Suspicious Moderate: The Life and Writings of Francis à Sancta Clara (1598–1680) [1 ed.] 0268100977, 9780268100971

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Suspicious Moderate

Suspicious Moderate THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF F R A N C I S À S A N C TA C L A R A ( 1 5 9 8 – 1 6 8 0 )

ANNE ASHLEY DAVENPORT

       , 

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu Copyright © 2017 by the University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Davenport, Anne Ashley, author. Title: Suspicious moderate : the life and writings of Francis áa Sancta Clara (1598–1680) / Anne Ashley Davenport. Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2016058496 (print) | LCCN 2017013688 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268100995 (pdf ) | ISBN 9780268101008 (epub) | ISBN 9780268100971 (hardcover : alkaline paper) | ISBN 0268100977 (hardcover : alkaline paper) Subjects: LCSH: Franciscus a Sancta Clara, 1598–1680. | Franciscus a Sancta Clara, 1598–1680—Political and social views. | Catholic Church— Clergy— Biography. | Franciscans—England—Biography. | Theologians— England—Biography. | England— Church history—17th century. | Catholic Church—England—History—17th century. | Catholic Church— History of doctrines—17th century. | BISAC: RELIGION / Christianity / Catholic. | HISTORY / Modern / 17th Century. Classification: LCC BX4705. F7318 (ebook) | LCC BX4705. F7318 D38 2017 (print) | DDC 282.092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058496 ISBN 9780268100971 ∞This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected].

A Voice You who are said to drink of this almost absent water: Remember that it escapes us, speak to us. Is it what has deluded us, now finally grasped, Not water of a mortal taste — and has its word, obscure, That you have drunk at this ever-living spring, Illumined you? Or is the water Merely shadow, where your face But mirrors back its finitude? —I do not know, I am no more. Time ends Like the flood-tide of a dream, with its gods Still unrevealed; and like water, too, your voice Fades away in this clear language that consumed me. Yes, here I can live. The angel that is the earth Will appear in every bush, and will burn. I am this empty altar, and these arches, and this abyss — And yourself, perhaps — and doubt: but the dawn And the radiance of unsealed stones. —Yves Bonnefoy (translated by Hoyt Rogers)

C O N T E N T S

Preface Acknowledgments

ix xv



Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience

 

In the Clink

18



A Youth from Coventry

32



Franciscan Probabilism and the Gift of Conscience

54



“Problematicall Supererogation”

80



Deus, natura, gratia

112



A Detailed Look

148



A Conspiracy (English Suite)

173



Apologia episcoporum

214



Spars of a Shipwreck

247



Debate over Infallibility

278

 

Systema fidei

291



Hobbes Modestly Accosted

343



The Piety and Equity of Soul-Freedom

380



Enchyridion of Faith

410



Religio philosophi

453

 Self-Censorship without Self-Suppression

1

483

Epilogue

504

Notes Select Bibliography Index

509 642 655

P R E F A C E

In the summer of 1644, after three years in the Tower of London on charges of high treason, the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, was brought to trial before Parliament. The charges against him included the claim that he had conspired to “advance Popery in England” and reconcile the English Church “by degrees” to Rome. The evidence that was cited to prove Laud’s guilt was largely circumstantial, except for a vividly hard fact. Laud, it was alleged, had “wittingly and willingly” held conferences with a Roman Catholic priest—“one called Sancta Clara, alias Damport, a Dangerous Person and Franciscan Friar.” Who was this Franciscan, known to many of his contemporaries simply as “Sancta Clara,” and why would pinning Sancta Clara to Laud help to secure a conviction? Because he was embroiled in powerful historic trends shaping early modern Europe, Sancta Clara’s life and writings deserve special attention for three chief reasons. The first is that Sancta Clara made the strange choice of joining a loathed, feared, and persecuted “papist” minority. Born into a Protestant family of Coventry, he attended Oxford from 1613 to 1615, then converted to Roman Catholicism, ran off to the English College of Douay, and joined the Franciscan Order in 1617. Why would a simple Midlands youth from a middling Protestant family embrace Roman superstition, vow to live in voluntary poverty, and devote himself to restoring Franciscan life in England? The question is all the more perplexing given that Sancta Clara’s half brother, John Davenport, founder of New Haven in the American colonies, made a diametrically opposite choice and became a leading pioneer of New England Congregationalism. By examining Sancta Clara’s trajectory, Suspicious Moderate seeks to shed light on a dynamic English generation for whom religious self-invention opened up new existential pathways. ix

x Preface

What motivated Franciscus à Sancta Clara to become an author? A second reason to study Sancta Clara’s life and writings is that he matured into an exceptionally good theologian. In his written work, he sought to reframe Catholic theology so as to show that (1) Catholicism is compatible with freedom of conscience, (2) Catholicism is compatible with civil government, and (3) Catholicism is compatible with experimental science. Suspicious Moderate examines Sancta Clara’s theological works in careful detail in order to bring his method and doctrines to light. Contemporary accounts speak of Sancta Clara’s personal “charm” and “graceful” manner. A third reason to study his life and writings is that they provide a window into obscure and colorful aspects of seventeenthcentury England. Who were Sancta Clara’s allies and why? He was elected provincial of his order three times, serving from 1637 to 1640 (during the reign of Charles I), from 1650 to 1653 (during the Commonwealth), and from 1665 to 1668 (during the reign of Charles II). Appointed chaplain to Queen Henriette-Marie and theologian to Queen Catherine of Braganza, Sancta Clara sought out a wide variety of interlocutors, from statesmen to scientists. He forged ties of friendship with theologians on both sides of the Channel. He conferred with the Irish Franciscan Luke Wadding and with the Flemish chemist Van Helmont, befriended the Caroline divines Augustine Lindsell and Jeremy Taylor, and interacted with Lord Baltimore’s right-hand man in Maryland, John Lewgar, and with Francis Windebank. Most importantly, he enjoyed a lifelong friendship with the controversial philosopher-priest Thomas “Blackloe” White and through him came into contact with the circle of Kenelm Digby. In the process of researching this book, I made the lucky discovery that the mysterious “Philip Scot” who published one of the earliest English discussions of Hobbes in 1650 was none other than Sancta Clara (first announced in Hobbes Studies in 2014). I now explore some of the ramifications of my discovery. As we will see, Sancta Clara joined the effort to fight Hobbes’s Erastianism by carefully reflecting on Hobbes’s pioneering ideas and by attempting, in characteristic fashion, to find common ground with him, no matter how slight. During the Commonwealth, Sancta Clara petitioned Cromwell for religious freedom in the name of civil peace and formed a friendship with the Oxford librarian and Hobbes admirer Thomas Barlow. After the publication of Leviathan (1651), Sancta Clara attempted to refute Hobbes’s demonization of Roman Catholicism. Six

Preface

xi

years after Sancta Clara’s death, Pierre Bayle praised Sancta Clara by name in his landmark treatise on religious toleration, the Commentaire philosophique. In the nineteenth century, Sancta Clara’s vision of a less hectoring and more inclusive Catholic Church would help to shape the Boston mission of Bishop Cheverus and the apologetics of Étienne Badin, missionary to Kentucky and donor of the land that became the site of the University of Notre Dame. John Henry Newman’s famous Tractate 90, in turn, owed a close debt to Sancta Clara’s defense of the English articles of religion, which the Anglican reunionist canon F. G. Lee translated and published in 1865. Finally, attesting to a sort of enduring haunting of the English imagination, Joseph Shorthouse published a best seller in 1881, John Inglesant, in which Sancta Clara is prominently featured. As Sancta Clara’s life was largely lived underground and in the secretive wings of the Stuart court, his written works, mostly in Latin, constitute our chief record of his journey as a Franciscan priest grappling with the legacy of English odium. Only two book-length biographies of Sancta Clara have been written to date, both by Franciscans: one in German by Ermin Klaus (1938) and one in English by John Berkermans Dockery (1960). Neither examines Sancta Clara’s theology in detail or provides sufficient context to interpret it. Sancta Clara’s hallmark irenicism, however, has long attracted attention. In an influential monograph published in 1951, the French scholar Maurice Nédoncelle praised Sancta Clara’s subtle arguments and enthusiastically described him as an “intrepid archangel” for trying to win tolerance for Roman Catholics from Cromwell. George Tavard, in turn, described Sancta Clara as a “fine and little known” theologian. Most recently, Sancta Clara found a champion in Bruno Neveu, who emphasized the innovative character of Sancta Clara’s chief theological work, Systema fidei, in an article published posthumously in 2004. Leading scholars of the history of religion in Stuart England, such as Caroline Hibbard, Anthony Milton, Michael Questier, Brian Tyacke, Beverly South gate, Stefania Tutino, and Jeffrey Collins, to name just a few, have consistently cited Sancta Clara in their rich contextual studies. They have not, however, examined his doctrines in detail to show his full impact on Roman Catholic theology. Why the title Suspicious Moderate? The epithet was framed by a member of the Great Tew circle and fellow Roman Catholic convert, Hugh Serenus Cressy, apparently to denounce, but actually to praise, Sancta Clara’s

xii

Preface

irenic strategy of “conciliation.” Viewed with suspicion from all sides for his attempt to reconcile opposing views, Sancta Clara was himself suspicious — of dogmatism, of the political uses of religion, of Roman Catholic blindness, and of Puritan fanaticism. It is by trusting his own suspiciousness of human folly that Sancta Clara navigated storm after storm to become a champion of freedom of conscience. There is yet a third, darker sense in which the title is meant to remind us of a perennial obstacle facing sincere reformers. As we will see, Protestants were most often unwilling to believe that a Roman Catholic could genuinely be “moderate.” Even someone like William Penn, who was himself persecuted for being a Quaker, remained suspicious of Sancta Clara’s effort to reframe Catholicism and denounced him as a fraud. By calling attention to Cressy’s characterization of Sancta Clara, the book’s title hopes to emphasize the multidimensional context of suspicion and prejudice in which Sancta Clara’s life and theology evolved. Eschewing the satisfaction of clear-cut positions, moreover, we will immerse ourselves in realms of ambiguity and in strategies that were shaped as much by unreasonable hope and unreasonable suspicion as by facts. Starting before Sancta Clara’s birth, as an intellectual biography must, because acculturation is marked by initiation before new departures are possible, the first two chapters evoke a key aspect of the anti-Catholic hatred that was transmitted to Sancta Clara by his Protestant milieu and that loomed large over his life. At stake was a highly politicized claim by Protestants that papists were simply incapable of making moral decisions independently of Rome. The attempt to answer Protestants in this regard and to hammer out a new theory of moral freedom for Catholics started with Sancta Clara’s predecessors, jailed at the Clink (see chapter 2). Sancta Clara learned from them, gained their support, and eventually developed their approach into a comprehensive rejection of religious persecution. Chapters 3 and 4 narrate Sancta Clara’s childhood, education at Oxford, conversion to Roman Catholicism, and Franciscan calling, culminating with his travel to Rome and first publication (1628). Chapter 5 explores the revival of English Franciscan culture under Sancta Clara’s energetic leadership, but it also evokes the religious community of Little Gidding to argue that nostalgia for supererogatory holiness must be singled out as a key feature of the 1620s and 1630s, blurring confessional lines

Preface

xiii

and offering new opportunities for ecumenical rapprochement. This sets the stage for chapters 6 and 7, in which Sancta Clara’s most notorious work of theology, Deus, natura, gratia (1634), is presented and analyzed, along with his appointment as chaplain in Queen Henriette-Marie’s entourage. Chapter 8 describes Sancta Clara’s effort to reunite the Church of England and the Roman Church, highlighting the atmosphere of anxiety and deceit within which Sancta Clara pursued his dream. Chapter 9 presents Sancta Clara’s exhaustive defense of episcopacy (1640) and argues that Apologia episcoporum was overtly written against Presbyterians and Puritans, but covertly aimed at promoting a moderate alternative to Jesuit “papalism,” hoping to appeal to Laudian prelates. Chapter 10 examines damaging accounts of Sancta Clara that were written in the context of the English Civil War. After chapter 11 briefly presents a Catholic and Protestant debate over religious infallibility, mainly among members of Great Tew, chapter 12 presents Sancta Clara’s opus magnum, a veritable metatheology entitled Systema fidei (1648). I put forth the thesis that Systema fidei aimed at framing a theory of Catholicism suited to a religiously pluralistic, postWestphalia Europe. Special attention is given to Sancta Clara’s philosophical fallibilism and to his effort to protect the autonomy of Catholic conscience by arguing that personal assent need never exceed the degree of available evidence. Chapters 13 to 15 turn to Sancta Clara’s English writings during the Commonwealth, documenting his involvement in clandestine efforts to obtain religious toleration from Cromwell and his engagement with the work of Thomas Hobbes. Once again, the problem of the autonomy of conscience occupies center stage, inspiring Sancta Clara to defend a strict separation of church and state in the hope of refuting Hobbes’s Erastianism. Chapter 16 examines Sancta Clara’s last published treatise, Religio philosophi, which is concerned with miracles. Published during the Restoration, when Sancta Clara was again given a royal appointment as theologian to Queen Catherine of Braganza, Religio philosophi belongs to the expanded context of Thomas Browne’s popular Religio medici. Far from approaching miracles simplistically, our English Franciscan shows that the Catholic belief in miracles (1) poses no threat to the project of science, (2) protects believers against malignant forms of superstition, and (3) puts

xiv

Preface

in place a rational and intersubjective bulwark against atheism. Chapter 17 looks at the last eighteen years of Sancta Clara’s life and brings the investigation back to the problem of the autonomy of personal conscience, arguing that Sancta Clara drew on Hobbes to frame a liberating theory of self-censorship. My epilogue provides a summary of Sancta Clara’s major themes, a sketch of his main intellectual heirs, and suggestions for future research.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

My debts to colleagues, friends, and family over the course of this project are too numerous to acknowledge in detail, so I must confine myself to a few representative individuals in whom many others, as it were, are enclosed. In Oxford, I thank Carole Jordan for her kind sponsorship. In Paris, I thank Jacqueline Demnard, Philippe Leburghe, Martine Jeannet, and Angélique and Fabrice Gaussen for spiritual sustenance. At the University of Notre Dame Press, I most especially thank Stephen Little, Rebecca DeBoer, and copyeditor Scott Barker for their knowledge and patience. In New York, I thank Heyden and Nicholas Rostow, Xéna Lee, and Susan Rita Ruel. In San Francisco Bay, I thank Casey and Jessica Law, Elizabeth Arredondo, and Karla Arredondo for their subtle activism. In Santo Domingo, I thank Hoyt Rogers for the gift of poetry. In leafy New England, I thank Charles and Jessica Golub, Dennis Taylor, Richard and Anne Kearney, Jean-Luc Solère, Regis de Silva, John and Annette Lee, Elaheh Kheirandish, Hormoz Goodarky, Mark Kroll, Carol Lieberman, and Susan Peirce, for inspiration, comfort, and the gift of music. In heaven, I thank my brother Anthony and my cousin Pauline, who turned my writing into a sacra converzatione, connecting me to a myriad of lost voices. Above all, I thank my teacher, friend, and husband, Leon Golub—sine quo (quibus!) non. Finally, I dedicate the book to two resourceful brothers, Pablo Arre dondo and Manuel Arredondo, heirs of our fractious Western hemisphere and poets of resilience. May they draw deeply from history to reinvent brotherhood everywhere.

xv

O N E

Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience

A decade before our protagonist’s birth in Coventry, the world of English Catholics underwent dramatic changes. At the heart of these changes lay the issue of the sanctity of private conscience. According to William Overton, for example, who was bishop of Coventry and Lichfield from 1580 to 1609, Roman Catholicism had to be vigorously suppressed because its aim was to deprive individual Christians of their moral responsibility— to “snare the simple and mervailously intangle theyr consciences.”1 In sharp contrast, Protestants could be trusted in their “own knowledge and conscience,” most especially to recognize their duty to rise up against the treacherous discord promoted by Roman Catholicism and the pope.2 When Anthony Munday’s vivid little book, The English Romayne Lyfe, went on sale in London in 1582, English Protestants had a chance to read a firsthand account of Roman Catholic brainwashing. They learned that papist priests routinely seduced English youths to leave their native land by offering to pay for their passage to Rome. Once in Rome, these hapless English students were indoctrinated into the scarlet ways of the Whore of 1

2 Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience

Babylon and sworn to return as missionaries to England to corrupt hearts and suffer public martyrdom.3 Anthony Munday was in a special position to convey the full horror of Rome’s machinations. In Paris, English Catholic exiles mistook him for the son of a Catholic friend of theirs from Staffordshire. Taking advantage of the mistake, Munday traveled to Rome in order to infiltrate the English College. On the evening of his arrival, “not far from the Pope’s palace,” he was invited to enjoy the college garden, where a priest, “a dear friend of his supposed father,” took him aside to show him a list of Queen Elizabeth’s supporters who would be burnt at the stake, decapitated, or quartered as soon as England was “wholly returned” to the pope.4 Munday’s narrative was all the more forceful in its impact because he had a playwright’s flair for detail. English youths were given elegant white napkins at meals and whips in the evening to draw blood for personal penance. In winter, they gathered after supper with their Jesuit teachers, who regaled them with heroic stories of martyrdom. In the summer, relaxing amidst vineyards, they were encouraged to vie with one another to recount lurid gossip and demonize the queen—prompting their Jesuit mentors to cross themselves in horror, as though the devil had been named.5 Saint Peter’s heir, Pope Gregory XIII, had a special place in his heart for his English lambs. On Candlemas, he sent them each a large taper blessed individually by his own pontifical hand. The Holy Father believed that English hearts could be won over to God’s church in sufficient numbers through missionaries to ensure the success of military force in the near future.6 Since 1580, Jesuits had joined the English mission, led by Edmund Campion and Robert Persons. Their chief objective was to pressure En glish Catholics into abstaining from the schismatic Church of England.7 Catholics who continued to attend Protestant churches would be excommunicated. Only Catholic recusants (Catholics who refused to attend the Protestant Church) would receive Roman sacraments. More than a decade after Munday’s book was published, the English Parliament in 1593 responded to Rome’s new missionary zeal by enacting new penalties for popish recusancy.8 English Catholics living in England, such as the Napiers in Oxford or the Throckmortons in the region of Cov entry, were suddenly plunged into anxiety. According to the new Jesuit missionaries and to Rome, attending the English Church implied spiritual weakness and the loss of heaven. According to the English Crown, on the

Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience

3

other hand, no English subject who refused to worship in the Church of England could be trusted. By rejecting the local English church where their ancestors had worshipped, Catholic recusants showed a culpable foreignness — a treasonous submission to the foreign authority of the Roman pope, to the detriment of their own native sovereign, neighbors, and country. The dilemma facing English Catholics propelled them into a crisis of personal conscience. The very identity of Catholic was turned inside out. To be Catholic now meant worshipping God in secret. It meant receiving sacraments from outlaws. Conversely, in the name of civic loyalty, what did the government and the Protestant majority require? Roman Catholics were asked to conform publicly to the collective rituals of the English Church. They were asked to keep their dissenting beliefs private for the sake of a visible Christian and English unity. Told to conform to the English Church by their government and to abstain from it by their priests, the “wicked and seditious persons terming themselves Catholic” had no choice but to search their own consciences and make a personal choice. Much as Catholic recusants argued that a personal decision to abstain from the English Church was a matter of private religious conscience and implied no civil disloyalty, the argument was rejected by the Protestant majority as a mere pretext. 9 English Protestants were convinced that Catholic recusants obeyed their Jesuit priests and the Roman pope, not the voice of their own conscience. As a Protestant author explained in 1601, what recusancy mainly revealed was the extent of the pope’s despotic power over Roman Catholics: “Recusancy in them is not for Religion, but in acknowledgment of the Pope’s power.”10 Since Catholic recusants acted out of a blind devotion to the pope rather than from a private tender conscience, the fear took root among En glish Protestants that popish recusants were all potential traitors. Catholics were poised, at the mere command of some missionary priest, to rebel against their Protestant monarch, whom Rome had twice deprived verbally of her “pretended title.”11 By shunning Sunday services at their local church, Catholic recusants implied that they regarded their Protestant neighbors and their queen as little better than heathen. As Queen Elizabeth grew frail, visibly staggering under the weight of her mantle at Parliament’s opening, rumors that the Roman pontiff was actively interfering in the English succession raised Protestant anxiety to a

4 Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience

new pitch.12 When the queen’s onetime favorite, the Earl of Essex, tried to incite Londoners to join his rebellion on February 8, 1601, he deliberately played on anti-Catholic fear, shouting out for all to hear that England had been “sold to the Spaniards.”13 Conversely, when the rebellion failed and Essex was put on trial, he was accused of enlisting papists—of plotting to grant papists freedom of conscience in return for their support.14 Robert Cecil led the charge. Was Essex’s co-conspirator, Sir John Davies, Cecil asked, not a “Papist and a Catholick”? Essex, dismayed, retorted that he “could not search into the secrets of Davies’s heart to accuse him inwardly,” but he could vouch that Davies attended “the service of God” in Essex House and “behaved himself very Godlily.” Davies complied with the government’s requirement of outward conformity—what more was required under English law? When Cecil had become Elizabeth’s secretary of state four years earlier in 1597, he had successfully exploited tensions within the clandestine Catholic mission. English Catholic missionaries had become increasingly polarized into two factions. There was a militant, intransigent faction allied with Spain and led by Jesuits,15 and there was a moderate faction, seeking toleration for the Roman Catholic minority rather than the reconversion of England by force. The second faction was led by secular priests and was generally allied with France.16 When Jesuits had managed to have an archpriest of their choice, George Blackwell, appointed in 1598, the secular priests of the English mission refused his authority and revolted. The two sides broke out into open war.17 With Cecil’s approval, Bishop Bancroft helped the secular faction defy Blackwell and the Jesuits by secretly providing them with printing presses and by suspending a number of restrictions.18 The queen’s edict of November 5, 1602, which was ostensibly aimed at reassuring Puritans that England was not “sold to the Spaniard,” since it renewed the ban against missionary priests, intimated that priests who reported themselves to the authorities and acknowledged “their duty and allegiance” to the queen might benefit from special treatment. Cecil’s strategy to secure the support of moderate English Catholics was partly motivated by anxiety over Elizabeth’s succession. Soon after Essex’s execution on February 25, 1601, Cecil replaced Essex as James VI Stuart’s main champion for the English throne and chief secret correspondent.19

Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience

5

When the news spread in March 1603 that James was proclaimed Elizabeth’s successor, English Catholics for the most part rejoiced, convinced that the son of Mary Stuart would show special benevolence to Catholics.20 Before the king-elect reached London, he was presented with a petition by his “ryght truistie cusing” Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland.21 The document bore its purpose in its title: The Catholics’ Supplication unto the King’s Majesty, for toleration of Catholic religion in England.22 They urged James to suspend penal laws against Catholic recusants on three chief grounds. First, there was the recent example of France, which proved that religious pluralism did not impair a realm’s unity but instead helped to secure domestic peace by depriving foreign powers of a pretext to meddle internally.23 Second, English Catholics were not seeking full toleration but only the right to practice the Old Religion of England in privacy, unmolested. Third, unlike Protestants, who obeyed royal authority simply out of natural instinct, or convenience, or fear, Roman Catholics were instructed to obey royal authority as a matter of religious conscience, on penalty of eternal damnation. 24 Roman Catholics, the petition argued, possessed a distinctly harsh conscience poised to “torture them grievously” if they rebelled against James’s temporal authority. Catholics, in other words, presented the advantage of a religiously grounded theory of civic obligation. They were more securely prevented from political rebellion than others by their innermost conscience. James was not convinced. The problem, in James’s view, was that Roman Catholics were not actually in possession of their own consciences. Rome would not allow Catholics to make up their own moral minds. Roman Catholic declarations of loyalty could not be trusted, James believed, because “lyke maried wemen or minors,” they allowed their conscience to be “overreuled by theire romishe god as it pleasis him to allowe or revoke their conclusions.”25 Unlike adult men, who judged for themselves what obligations to undertake and who stood accountable for them before God, Roman Catholics acted under external supervision. Their promises, in effect, were conditional. If Roman Catholicism encouraged a distinctly religious theory of obligation, it was precisely because the pope, standing for God, judged what obligations ought to bind the faithful as a matter of religious conscience. James showed little inclination to respond to the petition favorably.26

6 Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience

When Protestants got wind of the petition, they reacted fiercely. Ga briel Powell, rector of Llansanffraid-ym-Mechain in Montgomeryshire, published the text of the petition along with a scathing commentary outlining the dangers of “tolerating Poperie.” Powell warned that any Catholic “protestation” of civil loyalty was worthless. The pope, Powell reminded James and all of England, could exempt English Catholics from their professed loyalty by means of a “single word.”27 Powell stressed that Roman Catholics were simply not able to “performe any allegiance or dutie that the King can desire or expect.”28 As long “as the Pope may discharge them of allegeance to their prince,” Catholics could not be considered “loyall Subiects.” Moreover, the French case did not apply to England and to English Catholic recusants. The French king “alloweth toleration to such as acknowledge him for their lawfull Soveraigne, who never plotted against his Crowne and life, nor can be induced upon any suggestion so to doe.”29 English papists simply could not meet the same criteria for safe toleration: “It is impossible for Papists to be loyall subiects to any Protestant prince.”30 James’s approach to his Catholic subjects seems to have been guided by two principles, bolstered by a very pragmatic demographic anxiety. To begin with, James was thoroughly convinced of the divine origin and sanctity of the human conscience. Conscience, James believed, was “nothing else than the light of knowledge that God hath planted in man, which ever watching over all of his actions, as it beareth him a joyful testimony when he does right, so choppeth it him with a feeling that hee hath done wrong, when ever he commiteth any sinne.”31 To attempt to change a person’s conscience by external means such as physical threats was essentially sacrilegious—tantamount to interfering with God’s immediate light. The conscience, moreover, played a key role in “conserving” religion. The mind knows right from wrong, but the conscience does more: it moves us to act as we ought. A Christian king, for example, is bound by his conscience to act justly. As a case in point, his conscience prevents him from resorting to physical persecution to change a subject’s private religious beliefs: “I wille never allowe in my conscience that the bloode of any man shall be shedde for diversitie of opinions in religion.”32 James was determined not to persecute Roman Catholics who lived quietly and who gave “but an outward obedience to the law.”33 Outward

Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience

7

conformity in religion—of the kind that was vouched by Essex on behalf of his Catholic ally Sir John Davies—would suffice. Catholic recusancy, on the other hand, was a different matter. It broke the law of the realm in the name of a competing, higher temporal authority. What sovereign would tolerate it?34 James’s second principle was that kings rule by divine right. Kings are appointed by God to govern their realms and are directly accountable to God—but to God only. There could never be legitimate religious grounds for absolving a king’s subjects of their loyalty.35 A church claiming the right to absolve a king’s subjects of their loyalty disqualified itself, ipso facto, as God’s church. Finally, James worried about the possible demographic increase of Roman Catholics within England. If a policy of toleration resulted over time in a Roman Catholic majority, what would happen to royal sovereignty, English godliness, and the sanctity of private conscience?36 As long as Roman Catholicism remained intolerably intolerant, Roman Catholicism could not be tolerated in England—at least not to the point of posing a political threat to English tolerance. Robert Cecil soon clarified to disappointed Catholics that “the king had promised a moderacion of religion but not a tolleracion.”37 James received a second plea for the toleration of Roman Catholics. This time, it came in the guise of a letter of dedication from someone who was destined to play a decisive role in Sancta Clara’s life—Matthew Kellison, Regius Professor at the University of Rheims and a Roman Catholic priest, exiled from England since 1581. Kellison greeted James’s coronation in July 1603 by dedicating his first published treatise, A Survey of the New Religion, to the new English monarch. 38 Painting himself to James as a loyal subject unfairly banished from his native country, Kellison explained that he was all at once a Roman Catholic priest, an ordinary human sinner, and a native Englishman. As an annointed priest of God’s church, he was, he argued, God’s legate, empowered to salute James “from the Great Monarche of heaven.” As a human being, he was, like every other human being, “a miserable sinner.” Finally, as a native of Northamptonshire, he was James’s “lowest subject.”39 Kellison’s threefold identity implied a harmony of loyalties. Kellison’s priestly character made him not Rome’s legate, but God’s legate. Moreover, since priesthood did not lift him above the mass of sinful

8 Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience

humanity, he was subject to civil government, to which, like every other human being, he owed full obedience. Finally, his most intimate, visceral identity made him a native-born Englishman and James’s subject. In dedicating his very first treatise to James, Kellison emphasized that he meant to offer his king more than a “bare bundel of papers.” He meant publicly to offer the king “his humble heart, sincere affection and faithfull service” as unconditionally as he had pledged himself to serve God.40 Kellison’s loyalty to James’s government was thus meant to be confirmed by a voluntary, public, and written declaration of allegiance. Having thus first professed his loyalty, Kellison requested the suspension of penalties against Roman Catholics in the name of freedom of conscience. English Catholics, he explained, sought “neither lands, nor livings, nor offices, but libertie for their conscience, whose restrainte they counte more greevous, then [sic] imprisonment, yea death of their bodyes.”41 As though echoing James’s own expressed beliefs in Basilikon doron regarding conscience and religion, Kellison pointed out that religion and freedom of conscience are mutually indispensable. Far from leading to rebellion, freedom of conscience will secure the deepest loyalty among English Catholics since they will view their freedom through a religiously bound conscience. English Catholics were taught that civil authority comes from God and that they are bound in conscience to obey it, not only when civil authority is vested in a Christian king, but even when it is vested in “Pagane Kinges, such as all were, when Sainct Peter and Sainct Paul commanded us to obey them.”42 If, however, James remained suspicious of the loyalty of English Catholics, there was a simple remedy: “But if your Highnes doubte of our fidelitie, we will bynde ourselves by corporall oathe, to obey your lawes in all temporal causes, and to defend your Roial Person, your Deare Spouse our Gracious Queene, and your towardlie Children, our Noble Lordes, with the laste droppe of our bloud; and this our oath we shall be contented to divulge to all the princes of Europe, yea all the Christian worlde.” Kellison’s 1603 epistle to James implied that there was no religious objection on the part of the Roman Church against English Catholics taking a public oath of allegiance to their king. Roman Catholics could safely vow to obey the king’s laws “in all temporal matters.” The problem, how-

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ever, was the ambiguous status of the law requiring English subjects to attend the English Church. Was it a purely temporal law, issued by the English sovereign in his (or her) capacity as temporal ruler? Or was it a religious law, issued by the English sovereign in his (or her) capacity as supreme head of the Church of England? Did James regard church attendance as a key test of his authority in temporal matters? The idea of a “corporall oath” binding English Catholics to their king “before the whole Christian world” was not new. In Elizabeth’s final days, thirteen missionary priests had responded to Cecil’s 1602 edict by composing and signing a “Protestation of Allegiance” to the queen. 43 One of the thirteen signatories, John Colleton, wrote, moreover, an anonymous Supplication to the Kings most excellent Majestie in 1604. Before broaching the idea of a “corporeal oath,” Colleton stressed that Catholic recusancy did not stem from any disrespect for the king’s authority or for English law, but from a “true real obligation of mere conscience” based on “inward persuasion,” which is “binding, even if erroneous.” 44 A Protestant monarch, he argued, is conscience-bound to suspend penal laws against Catholic recusants since (1) Protestants are “inwardly convinced” (whether rightly or wrongly) that freedom of conscience must not be violated, and since (2) Catholic recusants are “inwardly convinced” (whether rightly or wrongly) that attending the English Church jeopardizes their salvation. In other words, whereas there may or may not be a forceful Roman Catholic argument in favor of religious toleration, there is a forceful Protestant one, based on the special emphasis placed by Protestants on the sanctity of private conscience. 45 Colleton proposed that all missionary priests take a “corporeal oath” of loyalty to the Crown. If this were insufficient, they could provide “sufficient sureties, one or moe, who shall stand bound, life for life, for the performance of the said allegeance.”46 The English Crown, he implied, could take hostages. And if any missionary group “cannot provide such sureties,” then all of the priests “will join to ask the Pope to recall such priests from England.”47 A satisfactory modus vivendi could thus be reached. Conscientious missionary priests who were appropriately patriotic would take an oath of loyalty to the English Crown, while papalist hardliners (Jesuits) would be barred from England. Lay English Catholics, in turn, would practice their religion unmolested, according to their conscience, ministered privately by (secular, not Jesuit) priests who were known to the government

10 Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience

and against whom the government could retaliate if a plot were suspected. Colleton’s proposal was vehemently rejected by two Protestant divines, Matthew Sutcliffe, dean of Exeter, and Gabriel Powel. Full of indignation, they reminded England of the many Catholic statements granting the pope power to annul oaths and depose princes.48 James was again petitioned in 1604 by anonymous lay Catholics, in a document composed by John Lecey and entitled Petition apologeticall, presented to the Kinges most excellent Maiesty, by the lay Catholikes of England. Conceding that the chief obstacle to toleration was the problem of Roman Catholic “loyalitie and obedience,” Lecey proposed a “forme of the Catholikes submission” in which English Catholics vowed to defend the king as their lawful sovereign “against all pretendantes to the contrary” and against “all invasions, or forraigne enemies, upon what pretence soever.”49 English Catholics would agree not only to take a personal oath of loyalty “in such manner as shall seem best to your majesty” but would also take responsibility for ensuring that priests take the same oath of loyalty before being admitted into their homes.50 An internally policed and locally registered English Roman Catholic clergy would thus replace a shadowy underground mission of papalist fanatics controlled from abroad. As a side effect, English Catholic laymen would become directly accountable to the government for the loyalty of their priests and thus break new ground in shaping the character and operation of their church, at least in England. The Gunpowder Plot of November 1605, aimed at blowing up Parliament and the royal family, caused a dramatic turn. King James and Robert Cecil reacted strategically. Hoping to calm Puritan outrage at home without provoking Catholic retaliation abroad, James proposed, as part of a comprehensive “Act for the better discovering and repressing of Popish Recusants,” a new oath of allegiance, enacted by Parliament in 1606.51 Ostensibly aimed at distinguishing loyal Roman Catholic subjects from potentially dangerous traitors,52 the Jacobean oath made a new demand on Roman Catholic conscience. Although it shunned any mention of the king’s supremacy “in all Spiritual and Ecclesiastical things,” the new oath required Catholics to characterize the pope’s “deposing power” as heresy. English Catholics were not simply asked to swear that they personally would not ever comply with the pope’s “deposing power” (this was essentially Lecey’s formulation), they were also asked to denounce the pope’s

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deposing power as contrary to Christian faith. Catholics were asked personally to judge a matter of faith.53 The same year, 1606, Cecil published a short pamphlet against a Catholic “admonition” that blamed him personally for the new anti-Catholic legislation enacted in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. Whether or not the exchange was fictitious, Cecil’s Answere to certaine scandalous papers sheds important light on the government’s strategy. Cecil implied that there may be sincere Catholic recusants who abstain from the English Church based on private scruples of conscience, but the test of their sincerity is precisely that, faced with a national emergency, they will “joyn with us in chearfull Songs for this our happy deliverance.”54 Like Kellison three years earlier, Cecil implied that freedom of conscience and religion are indivisibly joined, so that the same person who refrains from a religious practice for the sake of conscience will also refrain from political treason for the sake of conscience. It follows that anyone who pledges his unconditional loyalty to the Crown deserves to be excused from attending the English Church “for conscience’s sake,” while anyone who refuses to pledge his unconditional loyalty to the government demonstrates that he acts not on the basis of conscience but on some other basis. Before elaborating further, Cecil made two closely related preliminary points. First, he challenged Rome either to renounce its “deposing power” or to clarify the exact nature of its claim.55 Second, he denounced “that most strange and grosse doctrine of Equivocation which is so highly extolled in the Church of Rome” as a strategy on Rome’s part to control Catholic consciences. Addressing English Catholics directly, Cecil warned them that the men “that rule your consciences have first dazled your eyes with fearefull, but false obiects, thereby hoping to engage you more deeply in their pernicious Attempts.”56 Cecil’s appeal to English Catholics to trust their own consciences, moreover, served as a general lesson on the sacred character of personal conscience: “Let me appeale to your owne consciences, which in every man holdeth place of Juge and Witnesse.” The problem, Cecil explained, is not simply that “unlearned papists” are discouraged from thinking for themselves and are enticed blindly into plots like trained attack hawks with blinders (“Hawkes hooded”)—they are positively indoctrinated to obey external authority, so that “the scruples of Conscience and the seeds of

12 Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience

Treason” grow up jointly and indivisibly, “as close together as the huske and Corne in one ear.” Because Catholics are not in possession of their own consciences, their consciences have been usurped and depraved into blindly doing another’s bidding. The way forward is for Catholics to open their eyes and resolve to become cognizant of their “dueties both divine and humane.”57 As a case in point, a sound conscience will teach rulers (and secretaries of state) always to prefer clemency over cruelty in safeguarding kingdoms. The heart “that holds any seeds of Conscience” is protected against malice and treason, while the heart that is bereft of a private conscience cannot “have any sense of Religion at all.”58 Clearly, the majority of English Catholics are not bereft of conscience since the Gunpowder plotters received little help. Catholic recusants who are so “for conscience’s sake” must not be punished along with traitors, since conscience tells us to distinguish between sins of ignorance and deliberate acts of wickedness. In conclusion, Cecil set a vivid personal example of why we must detach ourselves from external indoctrination and learn to appreciate our own conscience: “I will henceforth rest in peace in the House of mine owne Conscience, where if I doe good deeds, no matter who sees them; if bad, knowing them myselfe, no matter from whom I hide them; for they are of record before a Iudge, from whose presence I cannot flee. If all the world applaud me, and hee accuse me, their praise is vaine. Falli potest fama, conscientia nunquam” [“Common opinion is able to be deceived, conscience never”]. Within “the House of mine owne Conscience,” I cannot escape the torment of guilt if I act badly, nor can anyone or anything deprive me of the reward of serene peace if I act well. Or, as Bishop Overton put it, “the proper effect and worke of the Gospell” was to “bring joy and peace of conscience unto those that heare it and embrace it.”59 It is important to review Jacobean attempts to engage the private conscience of English Catholic recusants because Sancta Clara will struggle with the Jacobean oath all of his life—defending it, taking it, rewriting it, proposing alternatives. A pressing question confronting James’s privy councillors and Parliament in 1606 was how to probe the inner thoughts and attitudes of Catholic recusants.60 James’s friend, the Scottish jurist William Barclay, who lived in exile in France rather than be forced to attend the Protestant English Church, actively defended royal prerogatives

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in civil matters against Rome. Barclay’s son John was back in London in 1606, preparing to refute papal claims to temporal power while abstaining from Protestant communion.61 In 1606, Roman Catholic Venice lay under papal interdict for resisting the pope’s encroachments in temporal affairs. The dispute was over Venetian real estate. All of London cheered the Serene Republic and read the details of its heroic defiance in Paolo Sarpi’s account.62 As Sarpi made clear, the pope’s power in temporalibus could be challenged by Roman Catholics on soundly Roman Catholic grounds. The pope could hardly rest his claim to Venetian real estate on the doctrine of “Ecclesiasticall liberty” since the precise meaning of the doctrine was “not yet decided” and was a matter of debate.63 The same undecided status was also true of the doctrine of the pope’s “deposing power.” In the second edition of his Survey of the New Religion (1605), Matthew Kellison added a new introductory epistle, addressed to the king’s privy councillors. He assured them that Roman Catholics were not so enamored of their church as to forget to “render unto Cesar what was Cesar’s,” nor so devoted to the pope as to be “deaf to the voice of Nature that called them to cherish and defend their native countrie.”64 English Catholics, Kellison wrote, are “men as others are and are as English as who are most.” Indeed “is there any force of friendship,” he argued, that is “comparable to the natural affection which we beare to our countrie?” If the king’s privy councillors could only peer directly into the hearts of English Catholics! If they could, they would see only the staunchest love and loyalty: “If hartes had windowes, as Socrates wished, or were penetrable by sight, as cristal is, that their secrets might be discovered, I would not doubt but that your H. H. should see, which how iustly you may believe, as true affection and loyaltie in the Catholiques hartes, as any subjects can bear to their Souveraigne.”65 As James argued before Parliament in 1606, scrupulous Catholics should be given a chance to prove that they “retained in their hearts the print of their naturall dutie to their Souveraigne.”66 The purpose of the Jacobean oath was to make the recusant’s heart visible. Shortly after Parliament enacted the oath of allegiance, a posthumous volume on “cases of conscience” by the celebrated Cambridge divine William Perkins appeared for sale in London, containing a chapter on

14 Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience

oaths.67 Perkins defines an oath as “a religious and necessarie confirmation of things doubtfull by calling on God, to be a witnesse of truth and a revenger of falsehood.”68 Why “religious” when no clergy is involved? An oath, Perkins explains, is “no less a part of God’s worshippe than prayer itself” because God is directly invoked and irrevocably made a party to the transaction.69 An oath is said to be “necessarie,” in turn, because it must be taken only “when all other humane proofs do fail.” Thus an oath is essentially a pragmatic substitute for evident knowledge when evident knowledge is required but not available. Its aim is to show what lies hidden. In order to be valid, an oath must be taken truthfully, meaning that a person must “sweare as he thinketh” and “be in conscience persuaded of the same.”70 Perkins explains that the kind of truth that is relevant to oaths is “morall veritie.” A swearer who is honestly convinced but mistaken about a point of fact is not guilty of perjury so long as he swears according to his true conviction.71 The crux of morall veritie is that God is called upon to certify the subjective sincerity (truthfulness) of my belief—to certify that I am morally certain of my belief—not the objective veracity of the content of my belief. Whether what I swear to be true turns out to be true or not, God considers my oath to be true as long as I swear it truthfully. Perkins lists four types of circumstances in which an oath may legitimately be taken: (1) to further God’s glory, as when an oath serves to clarify sound doctrine; (2) to promote brotherly love, as when an oath serves to preserve a neighbor’s life or to attest to a neighbor’s good name; (3) to facilitate private transactions, as when an oath serves to defend my own good name or allows me to enter into contracts; and (4) to secure civil peace, as “when the Magistrate doth exact it, by order of justice.”72 The Jacobean oath nicely fits all four conditions: (1) it furthers God’s glory by purging religion of an impious doctrine (the deposing power); (2) it attests to the loyalty of Catholic recusants and thus removes Protestant fear of Catholic neighbors; (3) it allows Catholic recusants to conduct daily business by making them trustworthy with regard to contracts; and (4) it is mandated by law for the sake of public peace and duly exacted by a magistrate. The Jacobean oath thus appears to be a model oath. With regard to oaths that are “exacted by magistrates,” Perkins urges three cautions. First, on the magistrate’s part, the oath must be administered lawfully, which is to say “not against piety or charity.” Presumably,

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Perkins means to exclude physical coercion, since, as he explains later in section 3, an oath taken under duress may or may not be binding.73 Second, on the swearer’s part, there must be no mental reservation, which means that the swearer must swear according to the magistrate’s mind, not his own. Third, again on the swearer’s part, there must be no equivocation. The swearer must swear unambiguously, clarifying the content of his oath with the magistrate if need be. The purpose of an oath is thus very explicitly to bring private beliefs to public light as transparently as possible. The last two considerations are crucial in this regard, Perkins warns, since “Popish teachers affirme that in some cases, they may swear in a doubtfull meaning,” most especially “in time of Danger when being convented before the Magistrate.”74 A well-crafted oath, Perkins says, should address these concerns openly. The Jacobean oath, as a case in point, concludes by asking the swearer to swear (1) that the oath has been lawfully administered and (2) that there is neither mental reservation nor equivocation on his part. Thus the swearer affirms “in his conscience and before God,” that there is no hidden discrepancy between what he privately believes and what he publicly professes to believe. Is an oath always binding? An “oathe taken of things certaine, lawfull and possible,” Perkins affirms, “is to be kept and binds always.” A valid oath is binding “though it be tendred even to our enemies.”75 Perkins lists exactly six cases in which an oath fails to put the swearer under obligation. An oath is not binding (1) if it contradicts God’s Word or (2) the laws of the commonwealth; (3) if it is asked of a madman or (4) a legal minor; (5) if it is a vain oath (impossible to keep); or (6) if it is “reversed by God himself,” such as occurs in the case of a monk who discovers that his oath to remain celibate is impossible since God has not in fact given him the gift of continence.76 The Jacobean oath carefully avoids these impediments: with regard to content, it promotes both religion and justice; as for persons, it applies only to competent adults; and it requires the swearer to defend James and his heirs to the swearer’s “uttermost” power, not absolutely. The Jacobean oath, in short, is sound. To the six legitimate cases just outlined, Perkins warns, papists wrongly add two more. First, papists regard “customary swearing” as nonbinding when they should, instead, condemn it as rash, sinful, and blasphemous. Second, and far more problematically, papists claim that an oath is not

16 Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience

binding “when the Superior power, that is, the Pope, or other inferior Bishops, give order to the contrarie, by relaxation or dispensation.”77 Perkins vehemently rejects the idea that a human being can discharge another human being of the obligation incurred by a valid oath. His argument is that a valid oath establishes an immediate bond between the swearer and God: “In every lawful oath there is a double-bond; one of man to man, the other of man to God. Now, if in the oath taken, man were only obliged to man, the oath might be dispensable to man. But seeing man, when he sweareth to man, sweareth also to God, and thereby is immediately bound to God himselfe, hence it followeth that an oath taken, cannot have release from any creature. . . . And herein the Pope shewes himselfe to be Antichrist, in that he challengeth power to dispense with a lawfull oath, made without error and deceit, of things honest and possible.”78 Perkins cites numerous scriptural passages to bolster his argument, including, somewhat surprisingly, Matthew 19:6—“The things which God has coupled, let no man separate.” Once a lawful oath is validly sworn, no one but God can break the obligation to which the oath gives rise in the swearer. Any human being who claims the right to discharge the swearer of his obligation usurps God’s prerogative. And since the pope cannot annul valid oaths, the pope, in claiming a power of dispensation, is guilty, in effect, of encouraging perjury—precisely what God is called upon to punish. 79 James and his supporters were convinced that the law “of God and Nature,” which is inscribed in the human heart and rules the natural conscience, commands subjects to obey their lawful rulers. As William Barclay argued to Pope Clement VIII, no subject can ever be absolved of his duty to obey his prince since there can be no human dispensation where “God and Nature” command immediately. A subject is bound to obey his prince “by the laws of God and Nature,” prior to any oath and independently of any oath.80 The oath merely verbalizes and publicizes what the moral law commands. The real meaning of the Jacobean oath becomes clear. From the government’s point of view, the king’s subjects were simply requested “to make open profession of their naturall Allegiance, and civill Obedience.”81 Catholics were not really asked to judge a point of Christian theology but simply to explicate and endorse the moral law. Whoever refused to take the Jacobean oath betrayed a denatured conscience. The Jacobean oath

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forced the Roman Catholic swearer to show that he possessed a “godly conscience” with regard to civil authorities—to show himself to be authentically God-fearing by allowing magistrates to peer into his innermost conscience and ascertain that it functioned “naturally.” As Cecil’s ally the jurist Edward Coke explained, moreover, there was an ineffably English dimension to the moral transparency afforded by state oaths. Coke emphasized that every natural-born subject owes allegiance to his sovereign “as soon as he is born.”82 State oaths provided a means for the adult subject, in effect, to participate in an immemorial moral ritual of political and social cohesion. According to Coke, just “as ligatures or strings do knit together the joints of all parts of the body,” so “doth ligeance join together the sovereign and all his subjects.”83 Implicitly, every natural-born Englishman not only feels a natural obedience but wishes to declare his allegiance to his sovereign. Invisible to outsiders in Rome and elsewhere, a secret voluntarism and organic intimacy suffused the Jacobean oath, making it more compelling to the English Catholic heart, perhaps, than Bellarmine understood.

T W O

In the Clink

We must now consider a group of English Catholic priests whose resistance to papal authority critically shaped Sancta Clara’s outlook. Their arguments in favor of the legitimacy of the Jacobean oath inspired Sancta Clara’s life effort to define different levels of certainty in religion and to associate a distinct degree of moral obligation to each level. A generation before William Chillingworth made his well-documented contributions to probability and moral certainty in religious matters, Roman Catholic priests and Benedictines incarcerated in the Clink explored the issue with a similar aim of defending freedom of conscience.1 Almost as soon as the Jacobean oath was enacted in the summer of 1606, Pope Paul V issued a breve prohibiting Roman Catholics from taking it on the grounds that it contained “many things which are flat contrary to Faith and Salvation.”2 Nonetheless, in late June 1607, the archpriest George Blackwell was arrested and took the oath.3 In September, a second papal breve reiterated the condemnation. Cardinal Bellarmine, in turn, wrote Blackwell a letter of rebuke, urging him to choose martyrdom over an oath that “perfidiously denied the Primacy of the Apostolicke See.”4 Blackwell retorted that he “had no recollection of ever having waivered in the least article that certainly and definitely appertaines to the sublime majestie and 18

In the Clink

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supreme authority of the see Apostolicke.”5 Blackwell’s point was that the pope’s deposing power could safely be denied by Catholics since it was not an article of Catholic faith: “There is no certaintie” he wrote to Bellarmine, “as yet defined by the Church touching the Popes authoritie in things temporall.”6 Contrary to what the two papal breves appeared to insinuate, the oath contained no clause that was repugnant to any point of faith as yet concluded upon by the Church.7 By making the spiritual supremacy of the apostolic see rest upon “a wonderfull uncertaintie,” Blackwell argued, Bellarmine in fact dangerously weakened it.8 Blackwell reiterated his approval of the oath and his advice to English Catholics to take it.9 Nor should Roman Catholics who refused the oath fancy themselves to be glorious martyrs, since martyrdom involves dying for the Faith, not for a disputed opinion.10 Not only did Blackwell see no firm impediment against taking the oath, he was also convinced, as he wrote in his pastoral letter to fellow priests, that he would have “sinned against his own conscience and incurred God’s wrath” if he had refused it.11 Heartened by Blackwell’s example, many among his fellow prisoners and scores of lay Catholic recusants across England took the oath. By the spring of 1608, James’s defense of the oath, Triplici nodo, was published, citing and refuting Bellarmine’s arguments against Blackwell. The pope responded by deposing Blackwell from his functions and appointing a new archpriest to replace him. King James retaliated by ordering that the oath be administered to anyone who entered England.12 The Jesuit Robert Parsons answered James’s Triplici nodo in 1608.13 The oath, Parsons argued, is “unlawfull unto a Catholicke conscience” because it is a disguised new version of the oath of supremacy. The Jacobean oath threatens the unity of God’s flock, which was meant to be obedient to the same “general head and Pastor” with regard to both belief and manner of worship.14 As far as Parsons was concerned, English Catholics could not split their hearts in two. In the spring of 1608, William Warmington, a priest and oblate of Saint Ambrose, was arrested by two pursuivants and committed to the Clink.15 The son of a Catholic recusant father who had died in jail, Warmington was no stranger to imprisonment. He had been arrested as a missionary in 1581, condemned to death, reprieved, and exiled. He was also

20 In the Clink

no stranger to Roman Catholic plotting — he had joined the Roman household of William Cardinal Allen in 1586. At Allen’s death in 1594, Warmington expressed the wish to live in frugal obscurity and joined Cardinal Borromeo’s fraternity of secular priests.16 Warmington eventually returned to his native England as a missionary, perhaps at James’s ascent to the throne.17 In March 1608, when he entered the Clink, Warmington was greeted by Blackwell and other “schismatic” priests, who soon convinced him of the legitimacy of their position and the force of their arguments.18 A year later, in August 1611, Warmington was stripped of his priestly faculties, along with Blackwell and other Clinkers who persisted in defending the Jacobean oath.19 In 1612, Warmington published a work entitled A moderate defence of the Oath of Allegiance, claiming explicitly to “prove” the legitimacy of the Jacobean oath and to “solve” the “chiefest objections” raised against it.20 Warmington’s A moderate defence starts by rejecting the pope’s and Bellarmine’s claim that the Jacobean oath aims at undermining the confessional purity of Catholics. Instead, the oath is narrowly tied to the immediate context of the Gunpowder Plot. Warmington writes that the oath is a convenient means for the English government to distinguish “true and faithful Catholicke” subjects from “hollow-hearted” ones—thus implicitly agreeing with James that English Catholics who refuse the oath are morally depraved, lacking the natural affection that binds the human heart to country and king.21 The Jacobean oath, moreover, is a preventive measure that correctly singles out blind obedience to the pope as the root problem.22 Warmington’s task, as he understands it, is to prove (1) that nothing beyond civil obedience is implied by the Jacobean oath, (2) that nothing contrary to the Faith is contained in the oath, and thus (3) that the pope’s breves against it may be disobeyed in good conscience.23 In order to accomplish his objective, Warmington divides his subject matter into four related topics: (1) the theological status of the pope’s deposing power, (2) the ground and scope of Catholic obedience, (3) the limits of the pope’s dispensation power, and (4) the nature of oaths. For each topic, Warmington combines broad theoretical questions (“How do we ascertain, in general, that something is de fide?”) with specific details of the Jacobean oath (“Does the Jacobean oath require me to report known priests to the government?”) in order to make his case. The result of Warmington’s analysis is to promote personal autonomy as more Catholic than blind submission to papal directives.

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Does the Jacobean oath contradict faith, as claimed in the pope’s breve? Elaborating on Blackwell’s earlier defense, Warmington invokes a wide variety of authorities to establish that “to depose princes, is no matter of faith.”24 In particular, he cites Cardinal Allen to emphasize that the pope’s deposing power “is a meere matter of Divinitie disputable in schoole, and no certaintie as yet defined by the Church, touching the Pope’s authorities in things temporall.”25 Whether direct or indirect, the pope’s deposing power is not an article of faith.26 Catholics are not required to affirm it. Are Catholics, however, required to obey papal breves? The question, Warmington says, invites two clarifications. First, papal breves are not formal definitions. According to Jean Gerson, Catholics are not required to obey a pope’s private opinion in matters that are left undetermined by the Church as a whole.27 Catholics are not even required to believe that the pope has the authority to define matters of faith, or that the pope, without a council, is inerrable in matters of faith.28 Second, “as Cardinal Toletus noteth,” it is “not a sin to disobey a superior, yea the Pope” when the superior exceeds his jurisdiction, or (citing Emanuel Sa) when the superior is misinformed or unaware of the detrimental consequences of his command (all three cases apply, in Warmington’s view, to the pope’s prohibition against the oath).29 Most importantly, Catholic authorities teach that “no man is bound to obey his superior in pure interior acts, to wit, the understanding and the will.” Thomas More, in particular, affirms that “in such things as appertaine to the inward motion of the will, a man is not bound to obey another man, but only God.” In short, the papal breves may be disobeyed without fear of sin “because no man can force any to beleeve that which is matter only of opinion, not of faith formally, unless his understanding be first convinced, that it is an infallible truth which is commanded. And this of the Oath being an inward act of the understanding, is not subject in that case to the commandment of any man, according to the doctrine of the Authors aforesaid.”30 A Catholic is not required to affirm the pope’s deposing power since it is “but a matter of opinion, diversely held of divers learned men,” but is it morally safe for him to deny it? Yes, Warmington answers, because certainty is no more required for a truthful oath than for a truthful speech act. It suffices that a person be “persuaded in his conscience upon probable reason, and in his heart thinketh it to be so as he speaketh.”31

22 In the Clink

According to Warmington, “moral veritie” not only suffices to protect against perjury, it also makes it possible for a Catholic to embrace one side of a disputed question, based on his own judgment and conscience.32 The Jacobean oath, however, requires that the pope’s deposing power be positively condemned as heretical. Moral certainty may give a Catholic the right to his own opinion, but does it give a Catholic the right to condemn the contrary opinion as heretical? The answer, in Warmington’s opinion, is again affirmative, based on the argument that moral certainty does not entail a claim of epistemic certainty. Warmington points out that the wording of the oath is subtle. The oath requires that the pope’s deposing power be positively “detested as though it were heresy,” not, strictly speaking, affirmed to be heretical as a matter of objective fact.33 In the case of the Jacobean oath, Warmington explains, another factor weighs in favor of moral certainty. Since whatever contradicts scripture is by definition heretical and since scripture explicitly commands obedience to legitimate temporal authority, English Catholics have a good scriptural reason to take the oath and no clear reason to reject it.34 In doubtful and obscure questions concerning the law of Christ, all Christians must turn to the Roman pontiff for guidance, but in cases that are “as clear as the sun in the firmament,” supported by Holy Scripture and against which nothing was ever formally decreed in any general council, there is no need to consult the pope. For example, “the duty of subjects to their lawfull princes, or of children to their parents, or of rendring to Ceasar that is Ceasars” is “expressed commanded by the Highest, wherein no power created can dispense or justly condemn the contrary.”35 When Warmington joined Blackwell and other incarcerated priests in the Clink in 1608, the Clink prison, or “Clinke on the Bank,” as the London antiquarian John Stow labels it in his 1603 edition of A survay of London, was still intimately identified with the bishop of Winchester. In 1608, the bishop of Winchester was the scholarly Thomas Bilson, who had once defended royal prerogatives against William Cardinal Allen in writing. The neighborhood surrounding the Clink prison was wretched and colorful, with place names like “Slutt’s well” and “Fowle lane.”36 Taverns, whorehouses, “hot-houses,” bear- and bull-baiting rings, and theaters flourished around the bishop’s palace, outside the city’s jurisdiction.37 The Clink had underground cells that flooded when the Thames swelled up, but also less gruesome quarters. A fellow prisoner recounts

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how Blackwell used to “come down from his chamber” on a daily basis to see his confessor.38 When Blackwell died on January 12, 1613, opponents of the oath pointed to his sudden death as God’s judgment and spread the rumor that he had recanted his opinion of the oath before expiring.39 Not so, retorted our witness, since Blackwell had long suffered from chronic shortness of breath and had always expected to die suddenly.40 On the Saturday of his death, he struggled to regain his chamber after visiting his confessor and, with the help of some fellow priests, undressed and was put to bed, where he called for last rites.41 Asked by an attending priest about the oath, Blackwell confirmed his defense of it, saying that he “did that which seemed to him more probable” and had “done nothing against his conscience.” In the presence of still more priests, who “hearing of his sodaine sickness came to his chamber,” Blackwell proclaimed himself to be a “child of the Catholike Romane Church” and formally asked God’s forgiveness if his “opinions, which he followed in his conscience and which seemed to him just and probable,” had offended Him. Our witness, a fellow priest and a fellow prisoner, clarifies that Blackwell’s last words should not be construed as implying a doubtful conscience but rather an appropriately “pious and timorous conscience,” which is to say, a firm but not dogmatic conscience. Blackwell did not, our witness points out, acknowledge any fault absolutely, but only conditionally—“if peradventure hee had offended.” Blackwell had, moreover, led an exemplary life after he had taken the oath, as many could attest.42 As for Warmington, our same witness tells us that the publication of A moderate defense put a stop to the alms he had been receiving and upon which he depended for his daily sustenance.43 Deemed a schismatic, even a heretic and apostate by vocal members of his own religious community, Warmington was reduced to petitioning King James for relief. He was transferred to the bishop of Winchester’s residence. In 1626, when Surrey constables raided the Clink, they found Warmington in his chamber with his books and beads, but they also discovered that the wall of his chamber had been “broken downe into an other room in an house adjoining the prison.”44 Warmington lived, it seems, in a sort of guarded retirement, half jailed and half free, safe both from Puritans in London and from Jesuits in Rome. He lived, in order words, according to his wish— serving God in quiet poverty. Nothing is known of the date or circumstances of his death.

24 In the Clink

Our account of Blackwell’s death and of Warmington’s fate came from the pen of a minor landlord living in Northumberland, “Roger Widdrington an English Catholike,” under whose name the Benedictine Dom Thomas Preston took part in the Catholic debate over the oath. Preston would have an enormous influence on Sancta Clara’s project of reforming Catholicism. Sancta Clara would seek him out in person, converse with him, study his writings, encourage his successors. We must therefore examine his defense of the Jacobean oath in some detail. As his pseudonym grew increasingly thin, Preston (for his safety) was confined to the Clink, where he joined his coreligionists in approximately 1613, perhaps in time to witness Blackwell’s death personally. Well known to his fellow priests as the leader of the Cassinese Benedictines and obviously well liked by the English Crown since he enjoyed a well-stocked library and a personal valet,45 Preston was called to play a pivotal role in defending the Jacobean oath against the formidable string of Jesuit theologians who condemned it. Born Roland Preston in 1567 and exiled to the Continent after a brief sojourn at Oxford,46 he had attended the English College of Rome and studied moral theology under the Jesuit teacher Gabriel Vasquez at the Roman College in the late 1580s for at least two years. Then sometime after 1587, perhaps after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Preston rebelled against the Hispanophile politics of the Jesuits of the English College and fled to Monte Cassino, where he took the Benedictine habit in 1592. At Monte Cassino, Preston’s teacher of moral theology during his novitiate was his compatriot Gregory Sayer, who had also attended Vasquez’s lectures in Rome and who had also fled the English College in protest against Jesuit politics.47 Sayer died prematurely in the Venetian monastery of San Giorgio in 1602, but Preston returned to England as a missionary in 1603. Fearful that Jesuits would lay claim to Benedictine establishments in England if James converted to the Roman religion or instituted religious tolerance, Preston was eager to revive and defend the nearly extinct English Benedictine community.48 In 1608, Preston set out to compose a treatise in defense of the Jacobean oath against Cardinal Bellarmine’s treatment, Apologia Cardinalis Bellarmini pro jure principum, apparently while living under the protection of the Venetian ambassador.49 Preston drew on Vasquez, on his compatriot and fellow Benedictine Gregory Sayer, and on the Dominican theologian

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Bartholomew of Medina to frame an elegant strategy by enlisting the theory of moral probabilism for a new cause.50 Moral probabilism had started in earnest when Bartholomew of Medina, commenting on the Prima secundae of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae (1577), raised the following question: Is there a moral obligation to follow the more probable moral opinion, or is it morally licit to follow a solidly probable moral opinion even if the opposite opinion is more probable? Bartholomew of Medina answered: “It seems to me that, if an opinion is probable, it is licit to follow it, granted that the opposite opinion is more probable” (mihi videtur quod si est opinio probabilis licitum est eam sequi, licet opposita probabilior sit).51 Vasquez had embraced Medina’s answer, probed its coherence, drew new implications favoring obedience, and clarified its premises.52 Lecturing at the Roman College on Aquinas’s Prima secundae, Vasquez emphasized the conclusion that a learned person (e.g., a priest) could safely overrule his own (more probable) moral opinion in order to follow (i.e., grant absolution based upon) someone else’s less probable moral opinion, provided it not be devoid of credibility.53 Preston’s compatriot Gregory Sayer, in turn, was eager to make sure that moral probabilism did not violate the sanctity of human conscience by implying that a person could licitly act against his or her own conscience. The voice of conscience, Sayer stressed, is “God’s herald,” derived immediately from synderesis (the innate light that inclines us to seek the good and avoid evil), lex naturalis (the natural law that gives us innate knowledge of good and evil), and recta ratio (right reason through which we participate in God’s order).54 The voice of conscience delivers, not a (true or false) speculative judgment but a practical judgment, telling us whether an action here and now is licit or prohibited. A “rightful conscience” (conscientia recta) is a judgment derived from a true syllogism, while an “erroneous conscience” (conscientia erronea) is a judgment derived from a false syllogism. Sayer’s example of a false syllogism is the Puritan’s rejection of all oaths, based on a misunderstanding of Matthew 5.55 Preston, in turn, recognized that moral probabilism and speculative uncertainty could be effectively linked, starting with the case of the Jacobean oath. Whether or not it was morally licit (probable) for a Catholic to take the oath depended, Preston argued, on the speculative status of the pope’s deposing power. Since the pope’s right to depose temporal princes

26 In the Clink

was not established speculatively beyond a reasonable doubt, Catholics had no moral duty to obey the pope in refusing to deny it. Preston’s 1611 Apologia thus culminates with the judgment, reached through lengthy arguments, that, since the pope’s deposing power is a matter of controversy and thus, at best, a merely probable opinion in the speculative sense, and since King James is in possession of his right to the English throne and has a right to his subjects’ loyalty, which is undisputed and securely founded on the natural law, English Catholics cannot refuse the oath without moral risk.56 According to Preston, it was not only morally permissible for Catholics to take the Jacobean oath despite papal disapproval, but it was also morally mandatory for them to do so based on natural law. Let us examine the objections that Preston anticipated from his opponents and the answers that he provides. First, is there not a moral rule that says that, in doubtful matters, we ought to obey our superior? The rule does not destroy his conclusion, Preston answers, since, just as the pope is our superior in spiritual matters, so the king is our superior in temporal matters. Is there not, second, a moral rule that says that, in doubtful matters, the safer position ought to be preferred and thus the position advocated by the pope, God’s vicar on earth, ought to be preferred to the position advocated by a temporal prince? The rule does not destroy his conclusion, Preston answers, because it is safer to follow a moral opinion that is absolutely certain (my duty to uphold the ruler’s moral right to his throne and the loyalty of his subjects) than a moral opinion that is doubtful (my duty not to deny the pope’s deposing power). The third objection brings us to the very heart of the matter: If a Catholic believes that it is true that the pope has the right to depose kings, is he free to deny it by means of an oath? If he takes the oath, does he not act against his own conscience, or act with a doubtful conscience, both of which are strictly forbidden by both the divine and the natural law? Preston answers that “as theologians rightly teach, a person may with a safe conscience follow an opinion that he sees to be taught by learned men who are skilled in the matter, against his own opinion. . . . Thus they teach that acting against one’s own opinion and acting against one’s own conscience are two different things.”57 Elaborating on the distinction drawn by Vasquez between intrinsic and extrinsic grounds, Preston clarifies that we are not morally obliged to base our practical decisions on our own speculative opinions. We are free

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to consider alternative views and factors. Preston explains how someone who is personally persuaded of the pope’s deposing power is nonetheless free to judge that the oath must not be refused and thus free to decide to take the oath against his own speculative opinion but not against his own moral conscience: “Even supposing that the opinion affirming the Pope’s deposing power is embraced for its own proper and intrinsic reasons, which is to say based on the thing’s own causes (ex causa rei), or based on its effects, or on the contradictions that would follow; nonetheless, it could not be overlooked at the same time . . . both that the question remains undecided among theologians and lawyers and thus awaits judgment, and, most importantly, that whoever possesses something in good faith must not be deprived of it like a criminal so long as the party challenging his right remains obscure.”58 In conclusion, Preston emphasizes that, whatever opinion an English Catholic may hold speculatively with regard to the pope’s deposing power, he can hardly be exonerated from the charge of manifest disloyalty if, under pretext of devotion to the apostolic see, he decides in practice to disregard the king’s legitimate right. A subject’s duty to his legitimate ruler is no less sacred than a Catholic’s duty to the pope and is owed regardless of any excommunication or deprivation decreed by the pope.59 Preston’s Apologia was lavishly praised by King James60 and promptly attacked by a mysterious doctor “Schulckerius” (Bellarmine) as “wholly repugnant to the Catholic faith.” Widdrington (Preston) retorted with a lengthy Responsio apologetica in 1612.61 In his defense, Preston was eager to stress that the controversy between Bellarmine and himself did not concern the simple (speculative) proposition of whether the pope has or not the power to depose kings, but rather the modal proposition of whether the pope’s deposing power is so speculatively certain, so perfectly established as instituted by Christ, that whoever holds the opposite opinion and acts on it practically exposes himself manifestly to the danger of heresy, error, and mortal sin.62 In 1613, Preston appealed more explicitly to the Catholic tradition of scholastic disputation in a new work in defense of the oath, Disputatio theologica de iuramento fidelitatis, dedicated to Pope Pius V. Eager perhaps to reach a lay audience and also to spread his teaching to his compatriots, Preston himself translated his Disputatio into English the same year, with

28 In the Clink

the title A theologicall disputation concerning the oath of allegiance.63 Preston’s principles, fusing together the speculative latitude of scholastic Catholic culture with moral probabilism, are outlined in the “Epistle Dedicatorie” to Pope Paul V. The key is that, in speculative matters, a Catholic is morally free to endorse a speculatively probable opinion: “Unless my Adversarie be able to convince, as without doubt he is not, that the opinion, which denieth the Popes power to depose Princes, is altogether improbable . . . he will never be able to demonstrate that it is most dangerous temeritie and extreme folly to adhere to that opinion.” More audaciously, Preston’s fused doctrine insists that a Catholic is morally free to endorse a speculatively probable opinion against a “more probable” one—meaning one that is endorsed by more and more qualified authorities: “According to Vasquez his doctrine, which is, as he saith, the common doctrine of the Schoolmen, it is neither follie nor temeritie, to follow a probable opinion against the more probable, the more common and the more sure opinion of the Pope and other learned men.” As the context indicates, Preston redeploys Vasquez’s moral doctrine in such a way as to include speculative opinions in its scope. Preston indeed concludes that his own expanded version of moral probabilism provides “certaine general rules, by the which, if they be well observed, any Catholike man as well unlearned as learned, may clearly perceive, how he may with a safe conscience, and without danger of temeritie, or any other crime follow both in speculation and in practice, this or that opinion, whereof there is disagreement among Catholike divines.”64 Deliberately coordinating moral action (passing judgment) with speculative opinion, Preston explains that to assent to an opinion is to judge that opinion to be true; to dissent is to judge that opinion to be false. To doubt, in turn, is to suspend judgment altogether—“As if one who knoweth not the number of stars, this question should be propounded, whether the starres be odde or even.” Thus a doubtful matter requires me morally to refrain from judging, while a disputed matter leaves me free to endorse either side. Consequently, a probable opinion that I do not share, whether practical or speculative, is an opinion that others defend whose competence I cannot dismiss. Preston explicitly defends the autonomy of the rational subject in speculative matters: a learned and conscientious man who is guided by reason is free to endorse a reasonable speculative

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opinion that he alone holds on intrinsic grounds. Preston also defends intellectual honesty and open-mindedness. He stipulates that new knowledge may discredit earlier opinions. If there is a new speculative opinion based on new grounds that convince me of its probability, I am not free to endorse the contrary opinion based solely on the authority of an ancient doctor who was not aware of the new grounds. Preston draws four conclusions: (1) since a learned divine may defend his own speculative opinion against all other divines, a fortiori he may do so if other learned divines agree with his opinion; (2) an unlearned Catholic may defend a speculative opinion that he thinks is credible and is disputed and is supported by virtuous and competent men; (3) a Catholic may safely defend a credibly credible opinion (since it is possible to doubt whether an opinion is true and at the same time be morally certain that it is credible); (4) Catholics who defend a credible opinion must not be excommunicated.65 Preston’s A theologicall disputation was greeted with an official Roman decree condemning it along with the earlier Apologia. Preston took it as a new chance to defend his approach, which his opponents described as “the most devilish device that any man could invent.”66 Accusing his Jesuit opponents of usurping the Church for their own temporal advancement, Preston articulated a general axiom and warning: “It is against the truth and puritie of the Catholicke Church, she being the piller and ground of truth, that doubtfull opinions, and which among Catholikes are only in Controversie, and by the Parliament of Paris have been condemned as scandalous, seditious, damnable and pernitious, should be enforced upon English Catholikes, as an undoubted doctrine of the Catholike Faith, to the utter overthrow of themselves and their whole posterity, by men who are in no danger to loose, but rather to gaine temporall advancement thereby.”67 Preston explained, further, the key benefit of his critical approach. When opponents maintain an opinion so violently that they will not even allow the contrary part to be debated, it is necessary, first, to show that the position that they summarily reject is in reality “questionable and disputable.” Room must be made for minority opinions to be heard. Thus, for example, before John Duns Scotus, the opinion favoring Mary’s immaculate conception was hardly probable, yet “now is adopted almost universally.” By the same token, Preston insists, “It may fall out, that in the

30 In the Clink

processe of time this opinion that denieth the Pope’s authority to depose Princes may bee embraced by almost all Ecclesiastical writers, Bishops, Religious Orders and universities.” Would civil authorities, however, view Preston’s doctrine as sufficiently safe? Preston’s Jesuit opponents, hoping to isolate him from his English protectors and from his English coreligionists, argued that his approach made him both a bad Catholic and a bad subject. Why would James sponsor an author who is willing to grant that the pope’s deposing power is speculatively probable ?68 In response, Preston clarified that, by first establishing that the pope’s deposing power is merely a disputed question and not an article of the Catholic Faith, he established that the oath could safely be taken by Catholics, without risk of jeopardizing salvation or warranting excommunication. Then, by invoking the legal principle that “in a disputable case, the state of him that is in possession is the better” together with the dictate of the natural law commanding loyalty to a legitimate ruler, he further established that the oath must be taken by English Catholics as a practical matter, here and now, regardless of speculative opinions concerning the pope’s deposing power.69 English oath-takers act on a more probable and safer conscience since the king’s right to the loyalty of his subjects is more speculatively secure than the pope’s deposing power: “The Catholikes therefore of England, who have taken the Oath, were moved from the beginning to take it, both for intrinsecall and extrinsecall grounds, that is, both for sufficient reason and probable authority. Their reason was, for that they were assuredly persuaded, that they were bound by the law of God to obey the just command of their lawful Prince.”70 The speculative freedom to discuss the pope’s deposing power is radically distinguished by Preston from the practical imperative to deny it here and now based on the certainty of the natural law.71 Preston will defend his approach further in his next two publications, of 1616 and 1619, directed against the English Jesuit Thomas Fitzherbert. Preston’s focus will be to denounce, with ever increasing urgency, the narrow, intransigent, fraudulent version of Catholicism that Jesuits have substituted for true Catholic doctrine. Outraged by the attack mounted against him, Preston will reveal his opponents’ identity openly.72 (He himself had already acknowledged being Preston, despite keeping the pseudonym of Widdrington.)73 The 1616 text (of more than 200 pages) starts by show-

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ing “that it is not safe for the conscience of Catholikes to adhere alwaies to the Pope,” and insists that “Catholikes” are morally bound to examine the whole question and indeed to read Widdrington’s books, “notwithstanding the Pope’s, or rather Card. Bellarmine’s prohibition to the contrary.” The 1619 text (of more than 300 pages) accuses Jesuits of forging, teaching, and publishing “by fraude and violence false articles of Catholike faith.” In short, by 1619, Preston had not only appropriated and reframed probabilism to urge English Catholics to take the Jacobean oath. He had invoked it to revive a traditional, pluralistic, “disputational” view of Catholic theology against Jesuit confessionalism. We will return later to Preston and the Clink. But we must now leave London for Oxford and for the Midlands, where we will finally meet the unlikely hero, or antihero, of our tale.

