librarian in Venice carried any copy of it. The Venetian Inquisition and government complied (in certain cases unwillingly) with this request, but evidently the water was far from calm: when, in the fall of 1609, Bellarmine’s response came out, the English ambassador in Venice retaliated by asking the government to prohibit Bellarmine’s book also, since it had already prohibited the king’s. The response of the Venetian government was, once again, lukewarm: even though the nuncio could not find any official document prohibiting the book of Bellarmine, it seemed to him that no bookseller in Venice carried a copy of it.91 At that point, the Roman Inquisition decided to take a closer look into the matter, and from this point on, the correspondence between the nuncio and Cardinal Borghese was forwarded to the Holy Office.92 The nuncio in Venice was charged with the task of investigating why Bellarmine’s book was not circulating in Venice, and after a couple of months he sorted the matter out: “It is true that the librarians have no official prohibition to keep or sell the last book of Cardinal Bellarmine, and on Thursday the Assistants of the [Venetian] Holy Office confirmed this.” From other sources, however, the nuncio had learned that many Venetian noblemen did not want to upset James, and that, while they could not officially prohibit Bellarmine’s book, nevertheless some of them, especially Contarini, “by way of admonition or fear . . . terrorized some librarians, in such a way that they thought they were being forbidden from keeping the book.” Because the Venetian ambassador in Rome had lobbied the Senate to convince them to avoid fomenting the controversy by attacking Bellarmine’s book, the nuncio concluded, “For now the affair has ended well. And it will not be useless, since it anticipates what could happen in this or similar occasions.”93 The mystery solved by the nuncio regarding the official and unofficial hostility toward Bellarmine’s reply to James gave to Rome a glimpse of a difficult scenario. While it was true that James did not win any official endorsement in Venice, it was equally true that the antipapalist feelings shown by part of the

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Venetian patriciate during the Interdetto were still prominent, and in this respect it is relevant that no less than Nicolò Contarini appeared to be personally in charge of the campaign against Bellarmine’s book among the Venetian librarians.94 Also, the nuncio was right to remark that dealing with such matters was going to be useful in dealing with other similar instances. What the nuncio probably did not know was that a similar, and even more dramatic, situation had already happened in Paris. On 7 July 1609, Cardinal Borghese received a long letter from the nuncio in Paris, Monsignor Ubaldini. Ubaldini told Borghese that the week before King Henri IV had summoned the nuncio to court and told him that the English ambassador in France had presented James’s book to the French king. Henri showed the book to some of his trusted religious advisers, including Du Perron and La Rochefoucauld, who said that “even though the book was wicked, it was nevertheless possible to think that one could gain some fruit out of it, since that king affirms many things that today all heretics deny, and all heretics are very scandalized by the book.” Thus, Henri thought that the book “was an opportunity not to be missed” to convert James to Catholicism, and that in this respect it was very necessary that “His Holiness refrained from replying to it now.”95 Against the nuncio’s insistence that the book, far from giving reasons to hope for James’s conversion, was instead a sign of his progressively more hateful attitude toward Rome, Henri replied that he thought the book was more anti-Puritan than anti-Catholic and asserted that James’s fear for the political stability of his kingdom was to blame for the fact that the king of England seemed unable to “accommodate in a prince the profession of the Catholic religion and the security of the State.”96 The nuncio tried to explain to Henri that the fear for the security of the state was just a trick used by James to persecute Catholics, but Henri seemed unwilling to agree with the nuncio and instead gave the book to Du Perron and invited the nuncio to talk with the cardinal about it. When Ubaldini met with Du Perron, the French theologian told the papal diplomat that he also saw in James’s work “some points worthy of some consideration.” For instance, James had admitted the superiority of the pope as patriarch of the West, he had declared his approval for the first four general councils, and he never called himself head of the Church, as Henry VIII had done. For these reasons, Du Perron agreed with his sovereign that Rome should have given some credit to James, and that it should have refrained from “stabbing him with writings,” which would have been a good way to remove the “fear and suspicions” James had toward the Catholics. Consequently, Du Perron advised the nuncio that if Rome wanted to write a reply to the book, such reply should have not been like the one that Bellarmine made to the first edition of Triplici nodo, which had

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“moved and wounded James deeply.” This time it would be better to use moderation and conciliatory tones; therefore, instead of coming from a Roman cardinal or somebody otherwise too closely linked with the Roman Curia, the said reply should have come from France and should have been presented to James in person by somebody friendly to him and thus able to take advantage of the occasion to discuss with the English king some possible ways to bring him back to Catholicism.97 This report from France worried the Roman hierarchy incredibly because it was a clear indication that James’s strategy was, indeed, working. Henri seemed convinced by James’s position that the oath was about politics, and he believed that James’s theological opinions were very close to sound Catholic doctrine; for this reason he showed himself rather sympathetic toward the political fear and suspicion that James had toward his Catholic subjects, especially after the Gunpowder Plot. What was worse, from the Roman point of view, was that Cardinal Du Perron also seemed to agree with Henri, and that he thought it appropriate to avoid opposing James and to try instead to reason with him. But in order to reason with the king of England, Henri and Du Perron thought that the papalist faction and Bellarmine had to take a step back: if one wanted to convince James that Catholics were not political enemies, the author of the reply should have used a different strategy than the one Bellarmine had used in his Responsio, which avoided the political side of the arguments and insisted on the heretical nature of James’s belief. The letter of the nuncio was so worrisome that Borghese forwarded it immediately to the Inquisition: a copy of the letter is found also in the Archive of the Holy Office, and on the back of the letter we read that on 6 August 1609 the members of the Inquisition “privatim deliberarunt.”98 The substance of that private deliberation can be gathered from the letter that the nuncio wrote to Cardinal Borghese on 28 August 1609, in which he responded to what Borghese had evidently suggested based on the decisions taken in Rome.99 Three issues that the nuncio touched on represented the bulk of the directives he received from Rome: first, it was pivotal to convince Henri that James was a heretic, and, as such, it was not appropriate for him to endorse his opinions in any way; second, it was absolutely necessary that James’s book did not spread further in France so that the English king’s opinions could not get any further support; third, on the issue of the reply, Bellarmine was already at work on one, and the choice of the cardinal as the “official” Roman respondent was not up for discussion. The nuncio was happy to report progress on the first and second fronts. First, Henri IV had a meeting with the English ambassador in France, and of that meeting the nuncio said: “His Majesty maybe did not find the disposition

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that he hoped to find in that king [James], indeed, after he realized that the persecution in Scotland continued more cruel than ever, it seems to me that he recognizes, as I told him from the beginning, that the aim of the book was nothing but to make the Apostolic See odious to all the Princes, and to vomit out the poison that he [James] had been relentlessly drinking against it.” Indeed, the nuncio initiated some talks with Henri to convince him to appoint one of the French Jesuits closer to him to reply to the book, possibly Pierre Coton, Henri’s confessor, or Fronton du Duc.100 Second, the nuncio reported that “the King has forbidden to translate the book of the King of England, and the Chancellor has informed the printing presses and the bookstores that the book should neither be printed nor sold, and indeed in Paris there are very few copies of it.”101 But the issue of Bellarmine’s reply left the nuncio somewhat preoccupied: As to the reply that Cardinal Bellarmine is working on, since your most illustrious Lordship asks me to say my opinion, while people think that it is necessary to reply, I think that this has to be done as skillfully and sweetly as possible, since experience shows that all the writings that have come out from our faction have been as many flames which have ignited the hatred of that king against the Catholics. . . . I understand the difficulty, almost impossible to overcome, to construct this reply in such a way that the Catholic truth is defended, and the ears of that king are not hit, although they are ever so delicate, and indeed it is miserable to be in this necessity of replying, but maybe God will give such a spirit to the pen of Cardinal Bellarmine, that he could accomplish both. I will add only that the reply by Tortus, which is written with such modesty, was still considered most bitter.102 The nuncio’s doubts reveal the tough atmosphere that he evidently felt in Paris with respect to the question of the oath. Henri IV had demonstrated himself relatively sympathetic to the political arguments made by James, and even though the nuncio and the continued persecution against the Catholics in Britain had managed to convince Henri that James probably did not want to come back to unity with the Church of Rome, nevertheless, the nuncio thought that it was dangerous to keep pounding against James because that could awaken the antipapalist feelings that were still circulating at court and at the Sorbonne. Even this letter was forwarded to the Inquisition, and this time the reply was very harsh: on the back of the letter the Inquisitors noted that on 8 September 1609 the pope ordered the nuncio “not to meddle himself with . . . the question of the reply to be made to the book of the king of England.”103

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So, by 1609 James had managed, if not to acquire an open endorsement from the Catholic princes to whom he had offered his book, at least to acquire some unofficial forms of support for his political cause to strengthen the authority of the sovereign. In the meantime, the Roman Curia had decided to close its ranks around Bellarmine: although his own theories of the nature and extent of the authority of the pope in temporal affairs remained controversial, as I have shown already in describing the Roman reaction to the writings on the Interdetto, his uncompromising position toward the oath, that is, that it dealt with and threatened only the spiritual, and not the temporal, authority of the pope, and his aggressive pursuit of this point in his works against James had made him the ideal spokesman for the hard line of Rome against James. That is why the Roman Inquisition and the pope had replied harshly to the nuncio that his concerns regarding the lack of moderation of Bellarmine’s tone had no place in the battle that Rome had chosen to fight. But things were to get worse for Bellarmine and for Rome, as together with James’s “Premonition,” another important text came out in 1609, one that put Bellarmine’s polemical strategy in opposing the oath and the unity of the Roman Curia around it in serious jeopardy. It was, once again, Roberto Ubaldini who, in the same letter of 28 August, advised Borghese that “it has been seen here a book dealing with the pope’s authority, printed now for the first time in London, as it seems. The author is one Barclay, Scotsman, who is dead and who always made profession of being a Catholic. The book is most harmful, and I am enclosing a copy of it with this letter. Here we do not see it for sale yet, and I have looked for it with great diligence, and I found it with great difficulty. I will see to it that the book does not spread.”104 Less than a month later, the nuncio wrote again that people had started to read Barclay’s book, and that the news was not good: “That book by Barclay on the pope’s authority which I sent a month ago has here a very great reputation, and, what is more surprising and saddening, the most important theologians at the Sorbonne praise it, and in particular the three who are considered the most learned, the most pious and among the most experienced, and they say that in this matter a more useful book has never been published. I was also told that Cardinal Du Perron, after having read it, said these words: ‘This is a learned and good book, even though it will not be considered so in Rome, where they will want to reply to it, so the last error shall be worse than the first.’”105 What exactly did Barclay’s book contain to justify Du Perron’s praise of it? William Barclay’s treatise, unlike James’s texts in defense of the oath, did not engage the theological question of the spiritual superiority of the pope, which Barclay in fact openly endorsed in the dedicatory epistle, addressed to Clement VIII, but simply the pope’s temporal authority, which he saw as the

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main contention that the heretics of his time in France and Britain had against Rome.106 On the temporal authority of the pope, Barclay identified Bellarmine immediately as his main polemical opponent, for Bellarmine, “eruditissimus Theologus,” had treated the issue more “brilliantly” than anyone else.107 Barclay then attacked the core of Bellarmine’s theo-political view in an unprecedented manner. As I have said earlier, two key doctrines underpinned Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta. First, for Bellarmine the ecclesiastical and political authorities enjoyed a degree of autonomy with respect to one another. Second, the jurisdiction of the pope was fundamentally different from any other form of jurisdiction, and thus incommensurable to the jurisdiction of the sovereign. Indeed, Bellarmine identified the jurisdiction over consciences as the proper and unique area of competence for the pope, and while such an area of competence was distinct from and incommensurable to the temporal jurisdiction, at the same time, and precisely because of its unique nature, it put the authority of the pope at a different and superior level than the authority of the king. For this reason only the pope could rule indirectly in political matters, that is, when consciences were put in jeopardy by the authority over bodies. Paolo Sarpi had agreed with Bellarmine that secular and ecclesiastical authority were distinct and also that their areas of jurisdiction were radically different and incommensurable: indeed, he thought that, because clerical exemption was a fundamentally political matter that was absolutely unnecessary and completely outside of the reach of the spiritual authority, then, based on Bellarmine’s own theory, the pope had no right to intervene in the political decisions made by the Venetian government. By contrast, William Barclay, though he agreed with Bellarmine on the first point, that is, that ecclesiastical and political authorities were distinct, attacked the second, that is, that their respective areas of jurisdiction were at different levels. In other words, for Barclay political and ecclesiastical authorities were indeed distinct, but they were not, in a sense, incommensurable. Barclay started his treatise by relating the two contrasting opinions within the Catholic theologians and canonists on the pope’s authority in temporal matters, the directa and the indirecta potestas. First, he refuted the opinion supporting the first; in particular, he took issue with a treatise written by Tommaso Bozio, an Oratorian monk and theorist, entitled De iure status, sive de iure divino et naturali ecclesiasticae libertatis et potestatis. In this work Bozio had argued, along the same lines as Francisco Peña, that because Christ as a man was both “head of the Angels” and also king of “all natural things,” he had transferred this supreme political and spiritual authority to the pope, who then was the “source, apex, head and sun of the entire regal and priestly authority.”108 Against Bozio’s opinion, Barclay recurred to Bellarmine, whom he quoted as

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the main authority to demonstrate that spiritual authority and temporal authority were autonomous with respect to one another, since temporal authority existed before the Christian Church; that the ecclesiastical authority was purely spiritual and absolutely not temporal, because the kingdom of Christ was not of this world, therefore Christ had not been in charge of ruling natural things; that obedience to temporal authority was specifically commanded to the Christians in the gospel.109 Then, after showing with a variety of historical arguments that the political authority of the pope was, in fact, never exercised by the primitiva Ecclesia and that it was indeed the reason the Roman Church was under attack by the heretics of his own time,110 Barclay arrived at the core of his theoretical argument. While Bellarmine was right to argue that the origins, natures, and aims of temporal authority and spiritual authority were distinct, he was wrong to treat the spiritual authority as a completely different kind of entity with respect to the temporal authority. For Barclay, instead, political and ecclesiastical authority enjoyed the same position within the Christian commonwealth. Barclay argued that Bellarmine’s body-politics metaphor, according to which the pope and the king were two members of the same body but that they were not at the same level, for the former was like the head, the other was like a limb and dependent on the head, was not correct. By contrast, the pope and the king would be more appropriately compared to two feet or two arms or two shoulders: “indeed, a foot does not depend on the other foot, nor an arm on the other arm, nor a shoulder on the other shoulder,” and, just as both parts equally depend on a third element, so “the spiritual and temporal, or ecclesiastical and political authority, even though they are members of one political body, and part of the one Christian Commonwealth and Church, nevertheless they are not subject to one another . . . but both, like the two shoulders of one single body, are connected to the one head, which is Christ.”111 Because both authorities were directly instituted by Christ, and by Christ were clearly distinguished and separated, as Bellarmine himself admitted, then, Barclay argued, one must deduce that from a juridical point of view, their respective areas of competence are on an absolutely equal level: the spiritual nature of the jurisdiction of the conscience does not add anything special to the authority of the pope. Thus, according to Barclay, Bellarmine cannot treat ecclesiastical and political authority as both two and one, as both separate and joined, because then he will be confusing “potestas” with “respublica”: Either he [Bellarmine] is here talking about the ecclesiastical authority [potestas] completely separate from the civil authority [potestas], as it was once at the time of the Apostles and is now in the

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places where Christians live among pagans or infidels, in which case it is clear enough that that authority [potestas], that is, the ecclesiastical commonwealth [respublica], as he calls it, or its Princes and Ruler, have no right, not even spiritual, over the political prince, because he [the political prince] is by no means a son of the Church; or he [Bellarmine] is talking about the ecclesiastical authority [potestas] joined with the civil, as in the Christian Commonwealth [Christiana respublica], and in that case he wrongly makes two Commonwealths [respublicae], an ecclesiastical and a political one, when, indeed, they are only two authorities [potestates] of one Christian commonwealth [Christiana respublica], parts and members of one Church and mystical body of Christ.112 In other words, for Barclay, Bellarmine’s mistake was to have treated potestas, or the specific authority of the Church, as equivalent to the Christiana respublica, or the Christian commonwealth, and in this respect Barclay understood better than any other the implications of granting the authority over conscience a proper juridical space. By contrast, Barclay thought that one could refer to two different commonwealths only in the non-Christian states (and in this case there was absolutely no area of intersection between those two commonwealths), while he maintained that in the Christian commonwealth there is only one legitimate juridical space, which is shared without any area of intersection by two authorities, which are separate but equal. The metaphor of segregation is very apt here, I think: for Barclay, king and pope were equal but segregated within the one commonwealth they shared; for Bellarmine they were distinct, but neither equal nor segregated, because the jurisdiction over conscience was different from, and at the same time overlapped with, the jurisdiction of the bodies. That partial overlapping and fundamental difference was precisely what gave indirect temporal authority to the pope. Barclay’s theoretical move here has many important implications. First, by insisting on the absolute equality of the two authorities within the same commonwealth, Barclay “downgraded,” so to speak, the spiritual authority of the pope to the same level as the political authority of the prince; or, better, he “upgraded” the prince’s to the level of the pope’s. In this respect, De potestate Papae is very interesting when seen alongside his previous work dedicated to defend the divine-right character of princely sovereignty.113 Consequently, by claiming that both authorities were under the same commonwealth, and by claiming that the true king of that one commonwealth was Christ, Barclay removed the possibility of having a superior human authority in charge of deciding in matters of controversy. This argument was meant to neutralize the

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implications of Bellarmine’s belief that the pope’s jurisdiction over consciences was radically different from the sovereign’s: namely, that the pope’s jurisdiction was both separate from and overlapped with the sovereign’s jurisdiction. The indirect authority of the pope to intervene in political matters when the needs of consciences required it was the result of this overlap.114 From this perspective, Barclay’s intellectual operation was much more radical than the one Sarpi attempted. In fact, when Sarpi sought to defend the prerogative of the prince to intervene in matters of clerical exemption, all that he had to do—and all that Sarpi did—was to concede that the spiritual authority had ultimate judgment over consciences, and even if, or precisely because, this spiritual authority was in fact more important than the temporal authority, it could and should not concern itself with matters of bodies. And since clerical exemption was purely a matter of bodies, then the spiritual supremacy of the pope’s authority was intrinsically unable to rule over it. Barclay, however, went a step further by denying any special feature to the spiritual authority of the pope and by granting a juridically equal status to ecclesiastical and political authority. Sarpi noted the implications of Barclay’s move and in fact wrote that Barclay’s commonwealth could become like “a monster with two heads,” because Barclay had put God as the only superior to both the pope and the king, which left them on the exact same level within the Christian commonwealth, and without a human superior authority over them.115 Barclay’s radical “juridical” take on the relationship between ecclesiastical and political authority allowed the Scottish jurist to support the oath of allegiance in a theoretically powerful and far-reaching manner. In chapter 27 Barclay addressed the question by making a comparison between oaths of allegiance and monastic vows. Vows, Barclay argued, are regulated by the positive law of the Church because they are pacts between monks and God made through the Church and its vicar. Thus, since vows fall under the proper jurisdiction of the pope, the pope can dispense monks from their vows, provided that the request for dispensation does not clash with divine law. However, since an oath of allegiance, like any other oath, is a pact between the prince and the people, based on the precept of divine law that subjects should be obedient to their superiors, and since such a pact, even if it is said to be remitted to God, nevertheless is an obligation given chiefly not to God but to the man to whom one swears, that is, the king, then the ecclesiastical ruler has no authority whatsoever to absolve and liberate people from their oath of allegiance, and indeed the temporal ruler has more authority in dispensing from an oath than the ecclesiastical ruler has in dispensing from a vow.116 Thus, Barclay was able to frame the issue of vows and oaths as a question of jurisdiction: he granted that the oath of allegiance,

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by nature, was much more “human” than a vow, because, while based on a divine-law precept, it did not have God as one of the parties involved. However, precisely because the Church’s jurisdiction, which regulates pacts made with God, is not superior but perfectly equal to the prince’s, the fact that the Church can dispense in cases of pacts between men and God does not mean that it can dispense in cases of pacts between men and men. The implications of this argument were momentous, especially in France and in all Catholic counties, whose sovereigns were rather sympathetic to the attempt that they saw in James’s oath to protect temporal authority from the intervention of the pope, but also were wary of the theological implications of questioning the pope’s spiritual supremacy. Barclay admitted clearly that the pope had authority to make decisions concerning pacts between men and God, but he declared, equally clearly, that this authority, within the Christian commonwealth, was neither greater than, nor overlapped with, the sovereign’s authority to make decisions concerning pacts between men and men. From this point of view, it is clear why Du Perron considered Barclay’s work a masterpiece in the debate over the nature of temporal and spiritual authorities and their relationship. Bellarmine, of course, also understood the wide-reaching impact of Barclay’s theories, and he decided to reply with his De potestate summi Pontificis in rebus temporalibus adversus Gulielmum Barclaium, published in 1610, which represented the most comprehensive treatise on the temporal authority of the pope after the Controversia de summo Pontifice. This is because, with Barclay, Bellarmine not simply faced the task of defending the pope’s spiritual authority but was further called upon to defend his view of the pope’s temporal authority. This time the enemy was not only the heretic James, or Paolo Sarpi, but all Catholics like Henri IV or the supporters of the liberty and autonomy of the Gallican Church, who regarded with suspicion any attempt on the part of the pope to meddle with temporal sovereignty, as well as all Catholics like Francisco Peña, who since the 1590s were convinced that Bellarmine’s theory, far from strengthening the pope’s position, was in fact undermining it. Barclay’s strategy to first pit Bozio against Bellarmine and then to go after the theory of the potestas indirecta had made Bellarmine’s polemical task in his reply especially difficult. First, Bellarmine needed to show that Barclay’s voice was unique in the Catholic world, for every Catholic theologian and jurist granted some temporal authority to the pope, while Barclay granted none. However, he also needed to defend his own theory of the potestas indirecta as the most correct manner of understanding the nature of the pope’s temporal authority without attacking the opposing camp in such a way as to undermine

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his previous statement according to which the Catholic world was compact against Barclay. Bellarmine solved the problem by beginning his treatise with a long list of theologians from Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and Britain who supported in some form the pope’s temporal authority, in order to show how unique Barclay’s position was.117 Afterward, he quickly declared that he was going to pass over Barclay’s arguments against Bozio, because “I have chosen neither to refute nor to defend Bozio’s opinion, and I have decided to dispute only that in which all Catholics agree and in which we all disagree with Barclay, and to defend myself from his objections.”118 Immediately after that, Bellarmine attacked what he called the “principium sive fundamentum” of Barclay’s doctrine, that is, the principle that political and ecclesiastical authority are both absolutely separate by divine law and, by divine law, absolutely equal. Remaining committed to his entire theoretical system, Bellarmine conceded that ecclesiastical and political authority are indeed distinct, but he challenged Barclay on the issue of equality: “thus we affirm that the ecclesiastical authority is indeed distinct from the political, but is not only largely nobler, but is also superior with respect to the political authority so as to be able to direct and correct it, and in certain cases, that is, in order to the spiritual end and the eternal life, to rule it.”119 From that point on, Bellarmine’s treatise continued with a defense of the doctrine of the pope’s potestas indirecta, founded on the unique and special juridical, historical, and theological status of the jurisdiction over men’s and women’s conscience, an area regulated by the spiritual authority of the pope that both distinguished it from and made it superior to the temporal authority and jurisdiction of the sovereign. In this respect it is significant that, in replying to Barclay’s central point regarding the difference between potestas and respublica, which was the ground on which Barclay built his theory of the pope and prince as “separate and equal,” Bellarmine returned to the metaphor of the spirit and the flesh as the best way to describe two authorities that were distinct but not equal: “The spiritual or ecclesiastical commonwealth and the temporal or political commonwealth are both two and one: two parts, one total, just as the spirit and the flesh joined together constitute one man, indeed they are one man.” Thus, just as within a man flesh and spirit are both conjoined and separated, but definitely not equal, so the spiritual and temporal authorities, conjoined in the Christian commonwealth, are distinct with respect to origin, nature, and aim; but the ecclesiastical authority, in certain specific cases, takes the lead over the temporal, just as the welfare of the soul takes the lead over the welfare of the body.120 Another significant element is that in his treatise against Barclay, Bellarmine returned to Bernard’s statement on the pope’s two swords, which he had already mentioned in the first edition of De summo Pontifice, and which he had

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modified in the 1599 revised version of that Controversia. In the first edition of De summo Pontifice, Bellarmine remarked that Bernard did not mean to say that the pope had both swords in the same way, but that the manner in which the pope held the spiritual sword was different than the manner in which he held the temporal sword. In the 1599 revision of the work Bellarmine changed that passage and wrote that Bernard did seem to attribute both swords to the pope, even if, Bellarmine added, the same Bernard, in many other passages, had specified that the pope’s authority was properly spiritual, not political. Thus, in 1599 Bellarmine decided to avoid the question of the exegesis of Bernard’s passage on the two swords but refused to concede that Bernard’s opinions supported the validity of the theory of the potestas directa.121 Responding to Barclay, however, Bellarmine decided that he could not avoid taking Bernard’s bull by the horn, so to speak, and in fact devoted an entire chapter of his De potestate summi Pontificis to a lengthy theological and philological analysis of Bernard’s passage. Bellarmine’s main argument in that chapter was that “St. Bernard only teaches that the material sword cannot be taken out by the hand of the priest, which we gladly admit, but he does not deny, rather he affirms indeed, that the material sword is subjected to the spiritual one, and that it has to be taken out or put in the sheathe at the nod of the Pontiff.”122 Thus, while it is true that from the time of the Controversiae to the time of the debate with Barclay, Bellarmine had to change the tone of his interpretation of Bernard’s passage on the two swords, it is also true that Bellarmine did not change his mind concerning his commitment to the theory of the potestas indirecta. The debate with Barclay, however, as well as the controversy over the Interdetto, had convinced Bellarmine that if he wanted to remain committed to his potestas indirecta, he had to stress not only the point of the separation between political and ecclesiastical authority but also the point of intersection and the superiority of the latter over the former. The debate between Barclay and Bellarmine over the temporal authority of the pope had two main consequences. First, it became the occasion for a panEuropean debate over the nature of the spiritual and political authority, which at times took dramatic turns. As we will see in the next chapter, the enthusiasm for Barclay’s work, the sympathy for some of the political issues raised by James’s defense of the oath of allegiance, the publication of Bellarmine’s reply, and the murder of Henri IV contributed to an explosive mixture that put to a fundamental and dangerous test the political and theological implications of Bellarmine’s theory and challenged the very theoretical grounds of the Catholic Church’s universality and of its ruler’s authority. Second, the debate over Barclay’s treatise awakened in Rome the anti-Bellarmine and ultrapapalist flames, which, as we have seen, were still burning in the years of the polemical battle over the Venetian Interdetto and were never completely extinguished.

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In fact, when Pope Paul V, evidently worried about the recent polemical exchange, gave to Francisco Peña a copy of Barclay’s treatise and Bellarmine’s reply for him to examine, Peña recognized that the debate had potentially devastating consequences for the future of the Catholic Church in Europe and was violently enraged against the author whom he thought was putting the Church in such peril. Only, the author Peña wrote against was not Barclay but Bellarmine. In sending his response to the pope, Peña immediately identified Bellarmine as the source of all the problems: “If this little Christian,” Peña affirmed aggressively, “had solid and truly Christian zeal, seeing that after he published his Controversiae all the heretics of this century make use of them against the Church and the authority of the Vicar of Christ . . . he should leave aside this itch to write every week a book to defend himself, but he himself should amend his erroneous opinion,” and if Bellarmine was not willing to do it, then his opinion sooner or later would have to be corrected “with the public authority of the Holy See.”123 “The entire book of Barclay,” Peña continued, “is founded on the doctrine of this good Father.” Barclay’s treatise encompasses three main points: the denial of the temporal nature of Christ’s kingdom, the denial of the temporal nature of the pope’s authority, and the opposition to Catholic theologians who uphold those doctrines. All those points can be found in Bellarmine’s doctrine, and in this latest “discorso,” Peña continued, “he does not say anything against this, but, indeed, he leaves it firm, which is what the heretic could only have wished for.”124 For this reason, the Spanish canonist continued, perhaps it was not expedient to print Bellarmine’s reply unless Bellarmine decided to modify his own theory, “so that [the reply] could not be turned by the heretics in their own favor by saying that in Rome the opinion which denies Christ’s dominion in temporalibus is approved or allowed or tacitly consented to.”125 Paul V did not think it expedient to censure Bellarmine’s treatise after all, because he realized that censuring Bellarmine meant dividing the Catholic position in a visible and dangerous way. We should remember that the Inquisition had already communicated to the nuncio in France that Bellarmine’s reply was not up for discussion, and Rome could not afford to turn against Bellarmine, especially in the immediate aftermath of Henri IV’s murder and in a moment in which James’s oath of allegiance was receiving more and more support from within the Catholic camp. However, the pope did not think that Peña was completely off the mark either. In 1611, Peña’s treatise De regno Christi was published in Rome. The text, completed by the Spanish theologian in 1608, offered a powerful and powerfully anti-Bellarminian view of the kingdom of Christ as a perfect spiritual and temporal commonwealth, of which temporal sovereigns were, to a certain extent, vassals.126

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In conclusion, by the beginning of 1610, Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta was at the center of the European debate, even more dramatically than during the controversy over the Interdetto. The oath of allegiance and the debate that its promulgation provoked contributed to illuminate the implications of the theory of potestas indirecta for the discussion of the nature of both spiritual and temporal authorities, as well as for the discussion of their relationship. Both James and Barclay understood that by insisting on the unique and special spiritual nature of the pope’s authority, Bellarmine was redrawing the boundaries between political allegiance and confessional beliefs, and by pushing the authority over consciences beyond the confines of private profession of faith into the realm of public political actions, he put the authority of the temporal sovereign in jeopardy. For this reason, both James and Barclay tried to rethink the relationship between spiritual and secular authority in a way that would allow them to rebalance the system. For James, the way to do this was to entrust the temporal sovereign with some spiritual functions in accordance with the true Catholic doctrine and against the anti-Christian universal monarchy of the pope; for Barclay the same result—that is, to strengthen the authority of the sovereign—could be achieved by removing any special quality from the spiritual authority of the Church and by reducing it to a juridical concept, thereby assigning to it a perfectly distinct and perfectly equal position with respect to the other component of the Christian commonwealth, that is, the temporal authority of the sovereign. Of course, Bellarmine’s “Roman” enemies like Francisco Peña, who considered the debate over the oath to be the fulfillment of the prophecy implicitly contained in the controversy over the Interdetto or even in the issue of Henri’s absolution, also understood the importance of the implications of Bellarmine’s theory for the theological and political primacy of the Catholic Church. They sought to protect this primacy by insisting that Christ’s, and therefore the Church’s, kingdom was not a merely spiritual empire but a universal temporal and spiritual monarchy. From this perspective, one of the most relevant consequences of the debate over Bellarmine’s theory is its political repercussions: the issue at stake was not simply the theological status of the Catholic Church as the only true church with respect to the Protestants, but the political space that the spiritual authority could and should occupy. In this sense, Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta represented a complex attempt to redesign the theological and political universality of the Catholic Church by focusing on the jurisdiction over consciences, and by abandoning any attempt to attribute to the Church direct authority over bodies. In such a way, Bellarmine thought that the Catholic Church could be perfectly equipped to maintain its superiority against the Protestant Churches and also against the growing power of the early modern states. European monarchies,

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both Protestant and Catholic, recognized the depth and breadth of the implications of Bellarmine’s theory, especially as they attempted to enforce an increasingly sacralized view of their sovereignty against the universalistic pretense of the pope. Thus, Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta stirred a profound pan-European and cross-confessional effort to rethink the theoretical and theological identity of early modern governments and the nature of their relationship with the ecclesiastical authority. For this reason, I see the debate over Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta as a central moment not only for the structure of the Catholic Church but also for the processes of formation and consolidation of the theoretical and theological backbone of early modern states.127 In this theological and political debate, as we have seen, the battle lines were not neatly divided into confessional or even political trenches, for the fight over Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta shuffled the usual distinctions between enemies and friends and opened up new fronts. France was one of the most important of those new fronts. It is now time to turn to a more detailed analysis of the reception of the debate over the oath of allegiance and of Bellarmine’s theory across the Channel.

5 Robert Bellarmine and the Potestas Indirecta Continental Repercussions

Examining the French reaction to the debate between Barclay and Bellarmine, in the context of the complex political phase that France entered after the murder of Henri IV, is a good lens through which we can understand the centrality of the questions raised by Bellarmine’s theories for the European political equilibrium and for the theological and political structure of the French monarchy. In this chapter I want to show the implications of this debate in both the Gallican and the Ultramontanist camp, in order to demonstrate the theoretical and political consequences of Bellarmine’s theological foundation for papal authority in temporal matters. Bellarmine’s theo-political theory joined ecclesiological and political issues in a tight knot: both Gallicans and Ultramontanists, for different reasons, tried to sever that knot. Understanding the reaction of French Catholicism to Bellarmine, thus, will serve to illuminate not only the political impact of Bellarmine’s theory but also the tension between Bellarmine’s supernational view of the pope’s empire of souls and the “national” form of Catholicism that emerged and consolidated in France between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This tension was of fundamental importance for the development of the French monarchy and also for the future of the supremacy of the Catholic Church in France and the rest of Europe, which is why the elaboration of this tension, in a sense, reframed the

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ecclesiological and political controversy between papalism and conciliarism, and between Gallicanism and Ultramontanism, in surprising and interesting ways.

Robert Bellarmine in France: Potestas indirecta, Tyrannicide, and the International Context The months following the assassination of Henri IV by François Ravaillac were very tense for French Catholics and for the members of the Society of Jesus in particular, who had been readmitted into France by the late king and had depended on his ongoing support to fend off attacks from their Catholic and Protestant enemies. Thus, after the king’s death, the French Jesuits found themselves once again exposed to attack. Especially fierce was the Gallican reaction against political papalism, of which the Jesuits were considered to be primary supporters.1 However, the Gallican reaction to Henri’s murder involved not only the question of the political role of the pope and the future of the Society of Jesus but also the definition and elaboration of both political and ecclesiastical Gallicanism,2 as well as the debate over the prerogative of the Parlement with respect to the Crown.3 I argue that Bellarmine’s theory as it was expressed in his treatise against Barclay was a catalyst for, and a fundamental component of, the debate around all those issues. Before beginning, it is useful to remember that not all Jesuits and not all papalist writers were the same in the eyes of the French Parlement, the Sorbonne, and the Roman Curia. I will start with the case of Juan de Mariana and the doctrine of regicide. As Eric Nelson has argued, when, on 8 June 1610, the Parlement condemned Juan de Mariana’s De rege et regis institutione, it did so with two purposes in mind. First, the Parlement wanted to condemn clearly the doctrine of tyrannicide as a political position contrary to natural law and to a long and well-established theological tradition that affirmed the inviolability and sacrality of the king’s person. In this respect, it is very significant that before condemning Mariana the Parlement pressured the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne to reissue the decree with which it had condemned tyrannicide in 1413, and which had been confirmed in virtually identical words at the Council of Constance in 1416.4 Second, the Parlement wanted to reaffirm its role as the defender and representative of the French monarchy. In this sense, condemning Mariana was the Parlement’s response to those Roman theorists who thought that deciding whether a king was a heretic, and therefore whether he was illegitimate or inviolable, was a matter of theology and, consequently, within the exclusive competence of the Church. This issue had pressing urgency in the monarchy of Henri

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IV, whom some people of the Roman Curia, most notably Francisco Peña, thought of as a heretical and illegitimate prince. For this reason, Peña aggressively defended Jean Chastel’s attempted murder of Henri in 1594 and attacked the arrêt that the Parlement of Paris issued against Chastel. In November 1609 the Parlement’s arrêt against Chastel was included in the Index of Prohibited Books. Thus, by issuing an arrêt to condemn Mariana’s doctrine of tyrannicide, the Parlement reclaimed for itself the authority to decide in matters of regicide. For the Parlement of Paris condemning the doctrine of tyrannicide was, to a certain extent, a relatively easy task, both because the vast majority of its members thought that a condemnation of Mariana’s open endorsement of tyrannicide was right and timely, and because the Catholic hierarchy and the Society of Jesus were very quick to condemn the doctrine of regicide. Even though the Parlement’s arrêt did not mention the Society of Jesus in its condemnation of Mariana, nevertheless Claudio Acquaviva, the general of the Society, did not waste any time in distancing further the positions of the Society from those of Mariana. On 6 July Acquaviva issued a decree forbidding every member of the Society to “dare to affirm by publicly or privately explaining or advising and even less in written books that it is licit for anybody to kill kings or princes even under pretext of tyranny.” The decree, moreover, commanded the provincials of the Society to oversee that all the members complied with the orders, “so that in this way all would understand the position of the Society in this issue, and the error of one person would not make the entire Society suspect.”5 The Parlement had some problems, however, with the issue of jurisdiction, given the theological nature of Mariana’s arguments. Some members of the Parlement, including president Séguier, did not think that condemning the doctrines of the Society was a matter on which the Parlement could decide,6 and the papal nuncio in Paris, Monsignor Ubaldini, also based his own complaints on issues of jurisdiction. Writing to Borghese at the end of June 1610, the nuncio explained that, while there were many problems raised by the Parlement’s condemnation, there were especially two issues over which he decided to fight: “The first is the definition of Mariana’s proposition, that killing tyrants is allowed, as heretical; the other is the order given to the priests to publish in their parishes the decrees of the Faculty of Theology and this arrêt.” Those were the proofs, according to the nuncio, that the Parlement had usurped the spiritual authority of the pope and the Church by issuing a series of political commands on a theological matter. In fact, as the nuncio remarked, the French prelates, rather than being in charge of overseeing the affair, were commanded to publish the Parlement’s decision in their parishes. Because many prelates as well as the

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queen and her council shared the nuncio’s opinion that the Parlement had overstepped the boundaries of its jurisdiction, the nuncio reported, he hoped to obtain and in fact did obtain “some satisfaction” for the Catholic cause, namely, the queen’s prohibition to publish the arrêt.7 Thus, the French Parlement’s condemnation of Mariana’s book did not raise much conflict in France with regard to the need to take an open and vigorous stand against the doctrine of regicide, but it did prove somewhat problematic insofar as jurisdiction was concerned. In Rome, also, there was a clear sense that the doctrine of regicide had to be condemned, for the sake of the Society of Jesus and its future in France, as we can see from Acquaviva’s reaction to Mariana’s text, but also for the sake of French Catholicism and for the future relationship between Paris and Rome. What the papacy objected to, as we can see from the strategy adopted by the nuncio, was that a political authority condemned a theological doctrine. From a political perspective, moreover, the Mariana affair highlighted a potentially delicate political conflict between the Parlement and the queen regent in a moment in which the authority of the French monarchy seemed in jeopardy. In this complex situation, another Catholic-related bomb exploded in Paris: on 26 November 1610, Louis Servin, avocat général du roi, presented Bellarmine’s treatise against Barclay to the Parlement for condemnation.8 Interestingly enough, a certain trend of scholarship on Gallicanism and French antipapalism has downplayed the significance of the condemnation of Bellarmine and has interpreted Bellarmine’s work as an expression of the same politically aggressive Catholicism of which Mariana’s book was an expression. For instance, Victor Martin wrote that Bellarmine’s treatise, despite being “sans grande personnalité” because it consisted mainly of “une compilation de texts anciens,” was nevertheless embraced by many French Catholics as the antidote against the Gallican tendencies that brought about Mariana’s condemnation, and as such it soon became the object of the Parlement’s attention and condemnation.9 More recently, Jotham Parsons has argued, to a certain extent along the same line as Martin, that the condemnation of Bellarmine’s work was, so to speak, a natural consequence of the condemnation of Mariana. Since, as Parsons writes, “at a very early stage the question of whether political assassination could ever be justified became inextricably entangled with the question of the so-called indirect power of the pope,” the Parlement’s condemnations of Mariana and Bellarmine were parts of the same “systematic attempt to censor any publication of the suspect doctrines.”10 A different version of the same argument is given by Harro Höpfl, who, while acknowledging that Bellarmine always refused to discuss tyrannicide, and that tyrannicide “was demonstrably not an essential part of Jesuit political

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thinking,” nevertheless argues that tyrannicide “was perfectly coherent with the Jesuits’ interpretation of . . . the potestas indirecta of the papacy.”11 According to this argument, it was natural for the Parlement to condemn both Mariana and Bellarmine, the first for explicitly advocating the legitimacy of regicide, and the second for explicitly endorsing the doctrine of the pope’s potestas indirecta. While it is true that the doctrine of the potestas indirecta and the doctrine of tyrannicide had some relationship to one another from a theoretical viewpoint, and while they certainly were clustered together polemically by a certain strand of French and English anti-Catholicism and antipapalism as two of the most dangerous tools in the hands of the Jesuits, I think that the potestas indirecta in Bellarmine’s elaboration was different from the doctrine of tyrannicide. Bellarmine’s chief argument to prove the superiority of the pope with respect to the political ruler was the fact that the jurisdiction of the pope was substantially different from, and therefore superior to, the jurisdiction of the temporal ruler. Precisely because of the unique spiritual nature of the pope’s authority, then, the head of the Church, that is, the ultimate judge of controversies, had the task of deciding whether a sovereign was heretic, and thus illegitimate. How the people could or should get rid of the sovereign once he had been declared a heretic was not a matter theoretically necessary for Bellarmine’s argument, nor was it a necessary consequence of it. This is why the Jesuit theorist never even mentioned regicide in his De summo Pontifice; he had avoided addressing it (as well as the whole question of the Catholics’ political loyalty) in his responses to James’s Triplici nodo and “Premonition”; and in his treatise against Barclay he took an open stand against it by stating explicitly that excommunicating and deposing a heretic sovereign pertained to the pontiff, while “committing murders, and, even more, killing princes through treachery, does not pertain to monks or other ecclesiastical persons. Indeed, the Supreme Pontiffs usually did not restrain the princes in this way.”12 When Servin presented Bellarmine’s treatise against Barclay to the Parlement for condemnation, he mentioned Bellarmine’s passage on the pope’s authority to excommunicate and depose sovereigns as evidence of Bellarmine’s support for the doctrine of regicide. Bellarmine’s reply was that Servin confused excommunication and deposition with regicide: while Servin made it sound as if Bellarmine wrote that “it pertains to the Pontiff to order the assassins to murder kings and princes, and that the execution of the murder pertains not to the Pontiffs, but to the assassins, truly Bellarmine did not speak about the execution of the murder, but the execution of the deposition.”13 Of course, this does not mean that tyrannicide is not “coherent” with the doctrine of the potestas indirecta. However, it was not Bellarmine but Suárez who,

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in his Defensio fidei (1613), made that coherence explicit by arguing that killing a tyrant who attacks his commonwealth is one of the licit means of getting rid of a king, provided that either by the authority of the commonwealth or by authority of the pope a sentence is issued to declare the king deposed, and therefore a tyrant. Suárez justified his position by specifying that the commonwealth enjoyed this authority because it was directly subject to the tyrant and therefore had the ultimate right to defend itself, and that the pope, whose authority did not extend directly in political matters, could nevertheless intervene in politics for the sake of the subjects’ consciences.14 Certainly Suárez’s arguments to justify tyrannicide as one of the means of exercising the pope’s indirect authority in temporal matters are a development of the neo-Thomist political theory, and in this respect they are more similar to Bellarmine’s arguments than they are to the arguments used by Francisco Peña to justify Chastel’s attempt to murder Henri of Navarre. For Suárez the definition of tyrannicide was an issue of natural law. A tyrant is he who attacks his commonwealth without justification and thus must be rejected on the basis of the natural-law right given to the commonwealth to defend itself. In this manner, Suárez was able to accomplish a twofold aim. First, by understanding tyrannicide as a means of punishment whose legitimacy depended on the judgment of a superior authority (either the commonwealth or the pope), he annulled, to a certain extent, the conceptual validity of the distinction between tyranny by usurpation and tyrannical behavior on the part of the legitimate prince. Second, by considering the spiritual authority of the pope as a legitimate authority in charge of pronouncing the sentence of deposition, he linked tyrannicide and the pope’s spiritual authority to depose sovereigns for reasons of heresy. Since heresy, that is, an attack against the souls of the subjects, is a form of attack against the Christian commonwealth, and since the pope’s spiritual authority is in charge of deciding whether or not a sovereign is in fact a heretic, then the pope’s spiritual authority directly issues a theological sentence, which is carried out indirectly through a series of political means, tyrannicide included.15 For Peña, on the contrary, because the pope exercised the full dominium over the Christian commonwealth, and because the political sovereigns were more akin to vassals to whom certain aspects of that dominium were delegated, then the pope had the most ample authority to deal with his vassals in both spiritual and political matters. Thus, for Peña, heresy becomes a properly political ground for the physical elimination of the sovereign, which stems directly from the supreme political and spiritual authority of the pope as the absolute monarch of the Christian commonwealth.16 And yet, Suárez’s arguments were not the same as Bellarmine’s, and tyrannicide was not the same as the doctrine of potestas indirecta. Besides, the very

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theoretical background of Mariana’s theory of tyrannicide, that is, Mariana’s distinctive view of the pre-civil condition and of the relationship between law and authority was different from both Bellarmine’s and Suárez’s accounts of the origin of princely authority.17 The fact that Bellarmine and Mariana were creatures of different species was also used as an argument by the French Jesuits themselves to refute the doctrine of tyrannicide. In the summer of 1610 Pierre Coton published a pamphlet entitled Lettre declaratoire in which he declared that the entire Society of Jesus condemned the doctrine of regicide, and indeed quoted Bellarmine and Francisco de Toledo as authorities representing the official position of the Society on the matter who explicitly condemned Mariana’s arguments.18 While it is obvious for a French Jesuit to repeat the argument that Mariana was an anomaly with respect to the Jesuit doctrine, thus aligning himself with the same position of Acquaviva, it is noteworthy that in a text constructed as a polemical tool to protect the Society from the backlash of the Mariana affair Coton decided to quote Bellarmine. If Coton had any doubt that Bellarmine’s theories could have been perceived as similar to Mariana’s, he would have avoided mentioning Bellarmine and limited his references to Francisco de Toledo, who was relatively uncontroversial in this context. The papal nuncio in Paris, Monsignor Ubaldini, also seemed to think that Bellarmine’s text was free from the kind of political statements that made Mariana the object of so much hatred. We will recall that in the summer of 1609 Ubaldini was very worried about a possible reply by Bellarmine to James’s treatise because the king’s work had encountered so much admiration in France. Barclay’s book concerned Ubaldini even more because it was highly praised not only among the politiques and the Gallicans but also among papalist Catholics like Cardinal Du Perron, on whose support Ubaldini was counting and who, instead of condemning Barclay’s book, praised it as a masterpiece and forecast that the Roman response to it would be an error “worse than the first.”19 However, when, in the fall of 1610 the nuncio finally got a copy of Bellarmine’s reply and read it, he seemed greatly relieved by Bellarmine’s arguments. As he wrote to Borghese at the beginning of October 1610, Bellarmine’s reply “was necessary to impress well in the minds of the learned what the pope’s authority consists of, and what the opinion of the authors of all nations and many universal Councils against the impious and dangerous doctrine of the author [i.e., Barclay], is.”20 For the nuncio, the fact that Bellarmine had started his treatise by listing all the Catholic opinions, including those of French Catholic theologians and those of several general councils, on the spiritual authority of the pope, and the fact that Bellarmine had refused to endorse even implicitly politically aggressive opinions like Mariana’s, was a timely strategy to oppose Barclay without

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raising doubts about the political loyalty of the Catholics. In fact, the nuncio wrote, he thought it “expedient to have here many copies [of Bellarmine’s book] to distribute to whom I will think that it can be useful, because I know that Barclay’s book had some credit here, even among people considered pious and learned.”21 Thus, according to the nuncio, Bellarmine’s book was nothing like Mariana’s. Indeed, it could serve to advance the Catholic cause without provoking the kind of reaction that Mariana’s book had provoked among Catholic theologians and politicians because it was constructed as a politically moderate but theologically firm answer to the doubts of all those Catholic theologians and politicians who were convinced by Barclay’s arguments, aside from the question of regicide. Certainly the moment was delicate for the Catholics and for the Society of Jesus in particular, and that is why the nuncio suggested that Bellarmine’s book be printed not in Paris but in Avignon or in Flanders instead, and why he requested that a hundred copies of the book be shipped directly to him, so that he could oversee the circulation of the book personally and accurately.22 Later in the same month, the nuncio wrote to confirm that there was good reason to rejoice regarding Bellarmine’s treatise: he had showed it to some theologians at the Sorbonne, who had confirmed the positive judgment on Bellarmine’s “effort and diligence . . . in finding and perusing the authors of every nation, and especially the French, who defend the authority of the Pope.”23 Finally, in November 1610 the much-sought-after endorsement of Du Perron arrived: as the nuncio wrote, “Cardinal Du Perron praises the book as a work of great effort and erudition; he says that any other but Cardinal Bellarmine could not have accomplished it in less than ten years.” Du Perron added that “the authorities quoted are important and trustworthy,” and he also “denied that the Cardinal [Bellarmine] in this book wanted to give also direct authority to the pope, as some say, in order to make the book more odious.” Instead, according to Du Perron, “the Cardinal claims only to defend as an old man what he wrote as a young man, and not to embrace Father Bozio’s opinions.”24 Du Perron thought so highly of the book that on his own initiative, the nuncio reported, he “spoke of it very reverently with the principal ministers and with the Queen herself, showing to everybody that in the book there is nothing offensive to the state, and that it would be most impudent to oppose this doctrine now, since it has been tolerated without any opposition for so much time in this realm among the other Controversiae by the same Cardinal [Bellarmine].”25 Thus, Du Perron’s judgment on Bellarmine’s book was very positive, with respect to both the book’s intellectual content and the polemical position that it

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took in the context of French political and theological debates. As for the content of Bellarmine’s arguments, Du Perron recognized that Bellarmine’s strategy in the treatise against Barclay was, from a French papalist perspective, perfect. While Barclay had attacked the authority of the pope in temporal matters by, on the one hand, fully endorsing the pope’s spiritual authority and, on the other hand, by “downgrading” the juridical status of the Christian Church from a respublica to an auctoritas, Bellarmine had replied by dismissing, subtly but clearly, the opinions of Bozio and of the supporters of the potestas directa on the nature of the Christiana respublica and by insisting on the unique and uniquely spiritual nature of the pope’s auctoritas over souls, so as to ground the area of jurisdiction of the Christiana respublica in theological, not political, arguments. As for the polemical context, according to Du Perron the coherence that Bellarmine had demonstrated in his reply to Barclay with respect to his early work, and Bellarmine’s references to the opinions of French Catholic theologians and the decrees of several general councils, were very good points to separate the discussion over Bellarmine’s theory from the discussion over Mariana’s, and they ought to protect Bellarmine from the kind of attacks to which Mariana had been subject. Indeed, for Du Perron, Bellarmine’s treatise against Barclay was not “offensive to the state” precisely because Bellarmine had described the authority of the pope in temporal affairs not as a competing authority with respect to the temporal sovereign’s but as a (limited) consequence of the pope’s spiritual authority, and, as such, as part of an entire theo-political project that had been elaborated in the 1580s Controversiae and seemed to be supported by a wide range of French theologians and general councils. Thus, Bellarmine’s treatise was, and should have been perceived as, completely disjoined from the political issues at stake in the Parlement’s condemnation of Mariana’s book. Monsignor Ubaldini was just finishing the dispatch in which he announced Du Perron’s positive judgment on Bellarmine and the French cardinal’s effort to convince the queen and ministers of the inoffensive character of Bellarmine’s doctrine when news of the Parlement’s condemnation of Bellarmine’s text reached him.26 Incredibly surprised by this move, he immediately spoke to the queen to try to limit the damage. The good news was that the queen was as surprised and enraged as was the nuncio to see how the Parlement had “despised her commands” to keep Bellarmine’s text out of the list of possible books to condemn, and that she promised to annul or suspend the Parlement’s arrêt.27 The other good news was that the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne remained silent on Bellarmine’s book, despite the Gallican tendencies of his syndic, Edmond Richer, who in June 1610 managed to have the Faculty of Theology reissue the decree against tyrannicide that the faculty had already issued in 1413 and that the Parlement had wanted before moving to condemn Mariana. Richer

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was feeling the pressure of the Ultramontanist faction, headed by André Duval, who could not move his colleague against the decree on tyrannicide but who was not going to let Richer win in the fight over Bellarmine.28 It seems clear, then, that the Parlement’s decision to condemn Bellarmine’s book was not an automatic and natural consequence of its condemnation of Mariana, but that many different political and theological factors influenced and, in turn, were raised by the decision to condemn Bellarmine. For this reason, we need to investigate why the Parlement decided to take this step, which will further contextualize this decision. A number of scholars have already noted that, indeed, Bellarmine’s and Mariana’s books were not creatures of the same species, and they have tried to explain why, after the condemnation of Mariana, on which most members of the Parlement and theologians agreed but which had nevertheless raised within Parlement itself a degree of controversy because of the issue of jurisdiction, the Parlement also condemned Bellarmine’s book, a move that would raise the same issues of jurisdiction that Mariana’s book had raised, as well as even more significant theological and theoretical conflicts with respect to the doctrine expressed in Bellarmine’s work. For instance, Salvo Mastellone argues that the Parlement’s action against Bellarmine has to be considered as a sort of revenge against Bellarmine’s sojourn in France in the late 1580s, when he participated in the diplomatic mission led by Cardinal Caetani and endeavored to rally the support of the French clergy against Henri of Navarre.29 I think that Mastellone’s explanation does not stand, for a number of reasons. First, Bellarmine’s participation in the more directly political aspect of Caetani’s mission was very limited, and while Bellarmine might surely have sympathized with some of the arguments of the Catholic League, he never took an open stand against Henri of Navarre, as, for instance, did Francisco Peña.30 Moreover, Mastellone’s explanation does not give a sense of the theoretical significance of the Parlement’s decision: because Bellarmine’s theory was different from Mariana’s, as Mastellone himself admits, it is difficult to explain why the Parlement condemned Bellarmine’s text on the same grounds on which it condemned Mariana’s text, even if we grant that it wanted to personally punish the Jesuit for his involvement in French politics in the late 1580s.31 A more insightful answer is provided by Eric Nelson, who argues that by condemning Bellarmine the Parlement wanted to test the limits of its own authority with respect to the queen to decide theological matters that concerned royal authority. In this respect, the Parlement’s arrêt against Bellarmine, especially because of the issues of jurisdiction raised by the arrêt against Mariana, became a clear and vigorous sign of the Parlement’s intention to assert itself as

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the true defender of the French laws and liberties against both ecclesiastical and royal authority. The extent to which the Crown took this effort seriously can be seen, according to Nelson, through the complex negotiations involving the queen, Servin, and the nuncio Ubladini, over the suspension of the arrêt and over some proposed modifications to its wording, which began at the end of November and ended in December 1610.32 While I think that the political conflict between Parlement and Crown is definitely an important element for understanding this question, I do not think that it is the only explanation because, once again, it does not address the issue of why Parlement decided to test its authority on Bellarmine’s text; more specifically, it does not explain the implications of the Parlement’s choice of Bellarmine’s text. If we want to understand those implications, I argue, we must look outside of France and must insert the arrêt against Bellarmine into a pan-European theological and political debate, one started by the controversy over the Venetian Interdetto and refined by the controversy over the oath of allegiance. Monsignor Ubaldini understood the importance of this international context, and he communicated his considerations on this matter to Borghese. The nuncio wrote that immediately upon learning of the Parlement’s decision, he started to investigate the causes of the arrêt by inquiring in the queen’s circle and among the foreign diplomats living in Paris, and he learned that “one of the reasons for the arrêt was the supposed censure made, as they say, against the book in Venice. A copy of the supposed censure was brought to Parlement, and the arrêt was written in conformity to the censure. I have replied that I have no knowledge of any censure, and I think it is false and a mere fiction done by a Venetian, in order to raise the issue and to induce more easily this Parlement to prohibit the book, and unless the contrary is clear to me, I will never change my opinion.”33 Now, as we will recall, rumors of a prohibition of Bellarmine’s work in Venice were circulating in 1609, which referred to Bellarmine’s Apologia against James, not to his book against Barclay. The nuncio in Venice and the Roman Inquisition had looked into the matter in 1609 and had found out that even though no official prohibition had been issued against Bellarmine’s Apologia, nevertheless there was a sort of smear campaign waged by some important Venetian noblemen, including Nicolò Contarini, to convince librarians not to carry and sell copies of the cardinal’s work. This campaign must be put in the context of the relationship between Venice and England: because James had managed to acquire, if not an open endorsement of, at least a great deal of sympathy for his cause both among Venetian politicians and among Venetian theologians like Paolo Sarpi, Bellarmine’s work against James was unofficially boycotted.34

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The rumor according to which a similar boycott was under way in Venice with respect to Bellarmine’s treatise against Barclay, however, did not raise the kind of concerns raised by the 1609 affair: because it was not confirmed by any source in either Venice or France, the Inquisition ignored the hint and did not pursue it. Also incorrect was the nuncio’s suggestion that the rumor could have been started by Venetian antipapalists precisely to facilitate the Parlement’s condemnation of Bellarmine’s book. As we know from Sarpi’s correspondence with Leschassier, it was the Gallican theorist who informed Sarpi of the antiBellarmine actions that were being taken on the part of the Parlement and who in fact sent Sarpi a copy of the Parlement’s arrêt against Bellarmine’s treatise.35 Certainly if the affair had started in Venice, Sarpi would have known of it before Leschassier communicated with him. In the meantime, the Roman Inquisition was getting other tips regarding the international context of the Parlement’s condemnation. The same folder of the Inquisition that contains the material regarding the prohibition of Bellarmine’s Apologia in Venice also contains the summary of a letter written from England on 16 November. The anonymous author of the letter informed the Inquisition that “our King [i.e., James] has sent Bellarmine’s book against Barclay to the President [of the Parlement] and to other friends of his, stirring and inviting them to express publicly now what they often have expressed privately. Our king makes much effort in this regard through his ministers in France, so that he would join the French, not just the heretics, but also the more lukewarm Catholics, to himself in the same cause against the supreme Pontiff.”36 As in the case of Venice, also in the case of England there did not seem to be proof of an actual link between London and the Parlement’s arrêt. In fact, the Roman Inquisition neither commented on this specific hint nor asked for more information on it. While neither the nuncio’s hint to Venice nor the anonymous tip from England pointed to any specific name or instance of direct pressure on the part of Venice or London on Paris, they nevertheless point to a growing perception on the part of the Catholic Church that the arrêt against Bellarmine’s book had much to do with the wider European context, and not simply with France’s own internal affairs. More specifically, with the condemnation of Bellarmine’s book the Parlement was not simply addressing the French political question of the sacrality of the king’s person and authority; rather, it was joining Venice and London in the debate on the larger theoretical and theological question of the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical authority. Bellarmine himself understood the importance of this larger context in the issue of the arrêt against his treatise and used it as an argument to convince

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the queen of the necessity to suspend or annul the Parlement’s condemnation. In a letter he wrote in December 1610 to Marie de Medici, Bellarmine reminded the queen that his treatise against Barclay contained nothing new but was simply a version of the same theological views he had already expressed in print for more than twenty years and that he was forced to repeat against Barclay. Bellarmine continued by stating that not only had the Parlement, by prohibiting the book, in fact contradicted numerous French and European theologians and several general councils that had praised his theological doctrines prior to 1610, it had also showed its willingness to comply with the requests of the English Protestants. By explicitly linking the Parlement’s political attack against his doctrine with its support of a heretical doctrine, Bellarmine managed to join the question of jurisdiction with the question of heresy, or, better, to turn an issue of jurisdiction into an issue of theology: “The doctrine of my book is completely contrary to the book by William Barclay published by the heretics of England and prohibited as full of errors by the Holy Apostolic See, to which the supreme judgment over ecclesiastical doctrine pertains. Therefore the Parlement, by prohibiting my book, must necessarily approve the opposite book and declare itself a supporter of the enemy of the Church.”37 Bellarmine’s insistence on the essentially theological, and not political, nature of his theory, and his effort to frame the Parlement’s condemnation as a manifestation of heretical opinions close to the English Protestants rather than as a political statement, are very relevant from both a polemical and a theoretical point of view. While the Parlement tried to assert its authority to condemn a theological doctrine for its political consequences, Bellarmine turned the argument on its head and declared that the French Parlement and the French political authority could not politically condemn his theology without approving of a heresy, that is, they could not isolate the political elements of his theory from the theological defense of the spiritual authority of the pope in spiritual affairs, since his theory did in fact defend only this spiritual authority and not temporal authority. Excommunication and deposition had nothing to do with regicide: the former two were theological consequences of the pope’s spiritual authority, and the latter had no relevance for Bellarmine’s theory. Indeed, it was James and his supporters who tried to isolate the political repercussions of the theory of the potestas indirecta from its theological core by considering excommunication and deposition as political rather than theological prerogatives, but in so doing they ended up questioning not just the political authority of the pope but also his spiritual authority as supreme judge of theological controversy. If France condemned his book, Bellarmine argued, it meant that it joined the fight of the English against the Church of Rome: Was Marie sure that this is what France wanted to do?

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Bellarmine, malgré lui, was exactly right, for what Parlement had tried to do in condemning Bellarmine’s book was not simply to eliminate a politically dangerous doctrine or to win the juridical battle with the clergy and with the queen over which institution should be in charge of deciding matters of theology. Rather, Parlement tried to join the Venetians and the English in a cross-confessional pan-European fight against a political theology that did not pose itself as a direct, immediate threat to the political authority, as Mariana’s did, but that, by granting a special, unique, and supreme spiritual and juridical status to the Church as an empire of souls and to the pope as its supreme judge, framed the question of the relationship between political and spiritual authority in completely different terms. When Du Perron insisted that Bellarmine’s doctrine was not “offensive to the state,” he was right insofar as Bellarmine did not frame the authority of the pope as competing directly with the authority of the sovereign. However, Bellarmine’s theory was very dangerous for the state because of its understanding of the forum of conscience as the proper theological and juridical realm under the pope’s authority, a realm that extended over and beyond national boundaries and that, because of its fundamental difference from the temporal realm, did in fact claim to be superior to the temporal realm. Sarpi and Barclay understood this, and they both fought against Bellarmine’s theory, albeit from different perspectives. Now also the Gallican Parlement began to understand this, and it wanted to join the fight.

Robert Bellarmine and Edmond Richer: The Gallican Reaction As J. H. M. Salmon noted, between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, Gallicanism and Anglicanism did not merely have “parallel development,” but the relationship between them became, “under the challenge of a resurgent papacy with universal claims, a matter of imitation, reciprocal influence, and even association.” Such tightening of the bonds between Gallicanism and Anglicanism, according to Salmon, was fostered and cemented further by the controversy over the Venetian Interdetto: indeed, Sarpi’s intellectual contribution to the ecclesiological and political limits of the papacy contributed in a very profound way to the redefinition and development of political and ecclesiastical Gallicanism.38 I argue that what contributed to this far-reaching intellectual enterprise that brought Catholic and Protestant Europe together to rethink the relationship between church and state, the nature and aim of temporal authority, and the political and theological shape of the universal church (both Roman Catholicism and the “true” Catholic Church of England) was not simply “a resurgent

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papacy with universal claims” but Bellarmine’s new understanding and interpretation of the papacy’s universal claims. More specifically, the central feature of Bellarmine’s political theory was its insistence on the theological role of the pope as supreme judge of the consciences, which made the jurisdiction over consciences the theological and juridical area of the pope’s authority. In this way, the authority of the pope, uniquely spiritual, overlapped with the authority of the sovereign not as a competing political authority but as a spiritual authority that penetrated the state while remaining at the same time outside and above it. Consequently, Bellarmine made the political authority of the pope a necessary consequence of his spiritual and ecclesiological authority, so that whoever wanted to attack the former could not but attack the latter. This was the substance of Bellarmine’s arguments against Barclay: while Barclay wanted to reduce the Church to a juridically equal status to that of the state, Bellarmine replied by insisting that the theological and ecclesiological role of the pope, which was the basis of the entire Catholic doctrine, could not be reduced to the same level as the political role of the sovereign. By the same token, the supernatural character of the Christian commonwealth, the empire of souls, could not be reduced to sharing the stage with the political authority, and precisely because of this special supernatural character of the Christian empire of souls, the pope’s authority as the emperor and supreme judge of the consciences was both different from, and in certain cases encompassed, the political authority of the sovereign. If we move to the French context, these features of Bellarmine’s doctrines were profoundly linked to the latest developments in both political and ecclesiastical Gallicanism as they shaped up between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, when, according to Salmon, figures such as Edmond Richer and Jacques Leschassier were “defining a new balance” between Gallican ecclesiology and Gallican political theories.39 Regarding ecclesiastical Gallicanism, Richer and Leschassier elaborated their “extreme” version of conciliarist ecclesiology in the context of the response to the controversy over the Venetian Interdetto, which started with the publication of the Italian translation of two of Gerson’s treatises. In order to aid the Venetian cause, Richer published in 1606 a monumental edition of Gerson’s and other conciliarists’ works, and in 1607 he published Apologia pro Joanne Gersonio, printed anonymously in Italy, in which he defended, and to an extent revisited, Gerson’s conciliarist view.40 Leschassier, who had a long and intimate correspondence with Sarpi, was on the same page as Richer: both in his activities as a lawyer and in his written historical and juridical tracts dedicated to the liberties of the Gallican Church, Leschassier defended a form of richérist position according to which the lower clergy had the same power of government within the Church as the bishops and the pope.41

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The ecclesiological arguments had important political ramifications, or, better, Richer’s “extreme” conciliarism was influenced by and contributed to shape the developments in political Gallicanism, especially after the murder of Henri IV, which fostered a form of collaboration between the Gallican theologians of the university and Servin and his associates in the Parlement.42 Commenting on Richer’s intervention to push the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne to support the decision of Parlement to address the question of regicide, Pierre Edouard Puyol has argued that Richer “mit, du moins en apparence, au service du Parlement la première influence doctrinale de l’Église de France: celle de la Sorbonne.”43 If there is some truth to Puyol’s statement, there would be some truth also in saying that Parlement was, to a certain extent, at the service of the Sorbonne, as Parlement became the venue for strong statements of political Gallicanism and antipapalism, which in turn strengthened the force of the Gallican faction of the Sorbonne. In my opinion, the necessity to set down a unified theoretical and political strategy between Gallicans in Parlement and Gallicans at the Sorbonne became clear because of Bellarmine’s political theory. Because Bellarmine had based the pope’s spiritual authority on his spiritual and ecclesiological role as judge of the consciences, if the Gallicans wanted to attack the political side of Bellarmine’s theory, they also needed to attack its theological foundations. And precisely because of the tight knot in Bellarmine’s theory between political, ecclesiastical, and theological issues, trying to untie all the parts of the knot was both necessary and peculiarly challenging.44 Paolo Sarpi, with his usual insight, had already warned Leschassier that if France wanted to go after Bellarmine, a condemnation by the Parlement was not sufficient. When Leschassier informed Sarpi of the anti-Bellarmine campaign that was circulating in France and making its way in the Parlement, Sarpi replied that the one condemnation needed was the condemnation of the Faculty of Theology: “If the University, or whoever wrote on its behalf (which I do not consider less than the entire University) deliberated on the doctrine of the authority of the pope over the council, what should it deliberate on this doctrine, that makes precarious not only the sovereign’s kingdom, but even his life?”45 Or, in other words, why did Richer and the faculty of the Sorbonne take an open stand against the pope’s authority within the Church without taking an equally open stand on his authority with respect to the state? For Sarpi, joining the two issues was necessary if one wanted to attack the foundations of Bellarmine’s political and ecclesiological views. Furthermore, we should also note that for Sarpi the Sorbonne’s decree against tyrannicide issued in July 1610 did not count, so to speak, as the kind of action that he wished the Sorbonne would take on Bellarmine: the kind of political threat that Bellarmine’s theory represented could

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not be eliminated with a condemnation of tyrannicide, since tyrannicide and potestas indirecta were not exactly the same. However, unifying politics and ecclesiology proved especially difficult for the Gallicans of the university, as well as for those in the Parlement. The most ambitious attempt at unification, and the clearest sign of how difficult such an enterprise was, is Richer’s Libellus de ecclesiastica et politica potestate.46 The text starts with a vigorous endorsement of the Gallican principle that “all Ecclesiasticall power belongs properly, essentially and first to the Church, but to the pope, and other Bishops, instrumentally, and ministerially.”47 Thus, the pope and bishops depend on the whole Church and on its representative, that is, the council, through which they derive their authority from Christ. This is because, according to Richer, the Church “is a Monarchicall government ordained to a supernaturall and spirituall end, tempered with an Aristocraticall order (which is the best of all, and most conformable to nature) by the greatest Pastor of soules, Iesus Christ our Lord; Who is the only King, Monarch, absolute Lord.”48 While, Richer explained, “the Novelists” have tried to increase the authority of the pope in the Church by interpreting the Lord’s command, “Feed my sheep,” as being directed toward Peter, in reality the spiritual task of feeding the Lord’s sheep was entrusted by Jesus to the entire Church, which exercises it through the aristocratic element represented by the council and the monarchical element represented by the pope. However, for Richer the monarchical form is just “the state of the Church,” while the aristocratic is “the government of the Church.” In other words, to the monarchical element, that is, to the pope, pertain only the duty “to maintaine unitie & order” and also the executive power, that is, the power to enforce the canons. The legislative power, that is, the authority to issue the canons that the pope should implement, pertains only to the aristocratic element, that is, the council.49 It is very significant that Richer discusses the doctrine of excommunication in this section as a manifestation of the legislative component of Church government. For the French theorist, in fact, excommunication was an entirely spiritual tool in the hands of the Council, and because it lacked any coercive force it was not something that the pope could enforce in any juridically or politically binding manner.50 According to Richer, not only has the council the ecclesiological preeminence within the Church, because it properly governs the Church as far as issuing laws and prescriptions that are necessary to feed the sheep of the Lord, but it also has the theological marker of this preeminence, since to the council alone, Richer writes, it is appropriate to attribute infallibility in matters of theology. Indeed, Richer uses the argument that only the general council, insofar as it represents the Church, is infallible, as a proof through which it is confirmed that the aristocratic government is the ultimate source of authority for the Catholic Church.51

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An important ecclesiological corollary of this argument is that for Richer the relationship between the pope and the council is mirrored also by the relationship between the bishop and the synod of a local church. Just as the pope cannot make any laws without the council, so the “particular Synods” are really in charge of the local churches, “for particular Churches likewise must be governed by their own Bishops, with the rule of Canons, not with absolute power.” The consequence of this statement, the seed of the doctrine later called richérism, is that the Church’s government really pertains not just to bishops or clerical leaders but to “all Priests having charge of soules,” the true successors of the seventy disciples.52 Richer’s attack on Bellarmine’s notion of the ecclesiological and theological primacy of the pope as the supreme judge of consciences not only shrank the pope’s authority over the Church but also allowed Richer to avoid almost completely the question of the papal authority in temporal matters and to concentrate instead on the question of the authority of the entire Church in temporal matters. Since Bellarmine’s theory was founded on the role of the pope as the supreme spiritual authority, once Richer removed that spiritual supremacy, he also removed any grounds to attribute to the pope any political authority. In fact, Richer remarked, Bellarmine’s proofs for the potestas indirecta were based on canons and bulls that were not “made Synodically, that is, with consent of the whole Church, but by the popes privately . . . which therefore doe not bind.” Moreover, the historical examples of depositions that Bellarmine quoted, as for instance that of Childeric, were, too, decided only by the pope and were never ratified by either the council or the people, and for this reason were “a question of fact” rather than “a question of right.”53 Furthermore, attacking the pope’s spiritual supremacy within the Church allowed Richer to separate the doctrine of deposition from the doctrine of excommunication. For Bellarmine, as we saw in his works against James, precisely because the doctrine of excommunication was an expression of the pope’s juridico-spiritual role as head of an empire of souls, and because the doctrine of deposition was but a necessary consequence of this juridicospiritual role, separating the one from the other was impossible, and attacking the latter meant attacking the former, that is, attacking the entire doctrinal body of the Catholic Church. For Richer, on the other hand, excommunication was confined strictly to the realm of spiritual counsel, and for this reason it had no coercive force. Moreover, because excommunication was a manifestation of the legislative power of the Church, it was under the control of the council, not the pope. In this way, there was no relationship between excommunication and deposition, because the former was a spiritual counsel issued by the council and the latter a coercive act that the Church could

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not perform; further, there was no direct connection between excommunication and papal authority either. Thus, when dealing with the relationship between political and ecclesiastical authority, Richer switched the focus completely from the pope to the Church, and in so doing he had to address the same theoretical questions that Sarpi and Barclay had tried to address: Was the Church to be considered as a sort of self-contained spiritual commonwealth, that is, a community composed of the faithful, governed by the clergy in its entirety, whose aim was purely spiritual, or was the Church the juridical half of the one Christian commonwealth of which the temporal government was the other half? In the context of French Gallicanism, however, those questions were tied to the question of the definition of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, which highlighted a growing contrast between the Gallican Gersonian high conciliarism and the political Gallicanism of the Parlement.54 In this respect, Richer’s treatment of the issue of jurisdiction is an attempt to bring together those traditions and a demonstration of how difficult it was. Early on in his work, when he explained how the entire body of the clergy, and not just the pope, had the authority to govern the Church, Richer addressed the issue by offering a distinctive version of Gersonian ecclesiology with a very Sarpian undertone. Richer argued that, just as the whole body of the clergy, from the pope to the lower clergy, receives “power and jurisdiction (that is his authoritie for the governing of the Church) from Christ,” so in the French political context “inferiour Iudges and Magistrates, although subiect to Parliaments, derive as well and as directly their authority from the King, as the Parliaments themselves.”55 In other words, in this passage Richer seemed to have set up secular and religious commonwealths as two different commonwealths: the Church was governed by both superior and inferior magistrates (i.e., higher and lower clergy) who derived their authority directly from God; the state was governed by both superior and inferior magistrates (i.e., the “inferiour Iudges” and Parlement), who derived their authority directly from the king. In this manner, the political commonwealth is completely independent from the Church, and it possesses its own chain of superior and inferior authorities, all properly ordered up to the highest one, that is, the king, just as the Church possesses its own chain of superior and inferior authorities, up to Christ. This also means, as Parsons has argued, that Richer’s understanding of the jurisdiction of Church and state as completely separate but also at the same level not only strengthened the traditional episcopalism of the French clergy but also suggested that the jurisdiction of a bishop was not theoretically and theologically different from the jurisdiction of a secular magistrate.56

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Later in his treatise, Richer changed his position, and he described Church and state not as two separate commonwealths anymore but rather, à la Barclay, as two authorities within the same commonwealth: “The Church taken either for the whole companie of the faithfull, or for the Christian Common-wealth, is contented with her sole only head, and essentiall foundation our Lord Iesus Christ. Neverthelesse in the matter of exercise and execution of government in this Christian Common-wealth, shee is differently ruled by two divers persons, that is by the pope, and the Civill Prince.”57 Thus Richer, like Barclay, saw the Church not just as a community of faithful completely independent from the political community, as Sarpi thought, but also as a proper commonwealth, ruled by two separate authorities, the pope (through the council) and the sovereign (through the Parlement). As for questions of jurisdiction, for Richer the difference between the authority of the Church and the authority of the state concerned not so much the kind of matters that each had to regulate but the manner in which each authority ruled. In other words, Richer separated jurisdiction and coercive power, granting to the Church only the former in a very peculiarly unterritorial sense. The area of jurisdiction of the Church was “the inward motions of the conscience”; thus the only means at its disposal were persuasion and direction, without “any outward force or violence.” In sum, “the Church by divine right hath neither territorie, right of sword, nor contentious Court.”58 The area of jurisdiction of the state, by contrast, was not limited to political matters but also extended to the protection of the Church itself: “Since the civill Prince is the Lord of the Common-wealth and Countrie, protector and defender of the divine, naturall and canonicall law, and to that end doth beare the sword; it is he alone that hath power of constraining and restraining . . . wherefore, for the good of the Church and execution of Ecclesiasticall Canons he may make lawes.”59 By protection of the Church, however, Richer did not mean simply to reiterate a very common trope of political Augustinianism but instead argued that civil authority was actually in charge of settling disputes in matters of Church; in this respect, therefore, Richer attributed to civil authority a measure of ecclesiastical authority, not just political supremacy. In fact, at the end of his treatise Richer remarked that granting some authority to the temporal sovereign in ecclesiastical matters was a means to strengthen “the natural liberties of the Catholic Church, or the common right given her by God and Nature,” and when those liberties were threatened, “the Prince and Civill Magistrate” was the ultimate judge of appels comme d’abus. All Catholic nations had a form of supreme authority, but whereas among the “Spaniards & other Christian nations . . . every thing proceeds from the Court of Rome,” and thus the long negotiations between the sovereign nations and the

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papacy made it impossible to solve ecclesiastical controversies quickly and effectively, in France things were much smoother because of the sovereign’s ultimate control.60 Indeed, precisely because the jurisdiction of the Church, as Richer had argued earlier, was not territorial, it was the secular state that, in some sense, granted to the French Catholic Church its territorial jurisdiction: this is the core of the Ecclesia in Republica theme. Thus, the upshot of Richer’s moving from Sarpi to Barclay, so to speak, was a more open endorsement of political Gallicanism at the expense of ecclesiastical Gallicanism and the internal coherence of the text. Indeed, Richer’s entire discussion of ecclesiastical jurisdiction is itself a reflection of the tensions between the two Gallican traditions: on the one hand, Richer’s statements regarding the divine right of the bishops and also of the lower clergy justified an “extremist” view of the independence of the episcopate; on the other, his attribution to the king of the supreme authority not only in political matters but also some authority in ecclesiastical matters subordinated, to an extent, the clergy to the civil authority. Some scholars have already noted the significance of these tensions in the Libellus: for instance, Salmon has argued that “the most extraordinary aspect of Richer’s Libellus was its discordant combination of the two kinds of Gallicanism”;61 and Parsons has defined Richer’s Libellus as an “ultimately unsuccessful” attempt to “revive the old allegiance” between the Gallican arguments against the supernational authority of the pope and the Gallican arguments used to strengthen the authority of the sovereign in deciding matters that were regulated by either feudal or ecclesiastical courts.62 This “discordant combination,” or “failed attempt,” I argue, was the result of Richer’s attempt to address Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta in both its political and its theological aspects. Bellarmine’s arguments regarding the political authority of the pope stemmed from his theological view of the pope as the supreme ruler of consciences. Thus, if the French Gallicans wanted to move against the potestas indirecta, they had to attack its theological and ecclesiological premises, not just its political consequences. However, addressing the theological premises brought to light the fundamental differences, strategic but also theoretical, between political and ecclesiastical Gallicanism. Because Richer wanted to strengthen the political Gallicans in their fight against Bellarmine, he needed to mount an extreme criticism of the spiritual and ecclesiological supremacy of the pope. But how much could one reinforce the role of the French political authority in sorting out ecclesiastical matters against the usurped supernational and imperial authority of the pope without ending up submitting the French episcopate, whose liberties and authorities ecclesiastical Gallicanism sought to defend, to the ecclesiastical authority of the sovereign as opposed to the ecclesiastical authority of the pope?