T H R E E

A Youth from Coventry

In April 1613, the very year that Thomas Preston was preparing to publish his A theologicall disputation, two eager youths from the ancient “liberty” of Coventry arrived in Oxford. They found their way down High Street into Magpie Lane and entered the grounds of Merton College. Their names were John and Christopher Davenport. John was sixteen years old. Christopher, in the words of his earliest biographer, Anthony à Wood, was “about fifteen years of age.”1 More than half a century later, Anthony Wood would become acquainted with Christopher in London, dine with him at Somerset House, and correspond with him.2 Wood’s account of his “good friend” in Athenae Oxonienses (1691) provides us with the few surviving fragments available to attempt a sketch of Christopher’s early years. Although Wood’s account is flawed, it deserves a careful audition, for two reasons. First, Wood greatly admired William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656),3 implying on Wood’s part a special interest in Coventry, where Dugdale was educated at a time when Christopher’s father and uncle played leading roles in the civic magistry.4 Second, when he got to know the ageing Christopher in London, Wood was actively gathering information for his project of documenting the lives of Oxford authors and viewed Christopher as a trusted 32

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source. We have evidence that Christopher answered Wood’s queries conscientiously—for example, Wood’s query regarding the date of death in Paris of the Roman Catholic theologian Christopher Bagshawe, long connected to Gloucester Hall.5 Presumably, then, much of what Wood wrote down of Christopher’s life was taken viva voce during face-to-face visits, or from written statements in answer to direct questions. In 1613, when John and Christopher Davenport arrived in Oxford, Merton College was enjoying a new golden age, as promising in its own way as the bygone era of the medieval “Calculators” Thomas Bradwardine, William of Heystbury, and Richard Swineshead. The warden of Merton College, Sir Henry Saville, translator of Tacitus and editor of John Chrysostom, was “the most conspicuous Oxonian of his day.”6 Saville had played a prominent role in helping his friend Thomas Bodley give birth to a magnificent research library that attracted scholars from every corner of Europe.7 At Merton, Saville had revitalized the practice of live theological disputations and championed the teaching of mathematics and astronomy, including of Copernicus’s heliocentric hypothesis.8 Saville had also increased the number of postmasters (undergraduate scholars) and succeeded in attracting and funding “near twyse as many felowes” as his predecessors.9 For his elite Merton fellows, Saville had constructed a handsome new “Fellows’ Quad,” described by one visitor in August 1612 as “a graceful work and the most pleasing thing” to be seen at Oxford.10 In short, thanks in no small part to Saville’s energy, worldliness, and wardenship of Merton College, Oxford in 1613 once again deserved to be praised as Athenae nostrae nobilissimae, “sun, eye and soul of England, the very source and most cleere spring of good literature and wisdome; from whence religion, civility and learning are spread most plenteously into all parts of the Realme”—or so at least Saville’s friend William Camden put it in his jubilantly patriotic Britannia.11 Freshly arrived from Coventry and from the hands of their Coventry teacher, Philemon Holland (who had translated, among other Latin works, Camden’s Britannia),12 John and Christopher breathed the lofty air of Merton College with passionate surmise. The tutor in whose care they were put, Master Samuel Lane, had been elected probationer fellow of Merton College in 1602 and full fellow and arts master in 1607.13 Familiar with the rhythms and daily life of the academic community, Master Lane dutifully

34 A Youth from Coventry

admonished the two Coventry boys to speak Latin and to wear academic robes. He led them into the Merton College chapel for daily prayers, where they stood beneath rich stained-glass windows honoring pilgrim saints and kneeling patrons. Above the door, they gazed at a curious stone carving showing Bishop Merton in the wilderness with John the Baptist, surrounded by trees, a unicorn, a rabbit, a weasel, and a lion—vestiges of a forgotten language that had once communicated wisdom to incoming students. Master Lane warned them against the lure of alehouses in town, stressed the danger of tobacco and the indecency of wearing their hair longer than their ears. He reminded them that students were forbidden to be entertained in the houses of townsmen, lest they be led astray by adventurers or by the many papists still haunting Oxfordshire.14 Six years earlier, in 1607, Saville had decided to admit to Merton twelve “knights and gentlemen of great name” as commoners, but he would soon regret the decision and rescind it, which he did in July 1616, on the grounds that the merry sons of the nobility imperiled scholarly discipline.15 Details of what bothered Saville emerge in retrospect. Gentlemen “of great name,” it seems, too often skipped “disputations and lectures,” ran up exorbitant bills, and wandered about the college as they pleased, disturbing the peace.16 Master Lane’s two Davenport pupils, frugal and obscure, were not enrolled as commoners but as battelers. This meant, among other things, that the two Davenport boys saved money by purchasing their meals from the kitchen rather than dine like gentlemen in the common hall.17 Saville, who in May 1613 was in residence at Merton College not only as Isaac Casaubon’s host but also to keep watch over the Bodleian Library in the wake of Thomas Bodley’s recent death, was notified of the two Davenport boys’ irregular arrangements and was displeased. Indeed he “dismissed them unless they would become Commoners.”18 The boys’ parents were petitioned but refused to pay higher fees—or so at least Wood reports, presumably based on Christopher’s firsthand account decades later.19 The anecdote brings to light some of the color and texture of early modern Oxford as the university sought to accommodate “polite learning” alongside scholarship.20 Presumably, Saville’s chief concern was collecting fees. Yet by 1613 he must already have had incipient doubts about the desirability of admitting “gentlemen” commoners.21 Why, then, did he insist that the two modest and well-supervised battelers become commoners?

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Did he really wish to increase the unruly group of commoners, or did he hope that including frugal “middling” boys among them would help to tone down some of the bad behaviors? Did he feel cheated of revenue, having assumed that Master Lane’s two pupils would be admitted as commoners from the start? Since Saville issued the ultimatum that they become commoners or depart, he presumably had reason to believe that the Davenport family could afford the higher fees. Perhaps he had been told that the boys’ grandfather, Edward Davenport, had been mayor of Coventry in 1551, that their uncle Christopher had been mayor in 1603, and that their father, Henry Davenport, had just been elected mayor in 1613. There was even a rumor that Henry had staged an “admirable Stratagem,” a mock battle at the Coventry Cross featuring English, Irish, Scottish, and Spanish knights in regalia, symbolically battling to slay Death, with Henry’s son Barnaby acting as chief standard bearer, unfurling the colors of Coventry to the wind, so, surely, there was not such great a shortage.22 Did Saville suspect that the Davenport family was deliberately choosing humility, as though affirming in their sons the social gospel of the Evangelical preacher Richard Eaton, who liked to remind his Coventry flock that “there shall be no difference between the rich and the poor in the grave”?23 Indeed, since the Davenport family was given the option of upgrading the boys’ status, why did they refuse? Were they really unable to pay higher fees? Or were they unwilling to sponsor a more “gentlemanly” lifestyle? Pewterers and drapers by trade, the Coventry Davenports likely conceived of their sons’ university education on the model of apprenticeship. From their point of view, Master Lane was paid tuition to keep a vigi lant eye on the boys, requiring soundly menial tasks of them along with progress in Latin—lest they forget their precarious place as unprivileged youngsters in a harsh world. What possible benefit would derive from paying for them to dine with idle young knights? Faced with Saville’s order of dismissal, the two youths found themselves suddenly at a crossroads. Their tutor, Samuel Lane, reacted wisely and pragmatically. He had recently been elected first dean.24 He knew that Saville would soon return to Eton, where he was provost and where he was required, by statute, to reside. Moreover, the subwarden, Nathaniel Brent, was away in France.25 So Master Lane decided simply to ignore the warden’s displeasure and to keep his two Davenport pupils at Merton

36 A Youth from Coventry

College, at least until further notice. A year later, in May 1614, when Lane was elected principal of the postmasters,26 John and Christopher were still under his care at Merton.27 By taking the matter into his own hands and quietly ignoring Saville’s authority, Lane might have taught the two boys a worthy lesson about quiet resistance. In the event, John transferred to Magdalen Hall early in 1615, where he was exposed, Wood tells us, to “a severe and puritanical discipline for some time,” with the result that he “became afterwards a noted Puritan.”28 The younger Christopher, who also transferred to Magdalen Hall but delayed the transfer to later in 1615, reacted to Puritanism in a very different way. According to Wood, John and Christopher were brothers.29 Not only does Wood assert that John was Christopher’s “elder brother” in the biographical sketches of Athenae Oxonienses, but he also asserts it in his history of Oxford.30 Recent biographers have rejected Wood’s claim, pointing out that family records do not support it and that Wood’s account is so confused that it manages to make John into both Christopher’s brother and Christopher’s father.31 The romance of two brothers close in age choosing radically opposite belief systems, John the Puritan and Christopher the Franciscan, like a living image of England’s fratricidal war, may have proved, it seems, irresistible to Wood’s imagination.32 The most recent theory is that John was Christopher’s uncle, not his brother.33 On this theory, Christopher the future Franciscan was the son of John’s older brother, Barnabas. The theory, however, must be discarded, since Barnabas was christened in July 1586 and was not old enough to have fathered a son of Christopher’s age.34 Is it possible to salvage Wood’s claim that John and Christopher were brothers without violating known dates and facts? As Wood reports, and as local records confirm, John Davenport (John the Puritan) was born in Coventry in 1597, on April 9. The joy of the new birth quickly turned to grief as John’s mother, Winifred, died from the complications of her labor and was buried three days later, on April 12.35 John’s bereaved father, Henry, was suddenly left to manage his cloth business alone, with three underage sons (the oldest, Barnaby, was eleven) and a newborn baby. Times were difficult in Coventry for the cloth trade,36 and famine was widespread.37 Although Henry had the moral support of an extended family, with four prosperous older brothers living in Coventry, he remarried after a short

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six-month mourning period. The strength of his Protestant faith, the immediate existential needs of his newborn son, the example of distant forebears, and the urgency of daily life, all conspired to draw Henry out of despondency and focus his efforts on the task of living.38 Henry’s new bride, Elizabeth Bennett, was the daughter of a fellow clothier from Ebley, near Gloucester.39 We have indirect evidence that the new couple was in love— “sympathetically attuned” to each other, as Christopher would one day reveal in a philosophical treatise. When Elizabeth, pregnant with Christopher, traveled briefly back to Ebley Court to be at her father’s death bed in 1598, her husband, Henry, in distant Coventry, felt the baby move inside her womb.40 Elizabeth’s child was born in June 1598. He was Henry Davenport’s sixth son and was named Christopher—a cherished Davenport name. Henry had already named his third son Christopher, christened eight years earlier, on October 1, 1590. Is it believable that the same name would be given to two half brothers? The idea offends our modern sensibility, but in a world of frequent and sudden mortality, the sensibility might have been different. Henry’s brother Thomas named two of his sons William, born five years apart. The second William was known as “William the Younger.”41 Henry, in turn, was eager that his own name, “Henry,” live on after him, since he named two of his sons “Henry,” although in succession, so that he had only one living son named Henry after 1619.42 The name Christopher had a special meaning, evoking an ideal of civic leadership. Not only did Henry wish to honor his own older brother, Christopher, who had been sheriff of Coventry in 1592, but he also wished to com memorate their father’s charismatic cousin, Christopher Davenport of Woodford, who had married into a political family (Sir William Gerard, lord chancellor of Ireland) and had been buried in the ancestral chapel of Prestbury in January 1593, five years before Christopher’s birth.43 This Christopher had been named, in turn, for an earlier Christopher Davenport of Woodford, who had married Emma Blount and who had been named for his maternal grandfather, Sir Christopher Savage of Clifton, a mayor of Macclesfield, who had died at the battle of Flodden Field in 1513. Further back, there was the Christopher Davenport who had married Alicia Arderne in 1415, marking a fresh beginning for England after the debacle of King Richard II.

38 A Youth from Coventry

Beyond this earliest Christopher, the reassuring image of town magistrates gave way to more frightening figures, foresters and archers, knights and murderers, Vivians and Thomases, all the way back to the quasimythical Gilbert de Venables, from whom Christopher and Alicia both descended. From Christopher to Christopher, the fragmented story of a younger Davenport branch descending from lesser sons was not only saved from oblivion but also symbolically redeemed from the dark ages and civilized into town sheriffs and burgesses. Fifth son of a younger son of a junior branch, set adrift into the world to earn a living by the sweat of his brow, the struggling cloth-maker from Coventry commemorated the name Christopher not once but twice, in defiance of extinction. The name Christopher, like a bag of ancestral bones worn close to the heart, possessed talismanic properties. Wood’s account, it turns out, contains much syntactical truth. John and Christopher were half brothers. Christopher’s father, Henry (not John), was indeed, as Wood states, the fifth son of Edward (not Henry), who was indeed “grandson to a younger Brother of the Davenports of Henbury in Cheshire.” And Christopher’s mother’s name was indeed Elizabeth (Bennett, not Wooley). Similarly, the Warwickshire Visitation of 1619, taken by William Camden, is truthful, but incomplete. Camden correctly recorded the “Henbury-Venables” root that was devoutly transmitted by the Coventry Davenports from generation to generation. Camden also correctly recorded that Edward Davenport, mayor of Coventry in 1551, had had at least two sons, Christopher and Henry, yet he made no mention of Edward’s four other sons, such as Richard, who died without issue before 1612, or the godly Thomas, who quarreled with Lady Leigh of nearby Stoneleigh Abbey.44 The 1619 Visitation shows that Henry’s brother Christopher was without issue, even though he was married to Agnes Hopkins, from the Hopkins family of Palace Yard. The Visitation also faithfully reports that Henry fathered John the Puritan through his first wife, Wini fred, and that Henry remarried “Elizabeth Bennet, daughter of Thomas Bennet of Ebley Court.” The Visitation attests, moreover, that Henry’s second marriage was fruitful, since the couple bore a son, Henry, sometime before 1619. No fewer than four Christophers appear in Camden’s 1619 record of the Coventry Davenports, yet not one of them is a possible candidate for

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Christopher the Franciscan, whose life Wood summarizes in Athenae Oxonienses.45 If our supposition is correct, if Christopher the Franciscan was indeed Henry’s son by Elizabeth Bennett, born just a year and two months after John, why is he absent from the 1619 Visitation? By 1619, as we shall see, Christopher had illegally fled England, converted to the Roman Catholic Church, joined the Franciscan Order, and changed his name to Franciscus à Sancta Clara. Family and neighbors in Coventry were careful not to mention Christopher’s disgraceful existence because Christopher’s worthy half brother, John, had just been made curate at St. Lawrence Jewry in London.46 A conspiracy of silence thus greeted Camden’s inquiries concerning the Coventry Davenport family. Camden was told of the two Coventry aldermen and of Henbury and of the Venables. He was told of the godly John, but not a word was said about Christopher, Henry’s first son by Elizabeth Bennet. Growing up in Coventry, Christopher was exposed to powerful religious forces, plagues, famine, wars—which the proud walls and stubborn common sense of Coventry held at bay. Stars shone fitfully above the spire of St. Michael’s, sometimes overshadowed by comets, “with Great Smoake seen in the Air out of which came great flashes of fire.”47 From his childhood in Coventry, Christopher would keep a lifelong fascination for atmospheric phenomena along with a dose of skepticism. In 1599, after three years of scarcity, corn was again plentiful in Coventry, as though Christopher’s birth had brought providence back—or so his mother Elizabeth perhaps communicated with a gesture and smile to the two small infants whom she cradled lovingly on her lap.48 In 1601, Christopher’s father was granted one of two fifteen-year licenses to produce “Belle-Armantières cloth,” a soft woolen cloth to protect the body against night “rigours,” originally manufactured in Flanders.49 In 1602 and 1603, when “a great plague” killed nearly 500 persons, including “almost all the inhabitants of Dead Lane,”50 the family was spared. Christopher’s father and relatives helped to organize relief and distribute alms levied proportionally on all Coventry citizens. Political events intruded on town life. On the critical day of March 26, 1603, Christopher’s uncle Christopher was mayor of Coventry. Dressed in scarlet robes and surrounded by his magistrates dressed up in the same regalia, Christopher’s uncle proclaimed James Stuart king of England at

40 A Youth from Coventry

Cross Cheaping. Christopher’s father, Henry, sheriff of the city, stood at his brother’s side, perhaps with his two small sons in tow. The great Lord Berkeley from Caludon Castle, whose wife had occult powers, was also there.51 Christopher was too young to understand the event, but he imbibed the solemn pageantry, the resolve of adults standing anxiously together for orderly succession against invisible threats, and their collective strength symbolized by the civic stone cross that embodied the freedom of Coventry, connecting the living to heaven.52 The peaceful transfer of the English crown to the Scottish king soon brought a secret dread. There were rumors that the new monarch favored Catholics. The legend of the new king’s Catholic mother, the unfortunate Mary Queen of Scots, was well known to Christopher’s relatives, since she had been imprisoned in Coventry, first in the “Bull Inn” and then in St. Mary’s Hall.53 As though to reassure his Protestant subjects of Coventry and win their stout hearts, King James entrusted his little daughter, the Lady Elizabeth, to the care of Lord and Lady Harington of nearby Combe Abbey. In April 1604, the little princess visited Coventry, accompanied by her noble guardians and “divers other English and Scotch Ladies.” They were met at Gibbetts Ash by “the Mayor and Aldermen in their formalityes.” Christopher, now six, watched as the “Mayor lighted off his horse and kissed the Ladyes hand” and the whole group “came forward in great order to ye Citty,” with Lord Harington in front. The festive procession wound its way slowly past “all ye companies standing in ye street” to St. Michael’s, where John Tovey preached a sermon, then to St. Mary’s Hall, where Her Grace “satt and dined” and was given a gold cup. Then the procession took the little princess “round the Cross and down to the Library, to which she gave moneys” and through the city back and forth until a final stop at Gosford Gate, where the mayor again kissed her hand.54 The nobility, in short, was invited in, honored, and then firmly escorted out. Coventrians were wary of outside interference. Like dense family names and interlocked ties of kinship, civic rituals constructed a visible order against chaos. Or did they serve mainly to mask latent violence? A year later, on a wild November day, the same little princess Elizabeth was rushed to Coventry for her safety. Wicked papists were plotting to seize her from Combe Abbey and plunge England into war. The royal child, fated to become the “winter queen” of Bohemia and

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the gallant standard-bearer of Protestant Europe, was lodged at Palace Yard, the house of Christopher’s cousins.55 Christopher felt the danger, sensed the resolve of his family and of the citizens of Coventry to protect her. He saw neighbors and magistrates put on armor, seize weapons, and guard the royal child with their lives. Set me as a seal upon thine heart. After the danger had passed, Thomas Cooper preached a sermon of Thanksgiving at Holy Trinity, where the Davenport family worshipped. Cooper praised the magistrates of Coventry for protecting a “gracious Princess” and denounced “the Romish spider, with his Web of Treason.” He reminded his Christian friends and auditors of the Spanish Armada and of cruel Catholics who intended to deceive and snare them with “wicked subtill stratagems.”56 In April 1607, Coventry suffered a strange flood. Clusters of white snails were found in the houses and in the trees when the waters receded, perhaps driven by a mysterious sympathy to find one another and cling together for survival.57 The same year, a comet appeared in the sky, desperate rebellions spread over the Midlands in protest against enclosures, and the drapers and mercers of Coventry locked horns in a bitter fight.58 In 1608, the same year that the King’s Players came to town to perform Hamlet or Macbeth or the Tragedy of King Lear, the godly voices of Coventry grew louder. A crucifix, the “picture of a dead Christ,” was removed from the cross at Bablake church and destroyed. Ghosts of a suppressed world haunted Coventry, their ancient shrines profaned, their stones scattered.59 The Old Religion, reviled and unburied, lurked in the shadows, all at once repulsive and fascinating. Christopher learned that the relative for whom he had been named, Christopher Davenport of Woodford, had ceased to attend the Protestant church a whole decade before his death.60 Seductive tales of the suppressed Franciscans and of mystery plays surfaced dangerously. The Davenport family, plagued by persistent tales of recusant relatives at Bramhall, clung to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. In 1611, when Christopher was thirteen, a wrathful King James ordered the citizens of Coventry to receive Communion kneeling, which “caused the grief of many.”61 Tempers were quickly soothed, however, by Prince Henry’s visit the following year in 1612, especially as the royal heir “supped at St. Mary Hall att night, and lay att Mr. Breers in Little Park Street.” Prince Henry, who often visited his sister Elizabeth at Combe Abbey, had won every Protestant heart.

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He was a godly young man, people said to each other in streets and at home, a future king in whose hands England would prosper. When Prince Henry died unexpectedly on November 6, 1612, Coventry was distraught. By 1612, John and Christopher had studied for many years in the Coventry Free Grammar School, under the care of the schoolmasterphysician and humanist Philemon Holland.62 In a room “heated by coal and illuminated by candles,”63 the two boys sat in fifteenth-century oak stalls that had been rescued from the suppressed Whitefriars monastery. They listened to Holland discourse on Livy, on Plutarch, on Pliny’s Naturall Historie, and Suetonius’s Historie of the Twelve Caesars. Philemon Holland had translated these literary monuments into English himself. His gentle voice conveyed Greek and Roman lore to the young Midlanders as if it had all happened yesterday. Charmed by the sound of ancient stories, Christopher felt the smooth wood of the oak under his hands and pictured Roman legions as they receded from Coventry, leaving in their wake the skill to build beautiful arched doorways, which survived in local convents and monasteries, taught from father to son. Leofric, Lord of Mercia before the Norman Conquest, had endowed a convent in Coventry to please his pious wife, Godiva. Leofric’s great-nephew Wolfric had given land, in turn, to Glastonbury Abbey, founded at the dawn of the Christian era by Joseph of Arimathea. Legends entered into Christopher’s imagination like a slow-burning fire. On the oak stalls where Christopher now sat, a craftsman had depicted scenes of the Last Judgment. Anxiously, Christopher remembered that his own grandfather Edward had saved the papist ornaments of Trinity church from sacrilege under Edward VI, hiding them in the timbered walls of his house. In 1612, Holland was already a venerable old man of sixty and had only recently been admitted to the freedom of Coventry. He lived a frugal life and had amassed no wealth. As Christopher knew, his treasure had been to correspond with William Camden when he translated Camden’s Britannia in 1610. And when Holland was invited to visit Lady Harington at Combe Abbey, he strolled with her under great refreshing elms where Cistercians had walked not so long ago, detached from petty concerns. In the Republic of Letters, where knowledge weighs more heavily than birth or wealth, Christopher saw that there was freedom, brotherhood, dignity. Whenever Holland explained the elusive meaning of Latin words, his old

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wise eyes shone like ambers. Holland was not a sad man. On the contrary, he made light of misery. He soared above daily vexations. Did it matter that he had to continue working on Latin translations, in his old age, to earn his daily bread? Let your light shine before men. When Christopher became Samuel Lane’s pupil at Merton College in 1613, the very vitality of Oxford’s renewal had kindled new religious tensions. In 1606, a fellow of St. John’s College named William Laud had scandalized the community by preaching a “popish, or at least popishlyaffected” sermon at St. Mary’s. 64 Merton College had responded swiftly, mobilizing eight Merton fellows to refute a cluster of Roman Catholic claims. The subwarden of Merton College, Nathaniel Brent, opened the charge by denying that “the Roman pope aided by a Council” is qualified to judge scripture. Leonard Yate, Williot scholar for the year, proved, in turn, that “Sacred Scripture by itself is sufficient for establishing articles of the faith without the authority and commentary of the church.” Master Lee, head-dean, showed that “everything that is necessary for salvation is contained in Scripture.” As for Master Gulston, who would eventually become a noted medical scholar, his task was to ascertain that “the Pope is not the visible head of the church but, rather, anti-Christ,” to which Master Talbot added that “it was not the Roman Pontif ’s prerogative to call a general Council and preside over it.” The list continues, including rejecting Catholic inerrability and the requirement of celibacy for Christian clergy.65 Lane, who had just been graduated from arts bachelor to arts master and elected third dean, not only attended the debates but played an active part in supervising how the debates were prepared.66 The theological disputations through which Oxford masters sought to block cryptopapism required, of necessity, that Roman Catholic arguments be carefully studied and mastered. Calvinist vigilance thus prompted a new level of exposure to Catholic doctrine. In 1606, Francis Walsingham “caught the Catholic faith” by perusing Robert Parsons’s Defensio censurae while “studiously labouring” to refute an opponent.67 In 1608, Henry Eccles, a famous Oxford preacher, converted to the Catholic Faith as a result of studying Catholic doctrine too closely.68 A wide range of viewpoints thus emerged, confessional lines became increasingly porous. In 1610, John Mason, fellow of Corpus Christi College, “imprudently fell” into papism during his exercises for bachelor in divinity. He was forced to recant—to

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reject all papistical heresy as abhorrent—in order to obtain his degree.69 The incident almost certainly came to Master Lane’s attention since John Mason’s brother, Francis, had been a fellow of Merton and had since become a key defender of the English Church. Lane, like Mason before him, attracted Saville’s support because of his predilection for mathematics.70 In 1609, when Lane was assigned the task of conducting philosophical “variations,” he tackled as his first question a cutting-edge question of astronomy, namely, “whether the earth moves in a circular motion.” Lane answered in the affirmative: terra moveatur circulariter? Affirmat.71 Presumably, Lane had prepared for the question by studying Ptolemy’s Almagest with the help of Saville’s lecture notes, in which Saville praised Copernicus as the “prince of modern mathematicians” and conducted a systematic comparison of Ptolemy’s model to Copernicus’s model.72 At Saville’s suggestion, Lane may also have consulted the treatise published in 1601 by Saville’s friend and former Merton fellow John Chamber, praising astronomy, Melanchthon, and Peucer, while refuting judicial astrology.73 Saville may also have encouraged Lane to consult Mason’s treatise on astronomy, composed at Merton College when Mason was a fellow two decades earlier.74 Finally, Saville may have encouraged Lane to visit the celebrated mathematician Thomas Allen at Gloucester Hall, one of Saville’s key collaborators for the Bodleian Library. Allen had amassed a treasure trove of scientific manuscripts, including works by medieval authors once associated with Merton College, where he, Allen, had been trained in mathematics.75 If Lane ever visited Allen, he would likely have been told the story that Allen had once learned from “old Dr Barnes of Merton College,” that Sir Henry Billingsley, mayor of London and onetime Oxford student, had shamelessly plagiarized medieval manuscripts dispersed at the Reformation to publish The First English Euclid in his own name.76 The point of the story was to contest a certain kind of self-glorifying and biased Reformation narrative. To Allen, in particular, the story revealed a deep injustice and a sort of collective amnesia. Oxford had always championed mathematics. Oxford masters like Saville, Mason, and Lane followed in Roger Bacon’s footsteps. They stood on the shoulders of giants—of suppressed Catholic giants. Oxford, even more deeply than Coventry, was haunted by unburied ghosts.77

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Whether or not he discussed astronomy with Allen or consulted Allen’s scientific manuscripts, Lane did not disappoint Saville’s expectations. He publicly defended the earth’s circular motion in 1610, and Saville continued giving him special support, awarding him, in particular, the Hamsterley chaplaincy in August 1615.78 Saville no doubt approved of Lane’s combined pursuit of mathematics and divinity, since the formula had secured good placements in the past for Merton fellows.79 Mason stood as the role model. Born into a modest family, Mason had been elected a fellow of Merton College in 1587 thanks to his manifest mathematical ability and had since won the admiration and financial support of King James. In 1607, Mason had published a book defending the rituals and ceremonies of the English Church, arguing (against Puritans and Presbyterians) that the English Church has every authority to “make Canons and constitutions concerning things indifferent”—such as requiring the faithful to kneel for Communion, as King James had personally ordered to be done in recalcitrant Coventry. In 1613, when Christopher first arrived at Oxford, Mason published a new book vindicating English ordination, this time against Roman Catholics. Mason sent the book as a gift to Merton College,80 with a handwritten note expressing his gratitude. The note recounted how the archbishop of Canterbury, delighted with Mason’s arguments, had summoned Romanist priests to refute Mason’s evidence supporting the apostolic authority of the English primate.81 During the academic year that stretched from August 1614 to August 1615, Lane was put in charge of postmasters. Since Lane was pursuing a bachelor’s in divinity, he presumably exposed Merton undergraduates, including his pupil Christopher, not only to the critical philosophical questions of the day, such as whether or not the future could be conjectured based on the stars (no) and whether or not “Jesuits corrupt the sciences” (yes),82 but also to some of the pressing theology questions that were being debated by Oxford divines. A two-pronged strategy of vindicating the English via media against all possible competitors had emerged, based on proving that the established English Church was sufficiently purified of pagan idolatry to merit the adhesion of Christians, yet sufficiently “sacramental” to satisfy Catholics. By 1614, James’s government was far more concerned with achieving religious stability than with protecting the purity of Calvinist doctrine.

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Oxford still harbored vivid foci of dissent. In 1613, an ecclesiastical commission visiting Gloucester Hall had reported that some of the senior fellows, including Allen, were “found deficient in the required observances.”83 The same year, Daniel Price, spokesman of the late Prince Henry’s followers, argued in vesperiis that “papistical religion must not be tolerated in a free republic of Protestants.”84 In 1615, on Shrove Sunday, William Laud again preached a scandalous sermon at St. Mary’s, in which he called Presbyterians “as bad as papists.” On Easter Sunday, in retaliation, Laud was publicly berated for a whole hour.85 The fight between Arminianism (“as about this time they began to call it”) and Calvinism had begun.86 To Christopher, who had witnessed the grief of Puritans forced to kneel for Communion in Coventry and the dangerous bitterness of Catholic recusants fined and despoiled for their conscience, the choice between Arminianism and Calvinism spelled chronic insecurity. The English Crown threatened to reduce religion to a stultifying show of insular uniformity, while Calvinists threatened to fragment religion into as many zealous sects as there were preachers. Cut off from the Continent, allied to narrow Calvinist agitators everywhere, England would lose all coherence and sink into desolation—much as Coventry had fallen into misery following the destruction of its monasteries and chantries.87 When and where did Christopher encounter the Roman priest who, in Wood’s words, “invited” him to go off to Douay? What is most noteworthy about Wood’s account is its lack of details about Christopher’s Catholic contact, as though the priest’s name and place of residence “in or near” Oxford could not be revealed, even decades later.88 A good possibility, of course, is that the priest in question was associated with Holywell Manor, owned by Merton College since the days of Walter de Merton, and leased by Merton College to the notoriously recusant Napper family. 89 Samuel Lane, with his servant-student Christopher in tow, would have had numerous occasions to visit Holywell Manor, or to interact with Master William Napper on matters of college business.90 Napper’s brother, George Napper, had been expelled from Corpus Christi College for recusancy in 1568. Having fled to Douay and returned a priest in 1603, he was jailed in Oxford castle and then hanged, drawn, and quartered in Oxford on November 9, 1610.91 George Napper’s head was “impaled on the steeple of Christ Church and his quarters upon the four gates of the city.”92 In spite

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of the harsh example, pious hands had come to steal his relics under the cover of night and bury them in some unknown place. In 1612, William Napper’s sister-in-law Joyce was sent to prison for recusancy and for sheltering priests at Holywell Manor.93 Her daughter Ursula Napper would eventually become a nun, and two of her sons, William and Charles, would one day join the Franciscans of St. Bonaventure’s in Douay— Christopher’s own convent.94 Did Christopher, in a youthful paroxysm of ideality, identify with the victims? Did he yearn for perfect union with a torn and martyred God—encompassing all at once abjection and glory? There was also Gloucester Hall, where, in 1613, as we saw, Allen lived with a number of elderly recusant friends, and where, in Wood’s words, “lovers of the Catholic religion” had long “retired for their quiet.95 If Lane ever visited Allen to discuss the earth’s motion or to borrow scientific manuscripts, and if indeed he took his faithful batteler with him, Christopher would have been exposed not only to a picturesque astrologer but to an antiquary who embodied a distinctly Erasmian form of Church papism and mild recusancy.96 In retrospect, invisible but multiple ties emerge that may have connected Christopher to Gloucester Hall and to Allen. First, the benefactor of Gloucester Hall, Sir Thomas White, had also been a main benefactor of the city of Coventry. In both cases, White’s grants had aimed partly at preserving ancient priories from further destruction.97 Entering the grounds of the old Benedictine establishment at Oxford would have reminded Christopher of the Coventry priory and the ancient choir stalls in which he once sat as an schoolboy.98 Christopher also knew from his alderman family that White had endowed St. John’s College, his pride and joy, with revenues from Coventry.99 Second, since Allen was known as an antiquary, Christopher may have heard of Allen from Philemon Holland. The great William Camden, who had so closely collaborated with Holland when the Coventry schoolmaster translated his Britannia in 1610, valued Allen as a personal friend and fellow archivist. Lane, in turn, would have seen Camden and Allen interact at Thomas Bodley’s funeral in March 1613, shortly before Christopher’s arrival at Merton College. The point is that, if Lane had any reason to visit Allen at Gloucester Hall, Christopher may well have asked to come along. Allen, who in 1614 was seventy-four years old, was famously eager to encourage youth. Had Christopher been brought along to see him,

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Allen would have quickly discovered Christopher’s ties to Holland and to Coventry, but also Christopher’s kinship with the Blount family of Burtonupon-Trent, closely tied to his own Allen family of Uttoxeter.100 And did Christopher know that Richard Blount, from the Leicestershire branch of the Blount family, had chosen Douay over Oxford and was now a Jesuit priest? By the summer of 1615, Christopher’s prospects at Oxford had grown marvelously uncertain. Lane, his protector at Merton College, was pressed for time, working towards his divinity degree. In particular, Lane had to focus on the daunting task of defending “true” Catholic doctrine (Church of England doctrine) against the Council of Trent, but without empowering heretics (Presbyterians) in the process.101 To defend the theses that were required of him, Lane had to study everything from conciliar theory to the conceptual latitude allowed by Calvin’s theory of predestination. In April 1615, Lane felt overwhelmed and asked to be excused from the exercise.102 In June, Lane was presented for the Ibston rectory.103 In August, Saville visited Merton College and convoked senior fellows for a meeting. He made Lane, as we saw, Hamsterley chaplain, presumably to free up his time from teaching. In April 1616, Saville again visited Merton College, convoked his fellows, and, this time, among other items of business, asked the fellows to support his decision to nominate Lane for the half rectorship of Gamlingay.104 In short, not only was Saville often on the premises of Merton College between August 1615 and April 1616, he was also actively concerned with Lane’s progress. Christopher’s tutor at Merton College was preparing to move on.105 Although Wood does not report it, Christopher seems to have transferred to Magdalen Hall, maybe as late as August 1615, when Saville visited Merton and awarded Lane additional financial support.106 The transfer was not all negative. At Magdalen Hall, Christopher was exposed to the strident Puritanism of John Wilkinson, former Merton fellow, Hebraist, and principal of Magdalen Hall. Wilkinson had personally tutored Prince Henry, hero of Coventry Protestants, when the prince was matriculated at Magdalen Hall in 1605, the very year that the prince’s little sister, Elizabeth, had been rushed to Coventry for her safety against papist traitors.107 In 1614, Wilkinson had earned his divinity degree by defending staunchly Calvinist theses in vesperiis, including the thesis that “all of the works performed by the unregenerated are sins.”108 More importantly, Christopher

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was also exposed to the godly William Pemble, who was reader and tutor at Magdalen Hall in 1615.109 A fervent believer in predestination who read scripture in Hebrew and Greek, Pemble was also a convinced Aristotelian and an active member of a broad Aristotelian community. He encouraged a convivial approach to natural philosophy, based on observation, shared rationality, and common sense. 110 Studying in Pemble’s sphere of influence, Christopher would have learned all sorts of interesting philosophical facts (for example that the generation of living beings does not, absolutely speaking, require semen/seed since “putrid matter” suffices)111 and the names of the best philosophical authorities, for example, Jacobus Zabarella.112 There were also staunchly Jacobean theologians in residence at Magdalen Hall, such a Samuel Clarke, who proceeded B. D. in 1616 by defending the divine right of kings and the Jacobean oath.113 Either as Lane’s pupil, or at Magdalen Hall, or both, Christopher likely encountered Richard Field’s masterpiece, Of the Church, Five Books, freshly reprinted by Nicholas Okes in 1614. Field was a friend of Saville’s and a former student at Magdalen Hall.114 Since he had been a notorious theology disputant at Oxford in the late 1580s, when Saville became warden of Merton College, Saville may have urged Lane to consult Of the Church for help in preparing his theology exercises, especially with regard to refuting the Council of Trent.115 Field developed a remarkable strategy for vindicating the English Church against the Council of Trent without providing ammunition to Calvinists. Denouncing Rome as increasingly sectarian, Field argued that the very essence of the apostolic Christian church lies in its universality.116 The distinct errors to which Rome so stubbornly clung were more often than not the “private fancies and conceipts of particular men” rather than the Church’s constantly received positions.117 A case in point was papal infallibility, which its recent proponents wanted to impose as apostolic doctrine but which had consistently been denied by the majority of Christians and thus, at best, was “onley a matter of probable dispute.”118 The test of Christian truth, Field asserted, is what is held by “the whole number of believers that are, and have been, since Christ appeared in the flesh.” Conversely, error, which is “an aberration, declining, or swarving from the truth once delivered,” implied “a kinde of particularity and novelty.”119 Most remarkably, Field did not shun the fallibilist position that his approach entailed. To those who accused him of “making the whole Church

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subject to error,” Field responded that the universal Christian church, taken to mean the indivisible community of all believers that ever were, are now, and will be in the future, cannot err regarding what is necessary for salvation, granted that individual theologians are always, as such, liable to err.120 Consistent in his view, Field submitted his writings to the archbishop of Canterbury for censure. Implicitly, the episcopal hierarchy is needed to safeguard the catholicity of Christian truth against “noveltie and singularity.” Rome, in effect, had allowed “the private fancies and concepts of particular men” to subvert Christian doctrine. Canterbury, not Rome, had become the living heart and mind and guardian of God’s eternal and universal church.121 Not everyone felt the strength of his fervor. In spite of the coherence of Field’s attempt to marginalize Rome, in spite of the high-minded appeal of his ecumenical vision, something seemed stubbornly to lack in the English Church, stripped of its larger Catholic context and of its religious orders. By 1615, rumors abounded in Oxford of Benjamin Carier’s conversion to Rome, only the latest and the most spectacular of such defections.122 Suddenly left unsupervised,123 exposed to conflicting religious views, full of curiosity for the great forbidden world that lay beyond the shores of England, Christopher could not bring himself to share his half brother’s Calvinist faith or to embrace the utopic expectations of the evangelical saints who gathered at Magdalen Hall. Instead, filled with uncertainty, he gravitated to the taverns where Catholic recusants lurked—the Star, the Blue Boar, the Mitre, and the Dolphin.124 Dependent on his parents financially for his education and bereft of patrons in high places, Christopher may have decided, with the despairing grit of youth, to act boldly—to take command of his own destiny, come what may. Wood, remarkably, makes no mention of a religious conversion. He reports only that Christopher, by “the invitation of some priest living in or near Oxford,” went off to Douay in the year 1615. Did some inner sign, or private illumination, or powerful affection of the heart prompt Christopher to accept the invitation? Was he seduced by some small Catholic handbook smuggled to him on his way back from Holywell? Perhaps he was exposed to Daniel Powell’s translation from the Spanish of “The Ransom of Time”—Andrès de Soto’s lyrical Franciscan call to the good life, published in London in 1608. Perhaps he was given a

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copy of Anthony Browne’s 1610 translation of the Life of the Holie Father S. Francis, suffused with the gold light of Umbria.125 Or was Christopher given The Life and Martyrdom of M. Edmund Gennings? Written by John Gennings, a “middling” boy from the Midlands like himself, the book had recently been published and recounted the author’s miraculous conversion following his brother Edmund’s martyrdom.126 Gifted with an ardent imagination, Christopher may well have been stirred by Gennings’s description of premonitory marvels written mysteriously in the moody English sky. By 1615, John Gennings had been professed into the Franciscan Order by William Stanney, the last member of the ancient English province that had once made Oxford illustrious.127 With the financial support of Anthony Browne (second Viscount Montague), John Gennings now dreamed of reviving the English Franciscan province. He hoped to resurrect a banished form of holy life that was no longer offered within the English Church.128 John Gennings’s patron, Viscount Montague, had multiple ties to Allen’s circle at Gloucester Hall and to the Napper family of Holywell.129 Montague’s brother-in-law, Edward Gage, had already founded a convent of Franciscan nuns (Poor Clares) in Gravelines. What better place to recruit living souls for the project of reviving Franciscan life in England than Oxford, where Franciscan masters had once embodied a distinctly English combination of Catholic fidelity and political independence, of personal holiness and intellectual rigor? After all attempts at destruction and cleansing, the stones of Oxford still shone with the radiant memory of Bacon, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham. Even Saville admired the medieval Franciscan masters. Christopher may have been approached by the Franciscan Nicholas Day, a native of Oxford, born in Holywell. A theology professor at the Franciscan convent of Segovia in Spain, Day was, in 1615, on mission in England.130 Many long years later, on his deathbed in London, Christopher would ask to be buried “next to Nicholas Day in St. Ebbe’s Church in Oxford.”131 Did Christopher, on the verge of death, wish to divulge the secret of his youthful “invitation” to Douay? The elderly Christopher would have had every reason to conceal Day’s name from Wood, since the Day family still lived in Oxford in the 1670s, during a time of renewed antipapist persecution. If not the Oxford-born Franciscan Day, then maybe a

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confrère, sent to deliver a letter to relatives? Or sent by John Gennings? The whole episode of Christopher’s youthful flight to Douay remains veiled. Was Christopher not so much invited as recruited by a priest—offered financial support to travel to Douay and to further his education at the English College? Perhaps Christopher cared little about religious labels but much about education. Perhaps he leapt at a chance, unhoped-for, to see the Continent. Once again John Gennings and Day come to mind. By February 1616, John Gennings had managed to secure not only financial support from English patrons, but also logistical support from the rulers of Flanders, Archduke Albert, and the Spanish Infanta Isabella for establishing an English House of Recollect Franciscans in Douay.132 Records in the Douay archives attest that Gennings was actively assisted in his desire to establish the convent in Douay by the Infanta’s Franciscan confessor, Andrès de Soto, who in turn secured the help of the influential Irish Franciscan theologian Hugo Cavellus.133 In February 1616, all that Gennings lacked was an actual future congregation of friars—live English youths with the idealism and energy needed to resurrect the English Franciscan province from the dust. Did Christopher thirst for a life of the mind, far from the pewter or cloth trade? Did he find himself disinclined to marriage? Christopher left Oxford sometime before August 1616. According to one report, he had already committed himself to the Franciscans in August 1616, maybe pledging himself in some way to John Gennings.134 In any event, he must have been given funds to cross the Channel. Even more importantly, he must have been given a letter of recommendation for the English College of Douay, either in England or after he arrived in Flanders—signed by whom?135 Christopher was admitted to the English College of Douay on August 28, 1616, by the president of the college, Matthew Kellison—a close ally of John Genning’s patron Anthony Browne, Lord Montague.136 The college diary records that he was registered as “Christopher Davenport, alias Lathroppe,” that he was currently “in his twenty-second” year, and that he “had already studied for a few years at Oxford.” Was this information given to Kellison viva voce or stated in Christopher’s admittance letter? Whose idea was it to increase his age by four years, perhaps for the sake of reaching the canonical age required for priesthood, twentyfive, faster?

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Christopher studied at the English College for a year, attending courses, including a course in logic. Among his fellow students, some became fast friends for life, such as Jerome Pickford and the poet Walter Coleman, both of whom would join the English Franciscans. He probably attended the courses of Thomas “Blackloe” White since he would later describe him as his teacher and his friend. In July, rumors of the plague disrupted classes. On August 10, 1617, Christopher left the English College. He was taken by John Gennings, on Andrès de Soto’s authority, to the Flemish Franciscan convent of Ypres, where he embarked on his Franciscan novitiate.137 The Franciscans of Ypres had been reformed by the “Recollect” movement in 1597 and practiced a very strict observance of the Franciscan rule, emphasizing seclusion from the world and spiritual meditation. The Ypres convent was famous for the miracle-working effigy of Our Lady of the Garden—Onze Lieve Vrouw van Tuin—which had adorned the convent cloister until it was destroyed by iconoclasts in 1566.138 Upon entering the cloister, Christopher perhaps remembered the “picture of the dead Christ” that had been removed from the Bablake cross by his godly compatriots in Coventry and destroyed. In every region of Europe, townsfolk vented their rage on their own defenseless medieval patrimony, without recognizing it as their own. Like the Coventry crucifix, the statue of Our Lady of the Garden had been the handiwork of some anonymous wretch, whose life had been obscure and short—except for the miraculous surprise of seeing beauty emerge from his hands. What would the iconoclasts put in place of the fragile artwork that they destroyed? At the Ypres monastery, Christopher was carefully examined on the subject of faith and sacraments, as the Franciscan rule requires. Since he had no worldly riches to give up to the poor, he was told that his “good will” would suffice— as the Franciscan rule, again, stipulates. On October 7, he received the gray-brown robe and white cord of the Franciscan novice at the hands of Father Pierre Paunet, who was the spiritual director of the Infanta Isabella and a close associate of Father Andrès de Soto.139 For his rebirth in religion, he exchanged his name of Christ-bearer for the name of the alter Christus of Assisi and Mount Verna. He added the name of Saint Clare for courage and feminine protection. He became Brother Franciscus à Sancta Clara.

F O U R

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At Ypres, between vigils and fasts, Christopher found himself thrust into the vanguard of a Catholic reform that struggled to flourish in the contested culture of Spanish Flanders. Did Brother/Father Paunet or Brother/ Father de Soto suggest to him that he take the name Sancta Clara, in tribute to the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia?1 Andrés de Soto, chief dramaturge of the Infanta’s Catholic rule, knew the importance of cultivating visible and audible bonds between holiness and political power. At de Soto’s prompting, Isabella Clara, daughter of Philip II of Spain, also the ruler of Flanders, displayed a special zeal for Saint Clare.2 She dined with the Poor Clares and embroidered cloths for the altar of the Franciscan church, signifying to her subjects that Christian kingship is “but a heavy cross”—and Father de Soto, in turn, would publicly decline her gifts of candied fruit, requesting instead more alms for the poor.3 The Franciscan aura of Isabella Clara’s rule embodied an astute political understanding. Pierre Paunet, who supervised Christopher’s novitiate, emphasized the local legend of the holy hermit Saint Venant and his spiritual daughter, the royal “madame saincte Isbergue.” The legend told a 54

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secret story of resistance against feudal patriarchy.4 It focused attention on Flemish autonomy and kept the thought of Spanish overlordship in the background.5 According to the legend, Saint Venant had colluded with Isbergue to help her to reject foreign suitors. When a Scottish prince came to Flanders to marry her, he found her infected with leprosy. Suspecting Saint Venant’s powerful hand, the Scottish prince decapitated the hermit and tossed his body into the River Lys, which acquired miraculous healing powers to cure eye and skin diseases. The message was clear: a spiritual father and a pious princess working together will triumph over meddling foreigners. Saint Isbergue was Pepin the Short’s daughter and Charlemagne’s sister, which means that the story took place in the late eighth century or early ninth century. Sancta Clara was perhaps reminded of the mysterious Saint Osburg of Coventry, abbess of Coventry’s first convent, who was martyred by the Danes in the eleventh century. The name is similar enough to suggest that the Coventry abbess took the name of the earlier holy virgin from Flanders. Half a century later, Sancta Clara would reinvent himself as Father Venantius, in English “Father Hunt”—perhaps in memory of the holy hermit Saint Venant. Sancta Clara’s teacher of moral theology at the friary of Ypres was the Franciscan Recollect Pierre Marchant. Born near Liège in 1585, Pierre was the nephew of the Franciscan Jacques Marchant and had taken the Franciscan habit in 1601, when the Recollect reform was just beginning to spread in Flanders.6 His exceptionally ascetic manner and predilection for citing scripture, along with his eventual support for the Irish Franciscan Peter Walsh, would one day prompt accusations against him of Jansenism.7 Pierre’s moral doctrine, which has been described as “luminous and exhaustive,”8 championed a distinctly forensic view of the sacrament of penance, adopted from John Duns Scotus. The title of Pierre’s 1642 treatise emphasizes that penance is equivalent to setting up a judicial court: Tribunal sacramentale et visibile animarum in hoc vita mortali. The main duty of the confessor is to issue a judgment. The importance of penance, according to Pierre, is that it culminates in a public speech act that declares the penitent to be absolved. The confessor attests to the objectivity of the absolution and to the power of God’s church to bestow absolution following the penitent’s confession.9

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Like Scotus, Pierre argues that the sacrament of penance was instituted by God primarily for the purpose of absolving sins.10 The advantage of penance is that the sinner’s inner torment is brought to an end by a qualified judge, the confessor. Penance protects the sinner against excessive moral grief. Absolution signifies that the penitent’s conscience cannot punish the penitent further.11 On this forensic view, the question of the judge’s spiritual jurisdiction —of a given priest’s right, in a given case, to grant absolution—is obviously of prime importance. Pierre concedes that the rivalry between secular clergy and religious clergy (Franciscans) with regard to hearing confessions means that jurisdiction, in some cases, may not be indubitable, but merely probable. Doubt, however, is not insurmountable. Pierre advises penitents, in such a case, to set aside speculative doubts and achieve practical certainty. It is sufficient that the penitent be morally certain of the priest’s jurisdiction for absolution to be valid.12 Generally, Pierre explains, Catholics are not required to follow what is best, as long as they follow what is good, or at least what they justly believe not to be evil.13 How do we achieve moral certainty—how do we “justly” form the judgment that a given course of action is “not evil”? Pierre distinguishes synderesis (the innate inclination to pursue what is good and shun what is evil) from applied judgments of conscience.14 Pierre describes six states of conscience, ranging from a “rightful and infallible” conscience to a “scrupulous” conscience (which becomes paralyzed at the slightest doubt) and to a downright “hypochondriac” conscience (which operates out of morbid depression rather than based on rational principles).15 A “probable” conscience is defined as one that possesses good, yet not indubitable, reasons to act. A “probable” conscience thus acts on opinion rather than on certainty. A distinctive property of opinions is that opinions are always accompanied by the fear that their opposites might be true: formidinem de opposita veritate coniunctam habet.16 Pierre distinguishes speculative opinions (such as whether the heavens are materially corruptible) from practical opinions, yet he concedes that speculative opinions that entail practical consequences (such as whether or not matrimony is a sacrament) must be counted as practical opinions. Consequently, he is prompted to formulate a unified definition: a probable opinion is a judgment of fact, or a practical judgment, derived from reasons that are merely probable.17

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Pierre acknowledges a basic moral sense in us. Under no circumstance must we act if we experience a visceral fear that our action is wrong.18 Conversely, we should not allow anxiety to paralyze us when we feel morally certain that our action is safe. Thus when theologians disagree about various doctrines, Pierre advises us to judge the safety of a given action based on “natural human morality.”19 After endorsing the axiom that it is permissible to follow either one of two opposing probable opinions, especially since the more probable opinion is not truer simply because it has more arguments in its favor, Pierre tackles the following question: How do we judge that an opinion is truly probable—vere probabilis? Speculatively, a truly probable opinion is one that might be true (i.e., one that has not been ruled out), while a truly probable opinion in a practical sense is one that results, or might result, in a licit action. Is there a way to rate the probability of an opinion? Answering affirmatively, Pierre frames a hierarchy of values and responsibilities, an “order of charity,” ordo caritatis, that serves to rank the relative “true probability” of daily actions. According to Pierre’s ordo caritatis, God must be loved above all else, for his own sake (doctrine of pur amour).20 Thus, for example, by waking up at midnight to sing matins, Franciscans act with the highest moral certainty since God is loved in this action “for himself” and valued above sleep. In second place, a person must love his own soul for God’s sake and his body for the sake of his soul and of God. Thus perfect poverty and every form of good work heal the soul for God’s sake and purify the body for the sake of the soul. In third place, Pierre places communitarian action. We must love the temporal good of the Church and of the commonwealth above our own private temporal good, since a universal good must take precedence over a particular good. Below that, we must love our parents and relatives, and those who act in the guise of parents, such as kings and princes and magistrates, each in his or her just degree: unusquisque in gradu suo. Finally, we must love all creatures, starting with domestic animals and in proportion to each creature’s greater or lesser bond to the human sphere and contribution to the public good.21 Once this ordo caritatis is firmly in mind, the probability of opinions can be accurately measured: et juxta haec omnia opiniones sunt mensurandae ad hoc ut sint vere probabiles. Improbable opinions, in turn, can now be recognized as such: aut ut etiam improbabiles judicantur. Consequently,

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Pierre explains, two general rules may be framed. Rule 1: for an opinion to count as truly probable, it must conform to the precepts of charity to God and neighbor, in substance, aim, and order.22 Rule 2: no opinion that deviates in even the slightest way from the order of charity described above, “whether with regard to God or with regard to oneself or with regard to one’s neighbor, can be judged to be truly probable.”23 The ordo caritatis, which prescribes personal duties and responsibilities to all human beings, serves as the touchstone, the lapis lydius, by which every opinion must be tested, including human laws. And if the two rules were applied, Pierre concludes, “innumerable opinions that pass for probable would likely be shown to be false and damnable, to many people’s confusion.” Conversely, human conscience would find itself “liberated from many human laws, to many people’s consolation.”24 Let us point out two salient features of Pierre Marchant’s Franciscan moral theory. First, its aim is to provide the individual conscience with a decision-procedure that empowers it against human custom and worldly institutions. Second, it achieves this aim precisely because it places the love of God “for God’s own sake” above all other duties and considerations. The ordinary moral dilemmas that the individual conscience must confront unfold, as it were, in the shadow of a very pure devotion that serves as the transcendent keystone of the whole moral edifice. Franciscan vigils and matins, far from being superfluous, serve as the critical experience upon which to develop a proper theory of the autonomy of conscience. With the Infanta’s support and under de Soto’s guidance, Sancta Clara was called from Ypres in October 1618 by John Gennings to start the new English Franciscan community of Douay. De Soto summoned English Franciscans from distant Spanish convents and called Bonaventure Jackson from the convent of Malines to serve as praeses.25 The small community lived at first in a temporary house, carefully observing the Recollect life, frugal and hierarchical, a living image in miniature of Marchant’s ordo caritatis. At midnight, the brethren gathered to recite matins and lauds. On Sunday, after vespers, they recited the litany of Our Lady for the conversion of England.26 Nearby, their new friary, named for St. Bonaventure, was being built, financed in part by Elizabeth Noel, dowager Countess of Castlehaven, who in March 1619 married King James’s Anglo-Irish cupbearer, Sir Piers Crosby.27 James not only approved the marriage, he

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confirmed the couple’s estates in Tyrone County and Queen’s County, Ireland, as a wedding present.28 The project of reviving the English Franciscan province was thus supported by English Catholics and Anglo-Irish Catholics who were staunchly loyal to James. After the death of the Earl of Tyrone in 1616, the Irish Franciscan Hugh MacCaghwell (Hugo Cavellus) had urged his Roman Catholic compatriots to embrace King James as their legitimate sovereign “in all temporal matters.”29 The decision to build St. Bonaventure’s in the university town of Douay stemmed from the desire to revive English Franciscan learning. At first, members of the new community who were studying for the priesthood, such as Sancta Clara, were sent to attend day lectures at the nearby Benedictine school of St. Vedast. There, Sancta Clara was mentored by the Benedictine theologians Leander Jones and Rudesind Barlow, both graduates of the English College of Douay. Sancta Clara also studied at some point under Hugh Cavellus, whom he would later in life describe as his Master—Magister meus. When this occurred is not clear. Between November 1618 and September 1619, Sancta Clara was sent, it seems, to study theology in Salamanca, returning to Douay in September 1619 to receive the four minor orders. In March 1620, Sancta Clara was ordained to the priesthood—having supposedly completed his twenty-fifth year, but really only twenty-two. Sancta Clara’s first priority as a priest was to set up a proper studium at St. Bonaventure’s for Scotist studies. At St. Anthony’s in Louvain, Cavellus had just finished a new edition of Scotus’s Sentences Commentary, which appeared in two volumes in Antwerp in 1620. In August 1621, Sancta Clara was sent to live in Brussels as the confessor appointed to the English Franciscan nuns of the new tertiary convent of St. Elizabeth. That same year, the Infanta, widowed since April, assumed the dress of a Poor Clare.30 The Irish Franciscan house of St. Anthony’s, which Cavellus had helped to found in 1607, was in nearby Louvain.31 If Sancta Clara studied under Cavellus, it was most likely between August 1621 and February 1622, at which date Cavellus was sent to Paris to reform the Franciscan convent of the Faubourg St. Jacques. In his 1618 Mirror of Penance, written in Gaelic, Cavellus had already taken a distinctly Scotist approach to King James’s writings in order to emphasize James’s affinity to Catholicism and personal rejection of the heresies of Luther and Calvin.32 Similarly, when Cavellus drafted general rules

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for deciding what temporal commands should be obeyed by Irish Catholics (those that came directly from the king) and what commands should be resisted (those that came from Puritans in Parliament and/or Calvinist clergy), he showed a distinctly Scotist predilection for providing broad principles and leaving their application to individual practical judgment.33 Like Marchant, Cavellus was eager to include speculative judgments in a more generalized probabilism and to trace speculative probabilism back to Scotus—whom Cavellus in his enthusiasm believed to have been Irish, “from County Downe,” like Cavellus himself. Scotus, doctor subtilis, typically liked to frame questions probabilistically: Is it probable that the intellect has matter? Is it probable that intelligible species should not be posited?34 Two chief concerns inspired Scotus’s method. First, Scotus wished to show that Christian faith was less vulnerable to Greek natural philosophy than was generally supposed. This prompted him to show that many Aristotelian doctrines are not proved, but instead are generally doubtful, disputed, and inconclusive. Second, Scotus wished to show that a great many theological doctrines could be safely affirmed provided that they be regarded as probable rather than as demonstrative. Cavellus explored and updated Scotus’s approach. A good example of Cavellus’s contribution is found in the treatise that he composed when editing Scotus’s Quaestiones on Aristotle’s treatise De anima. Since Sancta Clara will specifically cite Cavellus in connection with Scotus’s questions on De anima, it is instructive to review it.35 Cavellus conceived of his treatise as a supplement to Scotus’s own questions: Supplementum ad Quaestiones Scoti in libros de Anima. In section 4 of this treatise, Cavellus establishes, first, that the speculative intellect and the practical intellect are one and the same faculty “since otherwise the opining intellect and the scientific intellect would be distinct powers.”36 In section 5, Cavellus defines synderesis as the habitus of moral principles and the conscience as the habitus of drawing practical conclusions from these principles. In section 6, Cavellus defines evidence and certitude as threefold—moral, physical, and meta physical. Finally, in section 10, he considers opinion, faith, doubt, suspicion, and anxiety, asking how they differ from one another.37 Cavellus starts by drawing a distinction between opinion and faith. Opinion, Cavellus explains, is “an intellectual act deduced from intrinsic principles whose truth or falsity are not evidently manifest; such as the

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conclusion that quantity is something other than the quantified thing, to which the intellect may assent or from which it may dissent.”38 Whereas opinion is based on intrinsic principles, faith is based on extrinsic testimony: opinio differt à fide, quod haec nititur testimonio dicentis.39 According to Cavellus, there is no such thing as an extrinsically held opinion. Either I derive a point of view rationally from intrinsic features of the subject matter under consideration, in which case I hold an opinion about it, or I accept the view that is conveyed to me by some extrinsic authority, in which case I hold a belief but not, strictly speaking, an opinion. Whatever I believe based on God’s authority or the authority of a fellow human being, I believe as a matter of faith. Thus I can only hold an opinion as my opinion, based on the reasons that I personally have for holding it. An opinion, Cavellus says, is either probable or improbable. A probable opinion is one that rests on such sufficiently good reasons that acting on it cannot be deemed imprudent.40 Cavellus’s definition implies two things. First, a probable opinion is, above all, an admissible opinion. As long as I possess sound reasons for holding a particular view or for adopting a particular course of action, I act prudently in holding the view or in adopting the course of action in question, granted that I cannot be sure that my view is true or that my action is good. Second, prudence and moral certitude are one and the same. What it means for me to act prudently is for me to be morally certain that my opinion is sufficiently justified to be admissible. Cavellus clarifies that “it is sufficient, however, as far as our conscience is concerned, to follow a probable opinion; nor are we required to adopt what is more probable or what is safer” (sed in conscientia sufficit sequi probabilem, nec tenens ad probabiliorem, neque ad tutiorem). Although Cavellus concedes that “it is licit to hold or follow the opinion of others against one’s own opinion,” he says that this amounts “more properly, to acting on faith.”41 Consequently, in order to act on faith in good conscience, I must ascertain that the extrinsic testimony that I embrace derives from a source that is worthy to be believed.42 Insofar as both faith and opinion rest on an obscure and fallible (human) medium, faith differs from opinion only slightly, but differs from it nonetheless.43 Faith is firmer than opinion, since faith often excludes all anxiety, as for example when I believe that the world existed before my birth or that Rome exists.44 As Scotus points out,

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faith is intermediary between science and opinion because opinion always comes with a certain amount of anxiety attached to it.45 Doubt may take both a negative and a positive form. If doubt manifests itself negatively as a suspended judgment, there is no risk of heresy regarding matters of faith, even though many argue to the contrary. If doubt manifests itself positively as a rash, baseless judgment, then indeed heresy may result.46 Implicitly, Cavellus distinguishes between positively denying a Catholic doctrine (which is not permitted) and refraining from affirming it (which is permitted). No anxiety (formido) is attached to negative doubt (suspended judgment) since anxiety arises only when I make a judgment and worry, while making it, that the opposite might be true. Thus it is licit for me to act with anxiety but not to act in a state of actual doubt.47 If my doubt, however, stems from purely intrinsic reasons, I may licitly pick a side based on extrinsic principles, that is, based on the judgment of others.48 Indeed, Cavellus points out that “if it is licit to follow the opinion of others against one’s own opinion, all the more will it be licit to do so when one is in a state of doubt.”49 Cavellus immediately adds that we are not required to follow the safer option in this case, any more than we are required to adopt the safer course when we follow an extrinsic opinion against our own. Finally, after citing Navarro and Vasquez, Cavellus embeds his discussion in a characteristically Scotist defense of human freedom, making at least two points. First, freedom does not consist formally in the judgment’s indifference, which means that I am no less free when I act on, or endorse, a certified truth, than when I act on, or endorse, an opinion or a belief. Second, since the will is the total cause of its own acts, I am fully responsible for checking that my actions are sufficiently justified, either because they are based on sound intrinsic reasons or because they are based on beliefs adopted extrinsically on worthy grounds.50 Since there is no proof against it, it is licit for me, in particular, to defend the opinion that human free will and angelic free will are the same in kind, considered strictly with regard to how they are related to intellections.51 In short, Cavellus not only embraces probabilism as a moral theory but invokes it to define the moral responsibility of Catholics with regard to speculative judgments. To Cavellus, as to Scotus, a number of theses are thus rationally admissible to the Christian philosopher over and beyond the legacy of pagan philosophy. A

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particularly important case in point, dear to Scotus and to his Franciscan disciples, especially after Lutheran and Calvinist attacks, is the dignity of human freedom, which, Cavellus declares, is credibly on a par with angelic freedom. Both Marchant’s and Cavellus’s Scotism will be reflected in Sancta Clara’s works, starting with his first treatise, published in Douay in 1626 and approved by Marchant. As we will see, Sancta Clara will defend human freedom by imposing a fundamental constraint on human speculative judgment. He will argue that it is not licit for a Catholic to endorse a speculative opinion that rules out human freedom. We must first picture the events in Sancta Clara’s life that prepared the ground for his authorial début. In September 1622, Sancta Clara returned from Brussels to Douay and resumed his efforts to develop a Scotist school at St. Bonaventure’s. A glimpse of the serene atmosphere reigning at St. Bonaventure’s at the time is given to us by Matthew Kellison, who had admitted Sancta Clara, and Sancta Clara’s new superior, Jerome Pickford, to the English College eight years earlier.52 In October 1622, Kellison was asked to write a report on the state of English establishments in Douay. He described the English Franciscan convent warmly as “still extremely poor but improving daily.”53 The friars, Kellison wrote, had managed to build a church and were expecting to have it consecrated any day.54 Hoping to send pious and learned missionaries to England, the friars were struggling to open schools, especially a school of theology—but how, with such lean funds?55 For the time being, their students attended classes with the Benedictines.56 The Franciscan community was too small and too young, Kellison wrote, to have as yet produced great fruit, but the friars had already managed to send missionaries of a high level of learning to England.57 Generally, the English Franciscans of Douay lived modest, exemplary lives.58 The papal nuncio for whom Kellison’s report was prepared was the urbane, aristocratic Giovanni Francesco Guidi di Bagno. Son of an ancient and powerful Italian family (his brother Niccolò was appointed general of the pontifical army in 1623 by Urban VIII), Bagno was already a seasoned diplomat at the age of thirty-five and a distinguished humanist with prestigious literary friends across Europe.59 Bagno sponsored, among many others, the painters Giovanni-Francesco Barbieri (detto Il Guercino) and

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Peter Paul Rubens.60 He was especially eager to encourage authors61 and urged religious orders to restore their level of learning to its “ancient splendor.”62 As soon as Pope Urban VIII (Matteo Barberini) made his nephew Francesco Barberini Cardinal-Padrone in 1623, Bagno and Francesco Barberini started to correspond. In keeping with the Barberini plan to unify Catholic Europe against Calvinism without falling wholly under Spanish domination, Bagno hoped to bring about a rapprochement between the English Crown and Rome. To this end, Bagno corresponded with various informants in London and forged ties with the powerful Earl of Argyll, who had fled James’s court and converted to the Roman Church. On September 2, 1623, Bagno reported to Francesco Barberini that the Earl of Argyll had shown him two letters from another Scot of high rank, William Alexander, stating that King James “wished to accommodate Protestantism and Catholicism” but did not wish to conduct the negotiations himself. 63 On September 23, Barberini wrote back to Bagno that the pope endorsed the effort, warning him, however, to be wary of Protestant “cunning and treachery.”64 By the end of October, Bagno reported to Barberini that King James wanted Bagno himself to serve as his intermediary with Rome.65 Barberini promptly endorsed the idea and told Bagno to keep the whole business secret.66 Both Urban VIII and Francesco Barberini had a strong desire to promote missions to heretics and a special interest in the sons of Saint Francis.67 Urban VIII’s brother, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, was a Franciscan cappuccino. Bagno, in turn, supported the Scottish Franciscan Recollects in their plans to create a new Scottish convent in Douay.68 In April 1624, when the English Franciscan community had just been granted the status of guardianate and Sancta Clara had replaced Bonaventure Jackson as guardian,69 Bagno asked the Benedictine abbot of St. Vaast in Arras to help pay for needed repairs at St. Bonaventure’s convent.70 Encouraged by the examples of Tobie Matthew, of Richard Dering, and of other English Protestants who had returned to the Catholic fold, the worldly Bagno was convinced that English Protestants of Arminian inclination would soon find their way back to the Roman Church.71 He also fully expected moderate Dutch thinkers such as Grotius and Hensius to turn their backs on the narrow fanaticism of Calvinists and return to the civilized conviviality of Catholicism.72 And although Bagno interpreted the unity and strength

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of the Roman Church to depend on outward doctrinal conformity, he was quick to forgive doctrinal errors at the slightest sign of submission to the Holy See. What mattered, in his view, was to avoid schism within God’s church. He warmly supported the English Benedictines, led by Rudesind Barlow, as soon as they distanced themselves publicly from Dom Thomas Preston’s positions.73 In January 1624, Bagno wrote to Francesco Barberini that the Spanish match between James’s son Charles and the Spanish Infanta Maria was on the rocks. Instead, secret negotiations were now underway to marry Charles to the French princess Henriette-Marie—King Louis XIII’s sister and Urban VIII’s godchild.74 In response, Barberini cautioned Bagno not to rejoice at the failure of the Spanish match overtly.75 On April 27, reporting on secret discussions with King James, Bagno urged Barberini and Urban VIII to appear to trust the British monarch and to continue negotiations for an accommodation.76 On May 4, Bagno wrote to Barberini that the French match was all but concluded.77 Despite strong misgivings regarding James’s sincerity, Bagno wrote directly to James on June 7 to praise him and to thank him for his good will towards the Roman Church.78 On June 22, Bagno reported to Barberini that James, at a recent dinner, had spoken favorably of the pope, shocking a French Calvinist guest.79 In July, Barberini updated Bagno on secret negotiations that had been conducted between the pope and James and gave Bagno detailed papal instructions.80 On August 10, Bagno reported to Barberini on his own latest attempts to negotiate a better understanding between James and the pope.81 In November 1624, Pierre de Bérulle, founder of the Paris Oratory, traveled to Rome at Richelieu’s request in order to obtain the necessary papal dispensation for the Anglo-French marriage. When the dispensation was granted, the Spanish court was outraged.82 Urban VIII, worried about Spanish wrath, sent Francesco Barberini to Paris to mend the differences between the two Catholic kings. On March 15, 1625, Bagno asked Barberini if he could join the Paris mission.83 In April, writing to Francesco Barberini’s uncle and replacement in Rome, Antonio Barberini, Bagno expressed Brussels’s pessimism following James’s death and warned that the English, aided and abetted by the French, planned to attack Genoa and the Italian coast.84 At the same time, Bagno secretly conveyed Urban VIII’s congratulations to Charles, the new English king, together with the pope’s

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promise of gratitude if “English Catholics were given better treatment.”85 On May 9, summoned by Francesco Barberini, Bagno left Brussels for Paris, arriving in the French capital the day after Princess Henriette-Marie had been married by proxy to King Charles I of England in front of Notre-Dame.86 Bagno’s secret negotiations with England bear centrally on our story because Bagno personally supported Sancta Clara. By mid-May 1625, Sancta Clara was on his way to Rome. John Gennings had selected him to go to the Eternal City in order to attend the Franciscan general chapter and request the official restoration of the English province. With him, Sancta Clara carried a letter by Bagno recommending him as a “zealous and good friar who deserved to be favored.” In the letter, Bagno further specified that Sancta Clara had “at various times done him service.”87 Of what nature? Courier? Translator? For all we know, Sancta Clara may have been involved in Bagno’s secret English initiatives in some capacity as early perhaps as April 1624, when we have explicit evidence that Sancta Clara and Bagno communicated directly over securing funds to repair St. Bonaventure’s. The real point is that discretion mattered. If indeed Sancta Clara was involved in the secret negotiations with James, he left no trace. Hence Bagno’s appreciation: a good and zealous friar. Sancta Clara’s journey to Rome brought years of effort to culmination. Leaving overcast Flanders behind, Sancta Clara and his traveling companion, John Frost, barefoot and dressed in the distinctive gray coat with rounded hood of the Recollects,88 reached Rome sometimes before May 17. As Urban VIII had shrewdly decided to suspend jubilee indulgences outside of the papal city in order to draw crowds and revenues, the Roman streets were bustling with pilgrims and handsome carriages.89 Sancta Clara and John Frost made their way through the crowds to the foot of the Campidoglio on the back side of the Capitoline Hill. When they reached the Franciscan monastery of Aracoeli, perched high above the city, Sancta Clara paused under the shade of a magnificent pine.90 Invisible cicadas filled the air, like the blessed spirits that Philemon Holland had once emphasized in his lectures on Plato’s Phaedrus. Sancta Clara had every reason to look out at the blue Roman hills with rapture. Through his own imagination and grit, aided by grace, he had reinvented himself, disciplined himself, reformed himself, and educated himself. Now he had reached

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Rome, the city of Holland’s Twelve Caesars, where he stood on his own two bare feet. With Lady Poverty at his side, with Saint Clare watching over him, with his two mentors, Cavellus and Marchant, in the audience to support him, with Bagno’s letter in his pocket, how could his petition to restore Scotus’s own English Franciscan province be denied? The Roman artist Ottavio Leoni captured something of Sancta Clara’s confident vivacity in the features of an anonymous Franciscan of Sancta Clara’s age (twenty-seven) and generation, who posed for him in 1625 at the monastery of Aracoeli.91 The general chapter opened on May 17, presided over by Bagno’s recent correspondent, Cardinal Antonio Barberini.92 Ten days later, on May 27, in response to Sancta Clara’s request, the newly elected minister general, Bernardine de Senis, officially restored the English Franciscan province, with the only reservation that it be called a custody rather than a province pending more numerous membership.93 In recounting the event for posterity, Sancta Clara would write with innocent immodesty that “in 1625, by the authority of Urban VIII in the Chapter of Rome, at my request, the Province was restored under the title of Separate Custody until the numbers increased.”94 The Annales minorum record further that Sancta Clara remained at Aracoeli through June for the purpose of obtaining privileges and dispensations for English Franciscan missionaries from the Congregation for Propaganda.95 Bagno’s letter was specifically designed to help in these pragmatic matters. It was addressed to Monsignor Francesco Ingoli, described by a contemporary as “the head, the body and the feet of the Congregation.”96 In the past year, Ingoli had become embroiled in a bitter dispute with the Florentine mathematician Galileo Galilei over astronomy. Ingoli had tried, in 1616, to disprove Copernicanism in a letter to Galileo, invoking both scientific and theological arguments against it. Galileo had not bothered to answer before 1624 when, encouraged by the new Barberini papacy, he had refuted Ingoli’s arguments.97 Sancta Clara, who had been exposed to Copernicus by Samuel Lane and who valued mathematics as an important part of Franciscan learning, may have asked to see a copy of Ingoli’s 1616 “Disputation on the Location and Rest of the Earth Against the System of Copernicus” and Galileo’s answer. He may have been told that Ingoli had placed Johannes Kepler’s 1619 Harmonice mundi (dedicated to

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King James I) on the Index of Forbidden Books (Index librorum prohibitorum) and ordered corrections to be made in Copernicus’s De revolutionibus. Sancta Clara had time on his hands to learn all he could and to visit Rome’s monuments—to admire Gentileschi’s Saint Francis altarpiece in San Silvestro in Capite, or ponder Domenichino’s depiction of Francis rapt in music at Santa Maria della Vittoria, or gaze at Mary Theotokos at Santa Maria Maggiore.98 Indeed, his petition to Ingoli, which requested the same privileges as had been granted to other missionaries, was not read until June 13. It was then passed on to the Holy Office, with the comment written on the back, as we saw, that “the papal nuncio of Flanders approves this friar as zealous and worthy to be favored.” Sancta Clara’s second petition, for dispensations that would permit a steady income for St. Bonaventure’s during times of persecution in England, was not addressed until June 23—when it was denied.99 Sancta Clara, meanwhile, had enjoyed more than a month in the Eternal City. On his return journey, Sancta Clara was detained in Milan because his traveling companion, John Frost, fell sick. Frost died on July 21.100 The melancholy loss forced Sancta Clara to think about the fragility of the English Franciscan community. Sickness and death threatened the infant English custody. In 1618, Sancta Clara had seen his friend William Bonaventure Clarke, a fellow student at the English College of Douay, die before completing his novitiate at Ypres.101 The promise that Sancta Clara had just made to Luke Wadding to help retrieve Scotus’s writings from “cimmerian darkness”102 might have inspired him to turn to writing as a means to recruit English students to St. Bonaventure’s. Soon after returning to Douay, Sancta Clara started to think about the project of authoring a treatise ad mentem Scoti. His daily duties as guardian of St. Bonaventure’s and as reader in divinity took up much of his time, but the calling to authorship infused him with energy. The treatise that he planned would bring to light the power of Scotist doctrine. It would demonstrate the central importance of scientific learning for the Franciscan life. It would exquisitely defend human freedom as a matter of Christian conscience. It would attract students and funds. Just an importantly, it would reach out to new developing circumstances in England and help to create a new alliance. Apparently timeless in its content, Sancta Clara’s first publication, a pastoral letter on astrology, was closely linked to the immediate English

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context. As guardian of St. Bonaventure’s, Sancta Clara came into regular contact with English missionaries and visitors who kept him well informed about recent events in England.103 An ominous downpour, he knew, had greeted Charles’s new Catholic queen when she had made her first public appearance in London.104 By August 1625, pestilence raged, scores were dying, famine threatened.105 Puritan preachers, more steadfast than others, remained in London to exhort their congregations to prayer.106 Sancta Clara’s own half brother, John, now vicar of St. Stephen’s, was rapidly gaining hearts and minds, sometimes officiating without a surplice and giving Communion to parishioners who refused to kneel.107 In Parliament, Puritans clamored for harsher measures against popish recusants.108 John Eliot, sitting for Cornwall, bitterly complained that six Romish priests had been pardoned as a result of the new queen’s intercession.109 Why, Puritans asked, was England suffering such an ominous increase in popish “insolencies”? They blamed Arminian theologians within the Church of England for defending idolatrous practices and publishing “books of mediation to reconcile us and the Papists.”110 Their chief target, in the summer and fall of 1625, was Henry Saville’s collaborator at Eton and King James’s chaplain, Richard Montagu. The English Catholic community of Douay followed Montagu’s tribulations closely. It was widely believed that Matthew Kellison and John Heigham had played a key role in composing the anonymous Romanist tractate that had triggered Montagu’s first book, A New Gagg for an Old Goose, published in 1624. The Romanist tractate had characterized the Church of England as narrowly Calvinistic, cut off from apostolic legitimacy. Montagu answered by denying that the Canterbury-based prelacy was committed to Calvinist doctrines and argued that the English Church was as fully Catholic as the Roman Church. In a second publication, responding this time to the ex-Catholic Marc Anthony de Dominis, Montagu wrote that there is nothing idolatrous about invoking the intercession of saints and angels.111 Given Montagu’s favor with King James, Puritans were at once alarmed, chagrined, and infuriated. Summoned to correct his views, Montagu instead defended them further in a new book, Appello Caesarem. Parliament responded by charging him formally with disturbing the peace of church and state. Parliamentarians were especially irate over Montagu’s statement that godly ministers

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were “worse than papists.”112 Montagu was also accused of maligning the “great lights of this Church,” such as Calvin, Beza, and Perkins, and of encouraging men “to persevere in poperye, or turne to it.” Montagu’s book, it was noted, was “exceedingly read and commended by Papists.”113 As reader in divinity at St. Bonaventure’s, Sancta Clara had a strong incentive to scrutinize Montagu’s concessions to Catholic theology. On the subject of free will, in particular, Sancta Clara would have noticed that Montagu explicitly approved of the doctrine of the “Councell of Trent.”114 Most remarkably, Montagu cited Scotus as his authority: “I wish with Scotus in 1. Dist. 39 that a man so wilfull as to deny free-will were well cudgeled, until hee confessed, it stood in mans power to desist from beating him.”115 Montagu also insinuated that Puritans were nothing less than present-day Pharisees, Christ’s opponents, since they taught that all things result from fatal necessity and thus denied free will—which, Montagu argued, contradicts both scripture and experience.116 “Therefore,” Montagu concluded defiantly, “fatall necessity is not at all,” by which he meant, in effect, that predestination is rubbish.117 Enamored as he was of Scotus, Sancta Clara would have recognized that Montagu’s “Arminian” doctrine of free will was really Scotus’s doctrine, which emphasizes the radical contingency of voluntary acts. According to Scotus, events that are immediately brought about by free agents are not merely future contingents in the sense that they are contingent before the will’s free decision to act, they remain contingent even as they are being performed since a free agent, at the very same moment that he is acting, remains free to act otherwise. Not only did Montagu explicitly endorse a Scotist doctrine of free will, he also proclaimed that this Scotist doctrine must be viewed as a fundamental cornerstone of the universal Christian church. “Wee cannot deny freedome of will,” he wrote, “since who-so doth, is no Catholique.”118 As though designed to bolster English Arminians and Montagu, in particular, Sancta Clara’s first written treatise defends and celebrates the Catholic doctrine of human freedom. Ostensibly, it narrowly targets judicial astrology, as its title indicates: Letter refuting two astrological propositions (Epistolium continens confutationem duarum propositionum astrologicarum). A quote from Tertullian, however, placed under the title, warns of the author’s broader scope. Tertullian reminds the reader that there ex-

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ists an intimate connection between heresies and astrologers.119 The connection, moreover, is subtle. Tertullian’s own phrasing implies two key insights that Sancta Clara’s reader must bear in mind. First, Tertullian’s call for vigilance against heresy is based on the axiom that “even eminent men have fallen from faith.” This means that Tertullian agrees with Arminians that “a man justified may fall away from Grace”—precisely what Montagu had declared to be “the doctrine of the Church of England” against Calvinist predestination, to the indignation of his opponents.120 Second, Tertullian attributes the success of magicians and astrologers to the predilection that heretics have for their own private answers, seeking truth “where God is not” rather than submit to the authority and “safely-guarded communion” of the unified church.121 This means that Tertullian, like Montagu, is wary of evangelical enthusiasts. By citing Tertullian’s own words, Sancta Clara implies that Calvinist predestination stems no less from a dangerous disregard of the Church’s apostolic magisterium than the deterministic heresies of antiquity. Perhaps as a result of interactions with Bagno, Sancta Clara reached out to a variety of Roman Catholic sponsors to have his treatise approved for publication. His approbatores included his Franciscan mentors, Marchant and Gennings, who approved the treatise on May 12 and 13, 1626, respectively. They also include the English Benedictine Dom Rudesind Barlow and the secular priest and Regius Professor of Theology at the University of Douay, Jacobus Pollet. Two Jesuit theologians, Charles Musart and Philippe du Trieu, also approved Sancta Clara’s treatise.122 Father Mu sart, who taught rhetoric and philosophy, was deeply interested in moral theology, religious imagery, and controversy.123 Father du Trieu, in turn, was mainly known as a logician, but he also taught moral theology. Sancta Clara, it seems, went out of his way to unite warring Catholic factions behind his Letter containing a refutation of two astrological propositions. The structure of Sancta Clara’s treatise is deceptively simple. Its chief originality in style consists in its hybrid character. For the purpose of defending the Catholic doctrine of free will, it blends Scholastic argumentation with historical narrative and personal anecdote.124 In guise of preface, a letter dedicating the treatise to Joseph Bergaigne, the Franciscan commissary general for Belgium and Britain, explains that the content was prompted by an immediate practical challenge. Sancta Clara recounts

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how, having been sent by Bergaigne on an errand to Brussels “not long ago,” he ran into an astrologer friend, who asked him for his opinion about two specific astrological claims, namely, whether a person’s hour and manner of death could be accurately predicted. Horrified that his friend could even hesitate in a matter that clearly jeopardized free will, Sancta Clara did his best to refute the two claims on the spot as “vain and superstitious.” Back in Douay, however, Sancta Clara “thought more deeply about the gravity of the spiritual danger facing his friend” and about his duty to help him. He was morally bound to put his arguments against astrological determinism in writing for the sake of protecting his friend’s soul—and countless more. Sancta Clara’s treatise, in short, was a work of spiritual mercy. It was commanded by Franciscan charity. Ordo caritatis: loving one’s soul and one’s neighbor’s soul for the sake of God requires a serious study of natural philosophy since philosophical errors may prompt the soul to doubt Catholic doctrine. This was a clear case in which a speculative judgment entailed practical consequences. With this connection in mind, Sancta Clara presented the treatise as a letter, epistolium, personally addressed to his astrologer friend, amico suo. The epistolary format, cherished by humanists, helped to temper the Scholastic character of the content. Modeling himself on Scotus, Sancta Clara starts by framing the problem as two distinct questions. First and chiefly, is it possible to make an accurate and reliable prediction of a person’s time and manner of death, by means of calculations based on the person’s birth native chart? Second, is it possible, based on the same astrological principles, to predict a person’s voluntary acts, such as a person’s deliberate acts of murder or specific decisions to travel abroad?125 Certo praenosci: the question is not whether vague conjectures about the future are possible. The question, as Sancta Clara carefully underscores, is whether astrology is capable of calculating precise future events in the lives of free agents. Refuting the second question automatically refutes the first since free decisions cannot be excluded from the causal factors leading to a person’s death. Is it possible to predict a person’s time of death? Without listing a single argument in favor of an affirmative answer, Sancta Clara directly invokes the main reason against it (quod non): the Catholic doctrine of free will. All sources of Catholic authority converge to affirm human free will: scripture, the Church Fathers, and Catholic tradition. These sources do not

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merely insinuate but “loudly proclaim” that the two astrological claims are inadmissible, even heretical. Neither claim can be legitimately defended, even in the form of an opinion: “neutra illarum possit vel opinative defendi.” As a firm rule, Sancta Clara tells his friend, Catholics cannot hold opinions that scripture and Church definitions positively reject as false: “inter Catholicos non est locus opinionibus, ubi res Scripturae vel Ecclesiae definitionibus decisa reperitur.”126 Catholic doctrine suffices for the two astrological claims to be dismissed, but Sancta Clara understands that his astrologer friend will be more likely to discard them on rational grounds. The task, then, is to show that the two claims cannot be defended “opinative” from a strictly rational point of view. For, indeed, if judicial astrology possessed a probable claim to predict future free acts with accuracy and certainty, then the world would be deterministic. Against the claim that a person’s nativity suffices to predict the person’s time and manner of death, Sancta Clara starts by invoking the argument put forth by Saint Augustine about twins. Twins more often than not die at very different times and in very different manners, as did, for example, the biblical twins Esau and Jacob. Sancta Clara concedes that disciples of the Roman astrologer Publius Nigidius have an answer to Augustine’s twin argument, namely, that a minimal difference in time—a single instant—suffices for two horoscopes to diverge.127 The twins Esau and Jacob were born instants apart, and thus their lives inevitably followed radically different destinies. Sancta Clara counters by pointing out that establishing birth times with instantaneous precision lies beyond human power. Since birth is a temporal process, individual nativity charts cannot have the kind of punctiform exactness that astrologers require in order to calculate individual destinies. Thus the proposed solution to the counterexample of Esau and Jacob falls apart. The argument only serves to bring to light the fact that a person’s time of birth consists of a segment of time, at least quoad nos. Where, then, Sancta Clara argues, will judicial astrologers find the certainty that they require—unde erit certitudo? Not only is it impossible to determine the exact instant of a person’s birth, the number of variables that affect a given person at birth preclude the kind of certainty and exactness required for making mathematical predictions about a person’s future death. How big, for instance, is the

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effect of stars on the newborn’s temperament (and thus eventually on the newborn’s future actions) compared, for example, to the mother’s state of mind?128 Moreover, as Pico della Mirandola and Maldero show, astrological prognostication suffers from overwhelming uncertainty because so little is known about the distances of planets from one another, the motion of the eighth orb, and much more.129 Add to this that there is no real agreement concerning the order of the planets and no knowledge at all of the stars of Antarctica, and certainty vanishes. A person’s native chart, in short, cannot avoid containing many errors. It is, at best, a very vague, rudimentary sketch that takes only a few of the most elementary variables into consideration. Unde igitur certitudo? Nor is judicial astrology vindicated by the fact that judicial predictions occasionally materialize. The record itself is biased. Astrologers take careful note of the predictions that come true but rarely report failures.130 More important than the rudimentary state of the science that is used to establish native charts is the irreducible obstacle of free will. The determinism that is required for judicial astrology to make predictions regarding a person’s time and manner of death is incompatible with the radical indeterminism that is introduced by free agents. Many deaths result from voluntary human acts, involving poison, violence, and so forth. Yet it is against both faith and reason to say that voluntary decisions are foreknown by any power under God. The human will is more powerful and more noble than any material thing and cannot be compelled by what is less noble than it. Sancta Clara cites a concrete example in order to illustrate the point. Just days ago, he learned that a doctor from Brussels had charitably warned a soldier that he (the soldier) was fated to die soon of a high fever or by violence at someone’s hand, based on some astrologer citing some omen. How could the prediction include a future murder? Even angels cannot predict voluntary acts—as Suarez, for one, explains, emphasizing that this is an axiom of faith. Scotus put it best and most succinctly when he affirmed that “God alone sees into hearts” (Deus enim solus scrutator cordium). To claim to be able to predict the future decisions of a free agent as though these decisions were inevitable events unfolding deterministically is plainly false and superstitious. In short, it would have been more charitable to warn the poor soldier to be skeptical of omens.131 Doctors are far more likely to predict a person’s longevity correctly based on bodily temperament, mode of life, and nutrition than on a per-

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son’s birth chart—especially since no precise astral conjunction is calculable at birth beyond the short span of fifty years. What is most reprehensible about judicial astrologers, moreover, is the assertive self-confidence that they show regarding their calculations. Once again, Sancta Clara illustrates the problem with a convivial anecdote. “A few years ago,” an astrologer in Paris had calculated the day and hour of his own death and had invited his friends to witness it. When the fatal time had come and gone, the astrologer was so vexed to be alive and to be an object of ridicule that he developed a fever—but even this did not kill him.132 What about comets, which some say always portend something big (aliquid magnum), such as the death of princes? Sancta Clara answers that cautious conjectures about such things as atmospheric conditions, or the weather, or the effects of meteorologic changes upon human beings, are not groundless: “non sine fundamento probabiliter potest praedici.” For example, according to probable philosophical principles, comets may portend a period of dryness and thus a period of dry and hot winds. As Delrio explains, this in turn may be a warning that people of a bilious temperament, who are typically of a rasher nature than others, are not unlikely to die, since they are prone to be stirred up to war and rebellion: “minantur non improbabiliter mortem bilosis.” Comets may thus be helpful in identifying a population at risk. Yet the claim that a given comet portends the specific death of a specific king definitely strikes Sancta Clara most certainly as uncertain: “certe mihi videtur valde incertum.”133 Sancta Clara agrees with Raymond Maldero (On Superstition, tractate 10, chap. 7, doubt 6) and with Delrio (bk. 4, chap. 3, quaestio 2) that it is possible that God intends strange mutations in the heavens to serve as signs of upcoming effects — as we read, for example, in Maccabees (2 Macc. 5). Since comets, according to Scotus, are not stars but fiery impressions caused by exhalations in the higher stratum of the air, it is possible that they affect us morbidly, like other infections of the air. Nor does Sancta Clara deny the “probability of astronomy” (astronomiae probilitatem) with regard to predicting rainfall, periods of frost, periods of fertility, and so on. Astronomy is useful, even indispensable, for medicine, navigation, and agriculture. As Scotus says, “physicians must be astronomers.”134 It is obvious, Sancta Clara says, that stars have a considerable influ ence on the earth and produce a multiplicity of effects here below. Consequently, it is necessary to know about stellar influences in order to conduct

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human affairs prudently. The key, however, is to acknowledge the probabilistic character of such knowledge. As long as astrologers understand that they cannot make precise and fully certain predictions, there is even some probability, Sancta Clara concedes, that some human actions may be anticipated in a vague sort of way, since human inclinations are affected both by celestial bodies and by a person’s natural complexion. Indeed as Scotus explains (Sancta Clara refers the reader to “2, distinctio 14, quaestio 3,” presumably of the Reportata Parisiensia), the heavens undoubtedly have an impact on terrestrial things. Planets and stars have an impact on imperfect mixtures, as we see in the case of comets, and on inanimate perfect mixtures, as we see in the case of metals. Yet, so many variables are involved, even in these inanimate cases, that it is extremely difficult to issue accurate and reliable judgments. Licet non certo: as long as predictions remain purely conjectural, astrological prognostication is not altogether improbable.135 A fortiori, judgments concerning the influence of celestial bodies on human beings must never exceed the bounds of mere probability. Scotus concedes that planets and stars have an impact on animated beings, both on the body’s constitution and on the senses. This means that planets and stars indirectly affect the intellect, as we see in the case of lunatics. By the same token, the rational will itself is not wholly insulated from celestial influences since it is characteristic of human beings in this lifetime to seek what is most immediately appealing to the sensual appetite. The rational will, however, is essentially free. It cannot be compelled to follow a bodily appetite because its freedom allows it to act against bodily impulses: “ex sua libertate potest contrarie.”136 To the extent that the rational will is prone to follow bodily appetites against the dictates of reason, astrological predictions about human behaviors may well turn out to be true. Implicitly, the more irrational a person is, the more his or her life will appear to be controlled by fate. The key is to recognize that probable conjectures about human beings in general or even about specific demographic groups are very different in character from the precise claims that are made regarding a specific person’s exact time or manner of death. As Scotus lucidly explains, it follows from the limited impact of celestial influences on human beings that only a range of tendencies and propensities can legitimately be predicted, not specific, determinate actions: “actiones in confuse, non autem actiones determinatas.” 137

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What about the claim that changes of religion affecting whole regions can be foreseen? Some venerable astrologers who took great pride in being Catholic once argued, for example, that people are more prudent and rational “when Jupiter is in Mercury’s house” and, thus, more receptive to Christian doctrine. Sancta Clara answers that the key, once again, lies in the character of the predictions. As long as the astrologers in question avoid a presumptuous certainty and contain their conjectures within the limits of probability, there is no reason to condemn them, granted that they attest to a sort of excessive curiosity. The point is that God knows the way in which things and times are disposed and thus has the power to call human beings to faith when their minds are more suitably disposed for it.138 Does this mean, as Durandus argues (1 Sentences, quaestio 6, prologue, and 2, distinctio 2, quaestio 5), that it is possible for human beings to make themselves suitable for God’s grace by their own unaided natural efforts, which is to say, by means of their free will? Sancta Clara sees a number of difficulties with this view since it seems hard to distinguish from semi-Pelagianism. Durandus, however, does not really abrogate God’s freedom since God gives his grace freely to the freely self-reforming person, not by any necessity or as anything that is due. While distancing himself from semi-Pelagianism, Sancta Clara prefers to leave the issue open. He concludes that, since both Aquinas and Scotus concede the possibility, it is safe to hold that celestial influences may render human beings “less indisposed” to faith.139 According to Scotus, however, as we saw, celestial influences affect only a person’s temperament and appetites. A person’s rational will is free to act contrary to bodily appetites and thus to celestial influences. In light of Sancta Clara’s previous discussion, it seems that a person who exercises his or her rational freedom against bodily impulses is able to make himself or herself less indisposed to receiving God’s grace. Which is not the same, perhaps, as making oneself more disposed—but close. The human will is not determined from the outside and does not act by necessity. In nullo tamen necessitatur voluntas : the radical freedom of the will precludes a deterministic universe. Somewhat mischievously, Sancta Clara says that he “sees no reason” to reject the hypothesis that the spread of Lutheranism was facilitated by the stars. Implicitly, a widespread fall from rationality resulting from planets and stars cannot be ruled out. The very first manifestation of such an adverse change in conditions, indeed, would be a denial of human freedom and a belief in predestination.

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On a more sober note, Sancta Clara cautions that the practical shortcomings of astrology, the complexity of the calculations, the number of variables, and their unknown relative contribution to any given situation mean that all conjectures based on remote causes are dubious. Finally, returning to judicial astrology and its false certitude, Sancta Clara warns that the predictions of judicial astrology are not merely useless but detrimental. The problem is human suggestibility, which is really just another way of succumbing to bodily emotion and failing to uphold the dignity of rational freedom against superstition. Sancta Clara resorts one last time to a concrete example to illustrate the spiritual desolation that results from any form of fatalism. Two years earlier, a young Scottish lord, tired of life and perhaps secretly remorseful for having apostatized from the Catholic Church, was tempted to kill himself. He consulted an astrologer about his nativity chart. The astrologer, through a diabolical suggestion, answered that he would die a violent death. “I knew it,” said the Scottish lord, and he soon cut his own throat.140 Such are the fruits of genethliac stupidities! In short, to believe that judicial astrology has the power to predict one’s death is to believe that all things happen “by fatall necessity.” Demons, no doubt, intend for us to fall into this wrong belief when they stimulate our fretful curiosity. The remedy is to recognize, with Deuteronomy 18, that our God has made us in His own image: “Tu autem à Domino Deo tuo aliter es institutus.” God has given us the freedom to resist all forms of determinism, starting with the power to resist our own biases and suggestibility, not to mention our own opinions and concoctions regarding predestination. Sancta Clara concludes by submitting himself “wholly” to the infallible judgment of Holy Mother Church—“in whose lap” he hopes to be kept always by God’s infinite mercy. 141 Human freedom and human life, in other words, are best protected by adhering firmly to the constant doctrine of God’s universal church. What Sancta Clara communicated to his astrologer friend out of a concern for his spiritual well-being is threefold. First, we believe that we are free agents based on God’s authority, transmitted to us by God’s church. Second, we know empirically that we are free agents based on the experience of acting rationally against bodily impulses. Third, we rule out the speculative hypothesis of determinism based on the fact that the pre-

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dictions of judicial astrology regarding a person’s time and manner of death fall short of the exactness and certainty that they need in order to qualify as scientific predictions. Implicitly, it is morally forbidden to discard a Catholic doctrine that is absolutely certain, namely, the doctrine of free will, on the basis of a philosophical conjecture that claims a necessity that it cannot prove. Ironically, in the summer of 1626, when Sancta Clara’s Epistolium was published, Europe was full of sinister rumors of the pope’s imminent demise. Urban VIII was terrified. The predictions came from the best astrologers and were spread by the Spanish, who were displeased about Urban’s support of the Anglo-French match and leniency towards Richelieu. Urban’s terror was not irrational or superstitious. He had real reason to fear astrologers who had been hired to predict his death. Their predictions, he knew, were not vain calculations but real threats.142

F I V E

“Problematicall Supererogation”

By 1626, when Sancta Clara’s Epistolium was published, opposition to Richard Montagu in Parliament had grown worse. Montagu stood accused of treason. He was charged not only with promoting “manifestly Arminian and Popish” doctrines but more generally with destabilizing the commonwealth by “disputing the poyntes of the doctrine of the Church of England problematically.”1 By treating the English articles of religion as “problematicall,” Montagu labored at every turn, his opponents argued, to minimize the differences in doctrine between the Roman Church and the English Church. There could be no doubt about Montagu’s ultimate aim. He hoped to reconcile the Church of England to the Church of Rome.2 From the point of view of Calvinists in Parliament, a powerful and dangerous Arminian faction threatened to take over the English Church and undo the Protestant Reformation. A chief reason why Sancta Clara would have made every effort to follow the English debate as closely as possible was that Montagu applied his “problematicall” method of theology to defend not only free will but also, surprisingly, the possibility of meritorious acts that are performed over and above duty—known in religion as “supererogatory” acts. In Roman Catholic theology, supererogation constituted the basis upon which the 80

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monastic orders in general, and Franciscan life in particular, were justified. If Montagu succeeded in defending supererogation within the Church of England, religious orders in England might be restored. As this chapter will argue, ambivalence over supererogation and nostalgia for monastic life lay at the core of English religious malaise. Sancta Clara perhaps remembered Montagu’s chief supporter, Richard Neile, the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, who had intervened in 1611 in Coventry to force parishioners at St. Michael’s to receive Communion on their knees. When Neile had been made bishop of Durham by James in 1617, he had gathered kindred souls to himself at Durham House in the Strand. His circle of friends included John Cosin, Augustine Lindsell, and Richard Montagu.3 The Durham House group had soon recognized that making a distinction between fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith and “problematicall” questions gave them leverage with which to purge the English Church of Calvinist positions. Montagu’s A New Gagg for an Old Goose, published in 1624 with Lindsell’s help, laid out the “problematicall” theology of the Durham House group very explicitly.4 The following year, in 1625, Montagu had stressed the importance of his “problematicall” approach to theology in a letter dedicating Appello Caesarem to King Charles. The problem, Montagu explained to Charles, was that the Church of England stood at a disadvantage. The national church seated at Canterbury could never hope to compete with the apostolic prestige of Rome as long as it appeared to endorse Calvin’s “fancies” as true dogma of the faith.5 By isolating Calvinist doctrines as the “Problematicall Opinions of Private Doctors,” Montagu hoped to establish that what is “resolved and subscribed” as Christian doctrine by the English articles of religion is rigorously Catholic—sanctioned by tradition and free from innovation. Calvinist doctrines, Montagu insisted, are mere opinions, “private fancies, peculiar propositions of private men,” most of them “raked together out of the lay-stals of deepest Puritanisme, as much opposing the Church of England as the Church of Rome.”6 Indeed, if the faith of Rome were approached with the same malice, if the many disputed questions of Scholastic theology were attributed to the Roman faith as its official doctrine, the Roman Church would rightfully cry foul.7 For example, the Roman doctrine that a “treasury of grace” or merit derived from supererogatory works lies at the disposal of the Roman Church to be

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dispersed (sold) in the form of indulgences is far from well established. At least two serious Scholastic masters, Francis of Mayronis and Durandus of St. Pourçain, challenged the doctrine of indulgences. Thus the Roman doctrine of indulgences is, in fact, merely “problematicall” and not de fide.8 Like Dom Preston, Montagu wished to emphasize that Catholic Christians (Roman or otherwise) are not required to uphold “Problematicall Opinions of Private Doctors” as though these opinions were articles of Catholic faith. Conversely, when Montagu’s Roman Catholic adversary had charged the English Church with holding the novel (Calvinist) doctrine “that faith once had cannot be lost,” Montagu had simply denied it.9 Just as Preston argued that (Roman) Catholics ought to be free to hold, or not to hold, the doctrine of the pope’s deposing power without fear of excommunication, so Montagu argued that (Church of England) Catholics ought to be free to hold, or not to hold, the doctrine that saints cannot fall from grace totally or finally “without heresie either way.”10 Montagu went on to point out that a whole range of positions on the matter had been proposed11 and cited numerous arguments in favor of the “assertion of Antiquitie,” which is that faith can, in fact, be lost “totally and finally”—exactly as the Roman Church teaches. Why, for example, are Christians instructed to pray every day not to be led into temptation if faith, once attained, cannot be lost?12 Nonetheless, Montagu abstained from determining the question positively and insisted that the Church of England “leaveth it at libertie unto us.”13 Montagu, moreover, urged that such disputed matters be confined to theology schools.14 The question of whether faith, once had, can be lost, is a purely speculative question, he argued, which does not affect a person’s salvation. When Montagu’s Puritan opponents expressed shock at reading that the best English theologians favored the Roman Catholic view,15 Mon tagu defended himself by pointing out that he had “determined nothing in the question positively.”16 Rather, his whole effort aimed at defending a range of opinions by arguing (1) that no doctrine on the matter is de fide, (2) that the Calvinist opinion is not heretical, and (3) that the Roman opinion is not distinctly “papist” since it is a common “tenet of antiquity” and is endorsed by German Lutherans.17 As for Montagu’s assertion that the “learnedst” English divines refused to endorse the Calvinist view, he could defend it on good grounds. As proof, he cited article 16 of the English

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Thirty-nine Articles. Article 16 states that Christians who have fallen from grace “may by God’s grace rise again and become new men”—meaning that final perseverance is “possible but not Certaine or Necessary.” Thus his assertion that “the learnedst” divines steered clear of the Calvinist doctrine is justified.18 Montagu’s opponents in Parliament reacted with outrage.19 A young graduate of Oriel College, William Prynne, published a spirited answer to Montagu in 1626, vehemently defending the Calvinist doctrine that saints cannot fall from grace. The Calvinist doctrine, Prynne insisted, is beyond dispute. It is “the received and resolved doctrine of the ancient fathers and of all Protestant churches.” Far from being a merely speculative question, it affects Christian practice and salvation centrally. Absent this doctrine, the English Church would succumb to popery and Arminianism, “nay Pelagianisme and Atheism.”20 As Prynne recognized, Montagu’s “problematicall” theology cleverly destabilized the whole edifice of the English Church’s Calvinist theology. Alarmed by the implications, Joseph Hall, who would be named bishop of Exeter in 1627, tried to limit the damage. He proposed supplementary articles of religion that would define an acceptable via media or “Way of Peace.”21 Hall’s solution consisted in pointing out that the two views could be “brought to the nearest verge of an accord.”22 Why not accommodate both views for the sake of peace? “Men, brethren, fathers, help. Who sees not a dangerous fire kindling in our church?”23 Hall, moreover, invoked the distinction between “matters of faith” and “scholasticall disquisitions” to put the scrupulous at ease. “Scholasticall disquisitions” are not authored by God but by “the brain of men” and “cannot command assent.”24 Hall insisted that it is permissible to hold these opinions in the privacy of one’s heart as long as there is no effort to promote them publicly at the expense of peace.25 Equally alarmed but more combative, Archbishop Abbot’s protégé, Daniel Featley, denounced Montagu’s doctrine of the will’s free cooperation with grace and capacity to operate “workes of praeparation.” According to Featley, Montagu’s doctrine of free will was Pelagian.26 Featley warned his reader in advance that “many men have too much free-will, and take themselves too free liberty nowadays to advance and maintain free will.”27 According to “Pelagiarminians” (as Featley called them), predestination is wrong because it is tantamount to fatalism—to “tying Gods grace to Destiny” and thus “brings in fatal necessity.”28

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George Carleton, bishop of Chichester, accused Montagu of using Pelagius’s very own language and of demonizing Calvinist predestination as a new form of fatalism—as positing “a decree absolute, irrespective, irresistible, determined, fatall, necessitating.”29 Carleton rejected Montagu’s claim that the English articles are “problematicall” and thus susceptible of a variety of interpretations. Predestination, free will, and perseverance, Carleton insisted, are not “scholasticall speculations, as the man in scorne calleth them, they are the grounds of our salvation.”30 Carleton identified Montagu’s most fundamental Pelagian/Arminian/popish error to be the belief that salvation depends on personal cooperation with God’s grace, no matter how minimally.31 Anthony Wotton, who had taught divinity at Gresham College in Elizabeth’s days, urged Parliament to “preserve the faith of our Church in its purity.”32 He pointed out that Montagu’s Pelagian view that the free will “works and concurs” with God’s grace implies three further errors that destroy Christian truth. First, it implies the error emphasized by Prynne, namely, that “a man (yea the Elect) may loose the habit of grace.” Second, it implies the error of universalism, namely, that “the habit of grace is common to the predestinate and not predestinate.” Third, and perhaps worst of all, it implies the self-idolatrous error of supererogation, namely, that “a man may do more then [sic] he is tyed unto by any law of God.”33 Did Montagu’s (Tridentine and Scotist) doctrine of free will lead to affirming supererogation? Roman Catholic doctrine distinguishes between God’s precepts, which all Christians are required to obey, and God’s evangelical counsels, which are elective. No Christian is required to live in poverty, chastity, and obedience, yet Christians may freely choose to do so with the help of God’s grace. Whoever embraces God’s counsels acts supererogatorily—beyond duty. The Church of England, it seems, rejected the notion of supererogatory acts and very explicitly did away with religious orders. Article 14 of the English Church indeed denies that “voluntarie works, besides, over and above God’s commandements” can be taught “without impietie.” Yet Montagu’s “problematicall” theology interpreted article 14 to allow, rather than forbid, supererogation. The scandalous novelty of Montagu’s claim—scandalous because it could open the door to a revival of religious orders in England—is brought to light by a brief review of some key predecessors. Like Montagu, earlier

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English divines had rebuked the Roman Church for deviating from apostolic Christian teaching by “declaring” a number of dubious opinions to be articles of faith.34 In 1610, for example, Thomas Morton and his collaborators had addressed the issue in A Catholic Appeale to Protestants (namely, for Episcopalian Protestants to remain Protestant and worship in the Church of England, not apostatize to Rome or seek a more reformed Christian church).35 Morton and his coauthors claimed to show that the English Church rejects only problematic, disputed Roman doctrines about which there had never been a clear Catholic consensus. With regard to supererogatory acts, Morton did not deny the distinction between precepts and evangelical counsels but rejected the Roman interpretation of the distinction. The case of the rich young man of Matthew 19:20 served to illustrate Rome’s pernicious inclination to innovate. According to the Roman Church, Christ’s counsel to the rich young man to give away his material possessions defines a realm of voluntary holiness that lies beyond what God actually commands. By inviting the rich young man to practice voluntary poverty, Christ reveals an elective path to holiness that the young man is urged, but not required, to follow. To the Roman Church, voluntary poverty exemplifies supererogation since it is meritorious if embraced, but not culpable if omitted. In contrast, according to Morton (and to Calvin), the rich young man was advised on a strictly personal basis to take drastic measures to cure himself of earthly attachments. Christ did not invite him to pursue special “supererogatory” merit, but meant for him simply to overcome obstacles that stood in the way of his eternal life, “which is the reward of commandments.”36 Morton’s Appeale to Protestants thus insists that Christ’s counsel to “Go sell, and give, and follow me” is best interpreted to be “an Evangelicall and temporal Commandement.”37 In Morton’s view, Christ’s advice was narrowly tailored to the spiritual peril faced by the rich young man who approached him. Never did Christ intend a general “evangelical counsel” of voluntary poverty. Rather, recognizing the young man’s presumption, Christ had counseled him specifically to detach himself from earthly riches for the sake of salvation, just as we would advise a merchant, if caught in a storm, to throw his cargo overboard rather than sink.38 Morton’s Appeale to Protestants goes on to reject one of the chief consequences of misinterpreting Christ’s counsels, namely, the Roman Church’s

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sponsorship of monastic orders, including the degenerate “begging Monks” or friars.39 Morton pointed out that the Scholastic master William of St. Amour along with Pope John XXII objected to the mendicant orders from the start.40 There never was a consensus among Romanists regarding the apostolic legitimacy of friars: Why should the English Church be labeled “schismatic” for rejecting such a dubious innovation? As for the second illegitimate consequence of the Roman doctrine of supererogation, namely, Rome’s claim to possess a “treasure” of supererogatory grace to be dispensed as indulgences, Morton’s Appeale rejects it as an innovation that was motivated principally “by filthy lucre.”41 In 1624, the same year in which Montagu’s New Gagg appeared, Francis White, a close associate of Montagu’s at Durham House, published A Replie to Jesuit Fisher’s Answer, in which the Roman doctrine of supererogation is once again explicitly rejected.42 Against the Jesuit claim that God “receives as a gracious and spontaneous gift” what is done by man “voluntarily beyond commanded duties,” White insists that “perfect obedience is required of man” and that “the Evangelicall Law commands us to be perfect.”43 The “Romish” doctrine of supererogatory works, White explains, rests on two faulty premises. It assumes (1) that it is humanly possible to “perform and fulfill all which the law commandeth” and (2) “that some thing be performed which the divine law requireth not, either expressely or derivatively.”44 White then argues that, even if we were capable of fulfilling God’s “strict and expresse law,” which we are not (since, at the end of the day, we are “worthless servants”) the higher “Law of Gratitude” binds us further in duty to God. By the “Law of Gratitude,” White explains, we owe God omne quod sumus et omne quod possumus (“all that we are and all that we can”).45 In order for supererogation to constitute a valid category of human actions, White argues, it would have to involve more than “the performing of some virtuous and rewardable Actions.” It would require that “the said virtuous and laudable actions bee nether enjoyned by strict and morall Precept, nor yet by the Law of Gratitude.” In short, White is willing to grant a distinction between (1) acts that comply with “strict precept” and (2) rewardable acts that aim at fulfilling a debt of gratitude, yet he refuses to characterize the latter as beyond duty, and, therefore, as “supererogatory.” He describes gratitude as a binding law that Christians can no sooner fulfill than the “strict precepts” of God’s commandments. Moreover, White

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stresses that a few virtuous acts performed out of gratitude do not amount to supererogation: in order for us to “supererogate,” we would have to “do the same universally, which we cannot.” Thus we safely remain “worthless servants”—as Protestantism requires. As for the second part of the Romish doctrine, concerning the Church’s treasury, this must be wholly rejected as an innovation motivated by “filthy lucre.” In conclusion, the “Romish” doctrine of supererogatory works must be rejected as unsound and unwarranted.46 The vast majority of Montagu’s predecessors and even a close associate like Francis White assumed that article 14 of the English Church is meant straightforwardly to reject supererogatory works. Not only had Rome added a new and unwarranted doctrine to Christ’s teaching, based on a faulty interpretation of scripture, Rome had rashly declared the doctrine of supererogatory works to be a doctrine of the Faith, despite its dubious foundation. The English Church, in contrast, had rightfully moved to preserve Christian truth by means of article 14, and by means of the other articles, which collectively establish a genuinely Catholic and apostolic Christian creed unpolluted by human opinion. This was the view of Joseph Hall, whose chief aim was to “clear” the English Church “from that hateful slander of heresie or schism.”47 Hall explained that the English Church rejected only “opinions and practices, which have been by degrees thrust upon the Church of God,” while retaining “inviolably all former Articles of Christian Faith.”48 The Roman doctrine of merit must be discarded as “peremptory.”49 It contradicts scripture (which says that we are unprofitable servants) and violates reason (since, “where all is of mere dutie, there can be no merit”). The doctrine of supererogatory works was forced upon Christians by the Roman Church.50 Article 14 correctly rejects the possibility of such works as “arrogant and impious.” Did Jacob Arminius, who was singled out by English Calvinists as a key inspiration of the Durham House group, endorse and promote supererogatory acts? No. Arminius remained firmly opposed to the idea of supererogation. Like other Protestants, he viewed Christians as bound to God by unlimited duty, excluding the possibility of merit. To a lengthy disputation On the Law of God, Arminius added a definitive corollary: “The doctrine of the Papists respecting Councils and Works of Supererogation, derogates from the perfection of the Divine commands.”51

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Against this backdrop, Montagu’s endorsement of supererogatory works in A New Gagg is remarkable. First, far from arguing that there are no grounds in scripture for the doctrine of supererogatory works, Montagu asserts that the Roman Catholic distinction between precept and counsel is fully warranted by scripture and serves as a sound basis upon which to define supererogatory works: “What is meant by works of Supererogation wee may collect out of the texts of Scripture cited, viz. that man in a state of grace, and assisted by God’s grace, may doe some things councelled, and not commanded or exacted in rigour.”52 To remove any doubt that he means the same supererogatory works as are meant by Roman Catholics, Montagu adds: “Many particulars are produced: it is commonly instanced, in virginitie and wilfull poverty.”53 Thus at least two of the traditional monastic works of perfection—voluntary chastity and poverty—are recognized by Montagu to be supererogatory— “things counseled, but not commanded.” According to Montagu, not only are supererogatory works legitimate and apostolic, but special divine assistance is received by those who freely choose to love God more than duty commands. This would imply, it seems, that monks and friars enjoy a special sort of added grace that Calvin’s prosperous and married saints (elect) do not. Is this the view of the English Church? Having defined supererogatory works on the basis of scripture and having illustrated the category by citing voluntary chastity and poverty, Montagu concludes: “For my part, I know no Doctrine of our English Church against Evangelicall Counsels.” According to Montagu, article 14 does not deny the distinction between precepts and evangelical counsels. And since the distinction between precepts and counsels, in turn, entails that someone assisted by grace may do “things councelled but not commanded,” such as live in voluntary chastity and poverty, it follows, at least according to Montagu, that article 14 does not rule out supererogatory works. Those who interpret article 14 in a more negative way—those who interpret article 14 straightforwardly to reject “voluntarie works, besides, over and above God’s commandements”—are entitled to their opinion, Montagu says, as long as they do not claim to speak officially for the English Church. Here as elsewhere, Montagu issues his general rule of tolerance: “Private resolutions this way or that, are but opinions, and may as well be rejected as ad-

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mitted.”54 In other words, article 14 does not rule out the Catholic doctrine of supererogatory works, but it does not impose it either. It is permissible “privately” to deny supererogatory works, or, conversely, to champion them and practice them. Article 14, in effect, leaves the question open. Whereas Hall, as we just saw, depicted the English articles as “retaining” what was indubitably certain from tradition and as rejecting improbable and dubious opinions endorsed dogmatically by Rome, Montagu instead depicts the English articles as conserving disputed questions in their unresolved state. But perhaps Montagu marks his opposition to the Roman Church by denying that supererogatory works are meritorious and suitable to receiving special reward? On the contrary, Montagu seems particularly fond of the meritorious value of supererogatory works and cites patristic sources to bolster it: “I willingly subscribe unto antiquitie for the point of Counsells Evangelicall. For, quod ex voluntate est, laudis est amplioris, saith Philastrius. God putteth the yoake of virginitie upon no man, but leaveth it to those that can and will undergoe it. Therefore Nazianzen well resolved: Wee have laws amongst us, that binde of necessitie. Others, which be left unto our free choice, to keep them or not. So as if wee keepe them, wee shall be rewarded: if we keepe them not, no fear of punishment or danger to be undergone therefore.”55 What, then, if anything, does article 14 reject? The English Church, Montagu argues, rejects only the Roman doctrine that supererogatory acts give rise to a cumulative “treasury” of merit to be transferred to others as indulgences. Thus Montagu interprets the English articles to be aimed at excluding whatever is downright improbable while tolerating what is dubitable. Both the veneration of saints and supererogatory works, in Montagu’s view, are sufficiently probable to be safely allowed. The thesis of a “treasury of merit,” on the other hand, is discarded. In summary, article 14, according to Montagu, imposes two negative boundaries to Christian doctrine: (1) it prohibits endorsing a “treasury” of merit, and (2) it prohibits rejecting supererogatory works altogether. Otherwise, article 14 allows considerable speculative freedom. It allows a range of probable opinions while insisting dogmatically on none. In particular, it allows the opinion that monks and friars love God more than is strictly commanded. It allows the opinion that voluntary poverty and

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chastity constitute just such supererogatory works. Finally, it allows the opinion that supererogatory works are meritorious and will be rewarded. And though it allows these beliefs, article 14 does not require that they be held dogmatically. Anyone who personally doubts that a human being can ever do more than is divinely commanded and who doubts that human actions are ever meritorious is free to hold on to his opinion, as long as he does not mistake it for God’s revealed truth. In his appeal to the Crown, Appello Caesarem, Montagu deployed a variety of tactics to respond to his critics. He argued that he had gone no further than his predecessors. Citing Morton’s Appeale to Protestants, in which the distinction between precepts and counsels is not strictly denied, Montagu wrote that Morton’s example sufficed to “excuse mee from Popery, who write no more than he did before me.” Really? As we saw, Morton’s discussion bears little resemblance to Montagu’s. Whereas Montagu’s New Gagg acknowledges the difference between precepts and counsels in order to defend the doctrine of supererogatory acts as not improbable, Morton’s Appeale to Protestants acknowledges the difference only to reduce all acts to obedience and, most especially, to deny the possibility of supererogatory merit.56 More forcefully, Montagu cited Augustine’s De sancta virgine, in which Augustine uses the term supererogaveritis in connection with chastity.57 Citing Augustine served to justify the term “supererogatory” itself and to claim Augustine’s authority for the opinion that voluntary chastity exemplifies supererogation. Montagu also went on the offensive. If Puritans deny the distinction between precepts and counsels, Montagu argued, then why do they not comply with Matthew 19:31 and sell their riches? The real problem, Appello Caesarem suggests, is that Puritans cannot tolerate the idea of an inclusive Christianity marked by a variety of equally authentic Christian callings. Consequently, Puritans demonize as “papist” whatever threatens their own narrow and self-serving doctrine of special election. In the case of Christ’s utterance to the rich young man of Matthew 19:31, “You neyther obey it, nor will suffer others to obey it that would. For you would account and stile him a Papist, that would do it. . . . For such an opinion you hold of the ancient Monks and Ascetes, as S. Anthony and others, that did practice it.”58 Adding insult to injury, Appello Caesarem includes a rapturous citation from John Chrysostom, emphasizing the human free

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agency that is manifest in supererogatory works: “He that counselleth, leaves it to choice and election of a man, to doe or not doe. It maketh him Lord and Ruler of his own actions.”59 Implicitly, supererogatory works celebrate human freedom and bring human freedom to a new level of plenitude, in which God’s free grace and free human cooperation are fused into a single redemptory force. Most of Montagu’s opponents assumed that Montagu’s “problematicall” approach to theology was a devious means to a subversive end. After Montagu stood his ground in Appello Caesarem, anger mounted. Daniel Featley, eager to oppose Montagu and the Durham House group as often and as firmly as possible,60 composed Second Parallel, published, like the first, in 1626. Featley set out to show, by means of parallel citations, that Montagu’s doctrine of supererogatory works coincides verbatim with the Roman Catholic doctrine and contradicts every word of article 14.61 Featley then sounded a fearful alarm: “this point touching Evangelical Counsels,” he warned, was far less innocent than first appeared—it led directly and inexorably to popery.62 Implicitly, to endorse or reject monastic life emerged as the single most important doctrine separating Canterbury from Rome. Anthony Wotton, in turn, refuted Montagu. For each point, Wotton inquired (1) “whether the propositions delivered by him be true or not,” (2) “whether they agree with Rome,” and (3) “whether they dissent from the Church of England.” With regard to supererogatory works, Wotton showed that Montagu agreed with Rome and dissented from the Church of England—indeed, that he had in effect substituted the Roman doctrine, formulated in Bellarmine’s words, for the authentic content of article 14. As for the truth of Montagu’s position, Wotton refuted it through standard Calvinist arguments, citing Luke (“we are worthless servants”) and the impossibility of perfectly fulfilling God’s commandements. To defend the doctrine of the Church of England, he said, meant proving that “there be no voluntary works.”63 Citations from Calvin and Peter Martyr also sufficed to dismiss Montagu’s most recent argument that the godly should sell their riches, since Christ spoke only to the individual case of the rich young man who approached him, addressing him individually and specifically, not Christians generally.64 In short, Wotton showed that Montagu had introduced a false doctrine that perverted the article in a way that tended to bring about a reconciliation with Rome—precisely

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what Pym’s report to Parliament had concluded. And to the charge of treason that was leveled by Pym, Wotton added the personal accusation that Montagu “embraced contradictories” out of personal ambition, namely, because “he wants both to advance in the English church and reconcile it to Rome.”65 The accusation was an old one, fueled by rumors and suspicions. In April 1623, one of Archbishop Abbott’s chaplains (perhaps Featley) had preached a sermon warning that “the hope of a Cardinalls hatt would make many a Scholler in England beat his braine to reconcile the Church of Rome and England.”66 Montagu’s opponents did not recognize (or deliberately refused to recognize) that his endorsement of supererogatory works aimed at supplying the English Church with enough flexibility to put it on an equal footing with the Roman Church and forestall defections. By arguing that article 14 allows the doctrine of supererogatory works without imposing it as an article of Christian faith, Montagu wished to cast the English Church in a very special Christian light. What was perhaps most apostolic and most Catholic about the English Church, Montagu implied, was precisely its willingness to live with unresolved doctrines and to maintain them precisely as unresolved. Schism, on this view, stemmed not only from turning mere opinions into dogma, but also from insisting that every question of theology be resolved into a certainty. The “truth” of article 14 is that it wisely refuses to rule out supererogatory works without asserting the doctrine positively. Or so at least Montagu’s “problematicall theology” might have been construed. What prompted Montagu to promote a new capaciousness within the English Church? In addition to forestalling defections to Rome, was there a secret longing among the members of the Durham House group not only for the beauty of holiness but for holiness itself? Close to Montagu’s friend Augustine Lindsell, there was a man at the midpoint of his life, in his thirty-third year, who found himself called, somewhat abruptly, to renounce the world. His name was Nicholas Ferrar. In February 1626, on Trinity Sunday, after a week of fasting and after a night spent in prayer, Ferrar, accompanied by Lindsell, went to King Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey to be ordained deacon by William Laud, bishop of St. David’s. 67 Ferrar’s solemn vow, which “ravished Lindsell with joy,” was to “separate himself to serve God.” Voluntary seclusion from worldly vanity

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and voluntary poverty were at the heart of Ferrar’s calling. When the news of his ordination reached the court, he was offered ecclesiastic preferment, but he refused. He had, he explained, “already parted with all propriety in his temporal estate by sharing equally.” His plan was to pioneer a new kind of supererogatory life with the consent of Anglican bishops. The strange and strangely delightful religious community that he founded at Little Gidding, with its chapel adorned of “sky-coloured” silk embroidered with gold, would be denounced a decade and a half later to Parliament as an “Arminian nunnery.”68 The case of Ferrar helps to understand the connection between supererogation and the “problematicall” theology that Montagu sought to foster within the English Church. In 1626, at thirty-three, Ferrar was bruised and chastened by the fickleness of fortune. Once a precocious youth who had been elected fellow of Clare College at Cambridge at the age of seventeen, he had turned to the world of business for the sake of his family. He had ascended brilliantly, only to fall catastrophically and very publicly. Worst of all, he blamed himself—unable to sort out his part of responsibility in the disastrous outcome of his family’s dreams for the colony of Virginia. What, exactly, had gone wrong? Nicholas had perhaps never been cut out for worldly affairs. A pious, sensitive child who grew into a gifted scholar, Nicholas suffered in his early adulthood from chronic insomnia and fevers, prompting his tutor Lindsell and the prestigious physician William Butler to urge him to take a vacation from his desk. Lindsell and Butler arranged for him to travel to the Continent in the entourage of Prince Frederick of Palatine and his new bride, Elizabeth Stuart, (accompanied by Philemon Holland’s son). Between 1613 and 1617, from the age of twenty to twenty-four, Ferrar roamed freely through Europe, visiting Hamburg, Leipzig, Prague, Venice, then the great medical center of Padua, then Rome and the Vatican, even Malta, before sojourning, finally, in France and Spain. 69 Nicholas learned many languages, observed many customs, and took stock of experimental schools and religious communities, and perhaps heard the music of Philip Neri’s Oratory. In April 1616, passing through Marseille, where Saint John Cassian had found refuge from the Egyptian desert, he nearly died of a fever. In Madrid in 1617, he received news that his family needed him. He walked all the way to the seaport of San Sebastian to board a vessel back to England.

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Nicholas’s father and older brother, John, were merchant adventurers. They were deeply involved in the Virginia Company and were friends and allies of Sir Edwin Sandys and of his patron, the Earl of Southampton. Within two months of his return from Spain, Nicholas “had contracted so neare friendship” with Sandys that “they were seldom asunder,” to the great satisfaction of Nicholas’s father. By 1619, the Sandys faction had gained control of the Virginia Company and held company meetings at the Ferrar family home in St. Sithes Lane. Sandys was treasurer and Ferrar served as deputy. Rejecting an offer to teach geometry at Gresham College, Nicholas plunged himself heart and soul into the day-to-day management of Virginia.70 Unlike the previous leadership, which had promoted trading profits and small, well-garrisoned coastal settlements, the Sandys– Ferrar faction hoped to develop Virginia’s natural resources and create a vast agrarian utopia—where all sorts of new crops and new industries would take root, such as tobacco, vineyards, orchards, silk, glassworks, and ironworks, but most of all where brotherly love and peace would flourish, setting a new standard for humanitarian colonization of the new world. English planters and Native American Powhatans would live in mutual harmony and flourish as a single Christian people, inspired by the example of John Rolfe and the Powhatan princess Pocahontas. A key priority for the Sandys– Ferrar faction was to develop a school at Henrico for the education of Native American children. Soon, Powhatan deacons and higher clergy would be able to spread the “beauty of holiness” to their savage tribes. Both Nicholas and his brother John materially supported the founding of Henrico College and sent “a great muster of Bibles and psalmbooks for the children.”71 Their father, who died in 1620, bequeathed money for “raising Indian youths in Christian Religion, and some good course to live by” and 300 pounds for the college.72 Back in London, divines raging from the “factious and popular” John Davenport to the charismatic John Donne were invited to preach to the members of the Virginia Company, kindling enthusiasm for the Sandys– Ferrar project.73 In Virginia, George Thorpe, who supervised the college lands, took every care to win the hearts and minds of the natives. In 1621, Sandys’s nephew by marriage, Francis Wyatt, appointed governor, reported from Virginia that the houses were “generally set open to the Savages, who were always friendly entertained at the tables of the

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English, and commonly lodged in their bed-chambers.”74 Ferrar, in short, had every reason to trust in the success of the Virginia utopia and to thank God for calling him to play a chief role in its instauration. On March 22, 1622, the Powhatans, increasingly pressed for land and anxious over their ancestral way of life, rose up to massacre more than three hundred of their English neighbors. The hopes of the Sandys– Ferrar leadership were dashed and their self-confidence shattered. That same year, Nicholas succeeded his brother John as deputy of the company and thus assumed direct responsibility for the expedient policies that were adopted in response to the massacre. The Sandys– Ferrar leadership continued to recruit new English settlers for Virginia, often suppressing details about the desperate conditions that these settlers would face. They also adopted a new strategy of extermination towards the natives, which Governor Wyatt and the Virginia Council executed ruthlessly.75 Soon, the previous leadership, the disgruntled Smythe–Warwick faction, denounced Sandys and Nicholas Ferrar for gross mismanagement. They called for an official investigation. By late 1623, the Crown was involved, and in May 1624, after a protracted battle in which Nicholas tried by every means to save his friends and his family from dishonor, the company was stripped of its charter.76 The final blow to Nicholas’s moral self-confidence came with the ugly epilogue of Lionel Cranfield’s impeachment. Following the Virginia debacle, injured and angry, Nicholas lead a veritable vendetta in Parliament against Cranfield, who had been a chief critic of the Virginia Company policies.77 John Ferrar’s brief statement, years later, that “it was no small grief to them when the Company was disbanded,” hardly captures the depth of Nicholas’s confusion and guilt in 1626. A pious scholar who had given up a Cambridge University fellowship and a Gresham College professorship in order to devote himself to his family’s investment in Virginia, Nicholas had been drawn, through a fatal combination of naïveté and presumption, into a spiral of greed, evil, bloodshed, and dishonor. His humanitarian efforts had been rooted in human blindness. In 1626, he resolved to “separate himself” from the world and to serve God by “entering into that religious life which he had so long and so ardently thirsted for.” No doubt the letter written five years later to Mary Ferrar conveys Nicholas’s state of mind and the ground of his decision to go off to Little Gidding in search

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of a holiness that had eluded him as long as he had lived in the world: “There is nothing but the practizes of virtue and Religion that can in the end yield comforts: all other things will turn to Bitterness at the last.”78 Little Gidding was devoted to “the practices of virtue and Religion.” Nicholas devised a daily regimen of prayer and work, modeled on the old monastic rules, to ensure that the members of his community (mostly family members) lived in unity, focused on God’s presence from dawn to dusk. The revival of cryptosupererogatory works at Little Gidding did not escape Calvinist critics, who charged the “Fryer-like family” with “mimicking actions of will-worship,” such as dispensing medical care to indigent outsiders “in a meritorious way.”79 Two spiritual masters whose writings Nicholas translated into English shed vivid light on the revival of interest in supererogatory works at Little Gidding. The first is the Jesuit Leonard Lessius, who was active in Louvain until his death in 1623. The second is the Spanish contemplative Juan de Valdés, a layman known as “Valdesso,” who died in Naples in 1541. Both Lessius and Valdesso championed supererogatory works. The earlier author, Valdesso, much like Jean Gerson,80 promoted supererogatory works over speculative theology as a more secure pathway to inward certainty. Valdesso insisted that rational argumentation would never bring the soul closer to God but would leave it, instead, dissatisfied and hungry. In Valdesso’s words, translated by Nicholas Ferrar, intellectual certainty is impossible and must be relinquished in favor of the practical certainty that is bred into the soul progressively through holiness. As long as human beings live “according to the flesh,” Valdesso writes, full of lusts and ambitions, their “faith, confidence and love” stand “in the Understanding,” rather than “in the Heart.”81 From Valdesso, Nicholas learned that loving God in practice, rather than reasoning about scriptures, constitutes the foundation of Christian life.82 A first consequence of rejecting doctrinal theology in favor of practical holiness is that tolerance emerges as the very hallmark of the true Christian: “It belongs to every Pious person to be very modest, and very moderate in approving or condemning things.”83 A fortiori, religious persecution must be shunned as a heinous crime and mortal sin: “And here I learned, that I ought to keepe myself from the fire to persecute any man of what manner soever, pretending to doe God service therein.”84 The practice of holiness, in effect, liberates the soul from an obsessive dread of right and wrong and from the murderous instincts that such dread entails.

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But if religious faith is a divine gift that cannot be reached by intellectual prowess or protected by persecution, what, if anything, lies in our personal power? According to Valdesso, what lies within our human power is to “disenamour” ourselves of the world by fleeing vanities and focusing wholly on God.85 The meaning of the evangelical counsels and the importance of supererogatory works consist in preparing the soul by purging it. As Nicholas Ferrar would have been in a special position to understand, supererogatory acts do not “merit” God’s grace so much as “comfort” the soul, making it more receptive to grace if God chooses to bestow it.86 And whereas it lies within our power to “disenamour” ourselves of the world through our own supererogatory efforts, we cannot positively “enamour” ourselves of God without God’s initiative and grace. Valdesso’s doctrine, in short, complies with article 14 of the English Church. Supererogation, to Valdesso, is beneficial rather than positively meritorious in the disputed sense of the term. By mortification, Valdesso writes, “a man maintains himself in the certainty of Gods providence.”87 Mortification also corrects our depraved tendency to rely on doctrines by teaching us that “the Christian business is not knowledge but experience.”88 According to Valdesso, those who are quick to believe “by Opinion and by Relation” usually believe more falsehoods than truths. In contrast, those who find it difficult to believe theological doctrines are often called to the deep Christian life of supererogatory works: “the difficulty of believing is rather a signe of vocation, than the easiness.”89 Finally, the uncertainty of theological doctrines matters all the less to true Christians because there is, according to Valdesso, a very “certain and secure way to obtain perfect mortification.” By letting go of past memories, both self-flattering memories and shameful ones, and by wholly focusing on God’s call to leave the world and follow Christ, a person will soon come to “abhor all those things that hinder him in his vocation, and love all those things which may continue and increase it.”90 Valdesso, moreover, emphasizes the festive joy of Christian mortification and the incomparable splendor of God’s presence. Whoever leaves the world to pursue Christian perfection, he explains, must rejoice at every moment since he is called “by a great prince unto a great feast, in comparison whereof all those feasts that may offer themselves unto him in the way, are not feasts, but childrens plaie.”91 Life at Little Gidding was organized to feel and look like the great celestial courts that Nicholas saw depicted in angelic colors by Italian masters during his travels through

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Italy. Every symbol of celestial bliss, including organ music, flowers, tapers, and gowns, was lovingly instituted. Collective gatherings were full of cheer and stories, angels and conviviality, as in a sacra conversazione.92 Meals were frugal. The second author to attract Nicholas’s favor, the Jesuit Lessius, promoted what he called “Holy Sobriety” as a central supererogatory practice—as a key means for the religious to live longer, attain wisdom, “serve God more perfectly and obtain greater glory in heaven.”93 By “Holy Sobriety,” Lessius meant restricted food intake. In a treatise entitled Hygiasticon, which Nicholas Ferrar translated into English, Lessius drew on contemporary physiology and ancient records of desert monks to argue that restricted food intake significantly enhances health, benefits the mind, and helps “contemplation, prayer and devotions, and the preservation of chastity.”94 Restricted food intake, according to Lessius, makes it possible to follow God’s evangelical counsels with “more ease and cheerfulness.”95 One of the purposes of Hygiasticon was to provide rules for each person to calculate what quantity of food and drink to allow himself (or herself ) each day. Even in monasteries, where meals are provided collectively, each person, he argued, must stick to a personal regimen. For the full benefits to accrue, dieting must be voluntary and personal. Indeed an important aspect of dieting is the daily opportunity it affords to “exercise greater virtue” since more food may be offered at meals than we need and since our dinner companions may have greater personal allotments than ourselves. Lessius cites the desert father Pachomius and the practice of setting a roast before monks, so that they “might have it in their free choice and libertie, either to eat thereof, or to forebear.”96 “Holy Sobriety,” in short, not only facilitates meritorious works but is, in itself, meritorious. To the argument that the desert saints may have lived long lives and died peacefully because of God’s supernatural favor, Lessius answers that no, the correlation between longevity and restricted food intake in this group is significant enough to rule out other variables.97 As a supererogatory practice, restricted food intake is meritorious since it attests to deliberate care of, and reverence for, a life dedicated to God’s service. The fact that “nothing is as potent as Sobriety, next to grace” for the practice of chastity and the fact that sobriety makes the mind “more fit for divine inspirations and illuminations” so that the religious can “lay up store for themselves a great treasure of good works” are, as it were, ancillary benefits. Once these added

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benefits are known, however, it is meritorious to choose to act to bring them about to the extent that it lies in our power. Self-care, in the pious and the religious, is meritorious.98 The supererogatory lessons of Lessius’s Hygiasticon appear to have made a deep impression on Nicholas Ferrar. We are told that the diet at Little Gidding “was neat and frugal, yet with variety enough accommodated to every one’s health and constitution”—not to mention varied enough to provide opportunities for “the exercise of greater virtue.” Each member of the community had the opportunity to diet “beyond the call of duty” and thus to practice supererogatory self-care. Lessius made one more contribution to the doctrine of supererogatory works that may have directly inspired Nicholas Ferrar. In a treatise on chastity, Lessius had argued that voluntary chastity, practiced by vow while living in the world, was both legitimate and meritorious. Pointing out that Augustine “deemed it most probable that the Virgin had vowed chastity before her marriage, rather than immediately after,” Lessius argued that the merit of voluntary chastity is not diminished by being adopted in the midst of worldly life, on the contrary. It requires special devotion to remain chaste while living in the world and retaining one’s riches.99 The important feature of Lessius’s argument is that it introduces a new flexibility with regard to supererogatory works, allowing for degrees and intermediary states to be cultivated between the two extremes of traditional monasticism and libertinage. The key was to treat evangelical counsels individually. “The counsels and advices of our Saviour Christ,” Lessius wrote, “are not so necessarily united one to the other, but that one may be followed without another, and by themselves in divers degrees.”100 By validating independent supererogatory practices that participate in the monastic life without attaining full religious status, Lessius opened up the realm of supererogation to new initiatives and half measures, indirectly encouraging the sort of experimental, semireligious community that the Ferrars pioneered within the English Church and under Anglican protection at Little Gidding. The decision to “separate himself ” from the world allowed Nicholas Ferrar and the members of his community to focus on orthopraxy and works of charity. Living according to a daily rule and sustained by ceremony, the “nuns and friars” of Little Gidding attempted to pursue Christian perfection in a secure haven that was impenetrable to doctrinal doubt

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and controversy. Working daily to “disenamour” himself of worldly vanity, Nicholas found it religiously meaningful to wear distinctive clothing and to prostrate himself before the altar and the cross.101 He encouraged his sisters to remain celibate.102 The Puritan critic who accused Little Gidding of being an “Arminian nunnery” was perceptive. As the members of the little community walked in solemn procession to the chapel for vespers, as they bowed and knelt and let the organ music transport them to ineffable heavenly realms, they felt little need to quarrel over predestination or to deny the universalism of Christ’s sacrifice. Anxiety over correct belief gave way to serenity. Compared to holy living, dogmatic victory seemed sterile and beside the point. At sunset, swallows frolicked in the English air; hearts were filled with contentment. Did a similar nostalgia for supererogation contribute to the proliferation of English monastic communities in Flanders? In 1629, James Wadsworth, who called himself the “English Spanish pilgrime,” reported that “one hundred at least of young gentlemen and gentlewomen a year are drawn out of our land” for the purpose of being educated in the ways of the Old Religion and, “more often than not, of joining a religious order.”103 England’s daughters, in particular, were fleeing England in the hope of “sequestering their bodies from the turbulent tempest of the world.”104 Abolished in England and condemned by godly Protestants as idolatrous, the supererogatory model of Christian perfection continued to exert a strong fascination on a generation that had been raised to reject it. We have already seen vivid examples. John Gennings converted to Rome and became a Franciscan. William Laud’s roommate at Oxford, John Jones, renounced the world in 1600, at the age of twenty-five, to become the Benedictine Dom Leander à Sancto Martino, Sancta Clara’s teacher at St. Gregory’s. Sancta Clara’s friend Walter Coleman, who had enrolled at the English College in 1617, returned to Douay less than a decade later, at the age of twenty-six, to join the English Franciscans as Brother Christopher à Sancto Francisco. By 1629, quite apart from the numerous Jesuit houses, no fewer than ten English monastic communities flourished in Flanders—in Brussels, Cambrai, Louvain, Ghent, Gravelines, Antwerp, Douay, and Ayre.105 A steady exodus of English widows and maidens fed the founding and expansion of convents. Between 1612 and 1619, four sisters from the

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same Radcliffe family joined the Poor Clares of Gravelines, a convent originally founded by Mary Ward.106 By 1624, the convent counted sixtyfive members.107 The tertiary convent of St. Elizabeth’s, in turn, was opened in Brussels in 1621 when Catherine Greenbury (age 26), Elizabeth Loueden (age 27), two Hockley sisters (age 25 and 20), and two Holt sisters (age 16 and 15) were clothed with the novice’s habit.108 In 1623, a Benedictine convent was founded at Cambrai when eight young women took the habit, including a great-great-granddaughter of Thomas More, Helen, aged seventeen, and James Wadsworth’s own sister Mary, age nineteen. In the realm of the supererogatory life, nuns had a very special cachet. Priests and monks and friars drew special inspiration from their ascetic zeal and vied with one another to guide them spiritually. To their Franciscan brethren and confessors, the Poor Clares of Gravelines seemed as heroic as “salamanders thriving on flames.”109 English Benedictines such as Leander Jones and English Franciscans such as Sancta Clara eagerly promoted their own ancient spiritual practices in the face of more fashionable Jesuit methods. The competition was fierce. By 1629, the Benedictine nuns of Brussels had been put under the supervision of two English Jesuits. 110 At Cambrai, Dom Augustine Baker had succeeded in keeping Jesuits at bay by developing a distinctly English and medieval spirituality that preempted Jesuit methods by emphasizing the promptings of the spirit.111 The Poor Clares of Gravelines, in turn, had come under a pro-Jesuit faction in 1626. Sancta Clara was sent in 1629 to rescue the loyal pro-Franciscan minority, including the four Radcliffe sisters, and start a new convent in Ayre under Franciscan direction.112 What sources did our new English supererogationists appropriate and revive? Dom Augustine Baker, appointed in 1624 to guide the Benedictine nuns of Cambrai, drew from the medieval English mystics Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle, and Julian of Norwich.113 John Gennings sponsored the translation of various Franciscan works into English, often for the special benefit of the English nuns. Three examples will suffice to illustrate the distinctive types of Franciscan spirituality that were pursued by the English Franciscans of Flanders. The first example is an English version of Marcos de Lisboa’s massive Chronicle and Institution of the Order of the seraphicall Father S. Francis conteyning his life, his death, and his miracles, and of his holie disciples and companions. Published in 1618, the same year

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that Sancta Clara took his solemn vows, the English version of Lisboa’s Chronicle is dedicated “to the most religious ensign-bearers of S. Clare, the Englishe Poore Clares in Gravelinge.” The letter of dedication is signed by a mysterious “CLA FRA,” who reveals that it was the nuns themselves who requested the translation.114 The Poor Clares of Gravelines, CLA FRA explains, deserve the whole merit of making examples of Franciscan perfection accessible to an English audience. Their merit, moreover, is “infinitely redoubled” every time a new soul is enflamed with charity by reading the English version of the Chronicle.115 Thus a sort of exponential supererogatory formula is sketched, amorous and baroque. To the saintly Franciscan examples described in the Chronicle must be added the new meritorious example of the English Poor Clares requesting that the Chronicle be translated, and the open-ended merit yet to be added every time the Chronicle inspires new merit—not to mention the meritorious example of the main translator listed in the approbationes, namely, the lay brother William Cape, and the merit of other unknown translators, such as “F. C.,” who “Englished” the first part. All of this merit is supererogatory since there is no divine precept to translate Franciscan literature, or to request that it be translated, yet both are morally good, beneficial, and charitable. Franciscan supererogation thus includes promoting supererogation through literary depictions and stories. The purpose of the Chronicle is not to argue any point of doctrine but to present inspiring examples of Franciscan saints and of their supererogatory works. As Marcos of Lisboa explains in his preface to the reader, we are much more powerfully induced to pursue the evangelical counsels by example than by verbal persuasion.116 No one would ever “joyfully resolve” to live a life of poverty, chastity, and fasting if others had not embraced such a life before. Christ came to us in order “to show us by example.”117 The Franciscan calling is, so to speak, strictly supererogatory. It is defined in its very essence by the three evangelical counsels that define the plenitude of Christ’s own perfection. The Franciscan vocation consists wholly in imitatio Christi. This is why no Franciscan can ever be dispensed from following the evangelical counsels, even by the pope.118 This is why the stigmata of Saint Francis, proof of the poverello’s perfect identification with Christ, manifest the highest degree of Christian perfection. The “glorious virgin Clare,” in turn, “cast the anchor of her soul” in the “secure harbor” of the convent of St. Damian, where she “built her

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nest” like a “silvered dove” in order to “settle in the way of penance.”119 She lived every penitential day “full of supreme delights.”120 Perfect embrace of the evangelical life coincides with perfect joy. Saint Clare always “carried a countenance gracious and joyfull” in the midst of her austerities, attesting to the supernatural serenity of “clearing the soul of all rumours of the world” and surmounting “the deceipts and appetites of the flesh by the bridle of reason.”121 Shaped by the evangelical counsels, Saint Clare “freely attained God’s high secrets.”122 Out of an excess of charity, she developed healing powers and “expelled divills” at a distance, by her prayers.123 Her merits brought her miraculous gifts and spread her fame abroad, even though she herself aimed solely at pleasing God by adhering to the evangelical counsels.124 Her miraculous powers, moreover, as effective as they were in converting sinners and curing the afflicted, were only the external “leaves” of her Franciscan vocation. The real “fruits” were all interior, sprung from “the tree of the crosse of our Saviour Jesus Christ that was deeply planted in her heart.”125 Saint Clare’s perfection lay chiefly in being a living example of evangelical perfection—in communicating herself, as such, across time and space, to human beings marred in material vanity in order to inspire “those which follow us.”126 Our second English translation offers a very different model of Franciscan supererogation. In 1625, Sancta Clara’s successor as the Franciscan confessor of the tertiary nuns of St. Elizabeth’s was the Hebraist Francis Bell, who had taken the Franciscan habit in Segovia in 1618. Bell published a translation of Antonio Daza’s Historia, Vida y Milagros de Santa Juana de la Cruz, rendering Daza’s work as The Historie, life and miracles of sister Ioane, of the crosse. The protagonist of the work, Joan of the Cross (1481–1534), was a Spanish tertiary whom the Franciscan Daza hoped would be canonized. Daza’s Historia was first published in 1610 and condemned by Church authorities for its many extravagances, including its disturbing forms of self-mortification. Daza was not the only Spaniard to venerate Sister Joan and to believe in her visions and miracles. The poet Lope de Vega, himself a tertiary Franciscan, wrote a sonnet comparing Santa Juana to the sun (except brighter), while his friend Tirso de Molina composed a vivid Santa Juana trilogy of plays (1613–14).127 Everything about Sister Joan was extraordinary, starting with her miraculous transformation, in utero, from male to female, leaving her with an Adam’s apple, as a sign of her special destiny.128 Sister Joan practiced outlandishly

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fierce mortifications in the specific hope of liberating souls from purgatory. She developed prophetic gifts and miraculous powers. She gained fame as a healer. She consulted her guardian angel in order to bring afflicted souls back to health.129 More spectacularly still, she convinced her guardian angel to carry rosary beads to heaven to be blessed and then to be returned to earth imbued with magic powers.130 In 1621, the process of her beatification was officially initiated in Rome. By 1625, when Francis Bell published his English translation of Sister Joan’s life, Daza was actively encouraging new Franciscan nuns to emulate Sancta Juana and to repeat the miracle of producing miraculous rosary beads.131 What motivated Bell to translate Daza’s work? The choice is all the more puzzling that the Portuguese theologian and inquisitor Emanuel do Valle de Moura vehemently attacked Daza’s book in 1620 and accused Sister Joan of having been little more than a witch (curandera).132 Bell’s translation was ready in October 1624, the date at which the English Benedictine Francis Crathorne, at St. Vaast, certified its accuracy.133 Sancta Clara, in turn, approved Bell’s translation as theologically and morally safe in February 1625, just a few months before setting off to Rome at John Gennings’s request to petition the general chapter for the restoration of the English province. Did the English Franciscans wish to show their zeal for a new Franciscan saint? Or did they wish to show respect for the Spanish province, Daza’s province, where Bell and other English Franciscans had first professed? Were they worried that Spain and the Jesuits might oppose the full restoration of the English province? The final imprimatur was given by Gennings, in his new capacity as custos, but not until September 1625. Bell dedicated the Historie, life and miracles of sister Ioanne, of the crosse, along with an English version of Lope de Vega’s sonnet, to two Poor Clares, Margaret and Elizabeth Radcliffe. The two sisters had been called from their convent in Gravelines to supervise the new tertiary nuns of Brussels and to instruct them in the Franciscan way of life until the tertiaries were spiritually mature enough to elect their own abbess. Revealingly, Bell praises the Radcliffe sisters for abiding by the more austere vows of their own second order while living among the laxer tertiaries—for sleeping on straw beds while the tertiary nuns slept on beds of wool, for going barefoot while the tertiary nuns wore shoes, for abstaining from flesh while eating at the same table, and so forth.134 “What monk or

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heremit,” Bell writes, has ever been asked to perform such austerity? In Bell’s Franciscan view, austerities are all the more meritorious that their voluntary character is tested by immediate temptation. The more voluntary the self-renunciation, the greater the supererogatory merit. The greatest merit of all is voluntarily to lay down one’s life, like Christ, in martyrdom— which Bell would one day be called to do, at Tyburn, manifesting his great joy for converting a thief who was about to be hanged alongside him.135 What new light does Daza’s Historia shed on Franciscan supererogation? Sister Joan was less courtly a figure than Saint Clare, who stopped her more extreme austerities on Saint Francis’s order. Daza’s Historia traces the transformation of a woman tormented by the most frenzied cruelty into a powerful healer who heals others by virtue of having been healed.136 Sister Joan’s macabre efforts to save souls from purgatory, in particular, attest to her grasp of the burden of blood and guilt that weighed on her sixteenthcentury Spanish compatriots. The brutal conquest of the New World, the scores of natives driven into slavery by Spanish greed, not to mention the expulsion of Jews from Spain, had contrived to foment a deep fear of retali ation in the Spanish heart, which her theater of morbid actions managed to externalize and address. Her creative initiative to obtain supernatural rosary beads from heaven was guided, in turn, by a deep insight into popular superstition. The beads, she warned, were effective only for good purposes, such as preventing wars, healing illnesses, and calming storms. Symbolically, Sister Joan outdid the Church on its own turf. Her miraculous beads gave her the power to distribute her own supererogatory merits to all, thus validating the Catholic doctrine of a “treasury” of merit while keeping some control over the distribution, which she placed in the hands of God’s poor, namely, her Franciscan confessors. The contrast between the serene Franciscan saints depicted in Marcos de Lisboa’s Chronicle and the abject but sublime “witch doctor” model offered by Daza’s Historia attests to the wide range of holiness to emerge out of Franciscan supererogation. Did the English tertiary nuns of St. Elizabeth’s in Brussels embrace Sister Joan as their model? They seem to have preferred the more serene examples of Franciscan sainthood—judging, at least, by a third translation, made this time by Catharine Greenbury, the first tertiary to be elected abbess of St. Elizabeth’s. Called in religion Sister Catharine Francis, Greenbury translated the biography of a medieval

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Franciscan tertiary, Saint Elizabeth of Portugal (1271–1336). Entitled in its English version A Short relation of the life, virtues and miracles of S. Elizabeth called the peacemaker, Queen of Portugall, the work had been written in Flemish by the Franciscan François Paludanus (van der Broecke). It was translated into French and Spanish in 1625, when Brussels celebrated Elizabeth of Portugal’s canonization by Urban VIII on May 25.137 Without telling her confessor Francis Bell of her project, Sister Catharine Francis took it upon herself to produce an English version of the Flemish work. Bell recounts how he happened to see the translation by chance and, recognizing Sister Catharine’s handwriting, ascertained that she had indeed translated it herself. Impressed by the perfect accuracy of her translation, he asked their superior, Sancta Clara, to approve it for publication. Bell then took the manuscript himself to the publisher, John Pepermans, whom he knew personally.138 The book was published sometime between October and December 1628. Greenbury’s English version of Elizabeth of Portugal’s life was designed to pay homage to a number of important patrons. First and foremost, it implicitly honored the Infanta, Clara Eugenia, who, like Saint Elizabeth, had become a Franciscan tertiary at her husband’s death in 1621. Second, it honored the Infanta’s cousin, Prince Emanuel of Portugal, who had given funds to St. Elizabeth’s in 1627 for the expansion of the convent and who would himself lay the cornerstone of the new building in May 1628.139 Last but not least, it honored the new English queen, HenrietteMarie—who, like Elizabeth of Portugal, had come into a troubled foreign land where, it was hoped, she would revive sanctity and bring peace. The story of Elizabeth conveys a model of conduct not “only for Religious, but also for Princes.”140 In a preface dedicated to Greenbury, Bell stresses the merit of Greenbury’s translation: “For nothing moveth more to perfection then [sic] the examples of those saintes that were in all respectes of the same profession that our selves are.” Saint Elizabeth was all at once a woman, a wife and mother, a tertiary Franciscan, a pilgrim, a diplomat, and a queen. A poetic engraving by Gillis van Schoor at the start of the book shows Saint Elizabeth with a youthful face and dreamy, imaginative eyes. She is dressed in a nun’s habit, with a pretty black veil lined in white, and a crown on her head, set against a bright halo of light. With one hand, she carries roses in the folds of her gown, recalling the day

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when the “greate summe of money” that she carried for the poor was miraculously turned into roses, concealing her charitable act from her kingly husband. In her other hand, she carries a knotty pilgrim’s staff, signifying her pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Strength and tact, tenderness and grit, combine to characterize the saintly tertiary queen, known as “the peace-maker.” Once again, a distinctive Franciscan appreciation of supererogatory merit is woven into the narrative. As a child, Elizabeth read the Divine Office so assiduously and was so charitable to the poor that her father “ascribed the good success of his affaires to his daughters merits.”141 The example she set of supererogatory holiness as a queen was visibly rewarded by God with miracles.142 Her fasts and daily devotions were rewarded by miraculous healing powers and, most importantly, by political powers that allowed her to “quiet the Civill warres in Portugal.”143 Supererogatory works earned her treasures of “wisdom, constancy and patience,” which she employed for “the commun good and publike profit.”144 Moreover, she typically “undertook to finish works begun by others” rather than seek her own glory.145 At the death of her husband, she became a Franciscan tertiary in order “that she might the better attend to the help and relief of poore people.”146 No sooner did she embrace the Franciscan rule than she acquired new miraculous powers and new evidence of the truth of the Christian mysteries.147 Her focus, however, remained the honor of God (pilgrimage in disguise to Santiago de Compostela), the salvation of souls (building of convents, prayers and masses for the dead), and the public good (building of hospitals). The example of Saint Elizabeth, in short, successfully fused the figures of Mary and Martha into one, just as it fused together humility and majesty. Implicitly, supererogation simultaneously redeems individual souls and improves communities. By seeking to please God beyond what is commanded by divine precept, Franciscan saints attract a surplus of divine benevolence that benefits others as much as themselves. What would it take for Franciscan life to flourish once again in the towns and cities and valleys of England? Protestant rejection of supererogatory vocations was certainly the chief obstacle to Sancta Clara’s dream, but not the only one. In 1629, debate over the exact role and prerogatives of religious orders raged within the Roman Church. The rivalry

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between secular clergy and regular clergy within the Roman Catholic mission in England had once again flared up, fueled by conflicting political interests. The secular priest Richard Smith, appointed bishop of Chalcedon in November 1624 at Richelieu’s urging, had returned to England in 1625 to oversee the English mission. He quickly alienated regular missionaries by claiming episcopal authority over them. Targeted for arrest by Charles’s government in December 1628 and again in March 1629, Bishop Smith took refuge in the French embassy in London.148 One of Bishop Smith’s staunchest supporters, Matthew Kellison, published A Treatise of the Hierarchie and Divers Orders of the Church against the Anarchie of Calvin in 1629, perhaps in time for the conference that was aimed at reaching a truce with Bishop Smith’s opponents.149 As we know, Kellison had a favorable view of the English Recollects of Douay, despite his staunch support for episcopal authority. Under what conditions would he favor religious orders on English soil? Kellison’s Treatise of the Hierarchie opens with an “Epistle Dedicatorie,” addressed to “the Catholiques of England.” It urges unity and explains that there can be no Roman Church in England without a bishop, since both the Church’s “essential members” (i.e., the secular clergy) and its “helps and ornaments” (i.e., the religious orders) depend on a bishop in order to function apostolically.150 Kellison acknowledges that he is himself a secular priest who “glories to be a member of our English cleargie,” but he says that he “honours all Religious orders confirmed by the Church” and “esteemes him no good Catholique who doth not esteeme them.”151 Clearly hoping to pacify regular missionaries and obtain their cooperation, Kellison included a separate chapter on “the state of the religious.” According to Kellison, the scriptural distinction between divine precepts and counsels fully warrants the Church’s protection of religious orders, as indeed the English Carmelite and Oxford theologian Thomas Waldensis proved against John Wycliffe long before Luther and Calvin.152 Those who are called to the monastic life, and who vow to follow with special assiduity the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience, legitimately “tend to more perfection then [sic] is the ordinarie perfection of Christians.” As Aquinas explains, monks and friars are distinctly called religious “because they consecrate their whole life to Christ and totallie abstract themselves from the world.”153 Many “holie men and great saintes”

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have been found among Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans, and other religious orders. Their miracles have been attested and their sainthood recognized canonically by God’s church. Each one of the three vows that constitute “the essentiall partes of a Religious life” is warranted by scripture and is explicitly supererogatory, pleasing to God and yet elective.154 Kellison, however, emphasizes that the perfection of the religious life “consisteth not in the vows but in charitie.” The counsels are only “profitable instruments of perfection,” or “convenient meanes to procure charitie.”155 Perfection, moreover, comes in many degrees. First, there is God’s perfection, which we are commanded to imitate but which we can never reach, since only God loves himself perfectly. Next, there is the perfection of the blessed in heaven, to which all Christian pilgrims aspire. With regard to heaven, the only difference “betwixt Religious and other Christians” is that the religious actually renounce worldly goods, while other Christians “must renounce them in preparation of mind.” Thus the goal of religious vows is to help a person achieve a required (commanded) mental detachment by means of a supererogatory (elective) physical detachment. Monks and friars are not necessarily more perfect than other Christians, they simply pursue perfection with special (meritorious) diligence. By means of their vows, Kellison says, monks and friars are “immobilized in a state of perfection,” which is to say that they are, as it were, irreversibly bound to pursue perfection. They cannot abandon the pursuit of supererogatory merit. As for actual perfection, they fall short of it every time they sin or fail to exercise charity.156 Implicitly, Benedictines, Franciscans, and Jesuits who meekly submit to Bishop Smith’s episcopal authority pursue religious perfection more effectively than those who sinfully rebel. There are higher and lower “states of perfection” in God’s church, forming a hierarchy. Bishops and prelates are in a “state of perfection that is already actually acquired” since they actively “illuminate and perfect” others, whereas monks and friars are only in a potential state of perfection, “in a state of perfection to be acquired,” since they are passively “illuminated and to be perfected.” Bishops and the secular clergy are “Agents and Maisters” while monks and friars are “Patients and Schollers.”157 Bishops and secular priests, moreover, are obliged “by their state” to expose their lives for their flocks and to govern many souls, whereas monks and friars, as such, seek only to save their own souls. Unlike secular priests,

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regular priests are sent to preach or convert souls as an “extraordinary” office. When asked to perform priestly functions, they are “extraordinarily called” to do so and exercise “greater actes of perfection then [sic] purelie monasticall.”158 At this point, Kellison introduces a distinction between state and calling. A secular parish priest, though he “have a perfecter calling then [sic] the Religious as Religious, yet he hath not so perfect a state as the Bishop, or the Religious hath.”159 Why? A secular parish priest has a more perfect calling than any monk of friar since he is called to care for a whole congregation of souls, but he enjoys a less perfect state than a monk or than a bishop since he is not “bound” to the permanent pursuit of perfection by special vows. Unlike a bishop, he is responsible only for a parish, not a diocese. Thus a secular priest is higher (“more perfect”) than a monk or friar only when he is actively in charge of a parish. An active parish priest is “more perfect” than an active missionary friar, since the parish priest exercises priestly functions through an essential calling rather than through an “extraordinary” calling. A retired priest, on the other hand, is less perfect than a professed monk and is thus free to join a religious order. At the top of the hierarchy is the bishop, who cannot retire and whose perfection in both calling and state exceeds both the secular clergy and the religious.160 Kellison’s conclusion is graphic: “And so, where a religious man endeth, there a Bishop or Pastour beginneth, and the Bishop laieth his foundation on the Religious mans toppe and roofe.” Religious orders, in short, provide a first tier of perfection, upon which the secular hierarchy is raised as upon a footstool, culminating with episcopal perfection. Monks and friars, in effect, are exemplary penitents—not pastors. Kellison’s Treatise of the Hierarchie and Divers Orders of the Church upholds the validity of religious orders against Protestant opponents, but it firmly places monks and friars under the control of the secular clergy and episcopacy. Implicitly, Kellison wished to remove religious missionaries from the pope’s direct protection in order to abrogate the pope’s ability to meddle in local contexts at the bidding of a foreign prince. Kellison explains that God’s church, like the hierarchy of angels, is monarchical in form but aristocratic in government. Like a temporal monarch, the “Su preme Pastour” cannot “sufficiently manage all the affaires of the Church alone” or “rule and direct all the members of it.” The pope must be assisted by the bishops and pastors who govern particular, local churches: “As in a

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kingdom or Monarchie there are rulers of Provinces, which they rule also not as the kings Lieutenants, but as princes in their degree: So in the Church of God there must be one onlie Monarch . . . but also other Pastours, I meane Bishops, who are spiritual Princes, and not his delegates.”161 Kellison’s solution for restoring harmony in the missionary English Roman Catholic Church is thus strongly Gallican.162 His motivation, it seems, was to elaborate a model in which religious missionaries, Jesuits in particular, would be supervised by a Roman Catholic episcopacy operating in England with the Crown’s consent. How would the English ruler react? Would Charles be willing to tolerate, even protect, a Roman Catholic hierarchy in England, in exchange for better control over Jesuit missionaries and plotters? In the final chapter, Kellison argues that the English king had no probable reason to be offended if a Roman Catholic bishop were allowed to operate in England.163 A number of distinctive Gallican themes highlight Kellison’s final appeal: evocations of Saint Ambrose,164 repeated assertions that the bishop’s functions will be purely sacerdotal,165 historic evidence of collaboration between English kings and bishops aimed at strengthening the political status quo. Between the lines, Kellison’s appeal seems to be addressed not only to Charles but to Charles’s bishops. Would an independent Roman Catholic episcopacy in England not, in fact, help to strengthen the established Anglican Catholic episcopacy, which was threatened by Puritans? As Kellison insisted with a double emphasis: “to have a Bishop in England cannot probablie encrease persecution because it cannot probablie be offensive to the King and state.”