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The tension between political and ecclesiastical Gallicanism had important repercussions in the English debates over Bellarmine’s theory and, more generally, over the relationship between spiritual and temporal authority. Some English Protestant divines who supported the oath of allegiance had concerns of their own regarding ecclesiastical Gallicanism, especially in its more radical expressions. As David Owen argued, the “rootes” of the “pagan principle” according to which subjects were allowed to resist their sovereigns were to be found among the conciliarists: “I can finde no ground of this leud learning, beyond 220 yeares in the Christian world: the first authors of it beeing Iohannes de Parisiis, Iacobus Almain, and Marsilius Patavinus. . . . from these, the Puritans have learned their error, of the power of States-men over Kings.”63 Also Robert Burhill admitted that the Parisian conciliarists were the founders of resistance theory, but he remarked that they nevertheless denied the pope any authority to depose the king.64 In fact, while ecclesiastical Gallicanism could be problematic for the supporter of the oath of allegiance, political Gallicanism could become a most useful ally. For instance, James seemed eager to have the French Gallicans move over to his side and join his project to construct new theological grounds for the Catholic Church of England, which was politically and, to an extent, ecclesiastically controlled by the sovereign. In his 1609 “Premonition,” James had explicitly mentioned the Gallicans as enemies of the pope’s political and theological supremacy from within the Catholic world, so to speak: the “Kings of France and Church thereof have ever stoken to their Gallican immunities in denying the pope any temporall power over them,” and the theologians of the Sorbonne and Gerson were “so farre from giving the Pope that temporall authoritie over Kings” that they denied to the pope any power not only over the political sovereign but also over the Church.65 As to the Libellus, the English supporters of the oath of allegiance also privileged the text’s political Gallicanism because they saw that it was very compatible with James’s view of the role of the sovereign as both head of the state and head of the Catholic Church of England, with respect to which the papacy and the Roman Curia were foreign political and also ecclesiastical entities. In the dedicatory epistle to James, the anonymous English translator of the Libellus insisted that the most important feature of Richer’s book was that it represented a condemnation of the pope’s usurpation not by heretics but by Catholics, “the Popes best friends.” Richer’s book proved, according to the translator, that the French Catholics had finally decided to join the fight initiated in England by the “reformed Christians and Catholiks who, rightly lightned with the shining truth of the spirit and the Scripture, have so lawfully shaken off that most unjust, most unsupportable iron yoake of later yeares forced in the Church of Rome.”66 Because of this new development it seemed possible for “all Christians of all

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professions” to come together in a “happy medium”: to hold a general council and finally decide the theological doctrines necessary to salvation, discarding the rest.67 Once that “happy assembly” finally gathered, however, “the first point and ground of all the following good” should be “clipping the Popes wings of so much as he hath most tyrannously usurped, and reduced universallity to his own particular.”68 In other words, for the anonymous English translator, Richer’s work was perfectly fit to complement James’s attempt to rethink the structure of the universal Church in a way that would reinforce the true tenets of Christian doctrine while eliminating the theological and political usurpation of the pope. The same insistence on the need to move against the pope’s usurped authority can be seen also in the anonymous translator’s letter to the “Romish Catholikes of England.” English Catholics were invited to join the “most Christian Fraunce,” the “Serenissime Venice,” and even “Catholike Spain” and form the true Catholic Church, which assigned to the pope “no more then a generall care of soules with a ministerial direction onely for order and execution of Canons over particular Churches” and “no power at all over the universall Church”; while attributing to the princes, established by God as the “Protectors and Defendors of the Church, and of both Divine and Naturall lawes” the “right and authoritie to commaund both Church and Church-men in some cases.”69 How could the English Catholics join this truly Catholic mission? By swearing the oath of allegiance.70 Thus, through Richer’s subordination of the Church to the political and ecclesiastical authority of the sovereign, as the translator of the Libellus made clear, French political Gallicans, together with English Protestants and English loyalist Catholics as well as antipapalist Venetians, were invited to join forces and form the bulk of this new universal Church: the oath of allegiance would represent a kind of political and theological badge that would distinguish the members of this universal Church from the sectarian Roman Catholics. Surely the theological grounds of this new and truly universal Church should be worked out by a general council, but stripping the pope of any political authority was a good, necessary, and to an extent sufficient starting point from which to move toward this new Catholic Church. The theologians of the Sorbonne were not sure that they wanted to join Richer’s attempt to rethink the theological and political structure of the French Catholic Church following this attempt to find a new balance between political and ecclesiological Gallicanism, and, in fact, they withdrew their support to the syndic. In the early spring of 1612, first the bishops of Paris and then the bishops of Sens, stirred by Du Perron and Ubaldini, condemned Richer’s Libellus; in the meantime, Richer’s opponents at the Sorbonne rallied against him

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and managed to have him removed from his office in September 1612, despite the support of the Parlement on his behalf.71 Richer’s attempt to attack Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta from both the political and the theological front did not succeed in offering a set of unifying principles to political and ecclesiastical Gallicans; rather, his Libellus became the catalyst for the expression of different souls of French Catholicism and French Gallicanism. This is because Bellarmine’s theory of the political authority of the pope as an expression of his theological role was very difficult to attack without attacking fundamental tenets of Catholic theology. In a sense, Bellarmine was right in his letter to Marie: the fight against his potestas indirecta was intimately connected with the fight against the Catholic religion that was being waged by the English Protestants, and it was evidently very hard for the French Gallicans to separate the two fights. However, the Libellus had important consequences for the future of French Catholicism and for the debate over papal authority: in the attempt to attack Bellarmine’s political theory in its theological roots, it contributed to really opening up the political and theological debate and to unifying, if not political and ecclesiastical Gallicans, at least London, Paris, and Venice in an attempt to rethink the theological and political structures of the Catholic Church thoroughly, since in order to destroy the foundations of Bellarmine’s view of the supremacy of the pope, a simple condemnation of some of its political aspects was not sufficient. Once again Paolo Sarpi, who was observing these developments from afar and with great interest, immediately picked up on this. His judgment of the Libellus was acute and not very flattering: writing to Leschassier in February 1612, Sarpi said that he had read Richer’s work attentively, but that he found its doctrine “inconsistent and, to say it in one word, lukewarm.”72 However, when Leschassier informed Sarpi about the controversy that the Libellus had raised and of the likely condemnation that the book would receive, Sarpi seemed glad: “If there had been no clamor raised against the Libellus de ecclesiastica et politica potestate, maybe it would have been overlooked, read by few and evaluated by even fewer. The war that has been raised will be useful, both because the issues will be examined with more diligence, and because the syndic and other sorbonnistes will be obliged to defend their own doctrine: a doctrine, even a very good one, remains neglected without an opponent, while it flourishes where it is attacked by opposition and supported by defenses.”73 Thus, for Sarpi the controversy stirred by Richer’s Libellus was a good development because it contributed to keeping the debate alive. Even if the Sorbonne decided not to rally in support of their syndic as had happened during the discussions over Bellarmine’s book, when the Ultramontanist faction succeeded in preventing the Sorbonne from condemning the book, nevertheless, according to Sarpi, to continue the debate would be a more felicitous outcome than oblivion, because through the controversy the antipapalist element

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of the French theologians would have the opportunity to refine their theoretical arguments against Bellarmine and make them more effective than Richer’s. To an extent, Sarpi was right, because Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta was the catalyst for a long, profound, cross-confessional, and geographically wide discussion over not only the authority of the pope but also the nature, aim, and scope of the authority of the sovereign. Because Bellarmine’s doctrine centered on the prerogatives of the pope’s spiritual authority in ecclesiological as well as political matters, it not only challenged in a novel manner the Protestant doctrinal denial of the supremacy of the pope but also questioned the nature and extent of the authority of the temporal sovereign. For this reason, Gallican France and the Venetian political establishment were not less invested than Protestant England in attacking the theoretical basis of potestas indirecta, and indeed they tried in several ways to form a coherent and unified front against it. Of course, this front was not all that coherent and unified, but the theoretical debates that invested Bellarmine’s theory served precisely as a means to elaborate just how different, theoretically and politically, Richer’s and Servin’s positions were with respect to James’s, and they are, in a sense, the clearest indication of the large scope of the issues at stake. Consequently, Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta enlarged the geographic scope of the debate, or, better, created a debate that almost naturally could not be confined within any national boundaries. This geographic and theoretical enlargement, in turn, highlighted important tensions within the Catholic Church as to the relationship between the center and the periphery of the Catholic world: Bellarmine’s theory represented an attempt to rethink the very concept of the “universality” of Catholicism and the ways in which this universality should be applied in doctrinal as well as political matters, and thus the Catholic hierarchy in Rome experienced the many challenges that rethinking its universal character presented. In this respect, it is very significant that Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta contributed to exacerbating the tensions not only between Rome and Gallican Catholicism but also between Rome and papalist French Catholicism. The importance of this latter debate can be seen through the complex history of the reception of the reply against Richer’s Libellus composed by an Ultramontanist Catholic: André Duval.

Robert Bellarmine and André Duval: The Ultramontanist Reaction In the winter of 1612 the situation in France was very delicate. As the nuncio reported, there were many reasons to be worried: even if some members of the Parlement and some members of the Faculty of Theology did not like Richer’s

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Libellus, the book was not only not yet officially condemned by either the Parlement or the Sorbonne, but “it was even translated into French and printed” and was thus being disseminated further.74 Moreover, the Huguenots had just learned of the attempted murder of Paolo Sarpi and had started to spread the news, which could foster sympathy for the Venetian friar not only among the French Calvinists but also among the French Catholics.75 Furthermore, the debate over the oath of allegiance in England continued to have important repercussions in France: in 1611 Roger Widdrington, alias Thomas Preston, an English Benedictine, had published Apologia Cardinalis Bellarmini, in which he defended the oath using “Gallican” arguments. Widdrington’s work was proving very successful in France, and for this reason Ubaldini tried to convince Rome not to print a reply under Bellarmine’s name in order to avoid stirring further controversy.76 In that grim scenario, the nuncio had one reason to rejoice. On 15 March 1612 he wrote to Cardinal Borghese to send to Rome a copy “of a new reply published in Latin against Richer’s book, written by one of the most learned, pious and esteemed doctors of this Sorbonne, named André Duval.”77 Duval was a central figure in the Ultramontanist party of the Sorbonne: an admirer and student of Bellarmine’s theories, he had been the leader of the anti-Richer faction of the Sorbonne since Richer’s election to the office of syndic. Not only had Duval opposed Richer in his attempt to have the Faculty of Theology officially condemn Bellarmine’s treatise against Barclay, he had also been the sorbonniste who led the charge against Richer and his Libellus, which ultimately led to the syndic’s deposition from his post.78 As the nuncio reported, Duval’s response to Richer began to raise some clamor in France, and in a positive way with respect to the interest of the Roman Curia. Servin and his associates had condemned the work, but the queen, the court, and the bishops of Paris had much praised it and had allowed the book to be printed with an official royal approbation. Probably more important, the nuncio reported that “Cardinal du Perron and many of these Bishops praise the book as the best and most useful book that has ever been published in Paris in fifty years, and they think it was an effect of Providence that Richer obliged him [Duval] to write it in a moment so appropriate to take away from the French people’s minds the very pernicious opinions that were spreading before and that prejudiced the authority of the pope and the dignity of this Holy See.”79 In the nuncio’s opinion, Duval’s book not only was very useful against Richer’s argument but also was “more consonant with the right doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church” than everything written previously by Parisian theologians. To make sure that this was the case, the nuncio submitted the copy to Rome and waited for its judgment. The nuncio added that Duval was thinking of

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writing another, larger work on the topic of the authority of the pope and that, for this reason, he thought that a positive judgment from Rome on Duval’s reply would be a good encouragement for Duval to keep pounding against Richer.80 However, things did not go as smoothly as the nuncio hoped, for Duval’s small reply to Richer contained a few remarks that French papalists such as Du Perron liked but that the Roman Curia did not. Duval’s polemical and conceptual strategy in his Elenchus, which was the reason Du Perron and some of his colleagues thought that it was the best book written by a French theologian in fifty years, was that Richer’s arguments were not only wrong but also represented a dangerous and painful anomaly with respect to the French papalists and the entire body of French theologians, including “silver-age” conciliarists such as Almain and Mair.81 Thus, in order to isolate Richer and separate him from those French conciliarists whose heir Richer wanted to portray himself as, Duval constantly referred to Almain, Mair, and Gerson as authors whom Richer had misunderstood or twisted, whereas in truth their position was very similar to Duval’s. The result that Duval hoped to achieve in this text, then, was to portray Richer as a breeder of sedition who threatened the unity of the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne and also the good relationship between the French Church and the Roman Church, which made Richer not only “graviter impudens” but also a “perturbator” of “both the Ecclesiastical hierarchy and the Christian peace.”82 To succeed in isolating Richer from the conciliarist camp, however, Duval was obliged to take the conciliarists’ ecclesiological arguments and their political implications a little too seriously for the Roman taste. Duval’s ecclesiological position in this text was that both French conciliarists and French papalists granted that the Church’s government was monarchical, even though the Church’s monarchy was not absolute. This meant that the pope was the head of the Church insofar as he was the highest authority in charge of the potestas iurisdictionis of the Church, as not only the French papalists but also Gerson and Almain, according to Duval, affirmed. When Richer affirmed that the Church was truly an aristocracy rather than a monarchy with regard to government, the Gallican theologian, according to Duval, was going against Gerson and Almain and also showing himself close to the positions of Calvin and of the Calvinist monarchomachs.83 Of course, Duval could not ignore that there were many differences between the ecclesiological positions of people such as Du Perron and those of Gerson and Almain, and if Duval wanted to make Richer appear as an isolated and Protestant-leaning theologian, he had to flatten, to an extent, those differences. Thus, on the one hand, Duval reaffirmed the pope’s role as the supreme

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authority in charge of the potestas iurisdictionis of the Church. On the other hand, however, he downplayed, so to speak, some of the theological and juridical implications of the pope’s supremacy with respect to the Council. For instance, Duval spent a great deal of his work discussing the pope’s infallibilitas decernendi, or infallibility in stating binding laws without the general Council. Duval admitted that the Sorbonne was divided on this issue, but he admitted also that even for papalist theologians “it is not de fide that the Pontiff has infallibilitas decernendi, even though it is more certain and more probable that the Pontiff, insofar as he acts as Pontiff, has this infallibility.”84 The question of the pope’s infallibility in deciding matters of faith was indeed a delicate one: it was certainly not to be believed de fide, but that did not mean that it was appropriate to deny it. Bellarmine himself, during the controversy de auxiliis, had insisted that, though the pope is the supreme judge in matters of conscience and undisputed head of the Catholic Church, he should refrain from making decisions in matters of faith without consulting other theologians in the Church, not because the pope as pope could not make this kind of decision but because it was more consonant with the practice of the Church for him not to do so. Thus, when Duval, in a conciliatory move, admitted in his Elenchus that the pope’s infallibilitas decernendi was not de fide, he did not say anything “wrong,” for it was part of the true Catholic doctrine that this kind of infallibility was not to be granted to the pope de fide. However, the way in which Duval said it was moderate enough to present some sort of theoretical inclusiveness with respect to those Parisians doctors who denied the pope’s infallibility and who, for Duval, could not be said to oppose any Catholic truth. Thus, by taking this position, Duval sharply separated Richer from his conciliarist authorities and left him alone in his unique and uniquely unorthodox ecclesiological positions. Duval had the same need to present his own positions as compatible with the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century conciliarists and to portray Richer’s as unique and uniquely dangerous when it came to discussing the political implications of the Libellus. Duval’s task was to argue as effectively as possible that Richer’s Libellus, far from strengthening the authority of the secular prince, in fact undermined it, and Duval approached this point with a twofold strategy. First of all, Duval briefly attacked Richer’s Ecclesia in Republica argument, in which the state granted territorial jurisdiction to the Church, and, consequently, the temporal sovereign was in possession of some rights and duties concerning the Church. For Duval, “the Church and the Christian commonwealth are one and the same. What is, in fact, the Church but the congregation of the faithful? And what is the commonwealth but, all the same, the congregation of the faithful?” Thus, for Duval, Richer’s very principle according to which state and

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Church together form the one Christiana respublica made Richer’s granting to the sovereign a form of ecclesiastical authority contradictory: if they are both parts of the same organism, how could Richer affirm that the Church is in the commonwealth “as in a foreign land or territory”?85 The only explanation, for Duval, was that in granting some ecclesiastical authority to the sovereign, Richer was doing nothing but mirroring the Lutheran and Calvinist heresies, while the true and sound Catholic doctrine is that by divine and natural law the emperor and the pope have different areas of jurisdiction, and neither the emperor nor the pope may occupy or invade the boundaries of the other. If Richer was right, and summoning and presiding over general Councils was the emperor’s prerogative, then the emperor would indeed be invading the pope’s boundaries.86 Notice Duval’s skillful strategy in this passage: he treated Richer’s granting of some ecclesiastical authority to the sovereign as a demonstration of Richer’s heretical attempt to diminish the spiritual authority of the pope without making any mention of the pope’s temporal authority (either direct or indirect), and he insisted that the authority of the temporal sovereign is instituted by natural and divine law, just like the pope’s, and that by natural and divine law that temporal authority was separated from the pope’s within the one Christian commonwealth. In this way, Duval succeeded in affirming the spiritual authority of the pope without diminishing the authority of the sovereign. The second way in which Duval attempted to align his own positions with those of the conciliarists and to isolate Richer’s unique and dangerous political statement was by treating the Church as a corpus politicum that was, to a certain extent, analogous to the temporal commonwealth. Almain and other “silverage” conciliarists had used the analogy between Church and state to argue that, just as in the temporal commonwealth the ultimate source of authority resides in the community of the people, so in the Church the ultimate source of authority resides in the congregatio fidelium. Since the temporal commonwealth is a perfect and natural institution, and thus cannot lack the power to defend itself, so also the Church, a perfect and natural institution, must be endowed with the same power. And, just as in the temporal commonwealth the power to punish and coerce resides in the entire community so as to defend it from possible attacks on the part of the prince, so in the ecclesiastical community the power to punish and coerce must reside in the entire community of the faithful, and not in the pope alone.87 From the Catholic papalist perspective, a crucially important change of pace happened when Cajetan replied to Almain’s conciliarist arguments based on the analogy between political and ecclesiastical commonwealth by denying that analogy and by arguing instead that Aquinas’s notion of natural law could not be applied equally to both the ecclesiastical and the political commonwealth. While Cajetan was happy to concede that in the temporal

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realm the power of jurisdiction resides in the whole community, he affirmed that the Church is absolutely not like a free and natural community, which is why the supreme authority of the pope comes not from the congregatio fidelium, by natural law, but directly from Christ, by divine law.88 Francisco de Vitoria, an acute and intelligent interpreter of Cajetan, understood that insisting on the radical difference between the natures of the ecclesiastical and political commonwealths could serve not only the purpose of opposing the conciliarist position but also, and more important from Vitoria’s perspective, the Protestant heresies of the priesthood of all believers and the foundation of the legitimacy of secular government in God’s grace. In fact, if temporal and ecclesiastical commonwealths were radically different, Vitoria could say that temporal government is founded in the law of God instead of in the grace of God; at the same time, he could also argue that the power of the keys was entrusted by Christ only to Peter and his apostles, not to the entire Christian community, thus excluding laymen from participating in both potestas iurisdictionis and potestas ordinis.89 For Bellarmine, the argument of the radical difference between temporal and spiritual authority was the keystone on which his entire theopolitical view of the Christiana respublica hinged, since it was this radical difference that caused the authority of the pope to be both incommensurable with and superior to the authority of the secular prince, which, in turn, enabled papal supremacy to withstand both the theoretical attacks of the Protestant theologians and the theoretical and political attempts to strengthen and sacralize the authority of the supreme temporal sovereign. Now, in his Libellus Richer maintained Almain’s and the other conciliarists’ notion of analogy between ecclesiological and political discourses, but he preserved his text from the potential constitutionalist implications of the analogy by granting to the temporal sovereign a great deal of political (and ecclesiastical) authority, or, as Oakley put it, by making the temporal sovereign “a sacral monarch” and the true “representative of God to his people.”90 While Richer’s position on this issue reflected and thereby exposed the contradictions between ecclesiastical and political Gallicanism, it put an Ultramontanist such as Duval in a tough polemical spot, for it forced him to defend the papal monarchy against Richer’s arguments while at the same time defending himself and his supporters from any potential accusation that they sought to downsize the authority of the temporal sovereign, which, in the immediate aftermath of Henri’s murder and in the context of the antityrannicide and antipapalist discourses, was especially dangerous for a French papalist. Duval thought that the most effective and least dangerous solution was to avoid following Vitoria and Bellarmine in affirming the radical difference between the political and ecclesiastical commonwealths and to follow, instead, Almain in affirming the analogy

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between the two, but turning the substance of the analogy the other way around. For instance, responding to Richer’s argument that the pope is the “ministerial” head of the Church because the ecclesiastical power has been granted by Christ, the Church’s essential head, to the entire Church, Duval wrote that if Richer was right and “God and Nature in the first place attend to the whole in a more immediate and more essential manner than to the most noble part,” the absurd consequence of this statement would be that “the kingdom of France is the whole, the king is the most noble part, ergo the power is given to the kingdom rather than to the king in the first place and in a more immediate and more essential manner.”91 We can see the same intellectual move again, and more explicitly, when Duval responded to Richer’s argument, which, Richer himself declared, he drew out of Almain, that since political sovereignty depends on the people’s consent, then the pope’s primacy depends on the consent of the Council, and since, as Paul said, every authority should be obedient to its superior, then the pope must obey the Council, on whose consent his authority depends, as a superior. To this passage Duval replied that if one were to take Richer’s argument seriously, then “insofar as the coactive power is concerned, the king of France would hold his dominion as if it was granted by his own subjects, and he would not be able to coerce them with his laws, even if the laws are just, without their consent.”92 In fact, there was no need to take this argument seriously because it was wrong. Indeed, Richer was not only wrong but also mischievous in (mis) quoting Almain as a supporting author, for Almain did not say that the authority of the prince depends on the consent of the people but that “nobody can be coerced unless either by his own consent, or by the will of the superior . . . hence the coactive power of the prince does not depend only on the consent of the subjects, otherwise his authority would be vain and superfluous, and for this reason even if according to the custom accepted in France the [king’s] edicts are usually confirmed [by the Parlement], nevertheless they do not receive their force from this declaration in any way, since the only necessary condition is that the prince’s will and intention are established.”93 Thus, by picking up Richer’s fight on Richer’s (and the “silver-age” conciliarists’) own terms, Duval tried to accomplish two important polemical victories. First, he tried to snatch Almain’s and the conciliarists’ argument away from Richer and to incorporate them as part of his own. Second, he used the argument of the analogy between secular and temporal authority to show that questioning the supremacy of the pope might imply questioning the supremacy of the king, while, by the same token, the defenders of the pope’s primacy within the church were not the enemy but, indeed, the best defenders of the prince’s primacy within his state. The drawback of the structure of Duval’s

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political arguments is the loss of the great theological and theoretical capital that came from the distinction between the natures of the spiritual and temporal commonwealths. As Bellarmine’s theory demonstrates, by insisting on the radical difference between spiritual and temporal authority, it was possible not only to affirm the theological and ecclesiological superiority of the pope within the Church but also to establish the pope’s primacy with respect to temporal sovereigns and to defend such primacy against the Protestants. However, that great theological and political capital came with some constitutionalist strings attached, which Duval could not afford to keep. Duval’s text, as we saw from the nuncio’s letter, was sent to Rome for judgment, and even though it was not forwarded to Bellarmine, the Elenchus reached the Roman Inquisition. The Inquisitor in charge of evaluating Duval’s book did not pick up on the significance of Duval’s statements regarding the political implications of his debate with Richer. However, he did pick up on Duval’s “conciliatory” statements regarding the pope’s infallibilitas decernendi: while to a French papalist such as Duval the need to avoid sharpening the conflict within French theologians and the Sorbonne in particular was very clear; from Rome things looked a little different. In fact, the anonymous censure of Duval’s Elenchus suggested that the passages in which the French theologian had argued that the pope’s infallibility was not de fide should have been “moderated.” For instance, the initial statement that defined the pope’s infallibility as not de fide but as “more certain and probable” than the opposite opinion, should be changed into: “it is not established that the Pontiff has infallibilitas decernendi, nevertheless it is certain that insofar as he acts as a Pontiff he has this infallibility.”94 Evidently the comparative certius seemed dangerous to the censor because it seemed to imply the possibility that the opposite opinion also contained some certainty. Apart from this and other such small phrases, which should have been modified in a more pious sense, the censor concluded: “I did not find in this most beautiful pamphlet anything that can be reproached in terms of doctrine.”95 The Inquisition censure did not cause too many problems for Duval: over the summer of 1612 the nuncio wrote to Cardinal Arrigone, a member of the Inquisition and perhaps the author of the censure, that Duval had been informed of the overall praise that the Roman authorities had for his work, and also of the small censures. The nuncio reported that Duval admitted that “the condition of the place and the wrongs of the times” obliged him to restrain himself on the topic of the pope’s supremacy and promised to modify the censured phrases in the second edition of his work. Duval’s promise and the nuncio’s endorsement seemed good enough, for the Inquisition closed the matter.96

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While the potentially dangerous theological and political implications of Duval’s defense of papal supremacy had been ignored by the anonymous censor, they were not ignored by Richer’s and Servin’s Gallican associates. One of them was the conseiller du roi Simon Vigor, a jurist of Gallican sympathies. In 1613 Vigor published an anonymous defense of Richer written as a commentary on the responsio synodalis of the Council of Basel.97 The central aim of Vigor’s text was to defend the political implications of Richer and his conciliarist theories against Duval’s accusations, based on the analogy between secular and ecclesiastical polity, that questioning the supremacy of the pope in ecclesiological matters could open up the road to questioning the supremacy of the king in political matters. Vigor began by stating that Duval’s theory was unique with respect to the rest of French theological elaborations and also was “foreign” to it in both a theological and a political sense. Duval’s opinion on the superiority of the pope over the council, Vigor wrote, was contrary to the authority of all the councils and all the theologians of the Gallican Church, “but this is not a novelty, since Duval, the only one among all the doctors of the Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne, will not condemn the impious admirers of Ignatius, so that he will rather be by himself, or nothing at all, than agreeing correctly with his fellow doctors.”98 Vigor’s insinuation that Duval’s papalism, far from being a “moderate” and “inclusive” view of the relationship between pope and council, was in fact a unique opinion that served the purpose of the admirers of the Jesuits rather than the interest of France, was accompanied by a direct engagement with Duval’s (and Almain’s) arguments drawn from the analogy between secular and ecclesiastical commonwealth. Vigor began by declaring that no Catholic ever doubted that the Church was a monarchy, but the question was what kind of monarchy. “In fact, there are two kinds of monarchy: one absolute, when the people transfer their right into one person; the other is a monarchy with laws, and whoever is a monarch in this case is obliged not to do anything as a monarch according to his own will.”99 The Church, Vigor continues, is a monarchy of the second kind, while some political commonwealths, as, for instance, the kingdom of France, are monarchies of the first kind. Thus, Those doctors who want to find arguments to prove the power of the Ecclesiastical Monarchy out of the analogy with the Political Monarchy are mistaken. In fact, just how much they differ from one another can be gathered from the fact that the king has the power of life and death over his subjects and whatever he pleases has the force of law, and even if he declares something against the laws, nevertheless he is considered to declare the law. But the usual custom and the canon law prevent us from asserting the same for the Pope, since the Pontiff does

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not have the absolute power of spiritual life and death over the Christians, because the use of the keys is regulated according to the canons, and it is not exercised by mere and absolute authority.100 In other words, Vigor argued that people like Duval, who, based on the analogy they saw between the secular commonwealth and the ecclesiastical commonwealth, concluded that diminishing the authority of the pope implied diminishing also the authority of the king, were wrong. The reason for this was that secular and ecclesiastical monarchies were very different: the king’s power was above the laws, while the pope’s was limited by the canonical law and by the law of the gospel. In this way, it is easy to prove that “the kingdom of France is a pure and absolute monarchy,” while the Church is not.101 On this point, Vigor insisted that it is undeniable that the form of government chosen by God for the Church was different from that chosen for the political commonwealth: “In fact, even if Duval says that God looked first to the people and then to the king, nevertheless he cannot deny that, insofar as jurisdiction is concerned, God looked not to the people, but to the king, for he granted jurisdiction to the king, not to the people. . . . God, however, wanted the Church to be governed by a different government than the royal one, and he did not grant the ecclesiastical jurisdiction to one man alone, but to all the Apostles.”102 Vigor’s position on conciliarism and absolutism is very important for a number of reasons. First, it represented an interesting polemical break with the significance of the Church-state analogy as used by fifteenth- and early sixteenthcentury French conciliarists such as Almain. While Almain had argued that, just as in the political commonwealth the ultimate source of authority resides in the community, so also in the ecclesiastical commonwealth the ultimate authority resides in the community of the faithful, Vigor argued that ecclesiastical and political communities are different with regard to forms of government. In the case of the Church, canon law and the fact that Christ granted the potestas iurisdictionis to all the apostles rather than to Peter alone represented an insurmountable barrier against absolutism. By contrast, certain political commonwealths, such as the kingdom of France, were free from this barrier and could thus be ruled by “mere and absolute authority.” Indeed, Vigor’s differentiation between the power of the king (which entailed power of life and death over his subjects) and the power of the pope (which did not) was more consonant to the anti-Catholic arguments of Protestant royalist theorists in the reign of James I than to the arguments of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French conciliarists.103 Second, Vigor exposed, so to speak, the risks inherent in Duval’s choice to defend the power of the pope within the Church considered as a corpus politicum of the same nature as the political commonwealth. Duval had not followed

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Bellarmine and Vitoria in insisting on the radically different nature of ecclesiastical and political commonwealths because he wanted to establish a link between the pope’s supremacy within the Church and the king’s supremacy within the state, and also because he wanted to reclaim Almain and his followers for the papalist camp. Vigor engaged the question of the relationship between conciliarism and absolutism by stressing the juridical limitations inherent in the ecclesiastical commonwealth. Since the marker of an absolute monarch is to be above the law, whenever a temporal king is indeed above the law, as in the case of the French king, then he can be said to be absolute. By contrast, the pope can never be above canon laws because Christ did not make him the sole holder of the potestas iurisdictionis, and therefore the pope’s monarchy can never be absolute. Bellarmine’s notion of the juridical and theological role of the pope as supreme judge of consciences, on which his theory of the unique and special character of the spiritual authority of the pope rested, was an effective antidote to Vigor’s position, but for Duval the neo-Thomist insistence on the radically different nature of the spiritual commonwealth contained constitutionalist implications that he was not willing or, to an extent, able to accept. Third, Vigor’s polemical strategy managed to isolate Duval’s papalism and portray it as a “foreign” doctrine, both religiously and politically. Duval, according to Vigor, was like the fifth column of the pro-tyrannicide and antimonarchical Jesuits, and his position opposed both the intellectual and theological tradition of French theologians and jurists and the political sovereignty of the king, whose murder was obviously still vivid in the memory of the French. For all these reasons, the papal nuncio in Paris informed the Roman Curia that Vigor’s pamphlet seemed to invigorate Richer’s faction at the Sorbonne and the antipapalist faction in the Parlement. Everybody in France was waiting for a condemnation of Vigor’s pamphlet by the Inquisition and the Index, even though there was the possibility that such condemnation would have raised even more clamor against the pope, especially because the Parlement was taking action against other books that defended the pope’s supremacy and were written by the Jesuits Suárez and Becanus in the context of the controversy over the oath of allegiance. That is why the nuncio was especially glad that Duval was, indeed, working on a large treatise on political and ecclesiastical authority, which would have both expanded the arguments already present in the Libellus and contributed to the opposition of Vigor’s book as well as Richer’s.104 When, in January 1614, the nuncio finally got a copy of Duval’s compete treatise, De suprema Romani Pontificis potestate in ecclesiam Disputatio, his reaction was mixed. The good news was that Duval had succeeded in affirming

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the primacy of the pope in a clear and effective manner, so that “the Catholic doctrine on this primacy will be more clearly impressed in the pious and Godfearing souls; and for those who, not out of malice, but out of an error of their intellect, had some difficulties, it will be completely clarified.”105 To this end, the nuncio added, Duval should be praised for, among other things, having reduced the authority of the Council of Basel to that of a mere “conciliabulum,” having declared that the pope is infallible when he speakes ex cathedra in matters of faith, and that the decrees of the Council of Trent should be received in France.106 The bad news, however, was that Duval’s book contained “some small things that are too consonant with the air of this country and with the pretensions of the Parlement of France, and which there [in Rome] will perhaps give some annoyance.” Had Duval showed a copy of the book to the nuncio before its publication, those things could have been removed, but as the situation stood and because of the great importance of Duval’s role in the fight against the heretics and the politiques, the nuncio reassured Borghese that Duval promised to correct what Rome wanted to be corrected in the second edition of his work, just as he had done for his Elenchus.107 Indeed, the nuncio concluded, strengthening the papalist faction represented by Duval was so important for the future of French Catholicism that it would have been useful if the pope had publicly declared his appreciation for Duval in front of the theologians of the Sorbonne who happened to be in Rome, “so as to oppose especially in such times the ungrateful sons of the same mother [i.e., the Sorbonne], who try in their published works to make the Sorbonne look like an enemy and opponent of this Holy See.”108 What exactly were those “small things” mentioned by the nuncio that could bother the Roman Curia? In a nutshell, the problems with the Disputatio were the same as those in the Elenchus because the polemical need that motivated Duval’s “lukewarm” papalism in the Elenchus remained the same in the Disputatio, especially since Vigor’s pamphlet represented another attempt by Richer’s friends in the Parlement to isolate the papalists both theologically and politically. However, Duval’s strategy of defending papal supremacy without splitting the theologians of the Sorbonne over his position was considered necessary in the French polemical context not just by French papalists but also by the nuncio. Ubaldini was the first to notice that some of Duval’s statements could be annoying for Rome, but at the same time he also realized the importance of Duval’s role in keeping the Sorbonne unified, and that is why the nuncio, rather than suggesting that Duval be punished for those “small things,” advised public praise for him and his colleagues. For instance, on the issue of papal infallibility, Duval had learned from the censures received on his Elenchus that stronger language was needed to praise

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Rome, and that is why, returning to the same issue in his Disputatio, he wrote that his conclusion on papal infallibility was that “even if it is not de fide that the supreme Pontiff, separately from the council, enjoy the privilege of infallibility even if he acts as Pontiff, nevertheless this is absolutely certain and undoubted”— notice the “absolutely certain” that replaced the “more certain” of the Elenchus.109 Immediately afterward, however, Duval specified that “the doctors of the contrary opinion,” including Almain, Mair, and Gerson, “are not condemned, either in this or in any other issue, by the Church,” even though, Duval admitted, “in matters regarding the Pope, D’Ailly, Gerson and Almain are not very authoritative, since they lived and wrote in times of schism.”110 Then, immediately following, Duval explained that, according to Cano, an opinion can be considered “temerarious” in three senses: if it is contrary to the doctrine of the Church; if it is contrary to the opinion of the learned doctors which has been accepted by the Church; or if it is contrary to the opinion of the learned doctors which, without having being accepted by the Church, is nevertheless “most probable and necessary.” Now, Duval concluded, since papal infallibility is neither de fide nor certain nor most probable in Cano’s sense, the opinion of those who believe that the pope does not have infallibility cannot be considered a “temerarious opinion.” Of course, Duval conceded, “nobody can deny that this proposition, that the Pontiff as Pontiff can indeed decide against the faith, opens the way to disobedience and offers the opportunity to doubt many things which in the whole world are already accepted, and established by the Pontiff, which does not lack a certain kind of temerity.”111 The rhetorical twists of Duval’s position could not be clearer, and their results could not be more ambiguous: papal infallibility is not de fide, and nevertheless it is “absolutely certain.” However, denying papal infallibility, as did D’Ailly, Gerson, and Almain, is neither something for which one should be condemned nor a doctrinally temerarious statement. Nevertheless, because it leads to disobedience and doubt about many acts already done by the popes, it does contain a kind of temerity. Duval faced the same problem, and he applied the same degree of rhetorical acrobatics with the same contradictory effects when he had to deal with the question of whether the pope was superior to the council. Duval started by expressing some form of uneasiness in being obliged by Vigor to deal with this question, for it was nothing but an “odious” and “dangerous” excuse to produce divisions within the Church.112 Called by his adversary to respond, Duval chose, once again, the strategy of moderation. First, Duval devoted a lengthy part of his treatise to expose the two different “sententiae,” and his final judgment was that “in such a great dissension among doctors, I would say openly that neither is de fide.”113 This means also that “not only neither is heretical, but

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also that neither is erroneous and temerarious, at least with regard to the temerity of the opinion,” even though the conciliarist position could be considered temerarious insofar as it fostered disobedience and division, according to the same logic that Duval used previously.114 Having established that neither is de fide and neither is heretical, it remained to be seen which one was true. Thus, in the following section of his work Duval went through some of the conciliarists’ arguments for the superiority of the council and confuted them (for instance, the pope is not a member of the Church but its leader because Christ had issued the command to feed his sheep to the pope alone; even if both the pope and the council received their authority directly from God, that would not exclude the possibility that the pope could be superior to the council; the Church cannot have two heads).115 What, then, was Duval’s conclusion in the chapter? Since he structured this section as a series of effective and seemingly final responses on the part of a papalist to the conciliarists, one would expect Duval to declare that it is, in fact, true that the pope is superior to the council. Instead, Duval wrote: “here are the weight and arguments of both opinions and their respective responses, which I wanted to present so that the prudent reader might embrace whatever he will think better and wiser.”116 These passages demonstrate the uneasiness of Duval’s position: he wanted to defend the pope’s supremacy against the conciliarists, but he also wanted to avoid enlarging the gap within the Sorbonne; thus he found himself obliged to create a papalism that was as palatable as possible to his adversaries and as inclusive as possible of the French conciliarist tradition, so as not to portray his papalism as a foreign position with respect to the theological history of France. The same complications were present also in the political implications of Duval’s position; indeed, Vigor’s powerful link between ecclesiological conciliarism and political absolutism had forced Duval into an even more delicate polemical spot. On what grounds could he defend papalism and the absolute sovereignty of the French ruler? There were two roads that he could possibly have followed: the first, which he followed in the Elenchus, was to insist on the analogy between the monarchical nature of the Church and the monarchical nature of the state. The second, which was the neo-Thomist and in particular Bellarmine’s solution, was to insist on the special and uniquely spiritual character of the monarchy of the Church, which gave to its ruler, the pope, a substantially different and superior authority both within the Church and with respect to any temporal ruler. In the Disputatio, Duval initially followed the latter but, with a sharp turn, ended up once again confirming the former. Duval began the discussion in a solid neo-Thomist fashion, explaining that ecclesiastical power and political power had different origins, ends, and also

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importance, for “the ecclesiastical authority is more noble than the royal or imperial authority.” Because of this superiority, then “if political authority errs, it is brought back to its duty by the force of the censure through the ecclesiastical authority, whereas if the ecclesiastical authority errs even gravely, it cannot be bought back to its duty or corrected through the political authority, and in fact the supreme Pontiff does not depend on Kings or Emperors in either spiritual or temporal matters.”117 However, when Duval needed to discuss one of the fundamental theoretical points underpinning the superiority of the authority of the pope over that of the temporal sovereign, namely, that the former was instituted directly by God while the latter was instituted by God through the people, he started to feel his constitutional scruples bothering him again. When the time came to discuss the issue of immediacy, Duval paused in the flow of his discourse and started to list the various opinions of theologians and canonists over whether or not political authority existed through the people’s consent. Then, warning the reader that “I did not intend to move this stone, for I want to discuss spiritual, not temporal, issues,” Duval declared: “Incidentally I will say, however, that the election of the people or hereditary succession (which in its first origin derives from the people) or the ordination and inauguration of the Pontiff, unless nothing else is added (as for example it happens in the case of the kings of Sicily or other princes who are vassals of the Church) does not prevent us from being able to say that the secular authority of Kings and Princes is immediately from God.”118 Duval made explicit the concerns he had regarding the potential constitutionalist implications of the neo-Thomist argument of the fundamental difference between secular and religious authority, for immediately after declaring that the people’s election does not diminish the immediacy of the relationship between royal power and God, he added that affirming this openly is especially useful in maintaining the people in their duty, so that the people do not sever themselves from their legitimate King through factions and rebellions. When, in fact, the people believe that the authority of their King derives from God and not from the people themselves, they accept the King’s domination more patiently, and obey the King’s orders more promptly and easily. The reason why we say that these things [i.e., the people’s election and the pope’s inauguration] do not prevent the authority of the King from being immediately from God is one of analogy: just as from the election of the Pontiff done by the Cardinals in the name of the whole Church it does not follow that the Pontiff borrows his authority from the Cardinals or from the Church, since he receives it only from Christ, . . .

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so likewise from the Pontiff’s ordination or the people’s election it does not follow that Kings hold their authority from them [i.e., from the Pontiff and the people], and not from God alone, unless something else intervenes, as I said.119 Thus, once again, although Duval realized the importance and effectiveness of Vitoria’s and Bellarmine’s arguments of the radical difference between secular and religious commonwealth to argue for the pope’s supremacy within the Church and against the Protestants, nevertheless, when push came to shove, the constitutionalist implications of this argument proved too much for Duval to bear. Especially when Vigor expressly accused his papalist positions of being antimonarchical and foreign, Duval found it necessary to affirm, equally expressly, that despite the many differences between secular and religious commonwealths, on the issue of immediacy both king and pope received their authority from God immediately, which was an important corollary for Duval to argue against any form of resistance theory, implicit or explicit, against the temporal sovereign. In fact, when Duval came to the discussion of Vigor’s statements on the limited monarchy of the pope as opposed to the absolute monarchy of the king, he chose to avoid Bellarmine’s distinctions and to insist instead on the analogy between the two monarchies. Duval admitted that “the Ecclesiastical Monarchy is not simply absolute, but that it is enclosed and limited by certain laws and boundaries.”120 However, against Vigor’s argument Duval specified that the monarchy of the Church “is absolute secundum quid, and it is equal, in spiritual matters, to the Monarchy of Kings and Emperors in civil matters.”121 From this perspective, Duval continues, not even the French monarchy is simply absolute, since even the kings of France run their edicts through the Parlement, but not “ex necessitate,” for their edicts do not actually need the Parlement’s approbation to have the force of law. Of course, there are other kings whose monarchy is even less absolute, such as the kings of Aragon, who cannot issue laws or require taxes without the consent of the magistrates, but between the king of France and the king of Aragon there is the same difference as between absolute monarchy and limited monarchy. The pope’s monarchy, Duval concludes, is exactly like that of the king of France. It is an absolute monarchy insofar as the pope’s laws are binding even without the council’s ratification and insofar as the pope’s authority does not come from the council, and indeed it is the council that depends on the pope, just as the king of France is the absolute monarch of France because his laws do not need the approbation of the Parlement to be binding and because his authority does not come from Parlement, while Parlement receives its legitimization from

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the king. The pope’s absolute monarchy is indeed limited with respect to natural and divine law, which the pope is bound to respect, but this is the same limitation that the French monarchy has to respect, since the French king cannot do anything against the divine and natural law, such as “condemn innocent people to death at will, seize the goods of the citizens, invade other people’s bedrooms, and nevertheless, insofar as civil matters and the administration of the kingdom are concerned, he does not depend on anybody but God.” Thus, in both cases there are limitations, but both monarchies are absolute, of the same kind of absolutism secundum quid.122 When Borghese received the nuncio’s letter and the copy of Duval’s new book, he wasted no time in forwarding all this information to the Inquisition, which looked at the matter more closely than it had done in the case of the Elenchus. The Inquisition assigned to one of its commissaries, the Dominican Andrea Giustiniani, the charge of writing a censure to Duval’s work,123 but it also sent a copy of the book to Robert Bellarmine.124 In the summer of 1614 Bellarmine read Duval’s book and Giustiniani’s censure and wrote some comments of his own on both Duval’s book and his fellow censor’s notes.125 Duval decided to respond to Bellarmine’s comments on his own work in the fall of 1614, and this originated a tight correspondence between the French theologian and the Jesuit cardinal, which lasted until 1618.126 From an examination of the Roman reaction to Duval’s theory many important elements emerge. First of all, there was, once again, a lack of consensus over Duval’s book, which in turn highlights a lack of consensus over the theoretical implications of Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta and its impact in the political situation of France. Giustiniani’s censure, in fact, is a strong testament to the uneasiness that certain factions of the Roman Curia felt toward Duval’s papalism, which in France was considered useful and prudent by people like Du Perron, but in Rome was considered lukewarm at best. In fact, all the propositions censured by Giustiniani concerned Duval’s effort to downplay the pope’s ecclesiological authority. For example, Giustiniani censured Duval’s contradictory statements regarding papal infallibility as not de fide,127 together with propositions in which Duval had affirmed clearly that the primacy of the pope did not imply any special status to the particular church of Rome, but concerned only the bishop of Rome insofar as he was a representative of the universal Church.128 Now, in the first case, Giustiniani noted as wrong a proposition that was not entirely unorthodox but was expressed in a contradictory manner, while in the second case Giustiniani censured a proposition that was, indeed, consonant with the true Catholic doctrine, for in no case could any infallibility be attributed to any particular church, not even the church of Rome insofar as this was

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intended as the dioceses of Rome. In fact, when Bellarmine saw Giustiniani’s censures, he corrected them quite assertively. As to the first, in his own comments over Giustiniani’s censures Bellarmine remarked that Duval’s statements regarding papal infallibility as not de fide were not all equally wrong but were more wrong in some parts than in others.129 In fact, in his own comments to Duval, Bellarmine did not note the entire passage as worthy of censure but suggested only the removal of Duval’s statement that “the opposite opinion [i.e., the opinion of those who deny papal infallibility] is neither heretical nor erroneous nor temerarious.” According to Bellarmine, Duval’s own arguments in support of papal infallibility were so strong that from them it followed clearly that denying papal infallibility was, at best, erroneous and temerarious, if not heretical: for this reason, Bellarmine thought that adding that statement was unnecessary and contradictory.130 Thus, since Bellarmine was aware that the issue was delicate because he was mindful of the theological inaccuracy and the polemical dangers of defining as heretical a proposition that denied something that was not de fide, since Duval’s arguments were clear enough and, finally, since Duval was in a tough spot, Bellarmine did not want to push Duval to openly declare that denying the pope’s infallibility was heretical, but insisted only that Duval refrain from mentioning the opposite opinion at all. In the second case, that of Giustiniani’s censure of Duval’s proposition concerning the Church of Rome as a particular church, Bellarmine’s judgment of his fellow Inquisitor was almost more severe in tone than his judgment over Duval’s text: while Giustiniani had censured Duval’s proposition, for Bellarmine denying any special status to the church of Rome as a particular church was “most true. In fact, the particular church of Rome, without the pope, has no infallibility.”131 In his own censure to Duval, Bellarmine did not note this proposition as worthy of correction, and in other similar instances concerning matters of ecclesiology, Bellarmine continued to refrain from obliging Duval to make more explicitly papalist statements and suggested instead that Duval drop controversial issues.132 The discrepancy between Bellarmine’s and Giustiniani’s comments is very significant because it demonstrates the tension between diverse strands of Roman papalism. While both Giustiniani and Bellarmine, from the vantage point of the Roman Curia, took issue with the “lukewarm” papalism that Duval defended in the French context, Giustiniani’s “overzealous” defense of papal primacy seemed to Bellarmine both theologically inaccurate and ineffective for the cause of Rome. When it came to discussing the political aspects of Duval arguments, the tension between Bellarmine and the “ultrapapalist” Giustiniani became even more evident. While Giustiniani did not note any proposition with regard to the political implications of Duval’s arguments, Bellarmine’s

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censure was dedicated almost entirely to political implications. And while Bellarmine’s suggestions on the ecclesiologically “problematic” parts of Duval’s text were concerned mostly with removing parts so that Duval could avoid getting entangled in difficult and dangerous questions, when it came to politics Bellarmine saw Duval entering a slippery road that led straight to heresy. Of course, Bellarmine picked up immediately on Duval’s passages regarding the fact that both the pope’s and the king’s authority came immediately from God, and his judgment on this proposition was accompanied by a brief and heartfelt theological lesson on why Duval’s statement was dangerous. Bellarmine wrote: [Duval] says that the royal authority is immediately from God, even if the king is elected by the people, just as the Pope is elected by the Cardinals and nevertheless receives his authority immediately from God. This was the first error of [Giovanni] Marsilio and later of Widdrington and others. The Cardinals, in fact, do not grant to the Pope papal authority since they themselves do not hold it, but they designate the person to whom God grants authority. Likewise, the kings elect the bishops, but they do not grant them authority; rather, they present the bishops to the Pontiff from whom they receive authority. The people, by contrast, not only designate the persons [of the kings] at the beginning, but they transfer to them their authority, as everybody knows. From this, in fact, follows the great variety of princes, for some have greater authority than others.133 This passage is crucially important to understand the issues at stake. For Bellarmine, when Duval wanted to argue that both the pope’s and the king’s authority come immediately from God, he abandoned the ecclesiological question of the relationship between pope and council to enter the dangerous territory of the relationship between secular and temporal authority. And Duval should have been especially careful with the arguments he used in this respect, for saying that the authority of the king comes immediately from God is the same argument used by the Venetian antipapalist writers and by the supporters of the oath of allegiance. Bellarmine understood that Duval meant to strengthen the authority of the pope over the council, but strengthening the authority of the pope through such an analogy did in fact weaken very dangerously the spiritual supremacy of the pope with respect to the secular sovereign. In this respect, the contractual language with which Bellarmine describes the original transferring of authority from the people to the kings is a testimony of both the constitutionalist implications of Bellarmine’s and other Jesuits’ theory of state,134 and, perhaps more important in the context of the present study, of the

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significance of Bellarmine’s insistence on the theological uniqueness of the pope’s spiritual authority and of the theo-political implications of such uniqueness with respect to both the fight against heretics and the fight against divineright theories. Now, when Duval replied to Bellarmine’s censures, he devoted a great deal of attention and polemical force to these political implications: he not only defended his own arguments as sound, appropriate, and effective but also aggressively pointed out the difficulties inherent in Bellarmine’s positions. For example, responding to Bellarmine’s comments on the dangers of granting that royal authority came directly from God, Duval replied: “I did not assert absolutely that royal authority is immediately from God, but only that the election of a King by the people does not hinder the royal authority from being immediately from God.”135 Duval stated that specifying that the election of a king does not prevent his authority from coming immediately from God was a necessary distinction to make, “both because it is a civil rather than a theological issue, and it pertains to the commonwealth rather than to the Church, and because the salvation of the people is not in any way jeopardized even if the people believe that the authority of their kings does not come from them, but directly from God. Indeed, on the other hand, that the people believe this [i.e., that the authority of their kings comes from God] is most useful for the tranquility of the commonwealth . . . especially since in France at the time of Charles IX and Henri III the people, which the sermons and writings of the heretics had made crazy, for this reason defected from the obedience they owed them.”136 Thus, first of all, Duval refused to see the statement that the people’s election does not make royal authority coming any less immediately from God as a theological issue but simply as a political one. On the one hand, talking about the significance of people’s election is not the same as talking about the relationship between God and political authority—indeed, Duval specified, many theologians, such as Navarro, were not very clear on the matter, since they asserted that the kings receive their authority through the people while at the same time they asserted that royal authority is of divine law.137 On the other hand, and from a political point of view, insisting on the divine character of royal authority was a very useful way to strengthen the authority of the sovereign, which, especially from a Catholic French perspective, was necessary and useful in order to distance Catholic political thought from the Huguenot resistance theory that had caused so much turmoil during the Wars of Religion, and, by implication, to distance Catholics from the recent wave of anti-Catholic polemics against tyrannicide following the murder of Henri IV. As to Bellarmine’s remarks on the proximity of Duval’s statements with respect to Marsilio or Widdrington, Duval was not willing to admit any fault in

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that. He was so far from following Bellarmine’s arguments that he mistook Giovanni Marsilio for Marsilio of Padua and thus replied that Marsilio of Padua, as far as knew, was never condemned for affirmations of this kind. As for Widdrington, Duval affirmed that he was condemned not specifically for any statement regarding royal authority coming immediately from God but “for the general argument of his book.”138 In the end, aside from the question of why exactly Marsilio and Widdrington were condemned, Duval recognized the weight and importance of Bellarmine’s reference to the heretics’ camp and promised that, even though he found no fault with his own position, he would change that part in the subsequent edition of his work, so as to avoid offense.139 When Bellarmine received Duval’s reply and read the justification of his political arguments, he could not refrain from offering his own lengthy considerations on it, since, as he put it, “it is an issue of extreme importance, and especially in these times the truth must be publicly preached and pressed upon [people].”140 The problem that Bellarmine saw with Duval’s statements concerned not the significance of the people’s election of a king but the theoretical grounds out of which Duval’s argument came, that is, the analogy between the pope’s and the king’s authority. As Bellarmine explained, by using this analogy one would “attribute either too much to kings, or too little to the Pontiffs, and either the theological truth, or the political truth will be destroyed.”141 Thus, Bellarmine repeated forcefully that Duval could not separate the theological issue of the supremacy of the pope from the equally theological issue of the unique character of papal authority with respect to not only the Church but also the political sovereign. The force of the theory of the potestas indirecta was precisely that of having offered a theological justification for the superiority of the pope over the entire Christian commonwealth, and it was not possible to separate temporal and spiritual jurisdictions precisely because the pope’s theological jurisdiction over souls reached over and beyond the temporal jurisdiction of the sovereign. As to the argument of the political utility of Duval’s position, Bellarmine stated that the question of utility as Duval put it was ill-posed: “it cannot be truly useful that what is false should be believed as true, neither is it useful, and indeed it is rather dangerous, for the people to believe that their king cannot in any case be deposed either by the supreme Pontiff, or by the princes of the kingdom: on this, in fact, eternal tyranny would be founded, and kings would be given the opportunity to introduce heresies and paganism and awful morals, since they would be certain that they could not be deposed in any case. . . . if royal authority does not require necessarily faith, then a heretical or pagan king can be king.”142 From this perspective, once again, Bellarmine repeated to

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Duval that he needed to be careful with these kinds of statements because they were, indeed, very similar to those of Widdrington and of Giovanni Marsilio, both of whom were condemned. Duval might have missed that, just as he missed the right Marsilio; thus, after a lengthy explanation on who Giovanni Marsilio was and on what he wrote, Bellarmine concluded in a somewhat patronizing tone: “I praise your sincerity in saying that in another edition you are willing to modify this passage so as not to offend any Catholic, since otherwise you would almost seem to follow the teachings of Giovanni Marsilio, Widdrington and other enemies of the Church: it is fitting for a pious and prudent man to avoid not only errors, but also any appearance or shadow of errors.”143 This exchange is one of the clearest explanations of the political significance of Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta: while Duval considered the constitutional implications of Bellarmine’s theology as a political danger, Bellarmine insisted that the real danger for politics came precisely from denying the theologically unique character of papal authority. When Duval mentioned Charles IX and Henri III as cautionary tales, Bellarmine repeated that Duval had missed the point: the political turmoil caused by the people’s rebellions in those cases originated not from the issue of the nature of royal authority but “because the Calvinists wanted to dominate and introduce or propagate their sect by force.”144 In other words, for Bellarmine the political problems in Europe were of a theological nature, and only a political theology that firmed up the theological authority of the pope could solve those problems. Of course, for Bellarmine solving the problems meant ensuring and strengthening the pope’s authority against the heretics and with respect to the temporal sovereign, which only the potestas indirecta could, in fact, achieve. For Duval, in the political context of France after the murder of Henri IV, the battle to assert the pope’s ecclesiological supremacy had to be fought while avoiding the political implications of that supremacy. To put it differently, if French papalists wanted to win the ecclesiological battle, they needed to side with, not oppose, the political sovereign. In fact, in his counterreply to Bellarmine, Duval insisted on the need to separate the political and the ecclesiological fight. Since, as Bellarmine himself admitted, the question of the people’s election of a king was a “politica veritas,” who was in charge of deciding in matters of political truth? For Duval, “The Church should judge on matters of faith and on matters which pertain to the eternal salvation, while the Commonwealth should judge on political matters, which concern the temporal salvation.”145 To this observation, once again, Bellarmine replied that the issue in question was not the significance of the people’s election but the analogy according to which royal and papal authority both derive immediately from God, because “that royal authority does not derive immediately from God in the same way as the authority of the pope is not a political, but a theological truth.”146

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Thus, from this analysis of the correspondence between Duval and Bellarmine we can gather a number of important elements. First, and just as I noted in analyzing Richer’s response to Bellarmine, the central tenet of Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta was the tight theological nucleus to which his view of the uniquely spiritual nature of the pope’s authority was anchored. In this way, Bellarmine had joined politics and ecclesiology in such a way as to make it extremely difficult to separate the two. We saw already how much difficulty the political and ecclesiological Gallicans encountered when trying to oppose Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta, and the Ultramontanist faction did not have an easier job than the Gallican faction had had. As Duval’s case demonstrates, the French Ultramontanist theologians wanted to defend papalism against conciliarism, but while they were more than willing to agree with Bellarmine’s ecclesiological stances on the supremacy of the pope, they were not willing to follow all the political consequences of Bellarmine’s theory. Second, and consequently, the debate between Duval and Bellarmine suggests that the implications of the potestas indirecta did not concern only the fight between Gallicans and Ultramontanists, just as, as we have already seen, they did not concern simply the fight between Protestants and Catholics. Indeed, Bellarmine’s theory was very difficult to digest for the French Ultramontanist faction precisely because it joined at the hip politics and theology, and in so doing it did not simply seek to assert the authority of the pope either with respect to the Catholic Church or against the Protestants but indeed sought to rethink the role of the pope as supreme spiritual ruler of the supernational Christiana respublica, thus putting much pressure on the conceptualization of a French national church or any national church, for that matter. Significantly enough, current scholarship has considered Duval’s ambiguous political and ecclesiological defense of the supremacy of the pope mainly as evidence of the strength and influence of Richer and of the Gallican faction at the Sorbonne. For instance, in his study of Gallicanism within the Sorbonne in the seventeenth century, Jacques Gres-Gayer has argued that what he defined as “ultramontanisme gallican” was characterized by a degree of “modération” concerning the interests of the French national church, which singled it out with respect to the Catholic factions “du temps de la Ligue” and was an effect of the strong Gallican tradition of the Sorbonne.147 The same point was made by Francis Oakley, who argued that the writings of an “even so moderate a papalist” as Duval “make perfectly clear” that the issue of papal supremacy was a contested one among French theologians, even among those who defended papal supremacy, as a result, once again, of the long-lasting influence of Richer and the other Gallicans.148 Duval, however, was not “even so moderate a papalist,” but he was in fact the papalists’ best champion, and the man Ubaldini and

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also the Roman Curia saw as their best papalist bet to reply effectively to Richer. This means that the category of “moderate papalism,” by itself, does not mean much in this context. By contrast, it would be more correct to say that while the polemical need to keep the Sorbonne united made Duval’s ecclesiological papalism “moderate” in a strategic sense, from a political viewpoint his papalism was not really “moderate” but was instead useful in the project to strengthen the sovereign’s absolute authority more than, or even at the expense of, the pope’s spiritual supernational authority. Indeed, one could say that the influence of Gallicanism on the Ultramontanists was so strong precisely because both camps were grappling with the political and ecclesiological implications of Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta and, more specifically, with the implications of Bellarmine’s notion of the supernatural and supernational power of the pope in the context of a national Church and a national state whose sovereign’s authority was increasingly considered as sacred. From this perspective, without putting Bellarmine’s theory at the center of the debate, we risk not understanding the complex responses given by different souls of French Catholicism to the political and ecclesiological debate. Just to remain in the Ultramontanist camp, would we define the papalist La Rochefoucauld, who vigorously opposed Richer and the Gallicans but was also very proud to have participated in the censure of some of the most extreme papalist statements in the work of Martin Becanus, also a “moderate” papalist?149 Could the same label be applied to Du Perron? Du Perron, in fact, was a great admirer of some of Bellarmine’s works and was also the main force behind the royal council’s decision to strike the first article of the Third Estate. At the same time, however, he expressed praise for Barclay’s treatise, and in his address to the Third Estate he opposed the first article but affirmed that the pope’s authority to relieve the subjects from their oath of allegiance to their king was not a doctrine to be believed de fide.150 The difference between Duval, on the one side, and Du Perron or La Rochefoucauld, on the other, is that the latter papalists were “moderate” insofar as moderation was the most effective strategy to defend and support a version of papalism that, as far as French Catholicism was concerned, was not at all “moderate” but was in fact as papalist as it got, and, from the point of view of European Catholicism, could be also very useful. As Bellarmine himself noted in his comments on Du Perron’s address to the Third Estate, “In some passages it can seem that the author has some opinions contrary to the dignity of the Holy See, but whoever reads the entire address, and considers the rhetorical aspect, and the time and place where he spoke, could perhaps excuse him [Du Perron], especially since the speech is very useful not only to the French, but also to the English, because with the occasion of this article also the English oath [of allegiance], out of which the article was elaborated, is very well refuted.”151

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As for Duval, however, his “moderation” is a more complex issue. On the one hand, Duval used a degree of moderation in matters of ecclesiology as a strategic choice to maintain the theological unity of the Sorbonne. Duval’s strategy was not dissimilar from La Rochefoucauld’s and Du Perron’s efforts to distance themselves from politically aggressive forms of papalism, and it appeared useful even to the nuncio, who never refrained from defending and praising Duval’s work in his correspondence with Rome. In this respect, then, Duval was less a “moderate” papalist than a French papalist, just like Du Perron and La Rochefoucauld. On the other hand, when it came to the political side of Duval’s arguments, the outcome of his insistence on the analogy between Church and state as two natural communities was much more dangerous and “radical” than a series of lukewarm statements on the superiority of the pope. Indeed, as Bellarmine declared, by failing to distinguish vigorously between the supernatural authority of the pope and the “natural” authority of the king, Duval was moving away from intra-Catholic ecclesiological questions and into the dangerous territory of the heretical views on the relationship between secular and spiritual authority alongside Venice and London. From this point of view, it is interesting to remember that, while Bellarmine excused Du Perron’s “moderation” because it could be very effective in the fight against the English oath of allegiance, he accused Duval’s moderation of actually strengthening the arguments of supporters of the oath such as Widdrington. Thus, from this political perspective, Duval’s arguments were not “moderate” but indeed opposite to one of the central tenets of Bellarmine’s doctrine of the potestas indirecta. Of course, it has been a central concern of this study to show that potestas indirecta is not the same thing as papalism, given the many Roman voices that time and again rose against Bellarmine’s theory, but this does not contradict the fact that the label of “moderate” used to describe Duval’s Ultramontanist positions does not mean much unless we understand those Ultramontanist (and also Gallican) positions against the background of the issues raised by Bellarmine’s theory. Furthermore, the tension between Bellarmine’s supernational empire of souls and Duval’s French papalist Catholicism underscores, once again, the importance of taking into account the relationship between center and periphery when dealing with early modern European Catholicism. French Catholicism had an important national character, which was highlighted not only by Richer, Servin, and the Gallicans, as we have already seen, but also by Ultramontanist leaders such as Duval. Indeed, even Monsignor Ubaldini, nuncio in France and great defender of papal authority, recognized that French papalism needed to be viewed from the perspective of the French Catholic Church rather than from the perspective of Roman papalism, as we have seen in his many

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interventions on behalf of Duval. Indeed, Ubaldini also contributed to shut down the debate between the French theologian and Bellarmine, thus protecting Duval one last time. We know that Bellarmine’s final reply to Duval’s counterresponse was sketched immediately after Duval’s letter arrived, in the winter of 1614, but Bellarmine did not send it until 1618. We know this because of a letter from Bellarmine to Duval, written on 15 October 1618, in which Bellarmine declared, “I had written some years ago a response to your letter, but I did not send it, because you seemed angry at me and it seemed that you had taken my letter in a bad sense. Therefore I did not want to pour oil onto the fire with a new letter, but I wanted to wait until the fire had been put out by the grace of God.”152 In the fall of 1618 the right moment to send the letter that had been “long hidden in my case of papers” seemed to have arrived: Bellarmine had received a visit from Henri Spondanus, the French Catholic continuator of Baronio and a friend of Duval’s. Spondanus gave to Bellarmine Duval’s regards and also let Bellarmine know that Duval was displeased because he regretted having used a “somewhat bitter” language in his last response to Bellarmine.153 Thus, Bellarmine decided to send his responses, and he invited Duval to “pretend that you are Augustine and I am Jerome, and read my letter with a state of mind as calm as you know Augustine read Jerome’s letters when they were discussing questions of sacred Scripture.”154 What Bellarmine did not tell Duval was that the idea to avoid pouring oil onto the fire was not simply his own but might have been suggested, and certainly was supported, by the nuncio Ubaldini. Writing to Borghese in the summer of 1615, thus in the middle of the crisis following the Parlement’s burning of Suárez’s Defensio fidei and in the immediate aftermath of the Estates General of 1614, Ubaldini had another piece of bad news to transmit to Rome, namely, that Simon Vigor had composed another pamphlet against Duval. The problem with Vigor’s new text, according to the nuncio, was that Vigor continued to insist on the question of papal authority in temporal matters, thus forcing Duval to address directly the question of the relationship between the pope and the temporal sovereign, rather than simply discussing matters of ecclesiology. The nuncio thought that it was “absolutely impossible for a Doctor of this faculty who lives here to profess and write freely what the Catholic truth is about this issue, and even if by chance it would be an act of prudence for anybody to abstain from such matter, nevertheless if . . . His Holiness our Lord will order Duval to confute it, I have such a high opinion of his virtue that I am sure he will do it most readily.”155 Borghese forwarded this letter immediately to the Inquisition, and the Inquisitors seemed especially concerned with the nuncio’s consideration that it was difficult for a French theologian to openly

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defend the pope’s temporal authority and that it might be better to drop the issue for the moment.156 In fact, while the Inquisition ordered immediately that Vigor’s new book be examined by the Congregation of the Index,157 the entire Roman hierarchy seemed to take the nuncio’s suggestions very seriously: Bellarmine’s reply to Duval was not sent until 1618, and Duval’s new treatise on papal authority, entitled Tractatus de summi pontificis auctoritate, was not published until 1622. In conclusion, the tension I have identified between Richer’s ecclesiological and political arguments in the Libellus points not just to the difficulty in linking ecclesiological and political Gallicanism but also to the difficulty in rethinking the relationship between Church and state originated by Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta. Bellarmine’s theory, in fact, gave a uniquely theological character to the supreme spiritual authority of the pontiff over souls, and in doing so it reshuffled the theological, political, and ecclesiological role of the pope over both the Church and the state. This reshuffling had important repercussions both for the ecclesiological debate between conciliarists and papalists and for the debate over the role and nature of the temporal authority with respect to the spiritual authority. Almain and his associates, in fact, gained a lot of mileage from the analogy between the secular and religious commonwealths as two natural communities: they used that analogy to argue that, just as the power to punish wrongdoing resides in the whole community of the state, so the power to punish must rest in the whole community of the Church. The upshot of this argument planted a seed of constitutionalism in the government of both the Church and the state. Cajetan and the neo-Thomists, by contrast, responded by denying the analogy and by insisting on the distinction between the king’s natural power and the pope’s supernatural power; thus, while the power to resist in politics can be in the community, in the church things are very different indeed. The upshot of this argument was that the seed of constitutionalism was planted only in the secular commonwealth, not in the papal monarchy. Now, royal Gallican conciliarists such as Richer and Vigor wanted to defend the absolute sovereignty of the temporal ruler while preserving Almain’s and the other conciliarists’ ecclesiological views. Thus, they insisted on the difference between the form of government of the Church and the form of government of the state: while the former was a limited monarchy with no territorial jurisdiction, the latter was an absolute monarchy whose ruler had both more power over his subjects than the pope had over the Christians and more power than the pope in the territorial jurisdiction of his dominion. Bellarmine followed the neo-Thomist doctrine of differentiating sharply between the natural power of the sovereign and the supernatural power of the

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pope, and indeed he grounded his view of the pope’s empire of souls precisely on the unique, incommensurable, and supreme character of the pope’s spiritual authority over both the Church and the Christian temporal commonwealths. This move, however, did not remove the seed of constitutionalism when it came to secular government, or, better, it weakened the authority of the sovereign with respect to the authority of the pope while at the same time granting to the temporal authority an autonomous space with respect to the authority of the Christian Church. From the Ultramontanist perspective, however, that political consequence was especially troublesome in a context in which people like Duval were forced to make papalism palatable and “inclusive” with respect to the French theological tradition and, at the same time, agreeable to an increasingly sacralized notion of the authority of the French king. This is why, paradoxically, Duval rejected Bellarmine’s distinction between the Church and the state and instead utilized the same “silver-age” conciliarist view of the Church as a corpus politicum. What this paradox highlights, I argue, is just how relevant Bellarmine’s theory was in the political discourse of early modern Europe, precisely because it was engineered to safeguard and preserve the pope’s spiritual primacy against both the Protestants and the authority of early modern monarchies. The significance of this issue transcends the question of the constitutionalist elements embedded in Bellarmine’s and other neo-Thomists’ doctrine: in a sense, in fact, precisely because Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta was meant to oppose the supernatural and supernational empire of souls of the pope to the national and “natural” jurisdiction of the king, it became a fundamental springboard to rethink the secular arguments and foundations of constitutionalism and absolutism. To put it differently, I do not mean to suggest that we should simply highlight and interpret the complex mixture of absolutist and constitutionalist elements in Bellarmine’s (or Suárez’s or Mariana’s) theory, which some scholars have already done with interesting results.158 Rather, I think that scholars of early modern French and English absolutism and constitutionalism can benefit from looking at these theoretical developments as a consequence of Bellarmine’s theory. This does not mean the doctrine of the potestas indirecta led directly to James’s absolutism, or to French constitutional theories, or to the European elaborations on the divine right of the kings, but it does mean that if we want to understand James’s absolutism, or French constitutional theories, or the European elaborations on the divine right of kings, we need to take into account Bellarmine’s peculiar and original notion of papal universalism because it is with that notion that many of these theoretical developments were concerned.

6 The Making of a Scapegoat The Case of Martin Becanus

As we have seen so far, the debate provoked by Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta was wide and profound, and Bellarmine’s doctrine was equally dangerous, although for different reasons, for supporters of the pope’s plenitudo potestatis, such as Francisco Peña; for Protestant sovereigns interested in strengthening their authority over their subjects, such as James Stuart; and for Catholic theologians who, like Duval, sought to defend the pope’s ecclesiological primacy but felt ill at ease with the political implications of Bellarmine’s notion of the pope’s supernational and supernatural supremacy over the Christian commonwealth. Some of the ripple effects caused by the French and English debates reached also into the German lands, with complex and illuminating results. In this chapter I explore some of those effects through the case of a northern European Jesuit, Martin Becanus, who participated in the English debate over the oath of allegiance defending Bellarmine’s theory. The works written by Becanus in defense of Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta were at the center of a complex affair that involved not only the English Protestant establishment, the English Catholic community, and the papal diplomacy in the German lands but also the heart of the Roman Curia and an important part of French Catholicism. As we will see, throughout the dramatic controversy provoked by his works, Becanus found few friends and many unexpected enemies: analyzing in detail the terms of this convoluted affair will show the centrality

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and fundamental importance of Bellarmine’s theory from yet one more geographic, political, and theoretical perspective.

Becanus and the German Context The status of the Catholic Church in Germany was complex, reflecting the many potential problems left unsolved and originated by the 1555 Peace of Augsburg. The religious settlement established at Augsburg had attempted to stabilize confessional boundaries by granting to both Catholicism and Lutheranism the right to be professed in the territories of the empire and by strengthening the authority of the secular ruler in establishing the religion of his territory. Many disputes, however, were left unsettled, and the terms of the peace planted seeds of new conflict. For example, the application of the norm according to which the Catholic lords who moved to the Protestant side had to forfeit their properties and revenues (the so-called ecclesiastical reservation) varied greatly according to the political and ecclesiastical pressures exercised by various authorities between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Also, the tension between the prince electors and the emperor assumed a significant religious dimension when, as in the case of the emperor Matthias and especially of his successor, Ferdinand II, the emperor started to implement a more aggressive Catholic policy both in the empire and in an international context. In addition, after the Council of Trent and thanks also to the work done by the Society of Jesus, Catholicism saw a progressive revival of its politico-confessional identity at several levels, which began to bear tangible results by the 1580s.1 By the late 1580s the protagonist of this chapter, the Jesuit Martin Becanus, had left his native Netherlands and had settled in Cologne, one of the strongholds of the recent Catholic revival, where he began teaching philosophy. He continued his academic career as a professor of theology and philosophy in Würzburg and Mainz, and in 1614 he moved to Vienna. In 1619 he was appointed confessor of the recently crowned emperor Ferdinand II. He retained this office until his death, in 1624.2 Becanus acquired a great reputation as theologian and controversialist: in the 1620s he published Summa Theologiae Scholasticae in three volumes, and he also wrote the popular Manuale controversiarum huius temporis, published for the first time in 1613.3 Between 1608 and 1612, Becanus’s role as controversialist was very relevant in both German and international contexts. During those years, in fact, Becanus published a few works of controversy aimed especially at the German context: the Aphorismi Doctrinae Calvinistarum, published in 1608 in response to the popular Calvinist

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pamphlet entitled Aphorismi doctrinae Jesuitarum, and a series of pamphlets on the Catholic doctrine regarding pacts and treatises, among which were the Disputatio de fide haereticis servanda, published in 1608, and the Quaestiones miscellaneae de fide haereticis servanda, published the year later. Afterward, Becanus entered the controversy over the oath of allegiance with a series of pamphlets that stirred the complex and at times dramatic debate with which this chapter will be mostly concerned. The first and most relevant element that emerges from the works Becanus wrote before contributing to the debate over the oath is the astuteness with which he treated the theological need to defend the Catholic doctrine in the context of the political pressure that living in the confessionally divided German lands presented. In a sense, Becanus’s skill in maintaining this delicate balance is a testament to the profound influence of the modus procedendi of the Society of Jesus in the fight against the heretics, and for this reason, Becanus’s way of writing controversies was very different from that of his German predecessors, such as Johannes Eck. Becanus’s production did not have the kind of systematic theological core that I identified in Bellarmine’s Controversiae, but it is nevertheless a significant representative of a very Jesuit way of adapting moral theology and casuistry to political, historical, and geographic contingencies. This feature is immediately clear in Becanus’s treatment of the question of whether promises made to heretics were morally binding. Responding to the Protestants’ charge against the Catholics, according to which Catholics believed that the promises made to heretics were not to be kept, Becanus argued that all promises that did not concern illicit acts were morally binding, including the ones made to heretics.4 Behind Becanus’s position, then, there is both a very Jesuit way of understanding morality in terms of the relationship between rule and exception and also a very Jesuit way of understanding the need to contextualize those moral norms in the place and time in which they had to be applied. In the specific case of the time and place in which Becanus lived, his position on promises had important repercussions on the application and understanding of the Peace of Augsburg, which, according to Becanus, bound the emperor to make some concessions to the Lutherans living in the territories of the empire. According to Becanus’s argument, while it would be morally right for Catholics to refuse to tolerate the heretics, in cases in which Catholic princes could not do that without grave disturbances for the commonwealth, then those Catholic princes should grant a measure of toleration to the heretics and respect it. His fellows Jesuits did not universally accept Becanus’s position. Among its detractors was Robert Bellarmine, who had a much stricter view on the

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conditions under which some form of religious toleration should be granted. In the early 1600s the Archduke Matthias, after his short tenure as governor in the Netherlands, went to Hungary on behalf of his brother Rudolph, the Holy Roman Emperor, to subdue a Protestant revolt. In 1606 he signed the Treaty of Vienna, with which he granted religious toleration to the Hungarian Protestants (this toleration was later extended to Austria). Rudolph rejected the agreement, and a controversy arose between the brothers, which ended with Matthias becoming king of Hungary in 1608 (in 1612, at the death of Rudolph, Matthias succeeded his brother as Holy Roman Emperor). In the summer of 1608, Bellarmine, probably at the request of the Catholic diplomats pushing Rudolph to oppose his brother’s decision, composed a short text to demonstrate that the freedom of religion that the archduke was granting was not a legitimate political and religious act on the part of a Catholic sovereign. Bellarmine argued that tolerating heretics when it was not possible to exterminate them was different from granting a form of religious freedom. While the first was a way to allow an evil to happen, which could be admitted in certain cases, the second was a way to commit an evil act, which was never permitted. On the Peace of Augsburg in particular, which was used as an argument in support of Matthias’s decision to grant some measure of toleration, Bellarmine’s judgment was much less positive than Becanus’s: “Charles V tolerated the heretics in Germany. But I do not know whether he conceded properly also freedom of religion. Nevertheless, it appears that that concession, whatever it was, was very harmful, since we see that in many places the true religion was completely destroyed.”5 Bellarmine and Becanus did not fight over the question of toleration for heretics in 1608; that fight happened a decade later. After the Protestant estates of Lower Austria refused to render homage to Ferdinand II unless he confirmed the concession of a limited form of religious liberty that Ferdinand’s predecessor Matthias had granted, the emperor asked the opinions of Becanus and William Lamormaini, who was rector of the Jesuit university in Gratz and future successor to Becanus in the role of confessor to the emperor. While Lamormaini’s position was very rigid and set a series of conditions almost impossible to fulfill, Becanus advised the emperor to grant the concessions on the basis of the “lesser of two evils” principle. A sort of formal complaint against Becanus emerged from the Roman leadership of the Society of Jesus, and more specifically from Muzio Vitelleschi (Acquaviva’s successor as general of the Society of Jesus). Bellarmine, who had already condemned Matthias’s concessions in 1608, also condemned Becanus’s elastic view of toleration with respect to the heretics. This stirred a brief correspondence between Vitelleschi and Becanus in 1620, which ended with the general’s acceptance of Becanus’s

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justification and apology for his position and his confirmation of Becanus as the emperor’s confessor.6 The tension between Becanus and Bellarmine (and Vitelleschi) in this instance is indicative of Becanus’s attention to the political circumstances of the German context. While Bellarmine and Vitelleschi, from Rome, saw granting forms of limited toleration to the heretics as a way to undermine the theological supremacy of the pope and the supremacy of the Catholic Church in Europe, for Becanus granting forms of limited toleration was a political strategy that fostered, rather than weakened, the survival of Catholicism in the confessionally divided German lands. As Harro Höpfl has argued in his analysis of Becanus’s treatment of the pacts with heretics, “Becanus’s position . . . was thus straightforwardly anti-Machiavellian, but it differed in no way from that of any identifiable politique.”7 Bellarmine, however, did not appreciate that politique feature of Becanus’s position because he saw the question of the relationship with heretics as a fundamental theological position on which no compromise should be made. When we analyze the other important work written by Becanus in those years, the more explicitly anti-Calvinist and pro-Jesuit response he wrote to the pamphlet entitled Aphorismi doctrinae Jesuitarum, we find the same attention to the political and confessional situation in which Becanus carried on his fight for the Catholic Church. The Aphorismi doctrinae Jesuitarum was a sort of standard anti-Jesuit and anti-Catholic pamphlet: the “Jesuitical aphorisms” in question ranged from affirmation of the pope’s absolute power in temporal matters to the doctrine of regicide to the doctrine of equivocation. In fact, the pamphlet enjoyed a truly pan-Protestant appeal: the Latin version of the work was printed many times across Europe; in 1609 the pamphlet was translated into English and French; and in 1610 it was translated into German. When Becanus responded to it, however, he kept the German context well in mind by trying to defend Catholicism while at the same time capitalizing on the internal Protestant struggle between Calvinists and Lutherans in Germany, which at the end of the sixteenth century was very profound and destined to grow deeper.8 In the dedicatory epistle to the reader, Becanus wrote that the author of the Aphorismi committed two “frauds”: the first was to have calumniated the Catholics and the Jesuits unjustly; the second was that “just as he assailed the Catholics with lies, so he assailed the Lutherans with cunning. In fact he sent his book to the Lutherans in Wittenberg, Saxony, so that they would approve of it . . . and then send it to print, which was done . . . this I would rightly say, Oh simpleminded Lutherans! O cunning Calvinists! The latter consciously and willfully fabricate lies against the Catholics, and dissimulate; the former approve and divulge those lies without having examined the matter. But let us

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forgive the Lutherans; and certainly the Calvinists should not go unpunished.”9 Thus, in keeping with the polemical intent expressed in this letter, that is, to defend the Catholics while isolating the Calvinists within the German Protestant community, Becanus divided his pamphlet into two parts. In the first, he reported the “true and genuine” aphorisms of the Calvinist doctrine, insisting especially on the doctrine of predestination and on some especially strong statements taken from Calvin’s Institutio regarding ecclesiology and liturgy.10 In the second part, Becanus examined some of the supposed Jesuitical aphorisms and disproved them. To do so, Becanus chose to anchor his entire argument on Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta because he saw that Bellarmine’s doctrine could effectively defend the Catholic truth but, at the same time, allow Becanus to present Catholicism and “Jesuitism” as harmless to the authority of the sovereign. Thus, Becanus portrayed Bellarmine’s theory as the true and full representation of the Jesuit doctrine, and in order to do so he also flattened or modified other Jesuits’ positions on sensitive issues so as to make them consonant with Bellarmine’s. In parallel, Becanus constantly pitted Bellarmine’s politically moderate theories against the Calvinists’ “extreme” form of religious radicalism and its political and ecclesiological consequences. For example, the first topic that Becanus decided to tackle was the authority of the pope. “The first lie,” Becanus wrote, “is that the Jesuits say that the Pontiff has an unlimited spiritual supremacy.” Instead, Jesuit theorists such as Bellarmine and Ribadeneira, according to Becanus, teach that “the Pontiff has spiritual or ecclesiastical authority in the entire Christian world; this authority is not, however, unlimited, but fixed and limited.”11 Another Calvinist lie is the attribution to the pope of an unlimited temporal authority: in fact, Becanus wrote, Bellarmine’s De summo Pontifice says exactly the opposite, limiting, rather than extending, the pope’s authority in temporal matters.12 Becanus employed the same defense of the Jesuits’ Catholicism as a politically moderate Christianity and opposed it to Calvin’s seditious views when dealing with the controversial issue of the exemption of the clergy. Against the Calvinists’ argument according to which the Jesuits thought that the clergy was exempted iure divino from any political laws, which justified the clergy’s disobedience to the political authority, Becanus referred the reader to Bellarmine’s De Clericis, in which one could find the true Catholic doctrine, that is, that while clergymen are in no way exempted from the duty of following civil laws, they nevertheless enjoy certain exceptions regarding their persons and goods partly by human law and partly by divine law.13 In this context, Becanus noted almost in passing that there are three ways in which somebody can be exempted from another person’s jurisdiction: “The first is by divine law, on which ground Calvin says . . . that clergymen are exempted from the secular authority in causes

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purely ecclesiastical. The second is by human law, on which ground clergymen are exempted from the same authority in civil causes. The third is by violence and rebellion, on which ground the Calvinists everywhere try to exempt themselves from every authority, both ecclesiastical and political, as experience shows.” If we want to look for a doctrine that denies the secular ruler any authority over the clergymen, then, Becanus suggested looking at the Calvinist doctrine rather than at the “moderate” mixture of human and divine law invoked by Bellarmine in certain specific cases.14 Becanus’s attempt to paint the Jesuits’ moderate papalism, of which Bellarmine’s theory was portrayed as a model, as something far less dangerous, and indeed almost innocuous, to the state when compared with Calvinism, was a strategic move dictated by the need to defend Catholicism against the aggressive, vivacious, and internationally active Calvinism that was spreading into Germany through the Netherlands. In fact, Becanus pitted this dangerous Calvinism not only against a politically inoffensive Jesuit Catholicism but also against an almost equally inoffensive Lutheranism, albeit “simpleminded” enough to be fooled by the Calvinists. In this context, Becanus’s defense of Bellarmine’s moderate view on the authority of the pope was theologically correct and politically savvy. As we can see from his treatment of the question of clerical exemption, Becanus was skillful in quoting Bellarmine’s mix of divine law and human law to justify clerical exemption. Becanus avoided getting involved in the heated question of whether clerical exemption was, in fact, by human law only, rather than by divine law (that is why he referred to a mix of divine and human law), and he painted Bellarmine’s view as a much less seditious and radical defense of clerical exemption than that of the Calvinists. An important consequence of Becanus’s polemical strategy in this text, which is consonant also with his position on the issue of treaties with heretics, is his implicit acceptance of a form of lawful coexistence of Catholics and Protestants in the German territories, if not as a desirable and solid basis for a theological and political truce, at least as a sort of unchangeable status quo of which Catholics should take advantage. This attitude is very evident throughout Becanus’s text, but it is especially interesting in the context of Becanus’s discussion of tyrannicide. Becanus divided this discussion into two parts. First, he briefly discussed the accusations against the Jesuits, and especially against Mariana, for fostering the killing of tyrants. He began by arguing that the Calvinists should pay attention to the kinds of accusation they make, because if they really thought that tyrannicide was to be condemned, why did the Calvinist Dutch leaders incite the people to remove Philip II with all might? Then, moving to the Catholic doctrine of tyrannicide, Becanus returned to the classical Catholic definition of the two typologies of tyrants, that is, tyrant by

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usurpation and tyrant by conduct. While an usurper can always be lawfully eliminated by the commonwealth because he had never been a “real” king, a tyrant by conduct, Becanus wrote, “cannot be killed by the subjects, as it is established in the Council of Constance, session 15, and the reason is, because he is a true and legitimate Prince: even if he rules tyrannically, he remains superior, and therefore the subjects must obey him and must not kill him . . . and this is the manifest opinion of Juan de Mariana in that passage and of other Jesuits who wrote on the matter, in which I see nothing that the Calvinists could rightfully reproach.”15 The interesting point is that this was not the manifest opinion of Mariana, (or, for that matter, of many other Jesuits, from Molina to Suárez), since Mariana’s opinion was precisely that in certain specific circumstances the tyrant by conduct could be eliminated as an “enemy of the commonwealth.”16 One can understand why Becanus felt the need to smooth out some of Mariana’s propositions so as to make the Jesuit position on tyrannicide as harmless as possible, but nevertheless Becanus’s moderation on this issue should be noted as significant, especially when we see that immediately after his defense of the Society’s doctrine from accusations of tyrannicide, in which he had avoided mention of Bellarmine completely, Becanus moved to dealing with the question of papal deposition, for which he, once again, explicitly recurred to Bellarmine’s doctrine. Becanus sharply denied that Bellarmine’s doctrine, according to which it was the pope’s prerogative to depose a heretic sovereign and thus to exonerate the faithful subjects from their duty of obedience, had anything to do with the political question of tyrannicide. Instead, according to Becanus, Bellarmine’s doctrine of deposition was simply a theological (and rightful) declaration that Christian men should always choose to profess the true faith even when they are pushed to abandon it. The analogy Becanus used to explain his view of Bellarmine’s position is very telling: “I ask the Calvinists, what would they think that the Christians who are subjects of the emperor of the Turks should do if the emperor wanted to compel them and draw them to Islam? Should Christ be abandoned, and Mohammad be followed? But this would not be the advice of a Christian man. What then? Should the yoke of the emperor be shaken off and should they persist in their faith? And this is precisely what Bellarmine teaches.”17 Thus, because Becanus wanted to make clear that Bellarmine’s doctrine (which, by extension, was the core of the doctrine of the Society of Jesus) had nothing to do with politics but only with religion, he treated this doctrine as separate from the question of tyrannicide. He also used the example of Christians living under an Islamic ruler to argue that Bellarmine’s doctrine, far from being a divisive, seditious, and dangerous Catholic means to remove a

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Protestant ruler, was in fact a crucial point of Christian theology on which any Christian man, either Catholic or Protestant, should agree. To make this point more strongly, Becanus decided to make another analogy, one that moved away from the distant Holy Land and deep into the heart of European Christendom. “Again I ask, if the King of England embraced the Catholic and Roman faith, and wished that every Calvinist who is in England professed the same faith openly, and professed allegiance to the Roman Pontiff, which position would they [the Calvinists] take? Would they follow their King? I surely wish they did, but I know well enough that they would not do it. What then? They would rather abandon their King, and keep their Calvinism wellpreserved. Why? Because losing the king is preferable to losing the reformed faith. Bellarmine argues in the same way.”18 This passage is significant for a number of reasons. First of all, it shows how Becanus translated, so to speak, the English question of the oath of allegiance in German terms. Catholic and Protestant princes, Becanus seemed to say, come and go, and while the political dynamics change, every confession, both the Protestant and the Catholic, plays the same game of asserting the theological supremacy of its own doctrine against the other’s. On the one hand, this theological game, so to speak, is very different from the political issue of sedition: every Protestant would agree that it is better to follow one’s faith than one’s ruler, even if this principle would not imply the political delegitimization of the ruler professing the “wrong” religion—the Peace of Augsburg was engineered precisely to create a space and a mode of action for those who did not want to abandon their religious beliefs and yet were not supposed to challenge the authority of the temporal ruler. On the other hand, while both Protestants and Catholics should recognize that asserting the supremacy of their faith did not constitute an act of political treason, the theological game that each played was not the same, since, of course, only one Church was the true one. That is why Becanus chose to emphasize Bellarmine’s doctrine as the true Catholic and Jesuit doctrine: it was the best way, in Becanus’s opinion, to strengthen and support the theological authority and primacy of the pope, and therefore the solidity and truth of the Catholic doctrinal system, and, at the same time, to show that the pope’s theological authority and primacy was not a politically seditious doctrine because, indeed, it was not intrinsically political. Thus, to conclude this introductory section, I would like to highlight the German “flavor” of Becanus’s interpretation of Bellarmine, or, in other words, the fact that Becanus came to Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta from a Catholic corner in the confessionally divided Germany. Becanus’s perspective, then, was, on the one hand, influenced by his “Jesuit” way of combining political and

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politique-like sagacity with moral theology, and, on the other, sharpened by the theological edge of Bellarmine’s theory in a political context in which religious uniformity was still a theological goal but not a politically concrete possibility. The question that remains for us to treat is whether or not Becanus’s “Germanflavored” interpretation of Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta could work in the debate over the oath of allegiance in a European, not simply German, context.