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Enamored as he was of Duns Scotus, Sancta Clara could hardly accept Kellison’s argument that Franciscans were confined to an ancillary role with regard to “illuminating and perfecting” souls. As Sancta Clara had shown in his Epistolium, studying the sciences was indispensable for saving souls from shipwreck. In November 1630, the first provincial chapter of the English Franciscans was held in Brussels at St. Elizabeth’s convent. Sancta Clara was again appointed custos and named as first lecturer in theology. He was also chosen by the provincial (John Gennings) to serve as commissary for Flanders because Gennings himself had to spend most of his time in England securing funds and recruiting students. Trusted now by his confrères as both a theologian and a leader, he was ready to emerge from the background in a decisive way. In answer to Kellison, he would vindicate Franciscan supererogation as a key to “God’s high secrets” (Saint Clare) and to peacemaking (Saint Elizabeth). Sancta Clara worried, no doubt, that Kellison’s staunchly episcopalian viewpoint might appeal to the English monarch and to his embattled “Arminian” bishops.1 In addition to Kellison, Bishop Smith had a prominent backer in Sancta Clara’s former teacher, Thomas “Blacklo” White, who, in 1629, was in Rome pressing the bishop’s cause. Another staunch sup112

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porter of Bishop Smith was Henry Holden, White’s student in 1617, who was now associated with the college of Arras in Paris.2 When it came to Catholic recusancy, Kellison and his pro-bishop party were as intransigent as their Jesuit opponents. Kellison insisted that Catholic recusancy was a matter of conscience: no conscientious Catholic, in Kellison’s view, could ever worship in the established English Church.3 Indeed, Kellison’s project to restore Roman episcopacy in England required that the two flocks, Roman Catholic and English Protestant, remain separate—each to be governed by its own episcopal hierarchy, forming parallel but distinct communities. Rather than aim at healing the schism between Rome and Canterbury, Kellison’s faction aimed at making the separation between English Roman Catholics and English episcopalian Protestants (Anglicans4) permanent. No less than the Jesuits, Kellison based the project of restoring Roman Catholicism in England on policing well-defined confessional boundaries. Kellison’s party, moreover, advocated the solution of two parallel communities in the name of freedom of conscience—precisely what nonconformist Puritans invoked to quit the “prelatical” English Church and form their own parallel congregations. Sancta Clara’s Benedictine friends at St. Gregory’s, Rudesind Barlow and Leander Jones, bitterly opposed Bishop Smith. Barlow worried that Benedictine missionaries in England would be forced to comply with the petty dogmatism of seminary priests and politically ambitious prelates.5 Submitting to the episcopal authority of Bishop Smith would deprive Benedictine missionaries of the flexibility that they had enjoyed so far to adapt creatively to circumstances. Persecution would likely increase.6 In the case of the Jacobean oath, for example, Benedictines had succeeded in avoiding, or at least in delaying, sentences of excommunication. The sons of Saint Benedict had always been favored by royal patronage. A particularly creative Benedictine, John Barnes, with Preston’s help, had offered his services to James I’s government in or about 1625.7 What Barnes had proposed was to work with the English Crown to achieve some kind of rapprochement with Rome. In exchange for royal protection and a state pension, Barnes had apparently agreed to defend the English Church against charges of schism and to champion the king’s temporal power against papal encroachments.8 The plan was audacious: both sides

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would see the other’s point of view and take steps towards reconciliation. There was little chance of success. Quite apart from the formidable theoretical obstacles that lay in its path, Barnes had an abrasive personality, which provoked internal power struggles among the English Benedictines, to the delight of their opponents. In particular, hoping to escape from the pressure that was exerted over the Douay community by Spain, Barnes sided with the “Cluniac” faction of the Benedictine order and transferred himself to the “more liberal air of France.”9 At first, Barnes had Barlow’s permission to reside in France, but then he continued in France without Barlow’s approval. In 1627, at Barlow’s instigation and with the Infanta’s support, Barnes was arrested in Paris and forcibly brought to Flanders before being transferred to Rome, where he was declared to be demented and jailed.10 It is possible that Barlow acted against Barnes, not because he disagreed with Barnes’s project of reunion, but on the contrary because Barnes, by his scandalous behavior and overt association with Paris parlementarians pitted against the Holy See, gave too much ammunition to opponents of the plan.11 Did Barlow see a copy of Barnes’s Catholicus-Romanus Pacificus?12 Barlow’s associate, Leander Jones, prior of St. Gregory’s from 1629 to 1633, came to share Barnes’s hope of reuniting Rome and the Church of England, much as he rejected Barnes’s expedient “Cluniac” thesis and wrote against it in defense of the autonomy of the English Benedictine province.13 Indeed, if a reunion between Canterbury and Rome were achieved independently of both France and Spain, if it were conducted as an English project that served to bolster English neutrality, it would have a better chance of success. There is good reason to suspect that Jones discussed the project of reunion in great detail with Sancta Clara between 1630 and 1632. Sancta Clara’s Scotist school at St. Bonaventure’s had gathered momentum. One of his students at the time, Henry Heath, would one day write elaborate Scotist commentaries.14 The very name of the restored En glish province—Province of the Immaculate Conception—paid special tribute to Scotus. Generally, Sancta Clara favored three Scotist strategies. First, “probabilize” a question so as to shift the burden of proof to opponents. Second, assume that scripture contains implicit truths that come to explicit light only gradually, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.15

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Third, assume that God’s church is infallible. As Sancta Clara no doubt emphasized to his students, no one had defended the inerrancy of the universal church better than Scotus—without, however, ever affirming papal infallibility.16 In 1630, the question of Catholic inerrancy was vividly raised by the arrival in Douay of William Chillingworth, a gifted Protestant controversialist from Oxford and William Laud’s own godson. Chillingworth had converted to the Roman Catholic Church and had come to study with the Jesuits, all because he felt the necessity that there “be some church infallible in matters of faith.”17 Sancta Clara, who had earned the goodwill of the Jesuits Philippe du Trieu and Charles Musart, likely learned some of the details of Chillingworth’s conversion. Jones, who had been Laud’s roommate at Oxford, likely met with Chillingworth in person. In September 1631, Sancta Clara was still in Flanders.18 By then, the embattled bishop of Chalcedon had left England, resigned his bishopric, and taken up residence in Paris with a pension from Richelieu. Chillingworth, in turn, apparently displeased with Jesuit authoritarianism, had sailed back to England, where he joined Lord Falkland’s circle at Great Tew. Chillingworth remained suspended between the Roman Church and the English Church, unable to commit. In 1632, Sancta Clara was appointed titular guardian of London and sailed to England. When and by whom were arrangements made for Sancta Clara to live under the queen’s protection?—if indeed historians are correct in affirming that he lived, from the start, among the queen’s Capuchin friars at Somerset House. Queen Henriette-Marie was entitled by her marriage contract to have a staff of French chaplains. In 1632, these consisted mainly of Franciscan friars, Capuchins picked by Richelieu and by Richelieu’s chief intelligence officer, Père Joseph, in replacement of the Oratorians whom Charles had expelled in 1626 as “so many wild beasts.”19 The queen, moreover, had been assigned two English chaplains, including the Benedictine Arthur Michael Godfrey and possibly a third, “to wit, Pres ton,” all of whom had taken the oath of allegiance.20 All three English chaplains had tried to negotiate an English pension for John Barnes with the support of Sir George Goring, the queen’s pro-French master of the horse.21 Two of Henriette-Marie’s closest courtiers, Lord and Lady Savage, both Roman Catholic, had helped to secure a chaplain’s position for the

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Benedictine Dom David Codner, a native Londoner who went by the name of “Matthew Savage,” or rather “Matteo Selvaggi,” since he lived disguised as an Italian.22 As we will see, Preston and Codner, along with Jones, would become key supporters of Sancta Clara’s new project. Sancta Clara’s way was perhaps prepared by his friend and confrère Walter Coleman. Sancta Clara had known Coleman since their student days at the English College of Douay and had personally “professed” Coleman when Coleman had joined the English Franciscans and taken the (suggestive) name of Christopher à Sancta Clara. After approximately four years at St. Bonaventure’s as Sancta Clara’s student, Coleman had been sent to England in 1630. Arrested as soon as he had landed on English soil, Coleman had refused to take the Jacobean oath. He had been thrown in jail, but he was soon rescued by well-connected friends and proceeded to London.23 In 1631, Coleman had composed an elegy for the death of Jane Savage, Marchioness of Winchester, the daughter of David Codner’s patrons. In 1632, when Sancta Clara arrived in London, Coleman published a long poem, La danse macabre or Death’s Duell, dedicated to HenrietteMarie in her native French. Coleman’s poem, printed in London, nowhere reveals that the author is a Franciscan friar. Coleman describes himself simply as the queen’s very obedient “serviteur et subjet.” The book opens with poems by various poets praising Coleman, including a poem by James Shirley, one of the queen’s playwrights. A short poem by Coleman himself, “To the great Empress of our little world,” compares HenrietteMarie to the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven. The main body of the book is a classic memento mori, made up of 261 stanzas. Henriette-Marie, who had been educated by the courtly Carmelites of the Faubourg St. Jacques in Paris, would have recognized in Coleman’s poem the mournful splendor of her own baroque ideal of devotion. In the epilogue, a few elegies are appended, all composed by Coleman, presumably as examples of his poetic skill: to Sir John Beaumont (d. 1627), to William Lord Paget (d. 1629), to George Lord Talbot (d. 1630), along with the poem that celebrates Jane Savage (who was also praised by John Milton). Jane Savage and Sancta Clara, moreover, shared a forefather, Sir John Savage, mayor of Chester and commander of the left wing of Henry Tudor’s army at Bosworth. Sancta Clara gained rapid access to the most recent Protestant literature — to works by Hooker, Whitacker, Richard White, and Montagu.

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He was befriended by Augustine Lindsell, who would present him to William Laud and who perhaps took him to visit Little Gidding. Sancta Clara actively sought out opportunities for viva voce discussions with a wide range of Protestant divines, including with Puritans, looking everywhere for common ground.24 Did he try to see his half brother, Reverend John, who preached at St. Stephen and had joined John Durie in promoting international Protestant unity?25 The story of how Edmund Gennings had successfully reached out to his brother John gives us at least a small ground to imagine that Sancta Clara might have taken a similar initiative and that the two half brothers met. By 1633, Puritans were fast losing ground. In February, the Puritan “Feoffees of Impropriation,” John Davenport en-tête, had been denounced as a conspiracy and legally crushed.26 William Prynne lay under arrest in the Tower, accused of libeling the royal couple.27 Charles was preparing to travel to Scotland for his coronation, loading a ship of war with all sorts of paraphernalia from the chapel royal to be sent up to the Firth of Forth.28 A rumor quickly spread in London that papists plotted to take advantage of the king’s departure to overthrow the government by the force of arms and seize power.29 In wet and windy April 1633,30 as John Davenport traveled to Bath to reflect on his own rapid drift away from conformity,31 Sancta Clara was ready to seek approval for the stunning new treatise that he had composed, Deus, natura, gratia. The very first approval that he secured was from Dom Thomas Preston, presumably still housed in the Clink, on April 16. Preston’s endorsement is revealing. After declaring that Sancta Clara’s work contains nothing against Catholic faith or good morals, Preston urged that it be published on the grounds that it would “dispose moderate Protestants to reunite with the Roman Church.” Preston also encouraged Sancta Clara to add a discussion of the Thirty-nine Articles in an appendix.32 Four days later, Sancta Clara obtained the endorsement of Queen Henriette-Marie’s chaplain, William Thomson. Thomson was a Scottish Franciscan and theologian originally from Dundee, who had befriended John Gennings in 1617 and to whom Sancta Clara was well known.33 Thomson declared that Sancta Clara’s work was worthy to be published and expressed the hope that it would bear fruit among moderate Protestants.34 Once again, Sancta Clara’s aim was depicted, innocuously, to be to attract moderate Protestants to the Roman Church.

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Pursuing his quest for support, Sancta Clara received, on June 20, the endorsement of the French Franciscan and royal courtier Gilles Chaissy, who listed himself as “once a General lecturer in Sacred theology both in Italy and France.” A native of Avignon and a Franciscan Recollect, Chaissy had been sent to England in Henriette-Marie’s entourage by Pope Urban VIII, at Richelieu’s request, presumably because of his famed skill in converting Protestants.35 As he enjoyed a special papal dispensation allowing him to dress as a courtier and use money, Chaissy moved freely. His chief ambition, it appears, was to convert the king. He had developed a warm friendship with Charles and discussed religious matters with him at lei sure.36 Significantly, Chaissy lived in London at the Venetian ambassador’s house, which is perhaps where Sancta Clara met with him to secure approval for Deus, natura, gratia.37 Chaissy solemnly attested that he had read Sancta Clara’s work and had found nothing in it but the most orthodox Roman faith: “In quo nihil nisi Fidei orthodoxae et Romanae Ecclesiae consentaneum.” He further declared that the work was useful for the direction of souls and full of subtle knowledge. He urged that it be published as soon as possible: “in publicum quamprimum prodeat.” At the beginning of July, Sancta Clara returned to his previous sponsors to have them approve the appendix that Preston had requested, in which the English articles of religion were paraphrased and discussed. Sancta Clara’s first sponsor for the appendix was his old teacher from the English College of Douay, Thomas Blacklo White. White had recently resigned his position as college head in Portugal and returned to London. On July 5, the two friends met. Thomas “Blaclous,” as he signed his name, not only approved Sancta Clara’s appendix, entitled Articuli confessionis Anglicanae paraphrastice exponuntur, but he also praised Sancta Clara’s zeal for the faith and commitment to Christian peace.38 Thomas White, as we know, was a staunch supporter of the bishop of Chalcedon and of the secular clergy against regulars. His endorsement thus gave Sancta Clara’s project a valuable air of consensus—of seeking to unite, rather than divide, English Catholics. White, it seems, was genuinely proud of his former student and happy about their friendship. New battles had flared up in France over Kellison’s treatise. Anonymous Jesuit pamphlets attacked Kellison’s new champion, the mysterious “Petrus Aurelius,” who would be known to posterity as Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, the Jansenist abbé de Saint-Cyran.39

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Thomas White also approved Sancta Clara’s main text, Deus, natura, gratia, praising Sancta Clara for his grasp of scripture, solid arguments, and excellent Scotist style.40 He was too politically astute not to anticipate that his support of Sancta Clara’s project would be criticized by his own secular colleagues. As a matter of fact, White’s fellow secular priest and kinsman John Southcot had known about Sancta Clara’s book since April. On April 26, Southcot had sent the following unfavorable report to Peter Biddulph, Bishop Smith’s agent in Rome: Here is one Father Francis, a Franciscan friar held in great esteem by those of his order for a great scholler and preacher. I ame tould for certaine that he hath written a book in Latin wherein he undertakes to make some kind of reconciliation between the Roman and Protestant religion of England, perhaps to comply with the State and gett favour. But it is a most dangerous subject and like to do much harme if it be published, and to hinder manies conversion to the Catholic religion, whereof it is here by the best much disliked. I heare he hath shewed it to Mr. Preston and others to have their allowance of it but I do not heare what their judgment is of it yet. These friars do multiply here apace and grow almost as politike in some kinds as the Jesuits do, in appropriating residences and penitents wholy to themselves by meanes of their gurdles.41 Apparently aware that Sancta Clara’s aim was to heal the English schism, Southcot decried the project as detrimental to the Roman Catholic mission in England and as politically motivated. The troublesome Franciscan would only succeed in discouraging English Protestants from converting to the Roman Church and would strengthen the English government. No doubt Father Francis’s real aim was to curry favor with Charles so as to increase Franciscan fundraising and networks in England with impunity. In all fairness to Southcot’s suspicion that the English Franciscans were gaining penitents “with their girdles,” Kenelm Digby’s beautiful wife, Venetia Stanley, had become a tertiary Franciscan.42 In Van Dyck’s official posthumous portrait of Venetia, her self-mortification and hidden hair shirt are discretely signified by the doves and the snake that celebrate her detachment from carnal lusts and by the crown of laurels that is held above her head by angels.43

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On July 11, Sancta Clara returned to see Preston to get his approval of the appendix.44 Preston was overjoyed. He endorsed Sancta Clara’s supplementary tractatus in glowing terms, writing that it should be published along with the main text, “the sooner, the better.”45 Nine days later, on July 20, Sancta Clara received John Gennings’s approval for both the main text and the appendix. In two statements of approval signed independently, Gennings cites “the testimony of so many illustrious men” as his main reason for allowing Sancta Clara’s work to be published. Acting in the capacity of Sancta Clara’s provincial, Gennings actually commands Sancta Clara to proceed to publication “with the merit of holy obedience.” From a Franciscan point of view, Sancta Clara’s publication of Deus, natura, gratia constituted an act of supererogatory obedience.46 Nor is the detail unimportant. Southcot’s letter to Biddulph in Rome of June 14 reveals that the secular clergy claimed for itself the right to regulate the publication of Roman Catholic works by English authors.47 Gennings, moreover, must have urged Sancta Clara to get William Thomson’s explicit approval for the appendix since Sancta Clara returned to see Thomson to obtain it on July 22. By then, the supporters of Bishop Smith had gotten wind that some sort of state project was being mounted to enter into dialogue with the pope. Southcot reported to Biddulph on July 19 that George Leyburn had learned “from a friend at court, that there is an intention to treat with his Holiness after the king rettournes hither whereby good must needs follow to Catholics here. What the particular subject of the treaty is, I do not know, but will endeavour to learn.”48 The signs all pointed to some sort of official project of rapprochement. William Laud, bishop of London, had ordered a return to Latin liturgy in the university colleges and commanded that altars be “dressed up alla Catolica with candles and crucifixes.”49 The king, on his journey to Scotland, had made a point of refusing to hear Puritan preachers.50 He had also made a point of stopping at Little Gidding, where he had praised the solemn rule of life, the fresh flowers adorning the church, and the devoutly crafted Harmonies of the Gospel.51 Thanks in part to Southcot’s diligent depictions of the king’s religious “moderation”—depictions aimed at thwarting Jesuit misinformation to the contrary—the papal nuncio in Paris, Alessandro Bichi, was well in-

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formed of Laud’s commitment to restore the “beauty of holiness” and of the general nostalgia among Anglicans for the Old Religion.52 For further proof that England was in a conciliatory mood towards sacramental Catholicism and thus ripe for a restored Roman Catholic hierarchy to govern Roman Catholics, Southcot emphasized to Biddulph that the Roman Catholic doctrine that good works are both meritorious and necessary for salvation had been defended at the Cambridge commencement on July 2.53 With a different aim in mind, Sancta Clara, in turn, had invoked the same Cambridge commencement in his appendix, which was approved, as we saw, by Thomas “Blaclo,” on July 5. This suggests that Sancta Clara must either have attended the commencement in person or known of Eleazer Duncon’s plan to defend the crypto-Catholic theses in advance of the Cambridge commencement. Laud’s chaplain, Edward Martin, was president of Queen’s College at the time and a zealous champion of restoring the rituals and doctrines of the Old Religion. He might have put Sancta Clara in contact with Duncon in advance of the public event.54 The plot now thickens. On August 16, Southcot reported to Biddulph that Sancta Clara’s manuscript had been sent by some unknown English “minister” to the Venetian ambassador in Rome “to be shewed to His Holiness.”55 In order to appreciate the context of intrigue in which Sancta Clara’s project was launched, we must consider the rapid succession of events between August 1 and August 16, when Southcot again voiced his displeasure at Sancta Clara’s project to Biddulph. On the eve of August 1, Sancta Clara received an enthusiastic endorsement from “Our revered Doctor and Master Jacques Dreux, Doctor of the Sorbonne” (nostri Jacobi Dreux, Doctoris Sorbonici). Dreux described the “extreme pleasure” (summa cum animi voluptate) with which he read both parts of Sancta Clara’s “most erudite” work. Dreux found nothing in it against Catholic faith or good morals. Dreux predicted that the book would be of great use to the Church and, with God’s help, would “conciliate erring souls”—an outcome for which he, Dreux, hoped and prayed. Dreux ended his endorsement by wishing for Sancta Clara’s friendship and declaring himself to be “most addicted” to him: tibi addictissimus—formulaic, to be sure, but warm nonetheless. A theologian on the Paris Sorbonne faculty, Dreux would become vicar general of Bishop de la Mothe-Houdancourt, brother of Daniel du Plessis, bishop of Mende, an ally of Richelieu who had

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accompanied Henriette-Marie to England as the French king’s chargé d’affaires in 1625. Why was Dreux in London in the summer of 1633? Three days later, on Sunday, August 4, Laud was at Greenwich, where the king had just returned from Scotland—at a gallop, it was said, in order to be in the loving arms of his queen as soon as possible. When the news came of George Abbot’s death on August 5, the king right away signaled that Laud would be promoted to the primacy of England. That same morning, Laud recorded in his diary that a Roman Catholic came to him and offered him a cardinal’s hat: “there came one to me, Seriously, and that avowed ability to perform it, and offered me to be a Cardinal.” Laud went to the king and “acquainted him both with the Thing and the Person.”56 Was the offer authentic, or was it a trap? Was it a loyalty test devised by Charles? On August 6, the king officially named Laud to be the new archbishop of Canterbury. On August 14, Laud recorded in his diary that he feared that he had been poisoned. On August 17, the offer of a cardinal’s hat was repeated, perhaps by the same person, but not necessarily, this time “away from court.” Laud recorded that he again answered that “he would not suffer that, till Rome were other than it is.” Was he negotiating? Did he mean to convey the message that if Rome changed, if Rome allowed the proper degree of autonomy to the English Church, then perhaps he would accept a cardinal’s hat? When Cardinal Bagno, in Italy, was apprised of Laud’s reaction, he interpreted it to mean that Laud was definitely interested in a Roman biretta. By the end of August, Laud had been elected archbishop of Canterbury. Sancta Clara, in turn, had received a further endorsement by a mysterious theologian named Peter Martin, who declared himself to be so impressed by the orthodoxy and piety of the work that he insisted on writing the approval for publication “in his own hand” (propria manu scripsi et subscripsi). Finally, at the start of September, David Codner, aka Matteo Selvaggi, personally certified Sancta Clara’s endorsements. Citing his own credentials as dean of the Cassinese Benedictine congregation and as Urban VIII’s old chaplain and apostolic notary, Codner wrote that he had reviewed all of the endorsements and that the book was ready to go to press. There was, however, an endorsement that Sancta Clara sought but failed to obtain: the endorsement of Southcot. In a letter to Biddulph of August 16, Southcot heaped contempt on Sancta Clara’s “determination

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to prosecute his purpose of printing his book.” He downplayed Thomas White’s endorsement, implying that it was, at best, lukewarm, and, worse, that White had been tricked. “Mr. Blacklo,” Southcot wrote, “hath in some sort approved it (unawares).” Sancta Clara (“the friar”) had also asked him, Southcot, for an endorsement, but “I putt it off with the excuse of my journy.” Southcot preferred, apparently, to condemn the book based on hearsay: “I do not heare by them that have seen the book that it will answer expectations, especially in that point touching the reconciling of the English Protestant doctrine to the Catholic, wherein he is very short and scant, although it seems to be his chief scope.” Sancta Clara, on the other hand, went out of his way to include as many leading missionaries as he could and to bridge the secular/regular divide. Without bothering to read Sancta Clara’s arguments, Southcot hoped with all of his heart that it would fail. Why? He clearly loathed and resented Sancta Clara, whom he described to Biddulph as the conceited darling of his detestable Franciscan Order: “The author being well conceited of himself, and the more bycause the stroke of his order conceave him to be one of the best schollers in the world.”57 In Southcot’s view, the very admiration that Sancta Clara’s project kindled in his brethren constituted a terrible danger. What should be made of Southcot’s report that some minister whose name he “cannot learn” had sent Sancta Clara’s book “to the Venetian ambassador in Rome to be shewed to his Holiness”? Was there, as Southcot suspected, “some trick in it”?58 We must try to gather further clues. Sancta Clara’s Deus, natura, gratia was apparently printed in Lyon, by Antoine Chard. According to the account given by Laud a decade later at his trial, Sancta Clara had sought Laud’s permission to have it printed in London, but Laud had “absolutely denied” it—or so at least he told his parliamentarian prosecutor, emphasizing that the book had been printed in “Lions, where I could not hinder the Printing,” and thus that he could not be blamed for “any part of it.”59 How the manuscript reached Lyon, if it in fact did, via Paris, where it was granted a royal privilege on February 6, 1634, no doubt involves colorful details, all lost to history. In any event, the book was in print and available in London by the end of April 1634— the time of a letter sent by George Leyburn to Bishop Smith, expressing dismay: “I cannot tell what to say about Father Francis his book.”60

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Leyburn, an influential secular priest who had been the queen’s chaplain but had been forced underground by an arrest warrant, predicted that the main beneficiary of Sancta Clara’s ill-wrought initiative would be the English government. He told Smith that the English state intended to “mentayne the booke and the author”—or so Leyburn had learned from a “privie counseller.” Despondent, Leyburn listed the advantages that Charles and his government would reap from Sancta Clara’s unfortunate book. For one thing, the book validated the rituals of the English Church. It argued that English religious rites were sufficiently similar to Roman rites to be accepted as legitimately Catholic. For another, it claimed historic precedents for the English king’s prerogative to oversee Church matters. Sancta Clara’s book, in short, was a grievous setback: “I doe assure you unfainedly I doe thinke that this book will doe infinite hurt.”61 Did Leyburn worry that Sancta Clara’s plan for corporate reunion might actually materialize? Leyburn went on to warn Smith that Sancta Clara enjoyed not only the support of the English government but also some very formidable support within the Roman Church. Most notably, Sancta Clara had the support of the papal nuncio in Paris, Alessandro Bichi, “who says that he is soe far from condemning the booke that he doth not finde any poynt which may deserve a censure.”62 Leyburn concluded the letter by encouraging Smith to find out more about Bichi’s endorsement of Sancta Clara. Leyburn’s next letter to Smith, a month later, on May 22, 1634, was even more alarmist. Leyburn denounced Preston as Smith’s active enemy and urged Smith to fight back against Bichi: “Deale effectively with Monsieur Bichi nunce.”63 Leyburn by then had incurred the animosity of Richelieu’s envoy to England, Fontenay. In a report to Richelieu prepared in June 1634, Fontenay described Leyburn as “a dangerous and malicious man” (un homme dangereux et malign) who should “be ousted, if possible.”64 We now turn to the content of Sancta Clara’s controversial work. The frontispiece nicely advertises the book’s agenda. Under the broad title of Deus, natura, gratia, a subtitle explains that the book will focus on three issues: predestination, merit, and the remission of sins, which taken together “encompass the whole question of justification.” A special section will then address the disputed problem of images and prayers to saints. The book, moreover, will not simply tackle the key areas of disagreement

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between Catholics and Protestants. Invoking Catholic faith as a standard, it will also evaluate Anglican doctrine. It will clarify what it is that Catholic faith actually holds, and it will assess how far Anglican doctrine differs from Catholic faith.65 In the process, Scotus’s doctrine, solidly rooted in Augustine and once the glory of England, will be explicated.66 To complete the effort, a detailed and systematic explanation of the “Thirty-nine Articles” of the Church of England will be supplied in an appendix. Finally, the title page expressly proclaims that the author is a Roman Catholic friar, Frater Franciscus à Sancta Clara, whose main qualification is to have served as primary lecturer in theology at the College of St. Bonaventure in Douay, convent of the English province of Friars Minor. Under the author’s name and qualifications, the guiding spirit of the book is spelled out by means of a citation from Augustine: “Those who do not cherish the unity of the church do not have God’s charity.”67 The book’s aim is thus clear. It means to apply the method of the English Franciscan doctor, John Duns Scotus, to the task of clarifying the Catholic doctrine of justification, in the hope of promoting the unity of God’s church. As Augustine implies, the task is a matter of conscience. Whoever does not take the task to heart and hope for its success lacks “God’s charity.” The author, Frater à Sancta Clara, is not only a Roman Catholic friar, but he is also English and a subject of the English Crown, as a letter of dedication to King Charles I affirms. Once again invoking Augustine’s authority, this time corroborated by scripture (Isaiah) and by tradition (Eusebius), Brother Francis starts by reminding Charles of his royal responsibility. As a lawful monarch, Charles has been “appointed the nursing father of the church by God.” Moreover, as king of England, Charles inherits the name “Defensor of the Faith,” bestowed on the English monarch by no less than “God’s Vicar.” Charles thus has a double appointment over the English Church, from God and from the Roman see. He has a double duty to come to the rescue of God’s church and prevent further “laceration of Christ’s body.”68 For, indeed, as Augustine and Hilary both warn, the Church risks “fragmenting to the point of irreversible agony if as many beliefs are entertained in it as there are human wills”— which is precisely what threatens the present Church: “Hic morbus noster.”69 The solution to this life-threatening condition, Brother Francis tells King Charles, is found in scripture. The solution is to follow the injunction to

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trust the Church’s judgment by putting one’s doubts openly before the Church: Dic Ecclesiae. Brother Francis will therefore provide Charles with the Church’s true definitions, based on examining the doctrines of Church Fathers and of venerable doctors, and based on carefully separating true doctrines from the nonsense of innovators.70 Brother Francis, moreover, will adopt a mild approach, aimed at healing. He will not wield a sharp scalpel, but will bathe doctrines gently, in order to cleanse them. By the end of the book, Charles will be empowered to uphold what the Church and Church Fathers teach. Such a mission, indeed, is “worthy of your Majesty and necessary for the salvation of souls.”71 Implicitly, Sancta Clara appeals jointly to Charles and to Urban VIII to be pragmatic. Rather than fight Charles’s prerogative as “supreme governor” of the English Church, Rome should take advantage of it to forestall a further defection of England towards Calvinism. Conversely, rather than fight the pope’s claim to be the supreme head of the Church, Charles should take advantage of it to cut through obstacles and bring about a prompt reconciliation. What exactly does Sancta Clara mean by “gentle bathing”? Sancta Clara’s approach consists in applying Scotus’s method to controverted issues in order to bring their “problematicall” character to light. Three steps must be followed. First, in each case, what is known with certainty must be carefully disentangled from what is doubtful.72 Second, whenever the truth of a matter is not manifest in scripture or positively declared by the Church, the range of probable opinions that have been framed to date on the matter must be conscientiously respected.73 Third, once a Catholic latitude of opinion (latitudo opinionum) has been ascertained, the question must be asked as to whether the doctrine of the Church of England falls within the admissible Catholic range, or not. Sancta Clara’s initiative, in effect, consists in generalizing Preston’s and Montagu’s approach. In the name of Scotism, Sancta Clara will defend speculative diversity as the very hallmark of Catholic theology. Deus, natura, gratia presents thirty-seven “problems,” sequentially ordered. Each problem prepares us for the next and logically gives rise to the next, so as to emphasize the multiple connections and mutually reinforcing arguments that give Catholic beliefs consistency and trustworthiness whenever truth as such is unavailable and undeclared. When possible, Sancta Clara presents the arguments and positions of Anglican theolo-

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gians as part and parcel of a long-standing Catholic culture of disputatio, rather than treat them as sudden innovations that break with tradition. This ecumenical approach serves two key purposes. It integrates moderate Protestant divines into a continuous unfolding sphere of Catholic voices, allowing Sancta Clara to marginalize extreme Calvinist positions as extrinsic to Anglican doctrine. It also allows Sancta Clara to foster a distinctive humility and charitable restraint, which Sancta Clara means to exemplify personally: “I, for one,” Sancta Clara declares at every opportunity, “would hesitate to condemn [whatever is a genuinely probable view].” In keeping with a Franciscan predilection for setting a visible example of charity, Sancta Clara displays in his own personal voice the respect that is owed to the opinions of others whenever they are not demonstrably false. Let us note that the heart of Sancta Clara’s approach consists in linking speculative uncertainty to moral probabilism in the following way: since it is morally licit for Catholics to embrace contradictory speculative opinions, it is morally required that Catholics respect each other’s views. When applied to licit acts affirming licit speculative opinions, moral probabilism is not itself a probable opinion. It is a firm, certain, absolute doctrine. Written in Latin, Sancta Clara’s problem-based theology is intended for a specialized audience of theologians confined to schools, as recommended by Montagu. Problema primum (problem 1) launches the inquiry by examining predestination: De praedestinatione sanctorum. Augustine’s definition, which no one will contest, provides a secure starting point. As Augustine bases predestination on the notion of God’s prescience, the Augustinian definition leads nicely to a debate over the various ways in which God’s prescience might be understood. Is God’s prescience a scientia media, a knowledge of hypotheticals, even of counterfactuals, such that God knows, based on the nature of things, how Peter will behave if Peter is tempted? Or is it more like a prophetic foreknowledge of future events, based on God’s knowledge of his own will regarding creatures, so that God knows, for example, whether or not he wills that Peter be saved? Attempting to escape the problems raised by the hypothesis of God’s scientia media, the Franciscan theologian Francisco de Arriba, Sancta Clara explains, proposes an alternative view, namely, that God judges all things infallibly in their causes, both necessary and free, so that God’s wisdom consists precisely in having infallible knowledge even of fallible and

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contingent events. On Arriba’s view, as Suarez correctly points out, God’s prescience does not precede God’s decree of election logically but is included in God’s willing it.74 Predestination is thus a highly textured doctrine with multiple dimensions and layers of difficulty. There is solid agreement, however, as far as defining it is concerned. Augustine’s definition is corroborated by Scotus’s definition, which in turn agrees with the common definition of the schools and with the definition that is given by article 17 of the Anglican confession (Thirty-nine Articles). Thus there is a core Catholic definition that stabilizes Christian belief despite the many possible ways of interpreting its exact content. A welcome feature of the Anglican formulation, Sancta Clara implies, is that it brings to light the special merit of Scotus’s doctrine. Like Scotus, article 17 emphasizes the connection between God’s predestination of saints and Christ’s merit. Both Scotus and article 17 affirm, in effect, that “Christ is the first of all the predestinate, both in excellence and dignity.” Both Scotus and article 17 specify that all the other elect are predestined only on account of Christ’s glory.75 As Scotus explains, the predestined are not elected firstly and absolutely, but only secondarily, per Christum, or “in” Christ, which is to say “in” Christ as the first elect.76 Scotus is thus by far the most useful doctor both for interpreting Saint Paul correctly (Ephesians 1:5) and for helping us to grasp the true meaning of article 17. Thus if we take Scotus’s doctrine as a true measure of Catholic orthodoxy (as no doubt we should), there is no discrepancy between Anglican article 17 and Catholic faith: “nulla igitur hac tenus differentia.” From the start, a web of mutually corroborating cross-references rather than a linear, deductive argument is adopted. Problem 1 does not prove the validity of article 17 so much as absorb it into a wider context of Catholic inquiry that gives it both meaning and worth. In the appendix, where the Anglican articles are discussed in numerical order, the reader will be asked to revisit problem 1 and its cluster of arguments to evaluate the orthodoxy of article 17 strictly taken as such. In both the main body of the text and in the appendix, what transpires most vividly is Scotus’s unique importance for understanding Catholic faith in a subtle and accurate manner. In particular, unlike earlier definitions, Scotus’s definition of predestination, like the definition framed by article 17, explicitly raises the

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problem of the causes of predestination. Thus problem 1 leads us directly to problem 2, which investigates the causes of predestination. Problem 2, De causis praedestinationis, starts by mapping out the contours of a permissible solution-field by dismissing all forms of determinism. Calvin’s doctrine is ruled out on the grounds that it excludes the possibility of free cooperation with grace on man’s part and thus posits a double fatalism.77 Sancta Clara then explains that a number of Anglican divines, reacting against the fatalism of “today’s Puritans,” follow Arminius, holding that God’s decree of predestination is not made “without some regard for the future cooperation of the free will.” These English followers of Arminius not only admit man’s free cooperation with grace but present it, not as a cause, but as a key condition of election: “nisi quem, licet non quia.”78 Richard Montagu, in particular, had explicitly defended the Arminian view in his books. As a result, these English divines are generally willing to concede that the doctrine according to which God’s decree is made with the foreknowledge of our future free cooperation with grace is very probable: “valde probabile est.” Thus in their praiseworthy resolve to reject Calvin’s determinism, Anglican theologians are willing to allow a place to be made for human free will in God’s decree. Sancta Clara concludes by pointing out that Montagu’s doctrine is not novel but has been and is now held by many doctors, including Molina.79 When it comes to the specific question of the causes of predestination, Montagu (now bishop of Chichester) and the Jesuit Molina really see eye to eye. He judges Montagu’s Arminian doctrine to be sufficiently orthodox— “valde probabilem judico”—but Sancta Clara says that he personally prefers Scotus’s doctrine, which seems to him to conform more to Saint Paul and to Saint Augustine. It is also closer to Aquinas’s doctrine, as the Franciscan theologian Theodor Smising (“Smisings noster”) has amply showed. What matters is that the doctrine of the Anglican Church falls safely within the range of permissible Catholic opinions: “intra hanc latitudinem opinionum tuto incedit Confessio Anglica.” Indeed, the English Church does not restrict Christians to one opinion or the other, but it allows a free discussion of the matter to be conducted academically. 80 What could be more congenial to Rome, under whose wise protection both sides of the Jesuit –Dominican debate over free will were deemed to be permissible in 1605? Nulla igitur hic causa litis inter nos: as far as the causes of

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God’s predestination are concerned, there is no ground for conflict between Catholics and English Arminians. Problems 3, 4, and 5 delve more deeply into the question of human free will. How is God’s eternal decree reconciled with human freedom? Is God, immutable and timeless, able to will something new? What is the nature of free will? After examining various views, Sancta Clara concludes that there is “evidently” no conflict between Catholics and educated Protestants regarding human free will per se. Sancta Clara’s conclusion, moreover, is neither novel nor idiosyncratic, since the Franciscan theologian Andreas de Vega had already reached it in his book on justification. Consensus is thus secure—provided, of course, we exclude the horrific views that were spawned by Calvin, who was neither a theologian nor a philosopher, as his letters attest and as Richard Hooker so correctly emphasized in his Ecclesiastic Politie.81 Implicitly, the Catholic consensus results from wise and well-informed doctors working within a shared Scholastic culture that allows them to work responsibly to find common ground and define areas that are open for discussion. The doctissimus Franciscan de Vega and the Protestant English divine Richard Hooker, by sharing a common scholastic paradigm, were able to reach similar, and similarly flexible, conclusions. Hooker’s book, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastic Politie, had been republished in London in 1632. It was being debated, moreover, by Chillingworth and his friends at Great Tew, who gathered around Lucius Carey, son of Elizabeth Carey, Lady Falkland. Elizabeth Carey had very publicly converted to Rome in 1626, as a result, she claimed, of Hooker’s positive valuation of Catholic tradition. Hooker’s theology had left her “hanging in mid-air”—“unable to stop” until she was fully reunited with Rome.82 By invoking Hooker against Calvin in the precise context of defending the dignity of human freedom, Sancta Clara reminded Caroline divines of all that they shared with Roman Catholic tradition and also of all that they would so easily regain if they mobilized to bring about a reconciliation of their church with the Mother Church. Sancta Clara knew that Hooker had stoked nostalgia for the Old Religion by pointing out that Calvin “preferred the sound of his own words” to quiet, disciplined learning. Hooker had warned that the zealous fashion of defining the English Church in opposition to Rome would spell its doom by playing into Calvinist nihilism.83

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Should all responsible Christians not join hands in defense of the freedom to defend human freedom? If wise theologians such as de Vega and Hooker could find common ground against Calvin in this fundamental regard, should they not worship together? Both theologians implicitly cherished the intersubjective dignity of Scholastic inquiry—the rational effort to tease out divine truths through argumentation and disputation, with a just sense of human finitude and a mature willingness to respect uncertainty. What, for example, could be known about the very essence of human free will, which Christian theologians could conceptualize “in the state of original justice”? Scholastic tradition was rich with probable opinions on the matter, but the most probable opinion, the consensus of doctors, held that man had been created with rational freedom for the chief reason that he was created to be perfect, inherently capable of knowing all things without deception of error.84 Scotus, in turn, built on this common opinion to argue that postlapsarian man remains capable of assenting naturally to supernatural truths that cannot be reached naturally.85 Thus a commitment to Hooker’s theology would lead back to an earlier English theologian and Oxford master who had defended human free will against its detractors and who, moreover, had anticipated Hooker’s prudence by suspending final judgment wherever arguments were inconclusive—Duns Scotus, doctor subtilis. Scotus and Hooker, both champions of Scholastic argumentation against empty preaching, provide us with firm agreement when it comes to human free will: “hactenus etiam cum Nostratibus pax.” Problem 5, on free will, gives rise to further areas of investigation. Problems 7 to 14 examine, in particular, what powers remain in the postlapsarian human will. Is man, blinded by original sin, unable, by his own natural means, without the help of grace, to know any practical truths? Sancta Clara concedes that such a pessimistic view is permissible—“hanc sententiam probabilem judicam”—but prefers to embrace Scotus’s view, which is that man is not so utterly blinded by original sin that he cannot reason correctly about many of his actions.86 Is man able, without the help of God’s grace, to do morally good acts? Luther and Calvin deny it, teaching that all of our good works, without faith, are simply sins.87 Where does the established English Church stand on this issue? Sancta Clara argues that English article 10, which is devoted to free will, agrees with Catholic faith rather than with Luther and Calvin. Article 10 indeed does not deny

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that we are naturally able to act virtuously in a philosophical sense—by acting justly, temperately, and so forth. What article 10 denies is that we are naturally able to do morally good acts that are accepted by God.88 This favorable interpretation is corroborated, Sancta Clara says, by many Protestant doctors, most especially by “Doctor Whitaker,” whose treatise on original sin Sancta Clara cites verbatim: “if by moral work, you mean philosophical virtues, we do not deny that man is able, without special grace, to do many acts that are upright, temperate and just.”89 Slim as the common ground may be between William Whitaker, champion of Protestants, and Catholic faith, it offers an authentic place of mutual validation, a precious, if isolated, intersection of sound belief. When Sancta Clara returns to article 10 in the appendix, he again enlists Whitaker’s authority for interpreting article 10 in a Catholic sense and again cites the same passage in full. What Protestant divine will deny it? What Roman Catholic will reject it? Sancta Clara insists that Whitaker’s statement suffices to exonerate article 10 of heresy: “These are his words. He used the word philosophical virtues in order to exclude virtues conducive to salvation. This is our very doctrine.” In the appendix, article 10 is cross-referenced to problems 10, 11, and 12, “even” to problems 5 to 12.90 Only by reintegrating article 10 into a multifaceted theology of human freedom, a theology that combines scripture, tradition, reason, precedents, and rational analysis, is it possible to begin to assess what falls within the latitude that is permitted by Catholic faith. There is nothing “indifferent” or “adiaphoric” about human freedom, on the contrary. Its key importance requires that as many common positions as possible be located among various opponents so that a stable “working hypothesis” is able to emerge, connecting divergent views where they intersect. By tackling the question of man’s natural ability to act morally, problem 11 leads to problem 12, which asks more narrowly whether man is able, without grace, to fulfill “all of God’s precepts” (An homo sine gratia potest implere omnia Praecepta). According to Molina, a threefold distinction must first be made among (1) merely natural precepts, derived from reason, such as are the precepts of the Decalogue; (2) precepts that direct us to our supernatural end but are fully consonant with natural reason; and (3) precepts that require supernatural light, such as faith, hope, and charity.91 Sancta Clara remarks that Scotus, in turn, is interpreted by some

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doctors to restrict what is possible by natural means to the first category, but he concedes that the Scotist position is open to debate. Sancta Clara cites as an example his own “illustrious teacher” (Hugo Cavellus), who emphasizes correctly that, without grace, we can no more comply with the commandment to love God above all things than with the commandment to have faith and hope.92 Nonetheless, by carefully comparing a variety of opinions, including those of the Protestant divines Richard Smith and Richard Montagu, and by testing their opinions against the opinions of de Vega (a reliable Scotist) and against the consensus of Scholastic doctors, it seems sound to infer that the degree of grace that is inherent in rational freedom might (“possit”) suffice for us to be able to comply with at least some of the divine precepts.93 At this point, Sancta Clara’s discussion richly illustrates the flexible way in which an inconclusive and yet sufficiently trustworthy and sufficiently Catholic position is framed. Is it possible for someone to be invincibly ignorant of God’s law? Sancta Clara proceeds cautiously: “The doctors commonly teach that a just and probable ignorance ought to excuse us of guilt.” What, then, counts as “probable ignorance”? Ignorance, Sancta Clara pursues, “is probable when a person has a probable ground for it.” He gives the example of an Englishman who believes that something is lawful based on the testimony of his (Protestant) parish priest or (Protestant) parents. Similarly, Sancta Clara continues, “there is probable ignorance when a man sees that there are probable reasons on both sides of a question and chooses to endorse the arguments that seem to him to be the more probable, which happen to be contrary to the truth that he sincerely desired. In this case, he errs without fault, even though he errs against the truth.”94 If a person conscientiously weighs the options and makes an honest mistake, he is not culpable. By the same token, someone who is supplied with bad reasons for believing in God is right to reject them and exonerated from fault. Sancta Clara underscores the point by emphasizing that, according to Aquinas, if articles of faith are propounded by frivolous arguments or by impious men, it is an act of faulty imprudence to believe them.95 Not only is an excusable ignorance of God’s law possible, such ignorance does not necessarily disqualify a person from salvation. Doctors, indeed, hold a variety of opinions on the matter—prompting the Franciscan Horantius to refrain from accusing his opponents of heresy, since it concerns “a doubtful matter, not yet judged.”96 Sancta Clara goes on to

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endorse Scotus, whom he interprets to argue that an explicit belief in Christ, or in the Gospel, is not absolutely necessary for grace or glory. According to Sancta Clara, “the Gospel binds not, today, where it is not authentically preached. Thus men may be saved without an explicit belief in Christ, as the doctor [Scotus] argued about the Jews.” According to Scotus and his followers de Vega, Faber, and Petigianis, and according to Thomists such as Bannes and Canus, and indeed according to the common opinion, ignorance of God’s law is not incompatible with grace. The doctrine expressed by the Council of Trent, session 6, chapter 4, should, in turn, be interpreted in light of Scotus’s argument that “the Jews might, by circumcision, be cleansed from Original Sin and saved without the Gospel.” By extension, the same holds for “all others, to whom the Gospel is not authentically promulgated.” As “our most grave Cordoba” comments, in the case of the excusably ignorant, an implicit belief in Christ suffices for the life of grace and, most probably, for the life of glory.97 Medina and Bradwardine concur, holding that an “implicit belief in Christ is sufficient for salvation.”98 We thus have an effective way, Sancta Clara argues, to put an end to debates over what articles are necessary for salvation. All that is necessary, strictly speaking, is “to believe as the Church believeth,” which includes believing that implicit belief suffices in the case of the excusably ignorant.99 As the Franciscan Joseph Angles rightly points out, moreover, those who “have no knowledge of these things to stir them up, are not bound so much as to seek information.”100 Thus the common people of England are excusably ignorant of the subtle differences between what they are taught and Catholic teachings. They are not at fault for trusting the knowledge and goodness of their local clergy. Sancta Clara, for one, hopes that many of his excusably ignorant compatriots are and will be saved.101 The common opinion of doctors, such as Valentia, Angles, and Vasquez, is that “the laity erring with their teachers and Pastors are altogether excused from fault.”102 Even among Catholics, “many are excused from the explicit knowledge of the Trinity and the Incarnation, especially if they lack a teacher,” as Emanuel Sa correctly points out. Thus to believe as the church believeth is to believe that excusable errors in theology matter little to a person’s salvation, so long as the errors in question are not deliberately invoked to divide the Church and foster sectarianism.

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Is it possible for someone to be excusably ignorant of the natural law and of the Decalogue? Problem 16 delves deeper into the matter of invincible and probable ignorance. Sancta Clara starts the discussion with a general axiom: “Here, as in all other questions where truth is not manifest either in Scripture or in the Church’s definitions, there is a range of opinions among educated men.”103 Although the great doctor Alexander of Hales, “our compatriot,” answered the question negatively, the common opinion of the Church is that excusable ignorance with regard to the law of nature and the Decalogue must be admitted. Sancta Clara, for his part, thinks that it is more in keeping with Scotus to grant the common opinion. His argument, based on Scotus, is that acting against the natural law or the Decalogue does not necessarily imply a deliberate rejection of our ultimate end, since true ignorance is ignorant of itself and thus prevents us from seeking information about our ultimate end or about what to do or not to do in order to reach it.104 Problem 17 (on justification) leads to problem 18 (on merit) and to problem 19 (on the special assistance of grace), which together allow problem 20 to be tackled, inquiring, namely, whether it lies within our power to act in such a way as to make ourselves fit to be justified: “An potest dari aliquod meritum, saltem de congruo, seu dispositionem ad justificationem.” Eager to distinguish “what is certain from what is uncertain,” Sancta Clara first rules out the opinion that holds that we have the power to make ourselves fit for justification by our own natural means. This is the heresy of Pelagius, which involves two basic errors, as Saint Bonaventure correctly emphasizes: the error of holding that the first moment of grace is in some sense deserved, and the error of believing that our own natural effort caused it to be deserved. Thus if we limit ourselves to the problem of the first reception of grace, there will be the greatest possible concord between Anglicans and Roman Catholics —“summa erit pax cum Nostratibus”—since the common teaching of Scholastic theologians, ratified by Scotus, denies that postlapsarian man is able by his own active efforts to merit the first reception of grace or of faith.105 If, however, we ask whether someone who is already possessed of actual grace is able to merit further help (not as owed by God but as fitting for God to bestow), even to the point of meriting justification, do we encounter irreparable discord?

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Problem 21 opens a debate of critical importance since two English articles, 12 and 13, seem explicitly to reject any possible merit de congruo. First, Anglican doctrine depicts good works as the “necessary fruits of a lively faith,” not as voluntary acts that merit further faith. Second, Anglican doctrine emphasizes that works done “before the grace of Christ” positively “have the nature of sin.” On the Catholic side, as Sancta Clara points out, a reliable consensus, rooted in Augustine and confirmed by Scotus, affirms that we are able to merit an increase of righteousness, through our good works, to the point of glory, once we have been initiated into grace. Fortunately, article 12 is less peremptory than first appears. It asserts that good works that result from justification “are pleasing and acceptable to God in Christ.” Thus there is no disagreement, Sancta Clara insists, between Catholic faith and Anglican teaching! For indeed, what else is meant by “acceptable to God in Christ” but that these good works are accepted by God so as to be rewarded—which is precisely “the doctrine of the Subtle Doctor” and the common Catholic opinion?106 Article 13, moreover, confirms Sancta Clara’s Catholic interpretation of article 12: by emphasizing that no works prior to faith are meritorious, article 13 implies that other works, namely, works done in faith, are meritorious and thus dispose us in some way for justification by their fitness to be rewarded by God with justifying grace—as Augustine affirms when he points out that “faith is not devoid of merit.”107 The multifaceted problem of merit, in turn, raises the questions of whether faith alone justifies (problem 22) and of whether justification is something infused in us (problem 23), which in turn prompts a discussion of the difference between God’s ordinary and absolute power (problems 24 and 25)—all for the sake of tackling the key question that is asked by problem 26: Does justification consist in an internal renewal of the soul through a justice that inheres in it, or does it consist only in hiding the soul’s sins by imputing Christ’s justice to it, as though Christ’s justice were the soul’s own justice? Sancta Clara first clarifies the meaning of the question. What is asked, in effect, is the following: Does justification signify only the remission, or rather the nonimputation, of sins, or does justification also involve a spiritual rebirth of the soul? The problem, Sancta Clara suggests, is analogous to the problem of heat in natural philosophy: Is the heating of a thing

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simply the remission of cold in it or does heating involve a positive influx in it of heat?108 After carefully considering a wide array of opinions, Sancta Clara concludes that the solution devised by the Council of Trent nicely captures a firm middle ground in which both Catholics and Anglicans agree. God grants us our own inherent justice, on account of Christ’s merits, which are imputed to us as if they constituted a ground of merit of our own. Sancta Clara defends the consensus opinion by means of a citation from Richard Montagu, who, in Appello Caesarem, explicitly proves that the Roman Catholic doctrine falls within the degree of latitude—“secundum gradus huius latitudinis”—that is allowed by the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles. Nor does the Catholic doctrine contradict Hampton Court article 9, on justification. To confirm that the Roman Catholic doctrine is permissible, moreover, Montagu cites Doctor White, who asserts that there are two divine actions involved in justification, one removes sins, the other conveys the power to resist sin. Such a power, Sancta Clara explains, is charity itself, infused in our hearts by God’s second action—which is explicitly “our doctrine.” Therefore, peace (“igitur pax”).109 Most importantly, problem 26 once again calls attention to the capacious approach of Anglican divines such as Montagu and White. Rather than insist on a rigidly narrow doctrine, they admit a latitude of opinions. If they themselves are willing to include the Catholic doctrine within their own probable range, should they not be credited with upholding it? In disputed matters, it is enough to affirm the probability of the common Catholic doctrine—or so at least Sancta Clara implies. Problems 27 to 30 address the certainty of election, the gift of perseverance, and the question, critical because contested, of whether it is possible for God’s elect to sin “terminally,” which is to say, to fall from grace permanently, on the threshold of eternity: “an justus potest finaliter peccare.”110 Sancta Clara defends the “universally received truth” that regenerate man, in via, remains free to fall from grace. Anglicans, he points out, affirm as much when they affirm that fleshly lust “remains in regenerate man” (article 9) and that “Christ alone is without sin” (article 15). The sole point of controversy concerns final perseverance, which Anglicans address in article 16. The Catholic sense of article 16 comes to light through a twofold examination. After ascertaining that article 16 describes the truly regenerate,

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which is to say, those who “have received the Holy Ghost,” not merely those who might wrongly think of themselves as regenerate, Sancta Clara points out that article 16 says of these true regenerate that they “may depart from grace given and fall into sin.”111 Article 16, however, goes on to affirm that these same truly regenerate, after falling into sin, “may by God’s grace arise again.” Does this mean that article 16 affirms Calvinist predestination? On the contrary, Sancta Clara argues, article 16 explicitly denies Calvin’s doctrine, since it carefully states that the truly regenerate, after falling into sin, “may rise again,” not that they “will certainly rise again.” Anglican theology thus refrains from endorsing Calvin’s dogmatic view and asserts, against Calvin, that there is no certitude of election or of final perseverance. Article 16, moreover, specifies that, after falling into sin, the truly regenerate require new grace on God’s part, “nor is this new grace due” to them, “for then it would no longer be grace, according to the Apostle and as all the Doctors teach after him.” Article 16, in short, refrains from distinguishing between the general mass of the baptized and God’s saints with regard to final perseverance. Article 16 and Catholic faith both agree that final perseverance is a free gift from God, about which no one can be certain. For indeed, as problem 26 clarifies, there is “no law for the infallible efficacious conjunction of grace and nature stained by mortal sin.”112 Mindful that Anglican divines have been ordered by Charles to read the Thirty-nine Articles according to their “plainest meaning,” Sancta Clara defends his Catholic interpretation of article 16 as the most straightforward interpretation by cross-referencing it to the Book of Homilies, where the fallen regenerate are depicted as fallen into the devil’s clutches and compared to Saul and Judas, who died impenitent.113 Problems 31 to 35 consider various opinions regarding the moral vir tues. First, are they all connected to one another? Second, is it possible to have prudence without moral virtue? The last question, tackled in problem 32, illustrates the latitude of opinion allowed by Scholastic tradition, since Aquinas and Scotus famously disagreed about the answer without mutual condemnation. Their disagreement, moreover, may be more apparent than real. Citing the earlier analysis of a fellow Franciscan, Petigianis, Sancta Clara points out that the answer depends on how prudence is defined.114 Scotus took prudence to be a practical judgment that simply shows us what is true and right with regard to possible actions.115 Aquinas

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took prudence to be a habit of practical conformity, by which he meant a cognition that is sufficient, in itself, for right behavior to ensue, regardless of any right election in the will. If prudence is taken Scotistically to be a practical judgment only, formally distinct from action, Thomists will not deny that prudence can be found independently of moral virtue. Scotus, in turn, admits the probability of the Thomist position: “et hanc viam Doctor judicat probabilem.” He judges his own position, however, to be more probable, mainly because it fits better with the radical freedom of the will. According to Scotus, Sancta Clara explains, we are never necessitated to act, since the will is not like the eye, which necessarily sees what is set before it. To act prudently is to act rationally, Scotus insists, but also to act freely. Consequently, the case cannot be ruled out in which a person knows what action is required by prudence and yet does not elect to do it. Sancta Clara’s apparent purpose in addressing the question of prudence seems to be to illustrate the value of philosophical debate for Catholic theology and to emphasize its inconclusive character. Among other things, prudence incites us to refrain from condemning opponents who reason prudently and defend permissible opinions. A deeper purpose, perhaps, is to show that the two great rival Scholastic friars were connected by their diverging views rather than cut off. The supererogatory vows that structured their daily life and bound them, as Kellison would put it, to the pursuit of perfection meant that philosophical confrontation was mitigated at a higher level. Even when the rift was irreconcilable (as it was in the case of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, passionately affirmed by Scotus and vehemently denied by Aquinas), the two doctors were able to remain brothers. Their religious vows allowed them, against all human impulse, to stand in mutual respect on either side, symbolically, of the Virgin’s throne, submitting to God’s infinity—or so at least Sancta Clara implies in his brief evocation of a vanished Scholastic culture that was threatened, but also stabilized, by the narcissism of minor differences. To a Thomist, not only is the idea of supererogatory poverty quite literally a “scandal” to natural reason, but its supernatural “prudence” is conceivable as such only to monks and friars. Indeed, since Thomistic prudence consists formally in a cognition resulting in virtuous behavior, only someone who is actually called by God to sell everything and follow Christ will know the divine “prudence” of evangelical counsels and sell

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everything and follow Christ. Ordinary Christian believers living prudently in the world according to God’s commandments will have no cognitive grounds upon which to favor, support, or defend the supererogatory life to which others are called. If monasteries are suppressed and religious orders banned, if depictions of saints and hermits are defaced, the very notion of the supererogatory life risks vanishing from Christian memory. In contrast, Sancta Clara’s Scotist view implies that ordinary Christians are able to judge that the supererogatory life is divinely “prudent” and yet remain free not to elect it. The stake is critical: Sancta Clara must defend the supererogatory life against Protestant rejection but also against Kellison’s impulse to restrict monks and friars to an ancillary role within the Church. In problem 36, Sancta Clara examines supererogatory works: de operibus supererogationis. From the start, he declares that there is absolutely no conflict on the subject between “the wiser and more educated Protestants” (doctiores Protestantes) and Catholics (nos). Hooker, whose doctrine, Sancta Clara insists, is taken to be authoritative, plainly agrees with Catholics in book 3, section 8 of his Lawes of Ecclesiastic Politie, where he proves the Catholic position based on Saint Paul.116 Hooker’s view, in turn, is defended by William Covell and by many others, most notably and most abundantly by Montagu in Appello Caesarem.117 The question of supererogatory works, Sancta Clara explains, is twofold. First, did Christ in fact institute things that have the nature of a counsel and are not, strictly speaking, precepts? Second, if we grant that he did, is man in this lifetime capable, with God’s grace, of fulfilling some of these counsels, over and beyond satisfying God’s precepts?118 With regard to the first question, Sancta Clara starts by noting that John Calvin is really a follower of Pelagius. Pelagius, indeed, insisted that no one is saved who does not sell all of his goods, as required by Matthew 19:21. Thus Pelagius, as Augustine stressed, wished to impose the evangelical counsels on Christians as precepts, against the meaning and the very letter of the Gospel.119 To the extent that Calvin denies the distinction between precepts and counsels, Calvin agrees with Pelagius. Implicitly, Sancta Clara warns his Protestant compatriots that a dogmatic rejection of the distinction between precepts and counsels will backfire and end up supporting the very Pelagianism that they reject.

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Calvin, however, seeks to prove his position by invoking Luke 17:10: “when you have done all that you were commanded, say, we are useless servants.” On the basis of this passage, Calvin argues that there can be no supererogatory acts, since there is nothing in our power to do that which we do not already owe to God. He confirms his interpretation by citing the authority of Saint Ambrose, of Bernard of Clairvaux, and of some of the more ancient doctors. These authorities notwithstanding, Sancta Clara rejects Calvin’s view absolutely. Catholic doctrine, as endorsed by all of the ancients, holds that no Christian is obliged to follow counsels instituted by Christ.120 This is proved, first, by the way in which the scriptures present the matter. When Christ speaks of precepts, absolute necessity is adjoined, as in “if you want eternal life, obey the commandments.” No one, therefore, is saved who does not obey God’s mandates.121 In contrast, when counsels are given, there is nothing of the kind. Rather, Christ says if you want to be perfect, go and sell everything and give it to the poor. The counsels, Sancta Clara argues, are not required in order for us to be (to have eternal life), but in order for us to be perfect.122 Precepts are necessary, counsels are fitting: “Hic ergo congruitas, ibi necessitas.” Christ’s modus loquendi defines a supernatural realm of elective action above strict requirements for salvation. No Christian is required to follow the counsels, but it is a fitting manifestation of loving God above all things to choose to follow them. Conversely, God is not required to reward supererogatory works with additional grace or even salvation, but it is a fitting manifestation of God’s acceptance that he do so. You may object that in Genesis 17:1, God commands Abraham to be perfect. Is perfection not, therefore, a precept? The objection does not hold, Sancta Clara answers, since what is meant in Abraham’s case is natural perfection.123 Saint Paul’s statement about chastity, moreover, is explicit in distinguishing counsels from precepts. Paul writes that he possesses no precept from God regarding virginity, but he gives counsel as one who has received the gift of fidelity: “De Virginibus autem praeceptum Domini non habeo, consilium autem do” (1 Cor. 7:25).124 Is voluntary chastity not, then, the apostle’s counsel rather than Christ’s? The answer is found by correlating Paul’s counsel in 1 Corinthians 7:25 with Christ’s own words in Matthew 19:12. After describing voluntary chastity, Christ adds, “He who is able to receive this, let him receive

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it” (qui potest capere, capiat). If Christ were delivering a command, he would not have used this turn of phrase. The nature of a command is such that (1) everyone must be able to receive it equally and (2) everyone receives it as a command, not as a choice. Christ thus implies that if someone is able to receive the counsel of chastity, this is because he is given special grace—precisely what Paul implies in 1 Corinthians 7:7, when he says that “each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of the other.” The key lies in the subjunctive form of the verb, capiat, “let him/may he receive him,” implying that he is free to receive it or not. Thus chastity is a counsel, not a precept. It is wholly elective. Whoever embraces chastity does better, yet it is not commanded, since there is no sin in not embracing it.125 Let us now turn, Sancta Clara says, to the Church Fathers. Augustine, in Sermon 61, De tempore, explains the distinction elegantly: “A counsel is one thing, a precept another. It is counseled as a good thing to preserve virginity, abstain from wine and flesh, or sell everything and give to the poor.” In contrast, justice is commanded. Augustine not only distinguishes precept and counsel explicitly, he also cites Matthew 19:12—qui potest capere, capiat—to argue that Christ recommends, but does not command, virginity, since a command by its very nature must be understood by all. Augustine, moreover, explicitly contrasts the supererogatory merit of embracing God’s counsels to the culpability of disregarding God’s commandments. Whereas someone who puts God’s holy counsels into practice will not only have glory but greater glory, whoever fails to comply with God’s precepts will be eternally damned unless she repents.126 Sancta Clara corroborates Augustine’s remarks in Sermon 61 by citing Augustine’s treatise De virginitate (On Holy Virginity), where the distinction between precept and counsel is further elaborated, once again on the basis of Matthew 19:12. In the case of adultery and murder, Augustine writes, God commands us to obey, whereas God nowhere commands us not to wed. If we follow God’s counsels we will be praised, whereas if we transgress God’s precepts, we will be damned. We are obliged to obey God’s commandments as a matter of duty, whereas in the case of the counsels, to the extent that we do more than is required—“si quid amplius supererogaveritis”—we will be rewarded.127 Thus Augustine’s authority, immediately based on scripture and internally consistent, endorsed with-

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out interruption by the majority of Catholic doctors and confirmed by a fresh examination of scripture, suffices to reach a secure conclusion. Over and beyond God’s precepts, which bind all Christians as a strict matter of duty, Christ instituted counsels as a matter of free election, notwithstanding Calvin’s “Pelagian” opinion to the contrary. Since the distinction between precept and counsel bears directly on salvation, it is hardly surprising to find out that God’s revelation to man (scripture) in this particular regard is clear and indubitable. Once the distinction is firmly established, Sancta Clara turns to the second controverted aspect of the question. Is it possible to implement at least some of God’s counsels, over and beyond God’s precepts? Sancta Clara starts by remarking that the question builds on the earlier problem of determining how far a man is able to fulfill God’s precepts. In problem 12 (which rests, in turn, at least partly, on a series of conclusions reached in problems 5 through 11), the “more accepted” view was reached that rational freedom, as such, supplies us with enough grace to enable us to fulfill some, but not all, of God’s precepts. Analogously, in the case of the counsels, Sancta Clara goes on to point out that the just, as such, through God’s grace, are clearly able to fulfill at least some of the counsels. If they were not, then God would not have spoken veridically when uttering the words “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear” (Matthew 11:15).128 Indeed, if no one is able to fulfill the evangelical counsel of voluntary chastity, then the subject “He who can hear” describes what cannot be instantiated. The subject, in effect, becomes self-contradictory, as in the proposition, for example, that “reason-less man is gifted with laughter” (homo irrationalis est risibilis). The fact, in itself, that the counsels were given implies that viatores (“pilgrims,” Christians who are “on their way,” in via) are able, by the power of God’s grace, to fulfill at least some of them, since Christ did not give us counsels in vain, against his own better judgment.129 Is the term “supererogatory” a new invention? No, Augustine uses 130 it. But lest any scruples remain about Augustine’s position, let us consider the objection that Augustine himself never denies that all of our works are God’s due, whatever their nature.131 The objection is answered in a number of ways. First, it is answered from the passages that have already been cited, to which is added a passage from On Adulterous Marriages (De coniugiis adulterinis) where Augustine explicitly describes morally

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good acts that are not due to God—as opposed to acts that in themselves are “lawful” but not “worthy” or “advantageous.”132 Nonetheless, does Augustine anywhere explicitly state that we are able to exceed what God requires of us? In Sermon 18, On Words of the Apostle, Augustine is explicit. Appealing to 1 Corinthians 7:25, he says about virgins: “Virgins have declined to do what is allowed, in order to be more pleasing to the one to whom they vowed themselves. They have aimed at that greater beauty of the heart. It is as though they said, ‘What orders do you give? That we abstain from adultery, is that your command? For love of you, we are doing more than you require.’”133 What, Sancta Clara says, could be clearer? (“Quid clarius?”) To embrace a life of chastity for the sake of God’s love is to exceed what is commanded. This is confirmed in Augustine’s treatise On Holy Virginity, chapter 30: “Believing and hoping (to have an eternal name in heaven), you have been able, not to shun marriage as forbidden, but to fly past it, even though it is allowed.”134 At stake in defending supererogatory works is God’s invitation to sublimate human energies into a higher plane of elective creativity. Nor does Augustine in this passage imply that evangelical chastity can be embraced separately, without the commandments. On the contrary, by invoking the idea of “an eternal name in heaven,” he implies that consecrated virgins must obey, not one or two, but all of God’s precepts, adding the elective embrace of chastity to the fulfillment of required obedience. For indeed if a holy virgin were to transgress a single one of God’s precepts, she would not be awarded “an eternal name in heaven,” but be consigned to the Gehenna of fire. Thus it is clear that, in Augustine’s view, we are capable of acting beyond duty—of performing truly supererogatory works. Saint Jerome’s authority, Sancta Clara pursues, may be added to Augustine’s: “It is a greater grace to offer what you are not bound to give, than to render what is required of you.”135 In Jerome’s opinion, something can be offered by us to God that is not owed. Jerome, moreover, further corroborates what has been said above in his Letter to Demetrias.136 The very knowledgeable Richard Smyth, in turn, discusses the subject most ably in his defense of monastic vows, against Peter Martyr.137 To close the debate, Sancta Clara turns, now, ad argumenta—to the task of refuting objections raised from scripture by Saint Ambrose and

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Saint Bernard. How is Luke 17:10, where we are enjoined to recognize that we are “unprofitable servants” (servi inutiles sumus), to be interpreted? There is a range, Sancta Clara says, of interpretations. Some theologians, by no means among the least reputable, take it to mean that we cannot be profitable to God, even if we obey all of God’s commandments, since God lacks nothing that is good. This was Nicholas de Lyra’s interpretation (Lyra nostra), inspired by the Venerable Bede.138 The more commonly received interpretation, however, is that “we are useless servants” in so far as we only do our duty. As servants, we do only what we are bound to do by duty, namely, what God commands us to do, and thus deserve no special reward. Hence the earlier statement, in Luke 17:9, to the effect that no servant who does only what is required of him will find favor.139 The fact that we remain “useless servants” as long as we limit ourselves to obeying God’s commands, which is only our duty, does not prevent us from following Christ’s counsels and thus becoming more to God than servants. To the argument that we owe God everything and thus cannot do more than we owe, Sancta Clara answers that he concedes the premise. Indeed, we owe God all that we can possibly have or do, as a matter of religion, as Ambrose explains, because of the essential dependence of the creature on its creator. Since God is the source of everything that we have, we owe him everything, at least negatively, in the sense that we cannot give to some other, or arrogate to ourselves as an end, what belongs properly to God. In a more positive sense, however, we are not bound to refer everything about ourselves to God. Indeed our elective acts, while they are from God in the sense defined above, are nonetheless put by God under our own control. As Leonard Lessius correctly pointed out in his De justitia et jure, we owe these actions to God, but as free vassals. Other acts we owe to God on a different basis, namely, on the basis that they are prescribed to us. Thus we owe it to God to obey the Ten Commandments, but no more, since we are not obliged under pain of guilt to exceed what God chose to command us. Consequently, if we offer further good acts to God, these can be said to be truly supererogatory. The solution is to allow our “owing” everything to God to be nuanced. Because absolutely everything about us depends on God and is thus owed to God in an absolute sense, God has carved out a special region of pure election for us by restricting our mandatory obedience to the Decalogue.

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Having explored and defended the Catholic doctrine of supererogatory works, Sancta Clara turns to Anglican article 14 to see whether it is possible to give it a Catholic meaning. The task, Sancta Clara concedes, is especially difficult: “Determinatio huius articuli durior videretur.” Fortunately, after declaring that “supererogatory works cannot be taught without arrogancy and impiety,” article 14 provides the means to a solution by defining supererogatory works as works that “render more unto God than is owed” (plus praestant quam debent). 140 Taken strictly at its letter, article 14, Sancta Clara argues, condemns supererogatory works only in so far as “by them, we declare that we render more to God than we are bound to do” absolutely, on any grounds whatsoever. For indeed, by Scholastic rules, the indefinite phrase, “render more than is owed,” must be interpreted universally, that is, to mean “more than is owed” on any grounds. But Catholic doctrine, as we recall, affirms that we owe everything to God in an absolute sense. In this unqualified sense, Catholic doctrine agrees with article 14. What is more, if God were indeed to elect to require everything of us, as by right He is entitled to do, we would indeed owe God everything as a matter of duty. We would thus be wholly unprofitable. In short, article 14 does not actually condemn the Catholic doctrine. Moreover, Sancta Clara argues, article 14 apparently speaks only of works that are performed by purely natural means, since “grace” is nowhere mentioned. In contrast, when “we” (Catholics) speak of supererogatory works, we mean works that are performed through the help of God’s grace.141 On this crucial point of Catholic belief, therefore, there is peace. Elated, Sancta Clara suddenly cries out: “Hic ergo pax. And may it be, not merely the peace that the world gives, which is shattered at every moment by some new opinion, but the peace that Christ bequeathed to his Apostles, and which was confirmed by the Paraclete!” (et Paracleti unctione confirmabatur): Sancta Clara implies a transcendent love of unity that is Christ’s living legacy to his church. Whereas cooperation in worldly affairs is marred by self-interest and achieved by constraint and punishment, the peace that Christ gave to his apostles is the ecstatic free self-giving of the Paraclete. It overcomes fear, heals division, and gathers God’s saints in a seamless manifold of divine charity. Implicitly, Franciscans, who have freely vowed to follow Christ above and beyond what is required for salvation by God’s

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commandments, are in a special position to help unlock the inner charity of Catholic doctrine. Far from being accidental adjuncts to the secular clergy in the great task of upholding God’s living church, the sons of Francis seek the unity of God’s church with supererogatory charity. Or so at least Sancta Clara implies by appealing directly to the Paraclete in the precise context of showing that Anglican Christians cannot quite bring themselves to reject supererogatory works unambiguously and forever.

S E V E N

A Detailed Look

Because the métier of theologian mattered to Sancta Clara as a means to facilitate debate and exchange, this chapter provides a detailed look at Sancta Clara’s (in)famous appendix, Paraphrastica expositio articulorum confessionis Anglicae. Was it composed and circulated independently of Deus, natura, gratia — as Sancta Clara’s nineteenth-century champion Canon Lee asserts?1 In order to bring out the Catholic sense of the Thirtynine Articles, Sancta Clara will adopt a formalist reading, intent no doubt on complying with the royal commandment of 1628 that the articles be taken in their “literal and grammatical sense.”2 Rather than presume to know the meaning of a given article in advance, Sancta Clara will exploit the literal words in order to determine a range of interpretations and to identify an article’s “best” meaning. Each article will thus require its own special level of exegetical ingenuity. Throughout the “paraphrastic exposition,” Sancta Clara appears to be mindful that Charles I, as supreme governor of the Church, was constrained by his coronation oath to defend the articles. By the same token, Charles had the power, nonetheless, to determine their official meaning. As a matter of fact, Charles had recently entrusted his “Bishops and Clergy” with the task of fixing the sense of the articles, subject to royal 148

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ratification.3 In many of his commentaries on individual articles, Sancta Clara will make a point of citing his “conferences” with English divines. All in all, Sancta Clara’s Paraphrase suggests a collaborate effort. The purpose of Sancta Clara’s Paraphrastica expositio, it appears, was perhaps to help Charles’s bishops tease out a content for each article that was sufficiently warranted by the choice of words and syntax to count as a plausible interpretation of Anglican doctrine and sufficiently Catholic to avoid Roman censure after Trent. The result, proving that the Church of England was, in effect, sufficiently Catholic to be readmitted into communion with Rome, would then be ratified by Charles. Though there is no evidence that Charles himself, or Laud, ever aimed at such an outcome, it seems that Sancta Clara was convinced that they did—or at least that they could be persuaded to desire it. Since the strategy relies on examining each article separately, in the way that a lawyer might examine a contract clause by clause, the technical character of Sancta Clara’s discussion matters as much as the conclusions that are reached. In this document, we see a theologian at work, resolving difficulties with his own precision instruments. Fourteen of the articles, Sancta Clara says, are unproblematically Catholic, requiring no clarification at all. Such are the first five articles, which “merely explicate the Apostles’ Creed” and thus declare the doctrine of God’s church without controversy. The agreement of Rome and Canterbury regarding the Trinity, the Incarnation, Christ’s descent into hell and resurrection, and on the procession of the Holy Ghost suffices for these doctrines to be Catholic. Articles 1 to 5 express what has been believed always, everywhere and by all Christians—“quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus.” Nine further articles are judged by Sancta Clara to be unproblematically Catholic. Article 7, which states that Christians are not exonerated from the moral commandments of the Old Testament, is “thoroughly Catholic” (totum Catholicus est). Article 8, which judges that the Nicene Creed, Athanasian Creed, and the Apostles’ Creed are all three grounded in scripture and worthy to be believed, agrees with the judgment of the Catholic Church. Article 23, which limits preaching and the ministering of sacraments to a duly ordained clergy, “conform[s] to Scripture, to the doctrine of the Fathers and to the practice of the Universal Church.”4 Article 26, which asserts, in turn, that an unworthy minister

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nonetheless delivers valid sacraments, is “the very doctrine of the church and of all the Fathers” (ipsa doctrina Ecclesiae et omnium Patrum). Article 27, on baptism, coincides with the judgment of the Church: “idem est judicium.” Article 33, which makes provisions for excommunication, “is Catholic and consonant with Holy Scripture and Antiquity.” Finally, the two last articles, articles 38 and 39, on the permissibility of private property and of oaths, respectively, are Catholic, pious, founded on scripture, and “based on the practice of the whole church.” Of the twenty-five remaining articles, nine are “arguably” Catholic if read in light of one or more of the thirty-seven “problemata” discussed in the main body of the book. Article 9, for example, on original sin, “contains sound doctrine,” but requires that the final clause about the “sinful nature” of the lust that remains in a person after baptism be clarified. In this regard, Sancta Clara invokes problem 12, where it was shown that both Saint Paul and Augustine speak of concupiscence as having “in some manner the nature of sin”—which, Sancta Clara says, suffices to give article 9 a Catholic meaning. In other words, since article 9 does not spell out what is meant by “the nature of sin,” there is no impediment against interpreting it minimally as “a lack of subordination to the divine law,” based on Pauline statements about “the law of the members.” Article 9 thus nowhere explicitly contradicts the Tridentine doctrine that baptism removes original sin. Similarly, article 10, on free will, is “Catholic,” but requires problems 5 through 12, especially problems 10, 11, and 12, to clarify just how Catholic it is. Article 10 emphasizes that grace is needed for human beings to act meritoriously—which no Catholic council has ever denied, least of all the Council of Trent. Since, however, article 10 nowhere asserts that human beings are naturally incapable of acting morally, as at least two leading Anglican divines, Whittaker and Montagu, fully concede, article 10 nowhere explicitly precludes the possibility of cooperating with grace once grace is offered, or of acting morally and thus finding some sort of favor with God, especially after baptism, when all that is left of original sin, as we just saw, is weakness of the flesh.5 Article 11, on justification, is “abundantly examined” in problem 22 and also in problem 26, where the conclusion is reached that “no discrepancy can be found between the Anglican Confession and the Tridentine definition.” Article 12, on good works, is shown to be “clearly on our side”

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with the help of problem 21, based on Scotus. Article 13, in turn, which denies any merit de congruo to works performed before justification, is in fact Catholic, as problems 1, 20, and 21 explain: first, because article 13 implies that other works, namely, works done in faith, deserve grace de congruo; second, because article 13 does not condemn works performed before justification as sins absolutely but only as “partaking in the nature of sin.” Article 13 thus contains nothing worse than “the common doctrine of the schoolmen,” based on Augustine and on Paul, the latter of whom says very explicitly that “whatsoever is not of faith is sin.” Article 14, which appears to reject works of supererogation, in fact allows them—as shown in problem 36. Article 16, on sin after baptism, contains “excellent doctrine,” as problems 27 and 30 attest, since it avoids Calvin’s heresy by asserting that those who sin after baptism “may” rise again, not that they “will necessarily” rise again. Article 17, on predestination, “is Catholic and is fully explained in Problem 1.” Finally, article 22, which seems to reject purgatory, rejects only “Romish” superstitions about purgatory, which are unfairly attributed to Catholics and are in fact condemned by the Catholic Church. The vast majority of the Anglican articles, twenty-three out of thirtynine, are thus Catholic—or lend themselves to a sufficiently Catholic sense upon proper examination. What about the remaining sixteen articles? As their content lies outside the nexus of interconnected theological controversies discussed in the problems, Sancta Clara treats them in a piecemeal fashion. Article 15, for example, requires only a gloss, drawn from Augustine. Article 15 declares that “Christ alone is without sin” and that “we the rest, although baptized and born again in Christ, yet offend in many things.” The first part, Sancta Clara says, is fully Catholic: “sanctissimus est.” The second part is Catholic to the extent that it does not include the Virgin Mary among “we the rest.” Since there is no mention of the Virgin, and since Augustine affirms that the Virgin must never be included “in the common dregs of sin,” and since, moreover, the Virgin was probably not baptized, article 15 no doubt avoids the case of the Virgin altogether. Article 15 “cannot rationally be extended to include a case so rare and doubtful” as the status of the Virgin. In other words, article 15 is Catholic because it no more rules out the Immaculate Conception of Mary than it affirms it. Like the Roman magisterium, article 15, Sancta Clara concludes, leaves the status of the Virgin undecided.

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As we will now see, Sancta Clara’s goal in the case of the fifteen remaining articles is to show that they fall within undecided areas of Church doctrine. Article 6, for example, trims the scriptural canon by rejecting such Old Testament works as the book of Tobias and the story of Susanna. In order to appreciate Sancta Clara’s new approach, it is useful briefly to mention two treatises on the articles that form the immediate background of his discussion. In 1607, the Protestant divine Thomas Rogers had written a detailed defense of the articles as defining “true Catholicke Christianity” against both “Roman Idolatry” and Puritan “Phanaticism.” In 1632, the English Roman Catholic priest Richard Broughton took upon himself to refute Rogers by arguing that the English Church is by no means “Catholick” since thirty-four of the thirty-nine articles plainly contradict Catholic doctrine.6 Rogers’s 1607 praise of the “Catholicke Doctrine of the Church of England” was promptly reprinted in London in 1633—perhaps indeed a factor in Preston’s suggestion to Sancta Clara that he append a systematic explanation of the Thirty-nine Articles to Deus, natura, gratia. As the title of the 1633 edition of Rogers’s book suggests, it was meant to serve as a cornerstone for Protestant unity.7 What matters for our purposes is to emphasize that both Broughton and Rogers shared the same premise that a doctrine counts as “Catholic” if and only if it is shown to be more authoritative than competing doctrines. Thus in the case of article 6, Rogers defends the purged English canon by citing “the ancient Councell of Laodicia” and the consensus of the Reformed churches, implying that the English canon is safer for establishing Christian doctrine than the longer Roman list.8 Broughton, conversely, defends the longer Roman list as more authentically Catholic on the grounds that it enjoys the greater consensus over time of the Church Fathers, councils, and Scholastic doctors. Both Rogers and Broughton, in short, agree that (1) there exists a determinately better judgment on the matter and that (2) a Christian is required to embrace the better judgment in order to qualify as “Catholic.” In contrast, Sancta Clara starts by conceding that article 6 appears, at first blush, to reject Catholic tradition in order to reduce the Catholic canon for the purpose of defining a narrow sola scriptura basis for faith. After disentangling the two issues and relegating the sola scriptura issue to a later discussion, Sancta Clara tackles the problem of establishing the canon. What books are canonical for the purpose of determining Christian

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faith and who decides? Sancta Clara proceeds to show that, despite the wide consensus established by the Council of Florence, there exists no perfectly probable opinion regarding either the list itself or the criteria for authoritative selection. Cajetan, for one, raised doubts against the very same texts that article 6 rejects. Indeed Cajetan agreed to call these questionable texts “canonical” only by specifying that they are canonical “in a different degree” (in dissimili gradu).9 Cajetan’s distinction of degree is a very useful precedent since it can be argued that a distinction of degree is all, really, that article 6 asserts. Upon careful inspection, article 6 does not exclude canonical Roman books simpliciter, absolutely and without qualification, but only “for the purpose of establishing what is necessary for salvation.” This sort of restriction, Sancta Clara points out, is not a novelty, since Rufinus made it “long ago.”10 Francis Mirandula, in turn, basing himself on Saint Jerome, defended the same opinion as Cajetan. Mirandula corroborated his opinion further by citing Saint Antoninus, who based himself on Nicholas de Lyra’s preface to the book of Tobias.11 In short, a respectable tradition of minority opinion concerning the texts that are contested by article 6 has long been part of God’s church, provoking subtle reflection and welcome nuances. Sancta Clara concedes that such a dissenting opinion may be viewed, after the Council of Trent, as so remote from the majority opinion as to fit Melchior Cano’s criteria of “nearing heresy,” but “nearing” heresy is not the same, exactly, as heresy.12 Moreover, is it really perfectly indubitable that councils have the final authority to define the canon? Waldensis (Thomas Netter) and Driedo (Jan Nys) have argued that the authority rests, ultimately, on all of the Church Fathers and all of the faithful since apostolic times. The English position cannot be dismissed as positively improbable. Sancta Clara, for one, would “hesitate to brand either Cajetan’s opinion or English Article 6 as heretical.”13 The same appeal to “dissimilar degrees” allows Sancta Clara to defend article 25, which affirms that “there are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, Baptism and the Supper of the Lord.” Article 25 appears to reject five Roman sacraments. But does it? Sancta Clara points out that article 25 makes two distinct assertions. It asserts, first, that baptism and Holy Communion were instituted by Christ in the Gospels, which is fully and unproblematically Catholic: “Duo a Christo Domino nostro in

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evangelio instituta sunt Sacramenta.” The difficulty lies with the second assertion, that the five remaining Roman sacraments must not be regarded as sacraments of the Gospel: “pro sacramentis Evangelicis habenda non sunt.” Does this second assertion reject the five Roman sacraments simpliciter? If article 25 simply insists that baptism and Holy Communion have a greater dignity and necessity than the remaining five sacraments, there is no controversy, Sancta Clara argues, since “all antiquity agrees with this, and scholastic theology universally, as is well-known to all.”14 So what does article 25 assert? Far from rejecting the five remaining sacraments absolutely, Sancta Clara argues, article 25 merely specifies that they “do not have the same essence” as baptism and Communion: “non eandem habent rationem.” All article 25 claims is that the sacramental nature of confirmation, penance, holy orders, matrimony, and extreme unction differs in degree from baptism and Communion: “non negat ergo simpliciter esse Sacramenta, sed in dissimili gradu.”15 Interpreted in this careful, literal way, article 25 is fully acceptable to Roman Catholics: “quod ultro concedimus.” Citing numerous medieval Scholastics ranging from Hugh of St. Victor to Scotus, Sancta Clara shows that the number of sacraments and their degree of sacramentality, dignity, and necessity have traditionally belonged to the realm of conjecture—of more or less authoritative, more or less probable opinions. Article 25 escapes heresy because its only literal claim, upon inspection, is that baptism and Communion are more distinctly “sacraments of the Gospel” than the other sacraments—a claim with a long and venerable Catholic pedigree. Granted, then, that all Catholics agree about the dignity and necessity of Communion, are there irreconcilable differences in how Commu nion is understood? Four articles attempt to define the form and meaning of Christian Communion. Articles 28 and 29 both appear to reject the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation. Article 30 asserts that “the cup of the Lord is not to be denied to the laity,” while article 31 asserts that the one and only sacrifice for our sins was Christ’s own death on the cross, so that the idea that the Mass constitutes a sacrifice is a “blasphemous fable and dangerous deceit.” Starting with article 31, Sancta Clara concedes that it seems “most difficult” (durissimus videtur) to explain in a Catholic sense. Upon “a more correct inspection,” however, it is not far from the truth— at least according to Sancta Clara’s personal judgment. How? Article 31 es-

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capes heresy because it denies only that the Mass is a full blooded sacrifice, not that the Mass is a sacrifice. It allows for the Mass to be a sacrifice of a lesser degree, an “immolation without immolation,” as the Nicene Creed describes it. Article 31, if “soberly understood,” says nothing against the sacrifice of the Mass in itself. It rejects only the “vulgar opinion” that priests perform a sacrifice that is independent of the sacrifice of the cross and thereby gain remission for the people. Article 31, like Trent and like many holy fathers, simply emphasizes the commemorative character of Communion and asserts that Communion must be understood as “an image and setting forth of that Sacrifice upon the Cross, whence, as from a root, all salvation springs.” Nor does article 31 deny the propitiatory character of the Mass absolutely, but allows a sort of secondary propitiatory character, similar to what is claimed by Cano, namely, that Christ’s death is applied “as if Christ were to die again.” Sancta Clara points out that the “more learned” among Protestants, such as D. Andrewes and D. Montagu, endorse this view. Moreover, since these Protestant divines think of themselves as “priests,” they can hardly reject all notion of sacrifice and propitiation, which is required by scripture of every priest. What, then, is meant by “sacrifice”? Sancta Clara cites the “common” definition of theologians, according to which a sacrifice involves offering something material to God and to God alone, which is “consecrated and transmuted into a fitting end” by a mystical rite administered by a lawful minister. In the case of Christian Communion, the controversy that arises is over exactly what is consecrated and what is changed. Bellarmine thinks that what is consecrated is the bread, and what is changed (sacrificed, destroyed) is Christ’s body. Suarez, on the other hand, thinks that what is consecrated is Christ’s body, which is then changed, immolated, destroyed “though in a mystical and unbloody manner.” Suarez doubts, moreover, whether the change/destruction of what is offered is really essential to the idea of sacrifice. Conceding that the whole matter is difficult, Sancta Clara points out that the “more common and truer” opinion is that some change is made in a sacrifice and that Protestants agree with this more common opinion, granted that, much like Suarez, they question whether the change must be bloody and hold that an unbloody change suffices. To conclude, article 31, as interpreted by “the more learned” English divines, interprets Communion to be a sacrifice, although not a “proper” one, in the manner

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of former sacrifices, but an unbloody one: “which we will readily grant” (quod nos ultro dabimus). Article 31, in short, escapes heresy because “sacrifice,” like “sacrament,” admits degrees. Seizing upon these degrees, various holy fathers and theologians have long debated the nature of the Lord’s Supper in the hope of better understanding its meaning and force. And though a consensus has formed in the Church in favor of the probable opinion that Communion is a sacrifice, probable opinions remain that contest the essence of sacrifice, among which is the probable opinion put forth by article 31, which falls within the range of permissible Catholic opinions—at least in Sancta Clara’s opinion. The content of article 31, in other words, escapes heresy to the extent that it can be shown to be probably probable. Similar strategies help to exonerate articles 28 and 29 from the error of denying transubstantiation simpliciter. Sancta Clara starts by examining to what extent the doctrine of transubstantiation counts as an undisputed truth of faith. Does it suffice that the Lateran and Tridentine councils define it as such? Not wholly, since (1) some have questioned the universality of the Council of Trent and (2) others question the infallibility of councils. The “constant opinion” of doctors, however, recognizes the authority of councils generally and of Trent in particular—or at least agree with Mirandula’s “Theorem” that we are bound to believe conciliar decrees that concern the substance of the faith so long as they have not been repudiated by the Church. Thus it is at least very probable that the doctrine of transubstantiation is a doctrine of the faith since it has not been repudiated by the Church. Scotus, for one, held transubstantiation to be a truth of the faith following the Church’s solemn declaration, as did all of England. And since the English Church bases its authority on continuity and precedent, article 28 must be interpreted in the very narrow sense of rejecting only “the old error of the Capharnaïtes,” who believed that “Christ was present in the sacrament in a natural and carnal manner and was chewed by their teeth,” because they misinterpreted the words of the canon issued by the Roman council. Hence the urge, in article 28, to clarify that Christ is present under the species sacramentally, not in a carnal or sensible manner. Since both the Eastern and Western churches agree with regard to transubstantiation, and since no council has contested the doctrine, there is a universal obligation to uphold it, granted that there is some latitude

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regarding how and when transubstantiation occurs. English divines allow a change, alteration or transmutation, “not only in form but in nature,” which means that they correctly uphold a change of substance, as attested by Dr. Andrewes and Dr. Montagu, based on the Church Fathers. Suarez, in turn, notes that it is very probable (probabilissimum) that the fathers used “change of substance” to explain the Eucharistic mystery, but that the Church chose “transubstantiation” for greater clarity. Thus article 28 must be interpreted according to the narrow “anti-Capharnaïte” sense described above, or else it would indict the “transmutation in nature” upheld by Andrewes and Montagu. Article 28 also asserts the laity’s right to the cup. It insists on defining the “heavenly manner” in which Christ’s body is absorbed and rejects various Roman rituals connected with the consecrated host, such as raising it and displaying it for worship. Sancta Clara postpones discussing the first two points and interprets the last point as rejecting latria only. Citing Andrewes, Jewel, Scotus, Ovandus, and “all the Scotists,” Sancta Clara judges that forbidding latria to be offered to the host is “most Catholic.” The Council of Trent, indeed, anathematizes only those who reject latria that is properly and narrowly offered to Christ in the host. Moreover, does article 28 positively reject Roman rituals connected with the host, or does it, rather, declare, correctly, that no one is bound by Christ’s commandment or by scripture to conduct or participate in these rituals? Nor does the Council of Trent anathematize anyone who disapproves of the rituals, as long as the disapproval is not based on the error of denying the presence of the body of Christ—as Cano explains. So far, nothing in article 28 contradicts Catholic doctrine. Sancta Clara addresses the clause asserting the “spiritual and heavenly manner” in which the body of Christ is eaten when he turns to article 29, which specifies that “the wicked eat not the Body of Christ” when they take Communion. Implicitly, to endorse transubstantiation is to commit oneself logically to the consequence that “the wicked eat the Body of Christ,” against the authority of Augustine. Sancta Clara agrees that Augustine’s intention must always be sought. Augustine’s authority, however, invalidates the ordinary interpretation of article 29. In one relevant passage, Augustine distinguishes between the Eucharist (panem Dominum) that Christ gave to his apostles and the mere bread that he gave to Judas

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(panem Domini). In another relevant passage, Augustine draws a very different distinction, this time between those who partake worthily and those who partake unworthily of the Eucharist. Those who partake unworthily “eateth and drinketh judgment” to themselves, Augustine writes, plainly implying that the wicked receive the very body of Christ—to their eternal peril. The best way to interpret article 29, Sancta Clara argues, is perhaps to draw on Bellarmine’s discussion of Augustine. On this view, article 29 asserts only that the wicked do not receive God’s grace when they partake of the Eucharist—they do not receive the Lord as Lord—while all, both the wicked and the faithful, receive Christ under a veil. To Augustine’s authority and Bellarmine’s reflection, Sancta Clara adds a rational argument. It must be the consecrating priest, not the communicating people, who “brings the body of Christ hither,” or else the power of consecration would be given to laymen, which no Christian church has ever taught. (Implicitly, Sancta Clara reminds the English hierarchy of the advantages of the Catholic doctrine for the stability and privilege of the clergy.) Article 30, in turn, allows Sancta Clara to complete his defense of article 28 by addressing the English assertion that “the cup of the Lord is not to be denied to the Lay-people.” Once again, the literal words must be carefully weighed. Does the article explicitly claim that the cup must be extended to the laity as “necessary to salvation”? Does it explicitly deny that concrete circumstances may require God’s church to change the external form of Communion without changing its essence? On both counts, which is to say the only counts that were deemed critical by the Council of Trent, article 30 is silent. Article 30 thus escapes anathema—all the more safely because Cano “excuses from heresy anyone who should affirm that the Church erred in her custom of communicating the people under one kind alone.” Even an “uncharitable” reading of article 30 is not enough to constitute an insuperable obstacle to reunion. In short, with regard to sacraments and to Communion, Rome and Canterbury have only minor differences that fall within the traditional capaciousness of Catholic doctrine. The harmony reached by Sancta Clara with regard to Communion is powerfully bolstered by the “manifest” truth of article 34, which asserts that the tradition and ceremonies of the Church need not “be in all places one, and utterly like,” since “at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversities of countries, times, and men’s man-

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ners.” Article 34 concludes by asserting that “every particular or national church hath authority to ordain, change and abolish ceremonies or rites of the Church ordained only by man’s authority.” In Sancta Clara’s view, article 34 captures a deeply important truth about God’s church. It is perfectly justified and consonant with the practice of the Church: “mihi verissimus et praxi Ecclesiae consonans videtur.” Indeed, it provides a sort of blueprint for distinguishing Christian faith, as such, from the flexible practices that have long served to adapt God’s church to a wide range of local cultures. Sancta Clara goes on to defend the articles that define the local practices of the English Church. Do they fall within permissible range? Article 19, which denies the infallibility of the “Church of Rome,” says nothing contrary to the Faith since it says nothing about the Catholic Church, impugning only a local church (Roman) among many. Article 20, which denies that God’s church has the authority to decree that something is necessary for salvation that is not found in scripture, is fully Catholic since it nowhere excludes from scripture “what is implied from Scripture.” Article 24, which invokes scripture to call for “Publick Prayer in the Church” to be conducted in “a tongue as the people understandeth,” says nothing about “mass” or about using vernacular languages exclusively, and thus does not fall afoul of the Council of Trent. Moreover, at Oxford, where Latin is understood, religious worship is conducted in Latin, proof, Sancta Clara points out, that article 24 reflects a case of local accommodation, perhaps wholly provisional, more than a dogmatic rejection simpliciter of Latin as the common language of the Western church. Nor does article 35 constitute an obstacle, since it promotes the homilies as “probable” teachings only, not as Christian doctrine. As for article 32, aimed against the requirement of priestly celibacy, it asserts only that God’s law does not prohibit the marriage of priests, which “is the more common opinion of the schools,” granted that the opinion is not perfectly universal, since it is not shared, among others, by Medina. We now come to the delicate question of the legitimacy of Anglican orders. Does Sancta Clara defend article 36, which asserts that bishops and priests of the English Church are “lawfully consecrated and ordered”? Sancta Clara tackles article 36 by asking whether the purified English rite established by the New Ordinal of Edward VI and endorsed by Parliament retains enough of the Catholic ceremony to confer the sacrament of holy

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orders and to confer the episcopal power to ordain priests. Sancta Clara starts with the ordination of English bishops. According to the established English rite, the archbishop of Canterbury pronounces the formula of consecration over the episcopal ordinand while several bishops perform an imposition of hands. The ordinand is then given a Bible, with suitable ritual words, yet no other “instruments” of the old Catholic rite are delivered, such as an episcopal ring and staff, and no unction is performed. The key question, Sancta Clara then says, is exactly what constitutes the “matter” of episcopal ordination: Is it the imposition of hands alone or does it include a full porrectio instrumentorum? Catholic tradition and Scholastic doctors are divided. There is no final doctrine, only more or less probable opinions on the matter. Let “wiser doctors,” then, Sancta Clara cries out, take it upon themselves to declare that the consecration of English bishops is void! Vasquez, for one, asserts that the words and imposition of hands suffice, jure divino, for valid episcopal ordination. Vasquez’s opinion is bolstered by Arcudius, for two reasons: first because scripture mentions these two points alone; second because the Greek Church does not consider the subsequent delivery of episcopal instruments, or the accompanying words, to be essential to the sacrament. By the same token, Arcudius points out that material unction is not necessary in the Greek Church, either for bishops or for priests. The English ordination of priests is, perhaps, more problematic. The formula it retains starts by conferring on the ordinand the power to forgive or retain sins—which is, correctly, the first power that was conferred by Christ, as Sancta Clara points out, citing scripture, Scotus, and Church tradition.16 The English ordinand is then given a Bible, along with “the authority to preach the Word of God and to minister the Holy Sacraments.” What about the priestly power to consecrate the host at Communion? What about the “delivery of the instruments” of the Mass, the porrectio of paten and chalice, which the English rite has entirely dropped? Some doctors, Sancta Clara explains, including Aquinas, Bellarmine, and the “very learned Kellison”—in whose “debt” he acknowledges himself to be “on many grounds”—argue that the power to consecrate the host is not a new power, distinct from the power to forgive or retain sins. It is included in the first power. Thus Aquinas, Bellarmine, and Kellison might not interpret the English rite of holy orders as lacking, or as rejecting, a priestly power of sacrifice, but merely as acknowledging it tacitly.

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Others, perhaps more convincingly, argue that the English formula makes the implicit power of sacrifice explicit when it confers the power to administer all of the holy sacraments. Sancta Clara, for one, has “no doubt” that the priestly power of offering sacrifice is part and parcel of the power of absolution, since “power is given over the true Body of Christ” in the power to forgive or retain sins. Certainly, the “almost unanimous consensus” of Catholic doctors is that no priestly ordination is valid without the power of sacrifice and of consecrating the host. Sancta Clara’s argument, in effect, based on scripture, Scotus, Aquinas, Bellarmine, and Kellison, is that English holy orders are not demonstrably invalid since it is not positively improbable that the priestly power to transubstantiate the host is conferred. Sancta Clara acknowledges that Puritans interpret article 36 to be aimed at purging Protestant ministers of the power of sacrifice, which they consider to be superstitious. Puritans, however, are not relevant to the project of reconciliation, since they basically reject the whole notion of priesthood. The point is simply to propose a benign interpretation of article 36, based on the literal words and on raising the Scholastic question of how validity is attached to the form and matter of sacraments. Thus on the one hand, although the “more distinguished” English Protestant doctors endorse the priesthood in the traditional sense of including sacrifice, they err, at the very least, by not observing the form that is prescribed by the Latin Church, since all Catholic doctors agree that the form is necessary, as Scotus explains at great length. On the other hand, does the English form retain enough of the Latin form to be valid? Sancta Clara will not assert it, much less endorse it. Yet a probable opinion in favor of the English form might be drawn from Innocent IV. According to Innocent IV, in the early Church, the formula “be thou a priest,” or some equivalent words, probably sufficed for valid ordination. Nor is the effectiveness of the ritual, according to Innocent, narrowly tied to the words that are used. It is tied to their meaning. Arcudius, in turn, concurs with Innocent’s opinion, and the Council of Trent seems to favor it too, since it declares that ordination “is performed (perficitur) by words and external signs” without specifying what words and signs are necessary. Most importantly, “many doctors hold, not improbably, that neither the words nor outer signs were prescribed by Christ but were left to the church.”17 On their view, equivalent words and signs are thus wholly

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sufficient. The Greek Church, as a matter of fact, uses a different formula from the Latin Church, yet no one denies that Greek priests and bishops are rightly ordained, since the substance of the sacrament is preserved. The same might apply to the English rite, since “it includes the power of sacrificing and of absolving” if taken properly and literally, rather than in a “twisted” Puritan way. Catholics who might cringe at such a benign opinion should, Sancta Clara says, consider Scotus’s argument. Scotus explains that it puts the sacraments of the Church at risk to insist rigidly on precise words and necessary formulations. Scotus indeed points out a nice paradox. The validity of sacraments depends on words absolutely without depending on any single absolute word. Put another way, the validity of a sacrament as a whole is not endangered by the inherent indeterminacy of each constitutive element. On the contrary, the validity of a sacrament requires that each constitutive element be flexible. The English formula for holy orders, moreover, shares more constitutive elements with the Catholic formula than does the Greek formula, since the English ritual includes an imposition of hands on the part of the priests who are present, as practiced in the Catholic Church on the authority of Saint Paul and as endorsed by Trent, whereas the Greek ritual does not. On what grounds, then, will anyone venture to declare English ordination null and void? As for deacons, it seems to many doctors that nothing is lacking in the English ritual, for all of the same reasons. Sancta Clara cites Arcudius again, “who got to the bottom of the question better than anyone.” The “delivery of instruments” is not the matter itself of the sacrament, and the Council of Florence should be interpreted accordingly. Sancta Clara says that he wants to add, here, a “most beautiful saying of the Doctor” (Scotus), which he cites verbatim: “It is unsafe for anyone to think so highly of his own skills and knowledge as to declare that he wishes precise words to be used for the consecration. It is more secure to say, simply: I wish to utter words that convey the intention that Christ intended them to convey; and whatever was appointed by Christ to be essential, I utter as essential, and whatever was instituted by Christ for the sake of reverence, I utter for the sake of reverence.” According to Scotus, valid sacraments require only that the intention to administer them validly not be compromised. Implicitly, the burden of proof is reversed. Anglican orders cannot easily be proved to be improbable.

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Are general councils inerrable? And by whose authority are they assembled? The English Church, in article 21, states (1) that no general council “may be gathered” without the commandment of a temporal ruler, (2) that no general council is immune from error “even in the things of God,” and, consequently, (3) that what councils decree counts as Christian doctrine only if drawn securely from scripture. Sancta Clara defends each claim step-by-step. He argues, first, based on abundant precedent, that it might not be physically possible for a general council to gather without “the protection and even commandment” of temporal princes because of the logistics involved. The English assertion that “General Councils may not be gathered without the commandment and will of Princes” is thus true factually and per accidens, granted that it is not true de jure divino. Perhaps the Holy See, as documented in the time of Saint Jerome and Constantine, might deem it wise, for pragmatic reasons, to transfer the authority to summon general councils to temporal princes when appropriate? Sancta Clara also defends the assertion that general councils “may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining to God,” thanks to the fact that the problematic clause—“etiam in rebus ad Deum spectantibus”— “has,” he says, “great latitude” (magnam enim latitudinem habet illa clau sula). The common opinion of doctors is that general councils are not immune to error with regard to matters that are not essential to salvation. Pope Innocent, Aquinas, Canus, and Bellarmine all concede it. Does “even in things pertaining to God” necessarily mean “even in things necessary to salvation”? No. Provided, therefore, that the problematic clause not include matters that are immediately necessary for salvation, the article asserts nothing that is not commonly received by God’s church. As for the article’s third claim, namely, that what general councils decree to be necessary to salvation has no authority unless it is firmly rooted in Holy Scripture, Sancta Clara shows that it complies perfectly with Catholic doctrine. The constant opinion of Catholic doctors is that councils do not formulate new truths but simply extract the latent truth that lies hidden in difficult passages in scripture. Thus, for example, Gerson, Suarez, and Canus, like Vincent of Lérins and Aquinas, argue in various ways that articles of faith cannot be concocted from scratch since “our faith rests on no other revelations than those which the Apostles and Prophets have set forth in Canonical books.” Most especially, Scotus correctly characterized the task of the Lateran Council to be to explain the old faith more fully, not to introduce a

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new faith. Molina, Turrecremata, and de Vega said the same about Trent. Valentia and Aquinas, in turn, asserted that “the Articles of Faith have not increased since the times of the Apostles,” which would be false, as Conink explains, if the Church framed new ones. All of Catholic tradition, in short, agrees with the last part of article 21 and with Saint Cyprian’s call to “return to the tradition of our Lord, of the Gospel, and of the Apostles” whenever Christian truth is perturbed or shaken. Implicitly, however, Sancta Clara warns the schismatic English Church of a problem. The Thirty-nine Articles are authentically Christian only to the extent that they, too, are verifiably rooted in the Gospels and the apostles. How will this orthodoxy be ascertained, if not by the authority of general councils? Finally, article 37, cornerstone of the English national church, treats civil magistrates. It presents, Sancta Clara concedes, “by far the most serious matter to be examined.” Article 37 declares that the English king is the chief governor of the English Church, as he is of all estates of his realm. Even though he cannot administer the sacraments or preach God’s Word, he is divinely appointed to rule over both ecclesiastical and temporal affairs. He is entitled to prosecute “evildoers,” whether lay or clerical. He is not subject to any foreign jurisdiction. The bishop of Rome, in particular, “hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.” How will Sancta Clara give article 37 a Catholic meaning? The basic question, Sancta Clara argues, is whether laymen are capable of exercising spiritual jurisdiction. Proceeding Scotistically, Sancta Clara starts by putting forth two axioms and a postulate. First, it must be carefully noted that laymen, by universal consensus, are not “capable of the keys,” since, if they were, they would be capable of remitting or absolving sins, which they clearly are not. Second, it must be noted that spiritual jurisdiction, as such, is not one and the same power as the “power of the keys.” Rather, the two powers are separable. They have not always been exercised jointly in practice, since neither divine law nor positive law requires it. Third, let us suppose (“supponendum”) that the “Highest Pontiff,” in every matter and in virtue of his absolute power, has sufficient authority to transfer spiritual jurisdiction to laymen, since no divine law prohibits it, as de Soto and Miranda point out. Does the postulate hold for the transfer of spiritual jurisdiction to women? Doctors, Sancta Clara points out, are divided on the answer. Mi-

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randa argues that there is no precedent for the transfer of spiritual jurisdiction to women, but “Aluin” (the Minim Franciscan Etienne d’Alvin) cites a number of cases in which the power of jurisdiction was conceded to abbesses. “Laymanus” (the Jesuit Paul Laymann) argues, in turn, that jurisdictional use is conferred to abesses rather than jurisdiction itself, which nonetheless allows abesses to confer benefices, to institute clerics to the churches of their monasteries, and so forth. Sancta Clara raises the question, presumably, for two reasons. First, since abbesses are barred from being ordained as priests but nonetheless rule their own communities and have the power to command priests under their jurisdiction to excommunicate rebellious nuns, they serve as a useful precedent for determining what kind of jurisdiction is transferrable to laymen generally, not just to women. Second, because English law does not rule out female sovereigns, it is crucial that the postulate apply to laywomen and to laymen, if it is to be useful. Conscious that the matter is grave, Sancta Clara reiterates, as a matter of personal opinion, that laymen are not entitled, ever, to exercise any power whereby spiritual grace is procured, namely, the power to administer sacraments. Nor are they capable of exercising any of the powers that belong inherently to the power to administer sacraments, such as the power to impose spiritual penalties, or to interpret scripture, or to ordain priests, and more. The exercise of such powers is absolutely restricted by divine law to men who are consecrated to God, as John XXII long ago declared against Marsilius of Padua and as Turrecremata had recently emphasized. The “postulate of transfer,” in effect, applies only to powers that are not inseparably annexed to spiritual offices, such as the powers that may legitimately be transferred to abesses. Nothing prevents these nonpriestly sorts of ecclesiastic jurisdiction to be entrusted to laymen. For example, laymen may be entrusted with the power to present and collate benefices, to enforce temporal punishment of clerics, and to do “many other things of the kind, as I said with regard to Abbesses.” Sancta Clara’s parallel between abbesses and laymen contains a further important clarification of how power is “transferred.” As Aluin’s authority establishes, abbesses have, in the past, been given jurisdiction over the management of their religious institutions “either by common law, or by custom, or at least by privilege.”18 By the same token, laymen may, in turn, exercise jurisdiction over institutional aspects of the Church and over temporal aspects of clerical

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life “principally by concession of the Church, or by the sanction of a long custom (ex consuetudine), with the consent of the Church hierarchy”; thus not only concession, but custom, of itself, gives jurisdiction, even in spiritual matters (according to Innocent IV), especially when the custom in question is immemorial (according to jurists, as cited by Francisco Salgado de Somoza).19 Article 37, however, makes a stronger claim. It asserts that the English king possesses supreme power over the English Church, not merely a sort of secondhand power by concession or custom. And if the king’s power over the English Church is indeed supreme, does it not, in fact, include power over purely spiritual matters, for which all Catholic doctors hold unanimously that no layman is qualified? Sancta Clara’s solution, inspired from Suarez, consists in interpreting “supreme,” not in an absolute sense, but in the relative sense of a power that cannot be revoked by any “superior” power: “suprema potestas, non simpliciter, sed quia non per superiorem auferibilis.”20 The way in which Sancta Clara introduces his solution follows the Scotistic method of shrewdly capturing the relevant principles in a concrete and targeted proposition: “I answer that the doctors cited earlier affirm that the Pope cannot take away the jurisdiction of princes when it is derived from a firm custom or concession that was validly and lawfully introduced.”21 Long-established royal prerogatives are thus inalienable, granted that they are not hegemonic. In support of his axiom of inalienability, Sancta Clara cites, first, Navarro’s discussion of French prerogatives in his En chiridion.22 He then cites Ignacio Lopez de Salzedo commenting on Juan Bernardo Diaz de Luco’s work on criminal canonic law.23 Last, but certainly not least, Sancta Clara invokes the authority of André Duval, the Sorbonne theologian who famously opposed Edmund Richer’s extreme Gallicanism in 1612.24 According to Sancta Clara, Duval acknowledges that the pope cannot revoke privileges of jurisdiction that have been ceded to temporal princes “by way of contract or concordat,” provided, of course, that the transfer of jurisdiction not contradict divine law.25 A number of authorities on canon law thus agree that royal prerogatives may be irrevocable under certain circumstances. In the case of English kings, what is the evidence? According to the English historian Nicholas Harpsfield (a Roman Catholic priest and a

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fierce prosecutor of Protestant heretics under Mary Tudor), specific prerogatives in Church matters were long ago granted to the English Crown, such as the right to nominate candidates and provide benefices.26 The right to prosecute clerics for crimes, in turn, has belonged to the English Crown since time immemorial, as the decisions of the Rotae Romanae (805) makes clear. You might object, as Suarez does when defending the Church’s prerogatives against the Venetian Republic in De immunitate ecclesiastica contra Venetos, that the prosecutory privilege in question was never fully decreed.27 The answer is that a well-established custom weighs more heavily in favor of possession than a full decree since a long-standing custom implies, of itself, the presumption of an irrevocable concession: “consuetudo notoria supponit concessionem irrevocabilem.” The combination of public belief in royal privilege with immemorial custom provides, in effect, the best grounds for affirming the king’s irrevocable right of jurisdiction over offending clerics. The presumption of possession lies on the king’s side, as it always must in such cases, lest an ancient right be lost by the difficulty of proving it. The jurists Fulvius Pacian and Camillus Borel, Sancta Clara adds, both agree on the matter.28 In other words, Sancta Clara brings a (sufficiently probable) legal opinion to bear on a (sufficiently probable) historical record for the sake of concluding that article 37 makes a sufficiently probable claim when it asserts that the English king has some kind of irrevocable (“supreme”) jurisdiction over the English Church. You might object that article 37 does not merely assert the king’s jurisdiction in his realm in virtue of concession or custom, but claims it by divine right. Is there an admissible sense in which the king’s power over the English Church is by divine right? For a start, Sancta Clara says, “quite a few doctors” hold that princes have jurisdiction over all matters that contribute to the common good of the state, including over many matters that, in themselves, would otherwise come under the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts. These same doctors argue, moreover, that princes hold this wide sort of jurisdiction by divine law, both positive and natural. However, other doctors, more correctly (“rectius”), invoke the papal bull In coena Domini to deny any such broad royal prerogative.29 They grant temporal rulers only a “bare” (nudam) civil power over clerics, strictly circumscribed to temporal matters and strictly for the defense of the state, civil justice,

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and civil peace. Since even these more restrictive doctors concede that kings hold their limited civil jurisdiction over clerics by both natural and divine law, their authority suffices to save article 37 from improbability. So far, Sancta Clara has defended the two first assertions of article 37 as admissible even to vigilant champions of papal prerogatives. If interpreted to mean that the English king has an irrevocable and divinely appointed right to police the purely temporal aspects of the English Church for the sake of securing civil security and peace, then the opening section of article 37 falls within the permissible teaching of the Catholic Church. The authority of Suarez, moreover, may be further adduced. Sancta Clara cites De summo pontifice, where Suarez explicitly recognizes that “human nature cannot be destitute of remedies necessary for its own preservation” and thus implicitly admits that temporal princes must be able to secure civil peace.30 Similarly, Morla (Pedro Agustin Morla, Spanish jurist, b. 1569 in Valencia and trained at Salamanca) argues that a ruler is implicitly given “all those things without which his kingdom could not be governed.”31 Since a ruler would not be able to govern without jurisdiction over clerics, it follows that such jurisdiction is given.32 Princes, Sancta Clara concludes, thus indirectly and accidentally have jurisdiction over ecclesiastical persons and affairs. Princes have the right, for instance, to “require Bishops to conduct their spiritual affairs so as to foster civil peace” and to “remove stubborn clerics from their offices.” Most importantly, princes also have the power to “protect innocent clerics from the unjust oppression of ecclesiastical judges.” In this last regard, Sancta Clara emphasizes Navarro’s reasonable attitude—“vide modestiam Navarri.” According to Navarro, there is no doubt that kings have the power to protect any subject who is verifiably oppressed and abused.33 Not only do Cajetan and Francisco de Vitoria support the same view, reason itself proves it, since clerics are citizens of the state in which they live and thus subjects of the king. They must, consequently, be bound by the civil laws that govern the commonwealth in which they live. They cannot be exempted from their duty of obedience to civil authority either as private persons or with regard to the conduct of ecclesiastical affairs. “Nor do I think” Sancta Clara says, “that a single Catholic doctor would deny it.” Without mentioning the Jacobean oath explicitly, Sancta Clara clearly implies it since he cites Cajetan verbatim to conclude that “Princes have the

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right, by natural law and the law of nations, to resist tyranny, even in ecclesiastical matters.” The king of Spain and the French king avail themselves of this incontestable right throughout their dominions. Article 37 claims no more for the English king. The interpretation that Anglican divines give to article 37 corroborates the limited and purely temporal character of the English king’s power over the Church: they “grant no spiritual power whatsoever to our kings” (nullam jurisdictionem spiritualem Regibus nostris concedunt). Sancta Clara cites Montagu as evidence, but he also cites personal discussions with Anglican clergy, including with the Puritan Dr. Reynolds, who concurs. Moreover, at commencement exercises in Cambridge, Sancta Clara reports, the pope was called “the Chief Father” in spiritual matters. Article 37, in other words, correctly promotes two complementary but autonomous spheres, temporal and spiritual. It claims for England only what is practiced by the Church in France and endorsed by the Paris parlement, “without prejudice to communion” with Rome. Sancta Clara says that he speaks “all the more freely” in favor of article 37 because Canus very explicitly rejects supine submission to every papal word and decision as both unworthy of Christians and dangerous. Canus adds that, though he would “eagerly die in just defense of the Holy See,” we must not deny princes their just due. Article 37 asserts, next, that “the Pope has no jurisdiction in England.” Does this statement not explicitly dash Sancta Clara’s hope of corporate reunion? Sancta Clara points out that the statement, in fact, lends itself to various interpretations. Perhaps it refers to English history and to whether King John might have turned England into a papal fief? As Harpsfield attests, King John had no legitimate power to make the pope overlord of England. Moreover, subsequent actions were taken by legitimately constituted English authorities to rectify the situation. Thus if article 37 simply reaffirms that the English king is not the pope’s feudal vassal and that En gland is a sovereign nation, there can be no objection to it. Another explanation might be that there was an immediate need, at the start of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, to defend the new queen from Pope Paul IV. Since Queen Elizabeth was not the legitimate daughter of Henry VIII in the eyes of the Catholic Church, and since Paul IV liked to use the “inane” title of “Sovereign Pontiff”—as Thomas More characterized it and as all Catholics now agree—the English may have feared the pope’s

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active meddling in England’s temporal affairs. Article 37 would thus simply be aimed at reaffirming English sovereignty and the autonomy of the temporal sphere. Yet a third approach to explaining article 37 in a Catholic sense is to examine what is meant, exactly, by “no jurisdiction in this realm of England.” If indeed it means that “every type of subjection and communion with the Holy See is denied,” then the article breaks with Catholic tradition in an irreparable way, since it rejects Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Cyprian. Implicitly, Sancta Clara issues a warning: Anglicans must acknowledge the English Church to be in some sort of communion with the bishop of Rome if they wish to be part of God’s apostolic and Catholic church. As we saw, however, Sancta Clara implied earlier that declaring the pope to be “Chief Father” of God’s church in spiritual matters may suffice to satisfy the requirement of communion with Rome. A second meaning, however, is possible. Perhaps the clause implies that the Anglican Church rejects obeying, not the Holy See itself, but the person acting as pope for a particular period of time. On this interpretation, article 37 does not deny that the Holy See, as such, has the power to promulgate Church law according to canonical procedure. It simply denies spiritual jurisdiction to the reigning pope, for a limited time. The question raised by article 37 is, therefore, the following: Is it lawful for a kingdom to withdraw from obeying a particular pope, with regard to matters of faith, for a period of time? Jean Gerson, for one, argues that it is lawful, based on precedent. 34 Gerson’s opinion that a prince may, under special circumstances, licitly appeal a given pope’s decision in matters of faith is cited abundantly by Anglican theologians, suggesting, at least indirectly, that this second meaning might, indeed, best represent what article 37 expresses. The second aspect of the question is factual: Did the circumstances in England, at the time, justify a breach with the reigning Roman bishop? Even if we grant it, Sancta Clara says, although no Catholic would concede it, the question of keeping the breach within proper limits remains. Even a lawful breach, if allowed to last excessively long, becomes culpable. Schismatic English divines must, therefore, carefully ponder the danger of a protracted schism. English Catholics who have made their peace with Rome, in contrast, have opted to embrace the truer and safer course: “veriori et tutiori parti.” They have recognized the insufficiency of the grounds

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for schism and the peril of allowing it to continue. They have heeded Augustine’s warning that “no necessity justifies a breach of unity.” Sancta Clara concludes by calling for a national synod to be convened by English “public authority” (Charles I) for the purpose of reconsidering the schism out of love for reunification: “ex affectu readunationis.” Puritans, however, should be excluded. As Augustine warned long ago about the Donatists, those who call themselves “evangelical” typically despise those who consider themselves to be Catholic members of the Roman Church. Far from wishing to become members of the same body, “Evangelicals” reject Catholics as “members of the body of Satan” or of the Antichrist. Not only are Puritans obstinately schismatic, they have lost all desire and solicitude for Church unity. They should thus be described, more correctly, as heretics: “rectius dixisset, haereos.” Sancta Clara implies that the chief danger of a protracted schism is that hearts and minds become accustomed to the separation. The sweetness of unity is forgotten. Schismatics, moreover, fatally transform into heretics. Cut off from Holy Mother Church, Anglican bishops and divines will not be able to withstand the pressure of Calvinist reformers. They will be stripped of their Catholic surplices and altars and church bells—or so at least Sancta Clara implicitly warns, with the urgency of imminent danger.35 Sancta Clara’s closing plea to the reader (“pie lector”) summarizes the nature and purpose of his “paraphrastic” effort. Our Franciscan aimed, above all, at “reconciling the Articles of the English Confession to the decrees of the Roman Church.” He did not, however, attempt to adjust Roman doctrine to the Thirty-nine Articles. Rather, he deemed it better to save the articles by adjusting them to Roman doctrine. How well did he succeed? Although the pious reader may balk at the “outer shell of words” that make up the articles, he will soon judge that their latent meaning, brought to light by Sancta Clara, is “not too dissonant from the truth.” Thanks to Sancta Clara’s paraphrase, the pious reader will discover, in effect, that the doctrines put forth by the articles are either wholly Catholic or sufficiently Catholic once clarified. They either match Catholic faith perfectly or fall within the range of permissible, “probable” opinions that the Catholic Church allows and has not yet determined. The sole purpose of his effort, Sancta Clara says, is to “repair Christ’s seamless garment.” His sole motivation is a pious thirst for Christian

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unity. Grieved at the protracted English schism, he wishes, by every means possible, to bring about the reunion of the English Church and the Roman Catholic Church: “hic unicus scopus meus.” He submits everything to the judgment of the Church—all the more willingly that, as Gerson once emphasized, no one should be accused of heresy who willingly submits himself to the Church. Finally, he calls on “God and His Saints” as witnesses that his sole intention is “the salvation of souls by the restoration of faith.” Sancta Clara, in short, on his oath, seeks neither to seduce any private individual away from the English Church, nor to favor any faction within the Roman Church, nor to act against Church authority, nor to advance himself personally in the Church or in the world. His advocacy of a national synod in view of corporate reunion is not illegal; his arguments in its favor may be discussed in broad daylight. Conversely, he has done nothing offensive to Rome. Since he has submitted “everything” to the judgment of the Church, he need not worry that his defense of the probability of the articles will be characterized as heretical. All he has done is bring to light how far the English Church might be willing to interpret itself in a Catholic sense in view of corporate reunion. In truth, what he has done is conduct a passionate defense of the English Church in which he was baptized.

E I G H T

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Is moderation in religion a virtue or a weakness? To the Jesuit missionary Matthew Wilson, alias Edward Knott, anyone who implied that salvation could be had in both the Roman Church and the Church of England was a libertine.1 Before turning to Sancta Clara’s own defense of Deus, natura, gratia, let us first investigate the extent and character of the support that Sancta Clara received. We start with the fragmentary clue contained in John Southcot’s letter of August 16, 1633, to Peter Biddulph, namely, that some unidentified English minister had sent an advance copy of Deus, natura, gratia to the Venetian ambassador in Rome in the hope that it “be shewed to His Holiness.”2 Why would the Venetian ambassador in Rome be willing, or be thought to be willing, to approach Urban VIII for the sake of promoting the irenic arguments of an obscure English friar? To understand this, we must entered the convoluted world of seventeenth-century intrigue.

PRELUDE

In August 1633, the Venetian ambassador in Rome was cavaliere Alvise Contarini di Tommaso.3 A consummate diplomat, Contarini had served as 173

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ambassador to the Dutch Republic (1623– 26), then to England (1626– 29) and France (1629– 32) before being appointed to Rome in April 1632.4 In keeping with the Serene Republic’s fierce commitment to the “common cause,” Contarini had tirelessly opposed Habsburg strategies to control Europe. While in England, he had shrewdly ferreted out Spanish plots to keep England and France at war, and he steered France away from collaborating with Spain.5 The challenge of preventing Anglo– French estrangement had been daunting, he reported, because of a “natural antipathy” between the two realms.6 In 1628, suspecting that Spain had secretly encouraged French Huguenots to rebel against the French king so that France would be crippled by domestic strife, Contarini had won Charles’s trust7 and argued against sending English ships to rescue La Rochelle.8 He had pointed out to Charles that if the Protestant Rochellese made peace with their king, France would be free to fight Spain in Italy and defend the Duke of Nevers.9 Generally, Contarini had explained, Habsburg rulers were the chief beneficiaries of Anglo– French animosity.10 To Contarini’s surprise, Charles had replied with warmth that he would rather ally himself with France than with Spain “on account of their relationship, their nearness and similar interests.”11 Contarini had also forged ties with Scottish nobles who had a long tradition of friendship with France.12 The problem, as Contarini saw it, was that Spain fueled religious intransigence so as to provoke Protestant retaliation. In order to foster divisions in England, Spain had lobbied the Holy See to condemn the Jacobean oath of allegiance, prompting Puritans in Parliament to retaliate against Catholics, who in turn threw themselves on Spain’s protection and supported policies “to the advantage of the Austrians.”13 In contrast, as Contarini had emphasized to Charles, Venice had always encouraged Catholic subjects to adhere to their natural prince.14 Charles, in exchange, had confided to Contarini that he wished to protect loyal English Catholics and to allow them the free private practice of their faith, provided he receive secure pledges of their civic loyalty.15 The French Franciscan Giles Chaissy, who had taken up residence in the Venetian ambassador’s household perhaps as early as 1626, would have been in a good position to confirm Charles’s moderate disposition to Contarini.16 In 1629, Contarini had succeeded in getting a peace treaty signed between France and England, despite strenuous Spanish efforts to thwart

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it.17 In gratitude, Charles had honored Contarini with a knighthood.18 Thus in August 1633, when Southcot wrote to Biddulph about Sancta Clara’s book, there were likely members of Charles’s government who had reason to trust that Contarini would support an English initiative aimed at undermining Spanish control of English Catholics. A letter by Sancta Clara of January 1637 corroborates Southcot’s report of Venetian involvement. Sancta Clara attests that the “Venetian Legate in Rome” (Contarini, or Contarini’s successor, Vincenzo Gussoni, also ex-ambassador to England) had been actively informed from London about Deus, natura, gratia and had agreed to serve as the project’s advocate at the Roman court.19 As ambassador to France, Contarini had developed a close friendship with Cardinal Richelieu.20 Contarini had personally backed Richelieu’s secret plan to form alliances with Protestant powers and negotiated terms for Venice to subsidize Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden.21 Contarini had applauded Richelieu’s decision to ally himself with the Dutch provinces after England’s shameful 1630 treaty with Spain.22 He had approved Richelieu’s secret treaty with the Duke of Bavaria, which had been negotiated behind the emperor’s back in 1631 by none other than the papal nuncio who had described Sancta Clara six years earlier as a zealous and useful friar, Guidi di Bagno.23 Contarini had witnessed the help that Richelieu had received covertly not only from Bagno but from Bagno’s friend and successor as Paris nuncio, Alessandro Bichi. 24 Did Contarini himself travel briefly to England on Richelieu’s behalf at the start of April 1632, before being rushed to Rome at the month’s end to assume his new post at the papal court?25 The possibility is all the more intriguing in that Richelieu had decided by the end of March 1632 to promote a new alliance with England over the Palatinate.26 Richelieu had gone so far as to request that Louis XIII address Charles’s brother-in-law, Prince Frederick, for the very first time, as “Elector.”27 Despite his vast experience with European courts, Contarini was unprepared for the level of backstabbing that he found at the papal curia, where he arrived in May 1632.28 He was quick to perceive the rivalry between Urban VIII’s two cardinal-nephews— Cardinal Francesco Barberini, Urban VIII’s secretary of state, whom Contarini would soon characterize as “wholly Spanish,” and Francesco’s hedonistic younger brother, Cardinal Antonio, well disposed towards France but politically weak. Like Contarini himself, Cardinal Antonio was a close ally of the

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urbane humanist Cardinal Bentivoglio, protector of France and early patron of Van Dyck.29 A year after Contarini’s arrival in Rome, in June 1633, Bentivoglio collaborated with Urban VIII to condemn the mathematician of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Galileo Galilei, to house arrest. Perhaps the French faction wished to keep Galileo sequestered in Italy, safe from Spanish offers to help develop military technologies in Madrid.30 Be this as it may, the chief threat facing the Barberini papacy since the fall of 1632, when Galileo was summoned before the Inquisition at Urban’s request,31 was Philip IV’s accusation that Urban VIII was “soft on heresy.”32 As Francesco Barberini wrote to Alessandro Bichi in Paris in November 1632, Spain threatened to have Urban VIII deposed if he refused to condemn French alliances with Protestant powers.33 While trying all at once to punish Spain, thwart Spanish plans, and contain Spanish wrath, Urban VIII had reason to fear that the French king, Louis XIII, might break loose from the Holy See if he, Urban VIII, submitted to Spanish demands and failed to act as a “common father.”34 Religious conditions in France were shaped by the historic fact of the Edict of Nantes, which imposed religious coexistence on the French, prompting Richelieu to advocate tolerance of loyal heretics as early as 1615.35 In May 1624, when Richelieu, behind Spain’s back, had sought Urban VIII’s dispensation for the Anglo– French marriage, a key French argument had been that a French marriage would serve the interests of the Faith in England better than a Spanish marriage since, though Spain had plenty of eminent theologians, France had experienced controversialists.36 Implicitly, Richelieu advocated rational dialogue as the best means to reconvert the British Isles, rather than Spain’s haughty dogmatism. In response, Spain, feeling outwitted and betrayed, had accused Richelieu of compromising with heretics for the sake of securing military alliances with Protestant princes. Under Urban VIII’s “neutral” leadership, Spain cried, Catholic orthodoxy itself was in danger. Spanish suspicion of Richelieu’s “lax” religious policy was not baseless. In 1631, Richelieu had approached the French Huguenot leader Moses Amyraut about a possible plan to reunite the French Reformed church to the French Catholic Church.37 Richelieu’s plan for reunion included negotiating mutual concessions with Protestants regarding points of both doctrine and ritual. In particular, Richelieu was prepared to make the five fol-

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lowing concessions: (1) to give up purgatory and prayers to the saints, (2) to give up the merit of good works, (3) to allow the cup to the laity, (4) to limit papal power, and (5) to create a French patriarchate if the Holy See refused to yield sufficient control to the French church to decide its own course.38 Bagno’s friend, the papal nuncio Bichi, was privy to Richelieu’s plan, which he described to Francesco Barberini in September 1631.39 First, key Protestant leaders would be secretly persuaded to explain in writing that the doctrinal differences between Roman Catholicism and Calvinism were less insurmountable than was generally believed. Then, a national conference would be convened in which these Protestant leaders would discuss doctrine with their coreligionists and prove to them that Protestantism, to the extent that it actually differs from French Catholicism, is wrong. The conclusion would be reached unanimously that the “so-called” Reformed church should, therefore, reintegrate into the French Catholic Church. After reunion had been agreed and effected, recalcitrant Protestant ministers would be denounced as enemies of the public peace and harassed into submission.40 Richelieu had already won over the Huguenot preacher Louis du Laurens, whom he commissioned in 1631 to prepare a national conference to settle doctrinal differences as a prelude to reconciliation.41 By 1631, which is to say, when Contarini was ambassador in Paris, Richelieu had thus put in motion a secret plan to make French Catholicism sufficiently inclusive and sufficiently autonomous to attract Calvinists back into the Catholic communion. Bichi surmised that Richelieu hoped to be made Roman legate for France, which would empower him personally to settle doctrinal matters. Nor was Richelieu discouraged by the initial failure of his secret project at Charenton in 1631. In October 1632, as royal troops successfully defeated Montmorency’s (Spanish-instigated) rebellion in Languedoc, Richelieu seized a number of Protestant ministers and secretly won them over to his plan, intending once again for them to organize conferences between Catholics and Protestants in which both parties would reach agreement.42 Bichi reported Richelieu’s new attempt to Barberini, stressing that the plan would empower Louis XIII to coerce all of his subjects back into the Catholic fold, using force if necessary.43 Although Bichi went out of his way to depict Richelieu’s plan as a means to eradicate French Calvinism, Cardinal Barberini grew hostile. He warned Bichi not to get involved

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in any plan for mutual concessions. He reminded Bichi that the Holy See frowned on the whole idea of “settling” religious doctrines outside of a general Church council called by the pope.44 As French nuncio from 1631 to 1634, Bichi was officially in charge of English Catholic affairs.45 His own assessment of Richelieu’s failure at Charenton was that reunion with French Calvinists in 1631 had been premature. In contrast, reports from Queen Henriette-Marie’s French Capuchins and from her Scottish confessor Robert Philip suggested that mainstream English Protestants and clergy were increasingly fearful of Puritans and overtly nostalgic for Catholic ceremonies. In May 1632, a Capuchin subject of the Duke of Savoy, Fra Zaccaria Boverio de Saluzza, had asked Propaganda (Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide) for permission to go to England, at Charles’s personal request.46 Zaccaria, as Bichi knew, had met Charles in Madrid in 1623 and written a treatise, Orthodox Consultation on the foundation of the true faith, aimed at converting Charles back to God’s church.47 In the spring of 1634, Bichi declared that Sancta Clara’s book contained “no poynt which may deserve a censure.”48 Bichi’s endorsement of Deus, natura, gratia mattered enough to cross the Channel twice. Uttered in Paris, it was “reported for certayne” to Father Robert Philip in London, then communicated verbally to George Leyburn, Father Philip’s protégé at the Queen’s Chapel at St. James,49 who reported it back to Richard Smith in Paris. In June 1634, Bichi gave Sancta Clara permission to prepare a second edition.50 Was Bichi, who had been in Paris since September 1630 as papal nuncio,51 acting independently of Richelieu? Bichi, who was a friend and correspondent of Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc,52 had earned Richelieu’s trust and accompanied the cardinal-duke on his historic journey to pacify Languedoc.53 It was at Louis XIII’s request that Bichi was raised to the rank of cardinal in November 1633. In June 1634, when Bichi authorized a second edition of Deus, natura, gratia, Louis awarded him the Abbaye of San-Mihiel in Lorraine. In 1637, Louis would name him “coprotector” of France.54 Thus when Bichi overtly favored Sancta Clara’s project in the summer of 1634, Bichi was not only a cardinal of the Roman Church but also a trusted ally of Richelieu. We must pause briefly to consider Bichi’s predicament between 1632 and 1634, when he was both responsible for English Catholic affairs and

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eager to help Richelieu in his struggle against Habsburg power. In the bitter contest between France and Spain to secure papal favor, Charles’s treatment of Roman Catholics in England had emerged as a highly politicized test of French resolve with regard to Henriette-Marie’s marriage treaty and thus of French fidelity to Rome. Supporters of Urban VIII and of France cited Charles’s good treatment of English Catholics as clear evidence of French (and Barberini) commitment to promoting the Faith, while supporters of Spain exaggerated English repression of Catholics as proof of French (and Barberini) dereliction. Thus whereas the queen’s confessor, Robert Philip, repeatedly praised the good effects of the queen’s piety to Bichi, who, in turn, forwarded Philip’s reports to Rome, supporters of Spain complained that “our Catholick Queen did us no more good than if she were a heretic.”55 To complicate matters further, as Bichi knew, Queen Henriette-Marie and her courtiers wavered madly in what they took “French interests” to be. They were periodically persuaded to plot with the pro-Spanish parti dévot or, alternatively, with the pro-Dutch Puritan party, against Richelieu.56 Reports of conditions in England for Roman Catholics were further colored by the rivalry that raged within the English mission between regular and secular missionaries. The rival factions in the English mission closely reflected the rival factions warring with each other in officially Catholic France, where Jean Duvergier de Hauranne (“Petrus Aurelius”) was busy exalting the secular French clergy against the dangerous papalism of Jesuits.57 In January 1633, the Capuchin diplomat Alessandro d’Alès was sufficiently worried about the internal conflict destroying the English mission to urge Barberini to send a Roman agent to London to pacify the two factions, preferably not a Spaniard or a Frenchman but a “neutral” Italian.58 When d’Alès had collaborated with Bagno’s secret mission to King James a decade earlier in 1623, he had urged James “to tear himself free from the Spaniards, and join with Rome, at least as a prince”—or so d’Alès had told the Venetian ambassador, Contarini’s immediate predecessor, visiting him secretly in the dead of night.59 By July 1633, when Peter Biddulph was inquiring about Contarini’s possible involvement in Sancta Clara’s reunion project, Contarini, as it turns out, had both d’Alès and the English mission very much in mind. On July 9, he wrote to the Venetian

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inquisitor that “Fratre Alessandro Alix, a Capuchin, came to Rome some weeks before the general chapter of his Order, which ended last Whitsun, and he has stayed on all the summer. His business is important and concerns the disputes taking place in England between the Secular and Regular clergy, in order to avoid a great schism in the Church, greater than has ever been, if it took root. I knew him in England. He is entirely devoted to the Duke of Bavaria. He has made several journeys about the Palatine’s affairs. He has a good understanding and is worth considering.”60 Worth considering for what? Back in England, Jesuits warned that any attempt on Rome’s part to restore Bishop Smith or nominate a new Roman bishop for England would trigger new waves of persecution.61 Smith’s allies retorted that Charles’s moderate outlook made it not only possible but imperative to appoint a Roman Catholic bishop to rule over English Catholics because English Catholics were increasingly drawn to the Church of England.62 Jesuits, in turn, were quick to remind Charles’s government that Bishop Smith opposed the Jacobean oath. The two factions, moreover, were supported respectively by France and by Spain, attesting to the continued intrusion of foreign powers into English affairs. Richelieu hoped to win over at least some of the regular English missionaries away from Spain, especially Jesuits. In June 1634, Richelieu’s ambassador, Fontenay, argued that Tobie Matthew might help in a scheme to fund Jesuit seminaries in France. Fontenay’s strategy to increase French control of the English Catholic mission and push Spain out included working with the English king to have the Jacobean oath changed into the less anti-Roman Irish oath, which the pope approved.63 Charles’s own protégé, Dom Thomas Preston, and his followers had their own good reason to oppose Bishop Smith’s return—they would all be promptly excommunicated for defending the oath. The rumor had spread that some Benedictines allowed English Catholics to have their children baptized in the Church of England, implying that recusancy might not be required always, everywhere, and in every way.64 The queen’s French Capuchins, in turn, took it upon themselves to marry Catholics and Protestants together without seeking episcopal permission—or so at least John Southcot reported to Rome as proof that episcopal authority in England needed urgently to be restored.65 The willingness of English Benedictines to disobey Roman bulls out of obedience to the English Crown brings us back to Richelieu and to

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Bichi. Richelieu, who was made abbot of Cluny in 1629, had long sought to amalgamate Benedictines in France into a single (more patriotic and less papalist) French Benedictine family.66 The effort had brought him and his Capuchin advisor, Père Joseph, into close contact with zealously patriotic English Benedictines, such as Dom Gabriel Gifford, Dom Augustine Bradshaw, and Dom John Barnes, who had opposed Spanish policies a generation earlier and had incurred the wrath of English Jesuits.67 An AngloBenedictine community, St. Edmonds, had sprung up in the Faubourg St. Jacques of Paris, and both Dom Wilfrid Selby in Rome and Bichi in Paris had sought Richelieu’s protection for it.68 By December 1633, Augustine Bradshaw’s associate Leander Jones, who had initially opposed the oath, had changed his position.69 Returning to England in January 1634 with royal permission, Leander now led the effort to negotiate a new oath or to have the papal bulls against the Jacobean oath rescinded. By the end of August 1634, Jones was corresponding regularly with Charles’s secretary of state, Sir Francis Windebank, giving Windebank copies of the letters that he was writing to Cardinal Bentivoglio and helping Windebank set up regular communication with Wilfrid Selby in Rome through the Paris convent.70 Jones’s English patriotism, however, made him wary of Richelieu’s attempts to dominate English Catholicism. He warned Windebank that Richelieu sought to exercise control over Capuchins in England by requesting that Rome prevent Scottish or English Capuchins from being sent into England and Scotland.71 Jones’s aim, it appears, was to promote a truly neutral English Catholicism, indebted neither to Spain nor to France. As we shall see, both Selby and Jones will make every effort to defend and support Sancta Clara’s project. Selby, moreover, will be selected by Charles in 1635 to advise the English agent in Rome.72 What English agent in Rome? In October 1633, d’Alès’s advice that a Roman envoy be sent to London to pacify the Catholic mission took on a sudden urgency when Cardinal Barberini was contacted by Sir Robert Douglas, freshly arrived in Rome and requesting an interview. Douglas, a Scot, bore credentials from the English queen and from her Scottish confessor, Robert Philip. He had brought letters for Bagno and for d’Alès from the Scottish secretary of state, the Earl of Stirling.73 Douglas’s visit was not unexpected since Urban and Barberini had both been prepared for it months earlier, through letters of January 5, 1633, written to each of them by Douglas’s powerful kinsman, the Earl of Angus.74 Bagno, in turn,

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had been notified well in advance by d’Alès himself.75 Douglas’s plan, supported apparently by Queen Henriette-Marie, Robert Philip, Stirling, and Angus, called for Rome and London to exchange resident agents in view of reconciling Charles and his realm to the Roman Church. As a first step, it called for Urban VIII to raise one of Charles’s subjects to cardinal as soon as possible—and the Scot George Con, Barberini’s own trusted secretary, was recommended by the queen for the promotion.76 The idea of creating an English cardinal was not new in itself, since d’Alès had suggested it back in June 1628 as a possible means to facilitate the conversion of England.77 What was new was the new impatience that Douglas brought to the plan. Bagno warned Barberini that Richelieu might be behind the whole initiative, since Richelieu had once argued that an English cardinal could be useful to France and had suggested his own protégé, Bishop Smith, as a candidate. On the other hand, Bagno reflected, would Richelieu have confided such a plan to Maximilian’s emissary d’Alès?78 And would Richelieu risk promoting a rival of Père Joseph to the cardinalate?79 Bagno concluded that the real motive behind the English initiative was to get the Holy See to put pressure on the Duke of Bavaria to restore Charles’s sister and nephews to the Palatinate.80 On October 21, d’Alès explained that it was Charles’s idea, not the queen’s, to maintain a resident agent in Rome.81 The whole initiative was so secret that “even the Queen was not privy to the complete plan.”82 Douglas, in turn, declared that it was Charles who had requested that the Earl of Stirling write to enlist Bagno’s help and the help of the Capuchin d’Alès, “in whose prudence and integrity his Majesty had entire confidence.”83 Douglas also claimed that Charles had verbally delegated “absolute” power to him, Douglas, to conduct negotiations.84 Barberini and Bagno soon realized that d’Alès was not only assisting Douglas but dictating Douglas’s every word.85 Bagno suggested to Barberini that d’Alès be sent to London, both to reassure Charles that his initiative was being taken seriously and to “allay Spanish suspicion and jealousy of the mission.”86 Douglas, in turn, was convinced that Jesuits were already acting to prejudice Barberini against him.87 Writing to the pope, Douglas emphasized Charles’s eagerness for England’s return to Rome, which was prepared, he explained, by new conditions of religion in England that would “gladden the Pope’s heart.”88 In a memorandum to Bagno, Douglas stressed that Charles would only be

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able to declare himself a Catholic if there was “a real understanding with the Holy See touching the present state of religion which the King now professed, so that His Majesty’s Catholic subjects would rally round him, if the need arose to pursue his pious intentions by force.”89 Douglas thus implied that Urban VIII could be convinced to ratify the English Church as it now stood, with its stone altars and surplices, but also with its Thirtynine Articles (interpreted in Sancta Clara’s Catholic sense) and its married clergy. Rome would then provide financial assistance to Charles against a Puritan Parliament, should the need arise. The letter that Douglas brought with him to Rome from Queen Henriette-Marie was dated April 2, 1633. This was the very week that Henriette-Marie’s cabal against Richelieu and against Richard Weston was brought to light and lanced.90 Richelieu and Weston came out of the ordeal more closely allied. Did Henriette-Marie volunteer to write the letter requesting Con’s promotion to the purple, or had “the French been using someone to work on her,” as Bagno suspected?91 On April 6, 1633, John Southcot reported from London to Biddulph that the Catholic Scot Sir John Hepburn was raising troops for France, “which the Spanniards here do not like,” and on April 19 that Weston and Richelieu were in close correspondence, “which the Spanniards do not like.”92 It is precisely at this time that Sancta Clara, suspected of acting “to comply with the state and gett favour,” had started to collect endorsements for Deus, natura, gratia.93 By the time Douglas arrived in Rome in October 1633, Charles had been crowned in Scotland in a lavish Anglo-Catholic ceremony. William Laud had become primate. Charles was ready, in effect, to assume his own heredi tary title of Defensor fidei, but also the irenic panache blanc of HenrietteMarie’s father, Henri IV—or so at least Sancta Clara and his sponsors might have conjectured, especially after Charles’s new “principall paynter,” Van Dyck, depicted Charles bursting onto history’s stage astride a charismatic white horse, assisted by Henri IV’s own personal groom, Monsieur Antoine. In the painting, Antoine looks up at Charles with expectant trust, carrying Charles’s helmet with both hands. In the background, a dark storm is already clearing, showing a beautiful English patch of blue sky. Implicitly, Charles had emerged to become the standard-bearer of Catholic reconciliation and European peace. Years later, Sancta Clara would cite this very painting as evidence of Van Dyck’s “divine” gift.94

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Three months after Douglas’s arrival in Rome, Barberini agreed to send an envoy to London and to arrange for a permanent exchange of resident agents between the pope and Charles’s queen.95 The envoy who was selected for the task, the Oratorian priest Gregorio Panzani, received his instructions from the pope in August 1634. Urban told Panzani viva voce “of his hope for Charles’s conversion” and speculated that Charles would have converted long before “but for the King’s fear of his nephews, the young Princes Palatine, acknowledged champions of Protestantism.”96 Panzani was told to consult with Bagno and Bichi. The main thing that Bagno told Panzani was that Archbishop Laud viewed himself as “Catholic” and yearned to become cardinal.97 Panzani discussed his English mission with Bichi in Paris. Bichi was not only Bagno’s friend but also the intimate friend of a promising young Roman diplomat named Giulio Mazarino, whose chief ambition was to serve Richelieu.98 It was Bichi who, in 1632, had given Mazarin a very symbolic tonsure (he clipped a single lock of hair) to qualify him for his first ecclesiastic benefice.99 In August 1634, as Urban VIII was under renewed pressure from Spain to impose ecclesiastic sanctions on France, Mazarin was expedited to Paris with the title of nuncio extraordinario, supposedly to placate Spain by upholding the rights of the deposed, pro-Habsburg Charles of Lorraine.100 Mazarin arrived in Paris in December 1634, laden with paintings by Titian and Pietro di Cortone to give to Richelieu, and accompanied by Gregorio Panzani.101 The whole question of English affairs loomed all the larger in Paris in December 1634 because Richelieu hoped once again to negotiate an alliance with Charles against Spain.102 Charles’s increasingly favorable treatment of Roman Catholics and recent statements of respect for Urban VIII, which were diligently reported to Barberini by Bichi to counteract new Jesuit rumors of English persecution,103 provided Richelieu with a welcome excuse to forge new ties of friendship with England.104 By the time Panzani arrived in Paris, news had reached Rome that Sancta Clara’s “pestilential book” was “so marvellously praised in England that no one, not even right thinkers, dare say a word against it.”105 Sancta Clara’s friends had already rallied to his defense. The Benedictine David Codner, in particular, had written to Francesco Ingoli at Propaganda in April 1634, and to d’Alès, praising Sancta Clara and his book.106 On De-

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cember 5, Panzani reported to Barberini from Paris that Sancta Clara’s book was “already under the censure of the Sacred Congregation of the Index”—or so at least he had been told by Cardinal Spada, Bagno’s predecessor as French nuncio.107 An anonymous document dated “1634” in the Clarendon State Papers suggests that proceedings were in motion in Rome against Sancta Clara’s book and that the English government was determined to avoid a condemnation.108 Mazarin likely knew that one of Richelieu’s Huguenot protégés, Brachet de la Milletière, had presented Richelieu with a treatise, De universi orbis christiani pace et concordia, published in Paris in 1634. Dedicated to Richelieu, De universi orbis called on Richelieu to take the initiative of restoring Christian unity.109 Milletière, like Sancta Clara, sought to reduce doctrinal divisions to a few key points in order to facilitate reaching agreement. Huguenots, Milletière argued, needed only to admit the pope’s spiritual supremacy (but not the pope’s monarchical jurisdiction) and some version of transubstantiation (but not separate real accidents) for reunion to be possible.110 Milletière’s method, moreover, like Sancta Clara’s method of “gently cleansing,” aimed at correcting Protestant misconceptions of Roman teaching and thus claimed to offer a fresh approach to restoring unity.111 Milletière gave a copy of his 1634 treatise to the ageing irenicist Jean Villiers de Hotman,112 who had served the English Crown and maintained an extensive network of French and English friends in Paris.113 Before leaving Paris for London, Panzani had thus learned from Bichi and Mazarin that Sancta Clara’s project for Catholic reunion through mutual moderation was not an isolated effort. Bichi’s successor as French nuncio, Giorgio Bolognetti, was explicitly told that England might convert back to the Roman Church and was instructed to learn the “most minute” details from Bichi.114 Based on Bichi’s information, Bolognetti was supposed to work “continuously” to advance England’s conversion.115 Panzani had every reason to believe that there was real Roman Catholic momentum on Sancta Clara’s side. When Gregorio Panzani arrived in London in mid-December 1634, he first met with Robert Philip, his fellow Oratorian, and asked whether Laud could be “won over.”116 Panzani met with Sancta Clara on December 21.117 On January 11, 1635, Sancta Clara met with Panzani again to emphasize that the English government would “take it very badly if the

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book were prohibited.”118 By the end of January, Panzani, Robert Philip, and John Gennings had joined forces to suppress the rumor that Sancta Clara’s book had been condemned. Their reason for protecting the book was political rather than theological—it met “greatly with the favor of the most Serene King and of some noblemen of this kingdom.”119 Windebank told Panzani repeatedly that Charles was pleased with the book’s “mild treatment” of Protestants.120 Presumably, Charles had in mind the sharp contrast between Deus, natura, gratia and Edward Knott’s publications of 1630 and 1634, in which the Jesuit fiercely denied the possibility of salvation in the English Church.121 A condemnation of Sancta Clara’s theology in Rome, Panzani was told, would infuriate the king and jeopardize any hope of reunion. Within weeks of arriving in London, Panzani had, in effect, joined a Roman Catholic coalition intent on depicting Charles’s government as eager to achieve a historic reunion with Rome. Support for Sancta Clara’s “mild treatment of Protestants,” moreover, was a distinctive sign of favoring the conspiracy.