Becanus and the Oath of Allegiance Becanus’s polemical position in those early texts, that is, his adoption of Bellarmine’s doctrine as the most effective means to assert the pope’s theological supremacy, combined with a vigorous denial that Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta had the theoretical potential and aim to jeopardize the legitimacy of the temporal sovereign, came in very handy in 1609, when Attilio Amalteo, nuncio in Cologne, was dealing with the politically delicate repercussions of James’s “Premonition.” Just as he had done in France and in Venice, James had presented his work to the German princes also, hoping to find some official endorsement from them. And, just as in the cases of France and Venice, the papal diplomacy in Germany wanted to send a strong signal of the dangerous heresies contained in the king’s arguments without risking the development of a form of political solidarity between the German rulers and the king of England. The confessionally divided nature of the German political establishment made this task all the more necessary and all the more delicate. Amalteo had some ideas on how to proceed, which he communicated to Cardinal Borghese in Rome in the summer of 1609. First, it was necessary to avoid heightening the political tension, and for this reason he proposed to avoid publishing the Index’s prohibition of James’s book in Germany so as to prevent a more public form of debate over the political conflicts between England and Rome. The theological arguments of the king of England, however, needed to be confuted, and in order to do this Amalteo informed Borghese that “I have already sent communication to Mainz to father Martin Becanus of the Society of Jesus, who, in my opinion, will be more appropriate to respond than anybody I know here, not so much because of his doctrine, since in this respect we have no lack of other people, but rather for the manner and grace he has in this genre of confuting heretical authors with brevity and clarity, in addition to the solidity of his doctrine.”19 Borghese seemed to like the proposal, and in September 1609 he gave his permission to the nuncio to have Becanus start working on a reply, with the reminder that Becanus should be advised that it was necessary “not to sting the king, and to abstain from that manner of speaking which could offend him: he

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[Becanus] should not avoid mentioning him [James] for this reason, but he should mention him expressly in the course of his work with that circumspection that his prudence will suggest to him.”20 While Becanus was working on his reply, the nuncio in Cologne had more bad news to communicate to Rome: Barclay’s book was now out and circulating in Germany, and it appeared very dangerous. Because Barclay declared himself to be a Catholic, and because, from a Catholic perspective, he challenged not the theological role of the pope as supreme head of the Church but only the pope’s authority, both direct and indirect, in political matters, Barclay’s arguments seemed to find some support “not only from the heretics, but also from a great number of Catholics, even clergymen.” Given the situation, it was necessary that the book be confuted “not only by two or three, but by more brave men, without, however, indicating that those confutations came by order of the Pontiff.” One of these men should be Becanus, to whom the nuncio intended to send the only copy of the book he had, so that once he was finished with the reply to James, he could work on replying to Barclay.21 Thus, from Germany there were high hopes that Becanus would show a sort of “golden touch” in contributing to the debate over the oath of allegiance: his doctrine was solid enough, but, most important, his “grace” in dealing with political questions, which was much appreciated in a German context, could be equally useful in the debate over the oath. That is why the nuncio suggested the name of Becanus, first, as the best option to respond to James, and, later, as one of the best options to respond to Barclay’s arguments. It is true that in Rome not everybody was as enthusiastic about Becanus as was Amalteo: on 12 December 1609, Borghese wrote to the nuncio sending other copies of Barclay’s work, since Amalteo had given his only copy to Becanus, but added that in Rome people believed “that the task of answering [to Barclay] may perhaps be greater than that father’s [Becanus’s] talent.” Nevertheless, Borghese confirmed that there was some excitement about Becanus’s reply to James, and everybody was anxious to finally see it.22 Thus, great expectations were raised in the Catholic world by Becanus’s work and by the contribution it could give to remedy the damages that the oath of allegiance could infer in the German lands and in the rest of Europe. Could Becanus deliver? In keeping with the instructions he received via the nuncio from Rome, and in line with the political astuteness he already showed in his other works, Becanus set up his Refutatio against James’s “Premonition” with the intent to steer clear of the most politically delicate issues and to concentrate instead on a theological attack on the king’s (usurped, according to Becanus) ecclesiastical supremacy. The Refutatio was divided into two parts. The first dealt with the king’s ecclesiastical supremacy; the second was dedicated to confute some

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“falsa dogmata” that were present in the king’s work, such as the saintly status of Mary, the role of the apostles, and the modes in which a general council should and could be held. Moreover, Becanus specified: “The fact that I will not add anything . . . on the Oath of allegiance, because of which the whole controversy arose, should not puzzle anybody: I am certain that the most Reverend and Illustrious Cardinal Bellarmine is going to engage with this and, as it is his habit, he will do so in such a solid and vigorous way that there is no need for others to make effort on the same subject.”23 After these short prefatory considerations, Becanus entered in medias res by reiterating that he was not going to discuss the king’s primacy in temporal matters, for “any king may have this primacy legitimately in his own kingdom,” and that the entire question of the supposed primacy of the king in spiritual matters revolved around the issue of whether or not the king had ecclesiastical potestas iurisdictionis exterioris, that is, the authority to call councils, excommunicate the sinners, appoint bishops, and so forth, for it was plain to everybody that the king had neither potestas ordinis nor potestas iurisdictionis interioris, that is, the authority of binding and loosing.24 Becanus started the discussion by denying that the king could have any ecclesiastical authority by natural law, because by natural law ecclesiastical and political authority were so separate as to exclude any area of intersection. Ecclesiastical and political power had two separate natures, aims, origins, and jurisdictions, and in fact Christ himself signaled this when he said that his kingdom was not of this world: for this reason, “Christ has primacy in the Church, not in the civil and temporal commonwealth,” and, by the same token, the temporal sovereign, despite being the supreme authority in temporal matters, could not claim any primacy in the Church.25 Becanus’s exposition of this very Bellarminian notion exemplified the political moderation that characterized this work: by insisting on the absolute difference between temporal and spiritual authority and by avoiding mention of any area of intersection between them, such as the pope’s indirecta potestas, Becanus positioned himself at the far left, so to speak, of the Bellarminian camp. Indeed, if we recall the dramatic controversy over Bellarmine’s use of Christ’s “My kingdom is not of this world” passage that started with Sixtus V in the 1580s and continued with Francisco Peña all through the 1610s, Becanus’s “radically Bellarminian” use of this passage is very significant. Thus, precisely because of the need Becanus felt to oppose the theological arguments of James’s text without touching on their political implications, Becanus was obliged to be more Bellarminian than Bellarmine himself. In his attempt to maintain his position as theologically effective and, at the same time, as politically savvy as possible, Becanus navigated the very

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dangerous territory of papal authority in temporal matters. Even if, and indeed precisely because, he explicitly steered clear of discussion on the king’s temporal authority, he needed to pay attention not to undermine the pope’s authority in temporal matters while attacking the usurped authority on the part of the king in ecclesiastical matters. Thus, in his entire Refutatio, Becanus acted as a gymnast on a balance beam, and because the beam was very narrow, Becanus could not avoid a small fall. That fall happened in Becanus’s discussion of alleged proofs from the Old and New Testaments that could be used to support granting some authority to the temporal sovereign in ecclesiastical matters, and in particular when Becanus discussed the notorious episode of King Solomon’s deposition of the supreme priest Abiathar (1 Kings 2:26–27 in the King James Bible), which, for the supporters of the king’s authority in temporal matters, was taken as an indication that in the Old Testament a king had enough ecclesiastical jurisdiction to depose a priest from his office. First of all, Becanus replied, making these kinds of comparisons might be dangerous because they could also work the other way around. For example, 2 Kings 11 narrated the story of Queen Athaliah, who was not only deposed but in fact killed by the priest Jehoiada: if James and his supporters’ interpretation of the episode of Solomon was to be admitted, by the same token one could point to a biblical reference that affirmed that a temporal sovereign could be not only deposed but also killed by the ecclesiastical authority.26 Thus, since it was clear that such literal interpretation was to be discarded, two interpretations of the episode concerning Solomon and Abiathar remained. One, which was the sort of standard Catholic interpretation of the passage and the one that Bellarmine had constantly used, was that Solomon removed Abiathar not by virtue of his regal authority but on the basis of the divine inspiration that he received insofar as he was a prophet.27 To this explanation, Becanus added another one of his own: even admitting that Solomon deposed Abiathar on the basis of his regal authority, that episode still did not prove that a temporal king had any authority over ecclesiastical people. In fact, Solomon was the legitimate successor of King David, and the priest Abiathar had joined a conspiracy against Solomon’s legitimate rule organized by Solomon’s brother, Adonijah. Thus, because the priest, by joining the conspiracy, had rendered himself guilty of laesa maiestas, since “any king is the supreme authority in temporal matters in his own kingdom” and since “the priests are subject to the king in temporal matters (aside from human law, by which the exemption of the clergy was introduced) and they can be judged and punished by him [i.e., the king] in civil matters, as Bellarmine writes in De Clericis, chapter 28,” then it is clear that even if Solomon deposed Abiathar by virtue of his regal authority, Solomon acted (as any other king in Solomon’s shoes would have done) to protect his

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own temporal authority against a temporal threat, and not to claim some form of authority over an ecclesiastical person.28 By deciding not to stick with the “safe” explanation of Solomon’s deposition of Abiathar as a prophetic, rather than a political, act, and by introducing the other explanation, Becanus seized the opportunity to strengthen the point that his attack against James was not politically charged but that, indeed, maintaining the theological supremacy of the pope in fact safeguarded the king’s supremacy in temporal matters in his own kingdom. In order to do this, however, Becanus slipped off of his beam by offering a relatively controversial interpretation of the issue of clerical exemption. In the first version of his De Clericis, Bellarmine had argued that clerical exemption was of human law precisely because having clerical exemption granted by divine law undermined his notion of the purely spiritual nature of the pope’s authority, which Bellarmine needed to justify the pope’s indirecta potestas in temporal matters. As we have seen, Bellarmine changed that statement in his post-1599 revisions of that work, even though he still refused to treat clerical exemption as a matter entirely of divine law. Becanus also needed to insist on the spiritual nature of the pope’s authority, for the defense of which he was attacking James’s text, and since Becanus’s argument was limited to an attack on the king’s authority in ecclesiastical matters without defending, at the same time, the indirect authority of the pope in temporal matters, he chose the pre-1599 version of Bellarmine’s view of clerical exemption to strengthen the difference between spiritual and temporal authority, and to emphasize the lack of intersection between the two. In his reply to the Aphorismi, Becanus had been more attentive when mentioning clerical exemption, but in this work against James his own strategic theological position forced his hand on the issue. Needless to say, Rome noticed Becanus’s slip. Becanus was confident enough about the force and effectiveness of his arguments that he did not give the nuncio a copy of his text before publication. However, when, in December 1609, the nuncio saw the printed work, he immediately sent it to Rome for judgment, and Borghese reported, in January 1610, that “Father Becanus’s reply has been seen and it does not fully satisfy us in certain points. However, it will not be necessary to make any difficulty, and not even to talk about it, because it is already published.”29 The reason Rome decided to condone the slip was that the man in charge of Becanus’s book was Robert Bellarmine. As we know from a number of sources, Bellarmine read and corrected Becanus’s work but, at the same time, protected it by expressing an overall positive judgment of the arguments it contained, and by mobilizing the Jesuit hierarchy to advise Becanus and to keep him in check for the future. On 20 February 1610, Acquaviva wrote to Becanus

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to inform him that there was something in his passage regarding Solomon that was noted, and he told him that more details about it were to be given to him later.30 A month later Acquaviva wrote again to Becanus, explaining that his treatment of the exemption of the clergy in his interpretation of Solomon was considered wrong and was to be changed in the second edition, which the general suggested should be sent to Rome prior to its publication.31 In the meantime, the nuncio also asked for an explanation of the affair, which he got on 27 March when he received a letter from Borghese telling him that “the censure of the book of father Becanus . . . consists in one point only, that is, in sum, his fifth objection, which he deduces from the episode of Solomon deposing the supreme Priest Abiathar, from which he gathers that the priests are subject to the king in temporal matters, and that they can be judged and punished by them in civil causes, aside from human law, by which clerical exemption was introduced, and for this he quotes Cardinal Bellarmine, book I, De Clericis, chapter 28.”32 The problem with Becanus’s interpretation, Borghese continued, is that Bellarmine “does not say this, nor that clerical exemption is of human law, indeed Bellarmine is of firm opinion that this cannot be safely defended unless one says that such human law is by inference divine law [interpretativum iuris divini].”33 Borghese concluded by reassuring the nuncio that aside from that small matter “the book has been much praised and approved, and especially by the said Cardinal himself, who tells me he has already written to your Lordship over this matter.”34 Bellarmine had indeed written to the nuncio and to Becanus about the matter, reminding them of the new edition of De Clericis and of the importance of the issues at stake in the question of clerical exemption; in fact, in April 1610 Becanus replied to Bellarmine apologizing for the mistake, made out of esteem for the authority of Bellarmine, whom he had misquoted “ex ignorantia et candore.” “In fact,” Becanus explained, “I was so used to the old edition [of De Clericis] that I did not note that in the new edition something had changed.”35 The nuncio endorsed Becanus’s letter to Bellarmine and added that Becanus was indeed very disappointed at his own mistakes, but the nuncio had made clear to Becanus “that your most illustrious Lordship [Bellarmine] has not failed to show that his [Becanus’s] opinion could have a good meaning, even if it would have been better if it had not come out in the way in which he [Becanus] wrote.”36 This small episode is significant in the context of the present study for many reasons. First, it helps us to position Becanus theoretically as a close ally to Bellarmine. Becanus’s mistake had come from an excess, rather than defect, of zeal in defending the special spiritual character of the pope’s authority, and for this reason Bellarmine could not but approve of the overall take of Becanus’s

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arguments. Indeed, Bellarmine approved Becanus’s take on the spiritual authority of the pope so much as to suggest that Becanus not change drastically his opinion on clerical exemption but just add that human law was “by inference” a sort of divine law—that same middle-way position Bellarmine took when discussing ius gentium in his post-1599 revisions of De Clericis. In sum, Bellarmine was on the same page as Becanus when it came to focusing on the theological supremacy of the pope and attacking the presumed theological supremacy of the king of England, and for this reason he suggested to his fellow Jesuit a safer way to interact with the more vigorous papalists in Rome. However, Bellarmine’s intervention in the affair of Becanus is also indicative of the increasingly large context in which the Jesuit author was positioning himself by entering the debate over the oath. This context did not simply involve the confessionally divided German provinces but also touched several other problematic knots. For instance, Bellarmine’s and Acquaviva’s direct interventions in the Becanus affair is indicative that the Jesuit hierarchy in Rome was worried about the potential repercussions, in Rome and outside of Rome, of Becanus’s positions for the future of the Society. The parallel intervention of the nuncio in Germany is indicative of the delicate dynamics in play between the center and the periphery of the Catholic world: the nuncio realized that Becanus might have slipped, but he also insisted on sorting the matter out as quickly and as innocuously as possible, for Becanus was a necessary piece in the strategy to defend and advance Catholicism in the German lands. Finally, Borghese’s role as an additional trait d’union between Becanus, his critics, and his admirers is indicative of the potential divisions within the Roman hierarchy over the political and theological positions that could be taken in the debate over the oath: Borghese and Acquaviva both saw things from a Roman perspective, but Borghese’s Rome was not exactly the same as the Rome of Acquaviva. The immediate consequences of this small and quickly resolved problem with Becanus’s text were two. First, nobody, not even Amalteo, again brought up the idea that Becanus could reply to Barclay: evidently the nuncio’s suspicion that Becanus’s talent may not have been enough for Barclay proved itself true. The second consequence was that Becanus felt that he had understood the lesson, and thus in the next short work he composed on the oath of allegiance, the Refutatio Tortura Torti, written against Lancelot Andrewes’s reply to Bellarmine, Becanus stayed far away from what he perceived to be contentious issues. The short work, dedicated to the Catholic archbishop of Mainz, is constructed as a catalogue of internal contradictions that could be found in Andrewes’s work over the presumed ecclesiastical authority of James and which, according to Becanus, were evidence of the lack of strength with which James’s own supporters defended the king’s authority in ecclesiastical matters.

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In this work, then, Becanus almost avoided defending the Catholic positions and concentrated instead on noting the adversary’s flaws.37 This polemical strategy put him in a relatively safe spot: as long as he kept attacking Andrewes’s contradictions without getting into a detailed explanation of the true Catholic doctrine on the authority of the pope, he could easily avoid contested issues such as the nature of clerical exemption. And even in the parts of the text in which Becanus offered a little more of the pars construens, rather than just the pars destruens, the Jesuit author learned how to keep out of trouble. At some point in the text Becanus had to respond to Andrewes’s use of examples from the Old Testament in which a temporal ruler exercised a form of authority over a clergyman. Becanus, however, did not mention either the episode of Solomon and Abiathar, or that of Queen Athaliah, but simply discussed the figure of Moses and argued that Andrewes had mistakenly interpreted Moses’ role as that of a political leader, whereas Moses was also, and especially, a priest.38 Unsurprisingly, Becanus’s Refutatio Tortura Torti received rave reviews in Rome. In the spring of 1610 Borghese told Amalteo that Becanus’s answer to Andrewes was much praised, and everybody thought that “it contained nothing that could displease the Catholics.”39 In May 1610 Amalteo, relieved by the recent praise for Becanus’s book against Andrewes, sent to Borghese the amended version of Becanus’s work against James in which the controversial passage on Solomon had been eliminated. The nuncio was very pleased to hear of the good reception of Becanus’s latest work, for such reception would give the Jesuit controversialist “not small courage and help to work on confuting the other errors in which the adversaries of our Holy Religion and Faith find themselves.”40 Borghese wrote with more good news: everybody in Rome liked the emended version of Becanus’s work against James.41 Acquaviva also was pleased to hear that Becanus’s emended version “valde placuit” in Rome.42 Galvanized by these positive responses, Becanus became convinced that he had finally found his own niche as a participant in the controversy over the oath of allegiance. If he stayed away from politics, insisted on the theological heresies contained in the king’s and other Protestants’ defense of the oath, continued to identify and expose the internal Protestant contradictions in order to capitalize on their doctrinal divisions, and avoided mention of Solomon, Becanus thought that he could keep writing without blame. Becanus did just that and in 1612 he published two more of his contributions on the oath, which reflected his newly sharpened polemical position. The first text, the Dissidium Anglicanum de primatu Regis, was a short treatise on the theological heresies contained in the oath of allegiance and a catalogue of contradictory statements that English Protestant writers made on their ruler’s ecclesiastical supremacy. The starting point of Becanus’s elaboration was that James’s oath of allegiance,

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far from being a political act, was in fact a reiteration of the same spiritual supremacy that Henry VIII and Elizabeth I wanted to claim for themselves.43 Once Becanus demonstrated that James’s oath was really nothing but a new version of the Act of Supremacy, he continued by insisting on the differences between various factions of English Protestants—the “Henriciani,” who, by agreeing to swear the oath, showed their acceptance of James’s ecclesiastical supremacy, and the “Puritani” or “pure Calvinists,” who denied the ecclesiastical supremacy of the king but agreed to swear nevertheless—and the Catholics, who neither recognized ecclesiastical supremacy nor swore the oath.44 The first group of people, according to Becanus, act “stulte & inconsiderate” because they all defend something on which they have no consensus, as it is proved by the contradictions that can be found among the Protestant supporters of the oath. The Puritans are less foolish than dangerous for James’s own regime, since they support Calvin’s position that secular rulers have no primacy in ecclesiastical matters. However, they swear the oath nevertheless, for reasons of political opportunism, and therefore “they should be called politici rather than Christians. About this people King James rightly said that he had found more loyalty among savage bandits than among this kind of people.” By contrast the Catholics, far from being the most dangerous and rebellious faction, are the only honest subjects of the king and the only true continuators of the martyrs of the primitive Church, who died rather than consent to the wrong religion.45 The other work that Becanus published in 1612 was a response to William Tooker’s Duellum, sive certamen singulare cum Martino Becano Jesuita, published in 1611. Tooker’s book defended the oath of allegiance as a legitimate political act on the part of the legitimate political ruler, attacking Becanus’s and other Jesuits’ position against the oath as a sign of the Jesuits’ love for the “meretrix Babyloniae” and hatred for the legitimate sovereign, which made them labor to substitute the “foreign” and anti-Christian rule of the pope to the legitimate and Christian rule of James.46 From that perspective, Tooker replied point by point to the arguments that Becanus adduced in his refutation of James’s “Premonition” in a relatively predictable manner for this kind of anti-Catholic polemic. When he had to discuss Becanus’s explanation of the episode of Solomon and Abiathar, Tooker did not pick up on the potential “tyrannicidical” character of Becanus’s mention of Queen Athaliah’s deposition and murder by order of Jehoiada. In fact, Tooker did not use that hint to argue for the monarchomach-like attitude of the Jesuits but limited his remarks to the argument that Queen Athaliah was a “nefaria foemina” who had tyrannically usurped the kingdom; thus her murder was not to be considered as “the deposition or expulsion of the legitimate Queen, but a defense against and a vindication of parricide and tyranny and a reinstatement of the true king who possessed the kingdom by hereditary right from the family of David.”47 As to

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Becanus’s argument according to which Solomon’s use of regal authority to depose Abiathar was punishment for a political act of treason and not (improper) punishment of an ecclesiastical person, Tooker responded by simply observing that not only the Old Testament but even the history of Christianity was full of examples of emperors and kings who deposed popes, such as the example of Justinian’s deposition of Pope Silverius through Belisarius. If contemporary history did not show an equal amount of evidence, it was because of the growing tyranny and anti-Christian state of the Church of Rome.48 Now, when Becanus responded to Tooker’s text, he repeated virtually verbatim the very same arguments he had already offered in his refutation of James’s “Premonition,”49 with two exceptions. First, Becanus ignored the mention of Queen Athaliah’s deposition and murder; second, on the episode concerning Solomon, Becanus completely omitted his discussion of clerical exemption and of the obedience owed by clergymen to the temporal rulers. Instead, Becanus argued that either Solomon had deposed the priest by virtue of his prophetic inspiration or that, even if Solomon had deposed the priest by virtue of his regal authority, there was no direct evidence in scripture that Solomon had performed a legitimate action, and indeed there was plenty of evidence that other kings who opposed priests were punished for this. For this reason, even if Solomon deposed a priest in his role as temporal ruler, there would still not be any evidence that it was legitimate for princes to depose clergymen.50 When Becanus sent both works to Acquaviva, the reaction of the general was very positive, for evidently Becanus had managed to clear any doubt about the potentially dangerous character of his work. Indeed, Acquaviva, in consultation with Bellarmine, thought that Becanus was ready to take on yet another challenge regarding the oath of allegiance, namely, Lancelot Andrewes’s reply to Bellarmine’s Apologia. Writing to Becanus at the beginning of December 1611, Acquaviva informed the Jesuit that “very recently a book against Bellarmine by one pseudo-Bishop came out, and it seemed a worthy endeavor for us to order your Reverence to refute that book, and moreover the same request will be made later by His Holiness and the most Illustrious Cardinal [Bellarmine], especially if your Reverence could do it as quickly as possible, and, as it is your habit, briefly, clearly . . . and without mordacity, as they [i.e., the pope and Bellarmine] hope you will.”51 By the end of 1611 we will recall that Bellarmine was in the middle of the French crisis stirred by his reply to Barclay, and for this reason he and Acquaviva probably thought that it was prudent for him to avoid writing yet another book against the oath. Nevertheless, a reply from the Catholic side needed to be produced, and all things considered, Becanus’s political moderation, which in the latest works had been perfectly refined, and the fact

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that he wrote from Germany, a relatively safer place than England or France, made the Jesuit an ideal candidate for a reply. The same day in which Acquaviva wrote to Becanus, Bellarmine also decided to write to his fellow Jesuit, asking him the same thing that the general had already asked. We do not have Bellarmine’s letter, but we do have Becanus’s response, dated at the end of December 1610, which reads: “I have just received the letter that you had most kindly sent me on 6 December. I will gladly contribute my little effort in refuting the Lord Almoner. And there was no necessity for you to ask me, but only to command me. I will remember modesty and I will make sure not to sin in this respect.”52 Thus, with Bellarmine’s and the general’s approval, Becanus started to work on a reply to Andrewes’s Responsio ad apologiam Cardinalis Bellarmini. Andrewes’s work, however, proved more challenging for Becanus than Tooker’s. Andrewes defended James’s oath of allegiance as a legitimate political act by the political sovereign; he also recognized the pope’s spiritual supremacy, in certain forms, over the Christian world. Consequently, Andrewes portrayed the pope’s opposition to the oath not as a defense of the pope’s theological supremacy but as an expression of the “plusquam regia” political authority that no spiritual leader could claim.53 If Becanus wanted to confute Andrewes’s Responsio, therefore, he could not avoid entering into a discussion of the pope’s true or presumed authority in temporal matters, which was the basis for Andrewes’s attack against the pope’s opposition to the oath. But discussing the pope’s temporal authority could prove problematic and could pose some challenges to the moderate tone that both Bellarmine and Acquaviva advised Becanus to maintain in the text. As Becanus worked on his reply, he realized that discussing the pope’s authority in temporal matters was necessary as well as potentially dangerous, and he must have asked Acquaviva for some feedback. In the summer of 1612 Acquaviva replied, reassuring Becanus: “We have received the letter your Reverence sent on 30 May, in which you indicated that the work in support of that most Illustrious Cardinal [i.e., Bellarmine] against the English pseudo-Bishop is ready, which we were pleased to hear. However, regarding those difficulties on the power of the popes to depose kings, this is not something that should hinder the publication of the work. Therefore your Reverence will be able to bring the work to light as soon as possible.”54 Becanus obeyed, and by the end of the summer 1612 he published the result of his effort, a work entitled Controversia Anglicana de potestate regis et pontificis, without, once again, sending it to Rome for approval before publication.55 Let us now see whether the content of Becanus’s book justified its author’s preoccupation, or rather Acquaviva’s optimism.

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In his Controversia, dedicated to Cardinal Francesco Sforza, Becanus addressed two main themes: the first was James’s ecclesiastical primacy, which was the polemical theme in which Becanus was most comfortable; the second was the more properly political question of the oath of allegiance, which Andrewes’s arguments forced him to tackle. Becanus divided the first theme further into two sections: the first was supposed to challenge Andrewes’s and the other English Protestants’ reading of a number of examples in the Old Testament in which kings demonstrated and exercised a degree of authority with respect to clergymen and priests; the second was a confutation of the king’s ecclesiastical primacy. Afterward, Becanus dedicated another section to discuss the oath of allegiance, and a fourth and final part of the work isolated and attacked certain doctrinal errors and internal contradictions present in Andrewes’s work, ranging from the legitimate modes of calling and holding a general Council, to the doctrine of the Eucharist, to the adoration of saints, and so on.56 The first part, then, was intended, as Becanus wrote, to refute Andrewes’s affirmation that “the king of England, by the law of the Old Testament, is not inferior to the Pontiff in any way.”57 For Becanus confuting this statement was especially important, for if he managed to prove that already in the Old Testament priests had supremacy over kings, then he could avoid dealing with the New Testament, for whatever primacy priests had before Christ’s coming must have increased, not decreased, after Christ. Thus, this section of Becanus’s text is structured as a catalogue of examples taken from the Old Testament that demonstrate that pontiffs “excelled” over kings in many respects: by the origin and nature of their offices, the prestige of their families, the modes of inauguration, and so on. Among Becanus’s proofs there was, for instance, the fact that Aaron was appointed directly by God as supreme priest, while the Israelites received a king after the people asked for it, and not by direct and spontaneous, so to speak, intervention by God. Also, in the Old Testament priests always came from the tribe of Levi, which enjoyed a special status among the tribes; and supreme priests often consulted with God directly before taking a decision, as Moses did, while kings had to ask the priests’ opinion before acting, as David did.58 A particularly tricky part of this section came when Becanus discussed the kind of exemption enjoyed by the priests, in order to argue that in the Old Testament kings were never exempted from the authority of the clergy, while supreme priests were often exempted from the authority of the king. The reason for the difficulty in this part was that Becanus had to engage with the episode concerning Solomon’s deposition of Abiathar, which had caused him problems in the past. Becanus, however, had learned how to avoid that hurdle and in fact in the Controversia he avoided discussing kings’ supremacy in temporal matters and

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priests’ exemption, and he simply wrote: “If Solomon did it [i.e., deposed Abiathar] by his regal authority, he did not do it legitimately, for not everything that is done by kings must be regarded as legitimate.”59 After clearing the issue of the role of kings with respect to priests in the Old Testament by repeating the arguments he had already made in his previous works and by omitting his peculiar explanation of the episode of Solomon, Becanus attacked the second point in his agenda, that is, James’s ecclesiastical primacy. Even in this case, Becanus did not modify substantially his previous positions but insisted on his old strategy of pitting the Puritans against the “Henricians” and labeling the latter as contradictory and confused and the former as seditious and dangerous.60 In this context, Becanus returned to follow faithfully Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta to show the Catholic position, once again, as the only one theologically sound and politically responsible. The Catholics, Becanus declared, believe that there are two primacies, one political primacy in charge of the commonwealth, and one ecclesiastical primacy in charge of the Church. From this principle, it follows that the Catholics’ position on James’s supremacy can be described as such: “The king of England, insofar as he is king, has certainly the temporal or political primacy in the kingdom of England, but not the spiritual or ecclesiastical primacy.”61 The proof of this statement, Becanus wrote, came from the fact that certainly no positive law (either political or canonical) granted the king this primacy. Natural law also cannot account for this primacy, since “those two primacies, spiritual and temporal, because of their nature are distinct . . . and one can be separated from the other, since Christ had the spiritual primacy without the temporal, and, by contrast, the emperor Tiberius had the temporal without the spiritual . . . thus the king, who has the temporal primacy, does not have in the same manner by natural law spiritual primacy; just as Christ, who had spiritual primacy, did not have in the same manner by natural law temporal primacy.”62 Finally, the king cannot claim any ecclesiastical supremacy by divine law, for in the Old Testament not the king but the priests were in charge of those things that pertained to God and the religion, and in the New Testament Christ said “Pasce oves meas” not to Tiberius or Herod but to the apostles.63 Thus, once gain Becanus resorted to a very Bellarminian notion of the radical difference between spiritual and temporal authority, and to make his point more forcefully he used once again the argument of the purely spiritual nature of Christ’s kingdom as proof that between Christ’s and Tiberius’s jurisdictions there was no area of intersection. As we have already seen, this position was not completely uncontroversial in Rome, but because Becanus had not seen it reproached or censured in the previous work (in which case Bellarmine was the censor), he did not think it necessary to change anything.

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The anxiety that Becanus felt and that he communicated to Acquaviva, however, regarded the new section of his treatise, the one on the oath of allegiance, in which he had to treat the question of the political authority of the pope in temporal affairs. In dealing with this issue Becanus thought it safest to stick, once again, to Bellarmine, and in fact this entire section does read like an attempt, at times unpolished and graceless, to paraphrase Bellarmine’s arguments to defend the indirect authority of the pope in temporal affairs and especially the legitimacy of the pope’s right to excommunicate and depose kings, which Becanus presented as a doctrine that was both doctrinally sound and respectful of the legitimate political authority. Becanus started this section by stating that regarding the oath of allegiance there were two main questions. One was whether or not a temporal king was entitled to ask for an oath of allegiance; the second was whether or not James’s oath of allegiance was a proper oath of allegiance. On the first, Becanus affirmed that there is no doubt that “the Catholics in England not only can, but indeed must, offer allegiance and obedience to their king in civil matters, no less than the Catholics in Spain, France and elsewhere do. Since natural law requires that subjects offer allegiance and obedience to their legitimate superior in those things in which he is superior, and since king James is the legitimate superior in civil matters, his subjects, by natural law, must offer him allegiance and obedience in those matters.”64 The problem was, according to Becanus, that James’s oath of allegiance was not that kind of rightful oath, for it contained a mix of right things (“that James is the legitimate king of England, Scotland and Ireland”; “that in those kingdoms he is the supreme lord in temporal matters”; that the pontiff cannot excommunicate or depose him without a legitimate reason) and wrong things, such as that the pontiff cannot excommunicate and depose the king even for a just reason and in certain specific conditions.65 Thus, Becanus dedicated the remaining part of that section to demonstrate the right of the pontiff to excommunicate and depose the king for just reasons and under certain conditions. As Bellarmine had already done, the first move Becanus made was to treat excommunication and deposition as two sides of the same (theological) coin. While only heretics denied that the pope could excommunicate any Christian man or woman, including temporal rulers, some Catholics, including Barclay, as well as the Protestant supporters of the oath, denied that the pope’s right to excommunicate a sovereign implied his right to depose the excommunicated sovereign. For Becanus, the question had already been settled at a theological and doctrinal level during the Fourth Lateran Council, when Innocent III decreed that it was a duty of kings and princes to exterminate heresies and foster the true faith, and that failure to do so even after being reproached by the pope

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would result in excommunication and deposition. The tight knot between a prince’s right to rule and his Christian duty to maintain true religion was, Becanus concluded, not only ratified by a general Council but also maintained by nearly every Catholic theologian, from Aquinas to Cajetan to Agostino Trionfo to Bellarmine, to whose work De summo Pontifice Becanus referred the reader for more details on the question.66 Becanus did not go into any further detail on the link between excommunication and deposition: he felt uneasy about pushing that political button, and he thought that he had done enough by insisting on the link between heresy, excommunication, and deposition, anchoring his arguments to a theological and doctrinal decision made in the context of a general Council, and, finally, by pointing the reader to Bellarmine’s work for more information. He did feel, however, that he needed to add more evidence to prove that the pope’s right of deposition was not just sanctioned by human law in a general Council but was also consonant with divine law and, more specifically, with the dictates of scripture. Since the adversaries’ argument denied that the pope had any authority over kings in the Old Testament, Becanus, too, turned to the Old Testament and examined episodes that confirmed the pope’s right to depose kings. His strongest evidence came from the episode concerning the deposing and killing of Queen Athaliah by order of the priest Jehoiada, which he had mentioned in his previous works almost ex absurdo, to oppose the Protestants’ literal reading of Solomon. Now, however, the explanation of the episode of Queen Athaliah was not used as a sort of logical absurdity but became a demonstration of the actual authority of the pope in temporal affairs, and this is where things got very complicated for Becanus. Becanus began by affirming that the pontiff in the Old Testament had power to depose heretical sovereigns, just as Jeohaida had deposed Athaliah. Tooker, as we remember, had already noted that that example was not worth much, since Athaliah was not the legitimate ruler, so that the priest’s deposition was not to be considered as the legitimate deposition of a legitimate sovereign. Becanus denied that statement, for even if Athaliah might have gotten the kingdom in a tyrannical manner, nevertheless she was from the legitimate family of rulers, and also she ruled for six years with the people’s consent, which made her kingdom tyrannical at the beginning and legitimate in the course of her rule. And here Becanus’s tongue slipped, so to speak. In order to strengthen his point about the fact that Athaliah enjoyed the consent of her people, which made her rule legitimate, Becanus wrote: “I will say more. Indeed in this matter the consent of the people had so much weight that even if the legitimate heir, to whom the kingdom was due, had survived and this had been well known by everybody, nevertheless, if the people, after having passed over

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the legitimate heir, had picked another one, that other person would have been the true king.”67 This statement on the importance of people’s consent had great “constitutionalist” implications: Becanus evidently did not see them— indeed, his point was not to make James feel less secure in his temporal primacy but to insist that despite this absolute temporal supremacy, the spiritual authority of the pope in punishing heretics allowed the pope to depose legitimate sovereigns, such as Athaliah, in his capacity as a spiritual, not temporal, authority. However, talking about people’s consent overruling hereditary law was a very dangerous exercise in Europe after 1610, and Becanus was going to pay for this. More problems, however, were in store as a result of Becanus’s treatment of the Athaliah episode. Continuing his discussion on Athaliah’s deposition, Becanus felt the need to address more specifically the question of tyrannicide. For, Becanus explained, one could object that Athaliah was deprived not only of her kingdom but also of her life. Would that mean that the popes could legitimately kill, and not just depose, temporal kings? Becanus responded by saying: Whether or not this consequence [i.e., that popes can deprive kings of their lives, and not only of their kingdoms] is true or false, it is not legitimately inferred from that antecedent, which I explain as follows. The Pontiff Jeohaida deprived Athaliah first of her kingdom, then of her life. Thus, he deprived her of her kingdom insofar as she was a queen and a public figure, but he deprived her of her life insofar as she was a private person . . . therefore that consequence, that is, the Pontiff deprived Athaliah of her kingdom and of her life by virtue of his pontifical authority and therefore he had authority not only to depose, but also to kill, the kings, is not valid. Instead, this only follows, that the Pontiff had the authority to kill a private person who was plotting a public rebellion, or to defend the new king against a new conspiracy.68 Once again, we should note that Becanus’s position on tyrannicide here is not different from Bellarmine’s and indeed very different from Mariana’s. In fact, Becanus’s treatment of tyrannicide in this episode was aimed precisely to make clear that tyrannicide was not a direct consequence of the pope’s power of deposition (that is why Becanus began this section by stating that whether or not the pope could kill a sovereign was beside the point because it was not a consequence of his authority to depose sovereigns); and also that the spiritual authority of the pope did not give him any authority to deprive any temporal ruler of his or her life, even though, in certain circumstances, the pope could

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help to defend the legitimate king by eliminating a private person who tried to overthrow the commonwealth and its sovereign. Bellarmine, however, was much more attentive and wise than Becanus. When he mentioned the episode of Athaliah in his treatise against Barclay, Bellarmine used a couple of polemical stratagems that made the episode “safe” from any tyrannicide-flavored implications. First, Bellarmine used the episode of Athaliah as an argument to strengthen the point that the pope’s potestas indirecta did not jeopardize in any way, and indeed enforced, the rule of the legitimate sovereign: it is true, Bellarmine wrote, that the pontiff deposed Athaliah, but it is also true that he conferred her kingdom to the son of the previous king, to whom the kingdom was entitled by hereditary law, which law the pontiff upheld and maintained.69 Also, when Bellarmine made another mention of Athaliah’s deposition in response to Barclay’s (and Tooker’s) argument according to which Athaliah was deposed not because of heresy but because she was an illegitimate and tyrannical ruler, and therefore her deposition did not demonstrate the pope’s spiritual authority in temporal matters, Bellarmine simply remarked that the Old Testament, the history of the Roman Empire, and the history of the barbarian tribes were full of examples of kings who started ruling tyrannically but later were accepted by the people as legitimate. In this brief discussion, Bellarmine made no mention of the role of the people’s consent in overruling hereditary principles, as Becanus did.70 Indeed, Bellarmine never picked up on the link between Athaliah’s deposition and tyrannicide; the only time he mentioned tyrannicide in his treatise against Barclay was to deny in very strong terms that clergymen, including popes, could legitimately commit bloody murders.71 While Becanus did not have Bellarmine’s intellectual coherence and ability, he was nevertheless committed to defend the spiritual nature of the authority of the pope, and therefore to defend the pope’s power to depose a temporal sovereign as a function of the pope’s spiritual supremacy, not as an expression of his temporal authority. To take just one more example of Becanus’s intellectual affinity with Bellarmine’s theological arguments and, in parallel, of Becanus’s lack of prudence in dealing with the political implications of those theological arguments, I would like to cite Becanus’s arguments to explain how the pope could legitimately absolve subjects from their duty of allegiance to an illegitimate sovereign. There are two manners in which the pope’s absolution of subjects from their obligation of loyalty can be legitimate. The first is the direct consequence of the pope’s spiritual role as supreme judge of the consciences. Since any heretical king can be said to inflict an “iniuria” to his people, and since the pope is superior to the king in spiritual matters, then the pope is entrusted with the task to vindicate the injury by freeing the subjects from the

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peril in which a heretical king puts their souls.72 There was, however, another way to think about the pope’s action as legitimate, which happened, Becanus wrote, “via compensationis.” “Between kings and their subjects there is a certain mutual promise and obligation, for subjects promise to their kings obedience in licit and honest matters, and in turn kings promise to their subjects faithful protection and government, as much as it is possible. Thus just as subjects are obliged by the bond of loyalty to offer obedience to their kings, so kings are obliged by the bond of loyalty to offer faithful protection and government to their subjects. Thus, if kings do not maintain the pact which they are obliged to maintain by law, they deserve that subjects do not maintain theirs, according to that maxim, Frangenti fidem, fides frangatur eidem.”73 Bellarmine, needless to say, accurately avoided this contractual language in defending the pope’s authority,74 and Becanus also had no intention of going all the constitutionalist way: that is why, immediately after stating that kings who do not respect the pact lose the right to obedience, he sharply changed the subject and brought up again the superiority of the pope in spiritual matters over both kings and people: “Thus the Pontiff, who is superior to both [i.e., kings and subjects] in matters pertaining to salvation, can order and decide that subjects be not held to maintain their pact with the kings, when kings do not maintain theirs.”75 In Becanus’s argument, then, it is not the broken pact but the pope’s spiritual authority that ultimately justifies the act of absolving the subjects from their duty to their princes. Thus, Becanus’s use of such contractual language here is an indication of his verbal incontinence rather than of his support of either the pope’s direct political authority or the people’s actual right to rebel against their sovereign if he or she breaks the pact: it is this verbal incontinence that made Becanus’s work different from Bellarmine’s. After demonstrating that denying the pope’s power to depose a heretical king went against true and sound Catholic doctrine, and that for this reason no English Catholic could swear an oath that explicitly requested that denial, Becanus moved, once again, into familiar territory and dedicated the last part of his treatise to note internal contradictions in Andrewes’s works, as well as parts in which Andrewes seemed to defend a different position than that defended by James, following the same polemical strategy he had already experimented with in his Dissidium Anglicanum, which had won him high praise in Rome.76 The conclusion of Becanus’s Controversia contained a small appendix on the Puritans and on the differences between them and the Protestant supporters of the oath, and a small summary of his final arguments, which repeated the main points that Becanus had argued throughout the text, that is, that the pontiffs in the Old Testament were neither inferior nor equal but largely superior to kings; that the oath of allegiance was rightly condemned by

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the pope and that English Catholics were rightly invited not to swear; and, finally, that in making those three points Becanus felt he had defended Bellarmine and destroyed Andrewes’s arguments.77 From this analysis, Becanus’s Controversia Anglicana emerges as a somewhat complex and puzzling text. First of all, the main theoretical position of the work seems perfectly in line with Bellarmine’s doctrine of the potestas indirecta, which Becanus followed even “too much” at times. Becanus’s account of the incommensurability between ecclesiastical and temporal jurisdiction was very Bellarminian, even though the manner in which Becanus denied that Christ had any temporal authority could have been problematic. We will recall that Bellarmine in his Recognitio had firmed up the question once and for all: it was true that Christ’s kingdom was not temporal, but it was equally true that Christ’s authority could have extended to temporal matters, since Christ’s authority, insofar as he was the son of God, was unlimited, unlike the pope’s. When Becanus treated the question of the nature of Christ’s sovereignty, however, he was not as attentive as Bellarmine: Becanus’s parallel between Christ and Tiberius treated Christ only in his human nature, without mentioning the plenitudo potestatis that Christ enjoyed as the Son of God. And because of the extremely controversial nature of the question of Christ’s sovereignty, such lack of attention to details was not trivial. Also, when dealing with the pope’s authority to depose kings, Becanus, like Bellarmine, insisted on the spiritual nature of the pope’s power of deposition, which was an expression of the pope’s theological role as supreme judge of consciences. He also coupled this defense of the theological supremacy of the pope with a clear endorsement of the legitimacy of James as the sovereign of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and, as such, the absolutely supreme authority in temporal matters. However, together with this kind of “ultra-Bellarminian” slip, Becanus added throughout the text a few constitutionalist and pro-tyrannicide-sounding passages, which contradicted his main lines of argument and that could be seen (and were in fact seen) as dangerously suspicious by Protestant and Catholic supporters of the supreme authority of kings. In a nutshell, Becanus certainly did not mean to mirror Suárez’s arguments, but he ended up not sounding entirely like Bellarmine either. When Acquaviva and Bellarmine read Becanus’s Controversia Anglicana, they both noted that certain points might have been made in a clearer and more correct manner, but at the same time, they did not think that any of those points would raise too much concern. Writing to Becanus in December 1612, Acquaviva said: “We have received gladly your Reverence’s book, and we, together with the most Illustrious Cardinal [Bellarmine] have read it. The Cardinal, however, wished that your Reverence had defended and protected him in more instances,

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since you have picked only one or two points in his defense.” Acquaviva continued by suggesting that Becanus change whatever he and Bellarmine asked him to change in the second edition of the work and reminded Becanus that if he, as he was told on previous occasions, had sent to Rome a copy of the Controversia before publication, “there would have been no necessity of this remedy.”78 Thus, Bellarmine noted that Becanus’s defense of his arguments was not as strong as it could have been, for Becanus had chosen only some points on which he insisted and had neglected others that might have been more relevant and less problematic, while Acquaviva showed some impatience with Becanus’s habit of publishing books without waiting for an official approval from Rome. Neither Bellarmine nor Acquaviva, however, seemed particularly worried about the content of the book, for whatever needed to be changed could have been easily changed in the second edition. In this judgment, both Bellarmine and Acquaviva were wrong.

Becanus in the Crossfire In November 1612, before Acquaviva sent the previously mentioned letter to Becanus in which he suggested modification of certain passages of his Controversia in its second edition, another letter arrived in Rome regarding Becanus’s book, and the judgment was much less positive than Acquaviva’s. This second letter came from Monsignor Ubaldini, nuncio in France, who alerted Borghese that Becanus’s book had appeared at the last book fair in Frankfurt, and that from there it had made its way into France. In Ubaldini’s judgment, Becanus’s Controversia, which was published without the approbation of Becanus’s provincial, “puts us in clear danger of new difficulties and problems with this Parlement . . . since those politiques affirm that the book is very damaging, and much worse than Mariana’s.” The nuncio had not yet obtained a copy of the book, but he had already spoken with the queen and with some Catholic members of the court, asking them to prevent any possible action on the part of the Parlement against Becanus. Given what had happened in the case of Bellarmine’s treatise against Barclay, the nuncio also contacted the Catholic theologians of the Sorbonne and asked them to work as much as possible to avoid having Becanus’s book discussed and condemned.79 Regarding the content of the Controversia, some members of the court and some theologians whom the nuncio trusted had seen the book already and had communicated to the nuncio their surprise “that a Jesuit Father has written in today’s climate on this matter as Becanus did.” Those trusted people also gave to the nuncio a list of propositions from Becanus’s book that had raised much

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clamor; to the nuncio one proposition seemed especially dangerous, the one “in which Becanus wants the people’s consent to be so powerful that even if there was a legitimate heir, to whom the kingdom was due, if the people . . . elected another, that other would be the true heir and king.” For this reason, the nuncio said, nobody felt like defending Becanus’s book, and everybody thought that it should be punished.80 The nuncio did not openly endorse his advisers’ opinion that Becanus’s book should be punished and, indeed, promised to make all the necessary effort to avoid a condemnation from either the Parlement or the Sorbonne, but he nevertheless voiced his complaints rather vigorously. Ubaldini had just finished dealing with the repercussions of the Parlement’s condemnation of Bellarmine’s book against Barclay, he was just starting to see the tides of the Sorbonne turning and Richer’s leadership being questioned, and he was in the process of pushing for, and overseeing, Duval’s responses to Richer. Thus, he reacted with impatience when he saw that another Catholic author, and a Jesuit to boot, was writing again on papal depositions in what his advisers told him were “radical” terms. Ubaldini, we should notice, took issue not only with Becanus’s constitutionalist passages but also with the more general fact that another Jesuit dared to bring up, once again, the question of the pope’s authority in temporal matters, after all the effort the nuncio had made on behalf of the French Jesuits and of the French supporters of the pope. Thus, enraged by this situation, he declared to Borghese that he felt obliged to say “with all due respect and sincerity that I think it appropriate that the General command to all the Provincials that they should let their subjects know that no work should be printed without their review and approbation, and that they should forbid publication of books that mention killing princes, and that the people could . . . create another king at their will.” If for some reason, the nuncio continued, Rome thought it necessary to write again to defend the indirect power of the pope over princes, “that task should be entrusted to secular theologians of the most famous universities in Europe, and to regular clergy of any order but the Jesuits, so that this would . . . put an end to one of the greatest excuses which these politiques use.”81 The suggestion given by the nuncio that the Society of Jesus should remain absolutely silent on matters regarding the authority of the pope in temporal affairs must have been taken seriously in Rome, for at the beginning of January 1613, Acquaviva wrote to the procurators of Germany, Austria, and Flanders that “on the occasion of father Becanus’s book against Andrewes and in defense of Cardinal Bellarmine, we order what was ordered to us by another authority,” that is, that the books dealing with the authority of the pope over princes should be sent over to Rome, and no new book on the same matter should be published. If

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there was some need to write on that matter, the local Jesuit authorities should see to it that “by no means such books be published, unless they be examined in Rome prior to publication.”82 However, this move was not enough to calm the renewed storm initiated in France by Becanus’s book: throughout the month of December, Ubaldini worked hard to avoid a condemnation of Becanus’s book on the part of either the Parlement or the Sorbonne, despite the opposition against Becanus that was spreading in France and that was fostered also by the English king, who by means of his ambassador in France was lobbying the Parlement to take action against the seditious doctrines contained in the book.83 Again, later in December the nuncio returned to the issue of Becanus’s book: since Richer was losing his fight within the Sorbonne, and Servin was not as effective as he was in 1610, the Jesuits in France could start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, “and if Becanus’s book is silenced, and nothing else arrives that provokes another storm against it [i.e., the Society], the situation [of the Society of Jesus] will be better every day.”84 At the end of December 1612 the nuncio returned once again to Becanus: an extract of his book, translated into French, was circulating among the theologians at the Sorbonne, and while he had managed to avoid the Parlement’s condemnation thanks to the pressure he exerted through the queen and the court, Ubaldini was worried that he might not succeed in avoiding a censure from the Sorbonne, especially if the pro-Richer theologians tried to condemn Becanus as an act of retaliation for the syndic’s deposition.85 Finally, from Rome some action against Becanus was taken. On 3 January 1613 the members of the Congregation of the Index, including Bellarmine, met and issued a decree with which they charged Becanus’s book with containing “nonnulla falsa, temeraria, scandalosa, et seditiosa respective.” Thus the Index prohibited the book “donec corrigatur,” forbade a new printing of the book unless it was corrected, and prescribed punishment for those who printed or owned it.86 The condemnation of Becanus’s book was accompanied by a list of annotations over certain propositions, which Paolo Camillo Sfondrati, cardinal of Santa Cecilia and member of the Congregation of the Index, sent to Ubaldini, who was entrusted to pass them to Becanus. On 14 February Ubaldini wrote to Santa Cecilia that “I have received, with your Lordship’s letter of the 4th of January, the prohibition and censure of this Holy Congregation of the Index against Father Becanus’s book, which I have immediately communicated to her Majesty and her ministers and the syndic of the Sorbonne, who were very happy about it for it gave them a most effective way to avoid the censure which here some wanted to make so as to have an excuse to condemn especially the pope’s authority in temporal matters.” Also, Ubaldini wrote that he had written to Becanus in conformity with the order received by the cardinal of Santa Cecilia

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and had alerted the Jesuit “not to correct or print again the said book with any other correction than that which . . . will be sent to him.”87 While Ubaldini seemed pleased that rumor of the Roman condemnation of Becanus eliminated a potentially dangerous occasion for the antipapalist theologians and members of Parlement to act publicly, he decided, after consulting with Villeroy, not to print the Index’s decree against Becanus’s book,88 possibly to avoid yet another occasion for a public debate. This public debate, however, happened nonetheless, for in March 1613 the Servin-Richer faction published a pamphlet entitled Recueil de ce qui s’est fait en Sorbonne et ailleurs, contre un Livre de Becanus. The pamphlet contained a French translation of the Roman censure, which for the Parisian anti-Jesuit faction was too lenient—the anonymous writer of the pamphlet took issue with the word “respective,” which he considered “un terme d’evasion, pour monstrer que les Iesuites ne condamnent pas simplement & absolutement la doctrine de Becanus, mais au regard des François seulement, parce qu’il s’offencent à boin droict de ceste doctrine: D’ou il resulte que ce Decret n’est pas une Censure, ains une pure illusion pour pipper les pauvres Francois [sic], & tousiours exposer leurs Roys aux assassins, quand ils desobeyront en quelque chose au Pape, comme dict Becanus.”89 The pamphlet also contained a summary of the discussions held at the Sorbonne over Becanus’s book between January and February 1613, a list of the propositions identified by the Faculty of Theology as worthy of punishment, and a long and angry report on the pressures received by the Sorbonne on the part of the queen, Villeroy, and other Catholic politicians to avoid a condemnation of Becanus. From the list of propositions in particular we can see that what the French theologians took issue with in Becanus’s doctrine was not only its constitutionalist implications but also Becanus’s more properly theological defense of the pope’s authority to excommunicate kings. Together with the proposition on the importance of people’s consent and that on the legitimacy of Queen Athaliah’s deposition (and murder) by order of the priest, in fact, we find censured almost all the propositions in which Becanus stated the theological role of the pope as supreme judge in deciding on matters of heresy, out of which Becanus justified the legitimacy of the pope’s excommunication of a heretical king.90 Indeed, the French theologians who opposed the pope’s authority in temporal matters treated Becanus’s book less like Mariana’s and more like Bellarmine’s, in the sense that the question of tyrannicide was not the only target in Becanus’s Controversia. Becanus, like Bellarmine, was dangerous because he diminished the political authority of the sovereign by contrasting it with the spiritual, not just the political, authority of the pope. Even Ubaldini seemed to share this view: as he saw it, the main danger constituted by Becanus’s book was to have, once again, brought up the question of

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the pope’s authority in temporal matters; this danger was only hightened by the less than subtle character of some of the propositions taken from Becanus’s book and by the fact that Becanus was a Jesuit. As is clear from Ubaldini’s correspondence between December 1612 and February 1613 over Becanus’s Controversia, the nuncio believed that after the dramatic crisis that French papalism faced between 1610 and 1612, no Jesuit theologian should again enter into a discussion over papal authority, no matter how subtle that discussion would be. In this respect, the position that Ubaldini took on Becanus’s book was perfectly coherent with the position he took on other authors, of a higher profile and greater subtlety than Becanus, such as Bellarmine himself at the time of his proposed reply to James. Thus, even though the Index’s decree against the Controversia proved useful in France as a form of preemptive strike with respect to the Parlement and the Sorbonne, it nevertheless provoked another outburst of public rage against the pope and the Roman Church expressed in the form of cheap print. While the nuncio seemed happy about the first result, the second was something he would have gladly avoided, given his concern for “silence” on the matter of papal authority. Where the Index’s censure really hurt the Catholic cause, however, was in the English context. Among the supporters of the oath of allegiance the censure against the Controversia was welcomed as a great “public relations” coup, while the English Catholic community looked at the censure with suspicion and apprehension. A letter sent to Borghese by an anonymous English informer narrated that in February 1613 James was in a very bad mood because of the internal opposition he was facing regarding his daughter’s marriage to the prince elector of the Palatinate, and “in order to make the king’s melancholy go away, they showed him a certain censure of one of Becanus’s book arrived from Paris, which comforted him to no end. The Court is already fully informed about it, since His Majesty brags about it and attributes it entirely to his book, which, as his pseudo-Bishops make him believe, makes miracles in the world. Among the Catholics there is disparity of opinions: the politiques, little devoted to the temporal authority of the Apostolic See, believe that the said censure is true, but the others think it is a forgery. In any case, it does irreparable harm.”91 The same preoccupation regarding Becanus’s censure was voiced by the English archpriest, George Birkhead, who, writing to his representative Thomas More in March 1613, declared: “It is straunge to us that becanus is Censured writinge for the Church and not others that have written against it. surely our frendes are deluded with faire wordes.”92 And over the course of the spring of 1613, things did not get any better, for, as another anonymous agent reported to Borghese, “The censure of Becanus’s book is affixed to the door of the [royal] palace in London with great triumph, since it seemed good to His Majesty to use it in this way to make public for the whole kingdom the victory reported over the

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Papists, and to convince them to finally come to their senses and to take the so-called oath of allegiance.”93 In the meantime, the censure against Becanus was printed in a Latin pamphlet entitled Supplicatio ad Imperatores, Reges, Principes and circulated throughout the English realm.94 Thus, by way of a small recapitulation, so far we have an author, Martin Becanus, who had already been in trouble in Rome for being too much of a supporter of Bellarmine’s notion of the absolutely spiritual nature of the pope’s authority; a book, the Controversia Anglicana, which was conceived to defend the pope’s spiritual authority but contained some small radical “constitutionalist” slips together with some affirmations of the legitimacy of James’s temporal sovereignty and of the absolutely spiritual nature of the pope’s authority; the English Catholic community still in danger of splitting over the oath of allegiance; and the French nuncio, who saw how dangerous those kinds of intervention in support of the pope’s authority could be in the French context, especially immediately after the great crisis followed by the murder of Henri IV. Last, we have the Index’s decree against Becanus, which is mysterious and puzzling for several reasons. In a nutshell, the question that needs to be answered is why Rome decided to take such a public stand against Becanus, when taking this kind of stand was to prove so problematic in England, and in fact was to provoke some form of public outburst of antipapalist feeling even in France. Or, in other words, can we interpret the Index’s decree against Becanus’s book simply as an attempt on the part of Rome to make Becanus into a scapegoat for the benefit of French Catholicism? Francesco Gui and other scholars have argued that indeed the censure against Becanus has to be interpreted as an act done for the sake of the French, or, as Gui put it, the “main aim” of the Index’s condemnation was that of “avoiding a condemnation on the part of the Parlement of Paris, which would have contained hostile declarations against papal authority.”95 As I have already shown, the value of the censure as a preemptive strike was clearly seen by the nuncio, who wanted to avoid causing any further hostile declarations against papal authority by both the Parlement and the Sorbonne. However, as Ubaldini wrote to Borghese, he wanted Becanus to be “silenced,” just as he wanted Bellarmine to remain silent against Widdrington. The very public noise that the censure ended up causing on both sides of the Channel is far from the kind of deafening silence that the nuncio thought best for French papalism. Moreover, Ubaldini had already dealt with Mariana’s De rege, with Bellarmine’s treatises against James and Barclay, and would very soon be dealing with Suárez’s Defensio fidei, but in none of those cases had the Index issued an official condemnation. One could certainly argue that Bellarmine and Suárez were of much higher caliber than Becanus, but what about Mariana? In Mariana’s case, there

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occurred both an open dissociation on the part of the Jesuit hierarchy with respect to the doctrine of tyrannicide and an attempt, albeit lukewarm, on the part of Acquaviva to forbid his fellow Jesuits from defending the book publicly, and yet there never was any decree by the Index, nor, for that matter, was there any official condemnation by the Society of Jesus against Mariana’s De Rege.96 In fact, Rome had at its disposal various means by which it could silence Becanus and obtain in some other way the same “preemptive-strike effect” with respect to France. For instance, when the Congregation of the Index alerted the nuncio in Cologne that Becanus’s book was causing troubles, it asked Amalteo to see to it that all copies of the book be collected and destroyed, and that Becanus understand that he was not to issue a second edition until further notice.97 Thus, perhaps the Catholic hierarchy in Rome would have helped Ubaldini just as much by dealing with Becanus privately, so to speak, as it did in Cologne and as it had already done in the case of Becanus’s Refutatio against James. Yet, in order to deal with Becanus’s Controversia, Rome chose the rather risky road of a very public and noisy decree of condemnation from the Index: What did Becanus’s text have that other works, equally dangerous in the French context and even more radical in defending the spiritual and political supremacy of the pope, did not have, to justify such an action? According to Johann Sommerville, the particularity of Becanus’s book was that it offered a “radical interpretation” of the deposition and killing of Queen Athaliah, that is, a radical interpretation of the importance of people’s consent in choosing a king even at the expense of hereditary succession.98 However, as we could see from the list of propositions censured by the theologians at the Sorbonne, the issue of the people’s consent was just one of the many points noted in the book, and alongside the constitutionalist issue there were many propositions that dealt with the spiritual and theological authority of the pope. Moreover, surely Ubaldini had noted how that passage could be problematic, but, once again, was a censure from the Index necessary to convince Becanus to eliminate it, especially since by taking a stand against Becanus Rome seemed also to take a stand against papal authority? Finally, the same constitutionalist implications, albeit not expressed with the kind of graceless brusqueness that Becanus used, were present also in Bellarmine’s and especially Suárez’s neo-Thomist account of the origin of temporal power, not to mention, of course, Mariana’s take on tyrannicide: Why was Becanus especially singled out by Rome? The uncertainty regarding the reasons behind the Index’s decree deepens when we take into account two small mysteries surrounding it. First of all, despite the official decree, the name of Becanus never appeared on any official list of the Index. Second, so far we do not seem to have any clue as to which

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propositions out of Becanus’s book were actually censured in Rome, even though we know that the cardinal of Santa Cecilia forwarded that list of propositions to Becanus through Ubaldini. Both mysteries can be solved by an extraordinarily interesting letter that Adam Contzen, a Jesuit and professor in Mainz and future confessor of Maximilian of Bavaria, sent to Bellarmine in defense of Becanus’s Controversia.99 The correspondence between Contzen and Bellarmine seemed to have started on scholarly issues, and at the beginning it had nothing to do with Becanus. When, in early 1613, Contzen was working at his own defense of the Catholic doctrine against the German Protestants, he sent to Bellarmine a draft of his work. Bellarmine replied to Contzen in March 1613, excusing himself for not having read the entire draft but praising “the authority, and acuteness, and the flow of the prose” displayed by the parts of Contzen’s book that Bellarmine did read.100 By the end of March 1613, however, news had reached Germany that Becanus’s book had been prohibited, and Contzen took it upon himself to turn to Bellarmine for help. On 26 March 1613, he wrote a long letter to Bellarmine: the content of the letter, Contzen admitted, “terrified” him, but he hoped that Bellarmine’s “kindness” might make Bellarmine forgive Contzen’s frankness.101 Contzen declared that he was writing not for himself, but on behalf of all German Catholics, for whom “it is fair to express doubt, an entreaty and a most humble request for advice in a most difficult matter, since the French, who burn books that support the same Church as the Germans, who write in support of that Church, have expressed the need of many things.”102 Thus, to make clear to Bellarmine the substance of the doubts and needs of the German Catholic community, Contzen reported in his letter both the specific censures of Becanus’s book made by the Index (eight in total), and the responses that he, on behalf of his fellow German Jesuits, had crafted. Contzen evidently appealed to Bellarmine as to a Roman and Jesuit authority who could be sympathetic to the needs of the German Catholic community and, more specifically, to the needs of German Jesuits and of Martin Becanus himself. Contzen must have known that Bellarmine was a member of the Congregation of the Index, which condemned the Controversia, but evidently he also knew that he could count on Bellarmine’s support. Bellarmine was, after all, a fellow Jesuit, and he had already shown signs of benevolence toward Becanus. As we know, when Bellarmine was personally in charge of censuring Becanus’s previous work, he showed himself very appreciative of Becanus’s argument and avoided any form of punishment, so Contzen must have decided to write to Bellarmine as to a potential ally, not an opponent. Going back to the substance of the censures, based on what we know so far, we would imagine that the propositions censured concerned the most

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aggressive constitutionalist propositions of the Controversia, which were the ones that especially bothered Ubaldini and his advisers. Looking at the actual list of propositions, our expectations are satisfied only to a certain extent. Out of the eight censures, in fact, only two dealt specifically with the kind of aggressive political “radicalism” that the nuncio complained was hurting the Catholic cause in France. The first one concerns, not surprisingly, the proposition on the fact that the people’s consent was so important as to trump hereditary right, because “this proposition, posed in absolute terms, contains some difficulty, since the legitimate successor is kept from the kingdom unjustly, and the people do not have any right to deprive him from his right to the succession without cause.”103 This censure was meant to protect the right of kings, but how far was Rome willing to go to defend the right of kings? Would it strengthen the right of kings even at the expense of papal authority? After all, the censure said that the proposition was wrong if “posed in absolute terms,” not absolutely wrong. Contzen picked up immediately on this potential conflict of interest on the part of the Roman hierarchy and tried to capitalize on it to support his defense of Becanus, whom he portrayed in this instace as a scapegoat unjustly sacrificed on the altar of France. First of all, Contzen remarked that Becanus was neither the first nor the only Catholic theologian to have declared that the people’s consent was necessary to legitimize the king’s rule. He mentioned no name, but then again, he was writing to Bellarmine, and there was no need to name names. Besides, if this proposition really bothered Rome, why not just ask Becanus to eliminate it? Finally, if the reason this proposition was censured by the Roman authorities was that it was odious to kings and jeopardized their life and security, what about all the authors who attribute any form of authority to the pope over kings? Would not those authors also be suspicious to kings? Why are those authors not being censured? “Becanus is whipped so that they might not be looked at with suspicion [by kings], but silence is not imposed to other authors, against whom kings complain.”104 The second explicit case in which Becanus’s positions were considered to be too aggressive toward kings, and as such problematic for the French Catholic supporters of papal authority, referred to the epilogue of the Controversia, where Becanus declared to have demonstrated that the oath of allegiance could not be legitimately sworn by any Catholic in England. After that part, the Index decreed, “a form of moderation is advised, by which it would be shown that the question does not concern Christian kings, so as to settle the Gallican tumults.”105 This censure really angered Contzen, and not just because he saw in this Roman insistence on moderation another sign of putting the French interests over those of the German Catholics. Rather, the reason for Contzen’s rage was

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that Becanus had indeed applied much moderation throughout his treatise.106 Becanus in fact applied moderation when he stated clearly that Tiberius’s and Christ’s kingdoms were absolutely separate; when he declared that James was the legitimate supreme authority in temporal matters; when he called James the “legitimate king” and “supreme ruler” of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The shocking part, for Contzen but also for us, was that the Congregation of the Index had not ignored those instances of moderation, and in fact it had censured precisely all those instances, in the same document in which it censured the aggressive propositions. As to the first, the Index declared that denying Christ any temporal primacy was not a legitimate proposition, and saying that spiritual primacy can be separated from temporal primacy “is not well spoken of in Rome”;107 as to the second, the Index remarked that according to canon law, subjects of a heretical sovereign should not consider themselves as such, which means that a heretical king cannot be properly defined as legitimate;108 and, regarding the title of James as king of Ireland, aside from the issue of legitimacy of a heretical king, there was also the fact that the papacy could claim a form of direct temporal authority over Ireland.109 As Contzen made forcefully clear, the Index could not have it both ways: it could not censure Becanus for not being moderate enough to please the Gallicans, and then censure him because he was too moderate in asserting the lack of the pope’s direct temporal authority. As Contzen put it, would Rome want to order Becanus to defend Barclay so as not to offend the French? 110 If so, why did the Index censure the proposition in which Becanus argued that Christ’s kingdom was not temporal? First of all, if the Index wanted to censure those propositions, Contzen wrote, it needed to censure the same propositions in plenty of Catholic authors, including popes, cardinals, Dominicans, and Franciscans, and if all those books were prohibited, then “the libraries will be empty.” Second, if Rome punished Becanus for the sake of the French, then it should know that the French Catholics also denied that Christ’s primacy was of a temporal nature, and indeed Becanus’s argument had the advantage of better opposing the cause of the Venetians, precisely because it defended the pope’s superiority in spiritual matters, while the French Gallican insistence on the uniquely spiritual nature of Christ’s primacy was very consonant with what Sarpi and his associates were saying.111 Moreover, according to Contzen, the Index’s censure showed not only Rome’s lack of coherence but also Rome’s lack of interest in, and attention to, the political and religious contingencies of Germany. For how could the pope condemn Becanus for having called James “legitimate,” without condemning also all the German princes and kings who were appointed as legitimate even though they were Protestants on the basis of the same principle by which Becanus had defined James as legitimate; all the

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German bishops who confirmed and treated those sovereigns as legitimate; all the people who swore allegiance to those sovereigns as to their legitimate sovereigns? Besides, the French themselves defended the same point that Becanus defended, and they did so much more strongly than Becanus had done, and yet they were not censured for it.112 Thus, for Contzen, these two themes that the Index decided to target in Becanus’s book were both contradictory and dangerous for the Catholic cause in Germany and in the rest of Europe. The remaining propositions censured by the Index, Contzen remarked, were concerned with such trivial inaccuracies that for Contzen it was easy to defend Becanus by ridiculing the Roman censors. For instance, one censure referred to the title of the book, Controversia anglicana de potestate regis et pontificis . . . pro defensione Illustrissimi Cardinalis Bellarmini, which, according to the censure, promised an “integra responsio” to Andrewes’s arguments in defense of Bellarmine’s, but delivered only a partial and incomplete defense. To this censure, Contzen replied first that Becanus wanted to write a fuller defense of Bellarmine, but that his many engagements obliged him to cut his text short. Besides, the title of the book did not really contain the word “promise,” and thus Becanus could not be said to have broken any. One could argue that the title was infelicitous, but could an infelicitous title justify a censure from the Index?113 Another censure referred to the dedicatee of the work, Cardinal Sforza, whom Becanus had addressed as “the only one left” out of the cardinals nominated by Pope Gregory XIII. The censors remarked that Becanus was mistaken: Sforza was not the only surviving cardinal appointed by Gregory, since François de Joyeuse also was still alive. This time Contzen was even more sarcastic in opposing the censure. First of all, it was a minor slip, hardly worthy of a censure; second, it should not be surprising that “a man who has been in battle against the heretics for thirty years already, and has not seen either the city or the palaces of the Cardinals, does not know by whom every Cardinal received his appointment.”114 In sum, for Contzen the Index’s censure made no sense. Either Becanus was too aggressive in attacking the supremacy of secular kings, and in this respect he was dangerous for the French Catholics, or Becanus was too soft in attributing too much authority to kings, and in this case he was perfectly in line with the French Catholics. In the first case, why did Rome decide to listen to the complaints from France at the expense of the defense of the Catholic cause, which the Germans were busy fighting? In the second case, why did Rome condemn Becanus and leave alone others who defended the temporal kings’ supremacy, among whom were many French Catholics? Besides, which case was it really, the first or the second? Because, as Contzen’s entire letter to Bellarmine showed, the Index just could not have it both ways.