ALLEMANDE

On January 30, 1635, Sancta Clara wrote to Panzani that he was in the process of preparing a second edition of Deus, natura, gratia and that he was willing to make any changes that Rome requested in writing. At Barberini’s or Panzani’s request, Sancta Clara also clarified the orthodox meaning of “suspect” passages in the book.122 Since Panzani denied “having any hand in the second edition,” and since Sancta Clara denied having the power to prevent the second edition from proceeding to print, we cannot dismiss the possibility that the new edition was handled by Sancta Clara’s Protestant friends and secretly printed in London—as the Puritan preacher Henry Burton would claim123 and as Peter Heylyn and Laud would vehemently deny.124 It was perhaps on the occasion of this second edition that Augustine Lindsell, Nicholas Ferrar’s mentor and friend, brought Sancta Clara to meet Laud. And it was this second edition that Laud “kept in his study in a bound copy with the king’s arms on the cover.”125 The 1635 edition of Deus, natura, gratia includes multiple new references to a recent book published under Laud’s patronage, Thomas

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Chowne’s Collectiones. It also contains new material from England’s Saxon period corroborating the ancient privileges of the English Church. Most importantly, it opens with a dramatic “Apologetic Letter” addressed to “the reader who is Catholic and studious for Christian peace.”126 Sancta Clara had conscientiously sought new approvals for the new edition, perhaps at Bichi’s prompting. Sancta Clara’s confrère Edmund of St. Lawrence and John Gennings had both authorized the improved text in July 1634. Gennings, moreover, had once again explicitly commanded Sancta Clara to print it “in virtue of holy obedience.”127 The apologetic letter, “Epistolium apologeticum,” is basically a manifesto of Sancta Clara’s method of theology: “modus nostrum agendi.” The method, Sancta Clara explains, consists in shunning the Puritan custom of clinging rigidly to the “strict letter” of a text in order to allow more flexible and more probable meanings to emerge: “molliores et probabiliores sensus.”128 Nor is his method, Sancta Clara says, an idle academic exercise. He was “incited by many of our most grave fellow citizens, both lay and clerical, to explain the English Confession in a less rigid way. The state of our affairs indeed favors, or better, invites it. There is at present an inclination against interpreting the letter [of the English articles] narrowly (as Puritans do) and in favor of [bringing to light] more flexible (molliores) and more probable meanings.”129 At least three claims are made in this short passage. First, Sancta Clara clarifies that the initiative to examine the doctrines of the English Church was not his: rather, he was asked to examine the Thirty-nine Articles by his compatriots, which implies that they were dissatisfied with the “narrow” reading that was imposed on them by extremists. And if Protestants came to Sancta Clara in search of new interpretations, it was presumably because “rigid” interpretations failed to reflect their beliefs accurately. Although we cannot be sure who these “most grave fellow citizens, both lay and clerical” were, the implication is that Caroline divines and lay Protestants, ranging perhaps from Augustine Lindsell to Laud’s godson, Chillingworth, and other members of Great Tew, were willing to consult Sancta Clara, a Roman Catholic friar, for a better understanding of their own religion. Sancta Clara’s second implicit claim is that his own “expository paraphrase” is no less faithful to the text of the English articles than “rigid” interpretations because all interpretations are really only interpretations.

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The claim that a “rigid” interpretation is “more literal” and thus more valid than a more subtle interpretation is no more than rhetoric. Third, Sancta Clara claims that his method delivers not only more flexible but more probable interpretations. Narrowly simplistic propositions are eliminated. Exegetical flexibility thus favors religion by avoiding, whenever possible, the trap of making clear (falsifiable) statements. Sancta Clara complains, next, that, far from being praised for his effort, he now finds himself “harshly rebuked.” In defense of his approach, he appeals, first, to human modesty: “Whoever believes that I err,” he says, should consider that “he himself is a human being like me, liable to infirmity, subject to vanity, erring multiply. He should thus worry that he himself might be in error, as the wise and famous Bradwardine stated long ago at the end of De causa dei.” Implicitly, a first moral drawback of rigid interpretations is that they nurture a dangerous self-righteousness. Whoever rashly accuses another of exegetical error might himself be in error. Sancta Clara invokes Saint Jerome’s authority to warn against the presumption of imagining that one’s own interpretation is uniquely valid: would that those who “acrimoniously complain” against him heed “Jerome in his Prologue to Isaiah!” Implicitly, both Puritans and intransigent Roman Catholics who heap scorn on the “probable” interpretations that Sancta Clara supplies for the English articles are guilty of pride. They lack the charity and humility of true Christians. Sancta Clara provides a second argument against “rigidity.” Rigidity, he explains, only makes matters worse. It inflames hearts and minds, making reunion impossible. Citing the example of Paul in Athens, who engaged his pagan interlocutors by speaking discretely of “the unknown God” rather than by bludgeoning them with the idea of the Trinity, Sancta Clara says that converting or “conciliating” someone requires sweet and prudent means that introduce God’s truths little by little—not violently abrupt statements that consume everything with fire. We must collaborate, Sancta Clara urges, with the spirit of moderation: “spiritu lenitatis collaboremus.” To the objection that Sancta Clara’s method will lead to innovations against the Church Fathers, Sancta Clara answers: “I have never excused novelties and profanities, indeed I have always carefully rejected them.” His method consists simply in “extracting the holier meanings” that may well reside in apparently novel views, “hoping to find a way to

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peace.” Sancta Clara insists that he has never condoned the slightest error. Rather, “modestly” and in his “own way, without harshness,” what he has done is “defend the truth as far as I am able, by choosing available paths.” He has never said that the Thirty-nine Articles could be taken in any way whatever, but has simply proposed correct ways in which they may be taken. Where is the harm? “Quid hic mali?” Sancta Clara, in effect, rejects the charge that his flexible approach undermines the notion of truth. On the contrary, since he devotes more care than others to testing propositions and to distinguishing truth from speculation, his method ensures that nothing dubious or inconclusive is rashly certified as true. Sancta Clara’s principle of charity, which consists in giving each article the benefit of the doubt, does not lead to laxity but to a better understanding of where a sound and stable consensus lies. “Would that our interpretations,” Sancta Clara concludes, “were adopted as to their substance!” If they were, the schism tearing God’s church apart would be healed and unity restored. A third argument in favor of Sancta Clara’s spirit of “leniency” is that, more often than not, differences are merely verbal. A case in point is the dispute over the procession of the Holy Ghost at the Council of Florence. As Scotus correctly pointed out, the conflict boiled down to a mere matter of words. Guided by the principle of charity, Scotus assumed that both the Latins and the Greeks were sincere lovers of truth. This allowed him to recognize that they simply conceptualized the mystery in different terms. Why, Sancta Clara now asks, cannot a Catholic theologian and a Protestant theologian today, both authentic lovers of truth, find concord in the same way?130 Not every real difference, moreover, deserves to be rigidly banned. As Pope Eugene IV urged, “it is possible to stay under one roof even in grave matters.” Different views regarding the disputed question of whether or not marriage is licitly dissolved for adultery do not imply breaking away from communion. God’s church, Sancta Clara implies, has a long tradition of allowing disputed questions. God’s church has always protected debate rather than require rigid agreement on every matter.131 As a case in point, Sancta Clara himself does not personally embrace many of the less common positions that are proposed by the articles, but since they fall within the range of the Church’s tolerated doctrines, as he shows, there is no basis to exclude them. Once the Catholic tradition of tolerating

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disputed questions is respected, concord becomes possible. Thus the task of Catholic exegesis should not be left in the hands of fiery fanatics but should be entrusted to the “sons of peace.” The “sons of peace” abhor schism. They seek to bring back the unity of God’s church and to “preserve the integrity of Catholic Faith” by “interpreting propositions mildly.” The key is to combine “holy audacity and solid doctrine” (sancta audacia et solida doctrina). Sancta Clara concludes by evoking Nicholas Cusanus: it is important to condescend to human infirmity and diversity, lest we bar ourselves from eternal salvation.132 Sancta Clara considers the objection that his method might be dangerous. Does it not encourage heretical doctrines by glossing them in such a way that they pass for orthodox and contaminate sound Catholic teaching? Sancta Clara answers that even the most reliable theologians have in the past required glosses in order to avoid the charge of heresy. How many wrong statements were found in Aquinas by the Parisian authorities? How many more were signaled in Aquinas’s followers by the book entitled “Shining light of Franciscan religion”? How many mistakes of all kinds, moreover, were found by Sancta Clara’s own illustrious teacher Hugh Cavellus in the work of the Polish Dominican Abraham Bzowski? Fortunately, “mild” glosses were supplied to save Aquinas’s theses and others from heresy. Sancta Clara denies, in effect, that an error can be made to “look” orthodox. If a proposition allows an orthodox interpretation, then it is orthodox, provided the “mild” or orthodox meaning is agreed to be the “substance” of the proposition. Finally, Sancta Clara points out that heretics are not really condemned for their opinions, but for invoking their opinions as a pretext to break away from God’s church. He cites Benjamin Carier, who argued to King James that the Church of England and the Roman Church agree in most points and that the English schism had continued to fester since the reign of Henry VIII for political reasons alone. Sancta Clara also cites Carier’s warning that Puritans are the chief obstacle to reunion and must be excluded if a reunion is to be attempted. In conclusion, Sancta Clara appeals directly to his compatriots—“ad nostrates”—to follow the example of Bradwardine: may they stand up to the Puritans, allow themselves to be guided by the Holy Spirit, and firmly reject novelties that masquerade as Gospel truths.

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Let us now turn to Sancta Clara’s decision to integrate references to Thomas Chowne’s Collectiones into his own discussion. Chowne’s Collectiones were not officially approved for publication before August 26. Were Sancta Clara’s references inserted after Bichi had authorized a second printing in June 1634? Chowne’s Collectiones, dedicated to Archbishop Laud, is nothing less than a précis of Anglican belief. Consisting of thirtyfive “collections” of conclusions drawn from “the judgments of various authorities,” Chowne’s pamphlet summarizes what Anglicans (“we”) hold to be true regarding such basic points as God’s nature, Christian salvation, faith and good works, Church unity, Church government, and more. Thus for example “we” take it for granted that God’s ways are inscrutable, so that it is presumptuous to claim to know anything about God’s election of saints and reprobation of sinners.133 “We” also take it for granted that the authority of the Church is needed to supervise how scripture is interpreted and to protect Christian belief from “illiterate, rude and uneducated people who, moved by their own spirit, want to elucidate obscure Scriptural passages for themselves.”134 Unlike Luther and Calvin, “we” deny that God’s church has ever been invisible.135 “We” hold that there is one holy and apostolic church dispersed throughout the globe and “we” acknowledge Christ as its sole head.136 Moreover, “we” consider the Roman Church to have “shone in the past like the moon among lesser lights” and to be sound in fundamentals.137 Yet “we” consider the English Church to be the fairest member of God’s mystical body—to be more ancient, faithful, traditional, apostolic, and generally praiseworthy than any other church.138 And what do “we” think of episcopacy? Why, “we” believe that it is absolutely necessary for the flowering of God’s church. “We” hold episcopacy to have been instituted by Christ through the apostles.139 How, then, do “we” regard Peter? As a matter of fact, “we” do not deny that Peter might enjoy some kind of “primacy-of-excellence (praexecellentia),”140 yet “we” deny that there is a basis in scripture upon which to “conjecture as probable” that Peter exercised imperial jurisdiction over the other apostles/bishops as a doctrine of the Faith.141 Finally, what do “we” hold regarding justification and grace? Not surprisingly, “we” share the views of Montagu, defended as “probable” by Sancta Clara, that justification involves three stages, so that the good works that flow from the initial gift of faith (and are thus latently included in faith) include not only adhesion

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and obedience but the desire to please God by desiring Christ’s merits. In short, according to Chowne, “we” are firmly opposed to Calvinists and in a vast majority of cases “we” believe “as the church believeth.” Chowne’s Collectiones paints a rapturous picture of God’s universal church, rooted in the Gospels, nurtured by the apostles and the fathers, protected from error and fragmentation by episcopal authority, flowering as a single organic tree with diverse members under Christ and destined to spread its branches to the four corners of the earth without ever losing its wondrous unity and supernatural peace. Who in Rome would not wish to appropriate this description? Who in Rome would not rush to welcome back such a green and gracious limb? Chowne never wrote anything but the Collectiones, presenting himself on the title page as a lay gentleman from Alfriston, Sussex. As the Collectiones was approved for publication by Laud’s close collaborator, William Haywood, it is tempting to speculate that Haywood had a direct hand in the work. 142 In August 1634, as debate already raged in Rome and in London over Sancta Clara’s “mild” interpretations of the articles, nothing would have been more useful to the reunionist cause than a succinct summary, in Latin, of Anglican doctrines, officially approved by the English primate. In the Clarendon State Papers, there are two pages written in Sancta Clara’s hand in which judgments are recorded of Chowne’s Collectiones. Collectio 16, for example, which asserts that the Roman Church is basically sound despite some accumulated tarnish, is declared by Sancta Clara to pose “no problem.” Collectio 17, which praises the English Church as the best living member of God’s church, is also ratified by Sancta Clara as acceptable “since it does not touch on the nature of Faith.” The two pages in Sancta Clara’s hand are undated, but were found among the “1633” papers. For our purposes, what matters is the suggestion that Windebank, or someone close to Laud, may have urged Sancta Clara to include Chowne’s Collectiones as a legitimate source of what is, or is not, “probable.” Sancta Clara’s second edition of Deus, natura, gratia is thus even more explicitly ecumenical than the first edition. By incorporating Chowne’s Collectiones, Sancta Clara not only bolstered the “probability” of his own “mild interpretations” of the English articles but provided Rome with independent evidence that Laud and the English government meant to conform their beliefs to Catholic tradition and to stand up against Calvinists. At the same time, by adding

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new warnings against schism in the Paraphrastica expositio, Sancta Clara put new pressure on Anglican prelates to seek reunion with Rome.143

COURANTE

By May 1635, Sancta Clara and his collaborators felt besieged by their Roman Catholic opponents. They turned for protection to the English state. Leander Jones sent Windebank “A plea by the ancient religious orders of our nation, namely Benedictines, Dominicans, Franciscans and Carmelites” requesting that “the king curtail their opponents Sir Toby Matthews and his companion Mr. Gage.” Jones also urged the state to administer a new “loyalty test” that would give missionaries from the “ancient orders” a chance to reject the doctrine of the Jesuit Edward Leeds, alias Courtenay, who proclaimed that not only the pope but also the people have a legitimate right to depose an abusive ruler.144 The “ancient religious orders” clearly hoped to distance themselves from a particularly intransigent Jesuit author and from English Catholics who were politically indebted to foreign powers. The plea also marks a new resolve on the part of Jones and the “ancient orders” not to let the issue of the oath slip out of their own initiative—much as Selby, in Rome, warned Jones “not to meddle with the deponibility of princes, for that article will never pass here.”145 A year earlier, in April 1634, perhaps as part and parcel of wooing Urban VIII, Charles had secretly asked Dom Preston to write a new defense of the oath emphasizing that the king required allegiance only with regard to temporal matters.146 The result, A Pattern of Christian Loyalty, had been published in 1634, ostensibly written by William Howard, “a lay gentleman.”147 The Jesuit Courtenay promptly responded with a “bould and seditious book” (Windebank’s characterization) to refute Howard’s Pattern of Christian Loyalty. Courtenay had been arrested and confined to the Gatehouse on October 29, 1634.148 Jones’s petition to Windebank in May 1635 was thus designed to stress the sharp difference between the loyal “ancient religious orders” and the treasonously papalist Jesuits. Charles’s government could count on Jones’s loyalty, moreover, because Jones very explicitly “referred his conscience to God alone,” even if this meant passing for a “bad Catholic” in the eyes of his Roman coreligionists.149

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By May 1635, Howard’s Pattern of Christian Loyalty and Sancta Clara’s Deus, natura, gratia had become closely linked. Joint proceedings had been initiated in Rome against the two books, and the English government, in turn, had put pressure on some unidentified English Roman Catholic who personally “disliked the doctrine of both books” to exert his influence in Rome to prevent them from being condemned.150 The project of reunion now hinged on Rome’s willingness to tolerate the Jacobean oath. In London, Preston, Howard, Codner, and Sancta Clara “often kept company” together—or so at least Leyburn peevishly reported to Biddulph.151 Jones, as we know, soon joined the group, making Leyburn “suspect noe good.”152 Leyburn also reported that the Anglican hierarchy was scheduled to be reordained by a bishop who had been properly ordained by the Roman bishop of Spalato, Marc Antonio Dominis (who had ordained Laud). The Anglican hierarchy, it seems, meant to have its apostolic credentials in working order.153 On May 8, 1635, Leyburn reported to Smith, moreover, that “the bishop of Canterbury and the secretary [i.e., Windebank] some 10 dayes aggoe did ask Father Leander what was the definition of a bishope and whether the bishops of this country, albeit marryed, migh not enjoye their bishopricks, wifes and notwithstanding be promoted to holie orders.”154 It seems that Charles’s government (Windebank) and Charles’s English Church (Laud) were exploring their chances of obtaining Rome’s official recognition. Jones, in turn, sent a letter from “all the ancient Orders in England” to Rome praising Sancta Clara’s “good effect in better disposing the minds of our countrymen to terms of reunion with the Church, which is the aim of all our endeavours.”155 The coalition of “ancient English orders” was eager not only to secure Charles’s protection but also to end the English schism by embracing Sancta Clara’s method of theology.156 A surviving paper in Jones’s handwriting argues, much like Sancta Clara’s “Epistolium apologeticum,” that “moderate Catholikes” are better suited to “declare and propose what they apprehend to be truth” than the “violenter” sort.157 In April 1635, Charles told the queen that Sancta Clara and his supporters “should, and would,” print a new book refuting Courtenay’s Discourse against the Oath, and that he (Charles) would “take it as a singular affront” if Rome were to condemn it.158 On all fronts, Jones and Sancta Clara were cooperating with each other and with Charles’s government, mobilizing the “an-

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cient English orders” under their leadership. In May 1635, Charles decided that the time was ripe to nominate an English agent to be sent to Rome as the queen’s resident.159 In June 1635, Robert Philip predicted rapturously that England would be united with the Holy See within three years.160 Panzani, in turn, wrote to Barberini that the “British Rose” would one day provide “very sweet meadows” to the Barberini bees.161 News from Rome, however, was less positive. On March 13, 1635, Barberini angrily ordered Sancta Clara to “disclaim his bold assertions” and depart England “while his fault was yet pardonable.”162 Sancta Clara answered that he was far too sick to travel and would “satisfy” Rome in some other way.163 On October 1, Jones wrote to Windebank “begging His Majesty’s protection for himself and his brother Benedictines against the influence of his enemies in Rome.”164 On October 10, Wilfrid Selby reported that a friar working secretly for the Jesuits, Fra Louis à Sancta Maria, was on his way to Rome to have Sancta Clara’s book condemned.165 On Novem ber 9, Jones, “being near death,” wrote to Windebank entrusting his Benedictines to the king and requesting protection for his friend and successor William Price.166 On November 20, John Southcot reported to Biddulph that Jesuits opposed Panzani at every turn.167 Sancta Clara’s optimism about reunion, however, remained intact. The trickle of Puritans sailing off to the New World had grown into a veritable exodus. Sancta Clara’s half brother, John Davenport, had fled to Holland disguised as a merchant in December 1633, to Laud’s relief.168 In another promising sign, Father Robert Philip seemed now convinced that Rome would allow the cup to the laity and accommodate a married clergy.169 On November 3, 1635, new ground was broken when Montagu met with Panzani to open negotiations for reunion.170 Charles, in turn, gave royal instructions to his envoy to Rome, Sir Arthur Brett, emphasizing four points: first, under no circumstance would a Roman Catholic bishop be tolerated to exercise ordinary jurisdiction in England; second, Rome must allow the Jacobean oath; third, Rome must rid England of Jesuits; fourth, Rome must cooperate with Charles to restore the Palatinate.171 Charles thus wished to convince Urban VIII that the way to move forth was for Rome (1) to ratify the existing Anglican hierarchy, (2) to affirm Charles’s temporal sovereignty in England, (3) to call back the disruptive Jesuits, and (4) to pressure Catholic powers to restore a “neutral” Palatinate

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ruled by Charles’s family. If the Palatinate were restored, if the English Church were publicly proclaimed to be a true Catholic church and the English king were positively assured of his subjects’ loyalty, would any Englishman begrudge the pope a purely spiritual authority as chief pastor? At court, even zealously Protestant nobles wished the Roman mission well, since it included the hope of restoring the Palatinate.172 Last, but not least, Charles instructed Brett to consult with “George Con, Cardinals Bagno, Spada and Bichi” but most especially to follow the advice of Dom Wilfrid Selby, “of good affection in our service—one whom you may trust.”173 In Brett’s packet, ready for Rome, was a letter from Sancta Clara to Luke Wadding, dated November 18, 1635. In it, Sancta Clara thanked Wadding for his “charitable offices concerning my book” in the face of opponents in Rome and told Wadding of the unwavering support that he, Sancta Clara, had received from Jones and the “ancient English Orders.” He warned Wadding that “one Fray Ludovicus à S. Maria” was on his way to Rome to stir up trouble. Fray Ludovicus, Sancta Clara explained, bore him (Sancta Clara) a personal grudge and had already tried to have Deus, natura, gratia condemned by the Sorbonne in Paris, but to no avail. The good news was that the reunion project was proceeding well. The bearer of the letter, Arthur Brett, would remain in Rome as the queen’s resident legate. Brett had been instructed by the king to consult with George Con and Selby. Would it not be good for Wadding to advise Brett? If Wadding would write back stating that he would be willing to serve as Brett’s advisor, Sancta Clara would “acquaint such here with it that shall authorize you as the other two are.”174 Apparently confident that the English government (Windebank) would follow his advice, Sancta Clara urged Wadding to join in Brett’s negotiations so that Franciscans would play an “unsurpassed” role in the historic return of England to Rome.175 A few days later, on November 22, 1635, Sancta Clara, Jones, William Price, and other leaders of the “ancient orders” who were gathered in Panzani’s room signed a truce with their seminary coreligionists and fellow missionaries. The two rival factions agreed to cooperate for the sake of advancing Catholicism in England. They pledged to make sure that only truthful information about England would be sent to Rome (!) and they pledged to defend Charles’s honor as a mild and just sovereign. The agreement was reached despite the “Jesuitts” and behind their back. Leander

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signed for the Benedictines, Sancta Clara signed for the Franciscans, and Sancta Clara’s teacher, friend, and approbator, Thomas “Blacklo” White, signed for the seminary priests, along with John Southcot.176 On December 8, the Feast of the Conception of the Virgin Mary, the queen’s new “chappell at Somerset House was holowed” in a magnificent ceremony, witnessed, no doubt, by Sancta Clara and Jones. In baroque fashion, Henriette-Marie made “the greatest demonstration of devotion that can be imagined,” and her grand almoner, Jacques le Noël du Perron, now bishop of Angoulême, sang Mass.177 Ten days later, on December 17, Jones died at Somerset House. His remains were buried in the cemetery of the queen’s new chapel—the very first body to be received in the queen’s consecrated ground.178 Trees, Laud noted in his diary, had not yet lost their leaves that year, as though life’s vitality would not let go.179

SARABANDE

After Jones’s death, Barberini’s suspicion of Sancta Clara grew more overt. At issue, first of all, was the second edition of Deus, natura, gratia, which appeared in early January 1636 and prompted Robert Philip to rush to Sancta Clara’s defense.180 Panzani apparently transmitted Barberini’s reprimands to Sancta Clara, since, on April 2, a distressed but defiant Sancta Clara wrote to Panzani that he was “astonished” at the “ill-will of his detractors.”181 After thanking Panzani for being frank with him, Sancta Clara went on to express his dismay that Rome listened to “every malcontent.” He reminded Panzani that “the good are always persecuted and hounded by the evil” (1 Peter 3:2). He complained that he had worked hard for God’s cause only to see his efforts treated with contempt. If Rome is domi nated by evil tongues and calumnies, he warned, “the spirit of good men will be broken.” Barberini’s relentless reproaches regarding the second edition of Deus, natura, gratia, Sancta Clara told Panzani, were simply unfair. Sancta Clara had no power to stop the new edition, as Panzani knew full well—having been told so by people “altogether above suspicion.” Who? Moreover, Panzani knew full well by whose counsel it was done. Whose? Cardinal Bichi, furthermore, had authorized it. Sancta Clara had written to Barberini in April 1635 to update him on the whole situation,

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but Barberini had not deigned to reply. Without written proof of Barberini’s objections, how could Sancta Clara hope to convince the publishers not to proceed? As for the content, Sancta Clara had put a great deal of thought into the new edition, writing a conscientious preface safeguarding Catholic doctrine, with the happy result that many in England who had rejected the first edition were now won over. Notwithstanding his innocence and the merit of his improved text, Sancta Clara then reassured Panzani that he had taken new steps to satisfy Barberini. He had discussed matters with the publishers and they had agreed to postpone the sale of the book until a copy was sent to Rome for judgment. As soon as Rome had a chance to read the new edition, Sancta Clara was sure, all would be well. Moreover, he would urge his friends to buy up the new edition so as to keep copies out of circulation until Rome’s approval was obtained. In short, Sancta Clara protested to Panzani that he was wholly cooperative and was being victimized and tormented on false grounds. And the worst of it, Sancta Clara implied, was that his doctrine was above reproach: “I beg you that, if I have written anything at all that conflicts with sound doctrine, it be pointed out to me. As soon as it is plain to me, I will correct whatever it behooves a Catholic to do.”182 A second bone of contention was Sancta Clara’s friendship with Anglican divines, such as Godfrey Goodman, bishop of Gloucester. In January 1636, hoping to manifest his goodwill towards Rome, Goodman asked Sancta Clara to present Panzani with the gift of a “large and beautiful silver-gilt vessel.”183 Panzani declined to accept the present, but requested instead, charmingly, the “gift of the bishop’s soul.”184 By February, Sancta Clara told Panzani that Goodman “wanted to resign his bishopric and declare himself a Catholic, but the king did not wish it.”185 A Carmelite (i.e., a member of one of the ancient orders) seems to have suggested that Goodman could convert to Rome secretly and continue his episcopal functions in the English Church. Would Rome condone such high-level “church-papism”? A week later, Sancta Clara confided to Panzani that Goodman had agreed to make a yearly donation to the Poor Clares of Ayre (whom Sancta Clara, as we recall, had rescued from Jesuit clutches). The plan, supported by Goodman, was to bring a few Poor Clares to England to start an uncloistered house of “Poor ladies”—provided, of course, that the Holy See give its blessing to the project.186 Panzani consulted Barberini, who became even more suspicious of Sancta Clara than before.187

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Sancta Clara’s interaction with the Anglican hierarchy was perhaps more extensive and intimate than the Franciscan avowed. On February 20, 1636, Panzani wrote to Barberini that both Sancta Clara and Robert Philip hoped to convince the English bishops to take advantage of their Easter gathering in London to discuss reunion.188 On March 22, Montagu met again with Panzani to consider concrete steps that would lead to a historical agreement.189 Montagu favored holding a conference in France, because of the relative autonomy of the Gallican church and because of the family bonds uniting the French and British crowns. Montagu also argued in favor of intercommunion and expressed a firm belief in the apostolic validity of his own English orders.190 In the spring of 1636, an anonymous pamphlet entitled Monitum ad Anglos was composed. Written in Latin and signed by “Your most humble servant in Christ Jesus,” Monitum ad Anglos called on English Protestant bishops and priests to petition the king for reunion with Rome. The text bears at least a few distinctive marks of Sancta Clara’s authorship. Quite apart from the passionate belief that reunion is a moral duty, the text depicts reunion as the natural outcome of Christian charity, prevented only by a few pseudo-obstacles that could be removed simply by being clarified. There is also a revealing detail. Monitum ad Anglos appeals to a rare edition of the canons of Nicaea, the “Arabic edition.” The anonymous author says that the Arabic edition treats canons 17 and 18 regulating the return of schismatic bishops “more fully” than other editions and thus favor the returning bishops “still more” than other editions. In his next publication, as we shall see, Sancta Clara will evoke the same rare Arabic edition to make the same point.191 More subtly, in a few short pages, Monitum ad Anglos appeals all at once to English history, Oxford logic, legal precedents, Christian moderation, and the zeal for unity. It aims, in other words, at inciting English bishops to act by combining “sound doctrine” with “holy audacity.” Did Sancta Clara compose Monitum ad Anglos?192 If so, did he compose it as a manifesto to be distributed to the English bishops assembled in London in April 1636? Or was it written later, as a last effort, after the Easter gathering had failed to advance the cause of reunion? Monitum ad Anglos makes its four chief points swiftly. First: since (1) there is no clear scriptural passage warranting the points of doctrine that separate Canterbury from Rome and since (2) Canterbury adopted these unwarranted doctrines at the Reformation (along with new ordination

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rites dating only from Edward VI), it follows that there is “absolutely no reason for any further differences between us on religious matters.” In a marvelously condensed argument worthy of Scotus, the author argues that if the English Church claims to be apostolic, then it cannot arbitrarily endorse idiosyncratic opinions appearing out of thin air as articles of faith. In order to bolster its claim to apostolic status, Canterbury must expressly marginalize the faddish innovations that the Reform introduced. And just as all Englishmen (“we”) make up a single people living united under a single sovereign, so “we” must unite “in the one Catholic and Apostolic faith outside of which there is no salvation.” The author’s second argument for reunion is that there is no obstacle against married priests keeping their benefices and ecclesiastical positions, since the Church has the power to grant them a canonical dispensation. The author cites a concrete case serving as a precedent for this sort of dispensation—the case of “the Greeks of Mount Lebanon, the Lituanians and Ruthenians.” He also cites three “eminent theologians”—Bellarmine, Aquinas, and Persons—who affirm that clerical celibacy is a matter of ecclesiastic law, not divine institution. Moreover, the Council of Nicaea decrees that schismatic bishops returning to the Catholic fold are entitled to keep the ecclesiastic dignity that they held previously. The Arabic edition is particularly clear in the evidence it offers of Church custom regarding returning bishops. Thus all three grounds—empirical, theological, and historical—converge to provide assurances to the English episcopacy that their positions would not be destabilized by reunion. In short, the married state, as such, is no obstacle to reunion. All that is needed is that En glish bishops bring their beliefs into conformity with the Catholic and apostolic church—which means, as we know, conforming to the Catholic practice of tolerating a vast array of probable opinions that contradict one’s own more probable opinions. The third argument is especially noteworthy. It clarifies that missionary Catholic priests “already in England” will simply come under the control of the reconciled English hierarchy. Thus it would become Laud’s responsibility, and also Montagu’s, Cosin’s, and Goodman’s, to supervise monks and friars, nuns and tertiaries. Any recalcitrant religious group, however, such as a religious group opposing the Jacobean oath, or resisting episcopal control, would be excluded from the realm. An implicit un-

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intended consequence of reunion would be to decrease Jesuit missionary activity in England. The fourth argument, evidently addressed to Parliament, concerns the king’s prerogatives. The king will retain the appointment of archbishops, bishops, and other dignitaries, and also of benefices. He will even be able to continue to act as “head of the supreme commission” supervising the Church. Thus he will enjoy the same rights over the English Church as the French king enjoys over the Gallican church, adjusted to satisfy distinctive English concerns. Final conclusion: “You may see what a simple thing it would be, if only it please His Majesty and the Protestant clergy are agreeable, to replant the Catholic and Apostolic faith in this kingdom and join once more in unity, as summoned by John 10:17—‘There will be one fold and one shepherd.’” Whether or not Monitum ad Anglos was written by Sancta Clara, and whether or not it was written specifically for the Easter assembly of English bishops in London in April 1636, its content coincides closely with Montagu’s statements to Panzani when the two met again on March 22, April 22, and May 7.193 In particular, Montagu told Panzani that he was “absolutely certain” that his orders were valid, just as he was convinced that the English Church held essentially the same basic doctrines as the Gallican church.194 The content of Monitum ad Anglos also coincides with the views that are summarized in the document labeled “Instruction concerning the present state of the Protestant Church in England,” dated May 1636. The document was perhaps prepared for Charles’s new Roman envoy, Sir William Hamilton, to deliver to Barberini and Urban VIII.195 The chief difference between the two documents suggests that they were composed in parallel: whereas Monitum ad Anglos calls on English Protestant bishops to take the initiative in requesting reunion, “Instruction” calls on Rome to take the first step. The possible impasse of risking public exposure unilaterally would thus be solved by two simultaneous overtures. And as Robert Douglas had urgently hinted to Bagno nearly three years earlier, it mattered crucially that “the Holy See should have a real understanding of the religion that the king of England now professes,” since the king would want his Catholic subjects to rally to his defense, “if the need arose to pursue his pious plans by force.” The reunionist plan, initially concocted with

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the help of d’Alès and with the support of Preston, Codner, and Robert Philip, had been carefully crafted. English reunion with Rome would involve no change in religion since the Thirty-nine Articles established by Parliament would be essentially approved by Rome, with a few clarifications here and there regarding their Catholic sense. Charles, therefore, would be fully justified in using force to defend the established English Church against Puritan opposition, even though the English Church would now be in communion with Rome. To further the plan of peaceful reunion, both Monitum ad Anglos and “Instruction” call for good will on both sides. On the one hand, no conscientious Anglican bishop can wish to remain separated forever from the Mother Church since continued schism defeats the cherished claim to apostolic legitimacy. This means that the Anglican hierarchy is morally obligated to seek reconciliation with Rome. Conversely, the Holy See cannot in good conscience exclude the Anglican hierarchy from Catholic communion once there is doctrinal conformity, since the pope is empowered with the necessary authority to grant dispensations in matters of ecclesiastic law precisely for the sake of conserving the unity of God’s church. The pope is thus morally obligated to grant the necessary dispensations and welcome the English Church back into the capacious unity of God’s church. Implicitly, the monarchical principle in both the Roman Church and the English state is advantageous to the cause of reunion, which is God’s own cause. Urban VIII, as God’s supreme vicar on earth, and Charles, as supreme governor of the English Church, both have the authority that is needed to heal the schism. There is no need for Urban VIII to call a general council (since no article of faith is involved) or for Charles to consult Parliament (since no change in the Thirty-nine Articles is involved). 196 Thus, as a matter of fact, the king’s prerogative over the temporal aspects of the English Church complements the pope’s prerogative over the spiritual unity of the Catholic communion. At the heart of Monitum ad Anglos is an implicit argument that the papal “deposing” power actually weakens the papacy, just as England’s rejection of the pope’s spiritual supremacy weakens the English Church. The pope’s universal spiritual jurisdiction and the king’s local temporal jurisdiction mutually strengthen one another. As Sancta Clara’s own hand-scribbled notes on the separation of church and state seek to clarify,

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the pope is God’s immediate vicar in spiritual matters and the king is God’s immediate vicar in temporal matters—while God is supreme Lord of both: “Deus supremus Dominus in utrisque.”197

GIGUE

In May 1636, Sancta Clara pursued his ecumenical arrangements with Bishop Goodman. This time, he sought permission for a priest to reside in Goodman’s household and say Mass for him.198 Barberini responded with hostility, warning Panzani that Sancta Clara might be working to “further his own interests.”199 Sancta Clara’s intimacy with Windebank, his frequent conversations and growing friendship with Anglican divines, the royal patronage that apparently protected him, the support that he received from the Venetian and French embassies, all contributed to cast suspicion on his motives.200 Barberini was especially distrustful of what appeared to him to be Sancta Clara’s veiled spirit of insubordination. The friar’s “powerlessness” to prevent the second edition of his book spoke louder, to Barberini’s mind, than his repeated verbal submission and willingness to correct his errors.201 And then there was the preposterous claim that Deus, natura, gratia was “acceptable to all parties”—as though English Catholics and mainstream Protestants constituted a single natural flock, kept apart artificially by extremists, namely, by Puritans and Jesuits.202 At the heart of the reunionist project, as we saw, was the problematic status of the Anglican clergy. Were Anglican orders valid or not? Were they quasi-valid, requiring only some sort of formal ratification from Rome? The unsigned “Instruction” of May 1636 emphasized that reunion would be all the easier to achieve in that English bishops “hold themselves to be true bishops and truly derived from the Sea [sic] Apostolique.”203 Charles’s new envoy to Rome, Sir William Hamilton, was also instructed, like Brett, to convey Charles’s firm opposition to the idea of a Roman bishop operating with “ordinary” episcopal authority in England.204 Perhaps unaware of Charles’s opposition or hopeful that it might be reversed, George Leyburn continued to lobby for Bishop Smith’s return and for the restoration of Roman episcopacy in England. On July 3, 1636, Leyburn wrote to Smith that the new Roman agent, George Con, “is daily expected

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here and he hath power to doe us good, and Father Philip told me in private that he was obliged to doe us good. But this to yourself.”205 Convinced also that Hamilton was their “trew friend” and “affected to their business as well as can be,”206 Leyburn and Southcot expected that the exchange of agents between England and Rome would result in Bishop Smith’s return to England and in additional bishops being appointed by Rome to help shepherd the English Roman flock. Did they have a special stake in denying the apostolic validity of the Anglican bishops, even as they went out of their way to uphold episcopacy as such? Leyburn, for example, found it strategically advantageous to present Brian Duppa with a copy of Smith’s defense of episcopacy against Knott’s papalist extremism. Knott had argued that the pope was the only absolutely necessary bishop and that he was fully empowered to give faculties to religious missionaries and thus under no obligation to appoint a local bishop if he judged the circumstances to be unsuitable.207 In late August 1636, with the plague increasing in London, Leyburn was in Oxford, where Panzani and the recently arrived George Con were visiting. Sancta Clara was also there, perhaps accompanying the queen’s court. A play was performed before the king and queen at Christ Church College, where the royal couple was lodged. Written by William Strode at Laud’s request, 208 The Floating Island depicted Laud, the primate of England, as the “Agent Intellect” whose authority was indispensable to persuade the rebellious passions (the Puritans) to submit for their own good to the rule of “Prudentius” (the king)—or so at least Leyburn described it.209 The play satirized the Puritan leaders Burton, Bastwick, and Prynne in the figure of “Malancholico,” prompting the royal couple to laugh “heartely.”210 In his rather favorable account of the play, Leyburn seems to have missed the point that Strode’s very Laudian Floating Island implicitly ruled out the possibility of two parallel hierarchies operating in England since the whole point was to portray the established jure divino English hierarchy as uniquely legitimate and uniquely empowered by God to serve as the pillar of English civil peace. Leyburn went on to praise Con’s successful wooing of the king and to express his confidence that Con “desireth noe thing more than 3 or 4 bishops for this country.”211 Leyburn’s only urgent concern was that seminary priests meet with Con as soon as possible, since Price, Sancta Clara, and

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Jesuit missionaries had wasted no time in establishing contact with the new Roman legate.212 Leyburn, moreover, expressed his confidence that, following the peace accord of November 1635, Benedictines, Franciscans, and other “ancient” orders were now willing to cooperate with the secular clergy against the Jesuits.213 Yet what Leyburn envisaged was profoundly at odds with Sancta Clara’s and Price’s project. Leyburn’s goal, in effect, was religious toleration for Roman Catholics, not reunion. He hoped to obtain royal protection for Catholic recusants, not religious unity through ending the need for Catholic recusancy. At the start of October 1636, a letter from Biddulph in Rome warned Leyburn’s faction that the Benedictines were only pretending to be allies. Behind the scenes, the Benedictines opposed Smith’s return. More generally, the Benedictines actively tried to “avert my lord of Canterbury and Secretary Windebank” from allowing a Roman bishop in England.214 How closely were the “ancient orders” collaborating with Laud and with the English state? In November, Con reported to Barberini that Windebank had wanted Sancta Clara to give a sermon at Somerset House on the week commemorating the Gunpowder Plot.215 What reunionist message would the Franciscan have put forth? Would he have promoted some of the ideas that Windebank and he had developed together regarding the separation of church and state?216 (See the appendix at the end of this chapter with my translation of Sancta Clara’s notes on this topic.) Would Sancta Clara have preached on the topic of “rendering unto Cesar what is Cesar’s” and urged English Catholics to show their loyalty to a just and good king by taking the oath of allegiance? Would he have praised the new sacramental practices of the Church of England? Would he have singled out the Jesuits as dangerous? Although the plan fell through, perhaps at Con’s instigation since the queen’s mind was changed, Sancta Clara’s sermon would have certainly countered Henry Burton’s own “Guy Fawkes’s Day” sermon, which was delivered that very November 5 at St. Matthew’s.217 Burton’s sermon fiercely attacked Laud and his bishops for seeking to rebuild Rome “in this land.”218 Burton denounced the principle of episcopacy by divine right as inherently “Romish” and as incompatible with the king’s authority.219 Responding forcefully to Strode’s Oxford play, Burton argued that Puritans were the king’s most obedient subjects, whereas Laud and his Romish bishops were eager to usurp the king’s power.220 As long as Laud and his

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minions claimed to be bishops “by divine right,” the king’s rightful prerogative was not safe.221 Burton also attacked Sancta Clara by name, citing, as we saw, the secret publication in England of Deus, natura, gratia as evidence of Laud’s sinister sponsorship of Romish superstition while persecuting God’s true ministers.222 Later that month and in December, Laud was plagued by nightmares.223 Three autograph texts by Sancta Clara among Clarendon’s collection of papers attest to Sancta Clara’s active pursuit of reunion in collaboration with Windebank, if not with Laud—although the theological content of the texts makes it difficult to believe that they were not intended to be forwarded to Laud. The first is a detailed discussion of Chowne’s Collectiones theologicarum, in Latin. The second is a two-page statement, also in Latin, that clarifies and codifies the distinct powers of pope and king. It is clearly meant to serve as a blueprint for separation of church and state, maybe also as the basis for a concordat with Rome. The third text is a brief legal discussion in English of the change that was made to the Mass under Elizabeth. It argues that the change was made “without any consent of the Lords Spiritual,” and thus that the English monarch is within his or her right as governor of the English Church to rescind it. The very same week that Con wrote to Barberini about Windebank’s attempt to have Sancta Clara deliver a Gunpowder sermon, Leyburn wrote to Smith that Dom Price, Sancta Clara, and Preston “tampered” with the English state and had “done us more hurt than ever the Jesuits did and now most violently oppose the setling of ordinarie jurisdiction.”224 According to Leyburn, the reunionist faction not only opposed the plan to restore “3 or 4” Roman bishops to England but had convinced Windebank to oppose it. And since Price and Sancta Clara had failed to gain Con’s support, Leyburn wrote, they now spread the rumor that Con was secretly allied with the Jesuits.225 By November 1636, Leyburn finally grasped the full character of Sancta Clara’s reunionist project and was seized with horror. Like someone who has discovered a dangerous state secret, Leyburn reported what he had heard to Bishop Smith in great secrecy “for there was so much more that he did not dare put in writing!” What opened Leyburn’s eyes was a conversation that Con had with Price on the subject of Roman bishops. When Con asked Price why he (Price) opposed the appointment of Roman bishops

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for England, Price answered that there were bishops already in England. Price declared further that “now the ministers doe style themselves priests, therefore noe priests must be in England.” According to Price, in other words, the Laudian English Church now supplied a perfectly sound and effective Catholic clergy and episcopacy, obviating further need for seminary priests to operate in England or for restoring Bishop Smith. The result of reunion, in effect, would be to rid England not only of Jesuits but also of seminary priests. Only the “ancient orders” would remain in England, Benedictines and Franciscans en-tête. They would flourish under the episcopal authority of the English clergy, regulated by the archbishop of Canterbury, and financed, no doubt, by royal alms—while continuing to enjoy nominal exemptions and privileges from Rome. Dom Price even explained to Con very categorically that “the State would not suffer bishops.” Moreover, “if His Holiness were to send a bishop with ordinarie jurisdiction,” Price added, he (Price) “would personally not obey him. He would leave England instead and retire to a monastery.”226 Price and Sancta Clara’s true aim was thus to restore monastic life in England under Canterbury’s authority. Appalled by the plot that he had uncovered, Leyburn concluded the letter by saying that he could not safely write more “lest my letter should miscarrie.”227 Two months later, in January 1637, Leyburn reiterated all of the same charges to Smith. The reason that Panzani (now back in Rome) “spoke coldely of episcopall authority” was because he had been set against it by Sancta Clara, Price, and Windebank. Sancta Clara and Price continued to confer with Con in the hope of winning him over, but they would not succeed, Leyburn predicted, as they had with Panzani.228 Both Sancta Clara and Price persisted in working closely with Windebank and frequented the court “very often,” endeavoring to do “many bad offices” to the secular priests and striving “to gayne friends on the French side.”229 In January 1637, Sancta Clara and Price continued to pursue reunion in close cooperation with Charles’s government. Both the Jesuits and the anti-Jesuit secular priests had a stake in opposing the kind of reunion that the “ancient” religious orders hoped to bring about. Sancta Clara defended himself defiantly against his detractors, citing the success of Deus, natura, gratia with the English nobility, the king’s protection, the support of Robert Philip and William Thomson, the many anonymous Protestants

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who had approached him about means of reunion, and the equally numerous Catholics who daily visited the Venetian and French ambassadors to urge them to write to Rome in Sancta Clara’s favor.230 And would “My Lord”—the mysterious recipient of Sancta Clara’s letter—please inquire from the pope, on Sancta Clara’s behalf, whether a certain Protestant doctor whose conversion to Rome remained secret could lawfully recite Anglican prayers that were taken from the Roman liturgy?231 Sancta Clara, it seems, hoped to secure Rome’s blessing by emphasizing that Anglican religious life remained rooted in its ancestral Roman past. Despite his good cheer, Sancta Clara was acute enough to recognize that Con opposed him. When Sancta Clara was unanimously elected provincial in 1637 on the first ballot, Con was conspicuously reserved in his compliments.232 Con seems to have devised a plan of his own—a plan in which he, Con, would play the starring role and thus clinch the cardinal’s hat that had been all but promised to him. Suspecting that Giles Chaissy, or Jones, or David Codner, or Dreux, or some other of Price’s and Sancta Clara’s troublesome band of reunionists had hoped to win Laud over to their project by dangling a cardinal’s hat before Laud in August 1633, Con decided to sideline Laud as much as possible. Con’s plan called for two historic victories that would cover him with glory and be immune to Spanish criticism. First, Con would receive Charles personally into the Roman Church, ahead of any corporate reconciliation.233 Second, Con would rally English Catholics to a staunchly confessional Catholicism that would satisfy Spain’s most zealous advocates.234 For his first move, Con hoped to have the Jacobean oath changed into a formula that would be approved by the Society of Jesus. Rather than join the reunionists in pleading Charles’s case for moderation to Rome, Con worked diligently throughout 1637 to convince English Catholics that the Jacobean oath could not be taken in good conscience.235 In January 1637, Con wrote proudly to Barberini that he had spent four hours convincing Lady Arundel that the oath was unlawful to Catholics as it stood.236 By April, Con had managed to undermine Charles’s own confidence.237 By July, the rumor spread that Con would ask Barberini to depose Dom Price and appoint a new Benedictine superior who would be bound by oath to oppose the Jacobean oath.238 In order to further his agenda, Con adopted a strategy of divisiveness. He gained access to Windebank through Sancta Clara and Price,239 but

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only the better to discredit Windebank to Charles in private.240 He spread rumors against Price, hoping to make him odious to Leyburn’s faction and to Rome.241 Conceited about his high birth, vain about his looks, ambitious for the purple, Con took full advantage of the special prestige that he enjoyed every time he obtained a Veronese or a Corregio for Charles’s collection.242 He charmed Charles with his elegant wit and did everything in his power to make the stout and beleaguered Laud seem small and worthless in Charles’s eyes.243 Worse, as though wishing to draw a stark line between the sublime purity of the Roman faith and the mongrel incoherence of English Protestantism, Con fomented an insidious rivalry between Charles’s adored Henriette-Marie and Laud.244 By the end of 1637, Laud was losing ground, hounded from two sides at once, hated by Puritans and ridiculed by Con’s party of court Catholics.245 Charles’s reunionist protégés resisted and fought back. Sancta Clara’s ally William Price grew closer to Laud and worked with Laud to thwart Con’s chances for the cardinalate.246 Selby, in Rome, soon backed Price’s effort.247 Con tried his best to discourage and isolate Sancta Clara, treating him with icy reserve,248 belittling “monks and friars” to the king as beneath contempt.249 The result was only to confirm Charles’s suspicion of Con’s growing closeness to the Jesuits,250 and to push Sancta Clara to form tighter bonds of friendship with moderate Protestant divines, in particular with Laud’s new chaplain, Jeremy Taylor. Unlike Panzani, Con was careful to court Jesuit approval. As Leyburn had anxiously anticipated, Con’s good relations with Jesuits soon gave credence to the rumor that Con secretly favored the Society of Jesus.251 The case of Edward Knott proved especially damaging. Secular priests like Leyburn and Southcot disliked Knott for articulating the Jesuit case against appointing a bishop for England and against episcopal prerogatives generally. Charles’s government and Protestant clergy, in turn, disliked Knott for denying that Christian salvation is possible in the English Church. In 1636, as Chillingworth prepared to answer Knott definitively on the matter, Knott preemptively published A Direction to be Observed, demonizing Chillingworth. Not only was Chillingworth a Socinian, Knott warned, but the Protestant church itself was a self-destroying pseudochurch, leading inevitably to Socinianism and atheism. Rejecting the distinction that moderates championed between fundamental articles of faith and disputed opinions, Knott continued to promote an uncompromisingly Roman and

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papalist Catholicism.252 Charles and Windebank were appalled and angered. They demanded that Rome banish Knott from England and condemn his latest book.253 Even Knott’s fellow Jesuits declined to defend him.254 Yet Con befriended Knott and encouraged him. Con haughtily dismissed Windebank’s concerns and the state’s right to become involved.255 He praised Knott as “the most learned man in England” and boasted of having received Knott’s approval in the matter of the oath.256 Laud, in turn, accused Con of protecting Knott even against Rome’s express orders to chastise and deport him.257 Even Leyburn was forced to concede that Con consorted too much with the Jesuits.258 Sancta Clara seized a very special opportunity to circumvent Con’s efforts. The English Franciscan chapter of June 1637 that elected Sancta Clara to serve as provincial took place five days after Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton were censored in Star Chamber for their attacks on episcopacy.259 At Sancta Clara’s urging, three special points of Franciscan discipline were emphasized at the chapter meeting. First, once a Franciscan book had been approved and published, it was agreed that no one would speak against it. Second, it was agreed that, barring ill-health, all had to live the common Franciscan life. Third, it was agreed that no disrespect to prelates would be tolerated.260 English Franciscans would not only cooperate with episcopal authority, but they would also exemplify obedience to the hierarchy of God’s church. But which hierarchy? In Flanders, this meant obeying such uncontroversial Catholic prelates as the archbishop of Mechlin, Jacques Boonen, or the bishop of Ypres, Cornelius Jansenius, but what did it mean in England? What other prelates were there in England for Sancta Clara and his brethren to respect but Archbishop Laud and his fellow English bishops? With the help of John Baptist Bullaker, who had joined the England province from Spain and who assisted Sancta Clara as his secretary, Sancta Clara embarked on a new treatise. Like Chillingworth, Sancta Clara planned to refute Knott’s papalist and monarchical model of Church government. Knott’s contempt for the autonomy of bishops gave indirect ammunition to the antiepiscopal zeal of Puritan extremists. In the process of defending the divine right of bishops as a more probable opinion than others, Sancta Clara would demonstrate to Kellison (“to whom I owe so much and to whom I am indebted on so many grounds”)261 that a Franciscan friar is perhaps better placed to defend the episcopal government of God’s

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church than a member of the hierarchy. No one was better able to teach and illuminate souls regarding the divine right of bishops than one of the Church’s helps and ornaments, who, standing outside of the hierarchy, could not be accused of a self-serving bias. Against Kellison’s slightly demeaning metaphor of building the hierarchy on the “Religious mans toppe or roofe,” the better to keep them repressed, Sancta Clara will, in effect, revive the metaphor of Saint Francis upholding the whole vacillating building of the Church from outside.

APPENDIX: SANCTA CLARA’S “ THREE SEATS OF POWER IN ONE HARMONY”

1. The pontiff is God’s immediate vicar in spiritual matters; the king is God’s immediate vicar in temporal matters. God is supreme lord in both. 2. The pontiff lays the law with regard to the soul; the king with regard to the body. God with regard to body and soul. 3. The pontiff is the distributor, not the lord, of mysteries, graces and spiritual goods; the king of temporal goods. God is the lord of spiritual and temporal goods. 4. The pontiff has keys to open and close the celestial realm; the king to open and close the terrestrial realm. God has the keys to both. 5. The pontiff presides and has jurisdiction over the treasure house of the church, which is to say over the accumulated treasury of Christ’s merits and of the merits of saints; the king is the guardian of the public treasure and holds its keys. God holds dominion over both. 6. The pontiff is the shepherd and judge of the faithful; the king is the governor and ruler of citizens. God rules over all. 7. The pontiff presides over individual churches, at least with regard to canon law and to matters that have been declared by councils, and he is the head of the universal church; the king presides over the provinces of his realm that are governed by local laws, and is the head of the whole realm. God heads and presides over both without limitation. 8. The pontiff has the power to dispense with regard to ecclesiastic laws if there is sufficient cause; the king with regard to civil and local laws. God with regard to both.

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9. The pontiff does not have the power to disturb or destroy the order of the hierarchy, nor does the king have the power to disturb or destroy the essential order of justice. God has the power to assist both, but is not obliged to do so. So far, both powers are of an even degree, each in its proper place, and both subordinated to God’s authority. In some points, however, the temporal sword must subordinate itself to the spiritual sword. I. Unless special privileges apply (such as the king of France enjoys according to doctors of the Sorbonne, and which our most serene king may easily obtain, if as a matter of fact they have not already been obtained by our kings a long time ago, as seems probable based on ancient agreements), the pontiff may close the door of heaven to the king, but not the temporal door; the ecclesiastic door, not the civil door. II. He may take away the crown of glory, as explained below, but not the crown of royal dominion. III. He may deprive the king of the use of sacraments and of the communion of saints, but not of the loyalty of his subjects. IV. He may take away the allocation of ecclesiastical appointments; at least if the king fails to nominate someone within the canonical and customary time framework or refuses to nominate anyone. Otherwise, it is the king’s right to nominate bishops, abbots, etc., in his whole kingdom, even in foreign parishes that are royally administered, as our ancient law attests and as it is the practice today among other Catholic kings. The pontiff has no power whatever to appoint ministers of the realm or to deprive the king of the power to do so. V. The pontiff has the right to suspend all ecclesiastical men, qua ecclesiastical, from their offices, if the reasons are sufficiently serious. He cannot suspend officials of the realm from their appointed offices. VI. The pontiff may abandon a whole realm to the power of Satan if there is sufficient and urgent cause, but he cannot abandon a realm to a foreign power for invasion. VII. He may kill the king’s soul through excommunication, at least figuratively speaking, unless there is a privilege or an official agreement against it, or if it appears that a worse evil will occur, so that many advise against it and many doctors oppose it. Never is the pontiff allowed to kill the king’s body, as the church declares.

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These points are all taken from the more accepted doctrines of the holy fathers, of most of the older and modern doctors—granted that Jesuits and canonists will obstruct them. Once these points are correctly assimilated and compared to one another, the prudent and fair-minded judge will discern that each sword is helpful to the other and that they are compatible in the best way; even that each one maximally benefits the other and that they mutually consolidate and bolster one another against enemies. Endorsed by Windebank, “Mr. Damport”

N I N E

Apologia episcoporum

There is a hidden grit to Sancta Clara’s Apologia episcoporum. Dedicated to all Christian bishops—to “the illustrious and most reverend fathers of the world’s Christian episcopacy”—rather than to the Roman Catholic hierarchy as such, Sancta Clara’s treatise attempts to refute “new voices” that reduce the episcopal status down to the level of the presbytery and thus “destroy the sublimity of bishops.”1 In Sancta Clara’s view, there is an urgent need to defend the episcopacy because, as he writes, “this new blasphemy, unheard of by the Fathers, destroys not only the Church but the whole celestial hierarchy.” Sancta Clara’s Apologia is aimed at exploring the ecclesiastical structures that best promote and safeguard personal liberty. Sancta Clara’s opening exhortation to the Christian reader, “Parae nesis ad lectorem Christianum,” examines in a general way our human propensity towards error and schism. Three chief causes of conflict have been well known since Alexander of Aphrodisias, he explains: our “love of victory” (philonikeia), the intrinsic difficulty of specific subject matters, and our intellectual shortcomings. Presumably, when all three causes are present at once, the result is disastrous. Fallible human beings who are zealously intent on imposing their own partial views about difficult matters on others inevitably come to blows. Conversely, genuine humility and a 214

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conscientious respect for probable opinions would best help to restore dialogue, foster peace, and prevent schism. A fourth cause of schism, Sancta Clara says, has been diagnosed by “Rabbi Moses Maimonides,” who points out that custom, as such, causes opinions to diverge.2 Not only are we eager to win arguments and impose our views on others, not only are we intellectually deficient when faced with difficult matters, we also cling to our inbred prejudices rather than make the moral effort to consider evidence on its own merit, with fresh eyes. The result is that we refuse to give up our own familiar opinions even when presented with new facts. Having paid his respects to his predecessors, Sancta Clara adds a fifth cause of his own devising, which, “both in profane and sacred matters, shatters the world into pieces and leaves it perplex: namely, affectum altercationem.” What he means is the urge to settle a matter—to insist that one side or the other of a disputed question must be declared to be true.3 Unlike the impulse to win arguments, and unlike the inertial pull of prejudice, Sancta Clara’s fifth cause of schism, affectus altercationis, implies an irrational aversion to uncertainty. When faced with a controverted question, we prefer to condemn one side wholly rather than concede that it possesses some degree of probability. We resent admitting that our own views are inconclusive. According to Sancta Clara, the solution is to train ourselves to embrace the propositions that seem to us to be more probable without dismissing their opposites as positively false. We should learn to hold our own opinions securely while at the same time admitting that others may hold the opposite opinions, judging them to be more probable. Sancta Clara’s fifth cause of schism has the nice (Scotist) feature that it contains in itself what is most harmful about the four previous causes of schism. If we succeed in curing ourselves of our affectum altercationem, we, ipso facto, decrease our aggressiveness, diminish the grip on us of bias, and show a new level of intellectual competence by openly acknowledging our incompetence with regard to difficult questions that may not be fully decidable. Sancta Clara goes on to analyze the problem in closer detail. The intellect, through innate reason, first proposes an object, which the will, in turn, normally embraces. If, however, the will is moved by some secret aversion or by some external factor, it may obfuscate the intellect. Because

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of its essential freedom (self-dominion), the will may divert itself to some very remiss object. In particular, whenever the will is not fully satisfied by the intellect’s arguments—perhaps because these arguments fail to be fully conclusive—the will typically makes its election with deep dissatisfaction and falls into error. To make a judgment ex altercationis affectu, it seems, is to adopt or defend a proposition “arbitrarily,” which is to say to elect a proposition as “true” despite its lack of inherent certainty. Sancta Clara implies that when the will is “dissatisfied” by what the intellect proposes to it, the will ought either to embrace nothing, that is, suspend judgment, or to embrace what the intellect proposes with explicit reservations, as merely probable, without rejecting its contradictory. Sancta Clara’s analysis elaborates a key aspect of Franciscan and Scotist “voluntarism.” His premise is that the will is not passively determined by the intellect to embrace whatever the intellect presents to it as good and true, but it remains free in its very essence to elect, or not, what the intellect proposes. According to Sancta Clara, schisms in religious matters arise because the will, dreading uncertainty, elects to defend a proposition absolutely that is not fully supported on its own merits. The will, Sancta Clara implies, must not hide its secret dissatisfaction but instead adjust the degree of its embrace to what is rationally warranted. Thus the solution, Sancta Clara says, is “to weigh positions fairly and to reduce errors to their causes.” How? Rather than embrace one side or the other of a controverted issue absolutely, in spite of feeling dissatisfied with the evidence supporting it, we should embrace the possibility that both sides have some merit and that the issue is undecided, at least quoad nos. “As for myself,” Sancta Clara writes, “I have weighed the dignity and necessity of the episcopal order simply out of a predilection for truth (ex veritatis affectu).” Love of truth, as such, veritatis affectus, must prevail over the impulse to “take sides” arbitrarily, altercationis affectus. If truth guides us, Sancta Clara is convinced, we will easily recognize the supreme excellence of bishops. And how does truth, as such, guide us in theology? Sancta Clara tells his “friendly reader” that he will follow exactly what God prescribes in Deuteronomy 27 and is advocated by Cyprian.4 He will compare and combine excerpts from ecumenical synods, patristic judgments, and precedents drawn from Church history as recorded by theologians, all of which he will weigh carefully. To the extent that these various

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sources corroborate one another and give rise to stable, but not necessarily absolute, beliefs, scripture, patristic authority, historic precedent, and universal church rulings will, in effect, allow us to embrace a range of permissible views. Since we will rely on more or less supportive arguments rather than on single proofs that fully “satisfy” the will, many of Sancta Clara’s conclusions regarding episcopacy will be cast as probable opinions only. With regard to the key question of the divine right of bishops, Sancta Clara will not take the English side simpliciter. He will defend it as the more probable opinion, conceding, ipso facto, that denying the divine right of bishops is permissible. As always, Sancta Clara starts by removing error. In chapter 1, he denounces “the partisans of anarchy,” first by appealing to the historical record.5 Sancta Clara shows that opponents of episcopal authority are hardly new. There have always been self-proclaimed zealots who, “hiding under the pretext of religion,” have refused to obey the orderly customs of their communities and formed separatist sects. The key problem, Sancta Clara explains, is that the members of these separate sects become “vulnerable to every new idea.” They refuse to subject themselves to authority and, “like quasi-gods,” attack sacred power and destroy it. Consequently, they proliferate. The problem is not so much that they bring about anarchy but that they soon take control. As soon as they destroy legitimate religious authority, they replace it with their own despotic rule. As Sancta Clara explains, they appropriate power to themselves in order to build a world based on their own narrow opinions. What Sancta Clara means to emphasize is that the typical result of “anarchists” rebelling against episcopal authority is not some new state of freedom in which individuals are empowered to flourish according to their own conscience. Rather, the result is a far more rigid authoritarian control wielded by an opinionated faction of sectarians who are now unopposed in their sinister determination to impose their views by force on everyone else. Sancta Clara’s evidence is empirical. “I would be fastidious,” Sancta Clara writes, “if I cited the numberless examples that I have found in history. I will cite just one, namely the sect of Pharisees in Galilee, hypocrites and imposters.” By studying history, the reader “will clearly see, as in a mirror, the same features among recent contemptors of authority.” Paradoxically, to defend episcopacy against Puritan attacks is to defend Christian freedom against

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rigid Pharisees. Did Sancta Clara mean to evoke his own half brother, John, and the dream of building a new Jerusalem in the American wilderness? Sacred history provides a critical perspective on nonconformist Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians, predicting that their success will bring about a far more rigid theocracy than is maintained by the established English Church. Sancta Clara points out that Thomas More, for one, had warned his contemporaries that Henry VIII and his followers sought chiefly to seize power. George Buchanan made matters even worse. He “cunningly” undermined episcopal authority along with royal authority when he argued in De jure regni that a monarch reigns by the will of the people and thus may be deposed. Implicitly, in Buchanan’s view, Parliament by right has hegemonic control of society. A modern-day Jesuit like Knott is simply reviving Buchanan’s “anarchic” doctrine. To the extent that Knott denies episcopacy by divine right and teaches that kings can be deposed not only by the pope but also by the people, Knott is indistinguishable from a Puritan. Sancta Clara’s very first argument in favor of episcopacy by divine right is thus essentially pragmatic: to deny it is to expose ourselves to a fatal consequence—despotism. Sancta Clara also blames John Penry (“Penrius”) for “infecting the English” with his principles. The choice of Penry is strategic. Having appealed directly to Parliament for help in “planting the gospell” in Wales, Penry had been hauled before the High Commission by Archbishop Whitgift, convicted of publishing treasonous doctrines, and imprisoned.6 Archbishop Whitgift’s independent authority had thus served to balance Parliament’s control of religious matters. Should Parliament, Sancta Clara implies, have the sole or the final say over religion? Fortunately, King James (“the most wise James”) proved in De basilico doro, book 2 , that “Evangelicals” invoke religion mainly as a pretext to destroy all existing order.7 Although modern Puritanism has its root in Wycliffe, “today’s Anarchy,” Sancta Clara explains, originates more immediately in Geneva, as Christopher Goodman’s 1556 tractatus De obedientia attests, since Goodman argues there that God’s covenanted people have a right to resist an ungoldly ruler.8 At the Hampton convocation, moreover, King James understood that Puritans pretend to be loyal as a matter of expediency.9 To emphasize that there is nothing “Popish” about episcopacy, Sancta Clara

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next refers the reader to such staunchly Protestant authors as Matthew Sutcliffe (dean of Exeter), Richard Bancroft (archbishop of Canterbury), and John Bridges (bishop of London), who vigorously defend episcopacy against Presbyterians and “precisians.”10 The English hierarchy, in effect, understands that it has a duty to protect God’s church against private opinions and private appropriation of power: Sancta Clara cites the case of Edward Wightman, who claimed to be the Holy Ghost and rejected the Trinity.11 “Anarchists,” moreover, seek to impose their own private opinions on everyone else because they “lack the spirit of brotherhood and Christian peace. They hate others.”12 Convinced that their opinions are true absolutely, they exclude all other opinions as manifest heresies. The state must thus step in to protect open religious debate by bolstering lawful episcopal authority. This is best achieved by encouraging all Christian bishops to be in communion with one another. Sancta Clara concludes chapter 1 with an appeal to King Charles: “May our most serene king (as all good men hope) pass a decree in favor of the union of churches, inspired by his most holy predecessor Edgar who, in a speech directed at the church leaders of his day, proclaimed: I have Constantine’s sword, and you have Peter’s sword in your hand. Let us join them together and purge the church.” What indeed would make Charles more glorious “than to consolidate Christ’s body and at the same time, by the same decisive act, banish all treacherous plotters from the limits of the realm?” Sancta Clara’s appeal to Charles, in effect, is twofold. In order to strengthen the authority of English bishops, Charles must reunite the churches and he must also banish all of the intransigent opponents of reunion, namely, Puritans and Jesuits, beyond the borders of the realm. Presumably, Jesuits will find refuge in Spanish territories, while Puritans will leave for New England, where quarrels had already broken out and spawned breakaway sects. 13 Implicitly, episcopal authority in religious matters and monarchical authority in temporal affairs function jointly to protect local freedoms from being destroyed by zealots. Sancta Clara adds that Charles should not only revive Edgar’s alliance with the Church, but he should also emulate King William II, who embraced Anselm’s advice of mutual support: “Just as I have you for a temporal king and defensor, so you must have me as a spiritual father and governor of your soul.” Implicitly, God’s bishops must have enough autonomy not only to stand up to

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Parliament but to admonish kings. Above all, Sancta Clara concludes, Charles should abide by the worthy directive that his own royal father James bequeathed him: “Be nothing more actively than a good shepherd; hate no one more than a vain Puritan; value no title above that of being a nourishing father to the church.”14 Chapter 2 examines the most basic reason why the two pillars of social order, prince and bishop, are both indispensable: “De intima principis et praelati necessitudine.” Citing Nicholas Cusanus, Sancta Clara first states that the two powers, temporal and spiritual, are so mutually dependent that they cannot subsist independently except in a crippled way—a point emphasized also by William of Occam.15 It was Christ himself who divided earthly power into two, temporal and spiritual. It was Christ himself who then entrusted the powers to two distinct rulers, so that they would need each other — as a long list of Church authorities and citations confirm, including Bellarmine, on the basis of Saint Paul.16 Even Francis Georgius points out in his Problemata that Plato “wanted the gods’ places of purification to be next to royal palaces.”17 The Church Fathers agree unanimously that the two powers were made to work in tandem and that each power sustains the other through divine sympathy: God “made two great lights, which the Canonists interpret to mean Pope and King.” Sancta Clara also cites the Benedictine historian Eadmer of Canterbury (Historia Novorum, liber 1, fol. 20, lines 27– 30) and Eadmer’s 1623 editor and commentator, “the most learned” John Selden. Selden, who had become Laud’s ally since 1636, had recently refuted Prynne’s anonymous, Amsterdampublished, antiepiscopal treatise Unbishoping of Timothy and Titus.18 Perhaps the most remarkable feature of chapter 2 is Sancta Clara’s thoughtful embrace of Selden. Interweaving patristic evidence that “the first Christians taught equal reverence to king and bishop” with Selden’s own thesis that bishops have long played a critical role in the English tradition of “mixed government,” Sancta Clara emphasizes that the English Crown has always both appointed and funded English bishops. Implicitly, the mutual bond that ties the English Crown to the English episcopacy is warranted both on patristic and on patriotic grounds: “Thus the compilator of our ancients laws, according to the very learned Selden, correctly says that the king through the church and the church through a strong realm have their foundation.” Selden’s opinion is further corroborated by the

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“very learned” Francis of Mayronis, who wrote that “the temporal realm is protected under the wing of the church, so that no one can rebel against the king without also rebelling against the church.” Selden, in short, approaching the question from the point of view of English legal history, independently validates the opinion of the medieval Franciscan doctor Francis de Mayronne, who, in turn, consolidates patristic teaching and adds weight to Selden’s view.19 It follows, Sancta Clara concludes, that “those who want to remove bishops are public enemies.”20 The category most prominently includes Prynne and the Scottish Presbyterian “Didoclavius” (David Calderwood), but it also implicitly and more subtly includes someone like Edward Knott, who not only rejects the reigning English hierarchy but who makes episcopal power in general dependent on the pope. Chapter 3 reflects on the name “Bishop” by combining scholastic analysis with historical precedent.21 The term episcopos designates the dignity of an office, but the natural usage of the term does not tell us how episcopacy was instituted, by whom, or with what jurisdiction. If we consider the mere term, taken in its ordinary usage, “we cannot deny,” Sancta Clara says, “that the names bishop and priest are used interchangeably in Scripture, as both Thomas and Scotus concede.” Although Jerome concludes that the two functions are essentially the same and that bishops were raised above simple priests merely for the sake of preventing schism, Scotus suggests a more subtle solution, which “our” Delphinus confirms. According to Scotus, it is “not improbable” that priests in the early Church were all bishops materially speaking, but this is not to say that the two terms, “bishop” and “priest,” necessarily signified the same degree of dignity.22 As usual, when dealing with difficult and important matters, Scotus “affirms his position with great modesty and hesitation, so that we, in turn, must embrace it only subdubiè, under doubt.”23 Nonetheless, after considering alternatives, notably Durandus’s view that bishops were set up at a later date to supervise priests, Sancta Clara judges Scotus’s opinion to be “more probable”—namely, that the term “bishop” allowed the possibility, from the start, for a higher degree of dignity to be designated within the priesthood. Though formally distinct, the two degrees of dignity were materially superimposed, as it were, in the early bishop-priests. A similar confusion, Sancta Clara pursues, occurred with the term “pope.” Bellarmine, Boverius, Vasquez, and Kellison all agree that the term

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“pope” was initially assigned to all bishops equally. Moreover, “our most learned compatriot Selden” correctly points out that the term “pope” was ascribed specifically and exclusively to bishops in the Western empire.24 At the Council of Arles, Marianus was termed Ecclesiae Catholicae Episcopus: “Bishop of the Universal Church”—a title, Sancta Clara says, which is so sublime that he (Sancta Clara) finds himself hard-pressed to think of one more sublime!25 By evoking Marianus, bishop of Arles, who presided over a general Church council in 314 at Emperor Constantine’s invitation, independently of the bishop of Rome but very much to the bishop of Rome’s benefit, Sancta Clara implicitly illustrates once again how the mutual bond but also the mutual independence between king and bishop strengthens the papacy. Divinely secure and autonomous kings and bishops have the power to defend the pope in ways that supine slaves do not. The bishop of Rome could hardly have summoned a general council to validate himself— at least not credibly, not with the clout afforded to him by the Council of Arles. The case of the Council of Arles confirms, in effect, the uninterrupted tradition and advantages of “mixed government” in God’s church, including the tradition of securing a key role for temporal rulers. Both a hegemonic papalism (Knott) and an isolationist Erastianism (Prynne) seem by comparison to build God’s church precariously on a single pillar rather than build it firmly on a threefold rock.

IS A BISHOP’S POWER BY DIVINE RIGHT?

Conducted through a series of quaestiones that allow the complexity of the subject matter to come to light, Sancta Clara’s Apologia is a political treatise that investigates nothing less than the institutional parameters through which local and individual liberties are secured against hegemonic rule. When Sancta Clara later in his life will join other episcopalians in fighting against Hobbes’s Erastianism, his detailed grasp of how God’s church is apostolically structured to affirm but also limit civil and religious authority over the individual conscience will give a special force to his arguments. Chapter 3, “De definitione episcopi,” explores various definitions of episcopacy before embracing Scotus’s definition as the best. According to Scotus, episcopacy is defined as a special degree of priesthood. Consequently, a careful investigation into the origins of episcopacy is required

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to clarify exactly what special degree of priesthood defines a bishop and by what right, human or divine, this special degree of priesthood is conferred. Chapter 5, in turn, tackles the monumental question—“Utrum episcopatus sit juris divini”—through no fewer than eleven subsections. In the process, matters of history are invoked, along with various opinions interpreting the historical record, but also some very general questions of method, such as (1) how far Church custom must be taken to be authoritative, or (2) how far Church traditions establish articles of faith. Sancta Clara starts by dismissing Puritans, the “partisans of anarchy” discussed earlier, who not only deny that episcopacy was instituted by God but argue that episcopacy is positively Satanic. Among the reasonable opinions to be considered, there is the opinion of Saint Jerome, who speaks of bishops as “universal,” even though he argues against their apostolic origin. Is a purely human origin, however, enough to confer “universalism”? French Huguenots, more prudent than English Puritans, concede that the distinction between bishop and priest traces back to the early Church, even though they tend to deny that the distinction is of divine origin. At the heart of the issue, then, is whether or not, and to what extent, we must trust ecclesiastic customs “derived by true deduction from secure Apostolic teachings regardless of the silence of Scripture.”26 Augustine recommends Church custom as what is most safe when scripture is silent, but David Calderwood rejects it. Another way that Calderwood “obfuscates” the origin, and thus the nature, of episcopacy is by calling the existing records of the early Church into doubt. “No one denies that there are lacunae in the first centuries of our history, or that some Apostolic accounts are spurious,” Sancta Clara concedes, “but does this imply that all of Antiquity is to be spurned?” An obvious way out of the dilemma is to make distinctions among traditions. Each tradition must be weighted for its degree of authority. Thus a “strong argument in favor of the apostolic tradition of episcopacy is that John, in Revelation, speaks of sending angeles vel episcopos.” Whatever the term episcopos is taken to mean, the book of Revelation, canonical for all Christians, attests that bishops have been part and parcel of ecclesiastic management since apostolic times.27 Sancta Clara next considers the hypothesis that bishops, though present in the Church since apostolic times, are nonetheless not bishops jure divino. What would the consequences be?—“It is true that some Anarchists

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opine that bishops (insofar as they differ from priests) are placed in a position of superiority in the church by other members of the church, not immediately by divine right. This view implies that priests are qualified to ordain priests and to confer confirmation and perform all of the acts that are reserved for bishops.” Implicitly, the consequences of denying a distinctive divine character to bishops is that the pope, or a temporal monarch, would be able to exert despotic control over God’s church. Sancta Clara does not bring the implication to light, but instead investigates its probability based on authorities. “I do not find anyone among scholastics who pursues this kind of novelty,” Sancta Clara comments, “unless perhaps Delphinus (Giovanni Antonio Delfini, OFM, 1506– 61) should be counted among them, who, in De Ecclesia Bk. II, argues that a bishop receives his special jurisdiction from the Pope.” He concludes that episcopal ordination is a simple juridical act and thus that a deposed or degraded bishop cannot validly ordain priests. According to Delphinus’s opinion, it seems that bishops do not in any way differ from priests in God’s eyes, but only with regard to papal custom.28 Panormitanus (Niccolò de’ Tudeschi, Benedictine, 1386–1445) also denies any divine distinction between bishops and priests, Sancta Clara concedes, but his view carries little weight since it is based on “misreading Jerome.” If it enjoys such scant support, does the opinion defended by Delphinus and Panormitanus count as probable? In Sancta Clara’s opinion, those who deny that the distinction between bishops and priests is of divine origin should not be charged “formally or positively” with heresy. With regard to “our firebrands” in England, however, who deny episcopacy in every way, temporal authority has taken care of the matter since “they are condemned as heretics by our own English Parliament (I Elizabeth, chapter 1).” Implicitly, Sancta Clara interprets Trent (session 23, canon 7, which he cites) to tolerate the opinion that episcopacy is not jure divino as long as the opposite view is not excluded. The English Parliament, on the other hand, prohibits the opposite view for urgent political reasons that stem from local circumstances. Thus while God’s church is willing to leave the issue undecided, both Trent and the English Parliament agree that a dogmatic rejection of the divine right of bishops is illicit. Does Sancta Clara mean to vindicate, in the eyes of Roman Catholics, the active role of king and Parliament in protecting religion in England?

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At the very least, Sancta Clara implies that Selden’s cherished English tradition of “mixed government” poses no inherent threat to the proper stewardship of God’s church. Not only do the first four ecumenical councils affirm the necessity of bishops and incline towards holding episcopacy to be of divine origin, “the English clergy of the present age established Article 36 by common consensus in 1562, ratified by Parliament,” and thus endorsed bishops and episcopal ordination. King James, in turn, confirmed the view, declaring his constant belief, against Puritans (but also against Bellarmine) that bishops “are in the church as an Apostolic institution by divine ordination.” Medina, Waldensis, and Durandus all argue that bishops were originally instituted by divine right. It seems that the doctrine of jure divino episcopacy emerges more and more clearly to be “the more common and secure opinion”—at once more probable and safer. After discussing and refuting Calderwood’s arguments regarding Paul and Timothy, Sancta Clara concludes that “it seems sufficiently evident to me that episcopacy has a more powerful and worthy origin, namely none other than divine.” The endorsement is a matter of personal conscience, of embracing what seems to be the more probable opinion. A subtle indication that God’s church, however, latently favors the thesis of the divine origin of episcopacy is that Jerome mysteriously speaks of bishops as “universal.” How would it be possible, Sancta Clara asks, for bishops to be made bishops unrestrictedly, if not made so by God?29 In a second subsection, Sancta Clara discusses the general problem of how to preserve both (immutable) Catholic truth and Catholic flexibility. First, he proposes a method to evaluate the soundness of any given Church doctrine. Now that “we fully see that the Catholic church, wherever it took root, is governed by bishops,” he writes, “we must ask our Church Fathers whether, after the first century had elapsed, episcopal management still endured and whether they all proclaimed it unanimously. Let us then ascend by a single century from Apostolic to Patristic time. All of the records attest, and the acts and ordinations of the Apostles show, that episcopal management was explicitly endorsed and assumed.” Sancta Clara’s method thus consists in reasoning by a sort of informal diachronic induction. If a custom holds for the apostolic age and also holds for the patristic age (apostolic generation + 1), then it holds as a Church tradition—provided that there also be a consensus in its regard among Church Fathers. If a doctrine passes

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the test, we can feel relatively secure that no truth is more indubitable and ubiquitously acknowledged among the truths of the Faith.30 Sancta Clara is quick to add that he does not mean to imply that every Church tradition attests to a genuine article of the Faith, far from it. “Indeed many are not to be admitted strictly as of Faith, as Cano and Cajetan attest,” but must be placed among “pious beliefs,” even if it is probable that the whole Church believes it. Abulensis (Alonso Tosatado, 1400–1455), in turn, warns against embracing any self-contradictory doctrine as an article of faith, even if it is common to the whole Church. He cites the Assumption of the Virgin as an example—about which William of Occam, also, stated that one is free to speak of it as one wants: “licitum est cuique dicere quod vult.” A distinction must thus be made between what the Church believes piously and what the Church believes firmly. When there is universal and perfect consensus that a doctrine is an actual article of faith, then (as Augustine says about fundamentals) the doctrine is not only apostolic but divine. It is not simply embraced by all and transmitted from age to age, it is embraced specifically as based on God’s most solemn authority. “Many doctors,” Sancta Clara adds, “teach today what Gerson teaches in his Treatise De Declaratione veritatum qua credendae sunt de necessitate salutis,” namely, that “in addition to being a constant and uninterrupted belief of the church, a doctrine, in order to be necessary for salvation, requires a defining judgment that affirms it to be of faith, or condemns its opposite, based on the implicit or explicit ruling of the whole church.” Abulensis holds the same opinion, noting that “it is not required to hold this or that position, if it is not an article of faith or a doctrine that has been defined by the church as necessary for salvation.” He adds that, with regard to views that have not been ruled by the Church to be necessary for salvation, “it is permissible for anyone to opine as he wishes,” because “it is more rational to hold a position on the grounds that it is commonly held.” According to Sancta Clara, there are only two types of Church traditions that count as articles of faith: those that have been formally declared by a universal council to be of divine origin, and those that have been conserved through time as “manifestly of divine origin,” such as episcopacy— or so it seems to Sancta Clara (“ut mihi videtur”).31 Solidly transmitted doctrines from the patristic age that include the feature that nothing is recorded about their origin are more probably of divine origin than not. When Jerome hesitated to affirm that episcopacy was a divine institution

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and opined instead that it had been instituted by the apostles, his mistake was to interpret the lack of written evidence in scripture as counting against divine origin rather than in favor of it. Implicitly, if episcopacy were of human origin, scripture would have recorded when and by whom it had been instituted. The case of Jerome’s “mistake” suggests a corollary to Sancta Clara’s inductive method for testing Church traditions. If there is no unanimity of views among the Church Fathers, we cannot claim to have a secure apostolic tradition—unless the Church steps in and issues a definitive ruling for the sake of preserving ecclesiastic unity, as happened in the case of Cyprian. The problem, many argue, is that whatever the Church has once judged to be merely probable must remain so, since a new revelation would be required to upgrade its status. “Thus among opinions, we must concede that some will remain probable forever and never reach the level of faith.” Add to this that the Church, which is “the stable firmament of truth,” cannot ever endorse a heretical doctrine. Thus in its prudence, the Church regards Jerome’s published opinion to be at least probable, prompting it to refrain from declaring that jure divino episcopacy must be held as a matter of faith.32 The Council of Trent (Sancta Clara refers the reader in particular to session 23, canon 7) prudently endorsed the view that the divine right of bishops remains a disputed question. Nowhere does the Church anathemize the proponents of jure divino episcopacy.33 Sancta Clara is thus free to follow his own conscience in the matter. He is free to defend jure divino episcopacy as a more probable opinion, based on his method of testing Church traditions and collating arguments from a multiplicity of sources. Implicitly, English bishops such as Laud, Cosin, Potter, and Montagu are also free to affirm jure divino episcopacy, since it is not a position that is condemned by God’s church. Sancta Clara concludes subsection 2 by sketching the following historical picture. In the infant Church, there were no priests but only the apostles, who were all equal in dignity, as evidenced by Paul’s Letter to Titus, and by Acts 14. Next, through the apostles’ care, there emerged fellowworkers who were not yet priests, but whom the apostles eventually ordained as priests. In the adolescent Church, the process happened in reverse. Whenever there was someone worthy to be ordained as bishop, he was ordained as such. In subsection 3, Sancta Clara inquires as to when it

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was that Christ first ordained bishops. The answer, he argues, “will sufficiently prove that the distinction between bishops and priests is Apostolic and was in fact decreed by Christ, contrary to Jerome’s opinion.”34 Sancta Clara bases his answer on Scotus, who argues that the apostles were made into bishops at Pentacost (Acts 2). Peter was chiefly made bishop, but Peter was not made bishop exclusively, since, Sancta Clara writes, “I find no material anywhere to prove Turrecremata’s claim that Peter alone was made bishop and that he, in turn, consecrated additional bishops.”35 Sancta Clara cites Irenaeus next, who was “very close to the Apostles” chronologically and thus possessed of special authority with regard to determining the question — as though Sancta Clara meant to emphasize that Selden’s method of “synchronism,” so effective for establishing early English history, is equally effective for Church history. Irenaeus, while hinting at the primacy of the bishop of Rome, was eager to affirm the apostolic succession of all bishops. Sancta Clara concludes: “I do not know what more is needed for a Christian to hold that episcopacy was instituted by God.”36 Scotus’s authoritative interpretation of scripture, independently corroborated by Irenaeus and not falsified by any authority, suffices for a Christian licitly and securely to affirm jure divino episcopacy, without fear of heresy. After validating Scotus’s teaching, Sancta Clara now turns to Vasquez and his fellow Jesuit Giles de Coninck (Lessius’s student at Louvain, who died in May 1633). The two Jesuits, Sancta Clara reports, argue that bishops were made directly by God through a first divine act, then consecrated by the Church through a second act. This opinion is sound and Sancta Clara endorses it: “hoc idipsum est quod dico.” It suggests indeed a nice parallel: “Just as a temporal king receives his power and regal authority immediately from God, but his crown and scepter from the people, so a bishop receives his charismatic power from God, but his jurisdiction and flock from the church.” 37 Selden’s model of “mixed government,” it seems, is reinforced by Church government. Sancta Clara’s point is more subtle than first appears. His claim, implicitly, is that the English king, like a bishop, is empowered through a double or “mixed” process. He receives his royal authority, as such, from God, but he receives the ability to exercise this royal authority from the people. Insofar as they depend on human consent, they are accountable to Church or Parliament, and their power is restricted and regulated. But insofar as their power is from God, they serve in turn to restrict and regulate

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the human institutions that appoint them. They cannot be removed or replaced without due process. They speak and act with an independent authority that is immune, in principle, to public bullying or favor. Implied in Sancta Clara’s analysis is a further warning that “anarchy” will inevitably give rise to tyranny. Puritans like Burton and Prynne, who clamor against episcopal tyranny and want to subject the English Church wholly to the king, naïvely lay the grounds for a dictatorship. Similarly, Jesuits like Knott, who want to subject the Church wholly to the pope and abrogate the independent authority of bishops, promote a dangerous despotism. This is why, in his next subsection, subsection 4, Sancta Clara raises the question, surprising at first, of “whether valid consequences may be drawn from the Old Testament to the New.” Far from being an academic exercise, the question is critical to distinguishing legitimate authority from a pseudoauthority that is usurped by a political faction and disguised as “evangelical.” Thus whereas many theologians invoke the priestly order of the Old Testament to emphasize the absolute superiority of bishops over simple priests, Calderwood and Bellarmine both reject the argument because they deny that the Jewish synagogue is a proper “type” for the Christian Church.38 Sancta Clara protests that the synagogue was an authentic congregation of God’s faithful (ecclesia) and thus a suitable model for the Christian Church. Did the Jewish synagogue not include, Sancta Clara asks, “sacraments and sacrifices that are figures of our own? All theologians agree that circumcision is a true sacrament. It is even possible to regard Melchysedech to be a type and figure of Christ, just as Eve was a type and figure of the Virgin Mary.”39 By rejecting the priestly model of the Old Testament, Sancta Clara implies, Jesuits and Puritans do not emancipate Christians from Jewish law for the sake of a greater Christian freedom. Instead, they destroy the legitimacy of our inherited structures so as to be able to substitute their own. Greater enslavement of consciences, not greater freedom, will result.

IS THE EPISCOPAL POWER OF ORDAINING PRIESTS BY DIVINE RIGHT?

If the origins of episcopacy trace back to the Old Testament, a new problem arises. Were Hebrew priests empowered to ordain new priests by their

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own intrinsic power or by a power delegated to them by the high priest? Durandus, Sancta Clara points out, correctly distinguishes between the power of jurisdiction, which the Church bestows, and the power of consecration, which the Church does not have the power to bestow. And although he personally agrees with Durandus on the matter, Sancta Clara acknowledges that the opinion is not universal. Denying Durandus’s distinction, however, leads to problematic consequences. If the power of ordination is wholly derived from the Church, “then ordination performed by a simple priest may be a transgression, but it is not invalid.”40 This would mean, implicitly, that Lutheran clergies are validly ordained—at least those members of Lutheran clergies who were ordained by priests who were themselves ordained by Luther or other Roman priests who had turned Lutheran. In Scotist fashion, Sancta Clara does not prove one side or the other of the jure divino question regarding episcopacy, but he shows that denying jure divino episcopacy entails more problematic consequences than upholding it. In subsection 5, he asks, first, whether the priestly character is indelible, “which is a grave matter, denied by our opponents.”41 Citing Scotus, Sancta Clara stresses that the consensus overwhelmingly supports the view that the priestly character, like baptism, is indelible. A priest may be barred from exercising his priestly gift, but the gift itself, for example, the power to baptize, absolve, and so on, cannot be removed. In the case of the doctrine that bishops alone have the power to ordain, no one can doubt that the doctrine expresses the Catholic Church’s most constant and most plainly evident consensus. Its certitude, analogous to the certitude of first principles in the sciences, derives from the inerrancy of the Church “in faith and morals, because on this all the rest depends.”42 Yet there are some who believe that nonepiscopal ordination transgresses only Church canons, not divine law. John Major, after exploring the matter, concludes that God gave the power to ordain only to the apostles and their successors, which is to say to bishops, so that the episcopal power to ordain belongs to bishops jure divino.43 Augustine and doctors after him maintain that a bishop who was validly ordained but breaks with the Church and becomes a heretic conserves the power to ordain, but those who receive sacred orders from him act badly and do not receive the power of exercise. Implicitly, the English clergy is validly ordained, even

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though English bishops and priests exercise their episcopal and priestly powers unlawfully. The inalienable character of the episcopal power to ordain lies at the heart of the whole matter. Subsection 7 goes on to contest the position that simple priests may be delegated or commissioned to ordain—a position held by Vasquez, based on Peter Aureoli and Capreolus.44 Subsections 8 and 9 investigate and refute Vasquez’s claim that the rule restricting the power of ordination to bishops dates only from the Council of Antioch. The emergence of assistant-bishops (chorepiscopi) and of “titular” bishops without existing dioceses is also addressed.45 Subsection 10 establishes that there is no valid Church tradition, or precedent, supporting the claim that simple priests may be commissioned to ordain priests. Since the power to ordain would not be a charismatic power received directly from God if it could be humanly delegated, the absence of any recorded custom of delegating the power to ordain argues strongly that its origin is divine. Sancta Clara now considers an objection: If a bishop’s power to ordain is divine, how is it that the pope can take it away, as many canons grant? The answer is to affirm, once again, the distinction cited earlier between the power to ordain and the ability to exercise it.46 We notice that Durandus’s distinction, endorsed by Sancta Clara and compatible, in retrospect, with (1) the division into first and second acts that was sketched by Vasquez and Coninck and cited in subsection 3, and (2) Augustine’s opinion that a heretical bishop does not lose his power to ordain, is now “independently” corroborated by the fact that it provides a coherent solution to a new puzzle. Still, Sancta Clara concedes that there is contradictory evidence. Peter Lombard, for example, cites “some” who say that heretic bishops lose the power to ordain priests and cannot deliver valid sacraments. Lombard, however, counters this view with a much more probable opinion, “namely that, as long as the form of the sacrament is sufficiently conserved, the sacrament is valid, even if it is delivered by a heretic or excommunicated priest or bishop.”47 “Haec opinio omnino ut dixi est probabilis”: How, Sancta Clara asks, could a bishop’s power—to baptize, ordain, absolve, and consecrate the host—possibly be taken away? Only if the power were conferred to him by the Church alone, and not by God. But if episcopal power is a power that is conferred by the Church alone and is merely institutional in origin, how does a bishop truly baptize, absolve, ordain? Sancta Clara

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now tightens the noose to stabilize his argument: “The Subtle Doctor,” he says, “as interpreted by my illustrious Master Hugo Cavellus, raises a doubt as to whether excommunication deprives a bishop of the de facto power to confer orders. His commentator [Cavellus] explains the dilemma: if episcopacy is not a genuine order, then a degraded bishop indeed loses his power to ordain. On the other hand, if you hold that episcopacy is by divine right, as indeed all of the orthodox affirm, then, supposing that priesthood is per se indelible, we can prove the position that is offered by Durandus (4 d. 25, q. 1).” 48 A robust bundle of arguments, in effect, has emerged in support of the more probable opinion that the episcopal power to ordain is bestowed on a bishop directly by God. More exactly, the position held by Jesuits and “anarchists,” namely, that episcopacy is merely a delegated ecclesiastic office and not a divinely instituted order, cannot be sufficiently proved. It cannot, therefore, rule out Church tradition regarding the divine origin of episcopacy. The more probable opinion, moreover, is also implicitly safer. If we deny that a bishop’s power to ordain priests and consecrate new bishops belongs to him intrinsically as a power received directly from God, it is obvious that the pope or the Church may delegate such power arbitrarily; which, if we were to concede it, would allow us to do away with episcopacy altogether, since “according to Jerome and to Truth,” purely ecclesiastic, institutional acts are subordinated to human decisions as they are not commanded by divine right. The consequences, Sancta Clara warns, “are repugnant to all men of heart.”49 If episcopacy is not instituted by divine right, if bishops have no intrinsic power of their own directly from God but are merely Church or royal administrators, then nothing prevents a pope or a king from abolishing bishops entirely. And yet the Council of Trent affirms that “only priests ordained by bishops are valid.”50 Are the consequences of denying jure divino episcopacy essentially incompatible with Trent and with God’s church? Sancta Clara implies that there is, at the very least, a problem: “It follows from collecting together all of the above arguments that wherever bishops are absent, there can be no priests, a consequence so horrific that the necessity of bishops flows from it, as well as the depravity and absurdity of the schismatics’ agenda. For indeed where there are no priests, there can be no sacraments, except perhaps matrimony and baptism. How, then, will

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the merits of Christ’s passion be applied? How will we be saved from Shipwreck? How will we receive the viaticum, the Manna of Christians?” By denying jure divino episcopacy, Jesuits and Puritans alike seem to put the whole Church at risk, submitting it wholly to papal or royal prerogative. Conversely, there may be a very special corollary to the more probable and safer opinion that episcopal power, as such, comes directly from God. The “curious reader” may want to inquire, at this point, whether a single bishop suffices to consecrate a new bishop. “Which I answer in the affirmative,” Sancta Clara writes, “since there is nothing in Scripture affirming the opposite, indeed Scripture assigns the fullness of episcopal power to every bishop, as I will further establish in the treatise.”51 After citing the authority of Aquinas and multiple cases in which valid episcopal ordination involved only a single consecrating bishop, Sancta Clara explains away Church rules that appear to require more than one bishop for valid episcopal consecration. He then “easily draws the conclusion” that the constant doctrine of God’s church affirms that a bishop acting alone has the power required to consecrate a new bishop. The purpose of this corollary is twofold. On the one hand, it serves as a transition to the next chapter, which examines whether episcopacy is a sacred order in its own right. On the other hand, it implies that God’s church is robustly self-regenerating, since a single surviving bishop has “full” power to replenish it in case of physical devastation. By the same token, moreover, it implies that the archbishop of Canterbury, who was validly consecrated by the archbishop of Spaleto (Marc Antonio de Dominis), has “full” power to raise new English bishops. Sancta Clara indeed gives numerous testimonies to the effect that “any living bishop is qualified to consecrate a bishop” (Victoria) and that a bishop, with regard to intrinsic episcopal power from God, “is the equal of the Pope” (Silvester).

IS EPISCOPACY AN ORDER IN ITS OWN RIGHT?

Sancta Clara now turns to the question of whether episcopacy constitutes an order in its own right. What is at stake? If it can be proved that episcopacy cannot be distinguished from sacred orders generally, then Jesuits and Puritans win and the doctrine of episcopacy by divine right will be

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dramatically undermined. Sancta Clara starts with Scotus’s definition of episcopacy—episcopal ordination is the instituting of someone in a “preeminent ecclesiastic degree.” “By recalling this definition,” Sancta Clara writes, “we shed some light on the matter, since it is impossible to determine the question of whether episcopacy is an order in its own right if the nature of the orders or degrees of the hierarchy is ignored.”52 Sancta Clara’s strategy is to show that “doctors have held a variety of opinions on the matter.” Thus, for example, de Soto and Capreolus cite Aquinas and many other doctors who, though holding that episcopacy is a divine institution and that it involves a power superior to the power of a simple priest both in eminence and in jurisdiction, nonetheless view it as part and parcel of what all doctors call the sacerdotal, or “sacred” order. Their opinion is based on the way in which they define “order.” Since there is no essential difference between bishops and priests with regard to consecrating the host, there seems to be no fundamental difference in their sacred order. Thus Aquinas and many others deny that episcopacy is its own order: “Episcopatum ordinem esse negant.” Invoking the shared power to consecrate the host, they argue that episcopacy is a species of the sacerdotal hierarchy, not a sui generis order. They also adduce a logical argument, strongly urged by Peter Aureoli and adopted in turn by Delphinus. Their argument is as follows. If episcopacy is an order in its own right, either it is higher than the priestly order or it is inferior. But it cannot be inferior, since a superior cannot receive his defining mark from an inferior. Nor can bishops be said to be superior, since the superiority of an order stems from the dignity of its actions and higher charge. But without priest-candidates to be ordained, bishops cannot perform or enjoy these higher acts. Therefore the episcopal order is not properly an order per se, distinct from the priestly order that is based on the consecration of the Eucharist. Their third argument is based on the patristic authority of Augustine, who asked “what indeed is a bishop if not a chief priest?” Since primacy attests only to an extrinsic, or adventitious, character, episcopacy is not essentially (intrinsically) different from the priesthood. A fourth argument is that there are only seven orders, “as all believe,” but this argument, endorsed by Delphinus, proves nothing. Sancta Clara cites a fifth argument, which “scholastics until now have not evoked”: if episcopacy is a distinct order from the priesthood, then it cannot be removed by the Church on any extrinsic ground (assuming valid ordination). But we read

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of cases in which episcopal ordination has been voided based on some extrinsic ground. Clement, for one, cites this argument as a basis for denying that bishops are ordained through a distinct true sacrament. In typically Scotist fashion, Sancta Clara will not refute the arguments quod non so much as show that they lead analytically to the discovery of a deeper principle. Aquinas, Augustine, and others are not wrong in their objections but incomplete. The way to solve the question, Sancta Clara explains, is to consider that a special degree may sometimes be taken to mark a distinct status (order) within one and the same order. The priestly order contains a succession of degrees. These degrees, moreover, are not merely denominations, figures of speech, but real differences. Does the ecclesiastic term “ordination” require that a person be consecrated into a different type of order, with no overlapping functions? No. Sancta Clara’s very Scotist solution consists in showing that a person may be raised to a very special degree within the same order—so special as to signal a distinct sacramental status within the order. The key to Sancta Clara’s solution is that episcopacy is not merely a “higher” degree of priesthood, but it constitutes the full, or “unrestricted,” degree of priesthood. Once this way of conceiving episcopacy is brought to light, there is no obstacle to affirming that episcopacy is its own true sacramental order. Episcopacy is not “other” than the sacerdotal order, but it marks a degree of priesthood that is incommensurably higher than any other degree. A bishop possesses not only the priestly power to consecrate the host but also the episcopal power to consecrate those who have the power to consecrate the host and those who have the power to consecrate those who consecrate the host. A bishop is indeed “nothing other than a chief priest,” as Augustine affirms, but episcopal primacy is intrinsic and absolute. When a priest is ordained into a bishop, he receives the “fullness” of sacerdotal power directly from God. This is why the episcopal mark cannot be removed for any extrinsic reason. This is why the episcopal power cannot be “delegated” by the pope or any other human being arbitrarily. And even if a bishop does not exercise his episcopal power, even if he ordains no one, he possesses full episcopal power intrinsically, from God. This is why bishops, as such, are all equal, charismatically speaking, and why a single bishop suffices to consecrate a new bishop. Not only does Sancta Clara’s Scotist theory of jure divino episcopacy solve a host of difficulties, but it also brings previously divergent views into harmony.

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The objection is raised, however, that early records mention the ordination of “female deacons, priests and bishops.” Such evidence, if sound, would jeopardize Sancta Clara’s theory and imply instead a purely institutional or delegated power. Sancta Clara answers the objection by “giving a brief history of women’s participation in ecclesiastic life”—a subject that is dear to his own heart, as we know. Although wives of priests in the early Church were sometimes termed “priestesses,” women’s participation in ecclesiastic life traces back properly to the widows described in the Acts of the Apostles. As Clement confirms, widows who were especially devout in assisting the Church were sometimes elected and constituted into supreme deacons. They received the imposition of hands but were not literally consecrated into the priesthood, since imposition of hands may signify a blessing rather than sacerdotal ordination.53 This early practice of consecrating “deaconesses” was superseded by the emergence of “ascetics,” who professed religious vows and were termed moniales. It is not improbable that these moniales were initially like the “canonesses” described by the Council of Cabilonense and for whom a new way of religious life was framed.54 Photius, next, devised constitutions both civil and religious proving that deaconesses should be counted as clergy. Balsamon, in turn, affirms that deaconesses were truly ordained.55 This view, however, is easily refuted, since “we never read anywhere that these deaconesses participated in performing sacred functions, even though they promoted piety.” A better source to use for these matters is perhaps Espencaeus (Claude d’Espence), who (in his commentary on I ad Tim., bk. I, c. 17) abundantly and accurately treats of deacons. He persuasively shows that deaconesses were never formally ordained into the clergy or admitted into the sacred ministry, even though they were given ecclesiastic tasks in the apostolic Church and were called ministrae. Although women were indeed active in the Church from the start and in numerous ways, they were barred by an early canon from baptizing or from performing actions connected with the Eucharist: “Note, however, that the same decrees barred clergy from marrying. Indeed as our own Egbert reports, Gregory anathemized any priest who took a wife.” (Does Sancta Clara avail himself in passing of a new opportunity to remind Roman Catholics that clerical marriage is a purely ecclesiastical matter?) Were religious women allowed to teach? Clement denies it, citing as the basis of Church custom the fact that Christ sent his twelve disciples to teach, but not the holy women, of whom there was no shortage. Women,

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however, were allowed to read homilies. In England, an early statute was established barring nuns, “no matter how holy and doct,” from hearing men lecturing in convents, and the statute survives in “our present day” common law, but women, not surprisingly, contest its authority. They also contest the Carthaginian decree that rules that “no lay person is to be heard teaching if clerics are present, unless invited to do so by the clerics.”56 Conciliar rulings regarding purely ecclesiastic practices, implicitly, may be brought into question, revised, and updated. The point of Sancta Clara’s “brief history” is to emphasize that records must be broadly studied and compared before judgments are framed or, better yet, before judgments are cautiously suspended. Most of the time, we encounter “voluntary doctrines” rather than divinely ordained institutions. Everywhere we see human creativity, adaptiveness, and change with regard to ecclesiastic practices that are not fixed, as such, by divine decree. And though Sancta Clara agrees that “some shadow of ordination was granted to women” since the days of the early Church, he interprets the patchy and conflicted record to warrant a rich variety of religious vocations within God’s church rather than to force women narrowly into the sacerdotal mold. Why should there be exactly and only seven “orders”? The very essence of a religious “order” consists in being related to Christ’s mystical body in some special way, which admits of numerous possibilities beyond the priesthood.57 To conclude, nothing contradicts the view that episcopacy is such a supreme degree of the priesthood that it counts as a real and genuine order distinct from the simple priesthood, which means that it is marked by its own special sacramental grace, as Vasquez concedes hypothetically and as Scotus affirms to be true by definition, since the conference of grace is precisely what is most fundamental about ordination. Nonetheless, Sancta Clara writes, “if someone denies it, he cannot be charged with heresy, as Vasquez correctly asserts.”

IS EPISCOPAL JURISDICTION BY DIVINE RIGHT?

Granted that the fullness of priestly power is given to bishops directly from God, is the exercise of episcopal power also granted immediately by God? Returning to Scotus’s definition of episcopacy as designating “a degree of preeminence in the church,” Sancta Clara starts by pointing out that

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Protestants differ in their interpretation of what “preeminence” means. Calvin (Institutions, bk. 4, chap. 4) interprets it to be strictly advisory. The Augsburg Confession, in contrast, Sancta Clara writes, “does not wholly shun Catholic truth since it affirms that Bishops, according to the Gospel, have no other jurisdiction than to remit sins, discern true doctrine from falsehood, reject false doctrine and excommunicate the impious.” Nor do Lutherans omit the power of ordination.58 In order to solve the question, “let us proceed,” Sancta Clara writes, “by means of our usual scholastic method of dividing the term into parts.” Episcopal jurisdiction is twofold, internal and external. With regard to internal acts, such as absolving sins, there is no controversy. The controversy thus pertains wholly to external jurisdiction, which involves such acts as excommunication. On this topic, “there is no lack of diverse opinions, or, at least, of explanations.” Medina contends that all episcopal power derives from the pope. Consequently, all prelates beside the pope have power only “jure ecclesiastico” as the plenitude of spiritual power bestowed by God resides solely in the pope, who alone is Peter’s successor. Yet Vasquez and other doctors doubt the solidity of this doctrine insofar as it abrogates episcopacy and implies that the pope has limitless control over the Church. There must thus be some way to reconcile the pope’s universal solicitude for the Church with the notion that bishops share responsibility for it. The issue was problematic already for the ancients, as Scotus shows. A most learned “compatriot of ours and once our Provincial,” Roger Conway, in his defense of mendicants, emphasized that the Church hierarchy must include a supreme head “in whom resides the authority of the church taken as an undivided whole” and through whom “jurisdiction and power are directly or indirectly derived.” His primary point, however, was not to deny any form of autonomous responsibility to bishops absolutely speaking but simply to emphasize that no bishop should ever break away from the Holy See.59 Nonetheless, the weight of authority favoring a strongly papalist doctrine seems overwhelming. Cordoba, Vasquez, Bellarmine, and others all affirm that episcopal jurisdiction derives from the supreme pontiff.60 Is a dissenting, or more nuanced, opinion probable? A second opinion, “weaker but brighter,” holds that bishops are called to their part of responsibility for Church matters by divine right. Scotus, for one, concedes that this opinion appears to be problematic, but he inclines towards adopting

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it.61 The question, in effect, boils down to this: Are Christians, by divine institution, subject solely to the pope’s authority, or are they subject also to their regional bishop?62 One way to reconcile the two views is to point out that an elected bishop who is not yet confirmed does not have jurisdiction on the sole basis of his election. He acquires jurisdiction through confirmation—as Church laws and practices amply attest.63 Sancta Clara’s solution rests on clarifying that episcopal jurisdiction is a “mixed” commission, all at once de jure divino and de jure ecclesiastico. The case of “titular bishops,” who have no subjects, helps nicely to clarify the problem.64 The basic question may be reframed as follows: Does a priest who has been ordained a bishop, by virtue of his ordination, which is to say in the ordination as such, have jurisdiction ad extra annexed to his episcopal title by divine right? Or is this external jurisdiction wholly derived from the Church as something that he must “beg” from it?65 In other words, is a validly ordained bishop in some sense intrinsically and divinely disposed to exercising external jurisdiction or not? The diverging opinions cited earlier, Sancta Clara points out, really stem from this central issue. Suarez, for example, denies that a complete jurisdiction is annexed to ordination by divine right, allowing room for the Church to make jurisdiction complete. Further clarification is needed, however, since jurisdiction may be considered either from the point of view of its first act or from the point of view of its second act. With regard to its first act, some prefer to speak of its “substance” or “root.” Novariensis (Peter Lombard, master of the Sentences) rather nicely speaks of first-act jurisdiction as “some kind of indeterminate jurisdiction in root and received intrinsically as habitual based on the very essence of the thing” and contrasts this “root” power of jurisdiction to its “exercise.” From which it follows that we have yet a new formulation that clarifies the essence of our problem: Does a bishop, in being ordained, acquire jurisdiction in principle and substance only, meaning that what he acquires is a power that is suitable to be expressed in act but requires the Church for this to occur? Or is the external exercise of this intrinsic power also by divine right?66 Fire, Sancta Clara says, provides a nice analogy. In itself, by its very nature, fire has an intrinsic combustive power, namely, a “habitual” power to burn what it encounters externally. Fire, moreover, will burn what it

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encounters externally, if external things are present to actualize its combustive power. Similarly, a bishop possesses an intrinsic “root” episcopal power of jurisdiction ad extra by virtue of his ordination, but he requires that the Church assign him a diocese and subjects in order for this divine gift to be “actualized” as episcopal jurisdiction in actu secundo. Sancta Clara does not hide his delight. It will now be easy to harmonize the two main opposing views. The first position holds that the Church is needed for episcopal jurisdiction to be complete, since a bishop who takes control of subjects without having them be assigned to him by the Church acts illegitimately. By the same token, the second opinion is validated, since a bishop receives with ordination an inchoate power of jurisdiction, which is equal in all bishops and belongs to each bishop by divine right. Henry of Ghent explains the doctrine best. Treating of the power that bishops acquire by divine right through ordination, he points out that jurisdiction involves both acceptatio and executio.67 The grace needed to be able to accept episcopal jurisdiction is granted divinely as part and parcel of the sacrament of ordination, while the chance to exercise episcopal jurisdiction over the faithful of a specific diocese is granted by the Church. A number of corollaries flow from the “mixed” character, divine and ecclesiastic, of episcopal jurisdiction in act. First, Sancta Clara affirms that a validly ordained bishop who is granted no actual diocese by the Church is nonetheless a true bishop. Implicitly, such a bishop has the power validly to ordain a new bishop, even if the valid ordination that he performs violates man-made Church rules. Sancta Clara goes on to point out, second, that bishops are the apostles’ successors and that nothing in apostolic times prevented a given apostle from ordaining a new bishop without consulting Peter. Following in the steps of the apostles, each and every bishop is solidly the divine rector and chief shepherd of his diocese.68 It is positively heretical, Sancta Clara points out, to say that the pope is the immediate rector of all of the faithful, as the example of Peter attests. Granted that Peter was the leader of the apostles, he never thought of appropriating James’s power for himself, but allowed James to exercise his power in his own right.69 Perhaps the best view is Cyprian’s in De unitate Ecclesiae Catholicae that there is, in effect, a single episcopacy that belongs wholly and firmly to each bishop.70 The fact that the Church regulates the temporal conditions under which episcopal power is exercised does not in any way diminish the divine origin of episcopal power.

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Moreover, the jure divino episcopal power of ordaining new bishops and new priests implies the ecclesiastic power of conferring jurisdiction. Sancta Clara says that he, for one, places great weight on the premise “that Christ came into the world in order to set up the church, structure it and preserve it, as all Christians, whatever their denomination, hold on the basis of Scripture.” Christ instituted a sacerdotal hierarchy, including bishops, for the sake of ensuring that the Church would function from generation to generation in an orderly manner. This is why priestly ordinations that are not performed by bishops are null and void. And this is why “a bishop’s privilege regarding the ordination of priests includes the power to confer jurisdiction on them. A bishop, indeed, generates pastors for the Church: nemo enim dat quod non habet.”71 A bishop, Sancta Clara implies, possesses a sort of divine tenure that protects his autonomy and empowers him to serve as a living and indispensable pillar of God’s church. Indeed, it is “so important that Christians be ruled by their bishops that the longer a flock is without a bishop, the greater the danger.” In case of necessity, Sancta Clara adds, “a neighboring bishop may be assigned to take care of a flock, such as the Archbishop of Mechlin [Jacques Boonen] over Holland.”72 The indispensable role of divinely empowered bishops in God’s church leads Sancta Clara to ask, at this point, “whether there is anything that can be done in favor of the reunion of churches.” In particular, given that an illicit ordination is not necessarily an invalid ordination, what will happen “to the bishops of a church that returns to the orthodox fold after a period of schism?” Sancta Clara will limit himself to presenting relevant historical precedents from the Council of Carthage, which acted leniently towards the Donatists, and from the Council of Nice, which declared that Cathars willing to return to the Church could retain their ecclesiastic degree.73 What motivated leniency in this case was the worry that there be two heads of a given church. Thus if there are true bishops, validly ordained, it is best that these bishops conserve their seats when the whole country returns to the faith after a period of schism.74 Pope Arastasius and Augustine both advocate a similarly lenient view.75 Sancta Clara concludes by pointing out that we have an opportunity, “here and now, as in the case of Cyprian and his followers,” to show our love of ecclesiastic unity by urging that schismatic bishops and clergy be allowed to conserve their positions upon being readmitted into the Church’s communion.76

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Sancta Clara concludes chapter 7 with a final inquiry—“dubiolum”— into whether parishes are by divine right. The “very wise Gerson,” he points out, argues that parishes are by divine right since priests are the successors of the seventy disciples chosen by Christ to the same extent as bishops succeed the apostles. Thus if bishops are jure divino because they succeed the apostles, so are priests. Gerson adds a second argument, drawn from the notion of hierarchy, that priests are charged with purging, illuminating, and perfecting their flock.77 The custom of ruling the Church through parishes, Sancta Clara concedes, is very ancient, whether or not it is strictly by divine right. In England, parishes go back to 636 AD, when the fifth archbishop of Canterbury after Saint Austin—Honorius—ordained lower-level ministers, but it is not wholly clear that these ministers were parochial priests in the present sense of the term. David Carterwood, on the other hand, rejects parishes on the basis that there is no clear scriptural mention of them. Carterwood’s rash and categorical rejection of parishes, Sancta Clara says, exemplifies the difference between Protestants and Catholics with regard to interpreting scripture. Puritans insist on following their own idiosyncratic interpretation, whereas Catholics turn to the Church Fathers.78 Based on Church Fathers, custom, and scripture, a “mixed” view of parish priests analogous to the “mixed” jurisdiction of bishops emerges. Sancta Clara concludes that it is much more probable that parishes are not “fully” by divine right, but concedes that there is plenty of room for discussion. The question of parishes serves as a transition to chapter 8, which closes Sancta Clara’s Apologia with a final question: Are bishops elected by the people?

IS THE MODE OF ELECTING BISHOPS FIXED BY DIVINE RIGHT?

Until now, Sancta Clara warns, “we have treated of what pertains intrinsically to bishops, relying on Scotus’s definition in order to solve doubts. But now we descend to accidents and will adduce only external arguments.” Sancta Clara’s point is that the selection of bishops is largely left to human prudence. Calvinists insist dogmatically that a “bishop” must be

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elected by the people in order for his title to be valid. They cite two passages of the Old Testament against Catholics: Numbers 8, where God decrees that Levites must be elected by the Hebrew people, and 3 Kings 2, where kings and princes, that is, laymen, are charged with electing the clergy. Calvinists then consolidate their claim by citing the Gospels, arguing that Matthew and Barnabas were chosen to the apostolic ministry by common suffrage. Sancta Clara starts by showing that the Calvinist doctrine cannot be sufficiently proved. Sancta Clara’s reproach is that the Calvinist doctrine seeks to exclude all other ways of selecting Church leaders. Calvinists insist dogmatically that popular suffrage alone determines a valid Church leader. On the contrary, Sancta Clara argues, what has characterized Church practice over the centuries regarding the election of bishops is its pragmatic flexibility. Depending on circumstances, bishops have been elected through a wide variety of processes: sometimes by the people and clergy jointly, sometimes by the clergy at the people’s bidding, sometimes by emperors and kings, and sometimes by Church canons alone.79 The crucial point is that there is no rigidly fixed formula. Sancta Clara’s argument, in effect, is that God’s church is resilient precisely because such critical logistical issues as the selection of Church leaders has been entrusted by God to human prudence. Nor should we forget the case of Bishop Amphilochius, who was ordained by angels. With regard to England, in particular, Sancta Clara says that he “finds many records of various concessions made by the church in these matters,” all motivated by the desire to achieve the best possible harmony between the Church and temporal rulers. As Walsingham and Harpsfield faithfully report, there has long been “agreement in our realm between the highest prelates and our monarchs for the sake of facilitating the process of ecclesiastic election.”80 Walsingham, for example, mentions a concordat between Pope Pascal and Henry I, in which the Church Fathers unanimously agreed that the king be entitled to give his assent to the person elected to become bishop and that the election would include both the chapter and college. Innocent IV and Henry II, in turn, reached a new agreement. Their new agreement specified that the election would be conducted by the chapters, but stipulated that the chapters would petition the king beforehand for the permission to conduct the election. It also

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stipulated that the chapters would seek the king’s approval once they had elected a candidate. The king, in turn, would not withhold his approval unless he had a sound and clear reason to do so. “And this continues to be the procedure that is observed by our kings,” Sancta Clara concludes, “a procedure that falls squarely within Catholic practices, as all theologians and jurists remark.”81 Indeed a similar agreement was reached with Spain.82 Generally speaking, it is fitting that a local sovereign supervise the election of bishops in his church, lest troublemakers succeed in gaining power. As Bosquetus (François Bosquet) rightly emphasizes, the interest of domestic affairs requires the monarch’s scrutiny. Rejection of the king’s involvement caused many tragedies in England, as in the case of the election of Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury. The Holy See found itself obliged to send a papal legate to England in order to clarify that an episcopal candidate must not only be of exemplary life and of superior intellect but also faithful to the king, useful to the realm, of real help to the king’s council, and generally approved by the king. Thus Innocent III in Letter 138 states that the pope must not only consult the king regarding episcopal candidates but actually obtain the king’s consent. Conversely, as John Major stresses, princes must not work behind the scenes to make sure that their own choice of candidate is selected.83 “It must be observed at this point,” Sancta Clara writes, that capitularian elections are a very ancient practice, going back to Celestine III. Capitularian elections, moreover, have long been particularly prevalent in England, even though Lynwood fails to mention them in his Provincial Constitutions of the Anglican Church (Ecclesiae Anglicanae).84 By emphasizing the long-established English tradition of capitularian elections, Sancta Clara makes implicit room for a variety of human arrangements in the selection of bishops, including some sort of creative compromise that could be forged regarding the Scottish kirk, in which church leaders are elected “à clero ad petitionem populi”—by the clergy or local chapter, but “at the people’s call.” Sancta Clara draws three conclusions. First, in the judgment of God’s church, the election of clergy must not be entrusted exclusively to the laity. Second, the involvement of the laity in clerical elections evolved for pragmatic reasons, out of human prudence and a need for temporal management of Church affairs. Laity involvement is thus not of divine but of

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human origin, meaning that it may be expanded or curtailed as circumstances require. Third, “it follows that whenever necessity forces a strictly popular election of bishops, the church is weakened.” Sancta Clara’s three conclusions imply jointly that Calvinists may perhaps be allowed, in a limited sort of local way, to give a relatively large voice to the laity in selecting Church leaders, if this helps to preserve Church unity, but only as long as they desist from claiming unilaterally and stubbornly that the practice is divinely instituted. The key is to preserve and strengthen the “mixed” character of Church government as much as possible, granted that special circumstances might require provisional adjustments for the sake of expediency. Angels, kings, local clerical chapters, even laity, even the pope in Rome—the more voices converge to elect a bishop and anchor a bishop’s divine gift solidly in a local Church, the better; or so at least Sancta Clara’s chapter 8 implies, bringing his Apologia episcoporum to a close. What is the key discovery of Sancta Clara’s investigation into the origin and nature of episcopacy? According to the more probable Catho lic opinion that bishops are jure divino, not only is article 36 of the English Church admissible, but Archbishop Laud (who was consecrated by a validly consecrated Roman bishop, namely, de Dominis) and the whole English hierarchy belong validly if not licitly to God’s apostolic Church. The outer fabric of brotherly communion may be torn, but the mystical body of God’s universal church is intact. In its real mission of saving souls, the English Church is not wholly cut off from heaven. Its sacraments are holy. Its faith is intact. Does Sancta Clara’s Apologia imply that the Church of England already belongs to God’s universal church? There are enigmatic reports that Sancta Clara took personal steps to mend the schism in private. One report in particular, based on Sancta Clara’s own communication to Anthony Wood, states that Sancta Clara “reconciled” Godfrey Goodman to Rome before Goodman’s death in 1656. The special statement of Catholic belief that is recorded in Goodman’s will is stunningly ambiguous. Bishop Goodman starts by categorically denying that he ever changed churches or left the English Church in which he was ordained: “I do profess that as I have lived so I die, most constant in all the Articles of our Christian Faith and in all the Doctrine of God’s Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.” Nonetheless, he goes on to acknowledge an essential bond with the Roman Church: “I do acknowledge the Church of Rome to

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be the Mother Church.” He even concedes that there is no salvation outside the Church of Rome—“I do verily believe that no other Church hath any Salvation in it”—but he clarifies that this pertains only to the faith that is preserved and transmitted by Rome, not to any human opinions or practices.85 Goodman’s profession of faith does not by any means reject the Church of England in favor of the Church of Rome. Rather, it affirms that the Church of England is a full yet junior member of the Church of Rome insofar as both churches teach the fundamental articles of Christian faith that make salvation possible. Goodman’s formula, in effect, is an elegant synopsis of Sancta Clara’s moderate theology. We cannot dismiss the possibility that Sancta Clara practiced some discrete and modified form of intercommunion, as advocated by Bishop Montagu and condemned by George Con.86 More publicly, Sancta Clara’s Apologia corroborates Chillingworth’s famous response to Edward Knott. It basically agrees with Chillingworth, that the Church of England is a safe way to salvation (1637) since its hierarchy is apostolic and its bishops possessed of the same degree of divine grace as the apostles. Is it surprising to learn that Sancta Clara went to see Laud with the manuscript of his Apologia to discuss its publication?

T E N

Spars of a Shipwreck

Six short years after Sancta Clara went to see Laud about publishing Apologia episcoporum, Laud would make every effort, in the context of his trial, to depict Sancta Clara’s visit in May 1638 as unwelcome and brief. Laud would concede that Sancta Clara had come to see him and had urged him to approve his Apologia for publication in England, but only to be rebuffed. Far from encouraging Sancta Clara’s initiative, Laud had seized the opportunity to reject Roman doctrine: “My answer then was that I did not like the way which the Church of Rome went, in the case of episcopacy.”1 Laud had also expressed his indignation at the very idea that the Church of England might turn to a Roman Catholic author for a defense of episcopacy. He had told Sancta Clara that “the bishops of the English Church were able to defend their own cause and calling, without calling aid from Rome, and would do so in due time.”2 Laud, in short, had indeed conferred with Sancta Clara—but only to reject his offer and to condemn Rome’s failure to uphold jure divino episcopacy.3 Moreover, Laud had not been aware at the time that Sancta Clara was a priest, and he challenged his prosecutors to prove otherwise.4 Laud gave this account on the eighteenth day of his trial (July 10/17, 1644). Accused of upholding jure divino episcopacy for the sole purpose 247

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of driving a wedge between the Church of England and other Reformed churches, Laud protested that his defense of episcopacy had always been directed against Rome.5 Thanks to his tireless defense of jure divino episcopacy against Rome, the English Church, under his primacy, had stood firmly on its own autonomous God-given episcopal ground, proudly defiant of Roman papalism. Nonetheless, Laud reluctantly conceded that he had met with Sancta Clara “on two or three occasions,” after a first interview over Deus, natura, gratia. What prompted so many meetings? Sancta Clara, as we know, came under Charles’s royal protection at least as early as 1635, when the king expressed the wish that Sancta Clara and his supporters compose a book refuting the Jesuit Courtenay.6 Perhaps William Prynne’s anonymous Unbishoping of Timothy and Titus in 1636, or David Calderwood’s attack on the “pretended bishop of Gallway” of the same year, or Laud’s own speech against Prynne and Bastwick in June 1637, combined with the growing opposition of the Scottish kirk to bishops, had prompted the English state’s Franciscan protégé to write in defense of bishops. The chief problem, as Laud had argued against Fisher and apparently emphasized viva voce to Sancta Clara, was that the Council of Trent had refused to declare that episcopacy constitutes a distinct order by divine right—thus leaving room for Jesuits to side with Puritans in the effort to abrogate, even destroy, episcopal government. If the firm position of the English Church in favor of jure divino episcopacy could be defended on Roman Catholic grounds by an approved Roman Catholic author, the Church of England would score a victory against papal tyranny in the name of Catholic episcopacy everywhere. The challenge of defending “all Christian bishops” was perhaps all the more urgent in Laud’s mind because his friend Sir Kenelm Digby had defected from the Church of England in March 1636. Digby’s chief reason for returning to the Roman Church was that the Roman Church alone “hath had a constant and uninterrupted succession of Pastors and Doctors from age to age.”7 A second reason for Digby’s defection to Rome, equally significant and equally vexing for Laud, was that the Roman Church, unlike the Church of England, sponsored religious orders, especially the Franciscan Order, with its special sanctity and “Seraphical” rule of life.8 Perhaps a Franciscan defense of jure divino episcopacy, including in its scope a defense of the Anglican hierarchy, would carry special weight with

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moderates like Digby and safely test the waters for expanding the model of Little Gidding under the protection of Canterbury. Laud’s long-term plan was inherently progressive, even mildly visionary: he hoped to restore “the Catholic church of Christ” to a beauty and fullness that did not yet belong either to the existing Roman Church or to the existing English Church.9 In the speech that he delivered in Star Chamber against Prynne and Bastwick in June 1637, Laud defended English episcopacy as an apostolic institution that was equally “opposed to the Church of Rome as to the Puritan humor” and as a key pillar of the monarchy.10 Charles ordered the speech to be printed. Laud then encouraged Christopher Potter, William Chillingworth, and Christopher Dow to develop similar arguments against both Jesuit and Puritan efforts to undermine episcopal government.11 Laud himself prepared an expanded edition of his book against Fisher. He prefaced it with a statement affirming that “the church of England professes the Ancient Catholicke Faith” and “practices Church government as it hath been in use in all Ages.”12 There is thus some reason to suspect that Sancta Clara’s Apologia episcoporum emerged in close coordination with Laud’s effort to mobilize Christian moderates, whether in communion with Rome or not, behind the doctrine of jure divino episcopacy as indispensable to “the Catholic church of Christ.” Not surprisingly, the very first endorsement that Sancta Clara secured for his Apologia was the endorsement of Thomas “Blacklo” White, dated February 5, 1638, when White was residing in London in the household of his friend and patron Digby. Sancta Clara’s second endorsement came in March from his Franciscan confrère Lawrence à S. Edmundo, lecturer in sacred theology and titular guardian of Greenwich, where Sancta Clara in his capacity as provincial was striving to open a girls’ school under the supervision of the nuns of St. Elizabeth’s in Brussels. 13 When Apologia episcoporum appeared in print in 1640, Sancta Clara openly described himself on the cover as “Provincial Minister of the English Province of Friars Minor, now among Her Serene Majesty’s chaplains.”14 Armed with these two key endorsements, Sancta Clara apparently went to see Laud to discuss publication. A recent libel had cited Laud’s support of Sancta Clara’s previous book as proof that he, Laud, “tended to Popery.”15 It was prudent, perhaps, to wait until Laud’s own treatise against Fisher was republished and until a Protestant bishop with good Protestant credentials had written a defense of jure divino episcopacy before

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risking publication of Sancta Clara’s Apologia. Not until May did Sancta Clara meet with George Con to inform him that he would publish his Apologia. Con greeted him coldly. He berated Sancta Clara for the fiasco of Deus, natura, gratia and reminded him haughtily that he, Con, had full power from Rome to condemn unorthodox doctrines. Perhaps seeking to delay the publication, Con demanded that Sancta Clara submit the manuscript to further judgment before proceeding. Sancta Clara responded that he was perfectly willing to submit his manuscript to any censor of Con’s choosing—except to a Jesuit.16 Cornered, Con settled for Sancta Clara’s pledge to obtain the endorsement of his superior in Flanders (Peter Marchant). Suspicious at the sight of Blacklo’s endorsement that the real aim of the Apologia was to isolate Jesuits and kindle new loathing against them in the king and the English government, Con sought out Windebank to rail against Sancta Clara and other “quasi-schismatics” who promoted their own unscrupulous and utterly unrealistic version of reunion.17 Meanwhile, to Con’s frustration, Roman Catholic moderates like William Howard rallied to Laud’s side. In March 1638, when the position for secretary to the queen had become vacant, Laud had warmly supported Howard’s candidacy for the position. In a show of power, Con succeeded in getting John Winter, who was closely allied with Jesuit missionaries, appointed instead.18 In April, exasperated by the coalition that had emerged against him, Con tried to belittle Sancta Clara and Price to Howard, upbraiding Howard for wasting his gentleman’s time with “quarrelsome monks and priests.”19 Con was especially vexed at How ard’s continued collaboration with Laud and made every effort to damage Howard politically. In June, defying Con’s effort to create a tightly knit parti dévot based on strict Catholic recusancy, Howard attended the wedding of two Roman Catholics, George Stuart d’Aubigny and Katherine Howard, whose marriage ceremony was performed by a Church of En gland minister. Laud was delighted. Con was outraged.20 He reported the incident to Barberini all the more spitefully that the groom’s younger brother, Ludovic Stuart d’Aubigny, was Dom William Price’s candidate for the Roman biretta against Con. Worse insubordination on Howard’s part was in store. A few months after attending the secret Anglo-Catholic wedding, Howard collaborated with Laud to draft a special “Memorial.” Howard’s memorial called upon the king’s government to banish mis-

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sionary priests who denied absolution to English Catholic oath-jurors. Laud himself presented Howard’s memorial to Charles. The memorial was then sent to Rome behind Con’s back and entrusted to Hamilton, who blamed Con’s collusion with the Jesuits for the breakdown of negotiations regarding the oath.21 By January 1639, Barberini was fully convinced that Sancta Clara, Howard, and Price were “all of them dependent on the pseudo-archbishop of Canterbury.”22 Laud had succeeded over the years in turning Oxford into a lively center of Catholic learning and theology. Unexpectedly elected chancellor of Oxford University in 1630, Laud had expanded and renovated various colleges, added stained-glass windows to college churches, and secured more than two hundred rare books from Digby for the Bodleian Library — where Sancta Clara’s mentor and Charles’s protégé, Giles Chaissy, studied at his leisure, with the king’s permission and financial support.23 Laud had also framed comprehensive new statutes for the university. He had ordered that everyone wear a respectful cap at St. Mary’s Church and insisted that all scholars speak Latin. He had also insisted that prayers at St. Mary’s be performed in Latin “as ordained by Queen Elizabeth” and kept tight control over publications.24 He had cracked down equally on tavern-loving libertines and Gospel-loving Puritans. And whenever an Oxford student had been tempted to run off with some Jesuit, Laud had made every effort to find him a secure position within the English Church.25 By beautifying Oxford and transforming the university into a cosmopolitan center of Latin learning, Laud hoped to convince moderate Protestants and Roman Catholics alike to back a radiant new Catholicism, sacramentally inclusive and intellectually vibrant. If sufficiently many Christians from all sides flocked to Oxford and to Laud’s via media, Rome would perhaps be inspired to espouse English reforms. Laud never once denied that he hoped for Christian reunion. Christian reunion was no “damnable plot,” he would protest at his trial, if it meant that Rome came to embrace the Christian mildness of the Church of England. Laud’s project was never to reconcile England to Roman idolatry. As he himself explained, he hoped instead to reconcile Rome to English purity: “But if Christian truth and peace might meet and unite together, all Christendom over; were that a sin too? Were I able to plot and effect such a reconciliation, I would think myself most happy, whatever I suffered for it.”26

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By 1637, as Laud reported with satisfaction, the “porch at St. Mary’s was finished.” Planned and financed by his chaplain, Morgan Owen, a wealthy descendant of Welsh shamans, the new Marian porch presented the astonished Oxford visitor with an opulent classical entablature supported by two spiraling Solomonic columns and culminating in composite capitals flanked on either side by spandrels adorned with bas-relief angels. The visual focus of the new porch was a “scandalous” statue of the Virgin carrying the divine child on her right arm. Smiling girlishly, Mary stood in graceful contrapposto and wore a magnificent crown that proclaimed her boldly to be the Queen of Heaven.27 High above the scalloped niche in which Mary stood enshrined, an open book was set out at the center of a broken classical pediment, declaring “God is my illumination” (Deus est illuminatio mea). Two crowns were perched side by side on top of the book. A third crown was placed below it, sporting the university’s escutcheon, but the two top crowns implied unmistakably that king and bishop had been permanently appointed by God as coprotectors of God’s scripture and God’s church. Last, but not least, watching over the statue of Mary on either side, two large angels sat ponderously on a curvilinear tympanum, as though keeping powerful waves of time from engulfing God’s church. Symbolically, the “Catholic church of Christ” would emerge providentially with angelic help, rescued from the Red Sea of its human enemies. All at once cavernous and soaring, fiery and refreshing, sublime and tender, Morgan Owen’s new porch, with its profusion of angels and crowns, was offered, Owen explained, in lieu of a Latin sermon. Its message to students and visitors was hard to miss. There was no need for anyone to go to Rome and marvel at the church of the Gesù. The plenitude of Catholic grace was found in England, safely embodied in Oxford’s Mary the Virgin, nurtured by continuous tradition yet inexhaustibly youthful, as viscerally daring as the new architecture of Rome, yet leading into the delicate chaste Gothic womb of the Church of England.

SANCTA CLARA AND JEREMY TAYLOR

On November 5, 1638, Oxford fellows and students crowded through the new porch into St. Mary’s to hear Laud’s new favorite, Jeremy Taylor, de-

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liver the commemorative Gunpowder Plot sermon. Taylor had been selected for the sermon because of his public friendship with Sancta Clara, which had given rise to the suspicion that Taylor inclined to “popery.”28 The cold brisk air was thick with anticipation. Taylor’s Gunpowder Plot sermon has often been dismissed as a formal pièce de circonstance, designed to pacify Laud’s Puritan enemies by blasting Roman Catholicism in conventional terms.29 A careful reading, however, invites a fresh interpretation. Framed as a commentary on Luke 9:54, Taylor’s sermon calls upon Rome to condemn four dangerous Jesuit doctrines and thus to clear itself once and for all of idolatry. Specifically, Taylor’s sermon summons Rome to reject (1) tyrannicide, (2) the pope’s deposing power, (3) the absolute seal of confession, and (4) religious persecution. Not one of these doctrines, Taylor’s sermon argues, is legitimately Catholic. Roman Catholics wrongly hold these doctrines to be Catholic doctrines because they have been brainwashed, bullied by Jesuits. Taylor’s sermon approvingly cites the French (Roman Catholic) theologian Antoine Arnauld as a brave opponent of Jesuit innovations. The sermon also cites various decrees of the Paris parlement against Jesuit views, implying that vigilant Roman Catholics recognize the danger that Jesuit doctrines pose to the unity and holiness of God’s church. As long as Rome is dominated by Jesuits, as long as Rome fails to condemn the Society’s egregiously papalist doctrines, no temporal ruler anywhere is safe. True Catholics, meanwhile, ought to stand firmly together against the four key Jesuit doctrines that had prompted the despicable violence of the Gunpowder Plot. True Catholics everywhere ought to praise and support the Church of England for its apostolic character and episcopal government. English Romanists, in particular, ought to disregard the prohibition imposed on them despotically under Jesuit pressure against attending English worship. Better yet, Rome ought to revoke the bulls requiring recusancy and cooperate with Canterbury—or so at least Taylor’s Gunpowder sermon implies. Did Sancta Clara attend Taylor’s sermon in person or did he read it in its printed version, prefaced with a dedication to Laud? More than thirty years later, two younger contemporaries of Sancta Clara would report on Sancta Clara’s reaction to Taylor’s sermon, apparently based on Sancta Clara’s own verbal account. The Roman Catholic secular priest John Sergeant reported that Sancta Clara voiced his chagrin at the “lies” that Taylor

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told on this occasion “against God’s church, as is the fashion.”30 Wood, conversely, reported that “Taylor expressed some sorrow” to Sancta Clara for the things he had said against Roman Catholics in his sermon.31 The two accounts fail to tell a coherent story, like fragments of a long-lost event, torn out of context and adjusted by indecipherable bias to fit a later context. Wood’s account asserts that Taylor was “in a ready way to be confirmed a member of the Church of Rome, as many of that persuasion have said,” while John Sergeant’s account asserts more enigmatically that Sancta Clara was about to reconcile Taylor “to the Catholic Faith,” omitting the word “Roman.”32 Both accounts agree in reporting that Taylor’s Gunpowder Plot sermon prevented Taylor’s further confirmation in, or reconciliation with, “Catholic Faith,” but Wood’s account states explicitly that it was the vice chancellor (Accepted Frewen) who had inserted the “things against the Papists” to which Sancta Clara objected.33 Sergeant’s account says nothing about the vice chancellor, but instead reports that Sancta Clara refused to “reconcile or absolve” Taylor until Taylor had “by some public writing” made satisfaction “for the lies he had preached and printed.”34 Since Sergeant was a Roman Catholic priest, the phrase “reconcile or absolve” likely has a precise technical meaning tied to the sacrament of reconciliation. Two very different interpretations are thus compatible with our enigmatic fragments. The first and seemingly obvious interpretation, that Taylor was seriously prepared to convert to the Roman Church but was stopped in his tracks by Sancta Clara after the Gunpowder Plot sermon, has been dismissed by Taylor’s biographers as utterly improbable.35 A second interpretation, however, although wholly speculative, is far from implausible. On this second interpretation, Taylor had already made some sort of broadly ecumenical and idiosyncratic “profession of Catholic Faith” that Sancta Clara had drafted for him, and he was about to receive the sacrament of reconciliation. After the sermon, Sancta Clara encouraged his friend to express sorrow for the anti-Roman virulence that was added to his sermon by Accepted Frewen, which Taylor did (as reported by Wood). Sancta Clara then required satisfaction from his friend, namely, that Taylor put something in writing to correct what was uncharitable about his sermon. Did Sancta Clara then withhold absolution until satisfaction was fulfilled? More likely is that the two friends agreed that recon-

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ciliation, or absolution, as such, is not complete until amends have been made, since it is God, not the priest, who absolves the penitent.36 What suggests this interpretation is the new enthusiasm for auricular confession among Laudians in 1638. Taylor, in particular, would be accused in 1641 of “teaching that a man cannot be saved without confession to a priest.”37 Were the two friends in fact collaborating to restore Christian penance to a higher, purified, Catholic form? On this purified view, auricular confession to a priest signifies contrition (Roman Catholic doctrine) but does not suffice in itself to procure absolution (English doctrine).38 The role of the priest is to assist the penitent in the process of seeking reconciliation with God and to attest that satisfaction has been made, so that nothing stands in the way of God’s (freely given) forgiveness.39 Understood in this purified way, confession to a priest is of “so great use and benefit” that “they who neglect it are neither lovers of the peace of consciences, nor careful for the advantages of their souls.”40 In his Gunpowder sermon, Taylor focused on the doctrine of confession in great detail. His aim was to reject Jesuit intransigence regarding the “seal” of confession. Did Sancta Clara help Taylor with some of the explicitly anti-Jesuit arguments of Taylor’s sermon? As we know, Sancta Clara had composed his own Gunpowder sermon a year earlier under Windebank’s sponsorship, but he had been barred from delivering it, most likely by Con. Was any part of it recycled to Taylor? Taylor’s discussion of Jesuit confession, in particular, recalls Sancta Clara’s own Scotistic method of shattering dogmatic certitude. Once the doctrine has been problematized and shown to be, at best, an opinion, it is possible to show that the opposite opinion is, in fact, just as probable, or more probable, and safer. Taylor, in effect, argued that the Jesuit doctrine regarding the absolute secrecy of confession lacks probability, especially since Coninck, himself a Jesuit, refuses to support it and favors instead the more carefully calibrated position of the Church of England, which thus emerges as the more probable Catholic opinion.41 There is, as it turns out, no unanimity among Roman Catholics regarding the absolute secrecy of confession whenever treason or murder are involved.42 Trent’s ruling, moreover, cannot settle the question since Rome’s endorsement of a doctrine does not suffice, in itself, to make it Catholic. England’s endorsement is also required. The French church, for one, “practices publication of confessed treason.”43

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Origen, moreover, makes it clear that it is lawful to practice publication in some cases.44 The doctrine of the Church of England, in short, accords best with patristic teaching, Coninck, the French church, and the safety of kings.45 Moreover, when does the seal of secrecy apply? Coninck (an author often cited by Sancta Clara) argues that, in the case of future harm, there is no “confession” properly speaking and no repentance, so that what is told may be revealed.46 Thus by dogmatically teaching the absolute secrecy of confession in all cases, Jesuits impose their own private, fanatic, and dangerous view on the whole Roman Church. Taylor’s target, in short, was Knott and Knott’s ally, George Con—the latter of whom, aware of Rome’s increasing displeasure with Richelieu and operating now under the watchful eye of the pro-Spanish Duchess of Chevreuse and Queen Mother Marie de Médicis, loudly refused to call Anglicans “Catholic” (as Charles indeed called himself ) and insisted that Anglicans were heretics.47

SANCTA CLARA AND BISHOP HALL

In 1639, Laud sent his updated treatise against Fisher to press, while Sancta Clara, in turn, obtained Peter Marchant’s approval for Apologia episcoporum in March. As the troubles in Scotland “grew worse by the day,”48 Charles grew increasingly pressed for funds and turned to various creative sources of revenue rather than convene Parliament.49 While Win debank pursued a secret treaty with Spain, the queen with Con’s support and with the help of the main leaders of the Catholic mission, including Dom Price and Sancta Clara, organized a fund drive among English Romanists to help finance Charles’s first bishops’ war.50 By May, Scottish pamphlets appeared in England warning against a popish plot to push Charles into the arms of Spain for the purpose of destroying “English liberties.”51 Henriette-Marie, in turn, with whom Laud was now mysteriously in favor, sent her Capuchin Jean-Marie de Trélon to Rome to petition Urban VIII for financial aid.52 At the end of August 1639, Sancta Clara received a final upbraiding from Con before Con left England to return to Rome, still counting on being made cardinal.53 Con extracted a promise from Sancta Clara to abstain from writing about reunion “or similar matters” in the future.54

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Con’s successor, Carlo Rossetti, shared Sancta Clara’s optimism for England’s return to Rome and worked closely with Sancta Clara and with Windebank. Rossetti hoped to convert Laud and communicated with Laud through the “Franciscan chaplain of the Venetian ambassador,” Giles Chaissy.55 In his zeal to convert Protestant bishops, Rossetti apparently became the victim of a strange hoax involving the supposed apostasy of the bishop of Armagh, James Ussher, with whom Rossetti held face-to-face talks at the residence of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel.56 On September 28, 1639, dismayed to learn that the Scottish bishop of Orkney, George Graham, had repudiated his bishopric and “repented of it as a sin,” Bishop Joseph Hall wrote to Laud from Exeter to urge that a synod be called to stem the crisis.57 Laud convinced Hall instead to write a defense of jure divino episcopacy. Hall’s opinion would carry special weight, Laud predicted, since Hall was respected for his unwavering Calvinism.58 Laud then personally monitored Hall’s approach to defending episcopacy, urging him, among other things, to argue that episcopacy was not only ancient, but “so ancient that it is divine” (Sancta’s Clara’s argument) and to assert that episcopacy is its own “degree or order,” not a delegated function (also Sancta Clara’s argument).59 Hall’s book appeared in February 1640, approximately the same time as Sancta Clara’s Apologia episcoporum. By May 1641, John Milton had added his own powerful voice to the clamor against episcopacy. Milton denounced Laud’s strategy of joining forces with Sancta Clara, “the popish priest.” He pointed out that Sancta Clara’s defense of bishops “came out piping hot much about the time that one of our own prelates, out of an ominous fear, had written on the same argument; as if they had joined forces, like good confederates, to support one falling Babel.”60 Did Milton guess accurately? Laud may well have put Sancta Clara and Bishop Hall in contact, urging them to “join forces.” Let us simply note that Hall’s previous book, Christian Moderation, received an official imprimatur from Laud’s chaplain, John Alsop, on October 4, 1639—the very week that Hall wrote to Laud to convey his distress over Scottish attacks on episcopacy.61 This means that Laud’s urgent request that Hall write a book in defense of episcopacy was made in light of Hall’s Christian Moderation. Remarkably, in Christian Moderation, Hall states his willingness to honor the views of Roman Catholics—“of a Cajetan, or Montanus,

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or Cudsemius, or Franciscus à Sancta Clara—or any other temperate adversary.”62 By citing Sancta Clara in print as a welcome Christian moderate whose views carry legitimacy, Hall at least partially vindicated Laud’s controversial interactions with Sancta Clara, more perhaps than Hall himself knew. Hall’s Christian Moderation, moreover, promoted solutions that closely matched Sancta Clara’s own admonitions for preserving unity and charity. No church, Hall argued, should be blamed for the private opinions of individual members. Unimportant verities should be discussed calmly. Adversaries should not be vilified in “railing terms.”63 Laud may have hoped that Sancta Clara, in turn, could cite Hall’s endorsement of moderate Roman Catholics to Rossetti as evidence of Anglican good will in view of securing a Roman loan for Charles. Finally, Laud may have hoped that Sancta Clara’s arguments in favor of jure divino episcopacy would inspire Hall to produce his own soundly Protestant book quickly. Christian moderation was fast losing ground. When Parliament met in April 1640, Sancta Clara was singled out with special loathing by Sir Francis Rous, who was John Pym’s stepbrother and close ally. Rous made a point of revealing that Sancta Clara “has another name,” implying that the dangerous author of Deus, natura, gratia ought to be found, arrested, and questioned.64 When Parliament reconvened in November, Sancta Clara was again singled out by name, this time by Sir Benjamin Rudyerd.65 Events started to unfold at a rapid pace. On November 23, Strafford, impeached for “high misdemeanours,” was arrested. Windebank, in turn, was summoned to appear before Parliament, but he fled to Paris on December 3, carrying letters from the queen and a trunk of secret papers. According to the (pro-French) Venetian ambassador, Giustianino, Windebank fled the country only “after a thorough examination of conscience” and “with His Majesty’s express consent.”66 On December 7, the City of London presented a memorial to Parliament accusing the queen’s Capuchin fathers, along with Rossetti and three of the queen’s servants, of being “seducers.”67 On December 14, “Parliament notified the Queen that she must dismiss the numerous English Catholics in her service.”68 On December 18, Laud was impeached. In January 1641, Sir Kenelm Digby and Wat Montagu were called before Parliament. By the end of February, Laud had been charged with “advancing Popery” and with “harbouring and relieving divers popish priests and Jesuits, namely one called Sancta Clara, alias Damport, a dangerous person and a Franciscan friar.”69

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SANCTA CLARA AND RICHARD CARPENTER

Where did Sancta Clara “abscond”?70 A fragmentary but tantalizing clue comes from a book by the apostate priest Richard Carpenter, published in 1641 by order of Parliament and dedicated to Parliament. Carpenter’s Experience, Historie and Divinitie narrates the author’s spiritual coming-ofage as he quit the Church of England “and travelled, in his raw, green, and ignorant yeares, beyond the seas” in search of religious truth.71 Carpenter had joined the Roman Church and visited Flanders, France, and Spain. He had sampled the life of various religious orders, including the Benedictines and (perhaps) the Franciscans of Douay, before going off to Rome under Jesuit patronage. After being ordained a Roman Catholic priest in Rome in 1635 and sent back to England as a missionary, Carpenter had deserted the Roman Church sometime before 1637, when, “by the special favor of God,” he was “reconciled at last to the faire Church of Christ in England.”72 To mark his return to the Church of England, Carpenter had delivered a recantation sermon at St. Paul’s Cross in 1637. In 1640, he testified to Parliament that Laud at the time had pressured him, through Bishop Juxon’s chaplain, Samuel Baker, to curtail his attacks on Rome and to credit Laud’s campaign of holy beautification for his conversion back to the English Church. Even more damningly, Carpenter reported that Laud had prevented him from publishing his recantation sermon because of its anti-Roman statements. Laud had told him that he (Carpenter) would one day thank him (Laud) for it. Implicitly, Laud was confidently planning ahead.73 In the preface, which is dedicated to the House of Commons and promises to reveal inside information about the Roman Catholic mission, Carpenter explains that he plans to defend the Church of England against its enemies, most especially against his “old acquaintance Sancta Clara.”74 Without saying how long he had known Sancta Clara, Carpenter bursts into invectives and accusations. Carpenter explains that he had been appointed vicar of Poling through Laud’s patronage but that Sancta Clara had “followed him to the country” and organized a campaign of harassment against him. According to Carpenter’s angry account, Sancta Clara had taken up residence, moreover, in “a great house neer me,” which is to say near Poling. Carpenter’s bizarre attack on Sancta Clara is worth citing in full:

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And when men of such dark ways, men of pragmaticall, and working heads, are also bold, what will they not dare to endeavour? What will they leave unattempted? And are they not very bold, when Franciscus à Sancta Clara, a man of holy name, because hee named himself, but a subtil one, and of my old acquaintance, durst vent the relikes of his old Dictates in a forme, bending us and the profession of our Faith, by which we are entitled to Heaven, to a Reconciliation with them? And this being done, follow mee, almost to my owne doores, in the Country, and having took his standing in a great house, neer me, give matter, and heart to his evill Instruments, to dishonour me, and make a sport and scorne of mee, in my own Parish and within my own small fold?75 The “great house” in question is likely to be Arundel Castle. Situated just a few miles from Poling, Arundel Castle belonged to Thomas Howard—Windebank’s political ally, who knew full well how actively Sancta Clara had cooperated with Charles’s government. Thomas Howard, moreover, was William Howard’s uncle and thus had a personal stake in making sure that the “dangerous Franciscan friar” was safely removed from Parliament’s Committee of Religion. Arundel Castle would have provided an ideal hiding place for Sancta Clara—perhaps as early as Rous’s public call against him (April 1640), or following Windebank’s flight (December 3, 1640), or following Laud’s impeachment (December 18, 1640). Let us note that Carpenter’s 1641 preface, for all of its bizarre Menippean features, had the very concrete effect of publicizing Sancta Clara’s whereabouts to Parliament. Did the seventh article of impeachment against Laud (February 26, 1641) and Laud’s transfer to the Tower of London (March 1, 1641) prompt Carpenter to reveal Sancta Clara’s hiding place in Experience, Historie and Divinitie? There is also a report, as we shall see, that Sancta Clara started at this time to use the alias “Francis Hunt”—the name that he would use in his later years in London.76 Carpenter’s Experience, Historie and Divinitie contains a second explicit reference to Sancta Clara, directly damaging to Laud. The context is as follows. Carpenter explains that he wishes to supply the Church of England with “rules of holy living” that will help English Protestants

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achieve Christian perfection.77 In the process of framing these rules, Carpenter tackles the problem of brotherly love. Rule 9 is the rule that interests us. With regard to sinners, rule 9 emphasizes that we must hate the sin, but not the sinner, which requires, in turn, that we carefully distinguish between human weakness (which we must tolerate patiently) and spiritual wickedness (which we must recognize, confront, and destroy). As rule 9 puts it, Christian charity requires distinguishing between “the imperfections of men” and “their soules enemies.” We must tolerate human weaknesses in our brothers, Carpenter concedes, but “wee must not consort with known and professed sinners.” Carpenter then decides to illustrate what he means with a concrete example. The example he gives is of Laud’s consorting with Sancta Clara and failing to prevent Sancta Clara from publishing Deus, natura, gratia even though he was fully aware of its contents: “The Minister is not true to his Religion that is a silent Companion of Popish Priests. And it is not a good signe, or symptome, that Franciscus à Sancta Clara, alias Damport, admitted him to a perusall of his Deus, Natura, Gratia, before it was printed; and yet, he so farre went on with that wicked and unworthily insinuating Book, that hee suffered it to take its course without a discovery. How can this be characterized but A holding of Counsell with God’s enemies?”78 According to Carpenter, it was Laud’s duty to protect his English flock against Sancta Clara’s wily project of reunion, not to confer with him about it: “It is not the Shepherds place, where Wolves haunt, except his business be, to catch them and chase them away.”79 Sancta Clara, in turn, is branded as a “knowne and professed sinner”—an enemy of God and a “Wolfe” seeking to seduce God’s lambs. During the same period that Laud was actively censoring godly sermons and preventing them from being published, he was immersed in Sancta Clara’s “wicked and insinuating” book without lifting a finger to repress it. Why does Carpenter single out his “old acquaintance” Sancta Clara as particularly dangerous? In the penultimate chapter, Carpenter reverts to autobiographical mode and publishes a mysterious exchange of private letters. Stating that “Extraordinary occasions require extraordinary proceedings,” Carpenter publishes, first, “the copy of a letter sent to my lodging in Thames-street.” The author of the letter addresses Carpenter by name but withholds his own, describing himself to Carpenter simply as “an old

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acquaintance of yours.”80 Carpenter’s mysterious “old acquaintance” clarifies that he cannot safely put his name in print because Carpenter is a turncoat and a snitch: “Especially considering that you traduced an innocent man before the Bench as a seducer, because he lov’d you and therefore desired you to remember from whence you had fallen and repent of your error.” As the rest of the letter makes clear, the “old acquaintance” is a Roman Catholic who hopes to convince Carpenter to return to the Roman fold, exactly like the “innocent man” whom Carpenter has “traduced before the Bench as a seducer.” Indeed the “old acquaintance” still hopes to bring Carpenter back to the Roman Church: “I pitie you because I love you. Wither so fast? Looke backe, God is a Father still, and his Church, still a Mother. You seemed to us a man of good nature, and religiously enclined. And I remember when your Pen also was imployed in the behalfe of the Catholic Church.”81 Carpenter’s “old acquaintance,” moreover, hopes to convince Carpenter not to publish Experience, Historie and Divinitie. Rather than wash dirty Roman linen in public for all to see, Carpenter should “Thinke without passion.” Is Carpenter not guilty of theomakein, of “fighting against God”? Carpenter’s “old acquaintance” reminds Carpenter that fighting against God is doomed to failure, since God always triumphs. Moreover, Carpenter is too gifted and too accomplished to turn his back on God: “As God has furnished you with giftes of nature, which you by his helpe have bettered with labour: so he requires the imployment of them in his own service.” Carpenter’s “old acquaintance” appeals, finally, to Carpenter’s conscience against the schismatic church to which he now adheres: “Can you, without a pressure of conscience, call that a Church in which you are?” Carpenter’s “old acquaintance” means, presumably, to underscore the vociferous calls to abolish episcopacy and the recent vandalism against altars and railings.82 “Can your soule, which hath hungered after heavenly things, feed now with the swine upon such husks? ” The anonymous letter ends with a prayer that God may open Carpenter’s eyes—that Carpenter may “see and know God and his church” and gain self-insight. Carpenter’s “old acquaintance” then signs off by telling Carpenter that he “prays day and night” for him while “loving him night and day.” Whoever he is, Carpenter’s “old acquaintance” embodies the figure of the Romanist Seducer— which is also, depending on the perspective, the figure of the Good Shepherd seeking his lost sheep.