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However, having it both ways was precisely what the Index wanted to accomplish with its censure against Becanus. In fact, now that we have the list of propositions censured by Rome, and if we keep in mind the profound controversy that Bellarmine’s theory stirred in Rome since the second half of the 1580s, the puzzle of Becanus’s censure can finally be solved, and its implications appear in all their clarity and significance. In censuring Becanus’s Controversia, Rome wanted to get two pigeons with one stone. One pigeon was French Catholicism, or, better, the difficult situation that Nuncio Ubaldini faced. Dealing with the pope’s authority in temporal matters presented French papalist Catholics with a painful dilemma: they needed to defend it in order to defend the ecclesiological and theological supremacy of the pope within the Christian commonwealth, but they also needed to avoid any constitutionalist implications, as Duval well knew. “Silencing” Becanus was a useful way to avoid pouring oil onto the fire, but Rome had at its disposal a number of ways to silence Becanus, as we have seen in other cases, and were it not for the other pigeon, Rome could have silenced him in a less noisy manner than with a decree by the Index. The other pigeon was Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta. In his Controversia Becanus had taken the two central tenets of Bellarmine’s doctrine, namely, that Christ’s kingdom was purely spiritual and that temporal authority enjoyed a degree of autonomy with respect to the Christian Church, and had expressed them in a less than careful manner. Becanus wrote that there was no area of intersection between Tiberius’s and Christ’s jurisdiction, so as to make both rulers almost at the same level, and he had defined James’s rule over England as legitimate despite his heresy, so as to make temporal legitimacy almost independent of the ruler’s heretical beliefs. Now, Bellarmine had been more attentive on both accounts and had insisted that the pope’s spiritual sovereignty was not only separate from and incommensurable with respect to the king’s temporal sovereignty but also, and precisely because of its radical difference, superior to the king’s authority. Becanus had not been as prudent, just as he had been less than prudent in expressing the constitutionalist implications of the radical difference between the pope’s and the king’s sovereignty. Stressing the role of people’s consent as a medium through which a temporal king obtains his authority, as opposed to the pope’s receiving his authority directly from God, was indeed a necessary part of the structure of the doctrine of the potestas indirecta, and in fact Bellarmine, as we will remember, criticized Duval precisely for having ignored that point. But stressing it in the way in which Becanus had stressed it was theologically controversial and politically extremely dangerous. Thus, for the Congregation of the Index, hitting Becanus’s text in those points where he defended Bellarmine’s theory most aggressively (and least prudently)

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was a good way to send a signal that many people in Rome still had difficulty digesting Bellarmine’s doctrine, or, to borrow the wording of the censure, that some aspects of Bellarmine’s doctrine were not well spoken of in Rome, especially when this doctrine was expressed in such radical terms. With regard to Rome’s uneasiness about Bellarmine’s doctrine, we will recall that in the fall of 1610, Francisco Peña had written to Paul V asking him to punish Bellarmine and his writings, which he saw as the origin of books and opinions such as Barclay’s, that in 1611 Peña’s De Christo was published in Rome, and that the memory of the controversial use of Bellarmine’s arguments made by Sarpi and his associates was still vivid and indeed was being revitalized by the ongoing collaboration between Venice and Paris even after the official conclusion of the question of the Interdetto. This move shows, once again, the implications of Bellarmine’s theory both in the fight against heretics and in the process of affirming the pope’s superiority over temporal rulers. Indeed, the Index’s censure against Becanus is a testament to how difficult it was for the Catholic Church to retain its spiritual monopoly in both contexts. As Contzen’s comments made clear, if Rome wanted to express some moderation toward temporal sovereigns and, in doing that, making the job of French papalists easier, it risked being not effective enough in the fight against heretics, for by censuring Becanus, Rome took away some important ammunition that the German Catholics needed in the confessionally divided lands of the empire. By the same token, if Rome wanted to stress the pope’s spiritual superiority with respect to temporal sovereigns, it should avoid condemning doctrines that indeed reinforced that spiritual superiority. In this respect, Contzen made the best choice he could possibly have made when he asked Bellarmine to intercede with the Congregation of the Index and with the pope on behalf of Becanus, since Bellarmine was personally and theoretically invested in Becanus in a more profound manner than any other Jesuit could be. As Contzen put it, at stake there was not only the future of the Society of Jesus but also the future “of religion, for the sake of which now we strongly intend to defend an old defender of this same religion.”115 Indeed, the kind of Catholicism that depended on a positive resolution of the Becanus affair was Bellarmine’s own kind of Catholicism, the one founded on the spiritual authority of the pope, radically different from, and at the same time superior to, the authority of the temporal sovereign. Bellarmine also understood how important that censure was. Evidently he could do nothing to save Becanus from the censure in January 1613, but by that spring he was willing and able to help out, and he worked in the shadows of the Roman palaces to set things straight. The first result he accomplished was to have Becanus’s Controversia never appear on any official list of prohibited

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books. In doing this Bellarmine was so smooth that he left almost no trace of his intervention for modern historians; indeed, not even Bellarmine’s colleagues on the Congregation of the Index seem to have realized immediately that despite a decree in which the Controversia was prohibited donec corrigatur, neither the book nor its author ever appeared in any official list of prohibited books or in any official record. At a meeting of the Index held in January 1614, in which the members of the Congregation tried to sort out some confusion over certain books about which nobody knew whether they were actually prohibited, somebody raised the question of Becanus’s Controversia, which by then had been reprinted. Since, however, the second edition did not seem to follow the corrections suggested by the Index, which was the condition under which a work prohibited donec corrigatur could be removed from the Index (besides, at that point the Controversia had never been on any official list), it was not clear whether Becanus’s book was really supposed to be prohibited. That question, together with other matters, was forwarded to Santa Cecilia, whose charge it was to speak with the pope and sort the matter out.116 I will return to the issue of those corrections later, but for now I note that despite the request made to Santa Cecilia to look into the matters related to Becanus’s Controversia, nobody at the Index bothered checking it for the following four years. Becanus’s name came up again only in the fall of 1618, when the Congregation of the Index was asked by the Inquisition to issue a new general edict with a new list of prohibited books, so as to avoid the confusion generated by any discrepancies. In that meeting somebody asked what the situation of Becanus’s Controversia was, possibly remembering the 1613 prohibition and noticing the lack of traces of that prohibition in the official record. The discussion on Becanus was cut short very soon, because “the Secretary [of the Index] declared that Cardinal Bellarmine did not think that certain books were to be put on the Index for good reasons”: among those books was Becanus’s Controversia Anglicana.117 Thus, despite the lack of direct evidence of Bellarmine’s involvement in this affair, I believe that it was thanks to Bellarmine’s silent and prudent lobbying that the Index’s decree against Becanus was swept under the carpet. Also, presumably Bellarmine advised Becanus on how to modify the Controversia and encouraged his fellow Jesuit to print quickly a second edition of the work, in order to clear his name from any possible suspicion regarding the Roman opposition to the book. Once again, we have no direct evidence of Bellarmine’s actions, but some circumstantial evidence, as it were, points to the cardinal. From the tight correspondence between Acquaviva and Becanus in March and April 1613, we know that Acquaviva was worried about a possible second edition: Becanus was eager to clear his name by bringing to light a second

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and corrected version of the Controversia, but Acquaviva was preoccupied by the problems that might be raised if Becanus produced a second edition in haste and without waiting for approval from Rome. More specifically, Acquaviva learned that a second censure would be coming from Rome in addition to the first (the propositions from Contzen’s letter), and the general wanted Becanus to wait for this second censure, which would contain more details on the exact manner in which the Index wanted Becanus to modify his work.118 This second censure containing the suggested changes might have ultimately been produced, for it is to this document that the minutes of the Index’s meeting of 14 January 1614 referred; no trace of this second censure, however, can be found in the archives. In any case, at the very end of April and while Acquaviva and Becanus were waiting for that second censure, something happened, and I think that Bellarmine might have intervened to reassure Becanus that his name was not on any official record, and perhaps suggest him to reissue the Controversia without waiting for the second censure, provided that the parts of the text already highlighted by the Index’s first censure were changed appropriately.119 With Bellarmine’s approval and/or suggestions, Becanus must have completed his revisions for the second edition and sent copies of the finished work to Acquaviva. This move took even the general by surprise, for in a letter to Becanus dated on 4 May 1613 Acquaviva wrote confirming the receipt of the second edition but saying that he would have wanted Becanus to wait for the second censure that might be coming from Rome. Acquaviva, however, was not especially upset, because he had spoken with “Our Holiness and . . . some Cardinals, and I hope that everything will go well and with every consolation for your Reverence.”120 Acquaviva’s hope must have been well justified by some reassurance that the matter of Becanus’s book was definitely closed, for the general’s subsequent letter to Becanus, written on 15 May, did not contain any mention of the Controversia but dealt only with Becanus’s next book projects, which were supposed to discuss some aspects of the controversy over grace and free will—a touchy matter on which Acquaviva advised the utmost care.121 As we have already seen, the next time Becanus’s Controversia came up again in Rome was in the brief request for information in January 1614. Four years later, in 1618, Bellarmine’s definitive judgment that the book should not be prohibited effectively closed the case. This new development, that is, Becanus’s completion, possibly with Bellarmine’s encouragement and/or help, of a second edition of the Controversia, which was printed with the approbation of Henricus Scherenus, provincial of the Lower Rhine province of the Society,122 was not made to please the French papalists, and in fact did not please Ubaldini. Writing to Cardinal Mellini, a prominent member of the Inquisition, at the end of April 1613, Ubaldini confirmed that the

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French politiques hated the name of Becanus, and for this reason the hostility toward any defense of the papal authority was high. Ubaldini must have heard that a second edition was in the works, and he did not like the idea, for he thought that Becanus’s doctrine was so hated in France that “I am most certain that they [i.e., the politiques] will do some beastly attempt against that book even if it is reprinted with the due correction and emendation, so that the fruit that the censure of the aforesaid book has produced here may not be lost.”123 Ubaldini, however, did not think that a properly corrected edition was the ideal solution; rather, avoiding a reprint of the book would have been much better: “I am obliged to tell Your Most Illustrious Lordship with all due sincerity and respect, that maybe it would be better to wait some more time until the king’s minority, before printing the aforementioned book again.”124 What Ubaldini wanted, and what he had always wanted with respect to Becanus’s book, was silence, and a new edition of the Controversia could not help but raise some more clamor, which was what French papalists needed to avoid. Nevertheless, evidently Bellarmine was not willing to let Ubaldini win this time. The stakes for his own doctrine, as well as for the future of the Society, were high, and, as Contzen’s letter must have shown the cardinal, it was time to act. Thus, a month after writing to Mellini, Ubaldini found on his desk a copy of the second edition of the Controversia, already printed and sold at the Frankfurt book fair, where Ubaldini’s collaborators had found it. If Ubaldini was not pleased by the decision taken in Rome to allow Becanus to reprint a second edition, when he actually saw what the book looked like, he was furious. The second edition, in fact, contained all the changes requested on the basis of the comments made by Rome: those changes modified in a more papalist sense the basic Bellarminian position Becanus had taken in the text, without making much effort to smooth out what the French Gallicans (as well as the French nuncio) saw as the dangerous parts of the book. The long section in which Becanus discussed the deposition and killing of Queen Abiathar, which the antipapalist French theologians of the Sorbonne had singled out as dangerous, remained virtually the same, with one exception: the small paragraph starting with “plus dicam,” in which Becanus made the comment on the importance of people’s consent in choosing a king, was eliminated.125 Moreover, those propositions that the Index had censured because they were reputed as “too soft” toward temporal kings, and not strong enough in defending the pope’s primacy, were all either corrected or eliminated, so as to make the book sound more papalist but still Bellarminian. For instance, the passage on Tiberius and Christ was modified, cunningly but effectively. Becanus maintained his position on the substantial difference between spiritual and temporal

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authority but added a few significant words: “according to the adversaries’ opinion one authority can be separated from the other, since according to them Christ had the spiritual supremacy without the temporal and, by contrast, the emperor Tiberius the temporal without the spiritual.”126 Thus, with those two additions Becanus attributed to the “adversaries” the interpretation of the radical separation between spiritual and temporal authority, without having to recant his own (and Bellarmine’s) opinion on the substantial difference between them. Also, while in the first edition Becanus defined James as “legitimus superior” in civil matters, in the second edition James becomes simply “superior in rebus civilibus.”127 Again, because the Index had taken issue with Becanus’s attribution of Ireland to the king and had made reference to the direct temporal authority that the pope could possibly exercise over Ireland, Becanus thought that he could please the Roman censors by eliminating the adjective “legitimate” when talking about James’s rule over the British Isles (Ireland included), without making any more substantial changes on the status of Ireland and on the role of the pope in that, which would have been a sort of endorsement of the pope’s direct temporal authority.128 In a nutshell, in modifying his work, Becanus finally seemed to exercise some of the astute intellectual prudence of the man whose work he set out to defend, that is, Robert Bellarmine. Becanus did not change anything substantial about his belief in the indirect authority of the pope in temporal matters; he simply expressed his opinion in a much more subtle (and papalist) manner. Also, Becanus maintained his entire section on Solomon’s deposition of Abiathar (minus the short addition on the people’s consent), because that passage, as we will recall from my previous analysis of the work, was an important part of Becanus’s argument on the authority of the pope in deciding in matters of heresy, even if the heresy in question concerned a king or a queen. Thus, pace the Sorbonne and Ubaldini, that section was crucial for Becanus’s demonstration of the theological nature of the pope’s authority to depose an excommunicated king, and as such it was necessary for the entire argument of the text. In effect, the fact that Becanus’s subtle makeup was successful on several fronts in which Bellarmine was very interested can be considered, in a sense, further evidence that Bellarmine might have had a hand in the modifications made in the second edition of the Controversia. These modifications, in fact, succeeded in smoothing out the Roman controversy over the book by expressing the main tenets of the doctrine of potestas indirecta in a more astute way without fundamentally changing them, and they allowed Becanus to save his name and reputation from any stain or suspicion, both for the sake of the Society of Jesus and for the sake of German Catholicism.

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One front on which neither Bellarmine nor Becanus was interested in making progress was France: evidently appeasing the French Gallicans was not in Bellarmine’s or Becanus’s agenda, and indeed it was not even very high on the list of priorities of the Roman hierarchy. When he saw a copy of the second edition, Ubaldini wrote angrily to Rome: “I, not knowing whether that correction has been approved there [in Rome], and not being able to either praise or attack it, try . . . to defend it from any ill encounter, saying that since the first edition was censured there [in Rome], one should expect the judgment of the Holy See also on this second edition.”129 All the people Ubaldini spoke with, including some theologians of the Sorbonne as well as Villeroy and other members of the court, agreed with the nuncio’s position, that is, with his strategy of reassuring people by anticipating that another censure should soon be coming. Because of the anger that was floating around regarding this second edition, Ubaldini informed Borghese that he should expect some complaints from the French ambassador in Rome, Jean Savary de Brèves, “with all the more resentment because they claim that in what concerns the right that the supreme Priest had in the Old Testament of killing the kings, this work has not been corrected at all.”130 Ubaldini was quick to specify to Borghese that he was not attacking Becanus out of his or any French Catholic’s lack of zeal in defending the Catholic religion, but because books like that of Becanus rendered the job of the zealous French Catholics harder, not easier: “Since every day many most pernicious books against the dignity of this Holy See come out, here people must not think that for fear of the Parlement’s arrêts or other human consideration the good and pious Catholics cease to support the Catholic truth with their writings.”131 If we recall that in those months Ubaldini was working to foster Duval’s effort to oppose Richer, and recall the great defense that Ubaldini mounted for Duval’s papalism, which in Rome was considered too “French” and not Roman enough in terms of both ecclesiology and politics, Ubaldini’s complaint against Becanus’s second edition becomes even more indicative of the distance that separated Ubaldini and French papalism from other ways of defending Catholicism. However, as we have seen, the Roman hierarchy was not willing to follow Ubaldini completely. When Ubaldini complained against the first edition of the Controversia, the Roman hierarchy was happy to listen, and indeed issued a censure that ended up almost backfiring because it ignited another spark in the already inflamed debate. The Roman hierarchy did so because it thought that censoring Becanus’s book could please Ubaldini and, at the same time, send a strong signal to all those authors whose attitude toward papal authority was too Bellarminian or too lukewarm. Once Becanus fixed what he needed to fix in order to appease Rome, then nobody in the Index or Inquisition had any

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interest in pursuing the matter, notwithstanding the complaints that Ubaldini, once again, voiced. That is why, even though Becanus did not wait for the second censure from Rome, in which he would have found a more detailed explanation of the emendations, but simply corrected his work on the basis of the propositions censured by the Index with the possible help of Bellarmine, the Index was willing to forget about the Controversia and, when it was reminded of the book again first in 1614 and then in 1618, it was willing to listen to Bellarmine and forget about the book once again and forever. The other protagonists of the story moved on relatively quickly: in the fall of 1613 Acquaviva found another reason to complain about Becanus, but this time it had nothing to do with the oath of allegiance. In his Manuale controversiarum huius temporis, Becanus had touched on the controversy over grace and free will, on which no Jesuit was supposed to speak publicly after the controversy de auxiliis, and for this reason Becanus was called to Rome to render an account of what he did and ask for forgiveness. Thanks to the pressure exerted by his fellow Jesuits, Becanus managed to avoid the unpleasant trip.132 However, by 1620 Becanus was in trouble again, on the question of toleration for the heretics, and, as we have seen, even in that case Becanus found a form of accommodation with Muzio Vitelleschi, successor to Acquaviva as general of the Society of Jesus. Ubaldini also soon moved on: between 1613 and 1614 he was busy dealing with Duval and the Roman reaction to him, and soon he would get a novel source of grief from the Society of Jesus in the person of Suárez.133 Bellarmine also, of course, moved on, in the sense that after 1613 he ceased to be directly involved with Becanus until 1620, when the issue of toleration was brought up. But while the time Bellarmine spent on the Becanus affair was relatively short and can be considered as a sort of small appendix to Bellarmine’s involvement in the oath of allegiance and its French repercussion, the part (or better, parts) that Bellarmine played in the affair deserve some consideration. In dealing with Becanus’s work, in fact, Bellarmine performed simultaneously a number of roles. Bellarmine was the champion of Catholic truth against the heretics’ falsehoods, whom Becanus wanted to imitate and defend; but Bellarmine was also the theorist of the pope’s indirect authority in temporal affairs, which Becanus thought of as the most appropriate doctrine to defend effectively the theological superiority of the pope in a confessionally divided setting such as the German territories, because of the unique and uniquely effective way in which Bellarmine’s theory combined theological and political considerations. But the very elements of Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta that Becanus thought could be effective in the German lands could become most dangerous and detrimental for the Catholic cause in France. In this respect, it is very indicative that Becanus was censured by the Index for being “too Bellarminian” in separating political

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and religious authority and for stating in an extreme form the constitutionalist implications of Bellarmine’s theory, while Duval was censured by Bellarmine for not having been “Bellarminian enough” because he had not insisted enough on the radical incommensurability and absolute superiority of the pope in both ecclesiological and political terms. Both Duval and Becanus saw Bellarmine as their model and his theory as the most effective way to defend the Catholic faith in their respective contexts. Nevertheless, both had to face the difficulties inherent in the attempt to apply Bellarmine’s notion of the pope’s supernational and supernatural supremacy to their respective national contexts. From this perspective, a first, and by now obvious, reason for the importance of Becanus’s case in this study is that it contributes to the demonstration of the political implications of Bellarmine’s theory in different political contexts. While by examining the repercussions of Bellarmine’s theory in France we could appreciate the complex interplay between a national view of French Catholicism and Bellarmine’s supernational understanding of the pope’s authority, with Becanus we are confronted with the implications of that supernational authority in a religiously divided political entity. From this perspective, in fact, Becanus’s plea for (limited) toleration and his position on the oath of allegiance are two sides of the same coin—that coin represents the kind of currency a German Catholic like Becanus needed to defend Catholicism as the supernational and unique Christian Church that has to coexist with the Protestants in a politically legitimate, if not theologically correct, manner. But the relationship between the uniqueness of the pope’s theological authority and the political promiscuity in which such authority needed to be defended is not the only aspect that the Becanus affair highlights. In fact, the Roman censure against Becanus’s book, and the multiplicity of the roles that Bellarmine played in it, help us to understand further the more general question of the delicate and fragile dynamics between center and periphery of the Catholic world. From this angle, in fact, Bellarmine was a member of that Roman hierarchy whose task it was to fine-tune the interactions between the center and the periphery. Precisely because of the way in which Bellarmine saw things from Rome, the cardinal decided to oppose Becanus’s lenient position on toleration in 1620, and indeed, one could say that the same strategy of coordinating center and periphery brought about the censure against Becanus issued by the Index, of which Bellarmine was a member. However, we should remember that Bellarmine was not simply a member of a generic “Roman hierarchy,” but within that Roman hierarchy Bellarmine’s doctrine had provoked a long and profound debate. Bellarmine’s reconfiguration of the nature of the pope’s authority both with respect to the Protestants and with respect to secular authority was not universally welcomed in Rome,

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and indeed it attracted many powerful and dangerous critics, as we have had the opportunity to see on several occasions in the course of this study. From this other angle, the fact that it was the Controversia’s “Bellarminian” aspect, not just its anti-Gallican edge, that motivated the Index’s censure against Becanus’s book, and the fact that it was Bellarmine himself whom Contzen contacted to solve the matter and who seems to have eventually managed to save Becanus’s work and name, constitute a most vivid expression of the centrality of Bellarmine’s doctrine for the developments of the theological and political physiognomy of Roman Catholicism. This means, in a sense, that Bellarmine’s doctrine was the beginning of the problem and, at the same time, the way out of it. The problem in question was the need to reconfigure the theological structure of the Catholic Church so as to make it able to retain its monopoly against both Protestants and temporal monarchies. Bellarmine’s theory, in a sense, opened up this problem because it acknowledged the existence of the problem, as opposed to going back to some form of revision of the medieval notion of the pope’s plenitudo potestatis. Bellarmine’s theory also represented the solution to the problem, even though this solution came with a price, and not everybody was willing to pay. In conclusion, Becanus and his Controversia were most definitely treated as scapegoats, but whose faults were they used to cover up, and whose needs were they used to take care of? As I have argued throughout this chapter, it was not only French Catholicism that was supposed to benefit from the Index’s censure, and indeed, as we can see from the modifications Becanus made to the second edition of the Controversia, Ubaldini’s reaction and Rome’s indifference to that reaction, the benefit of French Catholicism seemed to have been quickly forgotten in the fast developments of the affair. German interests also were protected only to a certain extent: as Contzen remarked, the needs expressed by German Catholics were easily neglected because of the pressure coming from France, and they were finally attended to only when it seemed convenient for Rome to do so. As for Rome’s convenience, this is not a simple matter either: Which branch of the Roman leadership was Becanus’s censure supposed to benefit? The diverging interests of the Society of Jesus, the Congregation of the Index, Paul V’s papacy, and, finally, Bellarmine’s own Roman perspective really come to light in a most complex and interesting way through the vicissitudes surrounding Becanus’s Controversia. In sum, Becanus was not simply the scapegoat for French Catholicism, or for German Catholicism, or for a certain way to understand the structure of Roman Catholicism. Indeed, the entire Becanus affair, including the condemnation, the propositions censured, the corrections made, the silent and secret cover-ups, and the all-too-noisy and multifaceted propaganda around the text, can be considered as the scapegoat

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for the dramatic phase of adjustment that early modern European Catholicism was going through. In a sense, the affair of the Controversia bundled up all the issues that we have seen throughout this study that were both brought up and reconfigured by Bellarmine’s doctrine of the potestas indirecta. Throughout the development of the Becanus affair, Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta was both the victim and the savior, and I cannot think of a clearer and more significant example than this duplicity to demonstrate the extent to which Bellarmine’s theory was pivotal in the development of political and religious modernity. In the next and final chapter I will show some aspects of this modernity concerning specifically the intellectual and structural physiognomy of the Church of Rome, and I will address the question of what kind of modernity we are really talking about.

7 Robert Bellarmine and the Catholic Church Questions of Power and Authority

In this study I have sought to show some of the political and theological implications of Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta. I started by interpreting Bellarmine’s theo-political theory as a response not only to the growth and consolidation of the Protestant territorial churches but also to the growth and consolidation of the political authority of early modern European sovereigns, as well as to the increasingly forceful and sophisticated theoretical elaborations on the divine character of that authority. This interpretation of Bellarmine’s theory, I have argued, gives us a tremendous amount of insight into a number of questions, ranging from the theological debates over the structure of post-Tridentine Catholicism to the political and theoretical developments of early modern monarchies. In this respect, the fact that Bellarmine’s theory did not instantaneously become a sort of “official” position of the Roman Catholic Church, but that it instead originated and fueled a number of important and at times dramatic debates within the Roman Curia as well as within and between different souls of “national” Catholicism, is a testament to the centrality of Bellarmine’s theory in the history of early modern Europe. In this final chapter I want to come back to Rome, in a sense, showing how Bellarmine saw the Catholic Church not insofar as it was a supernational empire of souls but insofar as it was a politico-administrative as well as an intellectual institution. In other words, after examining the implications of Bellarmine’s view of the pope

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as sole judge and emperor of consciences, we should investigate in greater detail how, according to Bellarmine, the pope’s empire actually worked, that is, where the mechanisms and the dynamics of power in the pope’s empire should be located, and how they should function in order to make sure that the pope could exercise his supreme spiritual authority as effectively as possible. In order to accomplish this task, I propose to examine in detail two sets of questions that Bellarmine took into consideration at different times throughout his intellectual life. The first concerns the relationship between the pope and the bishops in the Catholic Church; the second concerns the role that Bellarmine assigned to the Catholic Church in contemporary intellectual debates, and, more specifically, in contemporary debates over natural philosophy. Although these topics seem very different from one another in nature and, indeed, have never been seen as linked by contemporary scholarship, I argue that they are two pieces of the same puzzle, and that the central part of that puzzle is the doctrine of the potestas indirecta. Once we insert those pieces into the entire puzzle, I believe that we can gain some important insight into the significance of Bellarmine’s theory not simply in the context of early modern European religious and political history but also with regard to certain important features that we see as fundamental components of religious and political modernity. More specifically, I think that Bellarmine’s considerations on the institutional and intellectual structure of the Church, seen alongside his considerations on the nature of the supremacy of the pope in temporal affairs, are part of a distinctive view of power and authority. Thus, the last section of this chapter investigates Bellarmine’s view of authority in historical and theoretical terms by examining his theo-political project through the lenses of Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty and Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony.

The Institutional Structure of the Church: De Officio Primario Summi Pontificis In the fall of 1600, Pope Clement VIII wrote a letter to his nephew and secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, who had returned to Rome over the summer after a two-year sojourn in Ferrara—a city that Clement VIII had succeeded in annexing, with the help of Henri IV, to the papal territories after the death of the childless Duke Alfonso d’Este. In the early fall of 1600, Pietro Aldobrandini was traveling again, this time directed to France, where he was sent to participate in the negotiation between Henri IV, Spain, and Savoy for the restitution of Saluzzo, occupied by Henri, to Carlo Emanuele, Duke of

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Savoy.1 The pope wrote to his nephew to tell him that “a few days after your departure Cardinal Bellarmine gave us a long text, in which he showed us the danger of damnation that we were in because of the provisions for the bishoprics. . . . you should see what kind of account this is, and under threat of hell.”2 The account with those hellish threats to which the pope referred was a short text entitled De officio primario Summi Pontificis, which Bellarmine composed sometime before October 1600 and which was never published, even though it enjoyed a large circulation in manuscript form.3 The text was structured as an admonition to the pope on his responsibilities concerning the appointment of bishops and on the danger that the pope and the whole Church incurred when bishops were not swiftly and properly selected. In this context, Bellarmine singled out a series of problems that he saw happening in the Church of his own day, starting with the question of vacant churches and of churches whose bishops were not up to the episcopal task. Bellarmine reminded the pope that both canon law and the writings of the fathers attributed to the pontiff as shepherd of the Church the task of providing their churches with proper leaders; thus the pope was to be held accountable if some churches lacked their bishops or if the appointed bishops were not worthy of that dignity.4 Bellarmine insisted on the upsetting frequency of appointment of people who were not fit to be bishops: “I was terrified when I saw two or three times in the holy Consistory some people being promoted to be cardinal-bishops who either for their excessive senility, or for the great weakness of their heath, or for lack of episcopal virtues, could be judged not only not the most useful, but indeed hardly useful or apt at all to rule souls.”5 To make matters worse, Bellarmine remarked that many considered a bishopric as something to grab, rather than a dignity to which one is called, which was against the practice of the primitive Church, since, as Gregory the Great had already declared, “the right order is to seek people for a bishopric, not that people seek a bishopric.”6 But even some of those churches that did have a bishop who, in principle, was capable of performing his episcopal duties were suffering because too many bishops, according to Bellarmine, failed to reside in their dioceses, thereby explicitly contradicting the dictates of the Council of Trent that established that bishops had to reside in their dioceses “praecepto divino,” “by divine precept.” Bellarmine elaborated at length on the impedimenta residentiae, the reasons that certain bishops—and Bellarmine named names in his text7 were allowed to forsake their dioceses, and in particular he found two categories of impedimenta to be especially troublesome. On the one hand, there were the numerous and, for Bellarmine, unjustified exceptions and dispensations granted by the pope to allow certain bishops to remain in Rome, “either wasting their time or occupying it in things that could be done easily by other men. . . .

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I do not deny that the supreme Pontiff can exempt for certain reasons and for a certain time some bishops from their residency, but I do not know whether it may please God that such a great number of bishops for such a long time are absent from their churches with such a great detriment to the souls.”8 On the other hand, another set of impediments was constituted by the many political and administrative functions that bishops were called to perform. Some bishops, for instance, served also as apostolic nuncios, and for this reason they spent many years without even seeing their churches, while other bishops served also as secular governors of certain provinces. Of this latter situation Bellarmine wrote: “I confess I ignore the reason with which they justify this,” since the apostle Paul and also the fathers of the Church in many passages had clearly prohibited those who have pastoral care from meddling in secular affairs.9 The text continues to enumerate other examples of what Bellarmine saw as a dangerous intervention of worldly concerns, both administrative and more properly political, in the selection and appointment of bishops, and it identifies the culprits as both the bishops themselves and those in charge of selecting them. For instance, Bellarmine condemned the phenomenon of what he called “spiritual polygamy,” that is, the fact that in certain cases the pope granted to the same bishop the care of multiple churches, a practice that was intended to increase the revenues of the bishop but that in fact violated both canon and divine law.10 Another set of problems was created by the manner in which bishops were transferred from one church to another, which was especially evident in the case of the Spanish bishops, who were appointed not by the pope but by the king, on the basis of the privilege that Pope Adrian VI had granted to Charles V in 1523. “According to the canons and the custom of the old Church,” Bellarmine remarked, “the transfer of bishops must not occur unless it is for the Church’s necessity or greater utility, since the churches are not instituted for the bishops, but bishops are instituted for the churches . . . now, however, we see daily that transfers happen only for this one reason, that bishops might be enriched with either prestige or wealth.”11 In sum, underlying the arguments made by Bellarmine in his memo there was a vigorous assertion of the spiritual, rather than temporal, centrality of the episcopate for the benefit of the spiritual, rather than temporal, authority of the Church. Based on this principle, then, Bellarmine chastised all those behaviors that contradicted the central spiritual character of the episcopate, both on the part of the Church officials—in primis the pope—in charge of appointing bishops and on the part of those selected for the office. That Bellarmine’s concerns in this text did not meet with the pope’s approval is very clear from Clement’s reaction to the memo, expressed both in the letter he sent to Pietro Aldobrandini immediately

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after receiving the document and in the comments he wrote on the margins of the document itself.12 The tone of Clement’s replies to Bellarmine’s complaints was firm, though defensive at times: the pope acknowledged the dangers involved in selecting less-than-perfect people as bishops, and in that selection process he admitted that “we have sinned and we continue to sin.” Nevertheless, the pope remarked, it was difficult to find the right people, and even in those cases where the pope sought and obtained detailed information on a candidate from a third party, he often found out that those informants “either had deceived us or had themselves been deceived by others.”13 Clement acknowledged that some bishops spent more time in Rome than in their own dioceses, but he was also ready to justify the exceptions and privileges he granted to the absentee bishops whom Bellarmine mentioned specifically. In one case, for instance, the bishop in question had a coadjutant who helped him to take care of the diocese while the bishop was in Rome, while in another case the bishop was a good theologian, and therefore he was needed in Rome for consultation.14 The question of practicality as an important factor to take into account when examining the discrepancies between the ideal and the actual manner of appointing bishops and in carrying forth the episcopal office is central to Clement’s replies to Bellarmine, and, indeed, the pope time and time again framed the questions raised by the Jesuit cardinal as questions of theory versus practice. For instance, commenting on Bellarmine’s assertion that the episcopal dignity was an honor to be bestowed, rather than an appointment to grab, Clement replied that “those things can be indeed said, but, when we come to practice, we stumble over many difficulties.” In other words, it was very well to say that nobody who asked for a bishopric should be given one because such a request showed that the candidate lacked the humility necessary to fulfill the eminently spiritual episcopal duties, but if bishoprics were to be assigned only to people who did not ask for them, many dioceses would remain vacant.15 The insistence on practicality became especially forceful when Clement defended himself against Bellarmine’s remarks according to which considerations of political and administrative benefits surpassed spiritual considerations in managing the appointment and the behavior of bishops. Responding to Bellarmine’s comment regarding the disadvantages caused by the practice of appointing bishops as apostolic nuncios, the pope assertively affirmed that “we think it most convenient that the nuncios are also bishops” and justified the practice of appointing bishops to the office of nuncios on the basis of both the internal political dynamics of the Church (since nuncios have, in certain cases, jurisdiction over bishops, it was more fitting for a bishop to be ruled by another bishop), and the political capital that the nuncios-bishops could provide for the

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Catholic Church in its relationship with the secular authorities (nuncios who are also bishops, Clement wrote, “carry more authority with princes and peoples”). It would be good, Clement admitted, if the position of nuncios rotated more frequently among bishops, but that was made difficult by the “great lack of men.”16 Clement used the same assertive tone and the same kind of practical justification when dealing with Bellarmine’s remarks on the corrupt manner in which certain bishops, especially in Spain, were transferred. Clement affirmed that “we do not transfer [bishops] easily” and argued that in Spain the issue of episcopal transfer was complicated by the fact that the king of Spain enjoyed the right to appoint bishops. Thus, Clement advised Bellarmine to consider “how many difficulties we would incur if now that faculty was taken away from the King; nevertheless we have not failed to warn the King regarding this problem directly ourselves and through our nuncio.”17 Thus, the exchange between Bellarmine and Clement in this document seems to pit two different views of the role of the episcopate within the Catholic Church against one another; indeed, current scholarship on this document has interpreted it mainly as evidence of a politico-ecclesiological battle, which Bellarmine fought (and lost) against certain politico-ecclesiological developments of post-Tridentine Catholicism. By contrast, I want to argue that Bellarmine’s “episcopal moment” was the ecclesiological consequence of his theological and political project, aimed to strengthen the authority of the pope over the Church and against Protestantism and early modern monarchies. Two scholars have paid special attention to Bellarmine’s memo, Klaus Jaitner and Paolo Prodi. Their interpretations, albeit slightly different, are nevertheless informed by the same kind of politico-ecclesiological considerations. According to Jaitner, the exchange between Bellarmine and Clement has to be put in the context of the larger contrast between those Catholic leaders who insisted on the relative independence of the authority of bishops against the tendency of the papacy, increasingly pressing over the second half of the sixteenth century, to centralize the government of the Church.18 This contrast was of course not new in the history of the Catholic Church, but it underwent an important development at the Council of Trent, where the reforming wing of the cardinals sought and failed to pass a decree affirming that the bishops’ residency was of divine law, against the papalist party, which opposed this statement because it represented a potentially dangerous hurdle in the attempt to enforce a more centralized system of government controlled directly from Rome. The fight ended with the compromise according to which bishops had to reside in their own dioceses “by divine precept,” though not “by divine law,” which is the formula that Bellarmine quoted at the beginning of the memo to

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Clement. After Trent, a number of influential figures, especially Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, continued to assert, unsuccessfully, a certain degree of independence for episcopal authority against papal centralization, up until the pontificate of Sixtus V, with whom Paleotti had a very hostile relationship.19 According to Jaitner’s interpretation, then, when Bellarmine insisted on the rigorous application of the Tridentine norms that highlighted the need to enforce the bishops’ obligation to reside in their dioceses as a step toward the renewal and reform of the Church, he joined Paleotti and his associates’ fight. And just as Paleotti’s vision was crushed by Sixtus’s aggressively “absolutist” view of the papacy, so Bellarmine’s plea to the pope to respect the decrees of Trent clashed with Clement’s way of governing the Church. This parallel trajectory, according to Jaitner, is an indication that the process of centralization in the Church was already well under way in Clement’s pontificate, and that despite the fact that Clement and Sixtus had different theological and ecclesiological personalities, they were nevertheless both pushing a process of centralization that was impossible to halt.20 While for Jaitner the story of the De officio primario is a story of a lost battle in a longer ecclesiological fight, according to Prodi, Bellarmine’s defense of episcopacy, though also a story of a lost battle, is not simply the expression of an ecclesiological battle between episcopal and papal government but of a more general politico-ecclesiological battle to halt the process of progressive “politicization” of the government of the Church. This “politicization” of the government of the Church, according to Prodi, was motivated by the need of the post-Tridentine papacy to facilitate the development of a centralized government within the Church, following the model offered by the contemporary political and administrative evolution of early modern monarchies. The forms that this process of “politicization” of the Roman Church took during the second half of the sixteenth century were several: for instance, the power of cardinal-legates over the authority of the local bishops grew progressively; clerical exemptions were increasingly enforced (we will recall that Bellarmine was obliged to revise his own view of clerical exemption on the basis of this enforcement); and more and more bishops started to neglect their spiritual duties as shepherds of their flocks in order to attend personally to matters of secular government, which was one of the issues expressly mentioned by Bellarmine in his memorandum.21 All those instances were signs, according to Prodi, that by the time Bellarmine wrote his De officio primario to Clement, this process was “in its already fully developed phase,” which makes it “surprising enough” that Bellarmine, who is commonly credited with strengthening papal absolutism, would denounce it in a manner that “could not have been more clear and decisive in the writings of a Sarpi or a De Dominis.”22 In Prodi’s reading, then, once again Bellarmine ends up on the

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losing side of the historical battle for the centralization of the papal monarchy. Indeed, if we recall Prodi’s own judgment on Bellarmine’s lack of engagement with the historical “interweaving” between political and theological spheres in the historical form of the papal state of Bellarmine’s own time,23 we have a coherent argument according to which Bellarmine seemed to have, in a sense, “missed the boat” because he failed to understand the profound implications of the transformation of the papal monarchy into a centralized organism, which blended in a peculiar way spiritual and temporal authority in its own bureaucratic apparatus. I think that both Prodi and Jaitner are, to a certain extent, right to interpret Bellarmine’s memo as “out of touch” with certain political and administrative developments of the Roman Curia. However, focusing only on what Bellarmine missed, so to speak, should not distract us from examining the other side of the question, that is to say, what Bellarmine gained, or, better, what Bellarmine thought the pope could gain by abandoning some of those centralizing and politicizing pretenses and allowing a greater degree of independence and authority to the bishops. To understand also this part of the story, I propose to reread Bellarmine’s memo, paying more attention to how his position in this document accords with his general theo-political project; in other words, I propose to interpret Bellarmine’s defense of episcopacy as an integral part of his potestas indirecta. First of all, we should note that Bellarmine was very explicit in making linkages between his position on bishops and his more general politico-theological project, right at the start of the De officio primario. In fact, the very beginning of the memo reads: “The supreme Pontiff holds three roles [personae] in the Church of God: he is the pastor and ruler of the universal Church, the bishop of the city of Rome proper, and the temporal prince of the ecclesiastical territories. But among all of his duties, the care for all churches holds the first place: this is in fact the first, unique, and supreme duty.” There are, Bellarmine continues, many bishops in the Church, and some of them preside over “most noble cities,” just as there are many and powerful temporal princes in the Catholic Christendom, “but the Pope alone is the Pontiff of the entire world, the general Vicar of Christ, the universal pastor of the Church.” The pope’s empire of souls, then, precisely because of its spiritual nature, has no limits, and for this reason the pope is the absolute supreme authority over the entire Catholic world: “The bishopric of the city of Rome has its own boundaries, and quite narrow at that, and likewise also the temporal dominion of the Church; but the Supreme Pontiff has no boundaries in the world, aside from those boundaries which the world itself has.”24 Thus, in the introduction to his memo Bellarmine explicitly recognized the pope’s “double body” and equally explicitly subordinated one

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body to the other: Bellarmine willingly acknowledged the temporal sovereignty of the pope over the papal state as an important component of papal authority, but he asserted that the other kind of sovereignty, that is, the pope’s imperial authority over souls, was more important than the pope’s properly political authority, since only the spiritual authority was unique, and therefore superior, with respect to the authority of any other religious or political leader. The same point is reiterated clearly in the other, shorter, piece that Bellarmine wrote between 1600 and 1601 on the relationship between bishops and the pope, a piece entitled De reformatione, in which Bellarmine argued that the pope, for the sake of his own authority, should see to it that episcopal authority was maintained and fostered in line with the guidelines provided by the Council of Trent.25 Indeed, in this text Bellarmine argued that if the pope wanted to strengthen his leadership over the universal Church, he should not only strengthen episcopal authority and see to it that the right people were appointed to the office of bishop, but he ought to subordinate his political sovereignty over the city of Rome to his own episcopal office in the diocese of Rome. “The Pope,” Bellarmine wrote, “should reform, first of all, his Curia and his person”: he should behave like a model bishop by preaching whenever possible, by always writing his own sermons even though he cannot deliver them in person, and by personally visiting his own parishes at least once. Of course, Bellarmine acknowledged, the pope should also see to it that his temporal possessions were administered properly, but he should have done it “more through other people than by himself,” since “the Pope should consider himself not as a temporal prince, but as a bishop. The administration of the church of Rome, in fact, has not been given to the Pontiff alone.”26 Thus, while in the De officio primario Bellarmine had identified the three main functions of the pope, and had put one (i.e., the pope’s role as universal emperor of souls) over the other two (i.e., the pope’s episcopal and temporal office with respect to the diocese and city of Rome), in the De reformatione Bellarmine maintained the first function at the top of the hierarchy and indeed subordinated the pope’s role as temporal sovereign of Rome to his role as bishop of Rome. In this respect, then, for Bellarmine the roles of the pope as spiritual leader of both the universal Church and the diocese of Rome trumped the role of the pope as temporal leader of the papal state. This means that while between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the papacy realized that by blending political and religious functions the pope could be a “better” temporal prince than any other temporal prince, for Bellarmine the papacy should realize that its sovereignty was not just better than any temporal prince’s sovereignty but was indeed unlike any other temporal prince’s sovereignty. For Bellarmine, merging political and religious concerns at an administrative level

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could gain some political strength for the pope, but in so doing the pope would lose the uniqueness and supremacy of his empire over souls: it was only the pope’s role as supreme spiritual judge of consciences, and not his centralized political authority, that could guarantee supremacy.27 In this respect, Bellarmine’s defense of the spiritual authority of bishops was not simply a way to counteract the papacy’s centralizing tendencies, as Paleotti had done, but rather a way to increase the papacy’s absolute and unique spiritual dominion over souls. Since the pope’s most relevant role was that of holding the absolute spiritual authority over the Christians’ souls, bishops became the local ramifications of that spiritual authority; and since the bishops’ main task was that of carrying forth this spiritual leadership, they needed to be selected on the basis of their prowess and excellence in spiritual, not temporal, matters. In my reading, therefore, Bellarmine’s memo should be interpreted neither as simply a reiteration of the Tridentine debates over episcopal authority, and thus as a reformulation of the position of Gabriele Paleotti and like-minded figures, nor as simply as a sort of “reactionary” move on the part of Bellarmine against a specific administrative development of the post-Tridentine centralized papal monarchy. Rather, Bellarmine’s memo should be seen as an attempt on the part of the Jesuit to frame the need for episcopal reform as part of a “new way of doing business” with respect to the Counter-Reformation papacy of his own time. The business in question was certainly the theoretical affirmation and practical strengthening of the supremacy of the Catholic Church and of the pope’s authority in the face of early modern Protestant territorial churches and early modern monarchies, and in this respect Bellarmine’s theo-political project was perfectly in line with some of the central aspects of post-Tridentine Catholicism. The novelty of Bellarmine’s solution, however, concerned the way to go about affirming and strengthening this supremacy. For Sixtus and Clement and a great part of the Roman Curia in Bellarmine’s day, the road to supremacy passed through the strengthening and tightening of the political structure of the papal monarchy by exploiting the distinctive blend of temporal and spiritual power that the pope, alone among all other temporal princes, could claim. For Bellarmine, by contrast, the road to supremacy passed through the reinforcement of the spiritual hegemony that the pope alone could claim over temporal princes on the basis of his purely spiritual authority. To put it differently, for Clement, some of his predecessors, and some of his successors, the pope could and did in fact become a “prince-plus,” and the papal monarchy could and did become a “monarchy-plus”; for Bellarmine the pope was not a prince but an emperor of souls, which put the papal empire at a different and superior level than the other temporal monarchies precisely by virtue of its substantially different nature.

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My reading of Bellarmine’s “episcopal moment” as an expression of his theo-political doctrine is further substantiated by the fact that Clement VIII was not the only pope to which Bellarmine expressed his concerns on the issue of bishops. In the fall of 1612 Bellarmine was spending a brief period of rest from his many obligations in Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, the novitiate of the Jesuits in Rome, and from there he wrote to Pope Paul V that in the time he spent reading the gospel and thinking about his own faults, “I found, among my other faults, a fear . . . that I have always had not to offend Your Holiness, if I had presented you what I thought on the common good of the Church.”28 Thus, following the example of Ambrose, who did not fear to counsel the emperor according to his own conscience and with absolute freedom, Bellarmine decided to include a short memo to the pope, specifying that anything he put in it came out of his sincere affection toward the pope, and that the document “could be beneficial, or not detrimental, since this is a secret text and nobody has seen it, and Your Holiness can tear it and burn it, if you think it is not appropriate.”29 The enclosed memo, in Latin, contained four considerations on different canons established at the Council of Trent, which, according to Bellarmine, had not been implemented successfully, and which were nevertheless most necessary for the benefit of the Church.30 The first consideration concerned the obligation for bishops to reside in their dioceses: not only that obligation, Bellarmine remarked, was established at the Council of Trent, but Domingo de Soto, “a man equally pious and learned,” discussing bishops’ residency in his volumes De iustitia et iure, wrote that while a cardinal who never visited Rome in order to reside in his bishopric could be sure of the salvation of his soul, the same could not be said for a cardinal who failed to reside in his own church in order to assist the pope in Rome. Thus, Bellarmine explained, “If he who does not reside in order to assist the Vicar of Christ in matters concerning the universal Church is in such great danger of his eternal salvation, what would happen to others, who do not reside for minor reasons?”31 Bellarmine’s second consideration referred to matrimonial dispensations, which according to the Jesuit were given by the supreme pontiff with excessive frequency, while his third consideration concerned, once again, episcopal questions, namely, the problem that in the De officio primario he defined as “spiritual polygamy,” and in this memo Bellarmine defines, with more sobriety, as the “multiplication of benefices.” There was nothing sober, however, in the tone that Bellarmine used to condemn this practice: it was “odious” not only because it contradicted blatantly the decrees of the Council of Trent that prohibited it, but it also contradicted the opinion of Aquinas on the subject, virtually unanimously shared by Catholic theologians. Aquinas, in fact, argued that

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since accumulating benefices was contrary to both human and divine law, even those men who were granted by the pope an exception to the rule for serious reasons were “safe in the human forum, but not in the divine forum.”32 The fourth and final consideration concerned the behavior of bishops, which, according to Bellarmine, should conform to their roles as spiritual, not administrative or political, leaders of their flocks. In particular, the Council of Trent established that “bishops and Cardinals must enjoy frugal meals and simple provisions” and should not use their patrimony to enrich their family members, since “ecclesiastical goods are the patrimony of the poor.” Instead, Bellarmine complained that “today we see few rich Cardinals or Bishops who do not seek to enrich their relatives and who do not care for possessing most precious objects.” Indeed, Bellarmine declared that he had begun to see that year with his own eyes cardinals furnishing their homes and carriages with exorbitant luxury: for instance, the adornments of furniture in the chambers of some cardinals were made out of golden fabric.33 The fact that Bellarmine, as we can see from this document, remained committed to the same positions he took on episcopal matters in 1600 even in 1612 is very significant. In 1600 Bellarmine had just recently been promoted to the cardinalate, and he had begun to see his academic and theological prestige grow more and more in Rome after the troubled times his Controversiae had faced during the pontificate of Sixtus V. Moreover, in 1600 the Roman Curia was in the middle of the controversy de auxiliis, which saw Bellarmine pitted against Clement precisely on the extent to which a direct papal intervention in matters of theology was desirable and appropriate, and which constitutes the background of the relationship between the pope and the Jesuit Cardinal against which the De officio primario should be seen. In 1612, however, the situation was very different. The controversy de auxiliis had been solved, albeit without a strong theological condemnation of either position, and the Church of Rome had to deal with the political backlash of Bellarmine’s theory of the potestas indirecta in a number of dramatic crises, from the controversy over the Venetian Interdetto to the oath of allegiance. In this context, the fact that Bellarmine presented to Paul V the same kind of complaints he presented to Clement VIII at the same time as he was acting (and as he was being perceived) as the most effective and high-profile defender of papal authority throughout Protestant and Catholic Europe is very indicative of the fact that Bellarmine saw his episcopal position as intimately connected with his political and theological project. In other words, once again, Bellarmine thought that fixing the episcopal problems was an important part of his theo-political project aimed at maintaining and strengthening the pope’s absolute domination over Europe.

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Pope Paul V, like Clement VIII before him, was not exactly receptive to Bellarmine’s suggestions. As the pope’s own comments on Bellarmine’s short memo attest, Paul was not willing to have his own centralized authority questioned. To Bellarmine’s first remark on bishops who neglected their own diocese for Rome, supported by a quotation from Soto, Paul responded with a quotation of his own, this time from Gregory of Valencia, according to whom “the Cardinals can be ordered [to be] in the Roman Curia whenever their presence and assistance is either useful or necessary to the Universal Church.”34 Behind Paul’s brusque and curt remark, then, there is the implicit affirmation that it was the pope’s task to figure out what exactly was useful or necessary to the Church, and that therefore any decision made by the pope as to how to deploy his bishops was not a matter for discussion. As to matrimonial dispensations, the pope was equally brusque in stating that they are granted only when the pope thinks it appropriate. The same rationale was behind the pope’s reply to the question of the multiplicity of benefices: “The Pope usually makes dispensations on the multiplicity of benefices after considering the quality of the people and of the places.”35 Finally, on Bellarmine’s moralizing remarks on the quality of the cardinals’ meals and lodging, Paul invited Bellarmine to “get some information on the quality of the food regularly served” at the clergymen’s tables, and he reminded the Jesuit that any donation made by a cardinal to any relative, “if it is made, is made modestly and does not come from ecclesiastical revenues.” As for Bellarmine’s complaints regarding the luxury of lodging and carriages, the pope remarked that it was not a novelty for a cardinal to possess and exhibit luxury items, that “many things which would not be licit become licit because of habit and custom.”36 Especially significant is, however, the closing remark that Paul V made on Bellarmine’s memo. While Bellarmine appealed to the authority of the Council of Trent to argue that it was the duty of the pope to implement all the decrees concerning the reformation of the Church that the Council had issued, Paul V reminded Bellarmine that the Council also prescribed that all parts of those decrees “were to be understood in such a manner that in them the authority of the Apostolic See should always remain untouched.”37 With that final sentence Paul V reminded Bellarmine that the main aim of the Council of Trent, whose authority Bellarmine invoked to justify his complaints, was, after all, to strengthen papal authority; in this manner, the pope framed his own and Bellarmine’s positions in purely ecclesiological terms and opposed the two positions in a polarized contrast between episcopal and papal government, according to the very same polarizing ecclesiological logic that Clement VIII had used.

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Bellarmine, evidently, refused such a frame: his views on the relationship between pope and bishops as it appears from both memos was not a politicoecclesiological antipapalist position, but the ecclesiological consequence of the theological and political defense of the pope’s empire of souls. This is why Bellarmine remained consistent in defending his view on episcopal matters at the same time as he (and the rest of the Roman Curia) was dealing with the political repercussions of his defense of the pope’s authority as purely spiritual, and as such absolutely superior to that of temporal princes. In other words, Bellarmine did not intend to deny that “the authority of the Apostolic See should always remain untouched”; he believed that the most effective way for the pope’s authority to remain untouched was to strengthen the pope’s spiritual supremacy, achieved at the expense of his ecclesiologically and politically centralizing tendencies, but in the service of a true and long-lasting absolute sovereignty that no temporal prince and no other religious leader could ever claim or oppose. Bellarmine’s view of the role of bishops, then, should not be seen simply as a form of opposition to one of the fundamental tenets of postReformation Catholicism, that is, the need to strengthen the authority of the Apostolic See, but should instead be seen as a way to found the supremacy of the pope in the form of an absolute spiritual hegemony rather than in the form of a stronger and tighter political machine.

The Intellectual Structure of the Church: Bellarmine and Copernicanism Just as Bellarmine’s position on episcopal matters should be interpreted as an important component of Bellarmine’s theo-political theory, so, too, Bellarmine’s contribution to the debate over Copernicanism should be seen as another part of the same story. The aim of my interpretation of Bellarmine’s role in this debate is not to establish how much of a friend or an enemy Bellarmine was to Galileo Galilei, since, first of all, this question has been treated by a considerable number of scholars and, perhaps more important, it appears as a manifestation of what has been defined as a “narrative of conflict” between “good” and “bad,” which, no matter which of two sides we decide to label as “good,” seems to lead to a sort of historical dead end.38 By contrast, the aim of my interpretation of Bellarmine’s role in this debate is to illustrate more clearly the Jesuit’s position on natural philosophy as an integral component of his political and theological views of the authority of the pope over Catholic Christendom. If we look at Bellarmine’s contribution to the debate on Copernicanism from this perspective, I argue, we will be able to obtain a more coherent and more historically significant picture of

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Robert Bellarmine as a political theorist, a theologian, and a central member of the repressive apparatus that the Roman Curia had at its disposal to censor books and opinions. Certainly, I am not the first one to note that scholarship on Bellarmine presents a somewhat “schizophrenic” picture of the cardinal insofar as Copernicanism is concerned: already more than twenty years ago, Olaf Pedersen lamented that historians of religion, familiar with Bellarmine’s numerous and important theological contributions, have mainly ignored his involvement with Galileo. Likewise, historians of science have paid little attention to Bellarmine as a theologian.39 More recently a number of scholars have tried to overcome the divide between theology and natural philosophy and have concentrated on the interaction between those two perspectives. For instance, Richard Blackwell has proved how the reaction of Bellarmine, the Congregation of the Index, and the Inquisition to Galileo, at least concerning the first phase of his trial, was motivated less by an investment on the part of the Church in Aristotelian physics than by the need to defend the truth of scripture through the Church’s interpretation.40 In Blackwell’s interpretation Galileo remains a victim, just like the Society of Jesus: they were victims of the logic of “blind obedience” and doctrinal uniformity, which Blackwell saw enforced by Claudio Acquaviva.41 If Galileo paid with the censures to his books, the Jesuits paid by losing their primacy in terms of scientific elaborations: the Jesuits’ loss of intellectual edge in scientific matters is, for Blackwell “one of the casualties of the condemnation of Copernicanism.”42 While Blackwell has sought to bring to light the theological dimension of Galileo’s position on Copernicanism, Ugo Baldini has explored the scientific dimension of Bellarmine’s work. More specifically, Baldini has argued that aside from the questions of scriptural exegesis, Bellarmine’s condemnation of Galileo can be explained on the basis of “scientific” considerations. If we look at the status of heliocentrism in the early seventeenth century, Bellarmine was indeed correct to affirm that it lacked a “vera dimonstratio,” or a solid physical proof of its truth. In this respect, Baldini argued that Bellarmine’s key intuition (and mistake) was that he “treated as absolute a contingent datum of astronomy of his time . . . and considered permanent a situation that was instead destined to a very rapid evolution.”43 In this section I take these scholars’ insistence—at different levels and with different aims—on the relationship between natural philosophy and theology a step further. More specifically, I argue that Bellarmine’s opinion of the value of Copernicanism, and thus his opinion on Galileo’s natural philosophy, was a function of his project to strengthen the spiritual authority of the pope. Just as Bellarmine’s view of the pope’s indirect authority in temporal affairs created a

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profound and, at times, dramatic debate within the Roman Curia and throughout Catholic and Protestant Europe, so also his opinions on Copernicanism were less an expression of the “official” Catholic position on natural philosophy and/or scriptural exegesis than a reflection of his own theological and political views. In this respect, then, Bellarmine’s reaction to Copernicanism was as controversial and original as his theory of the potestas indirecta precisely because Bellarmine’s notion of the respublica Christiana, of which the theory of the potestas indirecta was meant to be the basis, was a novel combination of theology and political theory that required a profound and controversial redefinition of both theological priorities and political positions. According to Bellarmine, the outcome of this redefinition was to grant to the pope the role of absolute emperor of souls: this kind of spiritual supremacy was completely different from, and for this reason absolutely superior to, any other authority. Thus, just as Bellarmine’s position on the absolutely spiritual nature of the episcopal dignity was conceived as a way to strengthen the pope’s absolutely spiritual hegemony, by the same token, I want to argue, Bellarmine thought the Church should treat Copernicanism and Galileo in such a way as to allow the pope and the Church to maintain their absolute intellectual hegemony. In other words, Bellarmine was interested not so much in personally assessing Copernicanism’s philosophical and scientific value, even though, we should recall, he was inclined to believe that Copernicanism had no scientific value for the reasons already discussed by Baldini.44 Rather, Bellarmine was interested in making sure that the Catholic Church remained the sole authority in charge of making that assessment and that such assessment was made in the most “correct” manner possible, that is to say, in a manner that would allow the Church to remain both theologically unquestionable and philosophically up-to-date. This attitude does not make Bellarmine a defender of the principle of blind obedience to the Catholic Church at all costs. Rather, Bellarmine understood that if the Catholic Church wanted to maintain its intellectual hegemony, a degree of intellectual elasticity had to be employed, just as in the case of the pope’s temporal authority. Thus, between 1616 and 1620, Bellarmine devised a strategy to make sure that while the Copernican theory was being discussed and, as he thought, proved wrong, the Catholic Church remained on top of the game, as it were. With this in mind, I will examine briefly some of the documents concerning Copernicanism. On 5 March 1616 the Inquisition issued a decree suspending Copernicus’s book “donec corrigatur” and “absolutely prohibited” Paolo Foscarini’s Letter, in which the Carmelite tried to defend Copernicanism by proving it compatible with scripture.45 The message is clear: Copernicanism does not sound defensible (in fact, in February of that same year the precept not to teach Copernicanism was issued to Galileo), and while the Catholic hierarchy

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made sure Copernicanism was condemned, nobody, particularly no member of the Church, was allowed to defend it, let alone try to fit it with scripture. In the meantime, other things seemed to be happening in the realm of natural science. On 2 April 1618 the Congregation of the Index met at Robert Bellarmine’s palace to discuss a proposal made by Francesco Ingoli, who had been appointed as consultor to the Congregation of the Index two years earlier. Ingoli was proposing to emend Copernicus’s work, which had been previously suspended, because it “was most useful and necessary to astronomy.” Bellarmine and his colleagues seemed very interested, so they appointed two professors of mathematics of the Roman College, Grienberger and Grassi, to examine Ingoli’s proposal.46 On 3 July 1618 Bellarmine informed the other cardinals of the Index that Ingoli’s proposal had been approved by the Jesuit mathematicians, and that “they thought that it was certainly useful that Copernicus’s work be permitted, once it was emended and corrected according to such correction.”47 Finally, at the beginning of May 1620, the Congregation of the Index met, once again, at Bellarmine’s palace and issued a decree listing the corrections that needed to be made to Copernicus’s work. The reason the decree was issued, we read, was that “since Copernicus’s work contains many things that are very useful to the commonwealth, by unanimous consent they came to that decision: . . . that it should be permitted . . . provided that those passages in which he argues about the movement and location of the earth as fact and not hypothetically are corrected according to the following correction.”48 Now, why did Ingoli and Bellarmine decide to emend Copernicus, and what exactly was so “useful to the commonwealth”? Why did they feel that they could not throw away the baby with the dirty heliocentric water? And what was the “baby”? The “baby” was represented by the new discoveries in terms of methods and calculations that observational astronomers were making. Unlike heliocentrism, virtually impossible to prove, these appeared to be useful and solid, even though they required some corrections to accord with certain Aristotelian tenets. Ingoli, who wrote some suggestions to the Congregation of the Index on the corrections to be made to Copernicus’s work, made a specific example of how necessary it was for the Catholic Church to keep up with the new astronomical calculations: “The calendar, which the Christian people greatly need both for celebrating the Lord’s feasts and for conducting their own affairs, depends on astronomical calculations.”49 In that respect, Copernicus’s work proved very useful, as he incorporated some of the new and more accurate calculations. Another work that was considered especially useful because of the accuracy of the new measurement it presented was that of Tycho Brahe.50 Bellarmine, who wanted the Catholic Church to remain in the loop or, better, at

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the center of the loop, knew that those results and calculations could not be ignored and that some adjustments needed to be made to incorporate those new results and, at the same time, maintain the theological orthodoxy and intellectual leadership of the Catholic Church. Thus, important adjustments were made in a timely fashion, for in the same year as Copernicus’s corrections, 1620, a Jesuit astronomer, Giuseppe Biancani, a pupil of Clavius and a professor of mathematics in Bologna and Parma,51 published a book entitled Sphaera Mundi, which represented a great novelty in Catholic cosmology. As Biancani wrote in the preface to the book, important new discoveries, and in primis the invention of the telescope, had made “a new restoration necessary for the old astronomy.”52 Biancani took Aristotelian cosmology seriously, but he did not refrain from updating it when needed: “My intention and aim in this work is first to report the hypotheses of the ancients, commonly accepted, and to pursue them . . . nevertheless, I will not think that the new observations and discoveries of the moderns should be neglected.”53 This compromise between old Aristotelian structures and new results can be seen clearly in Biancani’s treatment of the contribution by Tycho Brahe, the “exactissimus observator” of the movements of the Sun, whose calculations were far more precise than those of his predecessors, including Ptolemy.54 And it was thanks to those accurate measurements that it was possible to calculate exactly the duration of an astronomical year.55 Also, Tycho was to be commended, according to Biancani, for his observations of the movements of comets, which Biancani did not consider a blow to Aristotelianism but a further refinement of it “ex accuratis observationibus.”56 Biancani’s admiration for the new discoveries of astronomers in his day extended also to Galileo himself, whose theory on the lunar spots the Jesuit discussed at length in his own chapter dedicated to the topic.57 What about heliocentrism? Here Biancani, whose “modernizing” scientific attitude had gotten him in some trouble with the hierarchy of the Society of Jesus, which censured some propositions contained in Biancani’s Loca Mathematica and Cosmographia in the 1610s because they were too bold in criticizing Aristotle,58 aligned himself with the “official,” antiheliocentric line, albeit with some regret. After quoting some ancient philosophers’ opinions on the earth’s movement—Nicetas, Philolaus, Aristarchus from Samio—the Jesuit added: “Nicholas Copernicus, a man endowed with a sharp wit and Astronomy’s renovator, in these days has resurrected this old opinion on the movement and position of the earth, and has defended it.” While this position, Biancani, wrote, could be proved with better reasons and authorities than the Ptolemaic traditional position, nevertheless it needed to be rejected, for it was “sacris literis adversa.”59 Richard Blackwell has analyzed Biancani’s case as the symbol of the Jesuit science’s “dilemma” in the early 1600s: truth or obedience. For Blackwell,

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Biancani was trying to shift that dilemma toward the truth, while the Church pushed him to obedience. The result, Biancani’s Sphaera Mundi, which was a mix of Aristotle, some Galileo, and Tycho, was, in a sense, the sad outcome of this tension. This, Blackwell argues, was the moment in which Jesuit astronomy ceased to occupy a relevant role in the intellectual debate.60 I think that Bellarmine’s role in this matter was not simply that of a censor in charge of attacking Copernicanism at all costs, for Bellarmine was not simply pushing toward obedience. Instead, he was trying to make sure that the Catholic Church retained its hegemony in scientific—as well as political—matters not by rejecting the new science tout court but by incorporating what needed to be incorporated, just as he did when “downsizing” the potestas papalis in temporalibus from direct to indirect. Only, he did not think that heliocentrism was “true” enough to justify the immense labor of scriptural exegesis that Bellarmine had mentioned to Foscarini as necessary in order to accord Copernicanism with scripture. In a sense, between 1616 and 1620 one has a glimpse of Bellarmine’s strategy at its most effective: this strategy did not aim simply to condemn Copernicanism; instead, and more important, it aimed to strengthen the Church’s hegemony in the realm of natural philosophy. First, in the second half of the 1610s, Copernicanism appeared extremely dangerous, and while the Catholic censorship as well as the professors of mathematics and physics at the Roman College assessed just how dangerous it was, Bellarmine made sure that Galileo (or Foscarini) stayed out of it. In 1620 heliocentrism looked worse and worse: it could and should not be “true”—it was both contrary to scripture and “scientifically” impossible to prove—but some of the new observations and calculations made by Copernicus himself and by other astronomers such as Tycho Brahe seemed solid and useful enough. So a Jesuit, Biancani, was in charge–with some help from the Jesuit censors—of applying the newly embraced results in a “safe” venue, while Copernicus’s book, very “useful” in this respect, got some touch-ups. The only problem now concerned Tycho Brahe, the author of some of those new and solid astronomical calculations, whom both Biancani and Ingoli mentioned with esteem. Tycho was, in fact, a heretic. Bellarmine, however, could fix that problem, too. In the same year, 1620, Bellarmine in fact prepared a censure of Tycho’s Progymnasmata—we should remember that Tycho’s work was published in 1602, almost twenty years before the censure. Bellarmine’s censure begins by recognizing that there were many indications that Tycho was indeed a heretic, since in his works he praised heretics such as Luther, Melanchthon, and Beze. On the other hand, however, after Tycho’s death his children had dedicated their father’s book to the Catholic emperor Rudolph and had defined their own father “piae memoriae virum,” so maybe, just maybe, Tycho could have become Catholic at some point. What to do with the book, then? No

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problem: “Posset fortasse corrigi liber” by taking out Tycho’s praises of the Lutherans and his dedicatory epistles to Lutheran princes.61 I am not interested in pursuing now the question of Galileo’s role in this project or, better, the question of the many political contingencies, theological controversies, and issues of patronage that can explain to what extent Galileo was aware of the complex intellectual, theological, and political knots in which Copernicanism and his own case were entangled. Indeed, not only is the Galileo affair one of the most studied and hotly debated topics in early modern history, but scholars are still producing new and controversial interpretations of why exactly Galileo was condemned.62 My aim in this section is simply to show the benefit, as I see it, of inserting and interpreting Bellarmine’s role in the Galileo affair as part of a larger project that the Jesuit theologian had been constructing and implementing since the 1580s. This project, I argue, was nothing less than the construction of a new Christiana respublica centered upon the souls, rather than the bodies, of European subjects: precisely for the sake of ruling this empire of souls, Bellarmine argued, the pope needed to strengthen, affirm, and maintain his spiritual supremacy, and the Church needed to control, reshape, and adapt to every aspect of European intellectual debates, including those on natural philosophy. Thus, Bellarmine’s view of the Christian commonwealth and of the role of the pope as supreme emperor of souls implied a distinctive notion of authority and power. This notion was, as we have seen, supernational and spiritual. It is this distinctive notion of power and authority that holds together, theoretically and also historically, Bellarmine’s reflections on the spiritual authority of the pope, to which the pope’s temporal authority should be subordinated; on the intellectual hegemony of the Church, for the sake of which Bellarmine facilitated the emendation of Tycho Brahe’s work; and on the absolutely spiritual nature of the pope’s authority in temporal matters, on which Bellarmine based his defense of the supremacy of the pope with respect to Catholic and Protestant temporal sovereigns. It is now time to turn to a closer analysis of the significance of Bellarmine’s notion of authority in the context of the development of the religious and political history of early modern Europe, for this analysis can provide us with important elements to interpret the traces that Bellarmine’s theories left in our understanding of religious and political modernity.

Final Thoughts on Religious and Political Modernity: Robert Bellarmine, Carl Schmitt, and Antonio Gramsci In examining the traces Bellarmine’s theories left in the political and religious history of Europe, I should probably start from the relatively obvious statement

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that the choices Bellarmine made to keep the Catholic Church as a hegemonic intellectual institution, just like the choices he suggested to Clement VIII and Paul V to strengthen and defend episcopal authority, were wrong, in the sense that in both cases Bellarmine ended up on the losing side of the battles he decided to fight. Not only did Clement VIII and Paul V reject his proposals, but also Clement’s and Paul’s successors on the throne of St. Peter continued, and indeed increased, their efforts to centralize and politicize the papal state. Bellarmine was also wrong in his assessment of Copernicanism: in fact, Newton’s Principia was published less than seventy years after Bellarmine’s death. Between Galileo’s trial and the publication of Newton’s Principia, the new mechanical science completely overturned Aristotelian cosmology and physics, and not long after Newton’s time, mechanical science also challenged, and to an extent destroyed, the monopoly of the Catholic Church in matters of natural philosophy and of learning in general. The supremacy that Bellarmine intended his theories to grant to the pope with respect to early modern European monarchies also failed to materialize in the terms in which Bellarmine hoped it would. The European monarchs put up a mighty fight against Bellarmine’s plans for the control of their subjects’ consciences, and the Catholic Church itself decided to play a strictly political game rather than follow Bellarmine’s road of the absolutely spiritual supremacy. In sum, with the benefit of hindsight that is offered to scholars working in the twenty-first century and in the Western world, it seems clear that the kind of absolute supremacy that Bellarmine envisioned for the pope as emperor of souls never happened. But does this mean that Bellarmine’s theo-political project utterly failed to leave lasting traces? Or, better, does this mean that Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta should be considered simply as a phenomenon of the complex noumenon that we call “post-Reformation Catholicism,” and, as such, completely crushed and annihilated by the progressive march of historical and secular modernity? A good way to go about assessing Bellarmine’s role in political and religious modernity is to ask the same question that Benedetto Croce asked about Hegel’s philosophy, that is, what is living and what is dead in Bellarmine’s theory?63 We can start to answer this question by saying that what is definitely dead about Bellarmine is the more intrinsically Counter-Reformation aspects of his potestas indirecta. More specifically, the final goal of Bellarmine’s theory, that is, to maintain and strengthen papal authority over Catholic Christendom, a goal that Bellarmine shared with the Counter-Reformation Church, has been definitely destroyed, both historically and theoretically. Historically, as Franco Motta put it, “The project of universal monarchy of the Counter-Reformation . . . in a few decades [after Bellarmine’s time] would be nothing but one of the

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many illusions of power burned in the great pyre of the Thirty Years’ War.”64 In fact, from the point of view of the historical possibility of a universal papal monarchy, the Peace of Westphalia, which recognized the principle of territorial supremacy over religious affiliation, diminished greatly the political influence of the papacy over the European states. In a way, the French Revolution, which assigned a certain sacred dimension to politics, completed the process by marking a decisive victory for the temporal sovereign over the spiritual, and not just the temporal, authority of the Church. While by the end of the eighteenth century Bellarmine’s project, along with the overall vision of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, collapsed historically, theoretically speaking it was Thomas Hobbes who inflicted a deadly wound to Bellarmine’s theory via Carl Schmitt. In fact, in the (admittedly very rare) instances in which Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta is examined in a wider theoretical framework, the name of Carl Schmitt and his interpretation of Hobbes’s role in the development of political modernity recur most often as the almost unique point of reference to evaluate Bellarmine’s political theory.65 According to Schmitt, political modernity can be described as a process of the secularization of theological concepts, which brings about the realization that “the political is total,” as Schmitt wrote in the preface to the second edition of his Political Theology.66 When describing this process in historical terms, Schmitt presents Hobbes as the first modern political thinker insofar as he “defended the natural unity of spiritual and secular power” against “distinctions and pseudoconcepts of a potestas indirecta that demands obedience without being able to protect . . . and exercise power by way of indirect powers on which it devolves responsibility.” In this judgment Schmitt does not simply hint at Bellarmine but clearly indicates that it was the Jesuit theorist that he had in mind as the champion of the people against whom Hobbes fought and won: according to Schmitt, “nobody refuted Bellarmine better than he [Hobbes].”67 If we apply this theoretical framework to the work of Bellarmine, as Franco Motta has done, we find that in Schmitt’s theoretical trajectory Bellarmine represents one of the most vivid examples of a “reactionary” thinker who resisted the modern move toward a concept of sovereignty, which is “totalizing” insofar as it is centered upon the absolute rule of the territorial sovereign as opposed to the “a-territorial” and supernational confessional identity of the subjects. In this respect, then, the theoretical interpretation resonates with, and indeed runs parallel to, the historical interpretation of Bellarmine’s theory as a “failed attempt” against the modern, territorial form of sovereignty that triumphed after Westphalia. Discussing the contrast between Bellarmine and James Stuart in Schmittian terms, in fact, Motta argues that such contrast represents the conflict between Bellarmine’s notion of a ruler’s legitimacy “founded on religious

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affiliation” and James’s notion of a rule’s legitimacy “founded on the effective control of space.” The latter is the notion “to which Carl Schmitt refers the original nucleus of modern sovereignty” and which was to be asserted after Westphalia, against both Bellarmine’s theoretical elaboration and the CounterReformation papacy’s political project.68 Thus, if we think of Bellarmine’s theory as a means to an end, and if the end of Bellarmine’s theory (and also, more generally, of Counter-Reformation Catholicism) was to maintain and strengthen papal supremacy over Europe, then it is clear that both historically and theoretically the project failed.69 However, I think that this interpretation has some faults. First of all, it flattens Bellarmine’s theory completely on a certain specific form of CounterReformation papalism, which, as I have tried to show on several occasions in the course of this study, is not a historically and theoretically correct statement to make. Indeed, the conflict between Bellarmine and important members of the Roman Curia (including more than one pope) was very profound—in fact so profound that it manifested itself in different political, theological, and ecclesiological forms; in many different geopolitical contexts; and on many different occasions from the late 1580s all through the 1610s, at times with a dramatic intensity. This contrast, I have argued, should be taken seriously because it is an indication that the Roman Curia was not a monolithic well-oiled machine engineered to defend with a monolithic strategy the interests of the pope. Rather, the heart of European Catholicism after the Reformation was itself undergoing a series of important modifications and adjustments that were far from being uncontroversial and for which Bellarmine’s own theory served as both the catalyst and the solution. Second, interpreting Bellarmine as simply a part, albeit distinctive, of postReformation Catholicism might carry the risk of highlighting too much the end at the expense of the means. In other words, while it is certainly true that Bellarmine’s theory supported papal supremacy, and in this respect its goal was the same as the goal of the post-Tridentine papacy, the manner in which it did so was indeed remarkable. If, as I put it earlier, Bellarmine’s theory was a new way to do business, then the business in question (i.e., papal supremacy) might have failed historically and theoretically, but the novelty of Bellarmine’s new way, I argue, is still alive. To assess the significance of Bellarmine’s theory from the point of view of the means by which he sought to strengthen the pope’s authority, rather than from the point of view of the intended outcome of his project, I propose to take seriously Bellarmine’s insistence on the spiritual role of the pope as emperor of souls as the unique, distinctive, and supreme kind of authority that the pope, alone among all the other temporal and spiritual rulers, could claim. It is to this

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spiritual authority that Bellarmine subordinated the pope’s direct temporal claims: precisely because of this, Bellarmine’s theory incurred the hostility of many popes and many of his colleagues in the Congregation of the Index and the Congregation of the Inquisition, while at the same time it represented such an effective weapon against attempts on the part of both Protestant and Catholic sovereigns to strengthen their temporal authority. In other words, if, as I have argued, Bellarmine and James fought about the rule over souls as an area of jurisdiction proper to, respectively, the pope and the temporal sovereign, the battle between them was not simply a battle between two different notions of political sovereignty but rather a battle over spiritual hegemony. For both James and Bellarmine the territorial rule over the subjects’ bodies pertained directly to the temporal, and not to the spiritual, authority. The rule over consciences, however, was, in a sense, up for grabs: for Bellarmine, ruling over consciences in matters of religion was the exclusive prerogative of the pope, while for James the temporal sovereign, naturally in charge of bodies, also held a degree of authority over souls. From this perspective, then, if we want to understand the historical and theoretical significance of Bellarmine’s theory, it is not to Carl Schmitt but to Antonio Gramsci that we should turn. Gramci’s notion of hegemony, I argue, can be extremely useful to understand Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta, and interpreting the potestas indirecta through the category of Gramscian hegemony can offer important insight into an alternative development of political modernity than the one identified by Schmitt’s theory. Much has been written on Gramsci’s hegemony, a complex and still muchdiscussed term used to describe the kind of leadership that was held or imposed not through coercion and violence but through consent and persuasion.70 While Gramsci’s most original contribution to classical Marxism is precisely the fact that he understood hegemony as conceptually distinct from coercion, it is important to keep in mind that for Gramsci coercion and hegemony were not necessarily two opposed or mutually exclusive forces, since hegemony was exercised within the civil society as part of the state, even when it was used to challenge from the inside, so to speak, some of the state’s tenets.71 In fact, political regimes can and often do count on hegemonic forces in civil society to help them build consensus through different means other than violence and coercion. A classic example of the collaboration between hegemonic and coercive forces or between civil society and the state in this respect is the formation of a distinctive class of intellectuals, “organic” with respect to the regime without being an intrinsic part of the regime itself.72 In the context of his reflections on the nature of hegemony and on the relationship between consent and coercion, Gramsci dedicated a great deal of attention to the role of the Catholic Church as a hegemonic force with respect

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to the relationship between Catholicism and Italy’s Fascist regime in his own time, as well as with respect to the historical role and development of Christianity in the West.73 Gramsci’s considerations on the historical evolution of Christianity appear especially clearly, even though in a somewhat scattered form, in his Quaderni del carcere, in which he isolated and explained a series of phases in the history of Christianity as indicative of important historical and conceptual turning points.74 The first phase is characterized by the affirmation and consolidation of what Gramsci calls “primitive Christianity,” which lasted for the first three centuries of the history of the Christian Church, until the time of Constantine. During this period Christianity represented an alternative and revolutionary, albeit passive, worldview with respect to the Roman Empire’s pagan doctrines. Early Christianity, in fact, managed to represent the aspirations and needs of the lower classes, even though its lack of an active revolutionary component prevented it from effectively challenging the cultural, intellectual, and political hegemony of paganism.75 Early Christianity as a passive and incomplete revolution, however, changed when Christianity allied itself with the Roman Empire in the times of Constantine, when it became “religione di Stato.” As such Christianity ceased to be a passive form of resistance to the Roman Empire and instead became a hegemonic force organic to the Roman Empire. In other words, after Constantine, according to Gramsci, “it would happen in Christianity what happens in periods of Restoration with respect to revolutionary periods: the mitigated and camouflaged acceptance of the principles against which one had fought.”76 The alliance between pope and emperor, for Gramsci, originated the formation of what he called “cosmopolitismo teocratico,” which I would translate as “theocratic cosmo-political worldview,” that is to say, a worldwide political structure founded upon and supported by a specific theological system, that lasted all through the Middle Ages. The revolutionary moment in this history, according to Gramsci, came when the Protestant Reformation destroyed the anchor on which this theo-political system hinged. Following, to a certain extent, Croce’s interpretation of the Reformation in opposition to the Italian Renaissance, Gramsci argued that because the early Reformers were able to sever the knot between subaltern classes and the “Catholic” political regime, “the Lutheran reformation and Calvinism originated a wide popular-national movement where they spread, and only at later times [they originated] a superior culture.” By contrast, the Italian Reformers, linked too strictly with the intellectual model offered by the Italian Renaissance, failed to produce a popular movement and for this reason the Reformation in Italy “was infertile of great historical successes.”77

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How did the Catholic Church respond to the threat of the Protestant Reformation? For Gramsci, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, intrinsically unable to break its alliance with the political authority in order to become an active revolutionary force (which for Gramsci Christianity had never been, even in the times of the early Christian Church before Constantine), failed to recover its grasp on the masses by means of intellectual and spiritual hegemony and instead imitated political regimes in the use of violence and coercion to restrain its subjects/believers. The result of this strategy, Gramsci wrote, was that “in the course of the seventeenth century the weakening of the position of the Papacy as a European power is indeed catastrophic. With the Counter-Reformation the Papacy fundamentally modified the structure of its power: it had alienated the masses, it had been the promoter of destructive wars, and it had identified itself with the dominant classes in an irreparable way.”78 By mimicking the means of political control usually exercised by the state (i.e., coercion and violence), and by neglecting its power to influence and govern the masses through spiritual, cultural, and intellectual hegemony, Gramsci concluded, the papacy “lost the capacity to influence, both directly and indirectly, governments through the pressure of the fanatical and fanaticized masses.”79 What is so interesting and insightful for my purposes in Gramsci’s reading of the mistakes of the Counter-Reformation papacy is the fact that Gramsci explicitly excluded Bellarmine from this trajectory. In fact, Gramsci continued the previously quoted paragraph by adding that “it is noteworthy that just as Bellarmine was elaborating his theory of the indirect dominion of the Church, the Church, with its concrete action, was destroying the conditions for any dominion, even indirect, since it was severing itself from the masses.”80 For Gramsci, then, Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta was not only not the same as Counter-Reformation Catholicism but indeed ran against the papacy in what Gramsci saw as the central feature of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, that is, the distinctively political structure it assumed. In other words, for Gramsci the importance of Bellarmine’s theory was that it offered the papacy a new and effective way to retain its influence over the people by means of spiritual hegemony. The choice that post-Tridentine popes made to neglect spiritual hegemony for the sake of direct political control, according to Gramsci, precipitated in the Catholic Church a “catastrophic” phase, characterized by the loss of both intellectual hegemony and capacity to control. This catastrophic phase, according to Gramsci, did not end with the eighteenth century. In fact, the French Revolution inaugurated a new form of secularized alliance between ruling class and people by excluding the Church from the state. During the nineteenth century the papacy responded to this threat by persisting in its neglect of the masses—either by allying itself with the most reactionary

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political fringes or by withdrawing from politics altogether, as the pope did in Italy in response to the inclusion of Rome into the unified Italian state under the rule of Savoy, in 1870.81 Thus, starting with the Counter-Reformation and continuing throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the papacy, according to Gramsci, continued to ignore Bellarmine’s suggestions and to neglect its nature as hegemonic force, instead choosing to become first a (failed) coercive and violent instrument of control running parallel to, and sometimes in opposition with, the state, and then an arid and sterile force that had no political capital and no capability of engaging the masses. Things began to change at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Catholic Church realized, on the one hand, that the kind of “cosmopolitismo teocratico” that the alliance between Church and state had given birth to with Constantine and that lasted through the Middle Ages was not coming back, and, on the other hand, that the Church could not continue to position itself as an antagonist of the state but instead had to recover that hegemonic role alongside and in collaboration with the state. In order to do this, according to Gramsci, the Catholic Church entered into a new phase, marked by the Concordato signed by Pope Pius XI with the Fascist regime in 1929, which inaugurated a novel and successful expansion of Catholicism as a hegemonic force. On this topic Gramsci wrote that “the Concordato is an explicit acknowledgment of a double sovereignty in the same state territory. It is certainly not the same form of supernational sovereignty which was formally attributed to the pope in the Middle Ages . . . but it is a necessary derivation by compromise.”82 What do state and Church, respectively, gain from this compromise? For Gramsci, the state profits because “the Church does not hinder the exercise of [the state’s] power, but indeed promotes and supports it, in the same way as a crutch supports an invalid,” while the Church obtains a new form of supernational sovereignty, which is not the same as the one it enjoyed during the Middle Ages but is as good as it could ever get in modern times. In this new form of “doubleheaded” sovereignty, the task of the Church was that of “promoting that consensus on the part of a section of the governed people that the state explicitly recognizes not to be able to obtain with its own means.” The state’s acknowledgment of its own inability to create the consensus it needs, Gramsci specifies, is not only advantageous for the Church but in fact represents the “capitulation of the State,” because by admitting that it needed the Church’s collaboration the state did in fact “accept the tutelage of an exterior sovereignty of which it practically recognizes the superiority.”83 The Italian Catholic Church, led by Pius XI, did not waste any time in taking advantage of this new form of sovereignty over the state, which was

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exercised with the state’s very blessing through the development of different means to create consensus and solidify hegemony. For instance, the Catholic school system, according to Gramsci, was a perfect institution in this respect, because it was intrinsically “democratic,” in a paternalistic way, as Gramsci specifies, and as such it was able to form, shape, and educate people of different socioeconomic means, including lower classes, traditionally excluded by lay higher-education institutions. Another means by which the Catholic Church in the 1930s developed its hegemonic potential was through associations such as the Azione Cattolica, which, Gramsci argued, had been supported and strengthened by Pius XI as a means to spread Catholic values and culture throughout Italian society, and not just within the clergy.84 The scenario that Gramsci is describing here is no less than Bellarmine’s dream come true: Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta was elaborated precisely to make the sovereignty of the pope both superior to, and different from, the kind of sovereignty that could be exercised by a temporal ruler. What Gramsci defined as hegemonic strategies that Catholicism implemented during the first decades of the 1900s to penetrate the state with the state’s permission but at the expense of the state’s own sovereignty was precisely the kind of relationship between temporal and spiritual authority that Bellarmine had in mind, and for the defense of which Bellarmine suggested those profound changes in the ecclesiological, theological, and political identity of Catholicism that Bellarmine thought could ensure its monopoly against both Protestant churches and early modern states. I am not the first one to note this analogy: in fact, both Gramsci and Pius XI noted it too. At the end of the paragraph in the Quaderni in which he described the Catholic educational system and the Azione Cattolica, Gramsci wrote that those were ways in which the Catholic Church did not limit itself to “creating priests,” but also elaborated instruments with which it “wanted to permeate the State (remember the theory of indirect government elaborated by Bellarmine).”85 In another passage of the Quaderni, dedicated to Agostino Gemelli, founder of the Università Cattolica, that is, one of the most prestigious and influential Catholic higher-education institutions, Gramsci suggested that Gemelli’s insistence on “pure Thomism,” a Thomism, that is, that did not seek any compromise with either positivism or idealism, as the basis of the university curriculum was “linked with the Concordato and with the exceptional position of monopoly that the Catholics can obtain in Italy in the world of the high official and scholastic culture, given their possibility of concentration of intellectual forces.” This hypothesis, Gramsci wrote, was substantiated by the fact that Gemelli was not interested in speculative philosophy, since “in his own heart [Gemelli] could not care less about any philosophy.” Instead, “his interests are

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purely practical, [aimed at] the conquest of the cultural market on the part of Catholicism. His activity is aimed at ensuring the Vatican that indirect power [potere indiretto] over society and state which is the essential strategic end of the Jesuits and which was theorized by their current saint Robert Bellarmine.”86 Gramsci’s reference to Bellarmine as a “current saint” is not incidental, because Bellarmine was canonized precisely in 1930 and precisely by Pius XI. Gramsci was quick in understanding the implication of such timing: as he wrote in a fragment from the Quaderni, the fact that Pius XI had praised Bellarmine, whom Gramsci defined as the “greatest Jesuit authority after Loyola,” so much (the pope declared him Blessed in 1923, Saint in 1930, and Doctor of the Church in 1931) suggested that “Pius XI, who has been called the pope of the missions and the pope of the Azione Cattolica, must be especially called the pope of the Jesuits.”87 Later in the same text, Gramsci remarked that “the Jesuits today see in the canonization and the inclusion [of Bellarmine] among the Doctors of the Church [dottorato] a revenge.”88 Thus, Gramsci noted that Pius XI’s canonization of Bellarmine was part of a larger strategy or, better, represented a clear indication that Pius had decided to follow Bellarmine’s strategy of indirect power, which is why Gramsci noted the pope’s support of missions and of the Azione Cattolica as part of the same trajectory that brought about Bellarmine’s canonization. Moreover, Gramsci’s remark that Bellarmine’s canonization was seen as a “revenge” by the Society of Jesus suggests, as I have already argued, Gramsci’s intuition that Bellarmine’s theory had more to do with 1930s papacy than with Counter-Reformation papacy, which had, in fact, opposed Bellarmine’s canonization. In another fragment Gramsci wrote, somewhat hastily: “Canonization of Robert Bellarmine, sign of the times and of the supposed impulse of new power for the Catholic Church; strengthening of the Jesuits, etc. Bellarmine conducted the trial against Galileo and wrote the eight reasons that brought Giordano Bruno to the stake. He was canonized on 29 June 1930, but what is important is not this date, but the date in which the process of canonization began. . . . Bellarmine is the author of the formula of the potere indiretto of the Church over all civil sovereignty. The Feast of Christ the King (instituted in 1925 or 26?) on the last Sunday of October of every year.”89 In this fragment Gramsci, once again, linked the “revival” of Bellarmine with the specific political and religious circumstances of the 1920s and 1930s—Gramsci hinted at the linkage when he noted the chronological link between Bellarmine’s canonization and the institution of the Feast of Christ the King. Also, Gramsci noted again that Bellarmine was ahead of his time. Bellarmine’s canonization process began in 1627: the fact that it took the papacy three centuries to complete it suggests how far Bellarmine’s theory was from the intellectual and political horizon of Counter-Reformation Catholicism

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and how close, instead, it was to Pius XI’s vision. Also interesting is Gramsci’s mention of Bellarmine’s role in the condemnations of Galileo and Bruno, who for Gramsci represented the Italian Renaissance that failed to mobilize the masses.90 In a sense, Bellarmine’s condemnation of those Renaissance intellectuals contributed to eliminate the infecund Italian Reformation, which was sacrificed not only on the altar of the (failed) political project of CounterReformation Catholicism but also on the altar of the other, inherently Bellarminian, project to strengthen the papacy as a hegemonic force. This latter project came to fruition three centuries after Bruno’s and Galileo’s condemnations. In sum, Bellarmine’s intuition regarding the immense political, theological, and intellectual potential of the papacy’s supernational spiritual sovereignty did not burn, together with the Counter-Reformation model of universal papal monarchy, on the pyre of the Thirty Years’ War. Indeed, if we believe that the novelty and originality of Bellarmine’s theory lie in the fact that it identified and developed a kind of sovereignty that manifested itself aside from and beyond direct political coercion, or, in Gramscian terms, in the fact that it identified the future of Catholicism as a hegemonic force that worked within and above the state, then Bellarmine’s theory started to really come to life in the 1930s. For Gramsci, however, the future of this hegemonic Catholic Church born out of the collaboration between Pius XI and Bellarmine was to be short-lived. While, as we have seen, the post-Concordato papacy had managed to strike a decisive victory against the state, which, like an invalid, ceased to be autonomous in the exercise of its power and became more and more dependent on the crutch represented by the possibilities for creation of a consensus that the Church was able to offer, the very hegemony that the Catholic Church was able to create was destined to fail, according to Gramsci, either by “suicide,” as Gramsci put it in his early writings, or by “assassination” (ammazzamento), as he put it in his later works and in the Quaderni. To put it more clearly, Gramsci sketched two different but not mutually exclusive possible outcomes for the Catholic Church. The “suicidal” possibility was elaborated by Gramsci as a reflection on the foundation of the Partito Popolare in 1919, which for Gramsci was evidence that Catholicism had decided to insert itself more fully in the social life of Italian peasants in order to become a mass movement. In doing this, however, Catholicism ceased to be a hegemonic force organic to the state and became a historically necessary phase of the development of the proletariat toward communism, thus killing itself.91 The second possibility, which emerged in Gramsci’s later reflections, implied that rather than dying a natural death, so to speak, Catholicism had to be killed by socialism: when Catholicism tried to

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become a mass movement, in fact, it raised (or fell) to the same level as socialism, and thus a fight between the not fully realized and passive revolution represented by Christianity and the fully developed and active revolution represented by socialism could not but end with the destruction of the former by the latter.92 Evidently, the historical developments of the last thirty years have proved Gramsci’s predictions wrong. Anybody who looks at Europe (and the rest of the world) after 1989 cannot fail to notice that revolutionary socialism, and not Catholicism, was the one to die several deaths, some by suicide and some by assassination. The Catholic Church and Christianity in general, by contrast, have retained and, in certain cases, strengthened their roles as hegemonic forces, especially, but not exclusively, in the secularized Western world. Gramsci’s insights into the relationship between hegemony and power still stand as very useful theoretical tools to understand the mechanics and dynamics of power today. Indeed, not only organized religious denominations but also states and political organizations have refined their techniques to implement and solidify consent, or, following Foucault, such organizations have perfected the techniques by which they could not just rule but “govern” their people by shaping their behavior. In this respect, Foucault’s notion of governmentality represents an elaboration of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, or, better, as Chantal Mouffe wrote, Gramsci’s hegemony and Foucault’s governmentality concur to bring out a new understanding of politics and power: starting from the realization of the centrality of intellectual hegemony as a different technique of power with respect to coercion, “one can begin to understand that far from being localised in the repressive states’ apparatuses, power is exercised at all levels of society and that it is a ‘strategy,’ as Michel Foucault puts it.”93 Aside from the various hermeneutical possibilities opened up by a postmodern reading of the relationship between Foucault and Gramsci and, more generally, of the complex and multifaceted ways in which political power relates dialectically to the construction of the self, a topic that is beyond the scope of the present study, I am interested in stressing how Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta matters in this story. To put it differently, I seek to argue that if Bellarmine’s “Counter-Reformation aspects” are definitely dead, Bellarmine’s theoretical insight into the creation of a spiritual power are alive and kicking, just as Gramsci’s hegemony and Foucault’s governmentality are theoretically still very much alive and kicking. I certainly do not intend to argue that Bellarmine’s project needs to be understood as something entirely different from Counter-Reformation Catholicism, nor do I mean to draw a direct line between Bellarmine and Foucault by suggesting that Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta was a sort of clear precursor of

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governmentality. I argue that, on the one hand, understanding the originality of Bellarmine’s theory of the potestas indirecta with respect to the horizon of the Counter-Reformation can help us to gain a more insightful and complex picture of the intellectual, institutional, theological, and political features of “post-Reformation,” rather than simply “Counter-Reformation,” Catholicism. On the other hand, I think that taking into account the insights that Bellarmine’s theory offers into the nature and articulation of spiritual supremacy can be very useful to understand the development of a distinctive kind of political modernity, characterized not by the notion of territorial sovereignty, à la Carl Schmitt, but by a more complex and sophisticated understanding of power. As Foucault put it, governmentality, understood as a new form of exercising, creating, and thinking about power, emerged in the eighteenth century, but the context out of which governmentality arose can be found in the ashes, as it were, of two processes that developed in parallel in the sixteenth century: one that “leads to the establishment of the great territorial, administrative and colonial states; and that totally different movement which, with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, raises the issue of how one must be spiritually ruled and led on this earth in order to achieve eternal salvation.”94 Bellarmine’s theory was engineered precisely to move past this dualism by blending those two different processes into an organic theory of power. Any scholar interested in the historical and theoretical development of those processes, as well as in their outcome, should therefore take Bellarmine seriously.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Eric Cochrane, “New Light on Post-Tridentine Italy: A Note on Recent Counter-Reformation Scholarship,” Catholic Historical Review 56 (1970): 291–319. 2. Ibid., pp. 296–299, quotation at p. 299. 3. Ibid., p. 304. 4. William V. Hudon, “Religion and Society in Early Modern Italy: Old Questions, New Insights,” American Historical Review 101 (1996): 783–804. 5. See ibid., pp. 794–801. 6. Ibid., p. 803. 7. James Brodrick, The Life and Work of Blessed Robert Francis Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J., 1542–1621, 2 vols. (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1928). 8. Franz Xaver Arnold, Die Staatslehre des Kardinals Bellarmin: Ein Beitrag zur Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie des konfessionellen Zeitalters (Munich: M. Heuber, 1934); and Carlo Giacon, La seconda scolastica, 3 vols. (Milan: F.lli Bocca, 1944–1950), vol. 3, I problemi giuridico-politici. Suarez, Bellarmino, Mariana. 9. Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). See especially vol. 2, pp. 135ff. 10. Harro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 11. See, for instance, Peter Godman, The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index (Leiden: Brill, 2000); and Vittorio

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Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice: La censura ecclesiastica dal Rinascimento alla Controriforma (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2006). 12. F. Motta, Bellarmino: Una teologia politica della Controriforma (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2005). For another example of scholarship on Bellarmine that was informed by the concern for a more detailed and nuanced interpretation of the theological edge of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, see T. Dietrich, Die Theologie der Kirche bei Robert Bellarmin (1542–1621) (Paderborn: Bonifatius Druck-Buch-Verlag, 1999). CHAPTER

1

1. For an account of the formation and initial developments of the Society of Jesus, see John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (1993; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 2. For a synthetic outlook on post-Tridentine Catholicism and on the main historiographical developments of this theme, see John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Adriano Prosperi, Il Concilio di Trento: Una introduzione storica (Turin: Einaudi, 2001); and Ron Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal 1540–1770 (1998; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and the bibliography suggested by these scholars. On the establishment and early activities of the Congregation of the Index, see Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice. 3. vehementer instent studiosi, typis mandari ejus orationem quamquam habitam de morte in die animarum; Coster to Borjia, Antwerp, 2 December 1569, in BASC, doc. 46. The sermons given by Bellarmine in Louvain were eventually published in a collection entitled Conciones habitae Louvanii (Cologne, 1615). 4. Delle lettioni di theologia, che V. R. ha cominciato a far, crediamo li conferirà assai per molto ben stabilirsi nella theologia, e meglio possederla, oltre il frutto degli auditori; Polanco to Bellarmine, Rome, 29 August 1570, in BASC, doc. 51. 5. On the quick developments of Bellarmine’s career, see Coster to Borjia, Louvain, 4 June 1570, in BASC, doc. 49. 6. On this see Victor Brants, “La création de la chaire de théologie scolastique et la nomination de Malderus à l’Université en 1596,” Analectes pour Servir à l’Histoire Ecclésiastique de la Belgique 3, no. 4 (1908): 46–54. 7. In 1567 seventy-six propositions taken out of Baius’s tracts were condemned, even though the condemnation was published in November 1570; therefore, Bellarmine’s initial months in Louvain coincided with the most delicate phases of the affair. On Bellarmine’s role in the controversy, see Gustavo Galeota, Bellarmino contro Baio a Lovanio (Rome: Herder, 1966); and Vittorio Grossi, Baio e Bellarmino interpreti di S. Agostino nelle questioni del soprannaturale (Rome: Studium Theologicum Augustinianum, 1958). 8. On the links between Baianism and Jansenism, see Jean Orcibal, “De Baius à Jansénius: Le ‘comma pianum,’” Revue des Sciences Religieuses, no. 36 (1962): 115–139. On some aspects of the reception of Augustine in late medieval and early

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modern Europe, see Heiko A. Oberman and Frank J. James with Eric Leland Saak, eds., Via Augustini: Augustine in the Later Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation: Essays in Honor of Damasus Trapp, O.S.A. (Leiden: Brill, 1991). 9. The best account of Bellarmine’s soteriology remains, in my view, X. M. Le Bachelet’s, in AB, pp. 1–31. Le Bachelet also published some extracts of the Louvain lectures by Bellarmine on grace, free will, and predestination in ibid., pp. 33–85. The complete manuscripts of the Louvain lectures can be found in ARSI, Opp. Nn. 234 and 235; on those manuscripts see also Sebastiaan Tromp, “De manuscriptis praelectionum Loveniensium S. Roberti Bellarmini S.I. Chronologia et problemata annexa,” AHSI 2 (1933): 185–199. On Bellarmine’s stay at Louvain, see also Lucien Ceyssens, “Bellarmine et Louvain,” in M. Lamberigts and L. Kenis, eds., L’Augustinisme à l’ancienne faculté de théologie de Louvain (Louvain: Leuven University Press, 1994), pp. 179–205. More recently Franco Motta has reproposed Le Bachelet’s reading of Bellarmine’s Augustinian tendencies and has argued that the centrality of Augustinian soteriology in Bellarmine’s theological thought is the source of Bellarmine’s “originality” with respect to the theological elaborations of his fellow Jesuits (see Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 245ff. passim, esp. pp. 465–498). 10. A copy of this manuscript work can be found in APUG Ms. 1460. 11. Et quoniam Michael Baius insignis alioqui Doctor multas opiniones sequebat quae videbantur declinare ad novos errores Luteranorum, quaeque damnatae fuerant a Pio V Pontifice anno 1570 Animadvertit N. non deesse multos, quibus eae opiniones placerent coepit eos refutare non sub nomine Doctoris Michaelis, sed sub nomine Veterorum vel novorum haereticorum; ibid., 10r–v. 12. Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 67ff. passim. 13. Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 44–49, 357–360. 14. On late medieval elaborations on the concept of Christiana respublica and on the political role of the pope, see Michael Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), especially pp. 233–327, 411–449. 15. O’Malley, The First Jesuits, pp. 248–252. 16. Bellarmine took a series of lengthy notes on Toledo’s classes on the first part of the Summa, a copy of which can be found in APUG Ms. 375 and APUG Ms. 375A, and he used some of Toledo’s arguments in his own lectures in Louvain: for more details on the role of Toledo’s Scholasticism on the Jesuits’ and Bellarmine’s theology, see Motta, Bellarmino, 347ff. 17. O’Malley, The First Jesuits, pp. 136–157. See also Johann P. Sommerville, “The ‘New Art of Lying’: Equivocation, Mental Reservation, and Casuistry,” in E. Leites, ed., Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 159–184; and Stefania Tutino, “Between Nicodemism and ‘Honest’ Dissimulation: The Society of Jesus in England,” Historical Research 79, no. 206 (2006): 534–553. 18. J. A. Fernández-Santamaría, Reason of State and Statecraft in Spanish Political Thought, 1595–1640 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983), pp. 86–135; and Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 84ff.

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19. See, for example, Harro Höpfl’s considerations on Bellarmine’s reflection on prudence in De officio principis Christiani in Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 176–181. 20. Paez, Taucci, and Bellarmine to Mercurian, Rome, 2 May 1580, in BASC, doc. 86. 21. i casisti, se non fussero di bassissimo ingegno, sono la più mal contenta gente che vi sia, et fanno il peggio che possono . . . et come hanno poca affettione a simili sorte di studio, cercano distraersi in altre cose, et per il molto tempo che gl’havanza difficilmente si tengono in disciplina; ibid. 22. non ci è paese che habbia vescovi et parrocchiani più ignoranti che Italia. Altro non si vede se non juristi et canonisti, medici e filosofi, i quali però sono incorsi in molti pericolosi errori, perché non regnava al tempo loro, come ne hoggi regna, la theologia nelle schuole [sic] d’Italia; ibid. 23. La Germania et Inghilterra han bisogno ancor di molti che possino far fronte alli heretici et, quando non sono ben fondati, possono facilmente vacillare. Né pare basti udir controversie et casi di coscienza, perché nutrire puri controversisti, è metterli in gran confusione, come per esperienza si vede che i puri controversisti che hora abbiamo non intendano quasi niente, perché non hanno la luce della theologia scholastica, la quale è più sicura et chiara in definire le verità, onde anco la Chiesa adesso con essa si governa; et il lasciarla è un aprir la porta all’heresie, come l’esperienza ne mostra; ibid. 24. Ut sanctus Thomas proponatur tanquam communis auctor Societati sequendus, placet; Bellarmine’s text, entitled “De sententia cujusdam, qui S. tum Thomam uno solo articulo exempto sequendum censuit” and written around 1582, can be found in BASC, appendix XI. 25. quod sanctus Thomas docet de adoratione imaginis Christi . . . repugnat conciliis, patribus et formis loquendi ab ecclesia praescriptis. . . . in his, et similibus non video cur Societas nostra non debeat S. tum Thomam potius deserere quam fidei patrocinium, non solum in rebus magnis, sed etiam in parvis, nec solum in sententiis, sed etiam in verbis; ibid. 26. On Soares’s work, see Lawrence J. Flynn, “The De Arte Rhetorica of Cypriano Soarez, SJ,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 42 (1956): 367–374. 27. For a still fundamental overview of the role of rhetoric in the early modern world, see Marc Fumaroli, L’age de l’eloquence: Rhéthorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: Droz, 1980). On Counter-Reformation rhetoric, see also Frederick J. McGinness, Right Thinking and Sacred Oratory in Counter-Reformation Rome (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). 28. On this, see also Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 170–175. 29. BAV, Vat. Lat. 6613–6617. The manuscripts are based on the notes taken by Bellarmine’s students during his lectures: on the manuscripts, see BASC, appendix XVIII, p. 523. 30. For a more detailed analysis of the theological significance of those changes in the structure of the word, see Dietrich, Die Theologie der Kirche, pp. 62.; and Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 239ff. Also on the structure of the Controversiae, see G. Galeotta, “Genesi, sviluppo e fortuna delle Controversiae di Roberto Bellarmino,” in R. De Maio

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et al., eds., Bellarmino e la Controriforma: Atti del simposio internazionale di studi Sora 15–18 Ottobre 1986 (Sora: Centro di Studi Sorani “Vicenzo Patriarca,” 1990), pp. 3–48. 31. These can be found in BASC, doc. 75 32. sanctorum communio est participatio sacramentorum et unio; ibid. 33. Sed praemittenda est quaestio de verbo Dei, nam non possumus cum haereticis disputare nisi conveniamus cum illis in aliquo. Convenimus autem quod commune principium unde debeant duci argumenta est verbum Dei, sed alii solum verbum Dei internum, alii externum sed dictum; alii hos libros, alii illos; et denique alii alia ducunt. Itaque quaestiones de verbo Dei primo praetermittendae sunt; ibid. 34. Cum igitur haereses hujus temporis proprie circa hos duos articulos Symboli Apostolici nonum, et decimum fere omnes versentur, nos etiam controversias omnes ad eosdem duos articulos referemus; in “Praefatio . . . in disputations de controversies . . . habita in gymnasio romano anno MDLXXVI,” in OO, vol.1, pp. 53–62 at p. 61. 35. Ea igitur oblata occasione rem aggressus, eam disputandi rationem inivi, ut controversias fidei omnes complecterer, ac partim eas in sua membra tribuerem, partim cum aliis jungerem, et copularem, ut alia aliam sereret, et alia penderet, et nasceretur ex alia, et ex omnibus unum doctrinae corpus integrum, et perfectum, suisque numeris absolutum existeret; Epistle to the Reader, in OO, vol.1, pp. 49–51 at p. 51. 36. quae nostrae disputationes ab auditoribus primum in Gymnasio inter docendum exceptae . . . ut etiam aliqui minarentur se typis eas nobis invitis, ac repugnantibus mandaturos; ibid. 37. Ibid., pp. 49–50. 38. [disputationes nobis propositae] meliorem, ac magis necessariam totius Theologiae partem comprehendunt. Agendum est enim . . . non de Metaphysicis subtilitatibus, quae sine periculo ignorari, et interdum cum laude oppugnari possunt: sed de Deo, de Christo, de Ecclesia, de Sacramentis . . . deque aliis permultis gravissimis, et difficillim[i]s quaestionibus, quae ad ipsa fidei pertinent fundamenta; “Praefatio,” pp. 53–54. 39. Libri qui offerendi erant . . . nulli sane justius debebantur, quam tibi, qui et summus Theologus es, et unus Controversiarum omnium judex, ab ipso Deo singulari providentia constitutus; epistle to Sixtus V, in OO, vol. 1, pp. 44–47 at p. 47. 40. Duo sunt, quae pestem prae caeteris morbis merito horrendam, terribilemque efficiunt. Unum, quod summa velocitate venenum suum ad cor usque diffundit . . . alterum, quod cum unum interficit, centum alios inficit . . . tam celeriter serpit, ut si hodie domum unam invaserit, brevi civitatem totam cadaveribus repleat; “Praefatio,” p. 55. 41. talis [erat veterum Christianorum] fidei Catholicae ardor, quem si Germania, si Bohemia, si Anglia, si Gallia, si populi caeteri imitari voluissent, aliam profecto Rempublicam haberemus . . . multa certe Ecclesiae membra, quorum jam prope est desperata salus, adhuc integra et incorrupta manerent; ibid., p. 58. 42. Itaque majores nostri etsi in persecutionibus omnibus, contra portas inferorum, rem fortiter gererent . . . Imperatores edictis, legibus, mulctis pie in haereticos saeviebant . . . tu quodem, Sixtus Pontifex beatissime . . . in summum

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spiritualis militiae ducem lectus fuisse videare . . . celsitudo animi, robur mentis, constantia summo Principe digna; Epistle to Sixtus V, pp. 45–46. 43. in nostro opere nulla disputatio esset diligentius copiosiusque tractanda, nulla major, nulla instructior ea, qua summi Pontificatus institutio et auctoritas asseritur atque defenditur; ibid., p. 47. 44. de Ecclesia dicemus, primo de militanti quid sit, ubi sit, an errare possit, an sit aliquando invisibilis. Deinde an sit aliquis gubernator an non, quis sit, an errare possit. Tertio de conciliis episcoporum]; BASC doc. 75. 45. Initio igitur de Sancta Ecclesia disseremus: in qua disputatione agendum erit primum de ipso Christo, qui caput est, et Princeps Ecclesiae universae: deinde de parte Ecclesiae, quae laborat in terris, nec non de capite ejus visibili Summo Pontifice, deque omnibus ejus membris, id est, Clericis, Monachis, Laicis; “Praefatio,” p. 61. 46. Epistle to Sixtus V, p. 46. 47. Etenim de qua re agitur, cum de primatu Pontificis agitur? Brevissime dicam, de summa rei Christianae; Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, “Praefatio,” in OO, vol.1, pp. 451–459 at p. 451. 48. Primi, qui serio primatum Romani Pontificis oppugnarunt, videntur fuisse Graeci. Ipsi enim jam inde ab anno Domini 381, Episcopum Constantinopolitanum, qui antea ne Patriarcha quidem erat, tribus Patriarchis Orientis anteponere, et secundum a Romano Pontifice facere voluerunt; ibid., p. 456. 49. Denique anno 1054, aperte pronuntiarunt, Romanum Episcopum . . . de suo gradu excidisse, et jam summum ac primum Episcoporum omnium esse Pontificem Constantinopolitanum; ibid. 50. Ad extremum nostro hoc saeculo Martinus Lutherus, et quotque post eum haeretici apparuerunt, Romanum Pontificatum totis viribus omnique animi contentione labefactare conati sunt; ibid., p. 457. 51. Ac summa quidem doctrinae ipsorum haec est, Romanum Episcopum fuisse aliquando Pastorem et Concionatorem Ecclesiae Romanae, atque unum de caeteris, non super caeteros: nunc vero nihil esse aliud quam Antichristum; ibid. 52. Nemini dubium esse potest, quin et potuerit et voluerit Salvator noster Jesus Christus Ecclesiam suam ea ratione et modo gubernare, qui sit omnium optimus et utilissimus; Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, OO, vol. 1, p. 461. 53. Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings, ed. A. Pagden and J. Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1992), relectio on laws in Summa I.II 105.1, par. 136, p. 198. 54. Ibid., p. 468. 55. Regimen temperatum ex omnibus tribus formis propter humanae naturae corruptionem utilius est, quam simplex Monarchia; Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, OO, vol. 1, p. 467. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. On the centrality of the theme of the prince’s authority coming “ex universo populo” in early modern Catholic political thought, see Skinner, Foundations, vol. 2, pp. 148–166; Johann P. Sommerville, “From Suarez to Filmer: A Reappraisal,” Historical Journal 25 (1982): 525–540; Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 186ff.

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58. Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, OO, vol. 1, p. 467. 59. Jam vero Doctores Catholici in eo conveniunt omnes, ut regimen Ecclesiasticum hominibus a Deo commissum, sit illud quidem Monarchicum, sed temperatum, ut supra diximus, ex Aristocratia et Democratia; ibid., p. 469. 60. On Torquemada’s role in the fifteenth-century debate over conciliarism, see Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 60–129 passim. On Torquemada’s contribution to the neo-Thomist theories of state, see Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 348–351. 61. Indeed, from the very beginning of his text Sander had made clear that “ego in his Libris non solum eandem unius Pastoris Praefecturam plenius aliquando confirmavi, sed etiam omnem popularem, itemque Optimatum, in summo saltem gradu, gubernationem, ab Ecclesia Chirsti large remotam esse”; N. Sander, De visbili monarchia (Louvain, 1571), “ad lectorem,” unfol. (my emphasis). 62. On Sander and Bellarmine, see Stefania Tutino, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), chap. 6. 63. For a more detailed analysis of the relationship between Bellarmine and the English Reformation, see chapter 4. 64. Quos errores habuit etiam Henricus VIII, Angliae Rex: is enim se caput Ecclesiae Anglicanae constituit, et eodem modo censuit, alios Principes capita suprema Ecclesiae in suis ditionibus esse debere; Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, OO, vol. 1, p. 472. For a more ample analysis of this quotation, see chapter 4. 65. Regimen Ecclesiae supernaturale est . . . [Principatus saecularis] regit homines, ut homines sunt . . . [Principatus Ecclesiasticus] regit homines, ut Christiani sunt; ibid., p. 474. 66. Reges sunt Reges etiam in Ecclesia, et illis Christiani subjecti esse debent, tanquam praecellentibus. Verum est id quidem, sed in iis rebus tantum, quae ad statum politicum pertinent. Praesunt enim Christiani Reges hominibus Christianis, non ut Christiani . . . sed ut homines politici; ibid. 67. Ad conservationem politicorum regnorum non necessario requiratur, ut omnes provinciae servent easdem leges civiles, et eosdem ritus: possunt enim pro locorum et personarum varietate diversis uti legibus et institutis; et idcirco non requiritur unus, qui omnes in unitate contineat. Ad conservationem vero Ecclesiae necesse est, ut omnes conveniant in eadem Fide, iisdem Sacramentis, iisdemque praeceptis divinitus traditis; quod sane non fieri potest, nisi sint unus populus, et ab uno in unitate contineantur; ibid., p. 488. 68. non videtur posse fieri talis Monarchia, nisi adhibita magna vi et multis ac magnis bellis; ibid. 69. See ibid., pp. 488–495 passim. 70. Ibid., p. 481. 71. Ad illud de plenitudine potestatis, respondeo: summum Pontificem, si conferatur cum Christo, non habere plenitudinem potestatis, sed tantum suam quamdam portionem, secundum mensuram donationis Christi; Christus enim regit omnem Ecclesiam, quae est in coelo, in purgatorio, in terris, et quae fuit ab initio

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Mundi, et erit usque ad finem: ac praeterea pro arbitrio potest leges condere, Sacramenta instituere, gratiam tribuere, etiam sine Sacramentis. At Papa solum regit eam Ecclesiae partem quae est in terris, dum ipse vivit, nec potest leges Christi mutare, aut Sacramenta instituere, aut peccata sine Sacramento remittere. Si tamen summus Pontifex cum Episcopis caeteris comparetur, merito habere dicitur plenitudinem potestatis, quia caeteri definitas habent regiones quibus praesint, definitam etiam potestatem: ipse vero toti orbi Christiano praepositus est; ibid., pp. 485–486. 72. Itaque nihil est, quod haeretici tantum laborent in quorumdam Pontificum vitiis conquirendis. Nos enim agnoscimus et fatemur, ea fuisse non pauca; “Praefatio,” p. 453. 73. noster lapis angularis est; nam et Judaei et Gentes, quasi parietes duo simul conjuncti, atque unam Christianam Ecclesiam facientes, ab hoc uno angulari lapide continentur; ibid. 74. Bellarmine’s notes on Panvinio’s treatment of the lives of the first popes can be found in AB, pp. 544–552. 75. Nam cum 220 Pontificum vitas scribat [Platina], 180 Pontifices simpliciter laudat. Solum autem circa 40 reprehendit, e quibus si tres aut quatuor demas, in quorum vita sequutus est Platina Martinum Polorum aut alios imperitos scriptores, caeteri iure reprehendi potuisse videntur, cum ab aliis etiam historicis passim reprehendantur; Bellarmine’s censure of Platina can be found in ACDF, Index, Protocolli V, 391r–394v at 394v. This document has also been published by Godman, The Saint as Censor, pp. 250–259 and see also Godman’s discussion of the Panvinio’s affair at pp. 125–129. 76. Nec recipienda videtur excusatio eius, quod videlicet ad historiam pertineat fideliter res narrare. Nam, ut supra dixi, non meretur ipse nomen historici, cum nec integre nec ordine Vitas Pontificum describat; ACDF, Index, Protocolli I, 606r–609v at 606v; on this document, see also Godman, The Saint as Censor, pp. 163–164, and his transcription of the document at pp. 279–280. On Masson, see Pierre Ronzy, Un humaniste italianisant: Papire Masson (1544–1611) (Paris: Champion, 1924). 77. Methodus Ioannis Bodini erudite et eleganter conscripta satis utilis videri potest. Auctor tamen aut hereticus aut atheus fuit; ACDF, Index, Protocolli H, 479r–480r at 479r. On this censure, see Godman, The Saint as Censor, pp. 121–124, and his transcription of this document at pp. 244–247. 78. Here I disagree with Carmine Napolitano, who tends to see Bellarmine’s use of historical arguments as purely instrumental and apologetic and argues that Bellarmine’s interest for history “was linked to the controversistic need. . . . [For Bellarmine] the historical fact is important only if it gives more force to the dogmatic proof . . . if historians do not say what he [Bellarmine] hopes for, he reinterprets them and makes specific choices in accepting sources following the criteria of apologetic utility rather than philology” (in “La concezione della storia di Roberto Bellarmino,” in R. De Maio et al., eds., Bellarmino e la Controriforma, pp. 251–275 at pp. 269–270). Also along the same line as Napolitano’s are the considerations made by Stefano Zen in “Bellarmino e Baronio,” in ibid., pp. 277–321, especially pp. 305–317. 79. Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Origins of Ecclesiastical History,” in The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 132–152 at pp. 136–137 (Momigliano’s emphasis).

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80. Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963); Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). 81. Gregory B. Lyon, “Baudouin, Flacius, and the Plan for the Magdeburg Centuries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 253–272. 82. The tract, translated by Flacius in 1550, is now known as Petrum Roman non venisse. On this text and its importance in the discussion between Flacius and Baudouin over the composition of the Magdeburg Centuries, see Lyon, “Baudouin, Flacius, and the Plan,” p. 268. 83. tam de rebus nuper gestis, quam de antiquis finguntur errores, quando res sunt clam gestae, et sine testibus, aut quantum ad numerum annorum, vel similes circumstantias, quae facile mandantur oblivioni: non autem quantum ad ipsam summam, et substantiam rerum celeberrimarum; praesertim quando praeter testimonia Sciptorum, exstant etiam earum rerum moumenta lapidea; Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, OO, vol. 1, pp. 544–558, quotation at p. 558. 84. Duos enim fuisse Anacletos, quorum alter etiam Cletus dicebatur; tametsi propter nominis similitudinem multi Veteres unum ex doubus fecerint. Primum nobis persuadet Ecclesiae Catholicae auctoritas, quae duos festos dies in eorum memoriam celebrat: Cleti videlicet mense Aprili, et Anacleti mense Julio . . . deinde idem colligimus ex eo, quod aliqui Veterum Anacletum Clementi anteponunt . . . alii subiciunt . . . neque vero mirum videri debet, propter nominis similitudinem a Veteribus quibusdam ex duobus Anacletis unum esse factum, cum constet, apud Graecos passim confundi Novatum cum Novatiano; ibid., p. 548. 85. aliud esse successionem, aliud rationem successionis: nam successio Romani Pontificis in Pontificatum Petri ex instituto Christi est: ratio autem successionis, qua Romanus Pontifex potius quam Antiochenus, vel aliquis alius succedat, ex facto Petri initium habuit; ibid., p. 560. 86. Ibid., p. 598. In this respect I think it is thought-provoking that Gadamer points to the relationship between history and theology in the Protestant Reformers’ theology and historiography and especially in Flacius’s work as a fundamental component of the “prehistory of hermeneutics” that unifies theological and philological paths; see Hans G. Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960; New York: Crossroad, 1989), pp. 174–184; and also Lyon, “Baudouin, Flacius, and the Plan,” pp. 270–272. 87. Pontificem non posse ullo modo esse haereticum, nec docere publice haeresim, etiamsi solus rem aliquam definiat . . . Pontificem, sive haereticus esse possit, sive non, non posse ullo modo definire aliquid haereticum a tota Ecclesia credendum; Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, OO, vol. 2, pp. 79–80. 88. Ibid., pp. 80–85. 89. Ibid., pp. 79–80. 90. See Ibid., pp. 88–120, where Bellarmine dedicates a long section of this part of his controversy to examine the historical records of the popes whom the heretics had wrongly accused of holding heretical beliefs or of being heretics themselves. On the ecclesiological repercussions of Bellarmine’s positions on the pope’s infallibility see chapter 5.

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91. Primum igitur annotandum est, nos non loqui de Pontifice, ut Princeps est temporalis certae cujusdam provinciae . . . solum ergo nunc agimus de Pontifice ut Ponfitex est totius Catholicae Ecclesiae; et quaerimus: an ille habeat veram potestatem in omnes Fideles in spiritualibus, ut habent Reges in temporalibus; Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, OO, vol. 2, p. 120. 92. Ibid., pp. 135–136. 93. For a different reading of this part of the controversy De summo Pontifice and for the link between this argument and the question of the exegesis of the sacred scriptures, see Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 362–384. 94. See especially his Tribunali della coscienza (Turin: Einaudi, 1996). 95. Tum Imperatores potentissimi et Christiani, et quod majus est sub nomine religionis et pietatis, hanc ipsam sedem, unde ad eos Imperii Romani sceptra pervenerant, dejicere, atque evertere saepe conati sunt; Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, “Praefatio,” p. 452. 96. The role of the pope in effecting the translatio imperii recurs often, for instance, in Giles of Rome’s De ecclesiastica potestate (see the edition by R. W. Dyson [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004], pt. 2, chaps.4–5, and pt. 3 passim). On the significance of this theme in papalist medieval thought, see Walter Ullman, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages (1955; London: Methuen, 1965), esp. pp. 413ff.; and Robert W. Dyson, Normative Theories of Society and Government in Five Medieval Thinkers (Lewiston: Mellen, 2003), pp. 141–185. 97. Nam tametsi fateremur Romanum Pontificem neque re ipsa habere, neque et habere posse, ullam politicam potestatem non tamen indirecte colligeretur Imperium a Graecis ad Germanos ab eodem Romano Pontifice non potuisset tranferri . . . Papa, non quod esset rex Regum aut summus temporalis Monarcha, qualis Augustus et Constantinus fuere, occidentale Imperium a Graecis ad Francos transtulit, sed quod Pastor ecclesiae universae; R. Bellarmine, De translatione Imperii Romani adversus Matthiam Flaccium Illyricum. The first edition of this work was published in Antwerp in 1584, but because of the conflicts that the work provoked, this edition is virtually impossible to find. Later editions were printed in Antwerp in 1589 and in 1599. I am quoting from the manuscript copy of the work, in Bellarmine’s own handwriting, that can be found in APUG Ms. 372 (the quotation is at 62v, bk. 1, chap. 11). 98. che non era bene che questa opera uscisse per non parere di mettere in lite l’autorità che ha la Sedia Apostolica sopra l’imperio, essendo che detta Sedia Apostolica hora ne sta in possesso, et così la cosa è andata in niente, come si dice vulgarmente; ARSI, Opp. Nn. 243, vol. 1, 57v–58v, at 57v. 99. Nessuno ardisce di opporsi al Card. Sirleto, al quale più crede sua S.ta che a’ tutti noi altri . . . Quanto poi alle controversie, è vero che si fa grande instanza da molte parti, che si stampino. . . . Nondimeno simil cose vanno in longo, et io desidero, si è possibile, non vadino fuora cosi presto, per non haverle potuto polire et acconciare come conveniva; ibid. On Sirleto, see G. Denzler, Kardinal Guglielmo Sirleto (1514–1585): Leben und Werk, Munich: Hueber 1964, and Emidio Commodoro, Il Cardinale Sirleto 1514–1585 (Catanzaro: Grafiche Abramo, 1985); and on Sirleto’s role in the Index, see Godman, The Saint as Censor, pp. 28ff.; and Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice, pp. 91ff.

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100. Prima est summum pontificem iure divino habere plenissimam potestatem in universum orbem terrarum, tum in rebus ecclesiasticis, tum in politicis; Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, OO, vol. 2, pp. 145. Cf. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty, pp. 154–287. 101. One should also notice that this phrase was added in the 1599 edition, for in the first edition Bellarmine wrote simply that “Altera sententia in altero extremo posita duo docet. Primo, Pontificem, ut Pontificem, & ex iure divino nullam habere temporalem potestatem, nec posse ullo modo imperare principibus secularibus . . . Secundo docet, non licuisse Pontifici aliisque Episcopis accipere temporale dominium, quod nunc habent . . . Ita docent haeretici omnes huius temporis, ac praecipue Calvinus”; see Disputationes de Controversiis Christianae fidei, 3 vols. (Ingolstadt, 1586–15), chap. 1 of the Controversia de summo Pontifice, vol. 1 (Ingolstadt, 1586), cols. 1082–1083. 102. Tertia sententia media, et Catholicorum Theologorum communis, Pontificem ut Pontificem non habere directe et immediate ullam temporalem potestatem, sed solum spiritualem; tamen ratione spiritualis habere saltem indirecte potestatem quamdam, eamque summam, in temporalibus; Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, OO, vol. 2, p. 145. 103. Denique, Infideles Principes sunt veri et supremi principes suorum regnorum; nam dominium non fundatur in gratia, aut Fide, sed in libero arbitrio et ratione: nec descendit ex jure divino, sed ex jure gentium. . . . Papam dici Monarcham spiritualem in toto Orbe, non quod praesit omnibus hominibus, qui sunt in toto Orbe, sed quod praesit omnibus Christianis toto Orbe diffusis. Et rursum etiam ex hypothesi, nimirum, quia si totus Mundus converteretur ad Fidem, toti Mundo plane spirituali jurisdictione Papa praeesset; ibid., pp. 146–147. Bellarmine offered a more detailed explanation of this fundamental part of his doctrine also in his Controversia de Laicis, especially chaps. 2–13 (OO, vol. 3, pp. 5–48). 104. See Vitoria, Political Writings, pp. 82ff. 105. For an introduction to the political view of the neo-Thomists, see Giacon, La seconda scolastica; and Skinner, Foundations, vol. 2, pp. 135ff. 106. Ut enim duae illae artes [ars equestris et ars fraenifactoria] sunt inter se diversae, quia distincta habent objecta, et subjecta, et actiones; et tamen quia finis unius ordinatur ad finem alterius; ideo una alteri praeest. . . . ita videntur potestas ecclesiastica et politica distinctae potestates esse; et tamen una alteri subordinata . . . at haec similitudo non est omnino conveniens: nam in illis artibus inferior est solum propter superiorem, adeo ut sublata superiore tollatur continuo etiam inferior: si enim non sit ars equestris, certe supervacanea est ars fraenorum faciendorum; Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, OO, vol. 2, p. 155. 107. Giles of Rome, De ecclesiastica potestate, pt. 2, chap. 6, pp. 112–130. 108. ut etenim se habent in homine spiritus et caro, ita se habent in Ecclesia duae illae potestates: nam caro et spiritus sunt quasi duae Respublicae, quae et separatae et conjunctae inveniri possunt; ibid. 109. On this point, see the considerations made by Arnold, Die Staatslehre des Kardinals Bellarmin, pp. 349–360.

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110. See Vitoria, relectio on the power of the Church, question 5, articles 7 and 8 (Political Writings, pp. 91–94). 111. Cf. Francisco Suárez, Tractatus de legibus ac Deo legislatore (1612; London, 1679), bk. 3, chap. 6: “Nihilominus vera sententia est, summum Pontificem . . . non habere directam potestatem temporalem in universum orbem, sed solum in illa regna, vel provincias, quarum est dominus temporalis”; and Suárez, Defensio Fidei Catholicae (1613), bk. 3, chap. 6, in Opera Omnia (Paris, 1859,) vol. 24, pp. 231–238 at p. 232: “veritas catholica est, dari in Ecclesia spiritualem potestatem verae et propriae iurisdictionis, per quam possit christianus populus in ordine ad salutem animae convenienter gubernari” (my emphasis). 112. Potestas spiritualis Summi Pontificis ad finem supernaturalem, adjunctam quasi ex consequenti habet supremam et amplisssimam potestatem juridictionis temporalis super omnes principes; quoted in Frank B. Costello, S.J., The Political Philosophy of Luis de Molina, SJ (1535–1600) (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1974), at p. 89; see also his analysis of Molina’s treatment of papal authority at pp. 69–94. 113. This is chapter 4 of book 5, “Papam non habere ullam mere temporalem jurisdictionem directe jure divino,” in OO, vol. 2, pp. 148–150. 114. This is chap. 5, ibid., pp. 151–155. 115. S. vero Bernardus lib. IV de Consider. utrumque gladium, spiritualem et temporalem, dicit esse summi Pontificis; tamen in multis locis ejusdem operis aperte demonstrat, Pontificis maximi potestatem proprie spiritualem esse, non temporalem; ibid., p. 154. This specific sentence was added in the 1599 edition of the work. In the 1586 edition of the Controversiae the statement on Bernard’s passage was even less “papalist” than in the revised version. In fact, after explaining the quotation from Bonifance and the Unam Sanctam, Bellarmine, instead of the previously mentioned phrase, wrote: “Porro beatus Bernardus & Bonifacius Papa mystice interpretati sunt hunc locum, nec volunt dicere, eodem modo habere Pontificem gladium utrumque, sed alio & alio modo” (see vol. 1, col. 1092). On the importance of this passage from Bernard in the history of the relationship between secular and religious authority, see Ian S. Robinson, “Church and Papacy,” in J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350-c. 1450 (1988; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 252–305 at pp. 300ff.; and John A. Watt, “Spiritual and Temporal Power,” in ibid., pp. 367–423 at pp. 368–374. Also, Bellarmine will change his focus in the interpretation of this passage in his treatise against Barclay; see chapter 4. 116. On the reception of Bellarmine’s treatise against Barclay in Rome, see chapter 4. I owe this point to Johann Sommerville, whom I thank. 117. See Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, OO, vol.2, pp. 148–151 passim. 118. It is interesting in this respect that we have two, slightly different, versions of a manuscript draft, written by Bellarmine, in which he collected a series of quotations and passages that demonstrated that the kingdom of Christ was not of this world, to be possibly used as notes to write a separate work or to respond to those Catholic authors who had disagreed with him on this point, since the authors quoted in the manuscripts, mainly Greek and Latin fathers, are not mentioned or discussed in the corresponding chapters of the De summo Pontifice. One version of the manuscript

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notes can be found in BASC, appendix VIII, and the other in ARSI, Opp. Nn. 243, vol. 1, 284r–285v. The main difference between the two is that while the first contains only a list of quotations from Greek and Latin fathers, the second contains also passages from Driedo, Soto, and Vitoria—all authors mentioned in the De summo Pontifice as well. In terms of dates of composition, Le Bachelet proposes the year 1590, when Sixtus V attempted to put Bellarmine’s Controversiae on the Index (see BASC, pp. 263 and 488), while Frajese believes it was composed at the beginning of the seventeenth century (see “Regno ecclesiastico e Stato moderno: La polemica fra Francisco Peña e Roberto Bellarmino sull’esenzione dei clerici,” Annali dell’Istituto Storico ItaloGermanico in Trento 14 [1988]: 273–339 at pp. 327–328). I am inclined to think that the version at the ARSI was the one mentioned in the 1590 letter from Bellarmine to Acquaviva quoted by Le Bachelet in BASC, p. 293, while the version in BASC was written later, to be included in Bellarmine’s 1607 Recognitio of his works (see my discussion of the Recognitio in chapter 3). On this part of Bellarmine’s theory, see also Arnold, Die Staatslehre des Kardinals Bellarmin, pp. 343–347. 119. hoc autem regnum perpetuum est non solum in coelo, sed etiam in terra, quamdiu mundus durabit. . . . ergo etiam potestas spiritualis ad regendum istud est a Christo huic Ecclesiae concessa, ut in ea perpetuo duret, quia non potest regnum sine potestate gubernatrice illi proportionata conservari; Suárez, Defensio Fidei, p. 233. On the genesis of the concept of the pope as vicar of Christ and the relationship between the militant and the triumphant Church as it was elaborated in the late medieval Christian thought, see Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty, pp. 354–407. 120. On the Church as Respublica perfecta in these theorists, see Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 355–357. 121. On the general difference, in this respect, between Bellarmine and Suárez, see Skinner, Foundations, vol. 2, pp. 178–184. On the different emphasis that Bellarmine and Suárez put, for instance, on tyrannicide and its link with the papal power of deposing heretical sovereigns, see also Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, 332–338. 122. See chapter 28 of the Controversia de clericis in the first edition (Ingolstadt, 1586, vol. 2 cols. 1416–1542), where Bellarmine wrote that “exceptio clericorum in rebus politicis, tam quoad personas, quam quoad bonas, iure humano introducta est, non divino” (cols. 1549–1550), and compare it with the same chapter in OO, based on the Venice 1599 edition, where Bellarmine wrote that “exceptio clericorum in rebus politicis tum quoad personas, tum quoad bonas, introducta est jure humano et divino” (OO, vol. 2, p. 489). In this last edition Bellarmine added two chapters to the controversy, in which he elaborated on Aquinas’s definition of the ius gentium as “aliquo modo naturale, et aliquo modo positivum, ac per hoc est medium inter ius naturale purum et ius civile” and inserted clerical exemption under this rubric (see chaps. 29 and 30 of De clericis, OO, vol. 2, pp. 491–497 at p. 492). 123. On the general lines of the debate within the Roman Curia over the issue of clerical exemption, see P. Prodi, The Papal Prince: One Body and Two Souls: The Papal Monarchy in Early Modern Europe (1982; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 102–122; Frajese, “Regno ecclesiastico e Stato moderno”; and chapter 3.

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124. Nos filii Dei sumus adoptivi secundum animam, non secundum corpus; renovati etiam sumus spiritu, corporis autem redemptionem adhuc expectamus, Roman. 8 tributa vero ratione corporis solvuntur; R. Bellarmine, Controversia de Clericis, 1st ed., vol. 2, col. 1541. 125. Francisco Suárez devoted the entire book 4 of his Defensio Fidei to the issue of clerical immunity, and often in that work he engaged with some of Bellarmine’s remarks on the same issue: see in particular chaps. 9 and 10 (pp. 393–406, quotation at p. 395) on his defense of the origin of clerical exemption in divine and natural law. 126. Looking at the same issue from the other side, as it were, Quentin Skinner already noted that Bellarmine constituted an exception to the neo-Thomist “almost hierocratic claim that, even though the Pope may not have any direct power to control temporal affairs, he must nevertheless be admitted to have indirect powers of an extremely extensive character” (Foundations, vol. 2, pp. 179–180). 127. On the contrary, Agostino Trionfo, along with other hierocratic writers, wrote that the fact that Constantine and other emperors gave certain temporal possessions to the popes “should not be understood as if they give them what is theirs, but as if they give back what was taken unjustly and tyrannically”; see Summma, i, I, p. 3, quoted in Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty, p. 543, but see Wilks’s whole section, pp. 538–547; and Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government, 74–86, for the ideological background of the fabrication of the forged document. 128. Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, OO, vol. 2, pp. 163–164. 129. Prodi, The Papal Prince, pp. 28–29; but see Prodi’s entire chapter, pp. 17–36. CHAPTER

2

1. On Sixtus’s attitude toward the Society of Jesus, see the background given by Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, 40 vols. (St. Louis, Mo.: Herder, 1936–1961), vol. 21, pp. 145–178. 2. See, for instance, Edmond J. M. Van Eijl, “La controverse louvaniste autour de la grâce et du libre arbitre à la fin du XVIe siècle,” in M. Lamberigts and L. Kenis, eds., L’Augustinisme à l’ancienne faculté de théologie de Louvain, pp. 208–282, which puts the Louvain controversy of the late 1580s in the context of the longer theological debate within the Catholic Church over the use of the writings of the Church fathers, and especially Augustine, in constructing the theological foundation of postReformation Catholicism. See also L. Ceyssens, “Jacques Jansonius (1547–1625) et l’Augustinisme à Louvain,” in L’Augustinisme à l’ancienne faculté de théologie, pp. 283–298, which contains a biography of Jacques Janson, the protagonist, together with Lessius, of the Louvain controversy. 3. See chapter 1. 4. Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 499–594, especially pp. 499–537, on Lessius. 5. The most exhaustive contribution to the subject is Silvia Mostaccio, “Gerarchie dell’obbedienza e contrasti istituzionali nella Compagnia di Gesu’ all’epoca di Sisto V,” Rivista di Storia del Cristianesimo 1, no. 1 (2004): 109–127. Mostaccio’s analysis of the historiography on the Vincent affair is at pp. 111–115.

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6. For a biography of Lessius, see Charles van Sull, Leonard Lessius, 1554–1623 (Paris: Edits du Museum Lessianum, 1930). 7. Mortuo R.mo D. Nuntio apostolico, quidam ex ista facultate theologica nobis quasdam controversias moverunt ob quasdam sententias quas anno praecedente docueramus in materia de praedestinatione; Lessius to Bellarmine, Louvain, 29 May 1587, in BASC, doc. 96. 8. quaestio fere tota pendet ex quaestione de auxilio sufficienti, quod negant omnibus dari ex parte Dei, et de gratia efficaci, quam longe aliam ponunt atque nos ponimus; ibid. 9. Ratio illorum est, quia ipsorum judicio non sequimur D. Augustinum . . . ego vero probabiliter teneo, hanc sententiam esse D. Augustini, et probo ex l. 1 q. 2, ad Simplicianum. Sed illi respondent hunc librum esse scriptum ab Augustino juvene ante exortam haeresim Pelagii, in posterioribus autem libris suis longe aliter docuisse; ibid. 10. Rogatam autem velim R. V. ut ad Patrem Nostrum de his sententiis tractet, eique totum negotium explicet . . . mihi sane probabile est D. Augustinum in re non dissentire, licet interdum durius de auxilio sufficienti, gratia efficaci et reprobatione loquatur. Et licet fortasse D. Augustinus in aliquo discreparet, an ideo putet hoc mutandum, cum haec rursus explicabuntur . . . dicere enim quod homo etsi necessario cadat, tunc peccet, quia quod adjutorium illud non adsit est poena peccati, videtur esse error Calvini; ibid. 11. See Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 465ff., and the bibliographical indications given there. 12. See BASC, docs. 97 and 99. 13. Bellarmine to Lessius, Rome, 24 July 1587, in BASC, doc. 101 14. Et quidem possent, meo judicio, pleraeque harum sententiarum sano modo exponi, ut exponere solent doctores verba sancti Augustini lib. de gratia et libero arbitrio, cap. 20. sed tamen videntur omnes hoc tempore scandalosae, cum in modo loquendi conveniant cum sententia Calvini et Melanchthonis; quae damnatur in Concilio Tridentino . . . nonnullae etiam videntur non solum falsae, sed etiam erroneae; R. Bellarmine, “Censura ad sententias Lovanio missas,” in BASC, doc. 102. 15. Haec sententiae . . . excerptae sunt ex scriptis cujusdam doctoris Jacobi . . . qui intimus est Michaeli Baio, et qui ejus erroribus aliquando addictissimus fuit; ibid. 16. See Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 533–537. 17. The protest of the theologians of Louvain and the list of offensive propositions taught by the Jesuits were sent to the Jesuit Seminary on 9 September 1587; they can be found in BASC, doc. 103. 18. Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 517ff. 19. See the letter sent by Bellarmine to Lessius in the fall of 1587 in which he wrote that “tertiam assertionem [de Sacris Scripturis] non video quem ad modum tueri possim”; in BASC, doc. 105. 20. Nam de illa 3a propositione . . . illam tantum loqui de possibili, nam est propositio conditionalis: si quid editum humana industria ex peculiari Spiritus Sancti instinctu, sine illa infallibili assistentia, publico Spiritus sancti testimonio

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comprobetur, id fore Sacram Scripturam, scilicet quoad infallibilem authoritatem; Lessius to Bellarmine, Louvain, 26 January 1588, in BASC, doc. 108. 21. Sommerville, “The ‘New Art of Lying,’” especially pp. 167–177. On Lessius’s moral theology, see also Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 142–163 and passim. 22. Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 183–185, but see the entire chapter, pp. 164–185. 23. Tertiam assertionem non video quem ad modum tueri possim; Bellarmine to Lessius, Rome, end of November 1587, in BASC, doc. 105. Cf. also Bellarmine’s considerations on the question of the divine inspiration of scripture, and on the issue of the second book of Maccabees in particular, in the Controversia de verbo Dei, bk. 1, chap. 25, in OO, vol. 1, pp. 99–103. 24. Nisi ergo judicium Sedis apostolicae accesserit, quo dogmata nostra tamquam secura comprobentur . . . nec etiam controversia sopietur; Lessius to Bellarmine, 26 January 1588, in BASC, doc. 108. 25. For the complex situation of the Spanish Jesuits in those years, see Antonio Astrain, Historia de la Compañía de Jesus en la Asistencia de España: Mercurian-Aquaviva (Madrid: Razón y Fe, 1909). 26. The document can be found in ACDF, St St M 3-g, fol. 545. For more details on the context of such action on the part of the pope, see Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza, pp. 226ff.; and Elena Brambilla, Alle origini del Sant’Uffizio: Penitenza, confessione e giustizia spirituale dal medioevo al XVI secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000). 27. On Acquaviva’s role in this delicate phase of his tenure as general of the Society, see Alessandro Guerra, Un generale fra le milizie del Papa: La vita di Claudio Acquaviva scritta da Francesco Sacchini della Compagnia di Gesù (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001). 28. R. V. faciat ut nostri se contieant, idemque conetur ut faciant etiam alii, et S. Pontificis determinationem, ad quem res delata est, expectent; Acquaviva to Coster, 21 March 1588, in BASC, doc. 111. See also Acquaviva to Coster, 4 April 1588, in which Acquaviva announced that Bellarmine was in charge of presenting the case to the pope through Cardinal Madruzzo, in ibid. 29. Praesertim, cum id persuasissimum habere illi debeant beati Petri tantum successori Pontifici Romano licere doctrinae Christianae res controversas definire . . . Itaque hoc valde curabis, et quamprimum efficies, ut omnia quae earum quaestionum, aut contentionum scripta illi, vel universe, vel sigillatim habent, tibi tradant: itaque tradita . . . ad nos recte mittas; Sixtus V to the nuncio in Lower Germany, 15 April 1588, in ACDF, St St E 7-c, folder 5, 110r–v at 110r. 30. See the letter from Sixtus to the Faculty of Theology of Louvain, 15 April 1588, in ibid., 112r–113v. 31. See chapter 1. 32. For a more detailed overview of Bellarmine’s stances during the controversy de auxiliis, see Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 533ff. 33. The main lines of the affair have been narrated by Mostaccio in “Gerarchie dell’obbedienza.” Ignatius’s letter on obedience was sent to the provincial of Portugal on 26 March 1553, and it must be put in the context of a series of grave acts of

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disobedience and lack of coordination between the Portuguese and Roman leaders of the order. By Bellarmine’s time it was one of the standard texts of the founder that were being read and circulated widely within the Jesuit seminaries and colleges throughout Europe; the text can be found in Monumenta Ignatiana: Sancti Ignatii de Loyola Societatis Iesu fundatoris epistolae et instructiones, 12 vols. (Madrid: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1909–1911), vol. 4, letter 3304; the context in which it was written can be followed in O’Malley, The First Jesuits, pp. 329–335. 34. The text of Bellarmine’s Responsio ad censuram P. Juliani Vincentii can be found in AB, pp. 386–400; and in ACDF, St St I 5-b, fasc. 62, unfol. (I will be quoting from the former). 35. This is the Tractatus de obedientia, quae caeca nominatur, in AB, pp. 377–385; and in ACDF, St St I 5-b, fasc. 62, unfol. (I will be quoting from the former). 36. This text is entitled Brevis demonstratio quod ex constitutionibus et praxi Societatis non colligatur Praepositum Generalem errare non posse, contra calumnias Juliani Vincenti, in AB, pp. 400–403. 37. In hoc dua nova et plurium errorum latibula continentur . . . quemlibet in hoc superiorem non tantum esse superiorem, sed et vicarium Christi; Bellarmine, Responsio, p. 389. 38. Quemadmodum enim solus Pontifex Summus, respectu totius Ecclesiae, vicarius Christi dici potest quia solus ipse vice Christi toti Ecclesiae praeest, ita etiam quilibet superior, respectu subditorum suorum, vicarius Christi recte dicitur, cum subditis suis vice Christi praesit; ibid., p. 390. 39. Duobus modis intelligi potest Christum in superiore loqui et verba superioris verba Christi esse: uno modo, ut Christum in superiore loqui sit superiorem Christi auctoritate loqui, dum ut superior fieri jubet; alio, ut Christum in superiore loqui, sit ipsum Christum immediate inspirare et quasi dictare superiori quid loquatur. Priore modo Christus loquitur in iis omnibus qui legitime praesunt, dum nihil contra ipsum imperant; posteriore modo loquitur in prophetis et caeteris quibus secreta sua revelare dignatur; ibid., p. 393. 40. Nihil vero aliud caecae obedientiae nomine intelligi voluit [Ignatius], nisi obedientiam puram, perfectam, ac simplicem; Bellarmine, Tractatus, p. 377. 41. Ibid., pp. 377–385 passim. 42. See Bellarmine, Brevis demonstratio, p. 401. 43. Si haec doctrina in constitutionibus inveniretur, Apostolica Sedes, quod fieri non potest, in confirmandis iisdem constitutionibus erravisset; ibid. 44. Dolemus, quod ista controversia in haec tempora inciderit; Lessius to Bellarmine, Louvain, 26 April 1588, in BASC, doc. 113. 45. Palam dicebant nos non amplius habere Gregorium; ibid. 46. That summary can be found in BASC, doc. 114. 47. For more details on Vincent’s biography after 1587, see Mostaccio, “Gerarchie dell’obbedienza,” pp. 114–118. 48. The decree with which Sixtus asked to have sent to him the Constitutiones of the Society to be examined secretly by two theologians, one of whom was from the Society of Jesus, can be found in ACDF, St St M 3-g, fol. 552. The Brevis demonstratio,

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which Bellarmine wrote in January 1589 in order to defend the orthodoxy of the Society’s concept of obedience, was probably meant also as a part of the documentary evidence presented by the Society to that papal commission. 49. The documents can be found in ACDF, St St I 5-b. This folder contains a series of dubia varia, mostly regarding small uncertainties on matters of confessions, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Jesuit documents, the only ones from the sixteenth century, can be found, unfoliated, in folder 62. 50. For an introduction to the dramatic events of 1589–1590, see John H. M. Salmon, “The Paris Sixteen, 1584–1594: The Social Analysis of a Revolutionary Movement,” in Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), pp. 235–266; and P. Mack Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (1995; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 128–150. On Caetani’s mission to France, see Michel de Bouard, “Sixte Quint, Henri IV et la Ligue: La légation du cardinal Caetain en France,” Reveu des Questions Historiques 20 (1932): 59–140; and, more recently, Michael Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV: Politics, Power, and Religious Belief in Early Modern France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1993), pp. 94–97. On the consequences of Henri’s victory over the French episcopate, see Joseph Bergin, The Making of the French Episcopate 1589–1661 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 335ff. 51. The title of the English translation is A Catholicke apologie, printed in London without the date; cf. STC 15137. 52. I am quoting from the English translation, p. 53. 53. On this point see the entire chapter 19 of the second part of the Catholicke apologie, pp. 60–68, quotation at p. 62. For an analysis of de Belloy’s arguments in the context of French and English political thought, see John H. M. Salmon, “Gallicanism and Anglicanism,” in Renaissance and Revolt, pp. 155–188 at pp. 168–169; Lisa Ferraro Parmelee, God Newes from Fraunce: French Anti-League Propaganda in Late Elizabethan England (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1996), pp. 102–106. 54. Primum igitur licet potestas ecclesiastica, quae in summo Pontifice potissimum residet, & potestas politica, quam praeter caeteros principes Impe. Romanus habet, non modo duae sint ac distincta finibus & officiis sed etiam separatae interdum inveniantur (nam aliquando ecclesia nullos habuit politicos principes, & nunc etiam multi sunt Principes, ac reges extra ecclesiam) tamen quando principes sunt Christiani, & in ecclesiae catholicae membris ac filiis numerantur, duae illae potestates ita coniunguntur, ac conveniunt inter se, ut unam rempub. unum regnum, unam familiam, immo & unum corpus efficiant; [F. Romulus], Bellarmine, Responsio ad Praecipua Capita Apologiae quae falso catholica inscribitur (1586; Fani, 1591), pp. 40–109, quotation at pp. 69–71. 55. Ultima restat obiectio, quod Tridentinum Concilium multa decreverit adversus regni Gallici libertatem, atque ideo in eo regno receptum non sit. Sed haec obiectio ad rem nihil facit. Neque enim hoc loco de iurisdictione ecclesiastica, vel seculari, sed de fide tantum, & religione agimus . . . Quare licet in Gallia decreta Concilii, quae ad reformationem pertinent, non sint omnia adhuc recepta, atque admissa, de qua re non putavi operae pretium nunc disserere: tamen in iis quae ad

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controversias fidei spectant, Concilium Tridentinum non minus in Gallia, quam in reliquo orbe christiano receptum esse nemo negare potest; ibid., pp. 38–39. 56. In Galliis caeperat esse celebre nomen N. ob libros controversiarum editos. Ideo multi eum videre cupiebant, et ipsum frequenter adibant; Bellarmine’s autobiography can be found in APUG Ms. 1460, quotation at 13r–v. 57. See Bellarmine’s autobiography, 14r–15r. The text of the letter that Bellarmine wrote for Caetani can be found in BASC, doc. 142—the copy of the letter printed by Le Bachelet was accompanied by a note identifying the author as Bellarmine, the “theologian of Cardinal Caetani” (theologus Card. Caietani). For the context of the proposed assembly in Tours, see Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV, pp. 96–97. 58. See the letter from Acquaviva to Bellarmine, 12 December 1589, in BASC, doc. 135, in which the general sympathized with the “difficultà de’ mali tempi et de’ diluvi” that Bellarmine had to incur during his journey. Bellarmine’s sensitivity to the cold northern European weather was the reason he had delayed his departure to Louvain for one year in the late 1560s (see Bellarmine’s autobiography, 8v). 59. Quanto al finire il 3 tomo, lo desidero assai, nondimeno vò adagio per molte cause, et ho perso quattro mesi per le strade; Bellarmine to Creswell, Paris, 19 February 1590, in BASC, doc. 143. 60. et quidem cum essem Parisiis et nihil fere haberem, quod agerem, in longa illa obsedione qua nos Rex Henricus quartus premebat, conatus sum linguam gallicam perdiscere; sed nullo modo potui, propterea quod jam essem senio nimis propinquus: alioqui enim, cum essem junior Lovanii linguam Hebraicam, etiam sine magistro didici; Bellarmine to Arnoux, Rome, 6 July 1621, in ARSI, Opp. Nn. 246, 119r–120v, at 119r–120r. 61. Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice, p. 133 62. The best general account of this affair is Xavier Marie Le Bachelet, “Bellarmin à l’Index,” Études 44, no. 111 (1907): 227–246, which, however, does not take into account the sources coming from the Archive of the Congregation of the Index, not yet open at the time of Le Bachelet’s research. Some of the documents from the Index have been published by Godman, The Saint as Censor, pp. 435ff. passim. 63. Peter Godman offers the conjecture that the initiator of the “conspiracy,” as he calls it, against Bellarmine was Francisco Peña, a papalist theologian who opposed Bellarmine on a number of occasions in the early seventeenth century, but Vittorio Frajese rejects this conjecture (see Godman, The Saint as Censor, p. 132; and Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice, p. 132). 64. Havera inteso V. R. per altera strada il romore, che fu fatto a N. Signore per l’opinione, che ella pone nelle sue opere, che in temporalibus Papa non sit dominus orbis; Acquaviva to Bellarmine, Rome, 19 February 1590, in BASC, doc. 144 (italics and Latin in the original). 65. Dopoi è occorso che un frate franciscano ha presentato un libro a S. Santità sopra questo punto, impugnando l’altera opinione, et così ha rinfrescato il rumore; pero S. S.tà ha commesso il negotio alli S.ri Cardinali della Congregatione delo indice, quali per gratia del Signore sono amorevoli della Compagnia, et io ne ho parlato con tre; ibid. No scholar working on Bellarmine, including myself, is able to identify the book mentioned by Acquaviva. On the internal politics involving the cardinals of the

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Inquisition and of the Index whom Acquaviva contacted, see Godman, The Saint as Censor, pp. 134–136. 66. Questi Signori come tutti intelligenti la tengono con noi et speriamo che come sua Santità sara informata che è opinione commune de theologi s’accettera; lbid. 67. congregatio habita apud Ill.mum Cardinalem Columnam ubi adfuerunt omnes excepto Borromeo . . . tractatum de R. P. Belarminio non reponendo ex omnium fere sententia in Indice; 22 February 1590, in ACDF, Index, Diarii I, 1, 39r–v. Godman thinks that the person who voted against Bellarmine was, once again, Francisco Peña (see The Saint as Censor, pp. 135–136, but see also Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice, p. 132, for a different opinion). 68. si riferiranno le cose in modo al Papa che restera sodisfatto. Sicche V. R. non se piglia fastidio alcuno, che al piu che si possa venire, potra essere che desiderino nella seguente editione si muttino alcune parolette, come dire, dove dice V. R. che sono errori, o sentenze d’alcuni, etc., et cosi moderarle; Acquaviva to Bellarmine, Rome, 23 February 1590, in BASC, doc. 146. 69. conclusum quod in indice expurgatorio de Francisco a’ Vitoria et Belarminio ratio habeatur; 5 April 1590, ACDF, Index, Diarii I, 1, 39v. Vitoria’s relectiones had been published posthumously for the first time in Lyon in 1557, and reprinted in 1565 in Salamanca and many times after that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 70. In somma la cosa si risolve che ‘n un’altra editione i titoli non si pongano negativi ma problematici: Utrum Papa habeat etc; Acquaviva to Bellarmine, Rome, 14 April 1590, in BASC, doc. 149 (italics and Latin in the original). 71. che non si chiami errore l’opinione che Christus habuerit dominium temporale, poiche questo è qui ricevuto molto male; ibid. (italics and Latin in the original). 72. Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice, pp. 133–135. 73. V. R. sia certa che ben s’intendono le ragioni che V. R. scrisse adesso, et prima ancora già s’erano da noi raccolte, con l’antichità de’ dottori che sono nella medesima opinione; Acquaviva to Bellarmine, Rome, 11 May 1590, in BASC, doc.151. 74. congregatio habita apud Ill.mum Card. De Rovere . . . memoriale oblatum pro Padre Belarminio a Padre Stephano Societatis Jesu; 2 July 1590, in ACDF, Index, Diarii, I, 1, 41r–v. The text of the memorandum can be found in ACDF, Index, Protocolli DDD, 424r–v. 75. Tanto piu che la dottrina loro, non essendo dalla Sede Apostolica stato determinato niente in contrario, è conforme a quel che communemente corre nelle Scuole de’ Teologi; ACDF, Index, Protocolli DDD, 424r. 76. si desidera che la Santità Vostra lasci che possano tenere l’opinione, che è stata permessa fin hora; ibid. 77. ogni oppositione o contradittione che gli fosse fatta sarebbe una piu che tacita condanna di molti gravissimi dottori, che da piu di dugento anni in qua la mesedima dottrina hanno insegnato et stampato; ibid. 78. col prohibirle. . . . si leverebbe l’animo a molti eccellenti dottori di non s’affaticar tanto in scrivere per l’estirpatione dell’heresie et reduttione de’ popoli infetti; ibid.,424r–v.

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79. per antichissimo costume si vede che la Santa Chiesa sempre ha giudicato esser meglio sopportare qualche nevo nei buoni scrittori, che con tanto lor smacco prohibire l’opere loro utili et fruttuose per edificatione del populo; ibid. 80. in altra ocasione, scrivendo dell’Indie occidentali, [Vitoria] dottamente prova che tutta la potestà, che sopra di quelle ha il re di Spagna, è derivata dall’autorità di questa Santa Sede; ibid., 424v. 81. l’opere sue sono state stampate e ristampate per tutte quasi le parti settentrionali con grandissimo affronto degli heretici et applauso et frutto de’ Cattolici; ibid. 82. è pronto a dargli ogni sodisfattione o nella seconda editione o nelle opere che adesso sta scrivendo secondo che S. S. gli ordinerà; ibid. 83. Quanto al negocio del libro, sappia V. R. che la cosa adesso va in fervore. S’è fatto ogni diligenza possibile, et adesso stiamo facendone un’altra di assai importanza, la quale speriamo che havrà buon’effetto; Acquaviva to Bellarmine, Rome, 6 July 1590, in BASC, doc. 153. 84. The minutes of the meetings of the Index can be found in ACDF, Index, Diarii, I, 1, 41v and .42r–v. For an analysis of the slight changes made to the memorandum, see Godman, The Saint as Censor, pp. 137–139. Godman also published the text of the memorandum in ibid., pp. 436–438. 85. Ma il principal negocio di che sempre le ho parlato, è stato del suo libro, nel quale l’avisavano della diligenza che s’era fatta, et come cotesti S.ri Cardinali l’intendevano bene, in modo che stavano con buona speranza, come anco adesso, et maggiormente havendo S. S.tà dati alcuni buoni segni della mente sua; Acquaviva to Bellarmine, Rome, 5 August 1590, in BASC, doc. 156. 86. See ACDF, Index, Protocolli K, 35r–36v, quotation at 35r. The document has also been published by Godman, The Saint as Censor, pp. 269–272. 87. Lectae per secretarium quam plures difficultates propositae a Patre Belarminio in regulas et Indicem Sixti Quinti et conclusum ad evitandas tot difficultates retinendum Indicem Pii 4ti cum suis regulis; 25 July 1592, ACDF, Index, Diarii I, 1, 47v; and Godman, The Saint as Censor, p. 439. 88. Isti tollendi videntur ex hoc indice tum quia sunt auctores vere Catholici, et opera eorum ut plurimum sunt utilia: tum quia videbitur acceptio personarum, si isti ponantur in indice prohibitorio, ut non ponantur alii multi, qui non minus errarunt, quam aliqui istorum, ut Alphonso de Castro, Albertus Pighius, Jacobus Almaynus, Jo[hannes] Gerson, Durandus, Scotus, Gabriel, Thomas Caietanus, et alii.; ACDF, Index, Protocolli K, .77r–78v, quotation at 77r; and Godman, The Saint as Censor, pp. 272–274. On Bellarmine’s role in the revisions of the Index started by Clement VIII, see Frajese, Nascita dell’Indice, pp. 141ff. 89. For a synthetic introduction on the religious situation of Hungary, see I. G. Tóth, “Old and New Faith in Hungary, Turkish Hungary, and Transylvania,” in Ron Po-chia Hsia, ed., A Companion to the Reformation World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 205–220. 90. On Arator, see Thomas Löhr, “P. Stephen Szántó und die Theologie,” Korrespondenzblatt 88 (1979): 26–58.

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91. De Bellarmini controversiis ea est doctorum praelatorum hic, plus illas nocuisse Ecclesiae, quam profuisse; non haereticis arma eripuisse, sed porrexisse. Numquam enim pro sua secta tuenda Calvinistae et Lutherani tot et tam firma argumenta scivissent excogitare, quot in Bellarmino invenient. Itaque ab ipsis magis emuntur ipsius volumina, quam a catholicis; Arator to Acquaviva, mid-1591, in BASC, doc. 169. 92. Argumenta catholicorum enervat, et modum solvendi ostendit haereticis; fortissimas rationes de Purgatorio, quas habebant catholici, rejicit, et futiles quasdam ex libris Regum adfert de funere Saul, Joab, etc. Multa et fortiora adfert haereticorum argumenta, et debiliter solvit; ibid. 93. This and the following paragraphs owe much to the analysis of the Bellarmine-Arator controversy done by Dietrich, Die theologie der Kirche, pp. 190ff. Arator’s censures, together with Bellarmine’s reply, can be found in ARSI, Censurae Librorum, Fondo Gesuitico 652, vol. 1 (1578–1604), 141r–146v, and have been printed in AB, pp. 403–415, as “Censura P. Aratoris et Responsio.” 94. “Censura P. Aratoris,” AB, pp. 404–405. 95. Ibid., p. 410. 96. Aliis etiam illud displicet, quod nimis multa argumenta adferantur haereticorum, ita ut fere aequent catholicorum. Hinc illud periculum sequi potest, quod si quis male fundatus in fide legat utraque, facile dubitare poterit quam partem sequi debeat, praesertim cum haereticorum sint plausibiliora et ad sensum videantur esse faciliora . . . Non indigebunt Calvinistae et Lutherani libris Lutheri et Calvini. Hic enim omnia ipsorum argumenta inveniunt, et proinde non minus avide ab illis emuntur quam a catholicis tomi Bellarmini . . . puto boni patris propositum fuisse colligere omnia haereticorum argumenta et confutare. Quod et praestitit strenue, ut bonus Christi miles; ibid., p. 414. 97. In eadem Praefatione distinguit Pannonia contra Ungariam, cum nunc pro eadem provincia accipiantur; ibid., p. 413. 98. [la dottrina et opinioni di detto Padre], se non m’inganno, potriano essere pericolose et qualche volta di fastidio alla Compagnia . . . Simili a questo sono le altre censure tutte fondate in contraddittioni, fuora che l’ultima, nella quale giudica esser male che io habbia sciolto tutti gli argomenti di Luthero et Calvino. Il che però se io non facevo, davo materia ai nemici della fede di gloriarsi che i loro argomenti fussero insolubili; Bellarmine to Acquaviva, Frascati, 27 December 1591, in ARSI, Censurae Librorum, Fondo Gesuitico 652, vol. 1, 151r–152v, at 151v–152r; and in BASC, doc. 169. 99. P. Stefano haverà in Vienna divulgato che per ordine di V. P. si rivede la mia opera, come suspetta o pericolosa; ibid. 100. Bellarmine to Acquaviva, Frascati, 9 January 1592, in ARSI, Cesurae Librorum, Fondo Gesuitico 652, vol. 1, 161r–v; and BASC, doc. 172. 101. La principale sua censura è l’ultima, dove esso dice, che io sciolgo tutti gl’argomenti de gl’heretici, et, se bene confessa che io gli sciolgo bene, tutta via mi riprende con dire, che gl’heretici cavano dal mio libro gl’argomenti di Luthero, et Calvino, et che pare che siano stati argumenti per una parte come per l’altra. Se questa censura fusse buona, bisognaria prohibire il libro del s.to vescovo e martyre Roffense, perche vi ha messo dentro ad verbum tutto il libro di Luthero, et similmente

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bisognaria prohibire li libri di . . . Sandero, et altri, che hanno riferito con l’istesse parole tutti gl’argumenti de loro aversarii; ibid. 102. The reply of Bellarmine can be found in ARSI, Censurae Librorum, Fondo Gesuitico 652, vol. 1, 141r–146v; and in AB, pp. 403–415, quotation at p. 410. 103. Judicium tanti Pontificis, credo, licebit mihi judicio huius censoris opponere; ibid., p. 414. 104. et se io non credessi certo che la P. V. ci rimediarà facendolo ritrattare, et che esso sia per obedire, mi terria obligato in coscienza a denuntiarlo al Santo offizio, come huomo pericolso in questi tempi, et in quelle bande; Bellarmino to Acquaviva, Frascati, 28 January 1592, in ARSI, Censurae Librorum, Fondo Gesuitico 652 vol. 1, 163r–v; and BASC, doc. 173, quotation at 163v. 105. See Dietrich, Die theologie der Kirche, pp. 109ff.; and Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 220ff., quotation at p. 222. On the theological structure of the Controversiae in the context of post-Tridentine Catholic controversistic works, see also Galeota, “Genesi, sviluppo e fortuna,” esp. pp. 28ff. 106. Acquaviva to Bellarmine, Rome, 3 April 1595, in BASC, doc. 193. 107. Acquaviva to Santoro, Rome, 7 March 1596, in BASC, doc. 205. 108. Prima che ricevessi l’altra di V. S. Ill.ma del IX di marzo, havevo inteso quello ch’ella mi avvertisse circa l’opere del Padre Bellarmino, et già ne havevo fatto qualche officio con alcuni di questi inquisitori, ma non ho trovato che essi habbino annotato cosa nissuna, ne che n’habbiano alcun pensiero; nuncio in Spain to Santoro, Madrid, 6 June 1595, in BASC, doc. 207. 109. fu da alcuni emuli data a N. S. una censura supra la mia opera, tanto essatta, che si vidde, che l’havevano studiata benissimo per calunniare ogni piccola cosa, il che è facile di fare in ogni opera, et io non leggo quasi mai libro nessuno, che non mi bastasse l’animo di fargli supra una buona censura; Bellarmine to Possevino, Ferrara, 13 July 1598, in ARSI, Opp. Nn. 245, 131r–132v, at 131r; and BASC, doc. 238. 110. Io pensavo dar fuora il correttorio di tutta la mia opera, ma non parve bene a N. S. ne agl’altri Padri, perche dicevano, che . . . poi ci era periculo, che il mondo si prestasse che io fusse stato costretto a fare come una ritrattatione; Bellarmine to Possevino, Ferrara, 13 July 1598, in ARSI, Opp. Nn. 245, 132r. 111. Se V. R. ha da far mentione di questa correttione, desidero che non faccia mentione se non di correttione d’errori di stampa, perche il resto non si puo provare, et N. S. voleva che fusse secretissimo . . . et di nuovo la prego che se nella sua opera fara mentione delle mie controversie, non nomini censure, ne apologie, massime che li nostri di Spagna, d’onde viene la censura, scrivano, che li emuli sono pentiti, et che s’accorgano di haver corso troppo; ibid. 112. This censure and Bellarmine’s reply can be found in BAV, Vat. Lat. 4675, fols. 141–147, and it has been published by Le Bachelet in AB, pp. 415–423. 113. per la sua superbia li Jesuiti et per estimar en niente le altre Religioni e dotori, sono cascati in questi inconvenienti persuadendosi che tuti sono ignoranti; relation by Peña on the debates over the controversy de auxiliis, 13 November 1601, in ACDF, St St O 5-i, 147r. 114. In primis videntur illi libri hominis parum in Theologia scholastica et morali exercitati; multa enim ex illis leviter attingit, et quasi dissimulans, praeterire se

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ait, cum tamen exacta eorum tractatio necessaria sit ad confirmandum ea, quae contra haereticos pro Ecclesiae dogmatibus adducit]; “Censura in controversias,” AB, pp. 415–416. 115. Praeterea non tam studet sacrarum literarum et Patrum testimoniis aestimandis et expendendis, quam cumulandis. Quare multa ex iis, quae in dogmatum confirmationem adducit, facile possunt ab haereticis retorqueri, aut saltem enervari . . . Denique adverarios multis addicit conviciis, quibus non solum non invitat et allicit ad veritatem, sed potius irritat, ut unjuriis lacessiti in catholicos liberius debacchentur]; ibid., p. 416. 116. Negat Christo dominium temporale . . . id quod negat propter rationem debilissimam, videlicet quia nec illud habuit ex haereditaria successione, nec ex electione, nec jure belli, nec dono speciali Dei; nam illud habuit titulo unionis hypostaticae, sicut alias similes dignitates; ibid., p. 418. 117. Porro autor non negat in Christo potestatem in omnes res temporales, quam habuit ut caput hominum et angelorum, sed negat eam potestatem fuisse dominium mere temporale, quale est regum et principum hujus mundi, et hoc efficaciter probat ratio quam ipse post Victoriam et Sotum adducit; “Censura in controversias,” Ibid., p. 419. 118. Belarminio respondio que . . . el no negava la potestad de su santidad sino que solamente decia a lo que le parecia mas conveniente. Que su santidad le avia replicado chesto seria bello che negasse la potesta: or su guardate bene chel che dite; 19 January 1602, in ACDF, St St. O 5-i, 151v–152r at 151v. CHAPTER

3

1. Clerici praeterquam quod Clerici sunt, sunt etiam cives, & partes quaedam Reipublicae politicae, igitur ut tales vivere debent civilibus legibus, non sunt autem aliae, quam quae a magistratu politico latae sunt, igitur illas Clerici servare debent; De Clericis, 1st ed., vol. 2, col. 1536. 2. absurdum videtur, ut ovis pastorem suum iudicet . . . Praeterea absurdum etiam videtur, ut terrenus iudex summi Iudicis servos, sacratosque homines capiat, vel puniat; ibid., col. 1538. 3. Exceptio Clericorum in rebus politicis tam quoad personas, quam quoad bona, iure humano introducta est, non divino; ibid., col. 1539. 4. Ibid., cols. 1540–1541. 5. The book was written in 1608, and two manuscript copies of it can be found in BAV, Vat. Lat. 7001. It was published with the title De regno Christi in Rome in 1611, the year before its author’s death. 6. dominium est ius de re corporali . . . disponendi . . . quia rerum incorporalium non est proprie dominium; De universali Dominio, BAV, Vat. Lat. 7001, fol. 2. 7. Ibid., fols. 2ff. On the significance of the distinction between dominium directum and dominium utile in late medieval debates over the relationship between pope and emperor, which constitutes the background against which Peña’s considerations should be seen, see Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty, pp. 200–229.

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8. It is not a coincidence that Peña’s treatise De universali Dominio was supposed to be the first of four books, two of which were meant to discuss specifically the issue of clerical exemption and ecclesiastical liberty; see Frajese, “Regno ecclesiastico e Stato moderno,” p. 319. 9. On this see also Frajese, “Regno ecclesiastico e Stato moderno,” pp. 312ff. 10. De Clericis, 1st ed., vol.2, cols. 1540–1541. 11. Tertio obiiciunt, si solum est de iure humano, ut Clerici non solvant tributa, & non trahantur ad tribunalia secularium, ergo poterunt Reges & Principes contrarium statuere. Respondeo, id non sequi, tum quia non soli ipsi, sed etiam Pontifices & Concilia hanc exemptionem Clericis tribuerunt, tum etiam quia orbis terrae in eam consensit, qui Regibus contulit eam potestatem, quam habent; Bellarmine, De Clericis, 1st ed., vol. 2, col. 1542. 12. This is the version of De Clericis that can be found in OO, vol. 2, pp. 409–497. 13. Exceptio Clericorum in rebus politicis tum quoad personas, tum quoad bonas, introducta est iure humano pariter et divino; Bellarmine, De Clericis, OO, vol. 2, p. 489. 14. Sed antea tamen observandum est, nos per ius divinum non intelligere praeceptum Dei proprie dictum, quod exstet expresse in sacris litteris: sed quod ab exemplis vel testimoniis testamenti veteris, vel novi per quamdam similitudinem deduci possit. Atque hinc fortasse conciliari poterunt Theologorum, et Jurisperitorum sententiae; ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 490. 16. Disseruimus hactenus de iure divino positivo; nunc de iure naturali disserendum est, quod plane divinum esse in dubium revocari non potest, cum ius naturale sit illud, quod est ab auctore naturae impressum; ibid., p. 491. 17. Primus [gradus] est eorum, quae ita perspicue sunt impressa in cordibus hominum, ut solo lumine rationis, sine ulla disciplina vel arte, imo sine novo discursu rationis judicentur ab omnibus iusta; ibid. 18. Secundus gradus est eorum praeceptorum, quae deducuntur ex illis primis principiis, tamquam conclusiones proximae, et quasi naturaliter fluentes per facilem, evidentem, et necessariam consequentiam; ibid. 19. Tertius gradus praeceptorum naturalium est eorum, quae deducuntur quidem ex principiis iuris naturae, sed per consequentiam non absolute necessariam, nec omnino evidentem, et ideo egent humana constitutione. Et haec sunt quae Theologi proprie referunt ad ius gentium; ibid., p. 492. 20. For the significance of Bellarmine’s and other neo-Thomists’ notion of ius gentium, see Skinner, Foundations, vol. 2, pp. 148–154. 21. See OO, vol. 2, pp. 492–493. 22. Ibid., pp. 493–494. 23. Ecclesiam vere unam tantum esse, et nullo modo duas, civitatem autem unam esse materialiter, et duas formaliter. Nam Ecclesia continet omnes Christianos Catholicos, sive sint Clerici, sive Laici. Si quis autem consideret coetum Laicorum, non ut Christiani sunt, sed ut cives, vel quocumque alio modo, is coetus Ecclesia dici non

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potest . . . at coetus Laicorum, et coetus Clericorum formaliter duae civitates dici possunt . . . et tamen materialiter unam quoque civitatem faciunt; ibid., p. 497. 24. On the Venetian Interdetto, see William J. Bouswma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter-Reformation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); the introduction to P. Sarpi, Opere, by L. and G. Cozzi (Milan: Ricciardi, 1969); and Gaetano Cozzi, Paolo Sarpi tra Venezia e l’Europa (Turin: Einaudi, 1979). Also useful is the introduction to the collection of primary sources edited by P. Pirri, L’Interdetto di Venezia del 1606 e i gesuiti (Rome: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1959). The Society of Jesus was readmitted in Venice only in 1657: for an overview of the negotiations, see Gianvittorio Signorotto, “Il rientro dei gesuiti a Venezia: La trattativa (1606–1657),” in M. Zanardi, ed., I Gesuiti e Venezia: Momenti e problemi di storia veneziana della Compagnia di Gesù (Venice: Gregoriana, 1990), pp. 385–419. 25. Il Cardinal Bellarmino chiaramente diceva, che il Papa non parlava con lui di queste materie giuridittionali, perche le intendeva un poco largamente, & che havrebbe essortato il Pontefice ad attender alla residenza delli Prelati nelle sue chiese; Paolo Sarpi, Historia particolare delle cose passate tra ‘l Sommo Pontefice Paolo V e la Serenissima Republica di Venetia ([Venice,] 1624), pp. 35–36. On the resistance on the part of some Roman cardinals to the excommunication, see also Bouswma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, pp. 370–373. 26. Sarpi’s theology was as influential as it was ambiguous and enigmatic, and much of the scholarship dedicated to his religious views attempts to solve the ambiguity by interpreting him as a politique (Federico Chabod, “La politica di Paolo Sarpi,” in Scritti sul Rinascimento [Turin: Einaudi, 1967], pp. 459–590); a closeted Calvinist (Gaetano Cozzi, “Fra Paolo Sarpi, l’Anglicanesimo e la Historia del Concilio Tridentino,” Rivista Storica Italiana 63 [1956]: 559–619; an atheist (David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi between Renaissance and Enlightenment [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983]); or a skeptic (Vittorio Frajese, Sarpi Scettico: Stato e Chiesa a Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento [Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994]). 27. The fact that with Gerson’s translation Sarpi succeeded in enlarging the Venetian debate both theoretically and politically to include also the contemporary Gallican reflections on papal authority has been noted by Francis Oakley in “Complexities of Context: Gerson, Bellarmine, Sarpi, Richer, and the Venetian Interdict of 1606–7,” Catholic Historical Review 82 (1996), pp.369–396. On the link between Sarpi’s conciliarim and the Gallicans,’ see also Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition, pp. 159–172. On the polemical battle around the Interdetto, see Adriano Prosperi, “‘L’altro coltello’: Libelli di lite di parte romana,” in Zanardi, ed., I Gesuiti e Venezia, pp. 263–287. 28. Nella discussione . . . da chi volse adulare furono dette tante essorbitanze dell’illimitata potestà, anzi onnipotentia pontificia, che il Padre Bellarmino con voce sommessa disse a Padre [Sarpi], “Queste sono le cose che hanno fatto rivoltar la Germania, e faranno l’istesso alla Francia, e altri Regni”; Fulgenzio Micanzio, Vita del Padre Sarpi, in Paolo Sarpi, Opere (Venice, 1687) (1st ed. Leiden, 1646), vol. 1, p. 52. Sarpi also repeated the phrase that Bellarmine had used in the anonymous preface to his edition of Gerson’s works; see Prosperi, ‘“L’altro coltello,”’ pp. 271–272. According

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to Micanzio, the “buon affetto ch’haveva per radice la virtù e carità Christiana” that linked Sarpi to Bellarmine did not disappear after the harsh polemical phase of 1606–1607, since Bellarmine kept worrying about Sarpi and sending him his regards more than once after the attempted murder of the Venetian friar in 1607 (see Fulgenzio Micanzio, Vita del Padre Sarpi, pp. 213–214). 29. alcuni canonisti hanno scritto che le chiese e persone ecclesiastice e li loro beni iure divino sono esenti in tutto e per tutto dalla potestà secolare, alla qual opinione ha dato occasione Bonifazio VIII . . . e all’auttorità di Bonifazio risponde il cardinal Belarminio. . . . che Bonifazio fu dell’opinione de’ canonisti, e non disse determinando che così si dovesse credere, ma esplicando la sua opinione, la qual però esso Belarminio non tiene né reputa da tenere. Sarpi’s Consulti can be found in the excellent edition of C. Pin, 2 vols. (Pisa and Rome: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Nazionali, 2001), quotation in vol. 1, tomo 1, p. 266. Bellarmine’s quotation comes from chapter 28 of his De Clericis, 1st ed., vol. 2, col. 1542. The canon quoted by Sarpi and Bellarmine, canon 4, Title 20, book 3, of the Liber Sextus, was issued by Boniface VIII and decreed that any person or institution that obliged clergymen to pay certain taxes should be excommunicated. The controversial part in this canon is Boniface’s affirmation that clergymen “non solum iure humano, sed quin immo et divino, a saecularium personarum exactionibus sint immunes” (text in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. A. Richter and A. Friedberg, 2 vols. [Graz: Akademische Druck- U. Verlagsanstalt, 1959], vol. 2, col. 1058). 30. La potestà del Sommo Pontefice di commandare alli Christiani, non è illimitata, né si estende a tutte le materie, & modi; ma è ristretta a fine della publica utilità della Chiesa; & ha per regola la legge Divina. Quelli, che nel Pontefice Sommo pongono una libertà, & assoluta potestà in ogni cosa, hanno questo solo fondamento, che egli è il Vicario di Christo, il quale è Dio, & però ha tutta la potestà di lui, la quale estendendosi a tutte le cose; per conseguenza a tutto si estenderà ancora la potestà del Pontefice. Non si deve mettere in controversia la suppositione, che sia Vicario: ma bene si mostrerà, che sia con limitata potestà: perche prima non gli ha communicato Christo la potestà sua, come Dio, ma come huomo: quella si estende universalmente a tutte le cose; questa egli restringe al Regno Celeste per il che disse il Signore “Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo”; Paolo Sarpi, Trattato dell’interdetto della santità di Papa Paolo V composto da fra’ paolo dell’Ordine de’ Servi ad altri Theologhi di sotto nominati (1606; Venice, 1687), pp. 36–38. 31. See ibid., pp. 41–47, 85–89, and passim. 32. Sono alcuni che si maravigliano che io risponda a certi libretti volgari che pajono, e sono veramente di poca sostanza e di meno dottrina, stimando che in questo si avvilisca la dignità cardinalizia, e l’autorità delle opere Latine che in altri tempi ho dato alla stampa . . . però mi è stato necessario rispondere, a ciò insieme servisse, come era obligato, alla causa commune e defendessi me stesso . . . dalle calunnie; Robert Bellarmino, Risposta al trattao delli sette teologi di Venezia (Rome, 1606), in OO, vol. 8, pp. 3–30 at p. 3. 33. In questa proposizione facilmente saremo d’accordo: perché sebbene la potestà del sommo Pontefice . . . considerata rispetto a quella de’ Vescovi particolari,

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ed anco de’ principi temporali, si può dire che sia illimitata, perché i vescovi hanno la loro potestà ristretta ad una diocesi; ed i principi l’hanno ristretta al suo particolare imperio, ed il sommo Pontefice ha potestà in tutto il mondo: nondimeno se la consideriamo rispetto a quella di Dio si può dire, che sia limitata . . . ma tutto questo non ha che fare con la controversia presente, né ci pare di dovere spender tempo senza necessità; ibid., p. 12 34. Risponde il medesimo Cardinale . . . solo . . . che resta ancora in piedi la quistione fra cattolici, perché alcuni non confessano che quel concilio sia stato veramente concilio generale: e questo l’ha detto perché voleva stabilire perfettamente quella verità, sciogliendo tutti gli argomenti non solo degli eretici, ma anco di quei pochi cattolici, che avevano sostenuto il contrario, cioè Gio. Gersone; ibid., p. 13. Cf. also Bellarmine’s Risposta ad un libretto intitolato trattato e risoluzione sopra la validità delle scomuniche di Gio. Gersone (Rome, 1606), in ibid., pp. 59–70, especially pp. 65–67. On the significance of the discussion over the Fifth Lateran Council (1516) in the context of the controversy of the Interdetto, see Oakley, “Complexities of Context,” pp. 385–391. 35. il Papa non può comandare separatamente i moti interiori in se stessi: ma può bene comandarli come modi, e circostanze degli esteriori; Bellarmine, Risposta al trattato, p. 14. 36. però bisogna guardarsi dal Theologizar in questo modo, col qual si disforma, & si disordina, & il Regno di Dio, & quello del Mondo; & sono ingannati li semplici, & induttti a credere, che in tutte le cose vi sia obligo di obedire al Papa; Paolo Sarpi, Apologia per l’oppositioni fatte dall’illustriss. & Reverendiss. Signor Cardinale Bellarmino alli Trattati & Risolutioni di Gio. Gersone (1606; Venice, 1687), p. 41. 37. Ibid., pp. 147ff. and passim. 38. Ibid., pp. 153–155. 39. Ibid., pp. 220–225. 40. conforme a’ quali [i.e. Soto and Vitoria] parla anco il Signor Cardinal Bellarmino nel trattato suo De Romano Pontifice, in tempo, che non essendo ancora nata questa controversia, giudicava senza passione; ibid., pp. 72–73. 41. Fa un luogo [sic] discorso il Signor Cardinale Bellarmino nelle sue Opere de Romano Pontifice, limitando l’Auttorità del Sommo Pontefice, & toccando molte cose, che il medesimo Pontefice non può fare, & sarebbe il suo discorso molto vano, quando non ci fusse l’eccesso della potestà; ibid., pp. 265–266, but see the entire passage, pp. 260–266. 42. The title of the treatise is Risposta alle oppositioni di fra Paulo Servita, contra la scrittura del Cardinale Bellarmino (Rome, 1606). Bellarmine’s manuscript copy of the work can be found in APUG Ms. 385A, 421r–463v. 43. dice F. Paulo, che dottrina è del Card. Bellarmino, che li ecclesiastici nelle cause criminali sono essenti iure humano . . . Rispondo, esser vero, che io ho scritto gl’ecclesiastici esser’essenti iure humano, ma ho anco aggiunto, et divino, che cosi vederà chi vorrà leggere l’editione Veneta del 1599 (et se bene nella prima ci era non iure divino . . . dire che non si trovava un precetto divino che espressamente comandasse questa essentione, non pero che . . .) . . . mi sono anco forzato di ridurre a buon senso le scritture, che nel primo aspetto pare, che non admettino l’essentione essere de iure divino; ibid., 431r. The words in brackets have been erased by Bellarmine.

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44. Et ho detto dichiaratione, non mutatione, o (contraddittione) correttione; ibid., 444r. The word ‘contraddittione’ has been erased by Bellarmine. 45. pienissima potesta non assolutamente, ma in quanto era communicabile ad un huomo mortale. Altrimenti chi voglia colunniare et cavillare, potra anco dire, non esser vero, che il passato non sia passato, et che l’huomo non sia irrationale, o la bestia sia rationale; ibid., 455v. 46. il Vicario di Christo non vole intraprendere, per usare la parola sua, le cose temporali de laici, ne è questa la (vera) causa ma un (falso) pretesto, della separatione degl’heretici dalla Chiesa di Dio; ibid., 464r–v. The words in brackets were added to the text by Bellarmine. See also the entire passage, 460r and ff. 47. quando escono dalla via della salute usando male la potesta (politica) loro o usurpandosi (l’ecclesiastica) quella che non è loro; ibid., 464v. The words in brackets have been erased by Bellarmine in the text. 48. On this defensive aspect of Bellarmine’s works against Sarpi in the context of the other Roman anti-Venice polemics, see Prosperi, ‘“L’altro coltello,” pp. 271–275. Indeed, it is ironic that when, in 1606, Bellarmine prepared, upon request of Paul V, a censure of Sarpi’s Trattato and other works, Bellarmine noted as heretical many propositions, some of which were not even considered so by even hard-core pro-Papalist writers as Francisco Peña, to whom the pope showed Bellarmine’s censures and who considered them too severe. Bellarmine’s censure and Peña’s judgment over them can be found in AB, pp. 587–590 and n. 1. For an in-depth overview of the arguments of Bellarmine and of the other Roman controversialists against Venice, see Bouswma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, pp. 293–338, 417–482. 49. Iure namque divino atque humano sacra a profanis esse debere distincta . . . Quid igitur vobis arrogatis de iuribus ecclesiasticis sancire leges, easdemque adversarias legibus ecclesiasticis, quandoquidem laicis inconcessum sit etiam praescribere de his leges; Cesare Baronio, Paraenesis ad rempublicam venetam (Rome, 1606), pp. 8–31, quotations at pp. 14, 17. The text was translated into Italian by Francesco Serdonati and published with the title Esortazione dell’Illustrissimo et reverendissimo Signor Card. Baronio (Rome, 1606). On this text see also Bouswma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, pp. 379–380. 50. Baronio, Paraenesis, pp. 53–54. 51. Admoneat vos periculum vestrum: exterreat perditio vestra; ibid., pp. 58–61, quotation at p. 59. 52. Ibid., pp. 65–67. 53. On Cappello, see Bouswma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, pp. 398ff. passim 54. gli Ecclesiastici . . . nondimeno per altro rispetto si possono chiamare più che huomini, anzi Dei onde necessariamente la conseguenza resta vitiosa, e dedotta da premesse che non hanno verità universale; perciò tutto il rimanente, che in questo capo dice l’autore, ad altro non serve, che a perder tempo, & empire i fogli di parole pungenti, e che non fanno al caso; [Benedetto Giustiniani], Risposta di Giulio Roffo teologo della val di Taro a Marc’Antonio Cappello (Rome, 1607), p. 33. 55. Quinci avviene, che si come l’arte del cavalcare, che ha per fine reggere, e maneggiar bene il cavallo, ha necessaria connessione con l’arte, che fa il freno . . . così

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la potestà Ecclesiastica è necessariamente congiunta con la politica Christiana; e si come il freno sarebbe vano, e disutile, se non potesse servire per cavalcare; così sarebbe del tutto vano, e perso il viver politico de’ Christiani, se non servisse per l’acquisto della beatitudine eterna; ibid., pp. 34–35. 56. See chapter 1. 57. tutti i Dottori . . . parlano in modo della immunità de’ Chierici, che dimostrano chiaramente esser cosa dovuta per ragione naturale, parte per la dignità dello stato, parte per gli ufficii, e ministerii, che sono obligati ad esercitare . . . quanto bene . . . non si possi con testi chiari della Scrittura provare; è nondimeno fondata nel ius divino [sic]; [Giustiniani], Risposta di Giulio Roffo, pp. 47ff. passim, quotations at pp. 57, 69. 58. l’autore in tutta questa sua scrittura, non ha tralasciato occasione alcuna, anzi l’ha senza proposito procacciata, di mordere, non che piccare, la dottrina del Cardinale Bellarmino, hora notandolo come troppo severo verso la Republica, hora cercando di mostrarlo contrario all’autorità Pontificia, per renderlo ugualmente odioso all’una parte, e l’altra. E se bene s’è ingegnato di farlo con qualche dissimulatione, e galantaria di parole, non deve però tenerci per tanto male avveduti, che non ci accorgiamo; ibid., p. 212. 59. On the personal and intellectual relationship between Bellarmine and Baronio, see Zen, “Bellarmino e Baronio.” 60. On Peña’s manual and its importance in the history of the Roman Inquisition, see John A. Tedeschi, “Inquisitorial Sources and Their Uses,” in The Prosecution of Heresy: Collected Studies on the Inquisition in Early Modern Italy (Binghampton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), pp. 47–88; and “The Organization and Procedures of the Roman Inquisition: A Sketch,” in ibid., pp. 127–203; Andrea Errera, Processus in causa fidei: L’evoluzione dei manuali inquisitoriali nei secoli XVI–XVIII e il manuale inedito di un inquisitore perugino (Bologna: Monduzzi, 2000), pp. 118–126. 61. Iam quomodo sit intelligendum Papam habere utrumque gladium docet Sotus . . . Gladium enim temporalem habet in ordine ad spiritualem, quare nunquam nisi ob fidei causam Regna per Pontificem mutata sunt; Francisco Peña, Directorium Inquisitorum (Rome, 1578), pp. 8–9. 62. Non est itaque fas dicere Romanum Pontificem non habere utrumque gladium, sive utramque iurisdictionem videlicet spiritualem & temporalem. Caeterum cum hic articulus de duplici Romani Pontificis iurisdictione sit late patens: nec nostrae brevitatis institutum eum hoc loco fusius explicari permittat, satis videbimur fecisse, si auctores & loca indicaverimus, unde eius notitia haberi possit . . . Admonebo tamen hic, non esse facile omnium auctorum praecitatorum, aut aliorum de hac re disserentium, recipiendam sententiam (neque enim eo animo eos retuli ut approbarem) sed iudicio opus esse; Francisco Peña, Directorium Inquisitorum (Venice, 1607), pp. 35–36. 63. See F. Peña, Censura in arrestum parlamentare Curiae criminalis parisiensis (Rome, 1595). On this text see also Frajese, “Regno ecclesiastico e Stato moderno,” pp. 282–290. 64. Peña’s work, entitled De veris et falsis remediis Christianae religionis instaurandae et catholicos conservandi, remained manuscript; a copy of it can be found in ASV, Borghese II, 450, which also contains some sheets in which the censure of

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Baronio to this work can be found. See in particular 87r and ff. for Peña’s arguments that the Church could not make any exception when dealing with heretics for any reason (this argument in particular angered the pope). On this text see also Frajese, “Regno ecclesiastico e Stato moderno,” pp. 290–298. 65. On the political background to Clement’s pardon of Henri, see Wolfe, The Conversion of Henri IV, pp. 159–187. 66. On Clement’s reaction to Peña’s note, see Frajese, “Regno ecclesiastico e Stato moderno,” pp. 293–298. 67. For an outlook on Peña’s role during the Interdetto, see ibid., pp. 298ff. 68. On Marsilio’s profile and his role in the debate over the Interdetto, see Bouswma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, pp. 398ff. passim 69. F. Peña, Assertio regni Christi, in BAV, Vat. Lat. 7194, 6v. 70. Ibid., 11v–13v. 71. This is also V. Frajese’s thesis, with which I agree; see “Regno ecclesiastico e Stato moderno,” pp. 306–308. 72. On the relationship between Sarpi and the Society of Jesus, see B. Ulianich, “I Gesuiti e la Compagnia di Gesù nelle opere e nel pensiero di Paolo Sarpi,” in Zanardi, I Gesuiti e Venezia, pp. 233–262. On the repercussions of the Interdetto on the perception of the Society of Jesus in Venice and in the rest of Europe, and on the polemical significance of it, see Vittorio Frajese, “Il mito del Gesuita tra Venezia e i Gallicani,” in ibid., pp. 295–345. 73. On the immediate repressive actions taken by the Congregation of the Index, see Prosperi, ‘“L’altro coltello,”’ pp. 267–268. It is also to be noted that the advice to the nuncios of keeping an eye on the Venetian books seemed to be a constant preoccupation of the Roman Curia even after the Interdetto was lifted, and the issue was mentioned many times in the diplomatic correspondence even after 1607. For example, see the letter of the nuncio in France to Cardinal Borghese, 17 March 1609, updating him on the circulation of Venetian books in Paris (ASV, Borghese II, 251, 118r–120v), and again on 28 August 1609 (ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 53, 284r–286v), and the letters the nuncio in Venice to Borghese from the spring of 1609 asking him to monitor the circulation of Venetian books (nuncio to Borghese, 18 April 1609, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Venezia 40, 122r–125r; and Nuncio to Borghese, 2 May 1609, in ibid., 151r–v). 74. For example, Sarpi’s Trattato dei sette teologi and the Apologia were condemned with both edicts of the Index and of the Inquisition multiple times in 1606; see Jésus M. De Bujanda, Index Librorum Prohibitorum 1600–1966 (Geneva: Droz, 2002), s.v., “Sarpi, Paolo.” 75. The document containing the judgment expressed by the cardinals of the Inquisitions in two meetings they had over Sarpi’s Trattato (one on 26 September 1606 and the other on 13 October of the same year) can be found in ACDF, Index, Protocolli CC, 353r–358v; it was probably sent over to the Congregation of the Index, which also discussed and condemned this work, for information and to ensure better coordination between the two. 76. Questa, cioè l’intiera potesta di Christo come huomo . . . et il che disse il S.re Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo . . . Censura: Propositio est scandalosa

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Christo Domino iniuriosa, et haeretica, cum auferat a Christo Domino omnem potestatem super temporalia, et subinde a summo Pontifice; ibid., 354v. 77. Proposizione 9: L’essentioni degli ecclesiastici dal foro secolare nelli delitti non ecclesiastici ma temporali o civili, non è de iure divino, ma per privilegio de Principi . . . Censura: Propositio quatenus dicit putandum exemptionem non esse de iure divino nullam habet censuram [marginal note: “verius est habere censuram”] quatenus aut . . . dicit esse ex privilegio Principum, in sensu authoris, qui intelligit esse ex sola concessione Principis secularis, erronea est in fide; ibid., 357r–v. Underlined in the ms. 78. Alii verum . . . dixerunt totam propositionem simpliciter esse erroneam; ibid., 357v. 79. On the Roman strategy in this respect, see Bouswma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, pp. 481ff. 80. On Cappello’s escape from Venice see ibid., pp. 398, 481–489. 81. On Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani—not to be confused with the Jesuit theologian Benedetto Giustiniani—see DBI, s.v. “Giustiniani, Benedetto.” 82. V. S. Ill.ma sa che questo padre . . . non desidera altro solo che non si tratti con lui in quegli modi che possono darli machia perpetua; Giustiniani to Borghese, Bologna, 20 April 1607, in ACDF, St St O 3-h, folder 12, unfol. Underlined in the ms. 83. Cappello’s letter can be found in ibid., unfol. 84. L’errare è cosa humana, che i più dotti huomini, i più santi, i più favoriti da Dio hanno tal’hora precipitato in errori gravissimi . . . Ma devvo bene gratie Infinite a Dio mio Sig.re che m’habbia conceduto luce fra tante tenebre di poter mirare, e riconoscere il vero, et gratia di poter ricorrere a questa Santiss.a Sede, e chiederli humil perdono delle colpe mie, con essibirmi pronto di correggere a miei falli con la penna, et (se cosi sia di compiacimento a V. B.ne) farne inchiostro il mio sangue; ibid. 85. quelli, che diffendendo la Causa di V. B.ne concedono, quella distintione, ch’altri precetti, e decreti fatti da questa cathedra sian dubiosi, altri chiari . . . et che ne i primi dove la Giustitia, & l’Ingiustitia è incerta, si deve obedire, ma non ne i secondi; ibid. 86. On the back of Cappello’s letter we find: “Feria IV die 9 Maii 1607. In Congregatione . . . lecta spontanea comparitione Mag. Marci Antonii Cappelli facta die 5 huius decretum ut deligantur propositiones ex eius libro scripto pro Venetos contra interdictum”; ibid. 87. The letter can be found in ibid., unfol. 88. Iudicavi haec exhibere sanctissimo tribunali non quidem ut mea scripta defendam, verum potius ut habito sensu meo, et cognito, unde scripta desumpserim, iustior, et sanctior de ipsis possit ferri sententia; ibid. 89. de potestate politica naturali quae contra distinguitur ab ecclesiastica spirituali patet, quia secuutus Arist., D. Thom., Vict., Navar., locis citatis, ubi omnes loquuntur de potestate naturali quae competit Principibus laicis, quae consequitur naturalem hominum imbecillitatem; ibid. 90. si non est impium dicere Christum, et Paulum agnovisse de facto superiores suos iudices temporales, multo minus impium erit, id de clericis affirmare; ibid. 91. Itaque patet, quod ante me vir iste doctissimus dixit, et quod clerici subiiciunt legitime quatenus cives sunt Principi politico, et quod Princeps politicus super clericis leges condere potest . . . si in ipso non sunt damnatae hae propositiones

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tanquam haereticae, quin potius permissae et approbatae, confido quod habito meo sensu a Censurae rigore absolventur; ibid. 92. 1607 Sabbato die 16 Iunii congregatio RR. PP. theologorum infrascriptorum in Palatio S. Officii in quo lectis, et discussis praedictis responsionibus P. M. Marci Antonii Cappelli ad suprascriptas censuras, omnes unanimiter dixerunt, nihil obstare dictas eius responsiones, sed singulas praefatas propositiones in eius libro vero reperiri, et censuras super ipsis factas optimas esse; ibid. 93. Feria V die 28 Iunii 1607 In congregatione S. Inquisitionis . . . proposita causa Marci Antonii Cappelli . . . Sanctissimus auditas voces DD. Consultorum decrevit ut abiuret de vehementi coram R. P. Congregationem et . . . penitentiae salutares iniungatur eidem, ut scripto revocet malam doctrinam, quam scripsit in suo libro . . . Circa eius habilitationem cogitabitur; ibid. 94. Del modo della retrattatione di fr. Marc’Antonio Cappello, non se ne può parlare, per essere passato il tutto per via del Santo Offitio, et secretamente; però V. R. mi escudi [sic], la prego, se non gli ne dico cosa alcuna; Bellarmine to Comitolo, Rome, 24 October 1607, in APUG, EB, vol. 3, doc. 706. 95. che poi detto fr. Cappello habbia mandata costi, et forse in altri luoghi scrittura in difesa delle cose sue, ha fatto molto male, et quando si sapesse qua da chi spetta, non so come fosse intesa; ibid. 96. Saria bene, che l’inquisitore di costi procurasse di havere quella scrittura, et la mandasse qua al Santo Offitio. Ma bisognaria, che lo facesse come da se, et non per richiesta di V. R. Sapienti pauca; ibid. 97. È verissimo com’ella dice che di un errore tanto publico convenirebbe che publica fosse anco la emendatione ma dobbiamo compatire alle infirmità humane; Borgese to Nuncio in Venice, Rome, 12 April 1608, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Venezia 39, 61r–v, quotation at 61v. 98. On the question of Cappello’s written abjuration and on his life after the Interdetto, see Giacomo Pietrogrande, Biografie Estensi (Padua: Salmin, 1881), pp. 65–68; and DBI, s.v. “Cappello, Marcantonio.” 99. On Michele Lonigo, see the entry of the DBI. On Gaspare we have scant information, mainly through his work and through the Inquisitorial procedure against him that I am about to analyze. 100. The title of the work is Consilium super controversia vertente inter beatissimum Paulum Papam V ac serenissimam rempublicam venetam (Venice, 1606). 101. Ibid., pp. 58ff. 102. De Summi Pontificis Dominio in temporalibus per Orbem sunt adeo manifesta Divina; ac humana iura, nullum habere in ipsis directum Dominium, ut superflua videatur huiusmodi tractatio; ibid., p. 10. 103. Christus, ut homo, dum in terris vixit, non accepit, nec voluit tale temporale Dominium, Papa autem est Christi Vicarius, & Christum nobis repraesentat, qualis erat, dum inter homines viveret, igitur Papa, ut Christi Vicarius, & Summus Pontifex nullum habet tale Dominium; ibid., pp. 12–13. 104. Ibid., pp. 13–15. 105. Ibid., pp. 21–22. 106. Ibid., pp. 22–28.

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107. Ibid., pp. 30–41. 108. ACDF, St St O 1-n, folder 3. 109. Desidera che si gli prometta la secretezza et anco di havere ad essere spedito incontinente per non dare sospetto con la tardanza a suoi quando si presenterà all’Inquisitore; nuncio in Venice to the Congregation of the Inquisition, 30 August 1608, in ibid., unfol. 110. 3a) Papam non habet ullum dominium temporale extra Civitates, et loca ab Imperatore donata, quia Christus, ut homo dum in terris vixit, non accepit, nec voluit tale temporale Dominium, igitur Papa cum sit Christi Vicarius, et Summus Pontifex nullum habet tale dominium, ut Christi Vicarius, et Summus Pontifex. CENSURA: Dixerunt omnes propositionem, quoad utramque partem, si intelligatur quoad potestatem, esse haereticam, si vero intelligatur, Christum non habuisse dominium, et Regnum aliquod in temporalibus, R.mus D. Pegna, P. Comm[issarius], Abbas S. Pauli, P. Mag[ister] Gregorius, P. Mag[ister] Lemos, dixerunt esse errorem in fide. Ceteri vero nihil addiderunt. P. Iustinianus dixit non esse censura dignam; ibid., unfol. 111. 3): Si excludat temporale dominium quatenus refertur ad bonum ac finem spiritualem haeretica ut aliae; Giustiniani’s notes can be found in ARSI, Opp. Nn. 186, 108r–113v. quotation at 110r. On the back of the document (113v) there is a note saying that “erit congregatio die veneris 25 septembris”; the year must have been 1607, since the final censures were already enclosed in the nuncio’s letter from 20 August 1608. Thus, Giustiniani’s notes must have been written in preparation for a meeting of the Congregation of the Inquisition on 25 September 1607, and between then and August 1608 the censures were finalized. The list of propositions given to Giustiniani is much longer than the one we have from the Inquisition, and on many of those propositions Giustiniani’s judgment was that they did not deserve censures. Evidently the other Inquisitors agreed, and those propositions were eliminated from the list of the ones officially censured. 112. Gasparo Lonigo da Este ultimamente è venuto a trovarmi, dicendo che in modo alcuno egli non vuole andare a ferrara, et che se bene me l’haveva promesso, non lo può osservare, perche temeria esser scoperto, et mandato in rovina con la sua Casa, ma dice, che qui in Venetia abiurera secondo quello, che io gli dirò esser mente della Sac. Congregatione; nuncio in Venice to Card. Arrigone, 22 November 1608, in ACDF, St St O 1-n, unfol. On the back of that letter we find: “Die 4 decembris 1608 coram S[anctissimu]m. Litteris Nuntii datis 22 Novembris. Summus mandavit rescribi, ut recipiat comparitionem Gasparii Lonigi, et illum abiurare faciat.” 113. On this see Oakley, “Complexities of Context”; Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition, pp. 141ff. 114. Sarpi, Considerationi sopra le censure della santità di Papa Paulo V contro la serenissima republica di Venetia, Venice 1606, pp. 38–47 passim. 115. Sarpi, Trattato, pp. 41–52 passim. 116. Aggiunge a questo discorso il Gersone alcune propositioni, per mostrare quello che può e deve fare il re cristianissimo, per difesa della libertà della Chiesa Gallicana, delle quali propositioni non è necessario che discorriamo in questo luogo . . . la libertà Gallicana, della quale scrive il Gersone, non ha che fare niente con la libertà, che ora pretende la repubblica Veneta, poiché quella si fondava ne’ canoni antichi,

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questa è contraria a’ canoni, così antichi come moderni; Robert Bellarmine, Riposta ad un libretto intitolato trattato e risoluzione sopra la validità delle scomuniche di Gio. Gersone, p. 70. 117. Sarpi, Apologia, pp. 294–307. 118. Lasso quello che al fine Fr. Paolo aggiogne delle libertà della chiesa Gallicana, perche non ha preso a trattar materia alcuna, ma solo a scoprire le falsità, et calunnie di Fr. Paolo contra la mia scrittura; Bellarmine, Risposta alle oppositioni, 460v. 119. See the collections of Sarpi’s Lettere ai Protestanti, ed. M. D. Busnelli, 2 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1931); and Lettere ai Gallicani, ed. B. Ulianich (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1961). 120. On these texts see Oakley, “Complexities of Contexts,” pp. 386–389; and Lettere ai Gallicani, pp. lxxii–lxxxiv, but see Ulianich’s entire, very useful, introduction. 121. Si fa qui tanto rumore del caso seguito in Venetia contra fra Paolo servita e quel che è peggio con si poco riguardo si parla del Papa, che mi par debito di bon vassalo, e fidel servitore dell’Ecc.ma casa Borghesi [sic] darne qualche particulare avviso . . . Al 2 di Novembre l’Imb.r [sic] di Venetia che si trovava con la sua famiglia in Fontineblaut [sic], sparse (si come fece anche il suo secretario, dal qu[ale] io seppi il caso), la nova che fra Paolo servita era stato ferito et assassinato in mezzo a Venetia incolpando di questo fatto il Papa et i Gesuiti, raccontando a tutti i meriti, bonta, dottrina et inocenza di fra Paolo. Giovanni degli Effetti’s report can be found in ASV, Borghese IV, 86, 229r–230v, quotation at 226r. 122. See, for instance, the letter of the nuncio in France to Borghese, 17 March 1609, in ASV, Borghese II, 251, 118r–120v. 123. See Ubaldini to Borghese, 13 April 1609, in ibid., 168r–v. 124. Ubaldini to Borghese, 13 April 1609, 180r–v (this is a different diplomatic dispatch, although sent on the same day as the previous one). 125. Alla grande querela, ch’io ho di nuovo fatto col Re del proceder de’ Venetiani, delle prediche di f. Fulgentio, dei libri heretici che da tutte le parti piu corrotte s’introducono in Venetia per le mani de’ lor medesimi Ambasciatori, delle pratiche, e della corrispondenza, che tien f. Paulo et suoi seguaci con i piu pestilenti Ugonotti non solo con saputa della Signoria, ma anche con aiuto, e con applauso di essa, non ha S. M.tà risposto altro, se non che i disordini, de quali mi dolevo, erano in gran parte veri, ma che non vedeva hora modo di rimediarvi, perché ogni di più s’inacerbivano gl’animi contra S. S.tà alla quale ascrivevano le nuove insidie scoperte contro la vita di f. Paulo; Ubaldini to Borghese, 12 April 1608, in ibid., 160r–162v, quotation at 160r. 126. Egli [i.e., the king] mi replico che il mondo non crede, che negli scritti di f. Paulo siano heresie, et che non contengono altro, che la difesa dell’autorità temporale de’ Principi; ibid., 161r–v. 127. On Wotton, see Logan P. Smith, Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), vol. 1, pp. 86ff. 128. On this see chapter 4. 129. The complete titles are A full and satisfactorie answer to the late unadvised bull, thundred by Pope Paul the Fifth, against the renowed state of Venice (London, printed [at Elliot’s Court Press] for Iohn Bill, 1606) [STC 21759], and An apology, or apologiticall answere, made by Father Paule a Venetian, of the order of Servi, unto the exceptions and

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obiections of Cardinall Bellarmine (London, printed by N[icholas] O[akes] for William Welby, 1607) [STC 21757]. 130. For example, for Gaetano Cozzi Sarpi’s relationship with England is a further testimony to the fact that the Venetian friar harbored secret Calvinist tendencies; for Boris Ulianich the correspondence between Sarpi and the Huguenots is evidence that Sarpi shared with the Protestants the hatred for the form of political Catholicism that the papacy, the Totatus, was trying to foster at the expense of spiritual issues. For Frances Yates, Sarpi’s contact with the English Protestant establishment pointed to the Venetian friar’s irenic tendencies; for Federico Chabod, Sarpi wanted to befriend the Protestants in order to get their support to create a movement of Catholic, not Protestant, reform. More recently, William Bouwsma interpreted Sarpi’s contact with English Protestantism as a manifestation of a complex set of religious and political views, influenced by the theological tenets of Venetian Evangelism, a political affinity with Renaissance civic humanism, and an ecclesiological concept of the Church as something separate from the political commonwealth. David Wootton, by contrast, argued that Sarpi’s affinity with the Protestants was based not on his adhering to their doctrines but on the fact that they emphasized the spiritual kingdom and the otherworldly character of Christianity, which fit with Sarpi’s skepticism more than other dogmatic positions. Cf. Cozzi, “Fra Paolo Sarpi, l’Anglicanesimo”; Chabod, “La politica di Paolo Sarpi”; Frances A. Yates, “Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944): 123–143; B. Ulianich, “Sarpi e i Gallicani,” (especially pp. cxxiv–cxlvi of Ulianich’s introduction); Wootton, Paolo Sarpi, pp. 93–104; Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberties, pp. 528–555. 131. In June 1608 Bellarmine corresponded directly with the editor Johannes Pillehotte in Louvain to coordinate the proofreading of the Controversiae and to arrange for the Recognitio to be added at the beginning of the work (see the letter of Pillehotte to Bellarmine, 4 June 1608, and the reply of the cardinal, 23 June 1608, in ARSI, Opp. Nn. 242, 68r). In July 1609 Bellarmine wrote to Adam Sartorius, the publisher of Ingolstadt who had issued the first edition of the Controversiae and who had expressed his desire to reissue the work, thanking him for the offer and urging him that if a new edition was to be made, it was necessary to update it and to “ad initium apponi recognitionem” (Bellarmine to Sartorius, Rome, 15 July 1609, in ARSI, Opp. Nn. 247, 44r–v at 44v). The same request was made once again to the nuncio in Cologne, who had expressed the desire of many Catholics in Germany to have Bellarmine’s work reprinted once again, at the end of 1614 (the correspondence between Bellarmine and the nuncio on this subject can be found in ARSI, Opp. Nn. 240, 173r–v). 132. Nam si ratio exemptionis Ecclesiasticorum est, quia sunt ministri Christi, qui est Princeps Regum terrae, et Rex Regnum, certe sunt exempti de jure, non solum a potestate principum Christianorum, sed etiam principum Ethnicorum. Permanendum igitur est in prima solutione, quod Apostolus Paulus fuerit subjectus Caesari de facto, non de iure; Robert Bellarmine, Recognitio librorum omnium, in OO, pp. 7–42 at p. 11. Cf. also the specification made by Bellarmine on a passage in De Laicis in which he used the verse from Matthew 17, “Then are the children free,” which Bellarmine wrote he intended to refer only to Christ, and not to the clergy (p. 23).

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133. Docuimus hoc loco, potestatem politicam in Regibus, aliisque Principibus non esse immediate a Deo, sed mediante consilio et consensu hominum. Et quoniam haec communis sententia est, non curavimus ullis argumentis eam communire. Quia vero dum hunc locum recognosceremus, nonnulli scripserant: Regum Potestatem politicam, non minus immediate esse a Deo, quam sit potestas summi Pontificis: necessarium esse duxi aliquid hoc loco addere; ibid., p. 23. 134. Intelligimus autem per jurisdictionem indirecte, jurisdictionem quam summus Pontifex habet super temporalia in ordine ad spiritualia, quae spiritualia proprie et per se respicit ejus jurisdictio; ibid., p. 13. 135. De regno Christi scripsi, quae vera esse credidi, atque etiam nunc credo; ibid., p. 13. 136. Ibid., pp. 12–14. 137. Alterum Christi Regnum est Regnum divinum universale, quod Christo convenit, ratione unionis hypostaticae. . . . quod non tollit dominia particularia, sed ea conservat, et in hoc dominio fundatur jus illud, quo potuisset Christus, si voluisset, regna omnia sibi assumere; ibid., p. 15. 138. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 139. Praeter ista Regna, quartum Regnum, quod proprie temporale dici debet, qualia sunt Regna principum terrenorum, nos quidem in Scripturis, et in Patribus non invenimus; imo existimamus repugnare Christi paupertati, et sapere errorem Judaeorum, et Haereticorum; ibid., p. 16. 140. Ibid., pp. 16–20. On Bellarmine’s addition of these patristic references, see chapter 1, n.118. CHAPTER

4

1. Tutino, Law and Conscience, chap. 6. 2. On the polemical and theological significance of Whitaker’s anti-Catholic works, see Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 93ff.; Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 46ff. 3. On Sutcliffe’s anti-Catholicism, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, pp. 46ff.; on the polemical context of Sutcliffe’s works, see Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Allen and Unwin, 1988), pp. 111–113. 4. This is chapter 7, in Bellarmine, De summo Pontifice, OO, vol. 1, pp. 473–476. 5. Quos errores habuit etiam Henricus VIII, Angliae Rex: is enim se caput Ecclesiae Anglicanae constituit, et eodem modo censuit, alios Principes capita suprema Ecclesiae in suis ditionibus esse debere; ibid., p. 473. 6. On this quote cf. chapter 1. 7. Together with the works of Henry VIII, Bellarmine proposed to include in the first class of heretical books the works of Cassander and Drescher, “cum sint haeretici” (see ACDF, Index, Protocolli K, 77r–78v at 77r).

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8. On the “Scottish strategy,” see Thomas M. McCoog, “Our Way of Proceeding”: The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland and England (Leiden: Brill, 1996), pp. 178ff. 9. vir mediocris his rebus satisfacere non potest. . . . si Pater Achilles venire posset, esset, opinor, commodissimus. P. Bellarminum non audeo postulare; Persons to Acquaviva, Rome, 26 September 1582, in BASC, doc. 90. 10. The document is entitled “Auctores qui de controversiis huius temporis scripserunt ordine Alphabetico in catalogum relati”; ARSI, Opp. Nn. 233, 48r–51r. Persons’s name can be found at 50v, while Sander’s name can be found at 50r. On Bellarmine’s revisions to this list and the date of the document, see Le Bachelet, BASC, appendix VI, p. 480. 11. Altro non mi occorre perche presto ci rivedremo; Bellarmine to Persons, Ferrara, 20 November 1598, in BASC, doc. 250. 12. Stefania Tutino, “The Political Thought of Robert Persons’s Conference in Continental Context,” Historical Journal 52 (2009): 43–62. 13. For the documentary evidence regarding the negotiations between Clement VIII and James, see Arnold Oskar Mayer, “Clemens VIII un Jacob I von England,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Biblioteken 7 (1904): 268–306. For the importance of these negotiations in the setting up of James’s ecclesiastical policy, see John J. La Rocca, “‘Who Can’t Pray with Me, Can’t Love Me’: Toleration and Early Jacobean Recusancy Policy,” Journal of British Studies, no. 23 (1984): 26–36; Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, “The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I,” Journal of British Studies 24 (1985): 169–207, especially pp. 182–185; and W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 31ff. 14. ut Maiestas tua serio aliquando animum applicet, ad id, quod est super omnia maxime necessarium, id est ad veram ecclesiam cognoscendam; Bellarmine to James, Rome, 1 July 1600, in ARSI, Opp. Nn. 250, 3r–5r, quotation at 3v. There is another copy of the letter in ARSI, Opp. Nn. 246, 68r–69r. 15. adesso trovo fra le mie letere un libro stampato di nuovo prima in Edenburgo et di poi in Londra con l’arme del nuovo Re, il quale libro tratta de libera et de absoluta monarchia provando che un Re monarcha è sogietto a nissuna legge sed est dominus absolutus omnium, et che nella coronatione ha da giurare di conservare la religione che trova . . . nel regno dove entra et si sua S.tà sara servito lo faremo tradurre poiche e piccolo ma pestilenziale; Persons to Borghese, July 1603, in ASV, Borghese III, 124 g.2, 31r–v at 31r. 16. Beatissimo Padre, con questa vanno l’ultimi foglii della traduttione del libro del Re d’Inglaterra, commandatici da V. S.tà, il padre che l’ha tradotto è huomo dotto et confidente et s’ha sforzato d’esprimere la vera sentenza dell’autore. The translation of the Basilikon Doron and Persons’s letter to the pope, unfoliated, can be found in ASV, Borghese IV, 95. 17. ci resta che pregiamo Iddio (come facciamo) che inspiri a sua M.tà d’esseguir nel suo governo, le cose ben dette et scritte in questo libro, et corregere quelle, nelle quali per causa dell’educatione Iddio fin qui non gli ha dato bastante luce; ibid., unfol. 18. We have two different versions of the Hieratikon Doron, both published by Le Bachelet in AB, pp. 209–256. The final version of this work can be found in manuscript

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in BAV, Barb. Lat. 1018, while the first preliminary version, with Bellarmine’s corrections and additions in his own hands, can be found in APUG Ms. 387. 19. Bellarmine to Borghese, Capua, January 1604, in APUG, EB, vol. 2, doc. 386. Eudaemon-Ioannis was an important figure in the Society of Jesus and in the intellectual landscape of early modern Italy. He was born in Crete in 1566, studied at the Roman College while Bellarmine was rector, and in 1596 became a professor of theology and natural philosophy there. In 1600 he moved to Padua, where he taught natural philosophy and was involved in some of the intellectual questions on which Galileo was working. In 1606 he moved to Naples, and he assisted closely Bellarmine, who had become archbishop of Capua. Starting with the 1610s he participated actively in the controversy over the oath of allegiance by writing a series of works. He also wrote against Isaac Casaubon and Marc’ Antonio De Dominis and engaged in some of the issues concerning the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek Orthodox Church. During this time his friendship with Bellarmine deepened: in his autobriography Bellarmine declared to have been convinced to write up his life by Eudaemon-Ioannis (see Autobiography, APUG Ms. 1460, 21r), and the Greek Jesuit assisted Bellarmine on his deathbed (on Eudaemon-Ioannis’s biography see the entry on him in DBI). 20. Supposto questo, prego V. P. R.ma . . . che lei consulti con i Padri, et risolva, se è bene che il P. Andrea pigli questa impresa; perche io ci sto dubio, et mi saria parso meglio, che havesse risposto a simili autori heretici qualche Padre Tedesco o Francese, che ha piu copia di simili libri, et piu notitia della cose loro; et forse non è male il parere di alcuni, che dicano, non essere necessario rispondere, perche chi legge i libri, si accorge facilmente chi ha ragione, et chi ha il torto . . . Et in questo particolare desidero grandemente che V. P. et gl’altri padri non guardino a quello che pensano che io desideri, ma a quello, che è più gloria di Dio, et utile dell’anime, che questo solo pretendo; Bellarmine to Acquaviva, Capua, 21 February 1604, in APUG, EB, vol. 2, doc. 393. 21. See the letters from Acquaviva to Bellarmine, Rome, 13 March 1604 (APUG, EB, vol. 2, doc. 398); and Acquaviva to Bellarmine, Rome, 5 June 1604 (ibid., doc. 410). Gretser’s work would have been completed in a few years and was published in two volumes in 1607 and 1609 in Ingolstadt, with the title Controversiarum P. Roberti Bellarmini . . . Defensio. 22. See Le Bachelet’s introduction to the Hieratikon Doron, in AB, pp. 201–202. 23. Cf. the final version, “Sed tu, qui Scripturas sanctas assidue meditaris,” and the first version, “Sed Maiestas tua, quae Scripturas sacras assidue meditari dicitur,” in AB, pp. 209–210 and n. 1. 24. Ibid., pp. 212–213 and n. 2. 25. Ibid., pp. 255–256. 26. See Le Bachelet’s discussion in AB, p. 202. 27. Et quamvis naevi isti, et maculae passim ab omnibus notentur, et reprehendantur: non tamen facile invenies, praesertim in regno tuo, qui fidelem amicum se praestare audeat, teque modesta libertate de iis rebus admoneat; ibid., p. 209. 28. Ibid., pp. 213–225 passim. 29. Ibid., pp. 230ff. passim. 30. Chapter 12 is in ibid., pp. 225–228.

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31. Ibid., pp. 225–226. 32. Respondeo non sine causa B. Paulum de potestate in genere, id est, non regia solum, sed de quacumque alia potestate . . . locutum esse; ibid., p. 227. 33. Esse autem Episcopos sublimiores etiam potestates quibus christiani quoque Reges subjici debeant; ibid. 34. De re gravissima et periculosissima filium tuum, Rex, instituere satagis dum ais: “Primum in sacris litteris te versatum esse oportet, non solum ut de salute tua certior fias, verum etiam ut ecclesiasticos tuos in officio continere queas”; ibid., p. 234. 35. Distincta sunt igitur civitas terrena et civitas coelestis, et sicut aliquando fuit civitas coelestis, id est, Ecclesia Christiana sine ullis regibus, et tamen suis magistratibus, id est, episcopis non caruit, sic etiam civitas terrena, et aliquando fuit, et nunc in multis locis est sine episcopis, et tamen suis magistratibus, id est, regibus non caret; ibid., p. 235. 36. Quae cum ita sint, videt prudentia tua, Rex, politicum magistratum in regnis christianis praesse subditis suis, ut sunt cives terreni, non ut sunt cives sanctorum et domestici Dei; contra vero, magistratus ecclesiasticos praeesse iisdem hominibus, ut christiani sunt, non autem ut cives terreni sunt. Quod si magistratus politicus, etiamsi rex ipse sit, non praeest christianis etiam laicis, ut christiani sunt, id est, in iis rebus quae proprie ad religionem christianam pertinent, quantominus praeesse Antistibus sive Episcopis, quibus ispe quoque ut christianus subjectus esse dignoscitur? . . . neque vero nullae erunt partes Regis in negocio religionis, si rex in Ecclesia sit ut membrum, non super Ecclesiam ut caput; ibid., pp. 235–236. 37. In this I disagree with Motta’s reading of the Hieratikon Doron; cf. Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 386–394. 38. Patterson, King James VI and I, pp. 75–123. 39. Michael C. Questier, “Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Oath of Allegiance,” Historical Journal 40 (1997): 311–329; and Questier, “Catholic Loyalism in Early Stuart England,” English Historical Review 73, no. 504 (2008): 1132–1165. 40. Johann P. Sommerville, “Papalist Political Thought,” in E. H. Shagan, ed., Catholics and the “Protestant Nation”: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 162–184, quotation at p. 177. See also his “Jacobean Political Thought and the Controversy over the Oath of Allegiance” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 1981). 41. Tutino, Law and Conscience, chap. 6. See also on this point the considerations made by Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 322ff. 42. Il caso dell’Inghilterra . . . [è] dimostrazione in qualche modo in uno stato più puro . . . della inevitabilità del processo di formazione delle Chiese territoriali; Paolo Prodi, Il sacramento del potere: Il giuramento politico della storia costituzionale dell’Occidente (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), pp. 275–282, quotation at p. 275. 43. Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus, in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. J. P. Sommerville (1994; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 85–131 at p. 87. 44. Ibid., p. 93. 45. Si iuramentum anglicum, catholicis a rege propositum, ad nos nudum venisset, non permixtum controversiis huius saeculi, fuisset a peritioribus probatum.

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Sed quoniam, et rex, et qui alii de eo scripsere, limites excesserunt iuramenti, hinc sit, ut qui articulos eius probat, censeatur eorum doctrinam omnem recipere, et propterea male audiat. Utinam rex ille regia tantum tractasset, et a theologicis abstinuisset! Prudenter illum fecisse arbitror, quia forte rebus suis ita conducebat, et cum subditis suis ita tractandum erat; verum pro rebus nostris aliter agendum est. Caelum terrae miscere nolumus, nec humanis divina; Sarpi to Leschassier, Venice, 5 January 1610, in Lettere ai Gallicani, pp. 66–67 at p. 66. 46. On some elements of this complex web of common interests, see Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition, pp. 140–181. 47. Both brevi were printed in James’s Triplici nodo triplex cuneus, as well as in Bellarmine’s response to the text, written under the pseudonym of Matthaeus Tortus and entitled Responsio ad librum inscriptum triplici nodo, triplex cuneus (St. Omer, 1608) in OO, vol. 12, pp. 209–256. 48. Thomas Fitzherbert, The reply of T. F. (St. Omer, 1614), p. 215. 49. supplica la S. V. Ill.ma il dottore Harisono procuratore del archiprete d’Inglaterra che si degni informare N.ro Signore intorno a un giuramento proposto dal parlamento alli Catholici d’Inglaterra, del quale ha detto Sua Beatitudine che vuole pigliarne il parere delli Signori della congregatione del Santo Officio, che questo giuramento pernicioso è stato cavato dalla dottrina delli preti Appellanti nelli libri loro stampati; Harrison to Bellarmine, Rome, 18 May 1606, in APUG, EB, vol. 3, doc. 574. Another manuscript copy of this memorandum, in Persons’s handwriting, can be found in ABSI, Stonyhurst Mss., Anglia III, fol. 60, and has been printed in Mark A. Tierney, Dodd’s Church History of England, 5 vols. (London: Dolman, 1839–1843), vol. 4, doc. 23 of the appendix. 50. Quid enim aliud est iureiurando abrenunciari omni potestati ecclesiasticae, quae sit extra Scotiae Regnum, nisi a Domino Nostro Jesu Christo in eius Vicario, manifeste deficere, eiusque ordinationi et legibus repugnare? Christus enim oves suas, quas proprio redemit sanguine, non ulli Regi temporali, sed Apostolorum principi B. Petro, qui Romae divino mandato sedem suam fixit, pascendas, regendasque commisit . . . Idem enim Christus claves Regni coelorum id est ligandi, solvendique atque aditum ad vitam aeternam aperiendi, vel claudendi potestatem non Regi Britanniae, neque ulli Principi politico, sed eidem Apostolo dedit. . . . Principes enim saeculi, ut Sanctus ait Ambrosius, in ecclesia sunt, non super ecclesiam. A copy of this breve can be found in ACDF, St St SS 1-c, 115r–118v, quotation at 116v–117r. 51. Feria 5a die 20a Decembris 1607 lecta supradicta minuta brevis scribendi Catholicis Regni Scotiae facta ab Ill.mo S. Cardinali Belarminio, Summus illam approbavit; ibid., 119v. 52. Bellarmine’s letter was printed in James’s Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus, pp. 99–102. 53. Bellarmine to Persons, Rome, 28 September 1607, in APUG, EB, vol. 3, doc. .699. 54. See the letters contained in ACDF, St St SS 1-b, Persons to the Assistant of the Holy Office, Rome, 22 September 1607, 127r; Persons to the members of the Inquisition, 5 January 1608, 177r–v; Persons to the members of the Inquisition, 18 January 1608, 197r–198v. Blackwell was deposed by Paul V with a breve sent on 1

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February 1608: the text of the document can be found in Tierney, Dodd’s Church History of England, vol. 4, doc. XXXI of the appendix. 55. Qui Apologiam scripsit . . . affirmat . . . iuramento fidelitatis, quod rex Anglorum subditis suis Catholicis praestandum proposuit, solam civilem obedientiam contineri. Addit, Brevibus Pontificiis, et Cardinalis Epistola civilem obedientiam prohiberi. Neutrum est verum; Responsio ad librum inscriptum triplici nodo, triplex cuneus, in OO, vol. 12, pp. 209–256 at p. 209. 56. hic probamus primo ex edicto regio . . . nam titulus edicti hic est: “Ad detegendos, et reprimendos Papistas.” Cur non dicitur, ad detegendos, et reprimendos rebelles?; ibid., p. 210. 57. illa formula [i.e., the formula of the oath] . . . dum jubet abnegari potestatem excommunicandi regem, simul jubet abnegari primatum Apostolicum in Ecclesiam universam, et aperit adytum ad constituendum primatum Regis in spiritualibus; ibid., p. 211. 58. quando autem quaestio est, utrum aliquod juramentum licitum sit, an illicitum, nemo judex magis competens fingi potest ipso summo Pontifice, quoniam agitur de re sacra, de re spirituali, de re, quae ad salutem vel perniciem animae pertinet; ibid, p. 215. 59. Ibid., p. 229. 60. Hac fraude Julianus Christianos, sub colore civilis honoris imperatori debiti . . . ad idolatriam . . . adducebat. Atque hoc est omnino, quod rex Anglorum imitatus est. Proposuit enim juramentum, quod sub colore civilis obedientiae in temporalibus regi debitae, eidem regi obedientia sacra ut primati in spiritualibus praestaretur; ibid., p. 243. 61. Molto Rev.do Padre, Ho cominciato a fare la risposta. Ma perche l’autore dell’Apologia dice, che questo re presente non ha perseguitato i catholici per conto della religione; havrei molto caro, che V. R. mi mandasse qualche cosa per provare, che prima della congiura, et poi habbia confirmato le leggi della regina contra li catholici, et che habbia carcerato, o spogliato della robba li recusanti. Item desidero sapere, se in quella congiura, per la quale mori il buon padre Garnetto, vi fussero soli catholici, o anco heretici, perche questo scrittor dice, che fu fatto con pretesto della religione catholica; Bellarmine to Persons, Rome, 18 April 1608, in APUG, EB, vol. 3, doc. 759. 62. Bellarmine, Responsio, pp. 217–219. 63. [Robert Persons], The Iudgment of a Catholicke English-man concerning Triplici nodo: Triplex cuneus. ([St. Omer,] 1608), p. 5. 64. Ibid., pp. 8–9. 65. Ibid., p. 10. 66. Ibid., pp. 38–41. 67. Thomas H. Clancy, Papist Pamphleteers: The Allen-Persons Party and the Political Thought of the Counter-Reformation in England, 1572–1615 (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1964), pp. 153–158. 68. Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 143–159. 69. Molto Rev.do Padre, Ho parlato questa mattina a N. S. intorno alla mia risposta et a S. S.tà è parso che V. R. et qualche altro Inglese la vegga prima et poi si porti a S. S. pero gli mando questa parte, a’ cio cominci a vederla, et fra due giorni gli

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manderò il resto. Gli rimando ancora le sue scritture, con le copie delli tre Brevi; Bellarmine to Persons, Rome, 22 May 1608, in APUG, EB, vol. 3, n.770. 70. ex mediis occupationibus ho voluto pigliar un poco di tempo per mettere in carta questo pensamento mio delli predecessori del Re Giacomo nostro, il padre Coffino anchora dimanda perdono della sua scrittura . . . stiamo tutti duoi occupatissimi; Persons to Bellarmine, ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico 640/651, doc. 39, unfol. The letter is undated, but I suspect it must have been written in 1609, that is, while Persons was working at his reply to Barlow. Also included in the letter is the short Latin text that lists briefly the Catholic predecessors of James, unfol., which Bellarmine later utilized for his reply to James’s “Premonition”; see Bellarmine to Persons, Rome, 23 July 1609, in APUG, EB, vol. 4, doc. 897, in which Bellarmine told Persons, “se V. R. mi potesse mandare in contrario li re obbedienti al Papa, che mi disse di haver raccolti, mi faria gratia piacere [sic]: massime se faccia presto” (if, however, Your Reverence could send me the kings obedient to the Pope which you said you collected, you would give me a great pleasure, especially if you did it quickly). 71. The folder on Persons’s Iudgment can be found in ACDF, St St SS 1-e, 102r–127v. The introductory summary can be found at 103r–109v, while Bellarmine’s letter can be found at 125r. 72. For Alabaster’s quarrels with Persons during his brief sojourn in Rome after his conversion to Catholicism see Michael C. Quester, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 45ff. passim. According to Leo Hicks, Persons retaliated against Smith for his support of Alabaster in this affair by denouncing Smith’s Answer to Thomas Bels late Challeng (see Letters of Thomas Fitzherbert 1608–1610, ed. L. Hicks, Catholic Record Society no. 41 [1948]: 123). On the contrast between Smith and Persons, see Ginevra Crosignani, “Richard Smith versus Robert Persons: A Double Denunciation of The Iudgment of a Catholike English-man at the Holy Office,” in AHSI 77, no. 153 (2008): 115–190 (see especially the appendix, pp. 159–188, which contains some of the documents from the ACDF and from the ARSI concerning the affair). 73. se velle Regi obedientiam praestare etiam invito Papa, et pro Rege ipso contra Papam et ensibus et dentibus dimicare; ACDF, St St SS 1-e, 104r. 74. [James’s anonymous Apology] fra l’altri diceva che non vi si conteneva altro che obedienza civile, e più che un gran numero di Catholici tanto Sacerdoti come Laici l’havevano pigliato per cosa lecita et però che darebbero maggior suspeto di mal animo quei che lo ricusassero. . . . parve al P. Personio necessario di porvi subito un rim[edio] con mandare in Inghilterra un libretto Inglese per firmare l’animi delli dubbiosi fino a tanto che il Si.re cardinale Bellarmino o altri rispondessero in latino . . . et il successo fu molto felice per che subito comminciarono li Catholici a stare saldi ricusando il giuramento et sopravenendo poi il libro del S. Card. Bellarmino si fece l’effetto che si poteva desiderare; ibid., 111r. 75. quanto tocca alla questione in generale, il niegare semplicemente et assolutamente ch’il Papa come Supremo Pastore della Chiesa Cattolica habbia autorità alcuna lasciatagli da Christo direttamente o indirettamente . . . di procedere contra alcun Principe . . . questo suppongo non era il sentimento delli Catholici che pigliarono il giuramento; ibid., 111v.

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76. Il Papa non prohibisce l’obedienza naturale in cose lecite, manco dice che tal obedienza naturale o civile sia contraria alla fede et salvatione dell’anime, o vero che il giuramento sia illecito perche vi si promette tal obedienza naturale et civile, ma perche il giuramento oltre di commandare questa natural obedienza che è lecita contiene ancora varii altri punti che toccano materie della religione Catholica, li quali punti essendo in tal modo congiunti et misti insieme colli altri che uno non si possa giurare senza quelli altri, fanno illecito tutto il giuramento nella forma proposta; ibid., 112r. 77. James VI and I, An Apologie for the Oath . . . together with a Premonition of his Majesties, to all most Mightie Monarches . . . (London, 1609), p. 1. 78. Ibid., p. 2. 79. Ibid., pp. 17ff., quotation at p. 17. 80. Ibid., pp. 35–50, quotation at pp. 46–47. 81. Ibid., pp. 47–49. 82. Ibid., pp. 51–108, quotation at pp. 107–108. 83. Ibid., pp. 121–122. 84. Ibid., pp. 131–132. 85. Bellarmine responded with Apologia Roberti Bellarmini S. R. E. Cardinalis pro Responsione sua ad librum Jacobi Magnae Britanniae Regis (Rome, 1609), in OO, vol. 12, pp. 117–203. Even in this case, Bellarmine and Persons collaborated closely on the text: in the summer of 1609 Persons sent both the English and the Latin version of James’s text to Bellarmine, and Bellarmine asked Persons, once again, for advice in replying to the parts of the text most closely concerning the history of England: see the letters from Bellarmine to Persons, Rome, 4 July 1609 (in APUG, EB, vol. 4, doc. 888), 14 July 1609 (in ibid., doc. 892), 22 July 1609 (in ibid., doc. 896), 23 July 1609 (in ibid., doc. 897). 86. Bellarmine, Apologia, pp. 125–126, 137–138. 87. Porro fides Anglorum de primatu regis in spiritualibus adeo Catholica dici non potest, ut ne unius quidem regni fides dici possit, cum in ipsa Britannia magna sit multitudo Puritanorum, qui Calvinum auctorem secuti, primatum Ecclesiasticum non ad regem, sed ad Senatum Ministrorum pertinere contendant; ibid., p. 120. 88. See ibid., pp. 146ff. passim. 89. Habbiamo ben avviso, che il Re d’Inghilterra fosse per pubblicare un libro pestilente contro l’autorità di N. S.re . . . ci pare di dover credere, che quel Re, si come dimostra ogni di odio maggiore contro la Religione Cattolica, cosi sia per non lasciare di esercitarlo contro la pubblicatione del libro istesso, et di francia, et di fiandra ne veranno le nuove più certe. A V. S. convengono nondimeno laudi particolari, che avvisi quello, che intende in materie tali, et si desidera che non lasci di continuare qualunque volta ne havrà nuove occasioni; Borghese to nuncio in Venice, Rome, 23 May 1609, in ASV, Borghese I, 897, 91r–93r, at 91r–v. 90. Il Libro del Re d’Inghilterra è così pestifero, et seditioso, come V. S. vedra dal foglio che viene qui incluso, dove si contiene una parte dell’Heresie che insegna. Non essendo venuto l’Ambasciatore Mocenigo alla audienza N. S.re ha fatto chiamare a se il Secretario dell’Ambasciatore, et consignatoli la copia del foglio medesimo, affinche rappresenti costi quanto inconveniente sarebbe, che fosse accetato da Principi

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Cattolici un libro tale in tutto contrario alla verità delle fede Cattolica. . . . Faccia similmente V. S. le diligenze, che in questa parte li pareranno opportune, che commendandola fra tanto di quelle che già haveva usate; Borghese to Nuncio in Venice, Rome; 11 July 1609, in ibid, 111r–112v, at 111r–v. 91. See, for example, the letters from Borghese to the nuncio, Rome, 22 August 1609, in ibid., 121r–v; 1 September 1609, in ibid., 127r–128r; 19 September 1609, in ibid., 135r–136r; and again 26 September 1609, in ibid., 140r–141v; and 14 November 1609, in ibid., 172r. 92. The correspondence between the nuncio, Borghese, and the Inquisition can be found in ACDF, S. U. Censurae Librorum 1607–1621, ff.148r and ff. 93. Riesce vero, che i librari non hanno alcuna prohibitione di tenere o vendere l’ultimo libro dell’Ill.mo S. Card. Bellarminio, et giovedi me lo confirmarno espressamente li Signori Assistenti nel Santo Offitio, affirmando che mai c’era stata tale proibitione. Ho poi inteso da altre parti che . . . per non pregiudicare all’amicitia del Re d’Inghilterra . . . et per il suo solito mal’affetto il Contarino per via d’ammonitione o di terrore spaventò alcuni librari, talche essi si giudicarno prohibiti di tenerlo, però all’hora né mai ardirono di nominare l’autore di questa prohibitione o ammonitione. Il S. Amb. Mocenigo scrisse quanto gli haveva detto N. S. nel dolersi che detto libro fosse prohibito, per hora il neg[otio] è finito in bene col’offitio né anco sarà stato inutile prevenendo quello che possa suscitare in questa et simini occasioni; nuncio in Venice to Borghese/Holy Office, Venice, 9 January 1610, in ibid., 164r–v. 94. On Contarini’s role in Venetian politics, see Gaetano Cozzi, Il doge Nicolò Contarini: Ricerche sul patriziato veneziano agli inizi del Seicento (Venice: Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1958); and Bouswma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, pp. 233ff. passim. 95. Mi fece il re la settimana passata chiamare alla Corte. Andai subito. Mi disse S. M.tà che voleva conferirmi, come il Re d’Inghilterra gl’haveva fatto presentare dal suo ambasciatore il libro scritto contra il S. Card. Bellarmino, che haveva S. M.tà dato a vederlo a SS. Card.li di Perona, e della Rochefocault . . . che questi gli havevano referto, che benche il libro fosse cattivo, si poteva pero pensare di cavarvi qualche frutto asserendo quel Re molte cose, che negano hoggi tutti gli heretici, i quali rimandono molto scadalizzati del libro. Che pareva a S. M.tà che questa occasione non fosse da perdere, et essa medesima era d’animo di adoprarsi con ogni ardore, tentando qualche via se non della conversione del Re, almeno di ridurlo più mite verso i Catolici . . . e concluse S. M.tà che principalmente bisognava hora, che S. S.tà facesse sospendere di rispondere costi al libro; nuncio in France to Borghese, Paris, 7 July 1609, in ASV, Borghese II, 251, 266r–270v, at .266r–v. 96. Mi replicò il Re, che il libro era piu nemico de’ Puritani, che de Catolici, che quando da questi fosse quel Re assicurato e nella vita, e nel Regno, non sarebbe impossibile di guadagnarlo, che era di natura timida, et che il timore solo e non altra causa gli ha fatto scrivere il libro, dove mostra di non saper accomodare in un Principe la professione della religione Catolica, et la sicurezza dello Stato; ibid., 266v. 97. Referi Perona di commun parere, che nella lettura del libro erano parsi loro degni di gran consideratione alcuni punti . . . Diceva il Card. che gli pareva, che da

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questi punti ci fosse aperto un gran campo da far frutto con quel Re, ma che bisognava tener seco modo tutto diverso da quel, che s’era fatto sin qui, come era il non pugnerlo con li scritti, et il levarli, quanto piu si poteva, il timore, et le sospitioni, ch’egli ha, de Catolici . . . Che sarebbe ben di cominciare con l’occasione, che ne porge questo libro, di risponderli, ma che non doveva in modo alcuno uscir la risposta di Roma, perché dovendo esser fatta con tanto artifitio di dolcezza, et di modestia, non conviene per la dignità della Sede Apostolica tanto offesa dal libro, ch’esca dalle mani di un Cardinale o di altri, che si possa presupporre d’ordine di S. S.tà . . . la scrittura del Torto l’ha ultimamente commosso, et ulcerato in estremo; ibid., 267v–268r. 98. The copy of the nuncio’s letter can be found in ACDF, S. U. Censurae Librorum 1607–1621, 56r–70v. The final comment is at 70v. 99. Nuncio to Borghese, Paris, 28 August 1609, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 53, 284r–286r. 100. forse non ha trovato S. M.tà in quel Re per i propositi che gli ha fatti tenere dal suo Ambasciatore quella dispositione, che sperava, anzi ha dopo visto più crudelmente che mai continuare la persecutione in Scotia, mi par che conosca, come io li dicevo da principio, che il fine del libro non è stato altro, che rendere odiosa la Sede Apostolica a tutti i Principi, e vomitare il veleno, che ha imbevuto implacabilmente contro di lei; ibid., 284v–285r. Neither one would eventually write anything against James’s book because they were worried to put the French Jesuits on the spot after Henri had recently revoked their expulsion; on this context see Eric Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy: Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590–1615) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 131–145. Coton will write Response apologetique a l’Anticoton (Pont, 1610), written to defend the Jesuits from the accusations of being the authors of the murder of Henri IV, to which Casaubon replied with the epistle Ad Frontonem Ducaeum (London, 1611). On the role of Coton and Fronton in the debate over the oath of allegiance, see Patterson, King James VI and I, pp. 127–136. 101. ha fatto prohibire, che non si traduchi il libro del Re d’Inghilterra, et che il Cancelliero ha fatto sapere alle stampe, et alle librarie, che non s’imprima o venda, et in effetto a Parigi ne sono pochissimi essemplari; nuncio to Borghese, Paris, 28 August 1609, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 53, 284r–v. 102. Quanto alla risposta, che va meditando il S. Card. Bellarmino, poiche V. S. Ill.ma comanda, ch’io dica il mio senso, mentre si giudica, che sia necessità di rispondere, io stimo, che questo debba farsi con la maggior desterità, e dolcezza, che sia possibile, poi che l’esperienza ci mostra, che quante scritture sono uscite dalla banda nostra, sono state tanto fuoco, che hanno acceso l’ira di quel Re contro i Catolici, sul capo de quelli tenendo egli sempre la spada sfoderata bisogna procurare di non irritarlo ma di placarlo quanto si può. Io conosco la difficultà quasi insuperabile in tirare questa risposta in modo, che resti difesa la verità Catolica, et non punte l’orecchie di quel Re, che pur sin troppo delicate e però è miseria l’essere in questa necessità di dover rispondere, però forse il Signore Idio darà tale spirito alla penna del Sig. Card. Bellarmino, che potrà far l’uno e l’altro. Aggiungerò solo, che la risposta del Torto, che pure è scritta con tanta modestia è stata stimata asprissima; ibid., 285r–v.

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103. 8 Septembris 1609 . . . Summus mandavit . . . Nuntio . . . quoad responsionem faciendam libro Regis Angliae . . . non se intromittat. A copy of the letter can be found in ACDF, S. U. Censurae Librorum 1607–1621, 64r–124v, while the Inquisitors’ note can be found at 125v. 104. È stato veduto qui un libro trattante dell’autorità del Papa, non prima di hora impresso, si crede in Londra. L’Autore è un Barcleo Scozzese, che è morto, che fece sempre professione di Catolico. Il libro è pessimo, lo mando a V. S. Ill.ma con queste. Qui non si vede ancora venale, et io l’ho fatto cercare con gran diligenza, et l’ho con difficultà trovato, procurerò, che non corra; nuncio to Borghese, Paris, 28 August 1609, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 53, 285v. 105. Ho da avvertir V. S. Ill.ma che quel libro di Barcleo sopra l’autorità del Papa, ch’io le mandai un mese fa è qui in una grandissima reputatione, e quel che è più maraviglia, e miseria, i più principali Sorbonisti lo commendano, et tre di loro particularmente, che sono stimati i più dotti, i più pii, et de più antichi, dicono, che in questa materia non è uscito mai il più utile libro. Mi è anco referto, che il Card. di Perone dopo haverlo letto disse queste parole. Questo è un dotto, e buon libro, ben che non sarà stimato tale a Roma, dove vorranno risponderle, et erit novissimus error peior priori; nuncio to Borghese, Paris, 25 September 1609, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 53, 303r–304r, quotation at 303v–304r. The last sentence is a quotation from Matthew 27:64. Even this letter was forwarded to the Holy Office, and a copy of it can be found in ACDF, S. U. Censurae Librorum 1607–1621, 148r–v. Some of this correspondence has been published by Godman, The Saint as Censor, pp. 458ff. (see also his considerations on the oath of allegiance, pp. 189–206). 106. William Barclay, De potestate papae (Mussiponti [vere London], 1609), Epistle “Santissimo Patri ac Domino Clementi VIII Pontifici Maximo,” unfol. 107. Barclay, De potestate, pp. 1–2. 108. igitur Christus, ut homo, est Angelorum, caput, ac Rex, idemque omnium rerum naturalium moderator supremus . . . ita ut homo, est omnium Rex; Tommaso Bozio, De iure status, sive de iure divino et naturali ecclesiasticae libertatis et potestatis (Cologne, 1600), pp. 81ff., quotation at p. 144. Bozio’s definition of the pope as “fons, apex, caput, solque totius Regiae & Sacerdotalis potestatis” can be found in the dedicatory epistle to Clement VIII, unfol. On Bozio’s arguments, see also chapter 1. 109. Barclay, De Potestate papae, pp. 17–34. 110. For an analysis of some of those arguments, see Tutino, Law and Conscience, chap. 7. 111. Nam neque pes a pede; neque brachium a brachio, neque humerus ab humero pendet . . . ita potestas spiritualis & temporalis, sive Ecclesiastica & Politica, licet membra sunt unius corporis politici, & partes unius Reipublicae atque Ecclesiae Christianae, neutra tamen alteri subjicitur . . . sed ambae, velut unius corporis humeri, ad caput qui Christus est annectuntur; Barclay, De potestate papae, pp. 110–111. 112. Nam aut loquitur hic de potestate Ecclesiastica separata prorsus a potestate civili, ut olim fuit tempore Apostolorum, & nunc est iis in locis, ubi Christiani inter Ethnicos aut infideles degunt: quo casu satis constat potestatem illam, sive Rempublicam Ecclesiasticam, ut ille vocat, aut eius Principes & Hierarcham, nihil quicquam iuris, ne quidem spiritualis, habere in Principem politicum: quod neutiquam

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filius sit Ecclesiae. Aut loquitur de potestate Ecclesiastica coniuncta cum civili, ut in Republica Christiana: tunc perperam facit duas Respublicas, unam Ecclesiasticam, & alteram Politicam: cum sint duae tantum potestates unius Reipublicae Christianae, uniusque Ecclesiae & mystici corporis Christi partes & membra; ibid., pp. 136–137. 113. On Barclay as a theorist of absolutism and divine-right kingship, see James H. Burns, “George Buchanan and the Anti-monarchomachs,” in N. Phillipson and Q. Skinner, eds., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 3–22, especially pp. 16–22. On the relationship between divine-right kinghip and absolutism, cf. Sommerville, “From Suarez to Filmer”; Johann P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London: Longman, 1986), especially chapter 1; Sommerville, “English and European Political Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century: Revisionism and the Case of Absolutism,” Journal of British Studies 35 (1996): 168–194; Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), pp. 152ff.; Burgess, “The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered,” English Historical Review 107, no. 425 (1992): 837–861. 114. On this point see also the considerations made by Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 408–439. 115. Cum ambae potestates, ecclesiastica et saecularis, ad eandem rempublicam christianam pertineant, necesse est vel alteram alteri, vel ambas alicui summae potestatis humanae subesse, vel ipsam christianam rempublicam monstrum biceps fore; Sarpi to Jacques Gillot, 29 September 1609, in Lettere ai Gallicani, pp. 136–138, quotation at p. 137, but see also Sarpi’s considerations in the entire letter. 116. Barclay, De potestate papae, pp. 210–219. 117. Robert Bellarmine, De potestate summi Pontificis in rebus temporalibus adversus Gulielmum Barclaium (Rome, 1610), in OO, vol. 12, pp.1–113 at pp. 2–12. 118. nam Bozii opinionem, neque refutare, neque defendere statui; sed id tantum, in quo Catholici omnes conveniunt, et in quo a Barclaio omnes dissidemus, meque ipse ab eiusdem Barclaii objectionibus propugnare decrevi; Ibid., p. 13. 119. Siquidem affirmamus, Ecclesiasticam potestatem, distinctam quidem esse a politica, sed ea non modo longe nobiliorem, verum etiam ita superiorem esse, ut eam dirigere et corrigere, et in certis casibus, in ordine videlicet ad finem spiritualem et vitam aeternam, eidem imperare possit; ibid. 120. Respublica enim spiritualis, sive ecclesiastica, et respublica temporalis, sive politica, et duae sunt, et una: duae partiales, una totalis: quemadmodum spiritus, et caro simul juncta unum hominem faciunt, imo unus homo sunt; ibid., p. 61, but see the entire section at pp. 60–67. For an analysis of other themes in Bellarmine’s treatise, see Tutino, Law and Conscience, chap. 7; and also Domenico Ferraro, “Bellarmino, Suárez, Gacomo I e la polemica sulle origini del potere politico,” in Bellarmino e la Controriforma, pp. 191–250 at pp. 213ff. 121. See chapter 1. 122. S. Bernardus solum docet, gladium materialem non esse exerendum manu sacerdotali, quod nos libenter fatemur; sed non negat, immo potius affirmat, gladium materialem subesse gladio spirituali, et nutu Pontificis exerendum, vel in vaginam esse condendum; Bellarmine, De potestate summi Pontificis, p. 66, but see the entire chap. 19, pp. 65–67.

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123. Beatissimo Padre . . . si questo christianello havesse solido zelo e veramente christiano, vedendo che poi che lui publicò le sue controversie, tutti li heretici di questo secolo se ne servono contra la chiesa et contra l’autorità del vicario di Christo . . . lasciando questo prurito di scrivere ogni settimana un libro per difendersi, dovrebbe . . . emendare da se quella erronea opnione che con publica autorità della S.ta Sede bisognara un giorno correggere; Peña to Paul V, undated but written between September and October 1610, in ASV, Borghese II, 23–24, 125r–126v at 125r. 124. Tutto questo libro di barclaio esta fondato nella dottrina di questo bon padre . . . da questo fondamento cavato da questo bon padre, seguita poi il suo discorso contra la potesta del papa in temporalibus: e . . . questo bon padre . . . in questo suo discorso non dice cosa alcuna sopra questo articolo, anzi lo lascia fermo, che è quanto poteva desiderare l’heretico; ibid., 125r–v. 125. V. S.tà poi considerarà, an expediat stamparsi in Roma questa resposta, senza confutare questo articolo, accio non fusse tornato dalli heretici a suo favore dicendo che in Roma con la conniventia et taciturnità viene approvata l’opinione che nega il dominio di Christo in temporalibus; ibid., 125v. 126. On this issue, see chapter 3. 127. On this point, see also the considerations made by Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 339ff. CHAPTER

5

1. For an overview of the French political and religious landscape after the murder of Henri IV, see Roland Mousnier, The Assassination of Henri IV (1964; London: Faber and Faber, 1973). On the role of the Jesuits, see Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy, pp. 151ff. 2. On Gallicanism, see Corrado Vivanti, Lotta politica e pace religiosa in Francia fra Cinque e Seicento (Turin: Einaudi, 1963), pp. 131ff.; Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, pp. 159ff. passim; William J. Bouswma, “Gallicanism and the Nature of Christendom,” in A. Molho and J. A. Tedeschi, eds., Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (Florence: Sansoni, 1971), pp. 811–830; Jonathan Powis, “Gallican Liberties and the Politics of Later Sixteenth-Century France,” Historical Journal 26 (1983): 515–530; John H. M. Salmon, “Catholic Resistance Theory, Ultramontanism, and the Royalist Response, 1580–1620,” in J. H. Burns, ed., with M. Goldie, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1400–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 219–253, especially pp. 231–236; Jotham Parsons, The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in France (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), especially pp. 96ff. Definitely dated but still useful are the works by Victor Martin, Le Gallicanisme et la Reforme catolique: Essai historique sur l’introduction en France des decrets du Concile de Trente (1563–1616) (Paris: Picard, 1919); and Le Gallicanisme politique et le clerge de France (Paris: Picard, 1929). 3. On the role of the Parlement in sixteenth-century France, see Nancy Lyman Roelker, One King. One Faith: The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), and especially her historiographical considerations at pp. 441ff.

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4. The decree of the Faculty of Theology was issued on 4 July 1610, four days before the Parlement’s arrêt against Mariana. On the discussion leading to the faculty’s decree, see Pierre Edouard Puyol, Edmond Richer: Étude historique et critique sur la renovation du gallicanisme au commencement du XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: Olmer, 1876), vol. 1, pp. 139–151. On the significance of the decrees of the Faculty of Theology and of Parlement in the larger context of the doctrine of regicide, see Mario Turchetti, Tyrannie et Tyrannicide de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001), pp. 512–534 especially pp. 519–523. 5. ne quis deinceps nostrae societatis religiosus publice, aut privatim praelegendo, seu consulendo, et multo etiam minus libros conscribendos affirmare praesumat, licitum esse cuicunque personae, quocunque praetextu tyrannidis, Reges aut Principes occidere . . . ut sic omnes intelligant quis sit ea de re Societatis sensus; neque privatim unius error suspectam reddat societatem universam. The copy of Aquaviva’s decree, which was reissued on 1 August 1614 in response to the Parlement’s condemnation of Suárez’s Defensio fidei, can be found in ARSI, Fondo Gesuitico 703, unfol. A French translation of this decree appeared in Paris in 1614, with the title Le Decret du revered pere Claude Aquaviva . . . contre le pernicieuse doctrine d’attenter aux sacrées personnes des Roys. On the reaction to Mariana’s text on the part of the Catholic and Jesuit hierarchy, see Harald E. Braun, Juan de Mariana and Early Modern Spanish Political Thought (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 7–9 and passim. 6. On the debate within the Parlement over the condemnation of Mariana, see Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy, pp. 162–170. 7. Accennai a V. S. Ill.ma nel foglio degli avvisi dello spaccio passato qualche cosa in confuso dell’Arresto fatto da questo Parlamento contro il libro della [sic] Mariana Gesuita, ma non le dissi le particolarità . . . che non mancano di molti, e notabili difetti, de’ quali non intendo però di discorrere, contentandomi di farlo sopra due punti dell’Arresto, che troppo gravemente attaccano la giurisditione et autorità ecclesiastica. L’uno è quello, che qualifica la propositione di Mariana, che sia permesso di ammazzare i Re Tiranni, per heretica; l’altro è quello per il qual si comanda ai Curati di publicare nelle loro Parrocchie, i sudetti Decreti della facultà, e questo Arresto; Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 23 June 1610, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 54, 91r–93v, at 91v. On the negotiations between Marie and the Parlement over the suspension of the arrêt against Mariana, see Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy, pp. 165–167. 8. For a narrative of the events surrounding the Parlement’s arrêt against Bellarmine, see Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy, pp. 179ff. On Servin’s career and intellectual background, see Salvo Mastellone, La reggenza di Maria de’ Medici (Messina: D’Anna, 1962), pp. 33ff. 9. Martin, Le Gallicanisme et la Reforme catolique, pp. 353–354. See also Martin, Le Gallicanisme politique, pp. 31–32, 117ff. 10. Parsons, The Church in the Republic, pp. 199–201. 11. Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 314–338, quotation at p. 338. 12. non pertinet ad Monachos, aut alios Ecclesisticos viros caedes facere . . . multo autem minus per insidias reges occidere. Neque Summi Pontifices consueverunt ista ratione principes coercere; Bellarmine, De potestate summi Pontificis,

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OO, vol. 12, p. 32). On this passage see also R. De Mattei, Il pensiero politico italiano nell’età della Controriforma, 2 vols. (Milan: Ricciardi, 1982), vol. 2, pp. 196–198. 13. Quod enim Bellarminus dixit, ad Pontificem pertinere per sentetiam excommunicare Principes et a principatu deponere, si id mereantur, executionem sententiae ad alios pertinere, ita interpretatur Servinus ac si dictum esset: ad Pontificem pertinere jubere sicariis, ut Reges Principesque trucident; caedis executionem non ad Pontifices, sed ad sicarios pertinere. At Bellarminus non de executione caedis, sed de executione depositionis loquebatur. Bellarmine wrote these notes on the presentation that Servin gave in the Parlement over the treatise against Barclay in the spring of 1611, with the probable intent of using them as arguments to defend his own works in some official venue. They can be found in AB, pp. 435–438, quotation at p. 437. 14. Suárez, Defensio fidei, bk. 6, chap. 4, pp. 675–683. On the neo-Thomist limitations of the commonwealth’s authority to depose the sovereign, and on the implications of this question for the development of constitutional theories, cf. Skinner, Foundations, vol. 2, pp. 174–184; Richard Tuck, Natural Right Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 50–57; Sommerville, “From Suarez to Filmer,” especially pp. 530ff. 15. Turchetti, Tyrannie et tyrannicide, pp. 543–552; and Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 332–337. 16. Cf. chapter 3. 17. On this point, see Domenico Ferraro, Tradizione e ragione in Juan de Mariana (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1989), pp. 93–153; and Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 239–248. 18. Pierre Coton, Lettre declaratoire (Paris, 1610), pp. 4–10 passim. 19. See chapter 4. 20. La risposta del Sig. Card.le Bellarminio al libro di Barcleo, si come era necessario per ben imprimere nelli animi di chi ha cognitione di lettere quello, che è dell’autorità del Papa, e quello, che ne hanno tenuto gli autori di tutte le nationi, e molti Concilii universali, contro l’empia, e pericolosa dottrina dell’autore; Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 11 October 1610, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 54, 124v–125r, at 124v. 21. così stimo essere espediente, che io ne habbi qui molti essemplari, per distribuirli a chi io conoscerò poter esser al profitto, sapendo io che il libro di Barcleo ha havuto qui qualche credito, anco appresso persone stimate pie, e dotte; ibid., 124v–125r. 22. non ho voluto incontrar occasione di disgusto col dare ad alcuno di questi stampatori l’essemplare, che mi ha mandato V. S. Ill.ma per imprimerlo, e parmi, che si possi recorrere al bisogno con ordinare a i Ministri di N. S.re in Avignone, o in Fiandra, che lo faccino ristampare in uno di detti luoghi, e me ne mandino qua cento copie per servirmene opportunamente; ibid., 125r. 23. Ho fatto vedere il libro del Sig. Cardinale Bellarmino contro Barclaio ad alcuni di questi Dottori Sorbonici . . . i quali l’ammirano per tutti i rispetti, et in particolare per la fatica, e diligenza, che S. S.ria Ill.ma ha usata in trovare, e vedere gli autori d’ogni natione, e massimamente i Francesi, che difendono la potestà Pontificia;

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Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 29 October 1610, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 54, 131v–132r, at 131v. 24. Il Sig. Card.e di Perona loda il libro come opera di gran fatica, et eruditione, dice, che altro che il S. Card. Bellarmino non l’havria potuto fare in manco di dieci anni, afferma che l’autorità allegatevi sono gravi, e fideli . . . nega che il Sig. Card.le habbi in questo libro voluto dare al Papa la potestà anco diretta, come alcuni per renderlo più odioso hanno voluto far credere . . . il Sig. Card.le professa solo di voler diffender vecchio quello, che il medesimo ha scritto giovane, e non di abbracciar la diffesa del libro, et dell’opinione del P. Bozio; Ubaldini to Borghese, 26 November 1610, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 54, 140r–142r, at 141r–v. 25. in somma so che n’ha parlato honoratissimamente con questi principali Ministri, e con la Regina stessa, mostrando a tutti, che nel libro, non è cosa, che offenda lo stato, e che sarebbe impudentissimo consiglio l’impugnar hora questa dottrina, che è stata senza alcuna contradittione già tanto tempo fa tolerata in questo Regno tra le altre controversie dell’istesso Sig. Card.le; ibid., 141v. 26. Stando sul dispaccio, e dopo haver scritta l’altra mia toccante il libro del S. Card.le Bellarmino sono stato avvisato, che nel Parlamento tenutosi questa mattina è stato per Arresto prohibito d’imprimer, vender, legger, e tenere il detto libro sotto pena di crime [sic] di lesa M.tà il che mi è stato di tanto maggior sentimento, quanto che per quello, che havevo di già in mano, della mente della Regina, et delli ordini precisi datisi in contrario dalla M.tà S. e da i suoi più principali Ministri; Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 26 November 1610, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 54, 147r–149r, at 147r–v. 27. Ibid., 148r–v. 28. On Richer’s and Duval’s roles in the debates in the Sorbonne, see Puyol, Edmond Richer, vol. 1, pp. 139–144, 309–316. 29. Mastellone, La reggenza, pp. 75–77. 30. See chapter 2. 31. See Mastellone, La reggenza, p. 77n.110. 32. Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy, pp. 184–189. 33. uno de i motivi dell’Arresto è stata la supposta censura fattasi, come dicono, del medesimo libro in Venetia conforme alla quale, di cui n’è stata portata copia in Parlamento, è stato notato l’Arresto. Io qui ho risposto a quanti m’hanno parlato, e domandato di questa censura, che non ne so nuova alcuna, e che la stimo falsa, et una mera fin[tione] di qualche Venetiano, per metter al punto, et indurre tanto più facilmente questo Senato a prohibirlo, et sin che non mi costi il contrario, non mi muoverò mai d’opinione; Ubaldini to Borghese, 26 November 1610, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 54, 147r–149r, at 148v–149r. 34. Cf. chapter 4. 35. See Sarpi to Leschassier, Venice, 7 December 1610, in Lettere ai Gallicani, pp. 97–98; and Sarpi to Leschassier, Venice, 4 January 1611, in ibid., pp. 98–99. 36. Rex noster librum Cardinalis Bellarmini contra Barcleum aeditum ad Praesidentem . . . et alios amicos suos transmisit, illos excitans, et invitans, ut quod saepius privatim professi sunt, nunc publice ostendant; et in hoc valde laborat per Ministros suos in Francia Rex noster, ut in eadem causa contra summum Pontificem

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Gallos sibi coniungat, non solum haereticos, sed tepidiores Catholicos; excerpts from an anonymous letter written from England on 16 November 1610, in ACDF, S. U. Censurae Librorum 1607–1621, 170r. 37. La dottrina del mio libro è del tutto contraria al libro di Gulielmo Barclai messo in luce dagl’heretici d’Inghilterra, et prohibito come pieno di errori della S.ta Sedia Apostolica, alla quale appartiene il giuditio supremo della dottrina ecclesiastica. Dunque il parlamento, che prohibisce il mio libro, bisogna che per forza, approvi il libro contrario, et si dichiari fautore de’ nemici della chiesa; Bellarmine to Marie de Medici, Rome, 20 December 1610, in APUG, EB, vol. 4, doc. 1025. This letter has also been printed as an appendix by Mastellone, La reggenza, pp. 227–229. 38. See the considerations made by John H. M. Salmon in “Gallicanism and Anglicanism in the Age of the Counter-Reformation,” in Renaissance and Revolt, pp. 155–188, especially pp. 181–188, quotation at p. 155. 39. Ibid., pp. 182–184. 40. For a more detailed analysis of Richer’s conciliarist arguments in the Apologia, see Puyol, Edmond Richer, vol. 1, pp. 217–271; Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition, pp. 159–172; Parsons, The Church in the Republic, pp. 137ff. passim. On the relationship between Richer and fourteenth- and fifteenth-century conciliarism, see also the introduction and critical apparatus of James H. Burns and T. Izbicki, eds., Conciliarism and Papalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 41. On Leschassier’s life, see the introduction by Ulianich in Sarpi, Lettere ai Gallicani, especially pp. lxxii–lxxxiii. On the significance of his juridical and intellectual activities, see Parsons, The Church in the Republic, pp. 208–212 and passim. 42. For the background of the debates over political Gallicanism within the French clergy, see Martin, Le Gallicanisme politique, pp. 82ff. Jonathan Powis insists on the centrality of the political theme not only in seventeenth-century but also in sixteenth-century Gallicanism; see his “Gallican Liberties,” pp. 520ff. 43. Puyol, Edmond Richer, vol. 1, p. 237. 44. The role of Bellarmine’s ecclesiology in shaping Richer’s conciliarism has been analyzed by Francis Oakley in “Bronze-Age Conciliarism: Edmond Richer’s Encounters with Cajetan and Bellarmine,” History of Political Thought 20 (1999): 65–86 (see especially pp. 74–83). 45. Si ob doctrinam de papae supra concilium auctoritate censuit universitas, vel qui pro ea scripsit (quem tota universitate non minoris aestimo) quid censendum est de ea doctrina, quae regibus dat non modo regna praecaria, sed et vitam ipsam?; Sarpi to Leschassier, Venice, 7 December 1610, in Lettere ai Gallicani, pp. 97–98, quotation at p. 97. 46. Richer’s Libellus was published in Paris in 1611 and quickly was translated into English and published in London the next year, with the title A Treatise of ecclesiasticall and politike power. Because the English translation is very faithful to the original, all my quotations will be taken from it. 47. Richer, A Treatise, sec. 1, unfol. 48. Ibid., sec. 2, unfol. 49. Ibid., sec. 4, unfol. 50. Ibid.

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51. Ibid, sec. 8, unfol. 52. Ibid., sec. 5, unfol. 53. Ibid., sec. 18. 54. For an overview of the discussions on jurisdiction among the French Gallicans, see Parsons, The Church in the Republic, pp. 137–184. 55. Richer, A Treatise, sec. 2, unfol. 56. On this point see Parsons, The Church in the Republic, pp. 152–154. 57. Richer, A Treatise, sec. 10, unfol. 58. Ibid., sec. 11, unfol. The same arguments are repeated by Richer when dealing expressly with Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta; cf. sec. 18. 59. Ibid., sec. 12, unfol. On the relevance of Richer’s distinction between jurisdiction and coercive power in the context of Gallican juridical thought, see Parsons, The Church in the Republic, pp. 144–146. 60. Ibid., sec. 13. 61. Salmon, “Gallicanism and Anglicanism,” pp. 186–187. The same point had been made also by Salvo Mastellone, who wrote that Richer’s Libellus, because of its “extreme” ecclesiological statements, “did not coincide with juridical Gallicanism”; see La reggenza, pp. 46ff., quotation at pp. 92–93. 62. Parsons, The Church in the Republic, pp. 146–147. On the discordant “voices” that contributed to the singing of the Gallican “hymn,” see also Claude Sutto, “Tradition et innovation, réalisme et utopie: L’idée gallicane à la fin du XVIe et au début du XVIIe siècles,” Renaissance et Réforme.8 (1984): 278–297, quotation at pp. 278–279. 63. David Owen, Herod and Pilate reconciled, or the Concord of Papist and Puritan (Cambridge, 1610), pp. 44–45. On Owen’s position with respect to Jacobean conformism and its relationship with divine-right kingship, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, pp. 515–523. 64. Robert Burhill, De potestate regia, et usurpatione papali (Oxford, 1613), pp. 195–215. On the contribution of fifteenth-century conciliarists to seventeenth-century English resistance theory, see Francis Oakley, “On the Road from Constance to 1688: The Political Thought of John Major and George Buchanan,” Journal of British Studies 1 (1962): 1–31. 65. James, “Premonition,” pp. 22–27, quotation at pp. 26–27. On James’s inclusion of the Gallican Church in his “Catholic” project, see also Patterson, King James VI and I, pp. 88–104. 66. Richer, A Treatise, dedicatory epistle “to the Prince,” sig. A2r–v. 67. Ibid., sig. A3r. 68. Ibid., sig. A3v. 69. Ibid., letter “to the Romish Catholikes of England,” sig. C2v–C3r. 70. Ibid., sig. C3r–v. 71. On this phase of Richer’s career, see Puyol, Edmond Richer, vol. 1, pp. 329ff. 72. Libellum a te missum de potestate ecclesiastica et politica . . . legi diligentius, eamque doctrinam non omnino probo; mihi inconsistens videtur, et, ut uno verbo dicam, tepida; Sarpi to Leschassier, Venice, 14 February 1612, in Lettere ai Gallicani, pp. 102–103, quotation at p. 102. 73. Si contra libellum de ecclesiastica et politica potestate turbae excitatae non fuissent, iacuisset fortasse a paucis lectus, et a paucissimis diiudicatus. Profuerit

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excitatum bellum, et quia res diligentius examinabitur, et quia syndicus et alii sorbonistae cogentur propria defendere: iacet inculta doctrina, licet optima, sine contradictore, viget ubi oppositionibus impetitur, et fulcitur defensionibus; Sarpi to Leschassier, 13 March 1612, in ibid., pp. 104–108, quotation at p. 107. 74. Non devo in tanto tacere a V. S. Ill.ma che questo maledetto libro non è stato altrimente suppresso, anzi venne anco tradotto in francese, e stampato; Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 28 Februrary 1612, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 71r–76v, at 75r. 75. Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 3 January 1612, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 20v–21r. 76. Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 19 January 1612, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 33v–34r. For more details on the Preston affair, see Stefania Tutino, “Thomas Preston and English Catholic Loyalism: Elements of an International Affair,”Sixteenth Century Journal, 41 (2010): 88–106. 77. Mando a V. S. Ill.ma un essemplare d’una nuova risposta uscita in latino al libro di Richer composta da uno de più dotti, pii et stimati Dottori di questa Sorbona nominato Andrea Duval; Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 15 March 1612, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 84v–85v, at 84v–85r. The title of Duval’s book is Libelli de ecclesiastica potestate Elenchus pro suprema Romani Pontificis in Ecclesiam authoritate (Paris, 1612). 78. On Duval’s role in the Sorbonne between 1610 and 1612, see Puyol, Edmond Richer, vol. 1, pp. 112–138, 309–316. 79. Il Sig. Card. di Perona et molti di questi SS. Vescovi lo comendano per il migliore, e più utile libro, che sia uscito in Parigi, da cinquanta anni in qua, et stimano effetto della providenza di Dio, che Richer l’habbi necessitato a scrivere in tempo si opportuno per levare dalle menti de francesi le perniciosissime opinioni, che correvano innanzi in pregiuditio dell’autorità de Papi, et della dignità di cotesta S.ta Sede; Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 15 March 1612, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 85r. 80. e certo che i Teologi della francia ch’hanno scritto di questi punti da molto tempo in qua non trovo che si sia conformato alla sana dottrina della Chiesa Cattolica Romana più di questo, che sta con desiderio attendendo d’udire il senso che ne havrà N. S. e V. S. Ill.ma et tutta cotesta Corte, e se mi sarà permesso di dargliene lodi, come spero, questo gli sarà un grande stimolo per pensare di fare qualche altra opera piu grave, e laboriosa nell’istessa materia, nella quale è versatissimo e pieno di zelo straordinario in questi tempi, e Paesi; ibid., 85r–v. 81. The distinction between “classical-age” conciliarism (the time of the councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basel) and “silver-age” conciliarism (between the end of the fifteenth century up until the eve of the Reformation) has been made by Francis Oakley, “Almain and Major: Conciliar Theory on the Eve of the Reformation,” American Historical Review 70 (1965): 673–690 at p. 674. 82. See Duval’s dedicatory epistle to Du Perron, in Elenchus, unfol. 83. Duval, Elenchus, pp. 48–54. 84. Non esse de fide Pontificem habere infallibilitatem decernendi, certius tamen & probabilius esse eum quatenus agit ut Pontifex illam habere; ibid., table of contents, unfol., and pp. 68ff. passim.

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85. unum & idem sunt Ecclesia & Respublica Christiana. Quid enim, quaeso, est Ecclesia, nisi coetus fidelium? & quid iam Respublica, nisi pariter coetus fidelium? . . . Non potuit igitur Anonymus nisi male feriatus, & Ecclesiae infensus asseverare, Ecclesiam esse in Republica: quasi vero haec multo latius pateret, & nonnullos contineret qui Christianae Religionis mysteriis non essent initiati. Unde turpius adhuc lapsus est, cum asseruit Ecclesiam in Republica esse, tanquam in alieno fundo, & territorio; ibid., pp. 124–125. 86. Ibid., pp. 128–129. 87. On this point see Oakley, “Almain and Major”; James H. Burns, “Politia regalis et optima: The Political Ideas of John Mair,” History of Political Thought 2 (1981): 31–61; Burns, “Scholasticism: Survival and Revival,” in Burns, The Cambridge History of Political Thought, pp. 132–155 at pp. 146–151; Thomas M. Izbicki, “Cajetan’s Attack on Parallels between Church and State,” Cristianesimo nella Storia 20 (1999): 80–89. 88. On Cajetan’s theoretical arguments and their implications, see Burns, “Scholasticism,” pp. 146–155. 89. On the influence Cajetan’s arguments on Vitoria, see Katherine Elliot van Liere, “Vitoria, Cajetan, and the Conciliarists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997): 597–616. 90. Oakley, “Bronze-Age Conciliarism,” especially pp. 74ff., quotation at p. 84. 91. Non miror si ex mala hac Dialectica peior Theologia nascatur. Sed eius axiomate eum referiamus. Deus & Natura prius, immediatius, & essentialius ad totum quam ad partem nobilissimam intendunt, sed regnum Galliae est totum, Rex vero pars eaque nobilissima; ergo prius, immediatius, & essentialius, potestats regno quam regi data est; Duval, Elenchus, p. 15. 92. si enim omnis principatus a subditorum consensu pendet, quoad vim coactivam Rex Galliae suum precario a subditis tenebit imperium, nec suis legibus quantumvis iustis poterit citram ipsorum consensum eos adstringere, cum tamen omnis anima potestatibus sublimioribus subdita sit; ibid., pp. 49–50. 93. [Almain wrote that] nemo potest obligari nisi aut ex consensu proprio aut voluntate superiorum . . . non ergo a solo subditorum consensu pendet vis coactiva Principis, alias authoritas eius vana & otiosa esset, quo sit ut etiamsi iuxta receptam Galliae consuetudinem edicta verificari solent, ab ista tamen declaratione suam vim ullo modo mutuantur, cum ipsa sit tantum conditio necessaria, ut de Principis voluntate & intentione constet; ibid., p. 50. 94. In Indice n.17 ubi dicitur, Non esse de fide, Pontificem habere infallibilitatem decernendi, certius tamen, et probabilius esse eum quatenus agit ut Pontifex illam habere pag.72 posset ita moderari. Non esse determinatum . . . Pontificem habere infallibillitatem decernendi, certum tamen esse eum quatenus agit ut Pontifex illam habere. The anonymous censure can be found in ACDF, St St H 2-a, 40v. 95. Haec sunt quae si moderentur, et doctissimum authorem magis pium erga Ecclesiam Romanam ostendent . . . nihil quod in doctrina reprehendi possit. . . . in hoc pulcherrimo libello inveni; ibid. 96. [Duval] si duole, che la condizione del luogo, e l’ingiuria de tempi, in che gli è convenuto di scrivere di questa materia non gli habbino permesso di dirne più liberamente quello, ch’egli ne crede, et n’ha sempre in voce professato in publico et in

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privato, e promette, che se il libro si ristamperà dinuovo, sodisfarà al comando e desiderio di S. S.tà e della Sacra Congregatione; Ubaldini to Arrigone, Paris, 7 June 1612, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 157r–158r at 157r–v. The second edition of the Elenchus was published in 1613, and Duval had indeed maintained the promise he made to change the few sentences according to the censure; see the letter of Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 26 March 1613, in ibid., 357v, in which Ubaldini sent a copy of the second edition to Rome and was happy to report that Duval corrected “i punti che furno annotati costi in tutto conforme alla mente della Sacra Congregatione del S. Officio.” 97. The title of the book is Ex responsione synodali data Basiliae. . . . de auctoritate cuiuslibet Concilii generalis supra P.P. & quoslibet fideles pars praecipua, et in eam Commentarius (Cologne, 1613). On the significance of the Council of Basel in the history of conciliarism, see Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition, pp. 44–48. 98. Valeat igitur Valla cum sua peregrina opinione, quam & sacrae scripturae, & auctoritatibus Conciliorum, Theologorum, Iurisconsultorum, Ecclesiae Gallicanae, & omnium Scholarum vult praeferre. Sed hoc non novum, cum ille solus inter omnes Doctores Facultatis Sorbonicae, impios Encomiastas Ignatii non condemnaverit, ut maluerit esse solus, aut nullus, quam cum condoctoribus bene sentire; Simon Vigor, Ex responsione synodali . . . Commentarius, 48v–49r. 99. Duo enim sunt genera Monarchiae: Una absoluta, cum populus omne ius suum in unum transtulit: Altera cum certis legibus, is qui Monarcha dicitur, est obnoxius, ne Monarcha omnia pro libidine faciat; ibid., 21r. 100. Et falluntur illi Doctores, qui ex similitudine Monarchiae Politicae, volunt argumenta petere ad probandam potestatem Monarchiae Ecclesiasticae. Nam quandum distent, vel ex eo colligere possumus, quod Rex potestatem habet vitae & necis in subditos, & quod ei placuit legis habeat vigorem, & etiamsi in leges pronuntiet, tamen ius dicere censeatur. At hoc in Pontifice obtinere usus quotidianus, & ius Canonicum repugnat. Pontifex enim non habet potestatem absolutam vitae & necis spiritualis in Christianos, propterea quod usus clavium regulatur secundum Canones, non autem mera & absoluta potestate exercetur; ibid., 21v. 101. At cum Richerius idem dicat, volunt calumniatores, ut invidiam in eum conflent, id in Regiam auctoritatem dictum persuadere: & improbe. Nam Galliae regnum est pure & absolute Monarchicum: & hoc facile est probare: Ecclesiae autem tale esse regimen, impossibile; ibid., 27v. 102. Cum enim Deum prius respexisse ad populum, quam ad regem dicat, tamen negare non potest, Deum, quantum ad iurisdictionem, respexisse ad regem, non ad populum, cui, non populo, iurisdictionem commisit. . . . Deus enim voluit alio regimine, quam Regio, Ecclesiam gubernari: & non uni soli iurisdictionem Ecclesiasticam commisit, sed omnibus Apostolis; ibid., 44v. 103. On this point, see Sommerville, “From Suarez to Filmer,” pp. 536ff. 104. Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 11 April 1613, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 361r–v; and Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris 6 June 1613, in ibid., 406r–v, in which the nuncio updated Borghese on the progress that Duval was making. 105. la dottrina Catolica intorno a detta potesta restera maggiormente confirmata nell’anime pie, e timorate, e che quelli che non per malitia, ma per errore d’intelletto ci

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havevano qualche difficultà ne resteranno a fatto disingannati; Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 28 January 1614, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 56, 28r–29r, at 28r. 106. Ibid., 28r–v. 107. bene è vero che se il buon Dottore non havesse conferita l’opera prima di publicarla, come desideravo grandemente, havrei creduto di potergli far levare alcune cosette, che s’accomodano un poco troppo all’aria del paese, et alle pretensioni de Parlamenti di Francia, e che costi daranno peravverntura qualche noia; ma in cio egli si scusa . . . col promettermi, che come egli l’ha sottomessa alla Censura di cotesta S. Sede, cosi la corregierà, et emenderà con perfetta obedienza della 2a editione, che se ne farà in cio che sarà notato, come pur anco fece del suo primo libro contro Richer ad mentem Su.mi S. D. N.; ibid., 28v. 108. dopo che sara stata revista l’opera costì S. S.tà et V. S. Ill.ma lo giudicheranno percio degno di qualche honore . . . parmi sarà molto a proposito, che S. B.ne oltre quello di piu in che lo vorra honorare, fatti chiamare a se i Dottori Sorbonici, che sono costì, e lodandogli affettuosamente il Dottore Duval, lodi insieme la Sorbona, da cui egli ha imparato si sana dottrina, per confondere massime in questi tempi gl’ingrati figli della medesima madre, che cercano di publicare, e farla stimare per emula, e contraria alla dignità di cotesta S. Sede; ibid., 28v–29r. 109. quibus ita animadversis statuenda nobis est haec conclusio . . . etiamsi de fide non sit summum Pontificem seorsim a concilio, privilegio infallibilitatis, licet agat ut Pontifex, gaudere, id tamen absolute certum est & indubitatum; André Duval, De suprema summi Pontificis in ecclesia potestatem disputatio (Paris, 1614), p. 210. 110. Doctores contrariae sententiae ut Alliacensis, Gersonius, Almainus, Maior Cusanus, Adrianus, & alii neque in hac parte, neque in ulla alia, ab Ecclesia sunt condemnati: scio quidem in re Pontificia Alliacensem, Gersonium & Almainum non esse tantae authoritatis, quia tempore schismatum floruerunt, & scripserunt; ibid. 111. Dixi vero non esse temerariam saltem temeritate opinionis, quia quicquid sit de opinione secundum se temeraria, nemo negare potest quin haec propositio, quod Pontifex ut Pontifex, contra fidem possit decernere, viam faciat ad inobedientiam, occasionemque praebeat dubitandi de multis quae iam toto orbe recepta sunt, & a Pontifice iudicata, quod non vacat specie aliqua temeritatis; ibid., pp. 211–214, quotation at p. 214. 112. Quam Vigorius quaestionem nobilissimam praedicat, hanc ego odiosam & hoc tempore tot tamque portentosis haeresibus adversus Sedem Apostolicam saevientibus periculosam affirmo; ideo ab ea penitus abstinuissem, si dudum sopitas in Ecclesia tragoedias denuo non excitasset infoelici suo commentariolo Vigorius; ibid., pp. 524ff. (note that at this point the page numbers do not follow the proper order, so that the page after p. 524 is numbered p. 539, and the following pages follow the last one, so that after p. 539 we find pp. 540, 541, etc.). 113. Verum in hac tanta doctorum dissensione, dicam ingenue neutram harum opinionem esse de fide; ibid., p. 542. 114. Ceterum non tantum neutra harum opinionum haeretica est, sed etiam neutra est erronea & temeraria, saltem temeritate opinionis. . . . Dixi vero neutram opinionem esse temerariam temeritate opinionis, quia etsi opinio quae stat a partibus conciliorum, in ratione opinionis temeritate vacet, propter rationem quam adduximus,

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a temeritate tamen inobedientiae vix potest excusari: fovet enim ut plurimum inobedientiam, & dissidia multa, magnosque tumultus Ecclesia semper excitavit; ibid., pp. 550–552. 115. Ibid., pp. 552–582. 116. Haec sunt utriusque sententiae pondere & argumenta, eorundemque solutiones quas ideo placuit adducere, ut prudens lector quod melius & consultius iudicaverit illud amplectatur; ibid., p. 581. 117. Eccesiastica potestas, Regia & Imperiali sit nobilior . . . Denique si haec delinquerit, vi censurae per Ecclesiasticam potestatem ad officium reducitur, illa vero & si graviter delinquat, ad officium per secularem potestatem reduci non potest, aut emendari; nec enim summus Pontifex in spiritualibus aut temporalibus a Regibus aut Imperatoribus dependet; ibid., pp. 67–68, but see Duval’s entire section, pp. 60ff. 118. Verum (ut iam dixi) lapidem hunc movere nunc non institui: de spiritualibus enim, non de temporalibus disserere est animus. Dicam tamen obiter, electionem populi, aut haereditariam successionem (quae in prima sui origine a populo derivatur) vel ordinationem & inaugurationem Pontificis, nisi aliud accedat (ut accidit in Regibus Siciliae, & aliis Principibus Ecclesiae vassallis) non impedire quo minus dici possit potestatem secularem Regum & Principum a Deo esse immediate; ibid., p. 66. 119. quod ad populum in officio continendum maxime confert, ne factionibus & rebellionibus a suo Rege legitimo desciscat. Cum enim credit populus Regis sui potestatem non a seipso, sed a Deo solo derivari, eius dominationem multo tolerabilius sustinet, eiusque mandatis promptius & facilius obtemperat. Ratio vero cur haec dicantur non impedire quo minus potestas Regis a Deo sit immediate, est a simili: sicut enim ex electione Pontificis quae fit per Cardinales totius Ecclesiae nomine, non sequitur Pontificem a Cardinalibus, vel ab Ecclesia suam mutuari potestatem, cum a Christo solo eam accipiat . . . ita nec ex ordinatione Pontificis, aut electione populi, nisi, ut dixi, aliud interveniat, sequitur Reges ab iiis, & non a solo Deo suam tenere potestatem; ibid. 120. Monarchiam Ecclesiasticam non esse simpliciter absolutam, sed certis legibus aut finis conclusam, & limitatam; ibid., p. 87. 121. Nihilominus contra Vigorium constanter asserimus esse absolutam secundum quid, & aequam pro rebus spiritualibus, potestati Monarchicae Regum & Imperatorum in rebus civilibus; ibid., p. 89. 122. Ceterum, quia sunt nonnulli Reges, qui absque generalibus comitiis, vel consilio procerum regni nullas leges condere, nullaque tributa aut vectigalia queunt exigere, ut Reges Arragoniae; alii vero qui inconsultis optimatibus regnique proceribus, haec omnia legitime praestant: Et si quando optimatum consilio utantur, id quidem ad melius esse (ut loquuntur) faciunt, non ex necessitate, & ad simpliciter, ut Reges Galliae, quorum edicta licet iuxta receptam Galliae consuetudinem approbari sive verificari soleant, ab ista tamen approbatione seu verificatione suam vim nullo modo mutuantur, cum sit tantum conditione eo fine requisita, ut de Regis voluntate, & intentione universo populo constet. Cum, inquam, Reges sint in duplici differentia, asserendum est Ecclesiae Monarchiam in spiritualibus, & Ecclesiasticis eiusdem esse rationis cuius est Monarchia Regum posterioris generis: Enimvero sicut Reges isti, etsi nihil contra ius naturae, & generalem Imperii sui statum moliri ac praestare possint,

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ut innocentes pro arbitrio morti addicere, civium bona diripere, in alienos thalamos irruere; nihilominus quoad res civiles, & administrationem regni a nullo quam a Deo dependent, neque ulli alteri de factis suis rationem reddere tenentur: Ita supremus Ecclesiae Monarcha, etsi legibus divinis, & naturalibus sit subiectus, statumque Ecclesie generalem convellere, aut deterere non debeat, in illius tamen potestate est ius Ecclesiasticum, aut in parte, aut in totum abrogare, & de eo cum fidelibus, ut visum fuerit dispensare; ibid., pp. 90–91. 123. Giustiniani’s censure can be found in AB, pp. 601–603. 124. See ACDF, St St H 2-a, 87v, which includes the following comment to the nuncio’s letter which we have examined: “Die 20 Februarii 1614 Summus ordinavit librum Doc.ris Andreae Duval videri ab Ill.mo Card. Bellarmino.” 125. Bellarmine’s comments on his colleague’s censure and on Duval’s book can be found in AB, pp. 603–608. 126. The complete correspondence between Duval and Bellarmine can be found in ACDF, St St H 2-a, 102r and ff. Le Bachelet has published part of this correspondence (AB, pp. 603ff.); his edition is based on copies of Duval’s and Bellarmine’s letters that can be found at the Vatican Library and in ARSI, Opp. Nn. 243, which contain small and unimportant differences from the Inquisition copy. The one important part missing from AB that can be found in ACDF is Duval’s second response to Bellarmine, which was forwarded by the French nuncio to Arrigone on 18 November 1614 (ACDF, St St H 2-a, 118r–131v). 127. Cf. the Disputatio, pp. 210–213, and Giustiniani’s censure in AB, p. 601. 128. The passage of Duval’s Disputatio censured by Giustiniani reads: “Et quamvis Ecclesia universalis huius infallibilitatis privilegio pariter gaudeat, non tamen ecclesia particularis, qualis est Romana, si seorsim a suo capite, nimirum Pontifice, sumatur” (p. 320). The censure can be found in AB, pp. 601–602. 129. Secunda est falsa, quoad secundam partem praecipue, sed a me quoque notata fuit; AB, p. 603. 130. Dicit iudicium Papae esse infallibile, sed contrariam sententiam non esse haereticam neque erroneam neque temerariam. Posset omitti ista qualificatio. Videtur auctor loqui contra mentem propriam. Nam ipse in pag.102 dicit infallibilitatem Papae esse absolute certam et indubitatam, et pag.215 dicit evidenter deduci ex verbis Domini, Luc.22, “Ego rogavi pro te,” etc. Ex quibus sequitur esse ut minimum erroneum et temerarium negare infallibilitatem Papae; AB, p. 604. 131. Quarta est verissima. Ecclesia enim Romana particularis sine Papa non habet ullam infallibilitiatem; AB, p. 603. 132. See, for instance, Bellarmine’s censure on the question of whether or not the council was superior to the pope; AB, p. 608; cf. Duval, Disputatio, pp. 524ff. 133. Dicit potestatem regiam esse immediate a Deo, quamvis rex eligatur a populo, quo modo Papa eligitur a cardinalibus et tamen accipit potestatem immediate a Deo. Hic fuit primus error Joannis Marsilii et deinde Widdrincthoni [sic] et aliorum. Cardinales enim non tribuunt Papae papalem potestatem cum ipsi eam non habebant, sed designant personam cui Deus tribuit potestatem; quo modo reges eligunt episcopos, sed non tribuunt potestatem, sed offerunt Pontifici a quo eam accipiunt; at populus non solum designavit initio personas, sed transtulit in illos suam potestatem,

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ut omnes norunt. Hinc enim magna varietas est principum; alii enim majorem, alii vero minorem habent potestatem; AB, p. 604. Cf. Duval, Disputatio, pp. 60ff. 134. On the historiographical debate over the constitutionalist implications of neo-Thomist political theories, cf. Skinner, Foundations, vol. 2, pp. 158–166; Sommerville, “From Suarez to Filmer”; Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, especially pp. 224–262. 135. Non asserui praecise potestatem regiam esse immediate a Deo, sed tantum electionem Regis per populum non impedire quominus regia potestas a Deo sit immediate; AB, p. 604. 136. Illud prius dixi. . . . tum quia res potius est civilis quam theologica et ad rempublicam potius quam ad Ecclesiam spectat, tum quia cum salus populi nullo modo periclitetur, etiamsi credat regum suorum potestatem non a se, sed a Deo immediate provenire, et alia ex parte plurimum confert ad ipsius reipublicae tranquillitatem ut istud sibi persuadeat . . . praesertim cum in Gallia, tempore Caroli noni et Henrici 3 populus, haereticorum concionibus et scriptis dementatus, ea de causa ab eorum obedientia defecerit; ibid. 137. Ibid. For the tensions that Duval picked in Jesuit and neo-Thomist theories between constitutionalist and absolutist elements, see Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 224ff. 138. Pro Widdringtono Anglo, scio quidem a SS.mo D.no Nostro damnatum, sed crederem potius eum propter generale argumentum libri sui quam propter hanc de immediata regum potestate a Deo et non a populo fuisse damnatum; AB, p. 604 139. Sed, utut sit de hujus opinionis ab Ecclesiae condemnatione. . . . partem hanc in secunda libri mei editione . . . ita temperabo ut nulli in posterum offendiculum pariat; ibid. 140. Est vero res haec maximi ponderis, et hoc praesertim tempore veritas est publice praedicanda et inculcanda. Bellarmine’s censure can be found in AB, pp. 609–613, quotation at p. 610. 141. Nam si collatio illa electionis regum a populo et electionis Papae a cardinalibus admittatur, sine dubio aut nimium regibus, aut nimis parum Pontificibus tribuetur, et aut veritas fidei, aut veritas politica peribit; ibid. 142. Nam non potest vere esse utile, ut quod falsum est credatur esse verum; nec utile est, sed perniciosum valde, ut populus credat regem in nullo casu posse deponi, vel a summo Pastore, vel a principibus regni; hinc enim fundaretur tyrannis aeterna, et daretur facultas regibus introducendi haereses et paganismum et mores pessimos, cum certi essent se in nullo casu posse deponi . . . at rex haereticus et paganus esse potest rex cum regia potestas non necessario fidem requirat; ibid. 143. Laudo vero sinceritatem tuam, quod in alia editione hunc locum ita temperare velis, ut neminem catholicum offendat, quasi Joannis Marsilii et Widdringtoni et aliorum Ecclesiae hostium placita sequi videaris; decet enim virum prudentem et pium non solum ab erroribus, sed etiam ab omni specie vel umbra errorum abstinere; ibid., p. 611. 144. Neque ideo fovenda est falsa et perniciosa opinio, quia populus Franciae ab haereticis persuasus coeperit deficere ab obedientia Caroli 9 et Henrici 3. Defectio enim a Carolo 9 coepit non propter utram sententiam de potestate regia, sed quia Calvinistae dominari volebant et per vim sectam suam introducere vel propagare; ibid. p. 610.

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145. Hac in re (ut ingenue tecum loquar) perplexus sum; tum enim haec potestatis regiae a populo dependentia, sit per se veritas politica, cuius queaso esse . . . judicium? An Reipublicae? An ecclesiae? Ecclesiae iudicare de rebus fidei, et de rebus quae ad salutem aeternam conferunt, Respublica vero de rebus politicis, quae ad salutem temporalem spectant [iudicat]. Duval’s counterreply can be found in ACDF, St St H 2-a, 118r–131v, quotation at 120v–121r. 146. dependentia potestatis regiae immediate a populo, in ipsam primam electionem est veritas politica: et hoc ego dixi. At quod non dependeat potestas regia immediate a Deo, sicut dependet potestas Papae, non est veritas politica, sed teologica: neque eo unquam dixi hanc esse veritatem politicam; ibid., 121r. 147. Jacques M. Gres-Gayer, Le gallicanisme de Sorbonne (Paris: Champion, 2002), pp. 15–16. 148. Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition, p. 172. 149. On La Rochefoucauld’s attitude toward papalism, see Joseph Bergin, Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld: Leadership and Reform in the French Church (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 38–66. 150. On Du Perron’s role in the debate over the article of the Third Estate, see J. Michael Hayden, France and the Estates General of 1614 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 131ff. 151. Puo in alcuni luoghi parere, che l’autore habbia qualche opinione contraria alla dignita della santa Sede; ma chi legge tutto il ragionamento, et considera il modo di dire, et il tempo, et il luogo dove parlava, forse lo potra scusare; massime essendo per altro l’oratione molto utile non solo a francesi, ma anco all’inglesi, perche con occasione di questo articulo, si refuta molto bene il giuramento d’Inghilterra, dal quale è stato formato l’articulo. Bellarmine’s notes on Du Perron’s address, written between 1614 and 1615, can be found in AB, pp. 680–682, quotation at p. 681. 152. Scripseram ante aliquot annos responsionem ad litteras tuas: sed non misi, quia videbaris mihi subiratus, et in deteriorem partem accepisse literas meas. Itaque nolui tunc novis literis augere incendium, sed expectare, donec per gratiam Dei extingueretur; Bellarmine to Duval, Rome, 15 October 1618, in APUG, EB, vol. 7, doc. 2044. 153. Opportune autem hesterna die venit ad me Dominus Henricus Spondanus, communis amicus, et me nomine tuo non solo humanissime salutavit, sed etiam addidit, poenituisse te, quod paulo asperius alias responderis literis meis. Nunc igitur tempus advenisse censui, in quo sine offensione mittere possem literas, quae satis diu delituerunt in scrinio meo; ibid. 154. denique finge te esse Augustinum, me Hieronymum, et tam pacato animo lege literas meas, quam scis pacato animo legisse Augustinum literas Hieronymi cum de quaestionibus sacrae Scripturae inter se disputarent; ibid. 155. detto Vigor ha usato grandissimo artificio per necessitare il Sorbonico . . . a trattare della Potesta Pontificia in temporalibus Principum; in cui essendo onninamente impossibile, che un dottore di questa facultà, e domiciliato qui ne profitti, e scriva liberamente quello, che ne sente la verita Catolica; è per avventura atto di prudenza, che s’astenghi ciascuno da tal materia; ma con tutto cio se . . . giudicherà, e comanderà la S.tà di N. S. che il medesimo Duval la confuti, e tale il concetto, ch’io

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ho della virtu di lui; che m’assicuro lo farà prontissimamente; Ubaldini to Borghese, 4 June 1615, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 56, 221v–22vr. 156. A copy of the nuncio’s letter can be found also in ACDF, St St H 2-a, 132r–v, and the quotation that I have reported from the ASV copy appears underlined in the Inquisition manuscript. 157. On the back of the nuncio’s letter we can find the comment of the Inquisitors: “Die 9 Julii 1615. Liber Apologiae . . . Vigori . . . missus ab Nunzio apostolico in Gallia cum literis datis die 4 Junii videatur a Congregatione Indicis”; ibid., 133v. 158. See note 134. CHAPTER

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1. On the general confessional configuration of post-Reformation Germany, see Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany: The Reformation (New York: Knopf, 1970); and Ron Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1770 (London: Routledge 1989). On the Peace of Augsburg, see Hermann Tüchle, “The Peace of Augsburg: New Order or Lull in the Fighting,” in H. J. Cohn, ed., Government in Reformation Europe 1520–1560 (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 145–165. 2. A brief biography of Becanus can be found in Bernhard Duhr, Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Ländern deutscher Zunge, 2 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 1913), vol. 2, pt. 2, pp. 219–225. 3. A complete list of Becanus’s works can be found in Carlos Sommervogel, Bibliothèque de la compagnie de Jésus, 12 vols. (Brussels: Schepens, 1890–1960), s.v. “Becanus, Martin.” 4. See Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 155–158. 5. Carolus V Imperator toleravit haereticos in Germania. Sed si etiam proprie libertatem religionis concessit, ignoro. Apparet tamen noxiam fuisse illam concessionem, qualiscumque fuerit, cum videamus in plerisque locis deletam prorsus esse veram religionem. The text of Bellarmine’s notes has been published in AB, pp. 596–599, quotation at p. 597. 6. On this episode, see Francesco Gui, I Gesuiti e la rivoluzione boema: Alle origini della Guerra dei Trent’Anni (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1989), pp. 392ff.; and Robert Bireley, The Jesuits and the Thirty Years War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 37–41. Bellarmine’s judgment over Becanus’s position, as well as Becanus’s response, can be found in ARSI, Boh. 94, 65r–90v. The correspondence between Becanus and Vitelleschi can be found in ARSI, Aust. 3 (I), fols. 67–88 passim. 7. Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, p. 161. 8. On this see Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, pp. 259–262; Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline, pp. 37–38. 9. Altera, quod sicut Catholicos mendaciis, ita Lutheranos astu circumvenerit. Misit enim libellum suum Lutheranis Wittenbergensibus in Saxonia, ut . . . eum approbarent, & iterum typis excuderent; quod & factum est . . . Merito dicam; O simplices Lutheranos: O versipelles Calvinistas. Hi scientes & volentes confingunt mendacia in Catholicos, & dissimulant. Illi, re non examinata, approbant & evulgant.

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Sed veniam demus Lutheranis. Calvinistae certe impune non abeant; Martin Becanus, Aphorismi Doctrinae Calvinistarum (Mainz, 1608), epistle “ad lectorem,” pp. 3–4. 10. Ibid., pp. 6–64 passim. 11. Primum mendacium est, Iesuitas dicere, “Pontificem habere omnimodam potestatem spiritualem.” Nemo ex citatis hoc docet. Fatentur quidem ipsi, sicut & alii Catholici, Pontificem habere potestatem spiritualem, seu ecclesiasticam in totum orbem Christianum; non tamen omnimodam potestatem, sed certam & limitatam; ibid., pp. 67–68. 12. Ibid., pp. 70–73. 13. Ibid., pp. 74–77. 14. Ubi obiter notandum est, exemptionem ab alicuius potestate & iurisdictione tribus modis fieri solere. 1. Iure Divino, quo pacto fatetur Calvinus . . . ecclesiasticos exemptos esse a seculari potestate in causis mere ecclesiasticis. 2. Iure humano, quo pacto ab eadem potestate exempti sunt in causis civilibus 3. Vi & rebellione; quo pacto Calvinistae passim conantur se eximere ab omni potestate tam ecclesiastica, quam saeculari ut experientia docet; ibid., pp. 75–76. 15. Qui autem est tyrannus posteriori modo, nempe ratione administrationis, non potest a subditis interfici, ut definitum est in Concilio Constantiensi sess.15 et ratio est, quia verus & legitimus Princeps, etsi tyrannice regat, manet tamen superior: Ergo subditi debent illi obtemperare, & non interficere . . . Atque haec est expressa sententia Ioannis Marianae loco citato, & aliorum Iesuitarum, qui de hac re scripserunt; in qua non video, quid Calvinistae possint merito reprehendere; ibid., p. 100. 16. See Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, pp. 314ff. 17. Nunc quaero ex Calvinistis, quid ipsi putarent faciendum illis Christianis, qui subsunt Imperatori Turcarum, si Imperator vellet eos cogere & pertrahere ad Mahometismum? An deserendum Christum, & adhaerendum Mahometo? At hoc non esset consilium hominis Christiani. Quid ergo? An excutiendum iugum Imperatoris, & persistendum in fide? At hoc ipsum est, quod Bellarminus docet; Becanus, Aphorismi, pp. 106–107. 18. Iterum quaero, si Rex Angliae Catholicam & Romanam fidem amplecteretur, & vellet omnes Calvinistas, quotquot in Anglia sunt, eandem fidem palam profiteri, & Pontifici Romano fidelitatem praestare; quid consilii caperent? An sequerentur suum Regem? Hoc quidem ego optarem. At non essent hoc facturi, sat scio. Quid ergo? Regem potius abdicarent, & suum Calvinismum sartum tectum conservarent. Quare? Quia praestat Regem, quam reformatam fidem amittere. Simili modo argumentatur Bellarminus; ibid., p. 107. 19. Circa poi il far rispondere a l’heresie contenute nel libro, io ho già mandato il foglio a Magonza al padre Martino Becano de la compagnia di Jesù, il quale a mio giudicio sarà più atto a rispondere di nessun altro, ch’io conosca in queste parti, non tanto per la dottrina, che non ne mancariano de gl’altri, quanto per la maniera et gratia, che ha in questo genere di confutare gli authori heretici con brevità et chiarezza oltre la solidità della dottrina; Amalteo to Borghese, Cologne, 1 August 1609, in Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland: Nebst erganzenden Aktenstucken: Die Kolner Nuntiatur (Padernorn: Schöningh, 2000), vol. 4, 2.2, doc. 806.

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20. ma ha d’avvertire di non pungere il Re, et astenersi da quei modi di dire, che lo potrebbono offendere: non per questo ha da pretermettere di nominarlo, ma potrà far mentione espressa di lui nel progresso dell’opera, con quella circospettione, che gli detterà la sua prudenza, e che gli porgerà l’occasione; Borghese to Amalteo, Rome, 12 September 1609, in ibid., doc. 868. 21. Ciò dico, perché come questa falsa opinione è abbracciata non solo da gl’heretici, ma anco da gran numero de’ catolici etiam ecclesiastici, così mi parrebbe che con l’occasione del sudetto libro fusse confutata con efficacia et nervo non da un solo o due, ma da più altri valent’huomini ancora senza però dar segno alcuno che si facesse di ordine del Pontefice; Amalteo to Borghese, Trier, 22 November 1609, in ibid., doc. 953. 22. si crede, che l’impresa di risponderli sia forsi superiore al talento di quel Padre; Borghese to Amalteo, Rome, 12 December 1609, in ibid., doc. 977. 23. Cur autem nihil addam . . . de Iuramento fidelitatis, propter quod omnis controversia nata est; nemo mirari debet: Vix dubito, quin R.mus & Ill.mus Cardinalis Bellarminus de hoc . . . acturus sit: & quidem suo more, tam solide ac nervose, ut nihil opus sit, alios in eodem argumento operam ponere; Martin Becanus, Serenissimi Iacobi Angliae Regis Apologiae, & monitoriae Praefationis . . . Refutatio (Mainz, 1610), pp. 11–12. 24. Ibid., pp. 17–20. 25. Et hoc indicat Christus, cum ait; Regnum meum non est de hoc mundo . . . Nam Christus habet Primatum in Ecclesia, non tamen in Republica civili & temporali; ibid., pp. 22–25. 26. Ibid., pp. 64–65. 27. See Bellarmine’s De summo Pontifice, bk. 2, chap. 29; sese also his De potestate summi Pontificis, chap. 5; and Becanus’s Refutatio, pp. 64–66. 28. Faciamus ergo (si sic lubet) Salomonem potestate regia usum esse. Iam oritur posterior quaestio, An hac potestate legitime usus sit, nec ne? . . . Esto igitur, non peccaverit Salomon, sed iuste ac legitime usus sit potestate regia in eiiciendo Sacerdote; adhuc tamen non sequitur, habuisse supremam potestatem seu iurisdictionem in rebus ecclesiasticis, sed solum in temporalibus. Hoc evidenter ostendo ex his principiis. Primum est, quod Salomon fuerit legitimus successor Davidis in regno. Alterum, quod Adonias frater Salomonis, iniuste aspiraverit ad regnum, & conatus sit Salomonem excludere. Tertium, quod Adoniae adhaeserint Abiathar Sacerdos, & Ioab Princeps militiae. Quartum, quod propter hanc iniustam conspirationem, Adonias, Abiathar, & Ioab fuerint rei laesae maiestatis . . . Quintum, quod quisque Rex in suo regno sit supremus dominus in temporalibus. Sextum, quod (secluso iure humano, quo immunitas clericorum introducta est) Sacerdotes subiecti sint Regi in temporalibus; & ab eo in causis civilibus iudicari & puniri possint; Bellarm. li. 1 De Clericis cap.28. Haec certa sunt. Ex quibus six concludo; Abiathar sacerdos iniuste conspiravit contra Regem Salomonem, ac proinde fuit reus laesae maiestatis. Haec autem culpa erat civilis, non ecclesiastica: Ergo a Rege tanquam civili magistratu iudicari & puniri potuit. Nec inde sequitur Regem fuisse Primatem in causis Ecclesiasticis, sed solum in civilibus, quod libenter concedimus; Becanus, Refutatio, pp. 65–69, quotation at pp. 68–69.

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29. Fu poi veduta, et considerata la risposta del P. Becano, la quale non finisce di sodisfare in alcuni punti. Tuttavia non occorrerà movere difficoltà alcuna, ne parlarne poiche è già publicata; Borghese to Amalteo, Rome, 30 January 1610, in Nuntiaturberichte, doc. 1039. 30. aliquod notatum . . . est circa id quod R. V. asserit de Salomone; Acquaviva to Becanus, Rome, 20 February 1610, in ARSI, Epp. Gen. Rheni Inf. 4, 339r. 31. Acquaviva to Becanus, Rome, 20 March 1610, in ibid., 340v. 32. In un punto solo consiste la censura del libro del P. Becano composto da lui in refutatione della prefatione monitoria del Re d’Inghilterra, che in somma si nota nella quinta sua obiettione, che deduce dal fatto di Salomone, quando depose Abiatar sommo sacerdote, dal che inferisce, che Sacerdotes sunt subiecti Regi in temporalibus, et che ab eo in causis civilibus iudicari et puniti possint: secluso tamen iure humano, quo immunitas clericoum introducta est, e per se cita il Sig. Card. Bellarmino lib. 1 de Clericis cap.28; Borghese to Amalteo, Rome, 27 March 1610, in Nuntiaturberichte, doc. 1118. 33. il quale [Bellarmine] non dice tal cosa, ne . . . che l’essentione de’ Clerici sia de iure humano, anzi è di ferma opinione, che cio non si possa difendere sicuramente: se non si dicesse, che tale ius humanum sia interpretativum iuris Divini; ibid. 34. il quale [Becanus’s book] nel resto è stato assai lodato et approvato, et in particolare del S. Cardinale sudetto che mi presuppone d’haver già scritto a V. S. a pieno di questo fatto; ibid. 35. Ex ignorantia et candore factum est. Assuetus ad veterem editionem, nescivi in nova mutatum aliquid esse. Et tam candide progressus sum, ut putarim solius Bellarmini authoritatem sufficere, tametsi plures alii in eandem sententiam citari potuissent. Et norunt, qui mecum sunt, quanti authorem illum semper fecerim; Becanus to Bellarmine, Mainz, 5 April 1610, in APUG, EB, vol. 4, doc. 966. 36. io già gli ho replicato che V. S. Ill.ma non ha mancato di mostrare che la sua sentenza può havere buon senso, se ben saria stato meglio che non fusse uscita in luce nel modo scritto da lui; Amalteo to Bellarmine, Trier, 17 April 1610, in ibid., doc. 968. 37. Martin Becanus, Refutatio Tortura Torti (Mainz, 1610, pp. 40ff. passim. 38. Ibid., pp. 55–62. 39. [Becanus’s book] non contenga cosa, che possa dispiacere a’ Cattolici; Borghese to Amalteo, 16 April 1610, in Nuntiaturberichte, doc. 1139. 40. non poco animo et aiuto per attender a confutar gli altri errori ne quali sono gli adversarii de la nostra Santa Religione e Fede; Amalteo to Borghese, Trier, 15 May 1610, in ibid., doc. 1179. 41. Borghese to Amalteo, Rome, 5 June 1610, in ibid., doc. 1198. 42. Acquaviva to Becanus, Rome, 24 July 1610, in ARSI, Epp. Gen. Rheni Inf. 4, 349r. 43. Martin Becanus, Dissidium Anglicanum de primatu Regis (Mainz, 1612), at pp. 14–45 passim. 44. Sunt enim tria subditorum genera in Anglia. I) Henriciani (ut aliqui eos vocant) qui & agnoscunt, & iurant Primatum Regium. II) Puritani, sed puri Calvinistae, qui non quidem agnoscunt, sed tamen iurant. III) Catholici, qui nec agnoscunt, nec iurant; ibid., pp. 54–56, quotation at pp. 54–55.

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45. Altera quaestio, quid dicendum de Puritanis seu puris Calvinistis, qui quidem non agnoscunt Primatum Regis, sed tamen, si iubeantur, iurant? Respondeo, sunt periuri . . . ideoque politici potius, quam Christiani appellandi sunt. De quibus vere dixit Iacobus Rex, se plus fidei in efferis latronibus, quam in isto hominum genere reperisse; ibid., pp. 54–56. 46. William Tooker, Duellum, sive certamen singulare cum Martino Becano Jesuita (London, 1611); see the dedicatory epistle to James I, and also pp. 1–49 of the work for Tooker’s accusations against the Jesuits as supporters of the foreign papal monarchy. 47. Certe non est tam depositio vel exactio legitimae Reginae, quam depulsio & ultio parricidii ac Tyrannidis: & restitutio illius veri Regis, cuius erat Regnum haereditarium ex familia Davidis; ibid., p. 148. 48. Ibid., pp. 151–152. 49. Martin Becanus, Duellum Martini Becani . . . cum Gulielmo Tooker (Mainz, 1612). As Harro Höpfl has already noted, Becanus “maintained a high publishing output by recycling entire sections from previous works” (Jesuit Political Thought, p. 321 n.36). 50. The passage on Solomon can be found in Becanus, Duellum, pp. 86–95. 51. Caeterum, quod nuperrime Angliae prodiit liber cujusdam Pseudoepiscopi in Illustriss. Card.lem Bellarminum, visum est operae pretium si R. V. illum commendaremus refellendum, et porro futurum id peroratum est S. S. et Illus.mo Cardinali, praesertim si R. V. quod sperant, pro more suo, breviter, dilucide . . . et sine mordacitate, quamprimum id poterit, praestet; Acquaviva to Becanus, Rome, 6 December 1611, in ARSI, Epp. Gen. Rheni Inf. 5, 380r. 52. Quas humanissimas ad me dedit 6 Decembris, hac ipsa hora mihi redditae sunt. In refutando eleemosynario [sic] regis Angliae, lubens meam opellam praestabo. Nec erat opus id petere a me, sed mandare. Ero memor modestiae: et curabo, ut hic non peccem; Becanus to Bellarmine, Mainz, 30 December 1611, in APUG, EB, vol. 4, doc. 1132. 53. On Andrewes, see Tutino, Law and Conscience, chap. 7. 54. Accepimus a R. V. datas 30 Maii quo significabat expeditum esse opus pro Ill.mo Card.le contra Pseudoepiscopum Anglum, quod nobis gratum accidit. Quod vero attinet ad difficultates illas de potestate Pontificum circa regum depositionem, non est quod illa remoretur editionem libri. Poterit ergo R. V. cum omni beneditione quam primum in lucem illum edere; Acquaviva to Becanus, Rome, 14 July 1612, in ARSI, Epp. Gen. Rheni Inf. 5, 393v. 55. The complete title of Becanus’s work was Controversia Anglicana de potestate regis et pontificis, contra Lancellottum Andream, Sacellanum Regis Angliae, qui se Episcopum Eliensem vocat, pro defensione Illustrissimi Cardinalis Bellarmini (Mainz, 1612). 56. Becanus gives the plan if his work in a short preface to the Controversia Anglicana, pp. 12–16. 57. Adversarii asserunt, Regem Angliae, iure Veteris Testamenti, nulla ex parte, Pontifice inferiorem esse. Id perspicue refellam ex comparatione Regis & Pontificis in veteri Testamento; ibid., p. 17. 58. Ibid., pp. 18–39 passim.

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59. Si Salomon authoritate regia id fecit, non legitime fecit. Nec enim, quicquid a Regibus factum est, legitime factum esse putandum est; ibid., p. 56. 60. Ibid., pp. 73ff., especially pp. 81–96. 61. Regem Angliae, quatenus Rex est, habere quidem Primatum temporalem seu politicum in regno Angliae; non tamen ecclesiasticum aut spiritualem; ibid., pp. 76–77. 62. Nam isti duo Primatus, spiritualis & temporalis, ex natura rei, distincti sunt . . . & alter ab altero separari potest, quia in Christo fuit Primatus spiritualis sine temporali: & e contrario, in Tiberio Imperatore fuit temporalis sine spirituali . . . Ergo Rex, qui habet Primatum temporalem, non ideo iure naturali habet spiritualem; sicut Christus, qui habuit spiritualem, non ideo iure naturali habuit temporalem; ibid., p. 77. 63. Ibid., p. 78. 64. Fatemur, Catholicos in Anglia, non solum posse, sed etiam debere, suo Regi fidelitatem & obedientiam praestare in rebus civilibus; non minus, quam id faciunt Catholici in Hispania, Francia, & alibi. Ratio est, quia ius naturale postulat, ut subditi fidelitatem & obedientiam praestent suo legitimo superiori, in iis rebus, in quibus superior est. At Rex Iacobus est legitimus superior in rebus civilibus: Ergo subditi, iure naturali, debent illi praestare fidelitatem & obedientiam in iisdem rebus; ibid., p. 98. 65. Est ergo quaestio, an Catholici sub hac formula possint ac debant praestare hoc iuramentum suo Regi? . . . Decisio quaestionis pendet ex eo, an omnes partes seu propositiones illius iuramenti sint verae? . . . Et mihi quidem certum est, non omnes falsas esse, si bene explicentur. Nam hae verae sunt 1) quod Iacobus sit legitimus Rex Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae; 2) quod in iisdem regnis sit supremus Dominus in temporalibus; 3) quod Pontifex, sine legitima causa, non possit illum excommunicare; 4) quod sine legitima causa non possit illum deponere aut subditos a civili obedientia liberare . . . At de his potest esse quaestio: 1) An Pontifex possit Regem, si id meritus sit, excommunicare; 2) an possit illum, si meritus sit, deponere, aut subditos ab obedientia liberare; 3) quo iure id possit; 4) & in quo casu; ibid., pp. 101–102. 66. Ibid., pp. 110–112. Becanus is referring here to canon 13 of bk. 5, title 7 of Gregory’s Decretales (the text of this canon, issued by Innocent III and ratified at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, is in Corpus iuris canonici, vol. 2, cols. 787–789). 67. Plus dicam. In hac re tantum valuit consensus populi, ut etiamsi superesset legitimus haeres, cui regnum deberetur, & hoc palam omnibus constaret; tamen si populus, praetermisso legitimo haerede, alium delegisset, ille alius fuisset verus Rex. Becanus’s discussion of the example of Athaliah can be found at pp. 117–124, quotation at p. 120. 68. Hoc consequens, sive verum, sive falsum sit, non legitime infertur ex illo antecedente; quod sic ostendo. Ioiada Pontifex prius privavit Athaliam regno, deinde vita. Itaque privavit illam regno, ut Reginam & publicam personam: privavit autem vita, ut privatam personam . . . Itaque non valet haec consequentia; Pontifex potestate Pontificia privavit Athaliam regno & vita. Ergo habuit potestatem, non solum deponendi, sed etiam interficiendi Reges. Hoc solum sequitur, habuisse potestatem interficiendi privatam personam, quae publicam seditionem moliebatur, vel defendi novum Regem contra novam coniurationem; ibid., pp. 125–126.

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69. Bellarmine, De potestate summi Pontificis, chap. 12. 70. Ibid., chap. 38. 71. Ibid., chap. 7. 72. Becanus, Controversia Anglicana, pp. 133–135. 73. Inter Reges & eorum subditos est mutua quaedam promissio & obligatio. Nam subditi promittunt suis Regibus obedientiam in rebus licitis & honestis: Et vicissim Reges promittunt suis subditis fidam protectionem & gubernationem, quantum fieri potest. Sicut ergo subditi, vinculo fidelitatis obligati sunt ad obedientiam praestandam suis Regibus; ita vicissim Reges, vinculo fidelitatis obligati sunt ad fidam protectionem & gubernationem praestandam suis subditis. Si ergo Reges non praestent fidelitatem, ad quam iure obligantur; digni sunt, ut nec subditi praestent ipsis fidelitatem, iuxta illud, “Frangenti fidem, fides frangatur eidem”; ibid., pp. 134–135. The principle quoted by Becanus, that if anybody made a promise and broke it, the other party was not required to respect his own side of the bargain either, was used first by canon lawyers (see, for instance, Gregory IX’s Decretales, bk. 2, title 24, chap. 25), and then it was applied by experts in natural and civil law; see Reinhard Zimmermann, The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundation of the Civilian Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 578–579. 74. See Bellarmine, De potestate summi Pontificis, chap. 24. 75. Ergo Pontifex, qui utrisque praeest in rebus ad salutem pertinentibus, potest mandare & decernere, ut subditi non teneantur praestare fidem Regibus, quando Reges non servant ipsis fidem; Becanus, Controversia Anglicana, p. 135. 76. Ibid., pp. 141–186. 77. Ibid., pp. 187–195. 78. Accepimus R. V. librum libenter, et legimus uti et Illustriss. Cardinalis, qui tamen in pluribus sese defensum et propugnatum optasset a R. V. quod tantum unum alterumve punctum allegit in ejusdem defensionem. Sed ea notata sunt quae . . . suamus declaranda in 2a quam eiusdem parabit editionem. Quid si liber antequam ederetur, huc missus esset, ut et ipsa R. V. sponte offerebat, non opus fuisset hoc remedio; Acquaviva to Becanus, Rome, 29 December 1612, ARSI, Epp. Gen. Rheni Inf. 5, 401r. 79. [Becanus’s book] ci mette in manifesto pericolo di nuove difficultà, e garbugli con questo Parlamento. . . . pretendendo questi Politici, che il libro sia perniciosissimo, e molto peggiore di quello di Mariana; Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 22 November 1612, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 275v–277v, quotation at 275v. 80. poi che i più dotti, pii, e devoti Consiglieri di Stato, e Dottori loro, e miei confidenti, ch’hanno veduto il libro, non si ponno meravigliare assai, che un Padre Gesuita habbi scritto ne’ tempi di hoggi di questa materia; come ha fatto Becano massime in quelle propositioni che vedrà V. S. Ill.ma lineate nell’estratto, e nominatamente in quella, dove vuole, che il consenso del Populo possi tanto, che anco, che vi fosse un legittimo herede, a chi fosse dovuto il Regno, se il populo . . . n’elegesse un altro, questo sarebbe il vero herede, e Re; onde nissuno vuol parlarne in sua diffesa, e tutti che ne sono interrogati lo qualificano per erroneo, scandaloso, degno di censura; ibid., 277r. 81. e perche vedo di quanto danno siano alla compagnia tali libri sono astretto di dire a V. S. Ill.ma con la dovuta reverenza, e sincerità, che giudico a proposito, che il

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P. Generale ordini a tutti i suoi Provinciali, che faccino sapere a i loro sudditi, che non stampino opere senza la loro recensione, et approvatione e che non permettino, che si publichi libro, dove si parli di interfettione di Principi, e che i popoli possino . . . farsi un nuovo Re a loro posta . . . quando pure sia giudicato necessario di far scrivere più in diffesa della potesta indiretta de i Papi sopra i Principi, ne sia data la carica a i Theologi secolari delle piu celebri università dell’Europa, et a Regolari d’ogn’altro ordine fuori che quello de Gesuiti a fin di fare . . . cessare uno de i maggiori pretesti, di che si vaglino questi Politici; ibid., 277r–v. 82. Occasione libri P. Becani contra lancellottum pro defensione Cardinalis Bellarmini ordinamus ad R. V. quod alibi ordinatum fuerat a nobis, demittendis huc libris pertinentibus ad materiam . . . de potestate Summi Pontificis super alios principes et non imprimendis . . . ita si iustissimis de causis faciendam censimus . . . R. V. dabit operam ne nullo modo prodeant eiusmodi libri nisi prius recogniti Romae sint; Acquaviva to the Procurators General of Germany, Austria, and Flanders, Rome, 5 January 1613, in ARSI, Epp. Gen. Rheni Inf. 5, 401r. 83. See the letter from Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 4 December 1612, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 283r–284r. 84. Le cose della Compagnia di Gesu sono hora assai tranquille, et se il libro di Becano si mette in silentio, e non arriva altro che ecciti contro di lei nuova tempesta passeranno ogni giorno meglio; Ubaldini to Borghese, 20 December 1612, in ibid., 289r–v, at 289r. 85. Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 31 December 1612, in ibid., 308r–v. 86. A copy of the decree can be found in ACDF, Index, Protocolli Y, 105r–v. 87. Con la lettera di V. S. de 4 del passato ho ricevuto la proihibitione, e censura di cotesta Sacra Congregatione dell’Indice contro il libro del Padre Becano la quale communicai subito a questa M.tà a i Ministri et al Sindico di questa Sorbona, che ne furno contentissimi per haver modo assai efficace di divertire la censura che qui pretendevano alcuni di fare per havere occasione di dannare in specie la Potesta de Papa in temporalibus. . . . Al P. Becano che è a Magonza ho scritto in conformità dell’ordine che me ne da V. S. Ill.ma cioè che non corregga ne stampi di nuovo detto libro con altra correttione che con quella, che . . . costi gli sara mandata; Ubaldini to Santa Cecilia, Paris, 14 February 1613, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 337r. Another copy of this letter can be found in ACDF, Index, Protocolli Y, 103r–v. 88. detta Censura, ch’io non l’ho fatta altrimenti stampare havendo il S. Cancelliere approvate certe ragioni, che mi persuadevano di non farlo; Ubaldini to Santa Cecilia, 14 February 1613, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, f.337r. 89. Recueil de ce qui s’est fait en Sorbonne et ailleurs, contre un Livre de Becanus . . . (n.p., 1613), p. 24. In March 1613, Ubaldini got hold of a copy of the pamphlet and forwarded it to Borghese complaining about how difficult it was for anybody to control the printing of books by “spiriti turbidi”; see Ubaldini to Borghese, 14 March 1613, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 351r–v. 90. The list of propositions can be found in Recueil, pp. 13–16. The censures referred almost entirely to the third section of Becanus’s Controversia, the one on the oath of allegiance, and especially pp. 108–136.

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91. Ma per far passar la Malancolia al Re, gli fu presentata da Parigi certa censura d’un libro di Becano, che lo consolò fuor di modo. Ne è già piena la Corte, gloriandosene S. M.tà et attribuendo il tutto al suo libro, che come gli danno da intendere suoi Pseudovescovi fa miracoli nel Mondo. Tra li Cattolici v’è disparere, gli Politici et poco devoti all’autorità temporale della Sede Apostolica tengono che sia vera detta censura, ma l’altri credono che sia cosa finta. In ogni modo fa danno irreparabile. The anonymous letter, dated 20 February 1613, can be found in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Inghilterra 19, 82r–v. A copy of the Index’s decree against Becanus can be found in BL, Add. Mss. 24195, 78r–v. 92. Birkhead to More, 1 March 1613, in M. C. Questier, ed., Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 213–217, quotation at pp. 214–215. 93. La censura del libro di Becano sta attaccata al portone del palazzo in Londra con sommo trionfo, parendo bene a S. M.tà di servirsene in questo modo per publicare a tutto il Regno la vittoria reportata da Papiste, et per ridorli a rendirsi finalmente et pigliare il giuramento detto di fedeltà. The anonymous letter, dated 9 April 1613, can be found in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Inghilterra 19, 84r–v, quotation at 84r. 94. This pamphlet, published in London in 1613, contained a Latin translation of the entire French Recueil, entitled Summa Actorum facultatis Parisiensis (the Index’s decree can be found at pp. 18–19). 95. Lo scopo principale della censura romana sembra . . . essere stato quello di evitare la condanna da parte del parlamento di Parigi, condanna che avrebbe contenuto dichiarazioni ostili all’autorità papale; Gui, I Gesuiti e la rivoluzione boema, p. 65n.38. See also Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy, p. 207n.195, who shares Gui’s opinion. 96. On the “lukewarm” attempts on the part of Acquaviva to isolate Mariana, see Günter Lewy, Constitutionalism and Statecraft during the Golden Age of Spain (Geneva: Droz, 1960), pp. 140–141; and Ferraro, Tradizione e ragione in Juan de Mariana, pp. 233–239. On the significance of the polemical use, on the part of French antipapalist writers, of the lack of an official condemnation of Mariana after the murder of Henri IV, see Lewy, Constitutionalism and Statecraft, pp. 146–147. Lancelot Andrewes echoed a familiar theme in English anti-Catholic polemics when he remarked angrily that Mariana’s De rege had never been officially condemned by the Roman hierarchy, and that any unofficial form of condemnation could be nothing “but a tale,” since the only public and official word on Mariana’s book was its approbation; see the sermon preached by Andrewes on 5 August 1610, in Selected Sermons and Lectures, ed. P. E. McCullough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 178–206, quotation at pp. 197–198. 97. See the communication to this effect between the nuncio in Cologne and the cardinal of Santa Cecilia in February 1613, in ACDF, Index, Protocolli Y, 103r–v. 98. See Sommerville, “Jacobean Political Thought,” p. 301. 99. On the importance of Contzen’s role in the political and religious history of the Thirty Years’ War, see Bireley, The Jesuits, pp. 86–89 and passim. 100. admiror gravitatem, et acumen, et facilitatem orationis V. R.; Bellarmine to Contzen, Rome, 21 March 1613, in APUG, EB, vol. 5, doc. 1273

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101. Literas meas, quemadmodum Illustrissima Tua Dominatio exceptura sit, horreo: sed erigit me humanitas Tuae Dominationis, quae et libertatem meam benigne accipiet, et erratis paterne ignoscet; Contzen to Bellarmine, Mainz, 26 March 1613, in APUG, EB, vol. 5, doc. 1274. 102. dubitationem, deprecationem et humillimam in re ardua consilii petitionem, quam impetrare Catholicos Germanos aequum est, cum plura impetraverint Galli, qui, Germanis pro Ecclesia scribentibus, libros eiden Ecclesiae faventes exurunt; ibid. 103. propositio ista absolute posita habet difficultatem; quia iniuste legitimus successor arcetur regno, neque ius est penes populum eum sine caussa iure successioni spoliandi; ibid. 104. Becanus flagellatur, ne male suspicentur, aliis silentium non imponitur contra quos queruntur reges; ibid. 105. Post elenchum capitum moderatio praecipitur, qua ostendatur de christianis Regibus non agi, idque ad tumultus Gallicanos sedandos; ibid. 106. Etsi valde iniqua sit Gallorum querela, respondent Germani . . . cautionem iam eam a Becano adiectam; ibid. 107. Non iure, dicitur Christus non habuisse primatum temporalem sicut neque Tiberius spiritualem. Deinde dicitur: alter primatus ab altero separari posse. Hanc propositionem ait censura Romae non bene audire; ibid. 108. p. 98 dicitur Iacobus Rex esse legitimus superior in reibus civilibus, et ideo deberi illi fidelitatem et obedientiam a subditis, ut etiam iuramento confirment se id facturos. Id Romae non admittitur, quia est canon 6 monens subditos ut intelligant se haeretico domino non esse subditos; ibid. The canon to which I believe the Index decree refers is Innocent III’s canon “ad apostolicae dignitatis,” cap. 2, title 14, bk. 2 of the Liber Sextus (text in Corpus iuris canonici, vol. 2, cols. 1008–1011). 109. p. 102 Quod dicitur Iacobus esse legitimus Rex Hiberniae, et supremus dominis [sic] in Anglia, Scotia, Hibernia, praeter supradicta videtur vergere in praeiudicium temporale Ecclesiae Romanae ad quam spectat directum dominium Hiberniae; ibid. The argument for the papacy’s claim over the direct dominion of Ireland came from the bull “Laudabiliter,” issued in the twelfth century by Pope Adrian IV, with which Ireland was given by the pope to the king of England as a feudal possession. On the bull there is a vast literature, which mainly deals with the contested question of authenticity; for an overview on the matter, see John A. Watt, The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 36–40. On the polemical recourse to the bull during the Reformation, see S. J. Connolly, Contested Island: Ireland 1460–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 90ff. passim. 110. quid tandem hac ratione agitur? . . . an defende Barclaium ne offendas Gallos? at pacandi Galli. Pacentur sane! Sed non ideo Becanum censura percellat innocentem, non obiiciatur eorum iracundiae fama eius, qui vera scripsit, ne Catholicis insultent Calvinistae; Contzen to Bellarmine, Mainz, 26 March 1613, in APUG, EB, vol. 5, doc. 1274. 111. Respondent Germani . . . Paratos se plures quam centum proferre qui idem cum Becano dixerint, scripserint . . . Quaerunt igitur, an omnes horum libri sint vetiti, et in eadem cum scripto Becaniano damnatione ? Si affirmatur, bibliothecae

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vacuabuntur. . . . Quid Sorbonistae? nonne diserte hunc Christo primatum negarunt? Imo et alia ratione negant, et quae magis obstat Venetae causae, quam quam negat Becanus, nam ex Becani sententia Veneti defendi non possunt, et absit ut illis faveat sententia tam multorum, et sanctorum: an ergo et in ea censura Sorbona?; ibid. 112. Quicquid sit de verbo “legitimus,” in Germania principes haereticos negare esse legitimos superiores, seditiosum haberetur. . . . hoc solum discere cupio, si vapulat tam graviter Becanus, quid faciendum Monarchis et Principibus, qui tales sua auctoritate ut legitimos constituunt? . . . Episcopis qui idem faciunt et agnoscunt? Aliis qui illis non modo ut dominis iurant, sed diserte ut suis naturalibus et legitimis dominis? . . . Galli qui multo durius docent sine censura sunt, et si iurisperiti haec pro Becano probarent, astipularentur; ibid. 113. Non videri pollicitationem illam in titulo esse. Est enim controversia Anglicana pro defensione Illustrissimi Bellarmini. Itaque haud operosum foret titulum, quem tamen Becanus mutavit, defendere, nisi certo constaret eius causa libellum ad indicem non reiici, nec titulum tam gravi censura percelli; ibid. 114. Falsum hoc obrepisse Becano, esse sphalma veniabile.Quid mirum, si homo qui iam triginta annos in acie contra haereticos steterit, urbem aulasque Cardinalium non viderit, nesciat a quo suum quisque honorem habeat Cardinalis?; ibid. The mistake noted can be found at p. 9 of Becanus’s Controversia. 115. Interest non magis Societatis, quam religionis, quod nimium nos nunc sentimus, veretem eius defensorem defendi; ibid. 116. proposuit autem secretarius alias difficultates, et decreverunt Ill.mi SS. quod cum S.mo communicarentur, et iniunctum secretario, ut illa seorsim adnotaret ac Ill.mo et R. D. Card.li S. Ceciliae traderet sicuti statim mandatis obtemperans, fecit, sunt autem seguentes. . . . An Martini Bacani controversia anglicana quam auctor correxit, sed non iuxta correctionem hic Romae editam, sit prohibendus. The minutes of that meeting, held on 14 January 1614, can be found in ACDF, Index, Diarii I, 2, 59r–62v, quotation at 61v–62r 117. Deinde Secretarius reprotestavit aliquos etiam libros non videri dignis de causis Ill.mo et R.mo Cardinali Bellarmino esse apponendos. The relation of the discussion of which books needed to be included in the Index’s general edict, and Bellarmine’s own list of books to include and books to save, can be found in ACDF, Index, Diarii I, 2, 142r and ff. The part on Becanus is at 148v. The secretary of the Congregation of the Index was Francesco Maddaleni Capiferreo, a Dominican friar who had occupied this role since 1615. 118. See the correspondence in ARSI, Epp. Gen. Rheni Inf. 5, 406r–408v. 119. The fact that Bellarmine had a central role in supporting Becanus throughout this phase of the controversy can be gathered from a letter, written by Bellarmine in response to a thank-you note sent by Becanus, in which Bellarmine wrote: “Non erat opus, quod R.tia V.ra mihi gratias ageret, quod non parum laboraverim pro sedandis turbis excitatis ex libris vestris, id enim facere tenebar ex debito, tum quod fratres simus, tum ob ecclesiae aedificationem, et merita vestra non exigua”; Bellarmine to Becanus, Rome, 1 May 1614, in APUG, EB, vol. 5, doc. 1414. 120. Accepta sunt tria exemplaria libelli V. R. 2 editionis, quam noluissemus propacatam ante 2am censuram . . . Ceterum quod attinet ad negotium, locutus

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sum . . . cum SS. D. Nostro, et. cum aliquibus DD. Cardinalibus, et bene speratus omnia successura et cum consolatione R. V.; Acquaviva to Becanus, Rome, 4 May 1613, in ARSI, Epp. Gen. Rheni Inf. 5, 408r. 121. Acquaviva to Becanus, Rome, 15 May 1613, in ibid., 410r. 122. Becanus, Controversia Anglicana (Mainz, 1613); the approbation can be found at p. 16. 123. Appresso questi Politici, e massime quelli del Parlamento è cosi odioso il nome del P. Martino Becano Gesuita per le massime tenute da lui nel libro suo ultimo contro il Re d’Inghilterra, et è in si grande horrore la dottrina Cattolica in materia della potesta Pontificia in temporalibus Principum, che dubito molto che non faccino qualche bestiale scappata contro il detto libro, ben che si ristampi con la debita correttione, et emendatione e che cosi non si perdi il frutto che ha prodotto qui la censura del prefato libro; Ubaldini to Mellini, Paris, 23 April 1613, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 376v. 124. sono astretto di dire a V. S. Ill.ma con la dovuta sincerità, e reverenza, che forse sarebe bene di lasciare correre qualche tempo di piu e sino alla minorità del Re, prima di publicare di nuovo il sudetto libro; ibid. 125. See Becanus, Controversia (1613), pp. 134–135. 126. Nam isti duo primatus, spiritualis & temporalis, ex natura rei, distincti sunt, cum habeant distincta officia & tribunalia, ut explicatum est; & alter ab altero separari potest, adversariorum sententia, quia secundum illos in Christo fuit primatus spiritualis sine temporali: & e contrario, in Tyberio Imperatore fuit temporalis sine spirituali; Becanus, Controversia Anglicana (1613), p. 89 (cf. p. 77 of the first edition). My italics identify the parts added in the second edition. 127. Becanus, Controversia Anglicana (1613), p. 112 (cf. p. 98 of the first edition). 128. Becanus, Controversia Anglicana (1613), p. 116 (cf. p. 102 of the first edition). 129. Io che non so se la correttione sia stata approvata costi, e che non posso però liberamente lodare o biasimarla, cerco di . . . deffenderla da ogni mal incontro, dicendo che poi che la prima fu censurata costi deve parimente aspettarsi il giuditio di cotesta S. Sede sopra la 2.da et di questa maniera n’ho trattato col Cancelliere et con alcuni dei più pii Sorbonici, i quali tutti mostrano di conformarsi al mio senso; Ubaldini to Borghese, Paris, 9 May 1613, in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 388v–389r. 130. si darà ben ordine a Breves di trattarne con S. S.tà et con V. S. Ill.ma tanto piu risentitamente quanto che si pretende, che in quello che tocca il jus, che haveva il sommo sacerdote nell’antico Testamento di ammazzare i Re, non sia punto corretta questa opera ibid., 389v. 131. Intanto io mi dichiaro apertamente che uscendo ogni giorno dei libri perniciosissimi contro la dignità di cotesta S. Sede, non bisogna che si pensi qui, che per timore degl’Arresti del Parlamento o per altro rispetto humano cessino i buoni, e pii Cattolici di con i loro scritti sostenere la verità Cattolica; ibid. 132. A short account of this matter can be followed through the correspondence between Acquaviva and the leadership of the German Jesuits (ARSI, Epp. Gen. Rheni Inf. 5, 423r and ff.). In the memo that his fellow Jesuits wrote to Rome to oppose Acquaviva’s request to have Becanus come to Rome, Becanus’s supporters made

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reference to the censure against the Controversia Anglicana and used it as an argument to protect Becanus: since many Protestants, including the king of England, had already gained so much from their perceived victory over Becanus due to the censure, “what would they [i.e., the English Protestants] say now that they see him called to Rome?” The short memo can be found in ibid., 423v. 133. On the Parlement’s condemnation of Suárez’s Defensio fidei and on the reaction of Ubaldini, see Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy, pp. 210–220. Ubaldini’s correspondence over the Suárez affair can be found in ASV, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55, 501r and ff., and Segreteria di Stato, Francia 56, 1r–148v passim. CHAPTER

7

1. The negotiations were successful, for they led to the signing of the Treaty of Lyon, in 1601, with which Henri agreed to give Saluzzo back to Savoy in exchange for other territories on the eastern side of the Alps. On the negotiations leading up to the treaty and on the role of Aldobrandini in them, see P. Richard, “La légation Aldobrandini et le traité de Lyon,” Revue d’Histoire et de Litérature Religieuses 7 (1902): 481–509; 8 (1903): 25–48. Aldobrandini’s own account of the negotiations has been published in La legazione in Francia del Card. Pietro Aldobrandini narrata da lui medesimo (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1903). 2. Pochi giorni dopo la vostra partita il Cardinale Bellarmino ci dette una lunga scrittura, nella quale ci rappresentò il pericolo nel qual stavamo di dannarci per causa delle provisioni dei vescovadi . . . vedete che sindicatura è questa et sotto minaccie del inferno; Clement to Aldobrandini, Rome, 14 October 1600, in ASV, Borghese I, 967A, 71r–20v. The letter has been published by Klaus Jaitner, “De Officio Primario Summi Pontificis. Eine Denkschrift Kardinal Bellarmins für Papst Clemens VIII (Sept./Okt. 1600),” in E. Gatz, ed., Römische Kurie. Kirchliche Finanzen. Vatikanisches Archiv. Studien zu Ehren von Hermann Hoberg, 2 vols. (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1979), vol. 1, pp. 377–403, quotation at pp. 393–394. 3. This text, accompanied by the pope’s response, was edited by X.-M. Le Bachelet in AB, pp. 513–518. The manuscript copy on which Le Bachelet based his own edition can be found in APUG Ms. 373, 160r–164v. I have found the following additional copies of the text (all with small variations of no relevance for my purpose), and there may be many others: BAV, Barb. Lat. 2628, 58r–61r; BAV, Barb. Lat. 1191, 1r–6v; BAV, Vat. Lat. 7398, 218r–223v and 226r–234v; BAV, Ottob. Lat. 2416,–42e–47r and .53–61v; ARSI, Opp. Nn. 243, vol. 1, 42r–47v and 53r–61v; ARSI, Opp. Nn. 252A, unfol.; APUG Ms. 373, 216r–220r; APUG Ms. 1652. The manuscript circulated also outside of Italy; a copy, including the pope’s response, can be found at the BL, Add. Mss. 48121, 577r–589v. 4. Bellarmine, De officio primario, AB, pp. 514–515. 5. Expavi, fateor, cum bis terve in sacro Concistorio vidi, ad episcopatus cardinalitios promoveri aliquos, qui, vel ob nimiam senectutem, vel ob magnam corporis debilitatem, vel ob defectum episcopalium virtutum, tales erant, ut non modo non utiliores, sed vix utiles vel apti ad regendas animas judicari possent; ibid., p. 515.

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6. Sanctus Gregorius, libro 6 in primum librum Regum, cap. ultimo, rectum ordinem esse dicit, ut quaerantur homines ad episcopatum, non ut quaerant homines episcopatum; ibid. 7. For the list of absentee bishops singled out by Bellarmine, see ibid., p. 516. 8. Nonnulli relictis ovibus suis Romae vel inutiliter tempus terunt, vel iis in rebus occupantur quae per alios commode fieri possent. . . . neque illud inficior, posse Summum Pontificem certis de causis atque ad tempus episcopos aliquos a residentia eximere; sed nescio an Deo placeat, ut tantus numerus episcoporum, tam longo tempore, cum tanto animarum detrimento, a propriis ecclesiis absint; ibid., pp. 515–516, quotation at p. 516. 9. plures adhuc numerantur episcopi, qui Nuntios Apostolicos agunt, quorum aliqui per annos multos ecclesias suas non viderint. . . . nonnulli relicto ministerio pascendi animas sibi creditas, magistratum politicum gerunt; id qua ratione justificetur, ignorare me fateor; ibid., p. 516. 10. Ibid., pp. 516–517. 11. translatio enim episcoporum secundum canones atque usum veteris Ecclesiae, non debet fieri, nisi ob Ecclesiae necessitatem vel majorem utilitatem; neque enim institutae sunt ecclesiae propter episcopos, sed episcopi propter ecclesias . . . nunc autem quotidie translationes fieri videmus ea solum de causa, ut episcopi vel honore vel opibus augeantur; ibid., p. 517. 12. The comments made by Clement in his letter to his nephew can be found in Jaitner, “De Officio Primario,” pp. 398 and ff., while Clement’s comments on the memo have been published by Le Bachelet in his edition of De officio primario. As Jaitner makes clear, there is a perfect concordance between Clement’s comments in his letter and Clement’s comments in Bellarmine’s document. 13. In hac prima re . . . fatemur nos peccasse et peccare; sed plerumque in causa est difficultas inveniendi personas idoneas; et quamvis saepe multi nobis proponantur, cum per nos ipsi nequeamus sumere informationes, et aliquando experti simus illos quibus hanc curam demandavimus, nos vel decepisse, vel ipsos ab aliis deceptos fuisse; Bellarmine, De officio primario, p. 514. 14. Ibid., pp. 515–516. 15. Ista possunt dici, sed, cum ad praxim devenimus, in magnas incidimus difficultates; ibid., p. 515. 16. Quoad Nuncios, putamus decentissimum esse ut Nuntii sint episcopi, quia episcopis imperant, et majoris auctoritatis sunt apud principes et populos, et nisi tanta hominum penuria laboraretur, citius mutaremus; ibid., p. 516. 17. Nos cum difficultate tranferimus . . . quoad hispanos episcopatus, cogitet D. V. si nunc Regi haec facultas tolleretur, in quantas difficultates incideremus; circa tamen hoc non defuimus monere Regem per nos, et per Nuncium nostrum; ibid., p. 518. 18. Jaitner, “De Officio Primario,” especially pp. 377–382. 19. Seminal studies on the debate at Trent over episcopal residency and on the implications of this debate for post-Tridentine ecclesiology are Giuseppe Alberigo, Lo sviluppo della dottrina sui poteri della Chiesa universale (Rome: Herder, 1964), pp. 11–102; and Hubert Jedin, “Der Kampf um die bischöfliche Residenzpflicht 1562/63,” in Kirche

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des Glaubens, Kirche des Geschichte, 2 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 398–412. On Gabriele Paleotti and on his role in the contrast between the papacy and the supporters of episcopal authority, see Paolo Prodi, Il Cardinale Gabriele Paleotti (1522–1567), 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1959–1967), vol. 2, pp. 323–388. 20. See Jaitner, “De Officio Primario,” especially pp. 381 and 392. 21. Prodi, The Papal Prince, pp. 102–122. 22. Ibid., pp. 103–104. 23. Cf. chapter 1. 24. Summus Pontifex triplicem gerit in Ecclesia Dei personam: est enim pastor et rector Ecclesiae universae, episcopus Urbis Romae proprius, et princeps temporalis ecclesiasticae ditionis. Sed inter omnia ejus officia primum locum tenet sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum: hoc enim primum, singulare, maximum. . . . episcopatus Urbis Romae suos habet limites, eosque satis angustos, ut est principatus ecclesiae temporalis; at Summus Pontifex nullos habet in orbe terrarum limites, nisi quos ipse orbis terrarum habet; Bellarmine, De officio primario, p. 513. 25. Bellarmine’s autograph copy of De reformatione can be found in ARSI, Opp. Nn. 243, vol. 1, 219r–220v; the text has been published by Le Bachelet in AB, pp. 518–520. On this text, see Jaitner, “De Officio Primario,” p. 381. 26. Papa reformet primo omnium curiam et personam suam . . . postremo invigilet statui temporali, sed per alios magis quam per se. Non se existimet principem temporalem, sed episcopum. Status enim Ecclesiae romanae datus est, non soli pontifici; Bellarmine, De reformatione, pp. 519–520. 27. On this point, see Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 579–580. 28. Beatissimo Padre, in questo mio ritiramento havendo con qualche diligentia considerato . . . la vita, et passione di Nostro Signore Christo Giesu et in particolare i miei peccati di tutta la vita, ho trovato fra gli altri mancamenti miei un timor . . . che ho sempre havuto di non offendere la S.tà V. se gli havesse rappresentato quello che mi occoreva intorno al ben commune di S.ta Chiesa; Bellarmine to Paul V, Rome, 13 October 1612, in ASV, Borghese II, 78, 104r. 29. ho preso ardire di mandargli l’incluso foglio, perche vedo che può giovare, o non nuocere, essendo questa una scrittura secreta, quali nessuno ha vista, et la S.tà V. la può stracciare et bruciare, se gli pare, che non sia a proposito. Di questo solo la supplico, che mi creda, che io ho sempre amato la persona sua dal principio, che cominciai a conoscerla, et gl’ho desiderato, et desidero somma felicità, non solo in questa vita, che passa come un’ombra, ma molto più nell’altra, che è eterna; ibid. 30. The title of this document is “Considerationes quatuor ex concilio Tridentino sess. 23, 24 et 25”; it can be found in ASV, Borghese II, 78, 105r–106r. 31. Dominicus a Soto, vir aeque pius ac doctus disserens in libris de iustitia et iure, de residentia Episcoporum scribit Cardinalem, qui ut resideat in suo Episcopato numquam venit ad Urbem, posse salvari: eum autem, qui ut assistat summo Pontifici, in Ecclesia sua non residet, eum, inquit, non dico posse salvari. Quod si in tanto periculo salutis aeternae est ille, qui non residet, ut assistat Christi vicario in negotiis Ecclesiae universalis, quid fiat de aliis, qui minoribus de causis non resident?; ibid., 105r.

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32. De multiplicitate beneficiorum, quae odiosa sacris canonibus est, statuit concilium Tridentinum sess. 24 cap. 12 ut ipsi etiam Cardinales unico beneficio contenti sint . . . S. Thomas de hac re disserens in quodlibetis, docet multiplicitatem beneficiorum rem esse malam . . . et addit, hanc multiplicitatem esse prohibitam partim iure divino, partim humano, et ideo qui dispensantur . . . securos esse in foro humano, sed non in foro divino; ibid., 105v. 33. Ideo concilium sess. 25 cap. 1 declarat Episcopos et Cardinales debere uti frugali mensa, et simplici apparatu . . . At paucos videmus hodie divites Cardinales, vel Episcopos, qui non studeant locupletare cognatos, et qui non curent possidere pretiosissimam supellectilem et hoc ipso anno caepimus videre currus aliquorum Cardinalium multo auro fulgentes, et in cubiculis paramenta . . . lectorum et sedium ex tela aurea; et. . . . alia id genus ad luxum pertinentia; ibid., 106r; underlined in the original ms. 34. Cardinales posse in Romana Curia mandari quando eorum presentia et assistentia est utilis vel necessaria Universalis Ecclesiae. The pope’s replies to Bellarmine’s memo (in Paul’s own handwriting) can be found in ibid., 107r–v, quotation at 107r. 35. de multiplicitate beneficiorum Papa attenta qualitate personarum . . . et locorum . . . solet dispensare; ibid. 36. de frugali mensa et semplici apparatu . . . Bellarminius poterit se informare de qualitate ciborum qui regulariter apponuntur in mensa . . . Donationes quae fiunt cognatis, si fiunt, modicate fiunt et non ex redditibus ecclesiasticis . . . Quae vero dicunt de . . . paramentis . . . semper visa fuerunt; et multa ex usu et consuetudine fiunt licita quae . . . licita non essent; ibid., 107r–v. 37. Concilium Tridentinum in sess. 25 cap. xxi declaravit . . . quod omnia et singula sub quibuscumque decretis et verbis . . . ita decreta esse intelligantur, ut in his salva semper autoritas sedis apostolicae sit; ibid., 107v. 38. I borrow the expression “narrative of conflict” from Rivka Feldhay, Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On the historiographical implications of interpreting the role of Bellarmine in the Galileo affair in an ideologically charged framework, see Maurice A. Finocchiaro, “Science, Religion, and the Historiography of the Galileo Affair: On the Undesirability of Oversimplification,” Osiris, 2nd ser., 16 (2001): 114–132. 39. Olaf Pedersen, Galileo and the Council of Trent (Vatican City: Specola Vaticana, 1983). 40. Richard J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991). 41. Ibid., pp. 143ff. 42. Ibid., p. 164. 43. Il punto decisivo è, allora, il fatto che egli assolutizzò un dato contingente dell’astronomia del suo tempo . . . , considerando permanente una situazione destinata invece ad una evoluzione rapida; Ugo Baldini, “Bellarmino tra vecchia e nuova scienza,” in Legem impone subactis: Studi su filosofia e scienza dei Gesuiti in Italia, 1540–1632 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992), pp. 305–331 at p. 330. On Baldini’s interpretation of

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Bellarmine’s scientific knowledge and theories, see also his “L’astronomia del Cardinale,” in Legem impone subactis, pp. 285–303. Baldini’s insistence of Bellarmine’s up-to-date (for his time) scientific knowledge is part of a larger point that the Italian scholar has been seeking to make, that is to say, a reevaluation of the contributions of early modern Jesuit scientists, who, far from being agents for backwardness, in fact played an important role in the mathematical and physical debates of their time; along the same lines see, for instance, William A. Wallace, Galileo, the Jesuits and the Medieval Aristotle (Aldershot: Variorum, 1991); Mordechai Feingold, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); Feingold, ed., The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth Century Perspectives (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003). 44. See Baldini, “L’astronomia del Cardinale.” 45. The documents concerning Copernicus’s censures by the Inquisition have been published in Pierre-Noël Mayaud, La Condamnation des Livres Coperniciens et sa Révocation (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1997) (the quoted decree is at pp. 40–42). We know that Bellarmine had a central role in that part of the discussion from a document of 24 February 1616 indicating that Pope Paul had decided that Galileo’s “opinion was erroneous and heretical” only after a discussion with Bellarmine on this topic (see Le opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. A. Favaro, 12 vols. [Florence: Le Monnier, 1890–1909], vol. 12, doc. 1185). 46. valde utilis et necessarius ad Astronomiam erat; Mayaud, La Condamnation des Livres Coperniciens, pp. 56–57 at p. 56. 47. censuerunt omnino expedire, ut juxta talem ejus correctionem [Copernicus’s work] emendatus et correctus permittatur; ibid., pp. 57–58. 48. Nihilominus, quia in iis multa sunt reipublicae utilissima, unanimi consensu in eam iverunt sententiam: ut Copernici opera . . . permittenda essent . . . iis tamen correctis iuxta subiectam emendationem, locis in quibus non ex hypothesi, sed asserendo de situ, & motu terrae disputat; Ibid., p. 70. The text of the decree, as well as the proposed corrections to Copernicus’s work, is heavily indebted to Ingoli’s 1618 proposal (cf. ibid., pp.57–58). Maurice Finocchiaro translated the same document in The Galileo Affair, a Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), but his translation is not as literal as I think should be in this context—for instance, in the case of this passage Finocchiaro translates “utilissima reipublicae” as “very useful generally” (p. 200). For this reason, I have done my own translation. 49. temporum rationes, quibus populus Christianus tum in divinis solemnitatis celebrandis, tum in negotiis peragendis summopere indiget, ab Astronomicis calculis pendent. Ingoli’s considerations can be found in Mayaud, La Condamnation des Livres Coperniciens, pp. 71–72, at p. 71. 50. See ibid., p.71. On the importance of Brahe’s models for Jesuit astronomy, see U. Baldini, “Dal geocentrismo alfonsino al modello di Brahe. La discussione Grienberger-Biancani,” in Lege impone subactis, pp. 217–250. 51. On Biancani see, Baldini’s “Dal geocentrismo alfonsino”; and Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine and the Bible, pp. 148ff. 52. veterem Astronomiam . . . nova indigere restauratione; Giuseppe Biancani, Sphaera Mundi (Bologna, 1620), “Praefatio,” unfol.

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53. mens enim mea, & scopus est, in hoc opere veterum hypotheses communiter receptas primo tradere, atque iis insistere: ita tamen . . . etiam recentiorum novas observationes, & inventa minime negligenda censuerim; ibid., p. 57. 54. Ibid., pp. 206ff. at p. 209. 55. Ibid., pp. 216ff. 56. Ibid, pp. 292ff. at p. 295. For a more detailed analysis of Biancani’s text and its debts to Brahe’s theories, see Baldini, “Dal geocentrismo alfonsino.” 57. Biancani, Sphaera Mundi, pp. 150–151. 58. For a more detailed analysis of the censures against Biancani, see Baldini, “Dal geocentrismo alfonsino” (in which some of the documents are published); and Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible, pp. 148–153. 59. hanc veterum de motu, ac loco terrae sententiam superiori seculo Nicolaus Copernicus, vir acri ingenio praeditus, atque Astronomiae restauratuor, ab inferis iterum excitavit, atque contra aliorum rationes tutatus est; Biancani, Sphaera Mundi, p. 75. 60. Blackwell, Bellarmine, Galileo and the Bible, p. 153. 61. The 1620 censure can be found in ACDF, S. U. Censurae Librorum 1607–1621, fasc. 13, 606r; it has been published by Godman, The Saint as Censor, p. 307 (on this document see also pp. 221–222). 62. The bibliography on the trial of Galileo is immense. A very useful introduction to the main historiographical interpretations of the trial of Galileo, with an equally useful bibliography, is Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 1633–1992 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Since Finocchiaro’s book a good number of new contributions on the trial have appeared; the most recent one to deal with the more properly procedural aspects of the Inquisition trial is Jules Speller, Galileo’s Inquisition Trial Revisited (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008). 63. Benedetto Croce published his essay entitled “Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto nella filosofia di Hegel” in 1907; the essay can now be found reprinted in the recent edition done by A. Savorelli and C. Cesa of Croce’s Saggio sullo Hegel, seguito da altri scritti sulla storia della filosofia, 2 vols. (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2006). 64. [il] progetto di monarchia universale della Controriforma . . . di lì a pochi decenni non sarà altro che una fra le tante illusioni di potere bruciate nel grande rogo della guerra dei Trent’anni; Motta, Bellarmino, p. 613. 65. The most explicit attempt to interpret Bellarmine’s potestas indirecta in wider theoretical terms has been done by Motta, Bellarmino, pp. 408ff. Hobbes and Schmitt are also invoked, albeit cursorily, by Gennaro Maria Barbuto, “Il ‘Principe’ di Bellarmino,” in De Maio et al., eds., Bellarmino e la Controriforma, pp. 122–189 at pp. 179–180. 66. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (1922; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), preface to the second edition, p. 2. 67. Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 83. Cf. also Schmitt, Political Theology, pp. 16–35 and especially pp. 33–35. 68. la disputa fra Bellarmino e Giacomo Stuart . . . è un vis-à-vis fra una nozione di legittimità fondata sull’apparteneza religiosa . . . e una del tutto diversa, edificata sul controllo effettivo dello spazio, ciò cui Carl Schmitt riconduce il nucleo originale della

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sovranità moderna; Motta, Bellarmino, p. 409. See also Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2003), pp. 140ff. 69. In this respect, it is not a coincidence that the complete title of Motta’s book is Bellarmino: Una teologia politica della Controriforma. 70. Among the many contributions on Gramsci’s hegemony, see Perry Anderson, “The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci,” New Left Review, no. 100 (1977): 5–78; Walter L. Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Cultural and Political Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Benedetto Fontana, Hegemony and Power: On the Relationship between Gramsci and Machiavelli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Fontana, “‘What Is Truth?’ Modernity and Hegemony in Gramsci,” Rivista di Studi Italiani 16, no. 1 (1998): 22–38; Fontana, “Hegemony and Power in Gramsci,” in R. Howson and K. Smith, eds., Hegemony: Studies in Consent and Coercion (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 80–105. 71. See Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, 4 vols., ed. V. Gerratana (1975; Turin: Einaudi, 2007), vol. 2, p. 751. 72. On Gramsci’s reflection on the intellectuals, see Eugenio Garin, “Politica e cultura in Gramsci (il problema degli intellettuali),” in P. Rossi, ed., Gramsci e la cultura contemporanea, 2 vols. (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 37–74. 73. The most recent and comprehensive contribution to the study of Gramsci’s relationship to the Catholic Church as hegemonic force is Bruno Desidera, La lotta delle egemonie: Movimento cattolico e Partito popolare nei Quaderni di Gramsci (Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2005), to which I refer the reader for more bibliographic suggestions on specific aspects of this theme. For a more general account of the role of religion in Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, see Tommaso La Rocca, “Gramsci sulla religione: Maestro di laicità,” in G. Vacca, ed., Gramsci e il Novecento, 2 vols. (Rome: Carocci, 1999), vol. 2, pp. 141–161. On the theoretical implications of applying Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to the academic study of religion, see Mark D. Wood, “Religious Studies as Critical Organic Intellectual Practice,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69 (2001): 129–162. 74. On this see Hughes Portelli, Gramsci e la questione religiosa (Milan: Mazzotta, 1976); John Fulton, “Religion and Politics in Gramsci: An Introduction,” Sociological Analysis 48 (1987): 197–216; Desidera, La lotta delle egemonie, pp. 83–106. 75. See Gramsci, Quaderni, vol. 2, p. 1434, and vol. 3, p. 1775; Desidera, La lotta delle egemonie, pp. 83–85. 76. Si sarebbe verificato nel Cristianesimo ciò che si verifica nei periodi di Restaurazione in confronto ai periodi rivoluzionari: l’accettazione mitigata e camuffata dei principi contro cui si era lottato; Gramsci, Quaderni, vol. 1, pp. 668–669. See also vol. 2, p. 998. 77. La riforma luterana e il calvinismo suscitarono un vasto movimento popolare-nazionale dove si diffusero, e solo in periodi successivi una cultura superiore; i riformatori italiani furono infecondi di grandi successi storici; Gramsci Quaderni, vol. 3, p. 1859, but see the entire section pp. 1854–1864. See also vol. 1, p. 248, for Gramsci’s use of the Christian “cosmopolitismo,” shattered, according to Gramsci, by the Reformation.

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78. Nel corso del Settecento l’indebolimento della posizione del Papato come potenza europea è addirittura catastrofico. Colla Controriforma il Papato aveva modificato essenzialmente la struttura della sua potenza: si era alienato le masse popolari, si era fatto fautore di guerre sterminatrici, si era confuso con le classi dominanti in modo irrimediabile; Gramsci, Quaderni, vol. 3, p. 1963. 79. [Il Papato] aveva cosí perduto la capacità di influire sia direttamente che indirettamente sui governi attraverso la pressione delle masse popolari fanatiche e fanatizzate; ibid. 80. È degno di nota che proprio mentre il Bellarmino elaborava la sua teoria del dominio indiretto della Chiesa, la Chiesa, con la sua concreta attività, distruggeva le condizioni di ogni suo dominio, anche indiretto, staccandosi dalle masse popolari; ibid. For an analysis of Gramsci’s diagnosis of the mistakes of the CounterReformation in the context of Croce’s philosophy and Italian idealism, see Desidera, La lotta delle egemonie, pp. 102–106. 81. For a more detailed analysis of Gramsci’s reflections on the Catholic Church in Italy and Europe in the nineteenth century, see Desidera, La lotta delle egemonie, pp. 107ff. 82. Il concordato è dunque il riconoscimento esplicito di una doppia sovranità in uno stesso territorio statale. Non si tratta certo più della stessa forma di sovranità supernationale (suzeraineté) quale era formalmente riconosciuta al papa nel Medio Evo . . . ma ne è una derivazione necessaria di compromesso; Gramsci, Quaderni, vol. 3, pp. 1866–1874, quotation at p. 1866. 83. Lo Stato tiene . . . che la Chiesa non intralci l’esercizio del potere, ma anzi lo favorisca e lo sostenga, cosí come una stampella sostiene un invalido. La Chiesa cioè si impegna verso una determinata forma di governo . . . di promuovere quel consenso di una parte dei governati che lo Stato esplicitamente riconosce di non potere ottenere con mezzi propri: ecco in che consiste la capitolazione dello Stato, perché di fatto esso accetta la tutela di una sovranità esteriore di cui praticamente riconosce la superiorità; ibid., p. 1867. 84. See especially ibid., pp. 1866–1874. 85. La Chiesa, nella sua fase odierna . . . non può accontentarsi solo di creare preti; essa vuole permeare lo Stato (ricordare la teoria del governo indiretto elaborata dal Bellarmino); ibid., p. 1871. 86. È da vedere se questa “conversione” del Gemelli [al “tomismo” puro delle origini] non sia connessa al Concordato, e alla posizione eccezionale di monopolio che i cattolici, date le loro possibilità di concentrazione delle forze intellettuali, possono conquistare in Italia nel mondo dell’alta cultura ufficiale e scolastica . . . il Gemelli nel cuor suo si infischia santamente di ogni filosofia . . . I suoi interessi sono puramente pratici, di conquista del mercato culturale da parte del cattolicismo e la sua attività è rivolta ad assicurare al Vaticano quel potere indiretto sulla Società e sullo Stato che è l’essenziale fine strategico dei gesuiti e fu teorizzato dall’attuale loro santo Roberto Bellarmino; Gramsci, Quaderni, vol. 2, pp. 1114–1115; Gramsci’s italics. In Gramsci’s work the Society of Jesus assumes a complex role: sometimes, as we can see in these previously quoted passages, Gramsci singled out Bellarmine as the theorist of those hegemonic strategies that Pius XI implemented in Italy and by which the Church managed to reaffirm its sovereignty, but sometimes Gramsci wrote on the Jesuits as a

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compact body that did not contribute to the permeation of Catholicism into the masses, as Bellarmine’s theory had done, but rather as a repressive and authoritarian religious order that widened the gap between Catholicism and masses. For a more detailed analysis of Gramsci’s treatment of the Jesuits as a compact religious order, see Desidera, La lotta delle egemonie, pp. 153–176. 87. Queste particolari attenzioni alla massima autorità gesuitica dopo Ignazio di Loyola permettono di dire che Pio XI, il quale è stato chiamato il papa delle Missioni e il papa dell’Azione Cattolica, deve essere specialmente chiamato il papa dei Gesuiti; Gramsci, Quaderni, vol. 2, pp. 917–918. 88. I Gesuiti oggi vedono nella santificazione e nel “dottorato” una rivincita; ibid., p. 918. 89. Santificazione di Roberto Bellarmino, segno dei tempi e del creduto impulso di nuova potenza della Chiesa cattolica; rafforzamento dei gesuiti, ecc. Il Bellarmino condusse il processo contro Galileo e redasse gli otto motivi che portarono Giordano Bruno al rogo. Santificato il 29 giugno 1930; ma ha importanza non questa data, ma la data in cui fu iniziato il processo di santificazione . . . Il Bellarmino è autore della formula del potere indiretto della Chiesa su tutte le sovranità civili. La festa di Cristo re (instituita nel 1925 o 26?) per l’ultima domenica di ottobre di ogni anno; Ibid., p. 809; Gramsci’s emphasis. The Feast of Christ the King was instituted in 1925, and Gramsci got the information on Bellarmine’s canonization and on the institution of the feast from an article written by Antonio Bruers in 1931, which noted that Pius XI was the pope in charge of both decisions (more information on this can be found in the critical apparatus of the Quaderni, vol. 4, p. 2733). 90. On Bruno and Galileo as the last representatives of Italian Renassiance intellectuals, see Gramsci, Quaderni, vol. 2, pp. 1129–1130, and vol. 3, p. 1919. 91. See the article that Gramsci wrote for L’Ordine Nuovo on 1 November 1919, entitled “I popolari,” now published in L’Ordine Nuovo (1919–1920), ed. V. Gerratana and A. A. Santucci (Turin: Einaudi, 1987), pp. 272–274. 92. For two different interpretations of the significance of the “suicide” and/or “assassination” of the Italian Catholic Church in Gramsci’s thought, cf. C. Vasale, Politica e religione in Antonio Gramsci. L’ateodicea della secolarizzazione (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1979), pp. 96ff.; and Desidera, La lotta delle egemonie, pp. 219–245. On the significance of Gramsci’s reflections on the Partito Popolare in the context of Gramsci’s larger reflection on religion, see E. Fattorini, “Gramsci e la questione cattolica” (paper presented at the conference “Gramsci e il suo tempo,” Bari, 2007). I am grateful to Professor Fattorini for giving me a copy of her unpublished paper. See also her “Gramsci e la storia della Chiesa novecentesca,” in Vacca, ed., Gramsci e il Novecento, vol. 1, pp. 145–155. 93. Chantal Mouffe, “Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci,” in Mouffe, ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 168–204, quotation at p. 210. For an influential criticism of Mouffe’s reading of Gramsci and Foucault, see Tony Bennett, Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 268ff. 94. Michel Foucault, “Govermentality,” in G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies on Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 87–104, quotation at pp. 87–88.

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ABSI Stonyhurst Mss., Anglia III

ACDF Index, Diarii I, 1 (Diaries of the meetings of the Congregation of the Index, 1570s–1610s) Index, Diarii I, 2 (Diaries of the meetings of the Congregation of the Index, 1610s–1620s) Index, Protocolli H (Various documents, 16th century) Index, Protocolli I (Various documents, 16th century) Index, Protocolli K (Various documents, 16th century) Index, Protocolli V (Various documents, 17th century) Index, Protocolli Y (Various documents, 1590s–1610s) Index, Protocolli CC (Various documents, 16th–17th centuries) Index, Protocolli DDD (Various documents, end of the 17th century) St St E 7-c (Documents concerning the Louvain controversy) St St H 2-a (Documents concerning Bellarmine and Duval) St St I 5-b (Dubia varia, 17th–18th centuries) St St M 3-g (Various documents, Sixtus V) St St O 1-n (Various documents, Venetian Interdetto) St St O 3-h (Various documents, Venetian Interdetto) St St O 5-i (Controversy de auxiliis) St St SS 1-b (Miscellanea Anglicana) St St SS 1-c (Miscellanea Anglicana)

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St St SS 1-e (Miscellanea Anglicana) S. U. Censurae Librorum 1570–1606 S. U. Censurae Librorum 1607–1621

APUG APUG Ms 372 (Various works by Bellarmine, including De translatione Imperii Romani adversus Matthiam Flaccium Illyricum and the autograph of Roberti Card. Bellarmini Examen ad librum falso inscriptum Apologia) APUG Ms 373 (Various documents on Bellarmine) APUG Ms 375 (Bellarmine’s notes on Toledo) APUG Ms 375A (Bellarmine’s notes on Toledo) APUG Ms 385A (Various works by Bellarmine, some autograph, including Risposta alle opposizioni di F. Paulo Servita) APUG Ms 387 (Various works by Bellarmine, some autograph, including Hieratikon Doron) APUG Ms 1363–1366 (Controversiae, ed. Venice, 1599, with Bellarmine’s own autograph corrections) APUG Ms 1460 (Bellarmine’s autobiography) APUG Ms 1652 (Various works by Bellarmine, collected by X. M. Le Bachelet) EB (APUG Ms. 1601–1636)

ARSI Aust. 3 (I) (Various documents, 17th century) Boh. 94 (Various documents, 17th century) Censurae Librorum, Fondo Gesuitico 652 (vols.1 and 2) Epp. Gen. Rheni Inf. 4 (1600–1610) Epp. Gen. Rheni Inf. 5 (1611–1620) Fondo Gesuitico 640/651 (Various documents, England) Fondo Gesuitico 648 (Various documents, including some on the Louvain controversy) Fondo Gesuitico 703 (Various letters to and from the fathers general, 16th–17th century) Opp. Nn. 186 (Various documents on the Venetian Interdetto) Opp. Nn. 233 (Bellarmine’s Scriptores ecclesiastici) Opp. Nn. 234–237 (Bellarmine’s Lectiones Lovanienses) Opp. Nn. 238 (Various works by Bellarmine, including his autograph De potestate summi Pontificis and Apologia against James’s Triplici nodo) Opp. Nn. 239 (Various works by Bellarmine, 1588–1589) Opp. Nn. 240 (Various letters by Bellarmine) Opp. Nn. 242 (Various letters by Bellarmine) Opp. Nn. 243 (vols.1 and 2) (Various works and letters by Bellarmine) Opp. Nn. 245 (Various letters and notes by Bellarmine) Opp. Nn. 246 (Various letters by Bellarmine)

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Opp. Nn. 247 (Various letters by Bellarmine) Opp. Nn. 250 (Various letters by Bellarmine) Opp. Nn. 252A (Various letters by Bellarmine)

ASV Borghese I, 897 (Letters to the nuncio in Venice, 1609–1611) Borghese I, 967A (Documents concerning the Saluzzo affair, 1601) Borghese II, 23–24 (Letters and documents concerning the pontificate of Paul V) Borghese II, 78 (Letters and documents concerning the pontificate of Paul V) Borghese II, 251 (Various documents concerning France and England, early 17th century) Borghese II, 450 (Various works and notes by Francisco Peña) Borghese III, 124 g.2 (Various letters by Persons and Creswell) Borghese IV, 86 (Various documents concerning England, early 17th century) Borghese IV, 95 (Latin translation of the Basilikon Doron) Segreteria di Stato, Colonia 211 (1608–1611) Segreteria di Stato, Francia 53 (1607–1609) Segreteria di Stato, Francia 54 (1610–1611) Segreteria di Stato, Francia 55 (1612–1613) Segreteria di Stato, Francia 56 (1614–1615) Segreteria di Stato, Inghilterra 19 (Various documents, early 17th century) Segreteria di Stato, Venezia 39 (1608–1610) Segreteria di Stato, Venezia 40 (1609–1611) Segreteria di Stato, Venezia 42 (1611–1612)

BAV Barb. Lat. 1018 (Various documents by and on Bellarmine) Barb. Lat. 1191 (Various documents concerning Henri of Navarre) Barb. Lat. 2628 (Various documents, including a copy of De officio primario Summi Pontificis) Ottob. Lat. 2416 (Copies of various works by Bellarmine) Vat. Lat. 4675 (Various documents concerning Bellarmine’s Controversiae) Vat. Lat. 6613–6617 (Notes on Bellarmine’s lectures at the Roman Collge) Vat. Lat. 7001 (Two copies of Peña’s De universali Dominio) Vat. Lat. 7194 (Copy of Peña’s Assertio regni Christi) Vat. Lat. 7398 (Various works and documents, including some by Bellarmine)

BL Add. Mss. 24195 (Various documents on and by James I, including copies of his poems, and a copy of the Index’s decree against Becanus’s Controversia) Add. Mss. 48121 (Various documents, including a copy of Bellarmine’s De officio primario Summi Pontificis)

379

380

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Wallace, William A. Galileo, the Jesuits and the Medieval Aristotle. Aldershot: Variorum, 1991. Watt, John A. The Church and the Two Nations in Medieval Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. ———. “Spiritual and Temporal Power.” In J. H. Burns, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, pp. 367–423. Wilks, Michael. The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963. Wolfe, Michael. The Conversion of Henri IV: Politics, Power, and Religious Belief in Early Modern France. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Wood, Mark D. “Religious Studies as Critical Organic Intellectual Practice.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69 (2001): 129–162. Wootton, David. Paolo Sarpi between Renaissance and Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Yates, Frances A. “Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944): 123–143. Zanardi, Mario, ed. I Gesuiti e Venezia: Momenti e problemi di storia veneziana della Compagnia di Gesù. Venice: Gregoriana, 1990. Zen, Stefano. “Bellarmino e Baronio.” In R. De Maio et al., eds, Bellarmino e la Controriforma, pp. 277–321. ———. Baronio storico: Controriforma e crisi del metodo umanistico. Naples: Vivarium, 1994. Zimmermann, Reinhard. The Law of Obligations: Roman Foundation of the Civilian Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Index

Aaron, 231 Abiathar, 223–5, 227, 229, 231 absolutism, 192–3, 210 Acquaviva, Claudio, 16, 54, 58–59, 63, 66–70, 72, 74–75, 119, 122, 161–2, 214, 224–7, 229–30, 233, 238–9, 245, 252–3, 257, 275 Adrian VI, 264 Alabaster, William, 138 Aldobrandini, Pietro, 262, 264 Allenson, John, 118 Almain, Jacques, 185, 187–9, 192, 195 Amalteo, Attilio, 220–1, 226, 245 Ambrose, 271 Anacletus, 34 Andrewes, Lancelot, 127, 226, 229–31, 237–8, 249 Responsio ad apologiam Cardinalis Bellarmini, 230 Anglicanism, 172 Aphorismi doctrinae Jesuitarum, 213, 215, 224 Aquinas, 11–14, 17, 20, 25–26, 42, 77, 104–5, 114, 187, 271 Summa Theologica, 11, 20 Arator or István Szántó, 72–76, 78 Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, 6 Aristotle, 25, 41, 105, 123, 278–9 Arnold, Franz Xaver, 5 Arrigone, Cardinal Pompeo, 190

Athaliah, Queen, 223, 227–9, 234–6, 242, 245, 254 Augsburg, Peace of, 9, 212–4, 219 Augustine, 12–14, 52–56, 124 De gratia et libero arbitrio, 53 auxiliis, de, 12, 50–51, 59, 77–78, 186, 257, 272 Azione Cattolica, 288–9 Baius, Michel or de Bay, 11–14, 52, 54 Baldini, Ugo, 275 Barclay, William, 43, 140, 148–57, 160, 163, 165–7, 169–70, 173, 177–8, 221, 226, 229, 233, 235, 248 De potestate Papae, 140, 151 Baronio, Cardinal Cesare, 94–95, 97 Paraenesis, 94 Bartolus of Sassoferrato, 83 Basel, Council of, 191, 194 Baudouin, François, 33–34 Becanus, Martin, 8, 193, 206, 211–59 Aphorismi Doctrinae Calvinistarum, 212 Controversia Anglicana de potestate Regis et pontificis, 230–1, 237–9, 242–7, 249–59 Disputatio de fide haereticis servanda, 213 Dissidium Anglicanum de primatu Regis, 227, 237 Manuale controversiarum huius temporis, 212, 257

398

INDEX

Becanus, Martin (continued) Quaestiones miscellaneae de fide haereticis servanda, 213 Recueil de ce qui s’est fait en Sorbonne et ailleurs, contre un Livre de Becanus, 242 Serenissimi Iacobi Angliae Regis Apologiae . . . Refutatio, 221–3, 245 Refutatio Tortura Torti, 226 Summa Theologiae Scholasticae, 212 Supplicatio ad Imperatores, Reges, Principes, 244 Belisarius, 229 Bellarmine, Robert Apologia . . . ad librum Jacobi Magnae Britanniae Regis, 142, 169, 229 autobiography, 13, 65 canonization of, 289 cardinal of Santa Maria in via, 81 Conciones, 11 Congregation of the Index, 71–72, 81, 102, 209, 241–5, 248–55, 258–9 Controversia de Clericis, 44–45, 73, 81, 85, 87, 93, 108, 114, 216, 223, 225–6 Controversia de Concilis, 118 Controversia de Ecclesia, 118 Controversia de Laicis, 81, 114, 118 Controversia de summo Pontifice, 24–25, 30–31, 33, 36–39, 61, 73, 81, 92, 96, 108, 114–5, 118, 153–5, 163, 216, 234 De obedientia quae caeca nominatur, 61 De officio primario Summi Pontificis, 263, 267–9, 271 De potestate summi Pontificis in rebus temporalibus adversus Gulielmum Barclaium, 153, 155 De reformatione, 269 De Translatione Imperii Romani, 38, 43 defense of papacy, 23, 31 ecclesiastical authority, 41–42, 82, 87, 96, 119, 126, 133, 154–5, 158, 216 Hieratikon Doron, 122–6, 132 and natural philosophy, 274 political theory of, 5, 8, 50, 81, 87, 173–4, 204, 258, 282 potestas indirecta, 8, 24, 40, 42, 45, 50, 64–65, 67–70, 72, 81, 92, 95, 97, 100–1, 103, 106, 113–6, 139, 149, 153–5, 157–8, 163–4, 171, 175–6, 179, 182–3, 199, 203–5, 209, 211, 216, 219–20, 232, 235, 238, 250, 255, 257, 260–2, 268, 272, 276, 281–2, 284, 286, 288, 291–2 Recognitio, 113–5, 238 Responsio ad librum inscriptum triplici nodo, triplex cuneus, 135–6, 146

Riposta al trattato delli sette teologi, 91, 93 Risposta alle oppositioni di F. Paolo Servita, 111 Romulus, Franciscus (pseudonym), 64 soteriology, 12 temporal authority, 7, 30, 39–42, 45, 64–65, 68, 75, 82–84, 87, 107, 109–11, 114–5, 118, 125, 127–9, 133–4, 139, 150–5, 171, 190, 201, 216, 224, 232, 238, 250, 268, 276, 280, 284. See also Bellarmine, potestas indirecta Tortus, Matthaeus (pseudonym), 133, 142 Belloy, Pierre de, 64 Bernard, St., 42, 154–5 Biancani, Giuseppe, 278–9 Cosmographia, 278 Loca Mathematica, 278 Sphaera Mundi, 279 Birkhead, George, 243 Bishop, William, 120 bishops, 263–73 impedimenta residentiae, 263 Blackwell, George, 120, 131–2 Blackwell, Richard, 275, 278 Bodin, Jean, 32, 33 body or, bodies, 30, 45, 81–82, 84, 87, 118, 129, 149–51, 154, 280, 284 and resurrection, 84 Bonaventure, St., 42 Boniface VIII, 90, 98 Unam Sactam, 98 Borghese (Caffarelli), Cardinal Scipione, 103, 106, 112, 143–4, 146, 161, 165, 169, 184, 194, 199, 208, 220–1, 224, 226–7, 239–40, 243–4, 256 Bozio, Francesco, 45 Bozio, Tommaso, 45, 149, 154 De iure status, sive de iure divino et naturali ecclesiasticae libertatis et potestatis, 149 Brahe, Tycho, 277–80 Progymnasmata, 279 Brodrick, James, 5 Bruno, Giordano, 290 Caetani, Cardinal Enrico, 64–65, 168 Cajetan or Tommaso de Vio, 187–188, 209, 234 Calvin, 26, 29, 36–37, 46, 53, 56, 73–74, 119, 185 Institutio, 216 Calvinists, 171, 184–5, 215–7, 228 monarchomachs, 185 Campion, Edmund, 119 Cano, Melchor, 195

INDEX

Cappello, Marc’Antonio, 95–96, 103–7 Adversus praetensum primatum ecclesiasticum Regis Angliae, 106 De absoluta rerum sacrarum immunitate a potestate principum laicorum, 106 Cardinals of the Holy Office, 131 Carlo Emanuele, Duke of Savoy, 262–3 casuistry, 12, 15–17, 55–57 Catholicism, 284–5 early modern, 4 post-Reformation, 7, 281 post-Tridentine, 3–7, 18, 37, 49, 51, 57, 78, 81, 261, 266, 270, 283, 286 Chabod, Federico, 4 Charlemagne, 38 Charles V, 264 Charles IX, 204 Charnock, Robert, 120 Chastel, Jean, 98–99, 161 Christ divine nature of, 22, 84 dominion of, 83, 150 human nature of, 238 image of, 17 kingdom of, 43, 102, 109–10, 115, 156, 232, 238, 248, 250 plenitudo potestatis, 29, 44, 109, 238. See also pope, plenitudo potestatis prince or king of Church, 23–24, 26, 175 Son of the Father, 115 temporal authority, 45, 68, 78–79, 83–84, 91, 100, 107, 109, 115, 149, 238 Christianity, Eastern, 25 church congregatio fidelium, 187–8 corpus politicum, 187, 192, 210 as an empire, 29–30 of England, 119 French Catholic, 179 Gallican, 110–1, 153, 191 government of, 25, 28, 175, 185, 191, 196, 209, 266–7 as a monarchy, 25–26 potestas iurisdictionis, 185–6, 188, 192–3, 222 potestas ordinis, 188, 222 Roman, 5, 200 spiritual kingdom, 84. See also souls, empire of universal, 172, 181, 183, 269 Clancy, Thomas, 135 Clavius, 278 Clement I, 34

399

Clement VIII, 50, 71–72, 76, 79, 98–99, 120–3, 262, 264–7, 270–2, 281 clerical exemption, 45, 81–97, 102, 108, 114, 127, 152, 217, 224–5, 229, 267 Cochlaeus, 19 Cochrane, Eric, 3–5, 7 Coffin, Edward, 137 Comitolo, Paolo, 105–6 commonwealth, 57, 277 Christian, 31, 36, 44, 59, 65, 82, 107, 116, 118, 125–7, 134, 150–1, 154, 157, 164, 173, 177–8, 186–7, 191–3, 198, 210–1, 250, 280 political, 42, 82, 87, 101, 107, 118, 125–6, 177–8, 187, 193 spiritual, 116, 177, 190, 193 temporal or secular, 14, 26, 37, 42, 44, 82, 116, 177, 187, 190–2, 198 conciliarism, 91, 160, 174, 177, 185–9, 192–3, 196, 209 Concordato, 287–8 confessionalization, 6 Congregation of the Index, 6, 10, 31, 66, 68–69, 275, 277 Congregation of the Inquisition, 6, 10, 102–3, 108 conscience, 15, 35–37, 42, 92, 126, 129, 135–6, 139, 149–52, 157, 164, 281, 284 Constance, Council of, 27, 160 Constantine, Emperor, 285–6 constitutionalism, 188, 190, 198, 201, 209–10, 235, 237–8, 242, 245, 247, 250, 258 Contarini, Nicolò, 145, 169 Contzen, Adam, 246–53, 259 Copernicanism, 274–9, 281 Coster, Francis, 58 Coton, Pierre, 147, 165 Lettre declaratoire, 165 council, 175–6, 178, 186, 189, 191, 201. See also conciliarism; Basel, Council of; Constance, Council of; Trent, Council of Counter-Reformation, 3–5, 270, 281–3, 286, 289–92 Creed, Apostolic, 20 Creswell, Joseph, 66 Croce, Benedetto, 281, 285 Curia, papal, 10 Curia, Roman, 8, 12, 39, 43, 45, 50–51, 58–59, 85–86, 88, 94, 108, 111, 121, 139, 146, 148, 160, 184–5, 193–4, 206, 261, 268, 270, 275–6, 283 D’Ailly, Pierre, 195 David, King, 223, 231

400

INDEX

De Dominis, Marc’Antonio, 106 deposition, 163–4, 171, 176, 218, 233–5, 238, 240. See also excommunication Dietrich, Thomas, 75–76 Diodati, Giovanni, 113 disciplinamento, 6 divine right of kings, 64, 151 Dominican Order, 12, 27 dominion or dominium, 83–84, 164 Douai, seminary at, 10 Du Perron, Cardinal Jacques Davy, 145–6, 153, 165–7, 172, 181, 184–5, 206–7 Du Plessis-Mornay, Philippe, 111 Duc, Fronton du, 147 Duval, André, 168, 183–211, 250, 256, 258 De suprema Romani Pontificis potestate in ecclesiam Disputatio, 193–6 Elenchus, 185–6, 190, 194, 196, 199 Tractatus de summi pontificis auctoritate, 209 ecclesiastical reservation, 212 Eck, Johannes, 19, 213 Effetti, Giovanni degli, 112 electors, prince, 212 Elizabeth, Queen, 10, 27, 120, 123, 228 England, 8, 10, 27, 57 English Reformation, 27, 126, 129 equivocation, doctrine of, 215 d’Este, Duke Alfonso, 262 Eudaemon-Ioannis, Andreas, 122 excommunication, 10, 64, 88–90, 98–99, 103–4, 108–9, 111, 133, 163, 171, 175–6, 233–4, 242 Eymerich, Nicolas, 97–98 Facchinetti, Giovanni Antonio (from 1591, Pope Innocent IX), 66 fall, the, 12 Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, 212, 214 Fisher, John, 132 Fitzherbert, Thomas, 131, 137 Flacius Illyricus, Matthias, 33–34, 38–39 Foscarini, Paolo, 276 Foucault, Michel, 291–2 Frajese, Vittorio, 66 Franklin, Julian, 33 free will, 11–13, 20, 50–51, 55, 63, 257 Gagliardi, Achille, 119 Galamino, Agostino, 103 Galilei, Galileo, 274–5, 279–80, 290 Gallicanism, 10, 64–65, 159–60, 165, 172–4, 177, 179–80, 188, 205–6, 209, 248, 254

Gemelli, Agostino (Edoardo), 288 Gerson, Jean, 89, 110–1, 173, 180, 185, 195 Gessi, Berlinghiero, 103, 108, 143 Giacon, Carlo, 5 Giles of Rome, 41 Giustiniani, Andrea, 199–200 Giustiniani, Benedetto, SJ, 95–97, 10o–3, 109–10 Delle controversie tra il sommo pontefice Paolo Quinto, et la serenissima republica di Venetia, 95 Giustiniani, Cardinal Benedetto, 103, 106 God dominion of, 83 grace of, 11–12, 40, 52, 188 and political authority, 202 providence of, 36 supreme good, 41 word of, 20 governmentality, 291–2 grace, 11–13, 20, 50–54, 63, 257 Grassi, Orazio, 277 gratia efficax, 52 Gramsci, Antonio, 8, 262, 284–91 Quaderni del carcere, 285, 288–90 Gregory XIII, 72, 249 Gregory XIV, 45, 49 Gregory of Valencia, 273 Gres-Gayer, Jacques, 205 Gretser, Jacob, 122 Grienberger, Christopher, 277 Gui, Francesco, 244 Gunpowder Plot, 123, 127, 134–5, 146 Harrison, William, 131 Hegel, G. W. F., 281 hegemony, 8, 121, 262, 270, 274, 276, 279–81, 284–8, 290–1 heliocentrism, 277–9 Henri III, 204 Henri IV or Henri of Navarre, 8, 64–65, 98–99, 112, 145–7, 153, 155–7, 160–1, 168, 188, 204, 262 Henry, Prince of Wales, 127 Henry VIII, 28, 118–9, 142, 145, 228 heresy, 13–14, 21–22, 99 Arian, 22 Pelagian, 12, 14 Hobbes, Thomas, 282 Holy Spirit, 22, 54, 56 Höpfl, Harro, 5, 14, 56, 162, 215 Hotman, Henri, 111 Houliston, Victor, 135

INDEX

Hudon, William, 4–5 Huguenots, 110–1, 184, 202 humanism, 18, 32, 33 Hus, Jan, 25 Ignatius of Loyola, 18, 51, 59–62 Index of Prohibited Books, 10, 50, 106, 119 Ingoli, Francesco, 277 Innocent III, 233 Inquisition, 51, 58, 62–63, 76–77, 97, 102, 104–6, 108–10, 144, 147, 156, 169–70, 190, 193, 199, 208–9, 252–3, 275–6 Interdetto, 8, 81, 88–116, 126, 144, 147, 155, 157, 169, 172–3, 251, 272. See also, Venice, Senate of ius divinum, 40, 44–45, 82–83, 85, 87, 96–97, 216. See also law, divine ius gentium, 40, 44–45, 83, 85–87, 96, 226 Jaitner, Klaus, 266–8 James VI and I, 42, 106, 119–29, 131, 133–148, 153, 156–7, 163, 169, 171, 180–1, 183, 192, 210–1, 220–22, 224, 227–8, 231, 235, 237, 243–4, 248, 250, 255, 282–4 Basilikon Doron, 121–2 “Premonition,” 143–4, 163, 220–1, 228–9 Triplici nodo triplex cuneus, 129, 133, 135, 138, 140, 143, 145, 163 The true lawe of free monarchies, The, 121–2 Jansenism, 12 Janson, Jacques, 51–54 Jedin, Hubert, 4 Jehoiada, 223, 228, 234 Jesuit. See also Society of Jesus Jesuit College, Louvain, 11 Josephus, 34 Joyeuse, François de, 249 Julian the Apostate, 134 Justinian, 229 Kelley, Donald, 33 kings, 124–5, 170. See also sovereigns, temporal election of, 202–3 La Rochefoucauld, Cardinal François de, 206–7 Lamormaini, William, 214 language, 55 Lateran Council, Fourth, 233 law canon, 45, 192, 248, 263–4 civil, 82, 86, 216

401

divine, 45, 86, 89–90, 93, 107, 152, 188, 199, 202, 216–7, 224–5, 232, 234, 264, 266 human, 45, 86, 89, 93, 216–7, 224–6, 234 Natural, 45, 86, 164, 187–8, 199, 222 positive, 45, 86, 89, 152, 232 Le Bachelet, Xavier Marie, 122–3 Leipzig, 19 Leo XI, 72 Leschassier, Jacques, 112, 130, 173, 182 Consultatio Parisiis cujusdam de controversia inter sanctitatem Pauli V et serenissimam Rempublicam Venetam, 112 De la liberté ancienne et canonique de l’Eglise gallicane, 130 Lessius, Leonardus or Leys, 50, 52–57, 61–63 Lombard, Peter, 11 Sententiae, 11 Lonigo, Gaspare, 107–10 Consilium, 109 Vincentino, Ventura (pseudonym), 107 Louvain, 11, 50–54, 57–58, 62–63 Luther, Martin, 19, 25, 30, 73–74, 119, 279 Lutherans, 13, 213, 215–6 Lyon, Gregory, 33 Machiavelli, Nicolò, 15 arte dello stato, 15 Madruzzo, Cardinal Ludovico, 58 Magdeburg Centuries, 33 Mair, John, 185, 195 Marcellus II, 10 Mariana, Juan de, 160–3, 165–8, 172, 217–8, 235, 245 De rege et regis institutione, 160, 244–5 Marsilio, Giovanni, 100–1, 202–4 Riposta di un dottore di teologia, 100 Marsilius of Padua, 25, 42, 83, 87, 100, 203 Martin, Victor, 162 Masson, Jean-Papire, 32 Mastellone, Salvo, 168 Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor, 212, 214 Mayenne, Charles de, 64 Medici, Marie de, 171 Melanchthon, Philip, 53, 279 Mellini, Cardinal Giovanni Garzia, 253–4 Mercurian, Everard, 16 Micanzio, Fulgenzio, 89, 112 modernity, 6–7, 260, 262, 280–2, 284, 292 Molina, Luis de, 12, 14, 42–45, 55, 63, 79 Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, 12, 63

402

INDEX

Momigliano, Arnaldo, 32 More, Thomas, 132, 243 Moses, 46, 227, 231 Motta, Franco, 6, 13, 51, 54, 76, 281–2 Mouffe, Chantal, 291 nature human, 12, 26 law of, 40, 95 Navarro or Martin de Azpilcueta, 55, 105, 114, 202 Nelson, Eric, 160, 168 Newton, Isaac Principia, 281 Oakley, Francis, 188, 205 oath of allegiance, 8, 127–53, 155–7, 169, 180–1, 201, 207, 213, 219–20, 226–31, 233, 237, 244, 247, 257, 272 O’Malley, John, 15 Orosius, Paulus, 34 Owen, David, 180 Paleotti, Gabriele, 267, 270 Panvinio, Onofrio, 31 papacy, 23, 31–32, 172–3 papalism, 160, 165, 185, 187–8, 196, 199–200, 204–7, 209–10, 217, 266 Parlement, French, 161–3, 167–9, 171–2, 174, 177, 183–4, 193, 198, 208, 239–41 Parsons, Jotham, 162, 177 Partito Popolare, 290 Patterson, W. B., 128 Paul, St., 114, 124, 189 Paul V, 72, 88, 99–101, 123, 131, 156, 251, 259, 271–3, 281 Pedersen, Olaf, 275 Pelagio, Alvaro, 39 Peña, Francisco, 45, 83, 87, 97–101, 106, 109–10, 116, 126–7, 149, 153, 156–7, 161, 164, 168, 211, 251 Assertio regni Christi, 100–1 De Christo, 251 De regno Christi, 156 De universali Dominio et Regno Domini et Redentoris Nostri Iesu Christi, 83, 100, 110 De veris et falsis remediis, 99 Directorium Inquisitorum, 97 Persons, Robert, 117–22, 132–9 Discussion of the answere of M. William Barlow, 137 The Iudgment of a Catholicke English-man, 135–9

Peter, St., 30, 33–36, 46, 58, 175, 188 patrimony of, 46, 107 Philip II, 57, 217 Pighius, Albert, 114 Pithou, Pierre, 111 Les libertés de l’Eglise Gallicane, 111 Pius V, 10, 13 Pius XI, 5, 287–90 Platina or Bartolomeo Sacchi, 31 Plato, 25 Polanco, Juan de, 11 politique, 99, 165, 194, 215, 220, 239–40, 243, 254 pope as Antichrist, 25, 30, 127, 141 authority of, 24, 28, 36–39, 45, 61, 65, 67–69, 88, 127–8, 233, 243, 247, 258, 272–3. See also Bellarmine, potestas indirecta; pope, spiritual authority of; pope, temporal authority of as bishop, 269 as head, 30, 43, 163, 185, 189 infallibility or infallibilitas of, 35, 37, 59–60, 104, 186, 194–5, 199–200 judge of consciences, 59, 68, 139, 149, 152, 164, 172–4, 176, 193, 236, 238, 262, 270 monarchy of, 198–9 patriarch of the West, 145 plenitudo potestatis, 29, 42, 44, 59, 82, 211, 259. See also Christ, plenitudo potestatis political authority of, 37, 173, 182, 221, 233, 282. See also pope, temporal authority of souls of, 46–47 spiritual authority of, 40, 42–44, 64, 83, 98, 126, 134, 141, 164, 171–4, 176, 179, 183, 187, 201, 205, 209–10, 226, 230, 235–8, 244, 270, 274–5, 284, 290. See also sovereign, spiritual authority of; souls, empire of supremacy of, 7, 22–24, 35, 38, 59, 79, 101, 141, 152–3, 176, 179–80, 182–3, 186, 188– 91, 193, 196–8, 201, 203, 205, 209–11, 230, 236, 238, 250, 270, 280–1, 283 temporal authority of, 36, 38–40, 46, 64, 67–68, 73, 75, 79, 83, 98, 107, 126, 128–30, 134, 141, 143, 148, 153–5, 167, 187, 209, 215–6, 223–4, 230, 233, 240, 242–3, 248, 250, 269, 275 vicar of Christ, 60, 68, 79, 90, 99, 107, 109, 142, 152, 268 vices of, 30–32 Possevino, Antonio, 77, 95, 103, 120

INDEX

Responsiones ad nobilissimi viri septentrionalis interrogationes, 120 potestas deponendi, 133. See also pope. potestas directa, 155, 167 potestas excommunicandi, 133. See also pope. potestas indirecta. See Bellarmine, potestas indirecta. potestas iurisdictionis, 185, 188, 192, 222. See also Church. potestas ordinis, 188, 222. See also Church. predestination, 54 priesthood of all believers, 188 priests, 231 princes, temporal, 26, 28, 45, 79, 82–85, 91, 94, 105, 109, 118, 124, 126, 129, 138, 141, 165, 213, 219, 229, 240, 270, 274. See also sovereigns, temporal and true religion, 233–4 Prodi, Paolo, 4, 7, 46–47, 128–9, 266–8 property, ecclesiastical, 88 Prosperi, Adriano, 37 Protestant, 9, 11–14, 17, 19, 40, 55–56, 78, 116, 117, 123–4, 198, 210, 219 anti-Catholic writings, 117 anti-Protestant, 13 Reformation, 51, 128, 285–6 purgatory, 20, 29, 73 Puritans, 232, 237 Puyol, Pierre Edouard, 174 Questier, Michael, 128 Quirinale, Sant’Andrea al, 271 Ratio Studiorum, 17 ratio successionis, 34. See also successio Ravaillac, François, 160 reason of state, 15 Reformation, English, 118, 140 regicide, 161–3, 165–6, 171, 215 respublica Christiana, 14, 16, 42, 49, 56, 84, 150–1, 167, 187–8, 205, 276, 280 Revolution, French, 282 rhetoric, 18 dispositio, 18 inventio, 18 Ribadeneira, Pedro de, 15, 216 Tratado de la religión y virtudes que debe tener el príncipe cristiano, 15 Richer, Edmond, 167, 173–91, 193–4, 205–6, 209, 240–2, 256 Apologia pro Joanne Gersonio, 173 Ecclesia in Republica, 186

403

Libellus de ecclesiastica et politica potestate, 175, 179–82, 186, 193, 209 richérism, 176 Roman College, 15–16, 19, 74, 277 royalism, 192 Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor, 214, 279 Ruggeri, Ludovico, 122 Salamanca, University of, 15 Salmerón, Alfonso, 39 Salmon, J.H.M., 172, 179 salvation, 12, 52, 204 Sander, Nicholas, 26–27, 75, 117, 120 De cultu imaginum, 120 De incruento Missae sacrificio, 120 De schismate Anglicano, 120 De visibili monarchia ecclesiae, 120 Santoro, Giulio, Cardinal of Santa Severina, 66, 76 Sarpi, Paolo, 88–94, 101–2, 110–3, 116, 126–8, 130, 135, 152–3, 169, 172–4, 177, 182, 184, 248, 251 Apologia per l’oppositioni, 92, 111 Considerationi, 110 Trattato dei sette teologi, 90–91, 93, 102, 110 translated into English, 113 Savary de Brèves, Jean, 256 Scherenus, Henricus, 253 Schism, Great, 25 Schmitt, Carl, 8, 99, 262, 282, 284, 292 Political Theology, 282 School of Salamanca or Neo-Thomism, 27, 40, 104–5, 107, 114, 164–5, 193, 196–7, 209–10, 245. See also Thomism scripture, 55–56 Séguier, Antoine, 161 Servin, Louis, 112, 162–3, 169, 174, 183–4, 191, 207, 241–2 Pro libertate status et reipublicae Venetorum Gallofranci ad Philenetum epistola, 112 Servites, 89 Sfondrati, Paolo Camillo (Paolo Emilio), Cardinal of Santa Cecilia, 241, 246, 252 Sforza, Cardinal Francesco, 231, 249 Silverius, 229 sin original, 84 remission of, 20, 22 Sirleto, Cardinal Guglielmo, 39 Sixtus V, 7, 21–22, 24, 31, 38, 49–51, 57, 59, 61, 63–68, 70–71, 89, 106, 267, 270–1 Skinner, Quentin, 5, 40 Smith, Richard, 138

404

INDEX

Soares, Cypriano, 18 Society of Jesus, 88, 101, 160, 166, 212–3, 226, 251, 259, 275, 289 anti-Jesuit sentiment, 7, 49–50 Censurae Librorum, 75 confessors, 15 Constitutiones, 51, 62–63 England, 117 and obedience, 59–61, 275 philo-Pelagian, 12, 54 political theory of, 6, 14 sola scriptura, 55, 124 Solomon, 223–5, 227, 229, 231, 234, 255 Sommerville, Johann, 55, 128, 245 Sorbonne, 147, 160, 166, 174, 180–1, 184–5, 193–4, 206–7, 239–42, 254–6 Soto, Domingo de, 55, 87, 98, 114, 271 De iustitia et iure, 271 soul or souls, 30, 37, 40, 47, 81, 87, 116, 118, 154, 176, 203, 209, 270, 280, 284 empire of, 30, 47, 49, 60, 84, 101, 159, 172–3, 176, 210, 261, 268, 274, 280. See also pope, judge of consciences sovereigns, temporal, 7, 27–28, 45, 61, 127, 131–2, 140–2, 156–7, 167, 173, 180, 183, 186, 188, 197, 201–4, 208–9, See also princes, temporal absolute sovereignty of, 209 ecclesiastical authority of, 187, 221–2, 224 legitimacy of, 139, 250 spiritual authority of, 126, 128, 142, 173, 282 supremacy of, 193, 235, 238 temporal authority of, 126, 128, 250, 282 Spondanus, Henri, 208 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 10 state early modern, 14, 45–47, 157–8 Fascist, 287 Suárez, Francisco, 42–45, 55, 163–5, 193, 238, 245, 257 Defensio fidei, 42, 164, 208, 244 Tractatus de legibus et Deo legislatore, 42 successio, 34 Supremacy, Act of, 228 Sutcliffe, Matthew, 118 Szántó, István. See Arator Theodoretus, 22 theology moral, 16 Scholastic, 16–17, 56

theo-political, 14, 37, 56 Thomism, 11, 14–17, 40, 58, 77–8, 288. See also School of Salamanca or neo-Thomism Tiberius, Emperor, 232, 248, 250, 254–5 Toledo, Francisco de, 15, 165 toleration, 213–5, 257–8 Tolstoy, Leo, 9 Tooker, William, 228–9, 234 Duellum, sive certamen singulare cum Martino Becano Jesuita, 228 Torquemada, Juan de, 26–27 translatio imperii, 38 Treaty of Vienna, 214 Trent, Council of, 3, 9–10, 53, 65, 194, 212, 263, 266–7, 269, 271–3 trinity, 22 Trionfo, Agostino, 39, 98, 234 tyrannicide, 99, 160, 162–4, 174–5, 193, 202, 217–8, 235–6, 238, 242, 245 Ubaldini, Roberto, 112, 145, 148, 161, 165, 167, 169, 181, 184, 194, 205, 207–8, 239–47, 250, 253–9 Ultramontanism, 159, 168, 182–4, 188, 205–7, 210 ultrapapalist, 35, 83, 155 Vatican Library, 19, 31 Velenus, Ulrich, 34 Venice, Senate of, 88–90, 94, 108, 110, 143–4. See also Contarini, Nicolò; Interdetto; Marsilio, Giovanni; Micanzio, Fulgenzio; Sarpi, Paolo Vigor, Simon, 191–2, 194–6, 198, 208 Villeroy, Nicolas de Neufville, seigneur de, 256 Vincent, Julien, 51, 59–63 Vincentius, Juan, 76–79 Vitelleschi, Muzio, 214–5, 257 Vitoria, Francisco de, 15, 20, 25–27, 40, 42–44, 67–70, 87, 105–6, 188, 193, 198 Waldenses, 25 Wars of Religion, 202 Westphalia, Peace of, 282 Whitaker, William, 118, 122 Widdrington, Roger, 202–4, 244 Apologia Cardinalis Bellarmini, 184 Preston, Thomas (alias), 184 Wotton, Henry, 113 Wyclif, John, 25