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Carpenter publishes, next, his own letter in response. First, the sentimental claptrap about being solicited by “an old acquaintance” moves him little since “amongst my old acquaintances, more have been evill than good.” Second, Carpenter denies that the man whom he has reported to the authorities is “innocent”: “The man whom you propose to me under the title of an innocent man, and a lover of me and of my soule, would have beene more truly described if you had said, A wilde Priest, a swaggarer, a lover and haunter of the Tavern, even when the sword of death hung by a small haire over his head.”83 Who is this “wilde priest and swaggarer”? The man whom Carpenter traduced to the bench was apparently no timid amateur, but a bold fisher of souls. We learn, next, what precise occasion prompted Carpenter to denounce this “wilde Priest” to the bench: “It was my chance to meete him in the King’s high-way, attired like a knight or lord, travelling alone in a fair coach drawne with foure great Horses, towards the house of a Lady; whose Priests have been the pernicious cause of many grievous disorders in the country where I live; and this, in a most dangerous and suspect time.”84 Carpenter, it seems, encountered the “wild priest” by chance, in the area of Poling. The encounter must have occurred recently, circa 1640 or early 1641, since Carpenter specifies that it was a “most dangerous and suspect” time for Roman Catholics. Carpenter recognized the “wild priest” (who must thus be an “old acquaintance”) under his courtly disguise. The “wild priest,” in turn, recognized him, since he professed warm feelings of friendship and proceeded to urge Carpenter to return to the Roman fold. Or, as Carpenter prefers to put it, the man endeavored then and there “to pervert me, and break the bonds and ligaments of my duty to God, and of my allegiance to my king.” Carpenter’s account in his letter of rebuke to his “old acquaintance,” in other words, sounds a lot like his account in the preface of his interaction with Sancta Clara near Poling. Carpenter’s letter then addresses the charge raised by the “old acquaintance” of acting against his conscience. On the contrary, Carpenter argues, how could he not have divulged the seducer’s name and whereabouts? “Besides the concealment of such a treason in regard of the law,” Carpenter protests loudly, “how should I have answered such concealement in foro interno, in the inward court of my heart and at the Bench of my conscience?” Far from commanding him to remain silent, Carpenter’s innermost conscience compelled him to report a criminal to justice: “Occisio animarum,

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the murder of soules, is the highest breach of the Commandment Thou shalt not murder. Was this not a murderous attempt in the King’s high-way? And pray, does he that attempts to murder the soule of a man love a man?” In short, Carpenter did not betray an innocent man who loved him but conscientiously reported a would-be spiritual murderer and a seducer to the authorities. Both English law and his own inner conscience prompted Carpenter to denounce an old friend for attempting to “seduce” him. Was the man whom he denounced, in fact, his old acquaintance Sancta Clara? In Carpenter’s own words, Sancta Clara had recently “taken his standing in a great house” near Poling. Sancta Clara’s possible sojourn at Arundel Castle would explain Sancta Clara’s access to the Arundel library, where he researched documents about early Franciscan activities in England.85 Carpenter’s account, moreover, is corroborated by Anthony Wood’s account that Sancta Clara “lived near Poling under the name of Hunt” and “put pressure” on Carpenter to speak courteously of the Roman Church as a true church.86

SANCTA CLARA AND SHIPWRECK

At the 1640 English Franciscan chapter, which was held in London, Sancta Clara had been named father of the province, Pater provinciae. Between December 1640, when Sancta Clara was forced into hiding, and February 1644, when he was back in Douay, conditions for Franciscan missionaries in England rapidly deteriorated. In October 1641, the Irish rebellion broke out, terrifying English Protestants. In November, Pym presented his “Great Remonstrance” before the king, demanding that papists be harshly suppressed. On December 8, Sancta Clara’s friend Walter Coleman was arrested and condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. The French ambassador petitioned Charles to intervene and the death sentence was not implemented on December 13 as scheduled—but neither was it rescinded. When did Sancta Clara abscond “beyond the seas”? 87 A large exodus of Catholics accompanied Henriette-Marie’s mother, Marie de Médicis, to Flanders in 1641. Thirteen ships, in turn, escorted Henriette-Marie and Princess Mary from Dover to Holland on March 8, 1642. An enigmatic entry in Laud’s diary deserves, perhaps, to be rescued from neglect. Be-

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tween the time that Henriette-Marie and the king proceeded to Dover (recorded by Laud in his diary for Friday, February 11) and the date of her actual departure (recorded by Laud in his diary for Friday, February 25), a mysterious man named “Mr. Hunt” came to see Laud in his lodgings in the Tower of London. At the time of Mr. Hunt’s visit, Laud already had two visitors with him—two members of Parliament, Edward Hyde and Richard Cobb—with whom he was conversing in his “inner chamber.” When Mr. Hunt knocked at the door, Laud apparently came into the front room of his lodgings alone, leaving the two parliamentarians out of view (but within hearing range) in the back chamber. Laud reported his interview with Mr. Hunt in his diary as follows: “There came a tall Man to me, under the name of Mr. Hunt. He professed, he was unknown to me. But he came (he said) to do me service in a great particular; and prefaced it, that he was not set on by any States-Man, or any of the Parliament. So he drew a Paper out of his pocket, and shewed me 4 articles drawn against me to the Parliament, all touching my near conversations with Priests and my endeavours to subvert Religion in England. He told me, the Articles were not yet put into the House.”88 What Mr. Hunt apparently showed Laud was a paper containing a draft of the “additional” articles of impeachment that had been drawn up against Laud. These explicitly included new evidence of Laud’s interactions with Sancta Clara. Mr. Hunt went on to explain to Laud that the new articles were based on the testimony of a renegade priest named Willoughby. Laud reacted indignantly. He rejected Mr. Hunt’s offer of help, calling the whole business “a bit of villany” and implying that he had nothing to hide. Laud seems to have interpreted Mr. Hunt as blackmailing him. In response, Mr. Hunt told Laud that he “sought no personal gain.” Maybe Laud worried that Mr. Hunt had been sent by his Puritan enemies to entrap him. In any event, Laud sent Mr. Hunt away and returned to his inner chamber where he told Hyde and Cobb “what had befallen him.” Subsequently, Laud wrote in his diary that he was sorry that his “indignation at this base villany” had prompted him “so hastily to send Hunt away” rather than “summon Mr. Lieutenant to seize him till he brought forth this Willoughby.” Whoever he was, the tall man who came to see Laud under the name of Hunt had gained access to Laud’s lodgings in the Tower in order to

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warn him that the case against him in Parliament had grown worse and included new evidence of his interactions with Sancta Clara. Perhaps Mr. Hunt knew that Windebank had safely escaped to France and had been sent to help Laud escape? Five days later, as Laud himself noted in his diary, “The Queen went to sea for Holland, and her eldest daughter, the Princess Mary with her.”89 Extraordinary occasions require extraordinary proceedings. A more subtle attempt to save Laud may have been concocted later in the same year in George Goring’s briefly royalist Portsmouth.90 On September 10, 1642, in the immediate aftermath of Goring’s surrender of Portsmouth to Parliament, an anonymous work entitled Safeguard from shipwracke, to a prudent Catholike (Safeguard from Shipwreck) was “reported to the Commons on the ground that it gave reasons why Catholics might attend church and take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy.”91 Its author had been taken into custody by the parliamentary committee of Portsmouth and was reported to be a secular priest named Green.92 Alarmed that papists were seeking to infiltrate the English government through outward conformity,93 Parliament handed the work over to Francis Rous and Laurence Whittaker with the instruction to publish it with a commentary by Daniel Featley detailing the danger of its content. Featley, we recall, was Archbishop Abbot’s protégé and a zealous opponent of Montagu’s “Pelagiarminianism” in 1626. The result of Parliament’s command was issued in October with the following self-explanatory title: Virtumnus Romanus, or, A discourse penned by a romish priest, wherein he endevours to prove that it is lawfull for a papist in England to goe to the Protestant church, to receive the Communion, and to take oathes both of allegiance and supremacie. To which are adjoyned animadversions in the margin by way of antidote against those places where the rankest poyson is couched. As Featley explains in the preface, it is useful for Protestants to know the content of the book because the papist author reveals three dangerous characteristics of Roman Catholics: their cynical political intrigues, their treachery towards one another, and their appalling methods of “equivocation” and “mental reservation.” Coincidentally, on September 9, on the eve of the day that Safeguard from Shipwreck was brought before Parliament, pursuivants searched the house in London where Sancta Clara’s fellow Franciscan and secretary, Thomas Bullaker, lived. They did not arrest Bullaker because, they said,

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they were “seeking someone else.” The pursuivants returned the following day, on September 10, and again showed no interest in arresting Bullaker, even though Bullaker told them that “there was no priest there but himself” and had an open Breviary before him. On September 11, Bullaker was arrested and a month later was put to death at Tyburn (October 12, 1642). Safeguard from Shipwreck is a very strange book. Its aim is to convince English Catholics to disregard papal bulls and join the English Protestant Church with a sound conscience. The Romanist author argues, first of all, that recusancy was imposed on English Catholics for political rather than religious reasons (same argument as Jeremy Taylor’s Gunpowder Plot sermon). Cunning Jesuits had abused the pope through misinformation and obtained papal bulls for their own benefit. By securing excommunication for Catholics who attended the English Church, Jesuits had managed to increase persecution and thus fill their coffers with money and their overseas colleges with students. There is no good reason for English Catholics to shun the English Church, the author argues, because the English Church is neither idolatrous nor heretical. The English Church respects the fundamental articles of Catholic faith and differs from Rome only with regard to indifferent matters. Even though it does not possess the “plenitude” of Catholicism, it contains no actual heresy. Thus there is no fear of “scandal” and no scruple of conscience preventing Catholics from attending English religious services. So far, our Romanist author sounds remarkably like Sancta Clara—in tone, in style of argument, even in citing Bonaventure (who affirms that it is licit to pray to God “here and everywhere”) and especially in promoting friendly persuasion (“civill conversing”) rather than military force as the best means to convert a kingdom.94 Would friendly discourse, the author exclaims, not “have been more consonant to truth and charitie, and lesse displeasing or odious to our State of England, then [sic] to suggest that they are idolatrous hereticks?” Unmistakably, the author’s mild approach to the English Church and personal patriotism call to mind Sancta Clara’s own approach in both Deus, natura, gratia and Apologia episcoporum. In the effort to convince Roman Catholics to worship in the English Church and disregard papal bulls of recusancy, however, the author, next, quite unexpectedly, launches into a vindictive and detailed attack on Sancta Clara. As proof that the pope is easily abused and thus that papal bulls

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must be disregarded, the author wants to show that any rotten scoundrel can obtain a papal bull to suit his own cynical ends. As evidence, the author cites the recent case of “one Francis Damport, alias a Sancta Clara,” who “being in London and having written a booke (called Deus, Natura et Gratia) which being disliked by one Day, a Franciscan, and through the same dislike at Rome, being there called into the Inquisition, was so much displeased with his Holiness and the said Day; that he publiquely jeered the Pope; saying that whereas before he thought him infallible (which he never thought to my knowledge) now he saw that he was fallible as other men were.”95 Let us note that the author’s first charge against Sancta Clara is that, following Rome’s rejection of his work, Sancta Clara stated publicly that he denied papal infallibility. Let us also note that the author claims to have a very intimate knowledge of Sancta Clara’s private thoughts, since he claims to have known that Sancta Clara actually never believed in papal infallibility. The charge continues and gets “worse”: And indeavouring revenge against the said Day, substituted a most ignorant and lewd man one George Perrot (his ordinary Broker in seditious matters) to goe with the said a Sancta Clara his instructions to Signior Gregory Panzani then the Popes Agent in London; accusing the said Day with much zealous hypocrisie, that he had put forth certaine pictures to the hurt of God’s Church and to the scandall of Protestants. After went a Sancta Clara cum tanta gravitate, seconding with an abominable deale of zeale and authoritie (having then got himself to be provinciall) the complaint of the said Perrot. Hereupon the said Signior with the said a Sancta Clara’s sollicitor, Luke Wadding, an Irishman in Rome, complaines to the Pope: and obtaines upon the former mens suggestions, a terrible Bull against the said Day being never cited to answer, admonished, or knowing anything thereof. The Bull being come to the said a Sancta Clara his lodging on Fleet Street and safe in his deske, he did me the honour to shew me the same. Which I read, and asking the said a Sancta Clara why he procured it, he told me, for the said Day his putting forth of the said pictures, who likewise said, that the said Day knew nothing of the same: and therefore desired me to be silent.96

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According to the author, Sancta Clara procured a papal bull condemning his own defenseless confrère Nicholas Day, simply because Day had objected to Deus, natura, gratia. With his accomplices George Perrot, Gregorio Panzani, and Luke Wadding, Sancta Clara had cynically invented some offense on Day’s part, accusing him of promoting idolatrous images.97 And although Sancta Clara, the author concedes, never promulgated the bull against Day but kept it “dead in his desk,” no doubt “through the remorse and sting of his own conscience,” Sancta Clara’s very success in obtaining the bull through devious means attests to the unjust character of Roman proceedings and thus to the nullity of papal bulls generally. The author’s attack on Sancta Clara continues for four more pages. Over and beyond Sancta Clara’s “high misdemeanor” of abusing the pope by obtaining a bull to stop Day’s idolatrous images, the author attacks Sancta Clara for reacting defiantly when his book was questioned by the Inquisition. Sancta Clara, he reports, “told divers persons that there was never an able man in Rome” and dismissed the idea that the Pope and Cardinals were fit men with a contemptuous gesture of the hand, calling them “slight and weake fellows.”98 Worse, Sancta Clara “added that he was writing a booke (conceiving as it should seeme, the whole Church to be weake, and to want his helpe) wherein he would shew, what Rules generall Councels ought to observe in declaring matters of faith; which rules (as he said) not observed, the Councell should not be held lawfull. Oh abominable presumption and ambition! Let any man judge whether this man be not descending to Lucifer, who will presume to be copartner with the Holy Spirit in directing and teaching God’s church?”99 Sancta Clara, in short, is utterly unmasked. Far from being the good papist that everyone assumes him to be, Sancta Clara defied Rome and the pope, used Roman proceedings cunningly to stop the proliferation of idolatrous images, denied papal infallibility, and planned to teach Rome how to regulate general councils. He planned to prove that general councils are binding only if they satisfy very stringent criteria. He arrogantly presumed to reform the Roman Church by promoting conciliarism. Sancta Clara, it appears, is a most derelict papist—really no papist at all. He felt little regard for the pope and wished to reform Rome along distinctly Protestant lines. And while the Romanist author calls on God to stop Sancta Clara’s “hereticall humour,”100 Featley in his commentary comes to Sancta Clara’s

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defense! Is it charitable of this anonymous priest, Featley asks, to “condemn Sancta Clara to black darkness forever?” Indeed “what has Sancta Clara done that in the uncharitable censure of this priest Lucifer must have him?” Implicitly, no Protestant would be so judgmental and excessive towards a fellow Christian. Featley points out, moreover, that Sancta Clara’s project of “drawing some Rules out of the Scriptures and the writings of the ancient Fathers For the direction of generall Councils in declaring matters of faith” may be a “capitall crime” to papists, but hardly to Protestants.101 And “what else,” Featley pursues, “hath this Priest against him?” The main charge is that Sancta Clara “hath paraphrased upon the Articles of Religion established in the Church of England, and shewed in what sense and how a good Romane Catholique may with a safe conscience subscribe to them all, though eighteen of them shoot point blanck at their Trent faith and pierce it through and through.” In other words, Sancta Clara’s paraphrase implies that Trent does not define Catholic faith. Moreover, Featley adds, a bit perplexed, “doth this Priest himself doe lesse? who paraphraseth upon the Oath of Allegiance and Supremacie, and sheweth in what sense a Romane Catholique may take both, though the former directly renounce the Popes temporall, and the latter the spirituall power?” 102 Featley’s perplexity is understandable since he has somehow been maneuvered into defending Sancta Clara as a reasonable (crypto-Protestant) moderate against the wrath of a papist. Is Safeguard from Shipwreck a “false flag”? With regard to the Jacobean oath, the unknown author of Safeguard from Shipwreck affirms that the oath may be lawfully taken by Catholics based on the arguments proffered by Preston and Sir William Howard, “who have so substantially wrote of the same with explanations of each branch; that I thinke no wise man dares hazard his credit in going about to refute the same.”103 Alas, “weak” Catholics, the author warns, have not only “taken scandall at the Oath but sought to defame and punish those who defend it and take it”—unable in their blindness to grasp the sound arguments of “Widdrington’s” “New yeeres gift” because they have been indoctrinated against it by “envious and peevish” Jesuits. The author is willing to concede that Catholics may have legitimate scruples about swearing that the pope’s own opinion is “damnable and heretical” but argues that, in the concrete case of English Catholics confronted with the oath in England, self-preservation warrants setting such scruples aside.

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To illustrate his point, to make the case that reasonable English Catholics may take the Jacobean oath with a sound conscience, the author now cites Sancta Clara in example. Going out of his way to use a contemptuous tone, the author reveals that Sancta Clara defied papal bulls and personally took the oath: “Let him follow the example of that huge Divine a Sancta Clara (an acquaintance of mine) and take it in private before a master of Chancey, and get a Certificate thereof from him, and it will be sufficient.”104 Two facts are conveyed. First, Sancta Clara took the oath and is therefore a loyal English subject. Second, by taking the oath privately, a Roman Catholic avoids setting a scandalous example and avoids passing judgment on the oath in an absolute sense. The king’s government requires concrete loyalty here and now, not some kind of definitive theological statement. The government wishes to cooperate with Roman Catholics as individual citizens and wishes to avoid persecution. Conversely, those on the Roman side who urge martyrdom and those on the government side who insist on public oaths collaborate histrionically with Jesuits to increase division and persecution. With regard to the oath of supremacy, does the Romanist author of Safeguard from Shipwreck differ from Sancta Clara? At first blush, it seems that the author argues diametrically against Sancta Clara’s project of corporate reunion, since he emphasizes that Rome and Canterbury are two distinct churches. According to the author, Roman Catholics may safely take the oath of supremacy because the oath simply affirms a fact, namely, that the English monarch is the supreme governor of the English Protestant Church. The author insists that the Protestant Church of England is not continuous with the Catholic Church but was started as its own new institution under Queen Elizabeth when Parliament “curtailed” the Mass. Thus the oath of supremacy was lawful to Roman Catholics “until the abrogation of masse and perfect establishment of the new Protestant church within this realm.”105 With this historic beginning, a new, Elizabethan oath of supremacy became required, affirming that the English Church is its own distinct Protestant ecclesia and that the English sovereign, rather than Parliament or anyone else, is empowered to govern it as its supreme head.106 Apparently unaware of the irony, Featley, in his commentary, fiercely rejects “Green’s” claim that the Church of England is new. Instead, he finds himself in the awkward position of defending Laud’s own basic position that the Church of England is fully continuous with the medieval English

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Church and fully Catholic. As though echoing Laud, Featley insists that the English Church is the same apostolic church that it has always been, only purged of Romish idolatry and reformed to its pristine episcopal state.107 Featley also rejects the argument that the Elizabethan oath of supremacy differs from the Henrician oath.108 Not only do the two oaths say the same thing, but they both apply to the same English Church. How does the Romanist author negotiate the clause that requires Roman Catholics to abjure the jurisdiction of any “foreign” prince or prelate? The author explains that the word “foreign” has at least two meanings: “foreign” in a geographical/national sense, and “foreign” in a communitarian or ecclesiastical sense. If Roman Catholics take “foreign” in the second sense, they affirm no falsehood when they swear that they grant no religious jurisdiction to anyone “foreign,” since the pope is not foreign to them, who indeed belong to the pope’s own religion and church. Is the solution original, surprising, without precedent? The author concedes that it is, but so what? Is it therefore false or scandalous? 109 It may be original, but it works—it allows Roman Catholics safely to take the oath of supremacy “without equivocation or mental reservation.” Thus the author is convinced (like Sancta Clara, as Featley earlier remarked) that a far-fetched but nonetheless probable interpretation is no less truthful than a more intuitively obvious interpretation, at long as it is defensible. Thanks to the author’s ingenious exegesis, Roman Catholics who take the oath of supremacy comply with the three criteria that are required for an oath to be truthful. They do not lie when they affirm that the king is the “only Supreame Governor” of the Church of England, nor do they affirm it rashly or unjustly.110 The author concludes by “rejoycing” that he has found a way for Roman Catholics “to prevent their own ruin with a safe conscience” and points out that “Sir John Winter and other men of estates have lately taken the same.”111 In effect, the author has extended Preston’s approach to the oath of allegiance to the more challenging case of the oath of supremacy. Moreover, he has relied on the same probabilist axiom that “in doubtfull words” penal laws must be “taken in the more favorable sense.”112 He preemptively rejects “whisperings” against him and thanks God for inspiring him to help Roman Catholics by “counseling and instructing” them to perform a “lawful” act, even perhaps a “meritorious act”—or so the author

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would affirm, he says, if he were not afraid of provoking more anger.113 In the final analysis, a Roman Catholic who takes the oath of supremacy acts not only lawfully but well, reasoning with God’s assistance about what best promotes God’s purpose in a given context. The author himself, with God’s grace, will practice what he preaches, granted that he will remain open to counterarguments. He begs those who are unwilling to follow his advice not to judge him or be “scandalized” but to honor the apostle’s exhortation: “he that eateth not, let him not despise him that eateth.” The author acknowledges that not all souls are alike and that different Roman Catholics will reach different conclusions. The question, he emphasizes, is not to determine what course of action is the most perfect or safest absolutely, but to recognize that, given the circumstances, each person must come to a private decision: “Let everyone looke and dive into his owne actions, and not into other mens.”114 What matters absolutely is simply not to act against one’s conscience, since this would be “to carry a continual hell” within—“the greatest of all earthly miseries.” The purpose of Safeguard from Shipwreck is thus to show that the oath of supremacy, like the oath of allegiance, is not so absolutely forbidden by God’s law or God’s church that it cannot be justified by prudence given the conditions in England. Featley energetically rejects the author’s conclusion, most especially his method of “paraphrase,” and goes to great effort to prove that no Roman Catholic may take the oath of supremacy without committing perjury. In Featley’s eyes, as in Rome’s eyes, someone like Sir John Winter is either a perjurer or no longer a Roman Catholic. Thus while Featley commends the “learned and intelligent Romanist” author of Safeguard from Shipwreck for declaring that the Protestant church is free from idolatry and that the two English oaths are justifiable by God’s law, he denies that a Christian is ever free to conceal his true religion. Citing the holy examples of Valentinian, Auxentius, and Theodoret, Featley urges Roman Catholics, in effect, to embrace martyrdom. Featley, in short, stumbles into contradiction: “Let us,” he concludes, “warme our zeale at the embers of these holy martyrs and Confessours and be ever mindful of the holy Apostles exhortation, Have no fellowship at all with the workes of darknesse.” Now as intransigent as the most intransigent Jesuit, Featley has penned Bullaker’s own defense against his antiroyalist, antiepiscopalian Puritan prosecutors. Was Featley baited? 115

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Apart from praising martyrs and defending Sancta Clara’s “hereticall humor” against his fellow papist’s uncharitable judgment, Featley took issue, significantly, with two key Roman Catholic doctrines endorsed in Safeguard from Shipwreck. First, whereas Safeguard from Shipwreck assumes that general councils are infallible if abuse is prevented, Featley’s commentary points out that general councils cannot ever be infallible. Second, whereas Safeguard invokes supererogation to argue that, since supererogatory acts are optional, Catholics cannot be required to sacrifice their lives and patrimony for the sake of avoiding “scandal,” Featley’s commentary denies that there are such things as supererogatory acts. 116 Implicitly, the Church of England, in Featley’s view, is safely prevented from regressing back to union with Rome by its sensible skepticism towards Church councils (article 21) and by its doctrinal rejection of religious orders (ar ticle 14). Coincidentally, as we will see, both the infallibility of Church councils and the transcendental importance of supererogation will constitute the focus of Sancta Clara’s next two publications. Curiously, the author’s argument in favor of the oath of supremacy is less foreign to Sancta Clara’s reunionist project than first appears. Among Windebank’s papers of 1633, there is a scribbled note in Sancta Clara’s hand that discusses Parliament’s abolition of the Mass, asking whether indeed Parliament was actually authorized to do so.117 It is clear in retrospect that the question of the Mass presented a special obstacle and that one option was to contest Parliament’s authority in religious matters. In the second edition of Deus, natura, gratia, Sancta Clara, as we saw, put new emphasis on the evil of schism and placed new responsibility on English Protestants for ending it. In a later treatise on schism, Sancta Clara will explicitly date the beginning of the English schism to Parliament’s rejection of the Mass, rather than to Henry VIII’s act of supremacy or to the beginning of Catholic recusancy.118 By August 1642, when Goring in Portsmouth was besieged by Parliament troops and Charles had raised his standard at Nottingham, English episcopalians and Roman Catholics alike had powerful reasons to rally to Charles’s defense and to the defense of the oath of supremacy that legally empowered the king to overrule Parliament in religious matters. By the same token, it was no longer advantageous for anyone in the king’s party to stress the proximity of the English Church to the Roman Church. Roy-

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alists had an immediate stake in distancing themselves from what was perceived to be Laud’s project of incremental reunion with Rome. Safeguard from Shipwreck, appearing mysteriously in September 1642 as a sort of spoil of war following Goring’s surrender of papist-infested Portsmouth, articulated the view that the Church of England is (1) radically distinct from Rome and (2) governed solely by Charles as its supreme head and not by Parliament. In other words, under the guise of urging papists to disregard papal directives for the sake of survival, the author of Safeguard from Shipwreck put forth a manifesto of the royalist position. Charles’s newly prominent advisor, Edward Hyde, explicitly staked his allegiance to Charles on this constitutional basis, as did Hyde’s close friend William Chillingworth, “London petitioner.”119 Hyde, moreover, was a friend of Laud and had been in Laud’s inner chamber, as we know, when the mysterious Mr. Hunt came to visit Laud regarding new revelations about Laud’s conversations with priests and with Sancta Clara in particular. By August 1642, Hyde sought creative ways to unify moderate Catholics and Protestant episcopalians around the king—precisely what Parliament feared that Safeguard from Shipwreck would achieve. Even more significantly, Safeguard from Shipwreck depicts Laud’s collaborator, the dangerous Franciscan friar Sancta Clara, as the pope’s opponent. Who was the author who violently denounced Sancta Clara as a scoundrel, yet championed Sancta Clara’s “mild” view of the English Church, praised William Howard’s defense of the oath of allegiance, and framed a clever argument in favor of the oath of supremacy? Who was it who knew Sancta Clara intimately enough to testify (1) that Sancta Clara had never believed in papal infallibility, (2) that Sancta Clara had privately taken the Jacobean oath, (3) that Sancta Clara kept a papal bull in his desk drawer in great secret, (4) that Sancta Clara had started to write a book on Church councils, and, finally, (5) that Sancta Clara had in fact left England in compliance with the king’s banishment proclamation (February 13, 1642)?120 Whoever the author was, his account of Sancta Clara’s “jeering the Pope” implied unmistakably that Laud had been the successful seducer—winning the Franciscan over to the English side, not vice versa. By September 1642, Laud’s friends must have appreciated how potentially damaging the revelations of Laud’s interactions with Sancta Clara

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were to the imprisoned archbishop. Jeremy Taylor, who in 1642 published his own defense of jure divino episcopacy, had a debt of gratitude to Laud. A second loyal friend of Laud’s was Kenelm Digby, who, in August 1642, was “expected any houre in Portsmouth” to join Goring’s rebellion against Parliament. Laud’s godson, William Chillingworth, in turn, petitioned Parliament to make peace with the king and support the established church.121 Sir William Howard and Dom Price had also collaborated closely with Laud and owed him a debt for his protection. Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary methods. Did friends of Laud perhaps concoct Safeguard from Shipwreck in the hope of showing that Laud’s interaction with the Franciscan Sancta Clara was really a conspiracy against Rome? Whoever “Green” was, he was brought before Parliament on September 10, 1642, and never heard of again. On September 11, Thomas Bullaker, as we saw, was arrested and tried for treason. He freely admitted that he was a priest. He refused “in conscience” to declare that priesthood as such made him guilty of treason. He accused Parliament of treason against the king and challenged the legitimacy of Parliament’s jurisdiction in religious matters. Bullaker was exonerated by the jury, but the judge overruled the verdict and condemned him to death. Bullaker was executed at Tyburn on October 12, 1642, just days before Safeguard from Shipwreck was made available to the public with its eloquent concluding defense, by Featley, of holy martyrs. Henry (Paul) Heath, who had been Sancta Clara’s student in theology, was executed on April 17, 1643.122 Arthur (Francis) Bell, who had been definitor with Sancta Clara in 1629 and had worked hand in hand with him as confessor of the nuns of St. Elizabeth’s, was executed on December 11, 1643. Violently wrenched from life, they left the double image of martyrs and traitors, their butchered hearts held up for loathing, their entrails cast to the flames, their quarters exposed on London Bridge. The French ambassador’s associate, François de Marsys, send his manservant to dip napkins in the martyrs’ blood and to collect charred relics. Like “the spars of a shipwreck” used “to recover somewhat from the deluge of time,”123 fragments of bone and bits of testimonials were dispersed through Catholic channels. By 1646, gruesome details of the martyrs’ trials and deaths had been woven into a narrative and conveyed to readers on the Continent.124 In a personal tribute to his brethren, Sancta Clara developed the habit of

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“commending himself daily” to Paul Heath—Brother Paul of Saint Magdalene, as Henry Heath had named himself upon joining the Franciscan order.125 Heath had left an unpublished manuscript of Soliloquies behind. His voice now reached Sancta Clara through written meditations on the mystery of Saint Francis’s side wound. “I hide my heart in thy wounded heart,” the martyred Heath had written presciently, “my delight, my sweetness, my all.”

E L E V E N

Debate over Infallibility

As Safeguard from Shipwreck revealed, Sancta Clara had been planning to write a treatise on general councils since at least 1642. Sancta Clara’s initial aim was bold—to “shew what Rules Generall Councels ought to observe in declaring matters of faith” and to “exonerate Catholics from abiding by Councils in which proper rules had not been followed.”1 Between 1642 and 1648, Sancta Clara’s project of examining Church councils grew into a comprehensive treatise on the grounds and decision-procedures determining Catholic faith. Franciscan authors were pledged, as we know, to write books only in response to a pastoral challenge. What pastoral concern prompted Systema fidei, Sancta Clara’s magnum opus? A number of details suggest that Sancta Clara composed whole sections of Systema fidei while in France. The content of Systema fidei attests to Sancta Clara’s familiarity with Thomas White’s De mundo (1642) and with Kenelm Digby’s Two Treatises (1644), and to his exposure to Descartes’s philosophy. Sancta Clara also cites his “good friend” Henry Holden and evokes “applause” at Holden’s public disputations at the Sorbonne, which suggests that he was perhaps in the audience. Sancta Clara may have joined Queen Henriette-Marie’s court-in-exile at the Louvre or at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in late 1644. On the title page of Systema fidei, 278

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Sancta Clara describes himself again as belonging to “the Queen’s chaplains.” Henriette-Marie was eager to maintain her status as queen-consort in exile, with an English entourage.2 In any event, in October 1645, Sancta Clara was in Evreux, Normandy, with a sufficiently finished manuscript of Systema fidei to be able to present it to various French theologians and doctors for official approval. Sancta Clara’s friend Francis Windebank was in Paris in late 1644. Sancta Clara reports in the appendix of Systema fidei that Windebank converted to Roman Catholicism in the summer of 1645 and that he (Sancta Clara) was at Windebank’s bedside when Windebank died (September 1, 1646). By November 1646, however, Sancta Clara was back in Flanders. If, then, Sancta Clara stayed in France for a protracted visit and immersed himself in White’s and Digby’s scientific milieu in Paris, it was likely between December 1644 and November 1646. One report, undocumented, claims that Digby experimented on Sancta Clara’s “ague” with his famous “sympathetic powder.” 3 In Evreux, in October 1645, the manuscript of Systema fidei received the endorsements of two Paris doctors. The first was from Louis Martel, who was at the time prior of the nearby Cistercian monastery of La Noé. The second was from Jean-Baptiste Du Souchey, moderator at the College of Evreux.4 On the same day, October 22, Sancta Clara also received the endorsement of Edmund Vinot, provincial minister of the Franciscan Recollect province of France. Vinot’s approval was given at the nearby Recollect convent of Vernon, which had been founded in 1248 by Louis IX and where Louis IX’s scandalous granddaughter Marguerite lay buried. In the fourteenth century, King Edward of England had torched Vernon, and the Duke of Lancaster had sacked it. Vernon had come under English rule in 1364, only to be recovered by the French in 1364, and lost again to the English in 1419, before being finally settled in French hands. Throughout, the Franciscan community persisted, tending the sick, praying for the dead, collecting alms for the poor.5 Perhaps in response to the upheavals in England and the martyrdom of his brethren, Sancta Clara had become passionately interested in antiquities.6 The walk from Evreux to Vernon took Sancta Clara through a richly historical landscape. The wooded hills and gracefully sloping valley had been the cradle of many families of Cheshire, including of Gilbert de

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Venables and of Richard de Vernon, palatine barons of the murderous Hugh Lupus. When Sancta Clara reached Vernon, he likely entered the collegiate church of Notre-Dame to see the tomb of Richard de Vernon’s father, William. Under the whiteness of the marble, the body still heaved with torment.7 The inscription asked the visitor to pray for William’s soul, that it be received in paradise.8 Once a powerful baron, William de Vernon now depended for his salvation on the prayers of anonymous and obscure Christians who descended perhaps from his victims. Through patience, God’s church had instituted forgiveness to warlord and serf alike, to French and English, Swede and Saxon—men of blood, tribal, half pagan, whose children and grandchildren had miraculously intermarried and lost some of their violent ways and slowly grown more civilized, threatened at every step by reversion whenever fratricidal conflict flared up again uncontrollably. Despite terrible crimes, despite corruption and sin, God’s church had forged a fragile pathway towards the dignity of personhood, awakening a thirst for justice.9 The reason to emphasize Sancta Clara’s French endorsements is that Systema fidei emerged out of a distinctly English debate. Like a pollinating bee, Sancta Clara carried English concerns across the Channel to be solved in a French environment where conciliar theory had long been valued. Whereas French theologians had accumulated special expertise in Church councils, English theologians were more particularly focused on debating Roman claims of infallibility, especially after Chillingworth’s 1637 refutation of Edward Knott and Laud’s 1639 publication of his conference with Fisher.10 Between 1640 and September 1643, the date at which Lucius Cary (Lord Falkland) rode to his death in a blast of Parliamentarian bullets, Chillingworth and his friends at Great Tew conducted an intense debate with Thomas White about Roman infallibility.11 As part of this debate, White published his late friend William Rushworth’s Dialogues in 1640 in Paris. Falkland’s own treatise was published at Oxford in 1645, while White’s response and Falkland’s reply in return were not published until 1651. White published a second edition of Rushworth’s Dialogues in Paris in 1648 and an augmented edition with a chapter added by himself in 1654. Most of the debate, however, appears to have circulated in manuscript form prior to 1648. Sancta Clara, possibly through White, appears to have been versed in it. We will see, moreover, that Falkland cited Sancta

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Clara’s own words against White’s theory, implicitly calling upon Sancta Clara to act as moderator. Sancta Clara’s confrère George Perrot confirms that the challenge of Roman infallibility prompted Sancta Clara’s investigation not only into Church councils but into the very architecture of Christian faith. According to Perrot, Systema fidei aimed at examining the authority of Church councils because Roman Catholic claims regarding conciliar authority constituted a key stumbling block for English Protestants who were contemplating a return to the Roman Church.12 The core issue was really the question of infallibility. Lucius Cary and his friends balked at the strong claims of Church infallibility that were made by Edward Knott. Not only did Knott insist that “the Catholique visible church cannot err,” but he also denied that any points of doctrine are less fundamental than others and insisted that Catholic infallibility applied equally to all Church teachings.13 Responding to Knott, Chillingworth conceded at most that particular churches have a “conditional authority” to settle controversies of faith, as long as they base their judgments strictly on scripture.14 Chillingworth, in effect, solved the problem by equating ecclesiastic authority with judicial authority, putting them on a par: “I hope you will not deny that Judges have the authority to determine Criminal and Civil controversies; and yet I hope you will not say, that they are absolutely infallible in their determinations.”15 According to Chillingworth, just as civil judges have, as it were, sufficient (but not infallible) authority to settle civil disputes as long as they proceed according to law, so ecclesiastics have sufficient (but not infallible) authority to decide religious controversies as long as they abide by scripture as the “rule of Faith.” In refuting Knott, Chillingworth also pointed out that Rome’s procedure for settling controversies was far from settled. Against Knott’s arrogant claim that Protestants could never achieve unity because they admitted no infallible external authority in case of controversy, Chillingworth stressed that “Roman Catholics disagree touching pretended means of agreement.” According to Chillingworth, Roman Catholics could not even agree about what exactly in the Roman Church is infallible. With delight and malice, Chillingworth challenged Roman Catholics to face their own state of confusion: “Some [of you] say [that] the pope alone, without a Council, may determine controversies. But others deny it.

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Some say [that] a General Councell without a Pope may do so. Others deny this. Some, [that] both [a pope and a General Council] in conjunction are infallible determinors. Others again deny it. Lastly, some among you hold the Acceptance of the Decrees of Councils by the Universal Church to be the only way to decide controversies—which others deny, by denying this Church to be infallible.”16 Chillingworth again refuted Rome’s claim of infallibility in a letter to his ex-friend John Lewgar. John Lewgar, whom Sancta Clara knew well and had brought to see Panzani in June 1635, had converted to Roman Catholicism partly as a result of Chillingworth’s influence.17 Lewgar now rebuked Chillingworth for giving up the perfect certainty that Rome alone could provide. Chillingworth replied that “wise humility” had convinced him that “Scripture and Universal Tradition” are a firmer and safer foundation for faith than the illusion of Roman infallibility. According to Chillingworth, there was no basis for the doctrine of Roman infallibility other than “sinfull credulity.”18 If Lewgar could produce a single good reason for the doctrine, a reason that would not “vanish into uncertainty” under scrutiny, Chillingworth would yield. Implicitly, Chillingworth was quite convinced that no rational case could be made in favor of Roman infallibility over and beyond the firm certainty that scripture afforded to all sincere Christians. Is it “a crime,” he asked Lewgar, “to imploy all my reason upon the justification of the infallibility of the Roman Church, and to find it impossible to be justified?”19 Lord Falkland remarked that the Roman claim of infallibility is essentially paradoxical since we can never infallibly know that the Church is infallible.20 Falkland agreed with Chillingworth that it was safer “to assume Scripture as infallible guide and judge of controversy.” He saw no good reason why councils, in particular, should be accorded infallibility: “If the infallibility of Councils be a point of faith, I desire to know why it is so?”21 Like Chillingworth, Falkland stressed that the status of general councils in Roman Catholic thinking raised more questions than the councils were meant to solve: “Who is to call them? The Pope or the king? Who are to have voices in them? Bishops only? Or bishops and priests?” Far from serving as an infallible means to solve controversies, Falkland concluded, councils could hardly qualify even as a credible means to solve controversies: “I doubt whether Councells are fit deciders of Questions.”22

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An equally formidable challenge came from William Laud’s Conference with Fisher, published in 1639 in the hope of proving Laud’s Protestantism. In refuting “the Jesuite Fisher,” Laud argued extensively against Roman infallibility and against the infallibility of Church councils in particular. The only infallible rule of faith, Laud’s Conference affirms, is scripture. Laud concedes that he is “reluctant to oppose what is concluded by a lawful, General Council,” but scripture alone serves as the ultimate standard of truth. What is lawfully concluded by a general council is true, Laud explains, because it is verified by scripture, not because the Church declares it.23 Even Bellarmine, Laud points out, concedes that “the Church can add no certainty, no firmness to the Word of God revealing it.”24 According to Laud, moreover, while God’s promise of divine assistance to the Church must be interpreted soberly to mean that infallible assistance was granted to the apostles, only “continual and fitting assistance” was granted to their successors.25 Consequently, the source and extent of the authority of general councils must be weighed carefully. The dilemma, Laud says, is as follows. If, on the one hand, we say that a general council cannot err, we risk depriving the Church of the awareness “that it may need a remedy and without a cause to seek it.” If, on the other hand, we say that a general council can err, we seem to “expose the members of the Church to an uncertainty and wavering in the faith” and to breed “unquiet spirits” who will dismiss Church councils generally, as indeed Puritans do.26 Is there a reasonable middle way? According to Laud, a general council is made up of a small group of fallible men who represent the greater Christian community by delegation. Since the delegates are fewer in number than the greater Christian community as a whole, they are more liable to error, not less—which poses a special problem because they have the same binding authority as the whole community.27 Laud agrees that a general council benefits from the “continual and fitting” assistance of the Holy Ghost, but not all of the determinations of a council benefit in the same degree from this supernatural assistance.28 As long as a general council “suffers itself to be led by the Spirit of Truth that is in Scripture” and refrains from fallible human interpretations, it cannot err with regard to what is necessary for salvation.29 Fortunately, the wider Christian community, possessed of scripture and therefore of the true principles of faith, is able to keep a sort of vigilant watch over the

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council’s determinations.30 Thus by tirelessly comparing the council’s conclusions to the supernatural authority of scripture, the Christian community as a whole secures “infallibility” for God’s church while avoiding the drawbacks of declaring dogmatically that general councils cannot err. Laud is careful to insist that the fallibility of the Church even in its general councils does not mean that the Church must not be obeyed. As Laud puts it, infallibility is not necessary for governing.31 An important consequence of Laud’s theory, however, is that provincial councils can (and must) correct the errors of a general council as soon as these errors are recognized, thus “reforming” God’s church locally. A good example, Laud says, is the error introduced into the Church by the Council of Constance, where it was declared that Communion under both kinds is not necessary. Appealing to the infallible rule of faith, namely, scripture, the Church of England was able to recognize and correct the innovation and restore obedience to God.32 As for the recent and heretical doctrine of papal infallibility, including the claim that papal confirmation is required for a council’s conclusions to be infallible, Laud condemns it as downright absurd, pointing out that he has personally “heard learned and judicious Roman Catholics” utterly condemn it. Both Jacobus Almain and Alphonsus à Castro, for example, marshal strong arguments against it.33 Moreover, Laud says, Jesuits assert papal infallibility against their own conscience. If they really believed in papal infallibility, they would work at nothing else but at establishing it, since it would end all controversies. Instead, Jesuits will go down in infamy for having made the pope, a mere man, into the rule and author of faith.34 Although Laud and his reconverted godson, Chillingworth, saw no good reason to grant infallibility to general councils, Thomas White, friend and mentor of Laud’s newly Romanist friend Kenelm Digby, initiated his own debate over general councils in Rushworth’s Dialogues (1640).35 In the dialogues, “Uncle” and “Nephew” discuss various aspects of the question. First, is it lawful for a “private man to doubt in himself and breed doubts in others” concerning the determinations of a general council? White’s interlocutor, cast as “Nephew” in the Dialogues, hesitates to deny it out of concern for defending freedom of conscience. “Nephew” concedes that it may be unwise to oppose great authorities, but “whether there be any obligation of conscience” to submit to great authorities, he “knows not.” Indeed,

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if a person believes that the conclusions of a general council are mistaken, there may be an obligation of conscience to oppose the council’s authority “to the utmost of one’s power.”36 “Uncle” responds that we are obligated in conscience to follow reason. Reason tells us to distrust our own biases and to submit to conclusions reached by legitimate authorities acting on the basis of evidence and agreed principles.37 “Nephew” then objects that we do not believe things at will. Therefore “no man ought to be forced to believe this or that” but should, at the very least, be allowed to suspend judgment.38 “Uncle” responds that the Church knows what is necessary for salvation and that her authority in this regard is simply greater than any other authority or combination of authorities. Thus, according to White, general councils are simply the highest and most responsible authority available to us in case of controversy: “Infallible or not, the determinations of General Councils are the best available and ought to be respected.”39 Since there “can be no higher judgment on earth than a General Council,” and since the Church excommunicates only those who reject the determinations of general councils (not those, more broadly, who defy papal briefs), it follows that general councils provide a sufficiently rational, fair, and effective way to settle controversies.40 Are all of the Church’s determinations, however, equally necessary, or are some determinations necessary “in a lower degree,” such as the pious use of images or the institution of religious orders?41 White’s answer is subtle, based on the premise that the Church has a mission not only to teach the principles of Christian virtue that lead to salvation but also to convince us of the value of Christian virtue and of its practical possibility.42 Thus while White distinguishes between Church doctrines that are of “Absolute Necessity” and Church doctrines that are merely “Highly Convenient,” he is inclined to excommunicate Puritans who selfishly reject the use of images, the cult of saints, and the supererogatory example of religious orders on the grounds that such Puritans break with Christian charity by depriving the “poor common people” of “most efficacious means” to bring them to the virtuous life, indeed, to “perswade” us all “to labour for our eternall happiness.”43 In the conclusion of dialogue 1, White considers what it would take to heal the English schism. He concedes that the Roman Church must actively reform moral abuses in both its clergy and its religious orders, and

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also urge Roman Catholics and Roman Catholic institutions to comply with civil authorities, pay civil taxes, and pledge their loyalty to civil governments. Nonetheless, White insists that it is up to the Church of England to take the proper steps to reunite with Rome. White’s reason is simple and reveals his basic doctrine regarding infallibility: “For the Catholicke Church essentially subsists on this principle, that she has received her doctrine from Jesus Christ by word of mouth, and succession from hand to hand, which cannot fail.”44 Rather than adhere to apostolic doctrine, Protestants “build their doctrine onely on their own (at most probable) interpretations of Scripture.” They themselves acknowledge that their interpretations are fallible and thus liable to be replaced by more clever or more fashionable ones at a later date. If the Roman Church were to “yield to the Church of England” in any point whatsoever that is not apostolically transmitted, she would “forsake her onely principle whereon relyes all her faith and belief.”45 God’s church, in fine, cannot err because it possesses God’s true, stable teaching, transmitted continuously through the ages without corruption. White also wrote an “Answer to Lord Falklands discourse of infallibil46 ity.” Falkland (whose two brothers were Roman Catholic priests and five sisters were nuns) vehemently contested the claim that Rome had faithfully preserved God’s revelation from human error since apostolic times, much less that Rome alone of all Christian churches possessed the unerring authority of tradition.47 To start with, Rome has maintained its supremacy by violent means “so contrary to those by which at first it was propagated”—by damning and burning so many at the stake.48 Moreover, far from serving as the divinely appointed steward of an immutable tradition, Rome has repeatedly introduced new doctrines by using general councils to define new heresies. A case in point is the doctrine of mortalism, which in the present time, 1640, cannot be held without heresy. Yet Pope John XXII, who held it, cannot be branded a heretic because the doctrine was officially allowed in his day.49 How can Rome claim to rely on tradition as a constant standard with which to judge Christian truth if what is tolerated in one generation is condemned as heresy in another? It is more reasonable to admit that Rome has no infallibility of any kind and that all sorts of human errors have crept into its body of doctrines over the centuries. What really occurred, Falkland said, is that doctrines that were initially considered by tradition to be merely probable were deemed over time

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to be “highly convenient” doctrines. Then they were declared to be necessary doctrines, then to be so absolutely necessary that opponents of the doctrines in question were condemned as heretics and burned.50 Indeed the vaunted unity of Roman communion owes more to Rome’s fierce methods of coercion than to any stability of tradition through time. All in all, Rome’s claim of infallibility has served to prevent Christians from adhering to the ancient Church in brotherly love and universal communion. In response, rather than defend papal infallibility as such or the infallibility of general councils, White focuses on defending the unerring character of tradition. By definition, White explains in his “Answer to Lord Falklands,” tradition is immune to progress, innovation.51 A cultural patrimony, for example, is transmitted from father to son through a selfreinforcing combination of word and gesture, teaching and practice. In the case of God’s gospel, transmission is especially secure. Because God’s gospel is supernatural in content, it is more reliably kept intact through the ages than other forms of patrimony, as it is more inherently refractory to the damage caused by human reason.52 What White means is that there is less tendency, in the case of God’s gospel, to rationalize and distort the content since the content does not result from human reason to begin with. Tendered freely by God to the unlearned and the learned alike so that all alike may seek heaven, the Gospel was entrusted from the start to the blind fidelity of human memory rather than to the analytic powers of human reason.53 The “efficacy of Tradition,” according to White, stems, moreover, from the fact that “Christian doctrine is not a speculative knowledge instituted for the delight of man to entertain his understanding,” but an art of living, “a rule of attaining unto eternall bliss, a practicall doctrine whose end is to informe our action.”54 Just as a physical body recognizes what is alien to it and fights off external agents that would perturb it and alter its nature, so the Church, “quickened by the Spirit of God,” recognizes and wards off any external threat that would damage or alter its apostolic faith.55 Impenetrable to human reason and genetically immune to foreign pathogens, God’s gospel has conserved over time all of its divine instructions for salvation. Tradition, White concludes, is more immutably constant than the course of the sun and stars.56 How, then, does a nonbinding belief become a binding article of faith at a later point in time?57 How does White reconcile the manifest development in time of Church doctrine with the claim that the Church believes

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and teaches only what it has received continuously and constantly from apostolic times? White answers that apostolic doctrines were initially disseminated unevenly throughout various regions of the earth. Consequently, a genuinely apostolic teaching or practice may be faithfully transmitted from father to son in one region but not be known at all in some other part of the world. Fortunately, if the universal church assembled in general council is made aware of such a doctrine and if the doctrine in question is found to be unquestionably apostolic in origin, then the doctrine is welded into Church tradition as a whole. A good example of this collective process is the gradual way in which the canonical books of scripture came to be written and to be “received into the constant beliefe of the Catholique world.”58 White’s answer, in short, is that there is no evolution in Church doctrine properly speaking. There is only a more or less incremental recovery of tradition, made possible through the work of general councils. Scripture, most notably, exemplifies the Church’s power of recovery. Implicitly, scripture is a reliable rule of faith only because tradition reliably asserts that scripture is reliable. Falkland’s answer to White’s answer, in turn, invokes the historic record in order to prove otherwise. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, Falkland objects, was utterly unknown to the early Church and only barely tolerated as a minority opinion in the Scholastic age. Yet it now threatens to be imposed by fiat on the whole Roman Church through the devious efforts of a well-organized faction pressuring the pope.59 The Arian heresy, in turn, was decided on the basis of scripture, or perhaps out of Church archives, but certainly not on the basis of any apostolic teaching.60 A further example is infant Communion. The present Roman Church teaches that infants are not to receive Communion, despite the fact that it was the well-established practice of the early Church and that Augustine considered it to be an apostolic tradition.61 The evidence against White’s theory of Roman Catholic tradition, Falkland concludes, is simply overwhelming. According to White, the invocation of saints has been taught continuously from generation to generation since the apostles, but this can be disproved. Numerous Church Fathers believed that no saint was admitted to heaven before Judgment Day. It follows that there was no solid, invariant, public, and continuous apostolic teaching regarding prayers to saints in heaven. Nicephorus Callistus, moreover, attests that prayers to the Virgin were introduced by a

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heretic five hundred years after Christ! To seal the argument, Falkland appeals to none other than Sancta Clara as his best witness: “I will rather chuse to confute this by the confession of Sancta Clara.” Falkland points out that Sancta Clara, citing Horantius in his discussion of the invocation of saints in Deus, natura, gratia, concedes that there is no precept “re corded sub evangelio” that warrants praying to saints. He speculates, furthermore, that the practice was deliberately omitted from scripture as a matter of caution, lest pagans become confused and “think themselves brought again to the worshipping of Men.”62 At the very least, the practice, Sancta Clara implies, was most certainly not preached by the apostles as necessary for salvation. How, then, did it become an apostolic doctrine? Falkland interprets Sancta Clara’s phrase sub evangelio, “under the Gospel,” to mean the apostolic age in which the Gospel was preached.63 Thus according to Falkland, Horantius and Sancta Clara concur in admitting that no doctrine of the invocation of saints was ever taught by the apostles. Did Sancta Clara mean instead that the apostles had delivered no written teaching (sub evangelio) of the doctrine, leaving room for the safer transmission of an oral teaching?64 In the context of refuting White, however, Falkland had no need to take the distinction into account since White’s defense of Church tradition affirms that scripture and tradition are coextensive in their revealed content.65 The absence of scriptural evidence for the invocation of saints suffices to refute White conclusively. White is forced to admit either that there is no continuous apostolic tradition at the basis of Rome’s doctrine, or that there exist revealed truths that are not in scripture and not published continuously since apostolic times, but held secretly. In either case, White’s particular defense of the infallibility of tradition collapses and the Roman Church is susceptible to error. Falkland’s aim is simply to convince White that Roman doctrine has not been constant and that error is possible. White’s second argument, namely, that the Roman Church cannot err because it merely teaches what it passively receives, in contrast to Protestants, who actively rely on rational speculation, does not hold. Falkland says that, rather than turn to Erasmus, whose words “will not find so much respect,” he prefers once again to turn to Sancta Clara. In Deus, natura, gratia, Sancta Clara affirms that the Roman Church, when defining points of doctrine, does not base its definitions on any new revelations, but rather “upon the ancient, lying hid in writings and words of the Apostles.”66 Sancta Clara attests, moreover,

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that this view is not his own private opinion but the “constant beliefe of Doctors.” Thus it follows from Sancta Clara’s assertion, Falkland argues, that hitherto unknown doctrines are now part of Roman faith because they were brought to light through reasoning about known apostolic doctrines, not by passively repeating what was learned and memorized (tradition). As Falkland puts it, “there are at least interpretations of what the Apostles taught, drawn forth by Reason, not received by Tradition, which makes now a part of the present Roman Religion.”67 Such a development of Roman faith, in turn, creates a “sufficient Gappe for Errors to enter at,” since nothing prevents new opinions and innovations to be introduced in the name of clarifying ancient doctrines. The Jesuit Salmeron affirms as a matter of principle that the more recent a doctor is, the more perspicuous he is likely to be, so that what lies hidden in revelation will become better and better known with time—contradicting White’s “conservation of Faith” theory directly.68 Finally, what “confutes White absolutely” is Posa’s explicit testimony that a number of Roman doctrines that were never even considered in the early Church were adopted by Church councils after generations of disputation, precisely “by conferring of Places of Scripture and Reason,” which is precisely the method that White “mislikes.”69 For Sancta Clara, to be cited so respectfully and so thoughtfully by Falkland was to be invited to puzzle out the consequences of the difference between his view and that of his teacher, White, but also to do so in light of Falkland’s observations. At Great Tew, where Falkland kept an open table and shared his library with friends and guests, modesty, moderation, and piety mattered as much as erudition and brilliance of intellect. A welcoming and inclusive circle suited to Sancta Clara’s temperament had formed organically, out of a sincere need in the hearts of its various members, ranging from Gilbert Sheldon to Thomas Hobbes, and from John Selden to William Chillingworth to Hugh Cressy, to find a personally satisfying set of beliefs. We know from one of Falkland’s most active visitors at Great Tew, Edward Hyde (future Earl of Clarendon), that Falkland had considered Catholicism deeply and never missed an opportunity to discuss religion with Catholic priests. Was it at Great Tew that Sancta Clara, who took every opportunity to visit Oxford, consulted Selden’s edition of Eadmer’s Historiae novorum? Sancta Clara’s descriptions of “moderate Catholics and Protestants” in the prefatory epistle of the second edition of Deus, natura, gratia evokes no one more than it does Falkland’s guests at Great Tew.70

T W E L V E

Systema fidei

Into the fraternal debate that was conducted back and forth across the Channel, Sancta Clara entered early (1642) and eagerly. Sometime before November 1646, when he returned to Flanders, he composed two additional chapters, on the papacy, to be included in Systema fidei as an appendix. Sancta Clara dedicated the appendix “De papatu” separately to Sir Kenelm Digby, describing Digby as “Queen Henriette-Marie’s legate to Rome,”1 which implies a date of spring or summer 1645. In the letter of dedication to Digby, Sancta Clara recounts how Francis Windebank, their common friend, had urged him (Sancta Clara) to clarify Catholic doctrine about the papacy because “no greater stumbling block” stood in the way of English Protestants returning to the Roman fold.2 By citing Windebank’s conversion to Rome in 1645, a year before Windebank’s death, and by praising Digby’s own zeal in bringing Protestants back to the Roman Church, Sancta Clara hoped perhaps to bolster Digby’s Catholic credentials and thus to help Digby’s difficult embassy to Innocent X in search of financial support for King Charles. Did Pierre Marchant, worried that Rome would take umbrage at Sancta Clara’s apparent conciliarism, encourage Sancta Clara to add a defense of the papacy to his treatise? The question suggests itself because 291

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Sancta Clara’s appendix “De papatu” examines the issue of whether Peter and Paul were both popes simultaneously—a controversial thesis that had long been defended by Anglicans but that had also recently been defended by Antoine Arnauld and by Saint-Cyran’s nephew Martin de Barcos.3 Marchant may have felt a need to isolate Sancta Clara, who had long been associated with “Blacklo,” from the charge of Jansenism. In the event, Marchant was the first to approve Sancta Clara’s appendix “De papatu” on November 25, 1646, in Ghent. By then, Marchant was aware of the struggle in Ireland between the Irish Franciscan Peter Walsh, who backed the Ormondist peace treaty, and the papal nuncio Giovanni Rinuccini, who opposed it. Rinuccini’s intransigent attitude was resented, moreover, by Henriette-Marie and Digby.4 The confrontation between Walsh and Rinuccini had grown bitter enough by 1646 that Rinuccini had excommunicated Walsh’s faction.5 As we will see, Sancta Clara’s discussion of the papacy manages to uphold the See of Peter firmly without falling into papalism. In particular, the implicitly antipapalist thesis favored by both Jansenists and Anglicans about Paul’s copapacy will be solved in a distinctly irenic way, aimed at satisfying both sides. A month after Marchant approved Sancta Clara’s appendix on the papacy, the Franciscan theologian Matthias Hauzeur approved Sancta Clara’s final manuscript in Namur, on December 25, 1646.6 Sancta Clara, in turn, felt the need to explain in writing that purely logistical factors had prevented him from returning to his French censors, Martel, Souchey, and Vinot, for approval of the “De papatu” appendix. By then, Sancta Clara explains, he had already returned to Belgium and thus was physically unable to consult them.7 Yet the impact of the budding Jansenist rift on Systema fidei must not be ignored. Indeed, the next theologian whose approval Sancta Clara secured was Valentine Randour, professor at the University of Douay and a firm champion of Roman authority against the Jansenist front emerging at Louvain. Randour approved Systema fidei on June 11, 1647, praising Sancta Clara for providing the Church with an “amulet against pestilential heresies.”8 Two months later, on August 9, 1647, Marchant enthusiastically gave his permission for the complete text of Systema fidei to go to press. Mar chant apparently met his old student in the health resort town of Spa, where they took the waters, perhaps at the Sauvenière spring favored by

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clerics and friars.9 Marchant praised Sancta Clara for his tireless labor and for succeeding in “uncovering the foundations and fundamental doctrines of the Catholic Faith.” He ordered Sancta Clara to proceed to publication “with merit of obedience.”10 In Marchant’s words, Systema fidei usefully serves God’s church by bringing “solace to the faithful, light to the erring and confusion to the obstinate.” Marchant was especially impressed by Sancta Clara’s clear demonstration that the true and supreme “cornerstone” of the Church is none other than Christ: “ipso summo Angularis lapide Christo Jesu ostenderis.” From Marchant’s point of view, Sancta Clara’s special merit was to have articulated a distinctly Franciscan vision of God’s church—wholly founded on Christ as the sole and inexhaustible “Rule of Faith.” The title page of Systema fidei summarizes the scope of Sancta Clara’s project. First and foremost, general councils will be examined and their nature and power established based on Scholastic principles, on ancient records, and on Augustine’s authority. Second, what is divine about the authority of scriptures and traditions will be explicated. Third, “the structure of Faith will be outlined.” Fourth, the distinction between fundamental doctrines and nonfundamental doctrines will be clarified. Fifth, the soul’s immortality will be ascertained based on little-known natural questions. Sixth, Trent will be vindicated. Finally, in the appendix, the divine origin of the papacy will be defended, and the question of whether Peter and Paul were both popes simultaneously will be solved. Sancta Clara, in short, clearly conceived of defending general councils as an opportunity to outline a comprehensive metatheology: “Fidei structura delineatur.”11 Systema fidei does not aim at explicating the content of Catholic faith but at clarifying how Catholic faith is known and decided. The hope is to bring the architecture of Catholic faith to light as a coherent and selfsustaining edifice suffused in every angle with divine illumination. As we will see, Systema fidei seeks to attract Anglicans both by addressing their concerns and by undermining their confidence in sola scriptura solutions. Athanasius of Alexandria is evoked on the title page to remind Protestants that all scripture must be taken into account and that no passage of scripture must be taken out of context: “Oportet omnia scripta legere, ut ex omnibus simul, non ex unico dumtaxat, judicium de Authoris Fide constitui possit.”12

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HUMAN FALLIBILITY

In the opening chapter, Sancta Clara asks, as a preliminary question, “in what sense” theologians mean it “when they investigate whether General Councils are infallible.” First, a basic axiom must be affirmed without reservation, Sancta Clara says, namely, that all human beings are fallible by nature. This is true whether human beings are taken individually or assembled in a group. Since all human beings are inherently fallible, there can be no intrinsic, a priori grounds upon which to demonstrate that general councils are infallible. Human judgments indeed are so essentially fallible, Sancta Clara insists, that they remain fallible even with God’s assistance and even when supernatural truths are taken as first principles. A proof of this statement may be furnished by drawing an analogy with physics. God lends his assistance to secondary effects in nature, yet no infinite effect is ever observed to result, such as, for example, instantaneous motion. By the same token, human judgments that are assisted by God remain human, finite, and fallible. In short, since God’s church is made up of wholly fallible beings, it cannot be denied that God’s church, as such, is fallible in all of its actions.13 Sancta Clara does not shy away from embracing the most uncompromising fallibilism—as radical as anything found in Chillingworth or at Great Tew.14 Nonetheless, Sancta Clara says, he will show in the course of the book that fallible human beings assembled in the name of God’s church and specially assisted by God do not err in act with regard to a very narrow and precise class of truths. Two key principles will frame Sancta Clara’s argument. On the one hand, we have God’s promise, explicitly recorded in scripture, that the Church does not err and will not err. The task will thus be to establish in what sense, when, and how God’s promise applies. On the other hand, we have a purely rational principle, namely, the distinction between potentiality and act. There is a critical difference between being fallible by nature and actually erring—between being inherently susceptible of committing errors and actually committing them. What is true by right may not always be true in fact. The task will thus be to inquire whether it is possible for fallible human beings to be actually preserved from error under certain circumstances. Citing Aquinas, Sancta Clara is eager to stress that God’s promise regarding the inerrancy of the Church never implies that a human assembly,

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as such, ceases to be fallible by nature. It matters, therefore, to keep in mind at all times that general councils are intrinsically fallible, since human nature, as such, cannot be changed. Chapter 2 examines a second preliminary question. What exactly is meant by the Church’s power to define truths? Some theologians, including the Jesuit Molina, deny that the present-day Church has any power to define truths. Molina’s argument is that articles of faith must be stable over time. Their number cannot be increased. Molina is not alone in this view, Sancta Clara says, since Sancta Clara’s own friend, the very learned Doctor Holden, has defended the very same position in Paris in vesperiis, prompting much applause.15 Both Molina and Holden agree that nothing can be proposed by the Church as an obligation of faith (“sub Fidei obligatione”) that is not already believed and believed to have been always believed: “quod non semper ante creditum erat.” (The reader takes note, in passing, that the Jesuit Molina and the Jansenist sympathizer secular priest Holden have at least one important position in common.) Scotus, however, concurring with Aquinas, argues that newly formulated definitions that derive objectively from revealed truths by strict logic are genuine articles of faith. Occam, in turn, agrees with Scotus in this regard, adding that Church councils produce infallible definitions so long as these definitions are deduced from sacred scripture, or from the unanimous consensus of the Church, or based on unimpeachable logical reasoning.16 Thus new articles/ definitions are not necessarily incompatible with the stability of Catholic doctrine. The key, Sancta Clara explains, is to put strict limits on the Church’s power to define truths. The Church, in principle, cannot define anything unless it is proposed by scripture or by clear and secure tradition; or included in scripture or tradition either virtually (Scotus) or evidently (Bellarmine). Scotus, moreover, who distinguishes three classes of credibilia (beliefs), stresses that there is no obligation to believe even the logical consequences of true revealed doctrines until the Church has actually defined them. Thus possible articles of faith, unlike actual articles of faith, are not binding. According to Scotus, Catholics are required only to hold nondefined doctrines soberly as opinions (“sobrie opinari ”). Gerson adopts a less rigorous but similar view in De veritatibus de necessitate salutis credendis. He implies that nothing is to be proposed by God’s church as a necessary belief except such doctrines as are found in scripture and in

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perfectly indubitable tradition, along with truths deduced from these secure doctrines as their necessary consequences by the light of faith or by evident natural light (such as, for example, that Christ had nerves and veins, even though there is no explicit mention of them in the Bible). In effect, as Cordoba nicely puts it, no doctrine is ever a matter of obligation “unless it be in Christ’s name.” (The Anglican reader is pleased by this.) Scotus, Gerson, Cordoba, and Stapleton all emphasize, furthermore, that only strictly necessary consequences, not merely probable consequences, are possible candidates for definition. Their argument is that the Church’s firm and indubitable decrees must rest on perfectly solid foundations. Thus as long as general councils limit themselves to defining truths that are derived by strict logic from firm foundations, they do nothing more, when they define doctrines, than declare the inherent meaning of scriptures and tradition. The Church’s power to define doctrines, Sancta Clara concludes, is thus nothing other than the Church’s power to declare Christ’s faith. Although chapter 2 leads naturally to the task, next, of examining the foundations of faith, two additional questions must be settled before proceeding further. After refuting the opinion that the Church relies on new revelations in order to define fundamental doctrines (chapter 3), Sancta Clara examines whether, in principle, the distinction between fundamental doctrines and nonfundamental doctrines is valid (chapter 4). Sancta Clara defends the distinction, based on five mutually reinforcing grounds of authority: the authority (1) of Catholic doctors, (2) of rabbis, (3) of Church Fathers, (4) of Augustine, and (5) of reason. Implicitly, the distinction is not some recently concocted ad hoc distinction framed to support a polemical agenda, but a reasonable, time-honored, perennial feature of Judeo-Christian exegesis conducted by qualified theologians. The distinction is so deeply embedded in the Church’s spiritual patrimony that it cannot be arbitrarily removed. Since chapter 4 validates a distinction that intransigent Roman Catholics reject (e.g., Edward Knott) but that moderate Catholics and Protestants (e.g., Falkland) embrace, it warrants our detailed attention. Sancta Clara first invokes the authority of Saint Vincent of Lérins, who points out that Church Fathers never reached agreement on every single question of divine law but only with regard to the rule of faith (“Fidei regula”)

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and with regard to doctrines resting firmly on fundamental Catholic doctrines. Lérins, in effect, says two things: (1) no one is required to adhere to every single patristic opinion as being de fide, which implies, in turn, (2) that there is a latitude of degrees in the necessity that belongs to the various matters that councils and Church Fathers address: “Dari magis et minus in iis quibus standum est Patribus et Conciliis, ut patet.” And although Lérins’s authority suffices, as such, to validate the distinction because Lérins studied the question with special care, Sancta Clara is eager to cite Pope Eugene’s confirmation of the distinction at the Council of Florence and, more recently, the confirmation given by “the most eminent Perronius” in a letter to Casaubon involving the English king. In the context of discussing the ambiguity of the phrase “necessary for salvation,” Perron showed that there are “many degrees of such a necessity.”17 Since a number of qualified authorities concur independently in asserting that not all doctrines possess the same degree of necessity for salvation, it follows that the distinction between more fundamental and less fundamental doctrines is, at the very least, not improbable. Jewish rabbis, whose authority in the matter, Sancta Clara says, should not be overlooked, wholly admitted the distinction. Maimonides, for example, divided precepts into different classes, arguing that some precepts are fundamental while others are merely useful for conserving the faith (Guide to the Perplexed, chaps. 28 and 35). His endorsement of the distinction could not be more explicit: “nihil ut credo manifestius desiderandi potest.” Joseph Albo, in turn, considered some articles of faith to be like roots, while others he considered to be like appendices or branches. Among the latter, he did not hesitate to include the precept to keep the Sabbath—ironically, given the many uncompromising Sabbatarians in England!18 The common rule among Hebrews, it seems, is that only precepts which are such that their destruction entails the destruction of the Law must be counted as fundamental precepts of the Law.19 Similarly, Sancta Clara says, “our doctors teach that the church may err in those things that are such that their destruction does not entail the destruction of Faith.” The same rule, moreover, is invoked to determine who qualifies as a Jew. Some articles must be endorsed absolutely if someone wishes to be called “Israelite” and pursue salvation, whereas other doctrines are not fundamental in the same sense. Only thirteen Jewish precepts among a

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great many more have been selected as criteria for Jewish identity. All of this is confirmed by Maimonides (De fundamentis legis) and by Abravanel (De capite fidei), where fundamentals are clearly distinguished from nonfundamentals.20 Clement, in turn, goes so far as to argue that there are differences of degree even among fundamentals (Stromatum, bk. 5) since some fundamentals shed more light than others on the foundations of faith. After invoking Augustine’s authority, but also Stapleton’s views and the views of “the author of the recently published Dialogi Angliae (Thomas White), Sancta Clara adds that “Reason itself” convinces us of the soundness of the distinction. How? Just as God, according to philosophers, never fails to give his assistance to things that are necessary in the realm of nature, God never fails, according to theologians, to give his assistance to things that are necessary in the supernatural realm of faith. By analogy, God’s promise of inerrancy applies exclusively to fundamental (necessary) doctrines, not, in truth, to superfluous things. Yet because many issues that are peripheral to faith are referred to councils, Sancta Clara says, some doctrines are determined in councils that are not necessary to faith but are simply conducive to faith. And although there is no harm in determining these peripheral issues according to one of the Church Fathers rather than to another for the sake of peace, the Church, Sancta Clara concludes, may well err in the case of these peripheral beliefs.21 In short, the distinction between fundamental doctrines and less fundamental doctrines matters critically because it affords a basis upon which to set strict limits on the Church’s potential claim of infallibility. What, then, is fundamental? Now that basic conceptual tools have been secured, Systema fidei begins in earnest as chapter 5 examines what constitutes the foundations of Faith: “Quae sunt fundamenta.” Sancta Clara starts by drawing a new distinction. We must distinguish, he says, between “foundations” ( fundamenta) and “fundamentals” ( fundamentalia). All sorts of confusion, he warns, stem from neglecting the subtle difference between the two. What, then, constitutes the actual foundations of faith (fundamenta)? Sancta Clara starkly declares that there is really only one supreme foundation of faith, Christ: “habemus Christum primo.”22 By affirming that God’s church is founded on Christ (not on Peter), Sancta Clara aims at radicalizing the whole structure of Catholic faith. God’s church, he implies, simply is Christ’s church—precisely the Protes-

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tant claim and the conviction of Puritan gospelers, but hardly a novel idea to a son of Saint Francis, alter Christus. To a Franciscan and a Scotist, Christ is the “first predestined,” elected prior to Adam’s sin and independently of it, with a primacy that is prior indeed to any need for human redemption.23 And if the (eternally) living Christ is the first predestined and the cornerstone of God’s church, then the true calling of God’s church is simply imitatio Christi—as Saint Francis recognized and as Pope Innocent III wisely grasped when he dreamed that the poor little man from Assisi would save God’s church from ruin by bearing its crooked weight on his shoulder. Habemus Christum primo: the implications are vast. If God’s church is founded on Christ, then adhering to Christ and to Christ’s church constitute one and the same indivisible vocation. This means that supererogatory perfection, which embodies the vocation to adhere to Christ in the highest degree, is indispensable to God’s church. Far from occupying a merely ancillary place, Franciscans, living in evangelical poverty, serve as living proof that God’s church is Christ’s church. By suppressing the old religious orders, the English Church has cut itself off from the fullness of the living Christ. Or so at least Sancta Clara’s foundational axiom implies. Habemus Christum primo: the foundation of God’s church is God’s infinite wisdom, which cannot be reduced to a finite list of articles or doctrines. Sancta Clara draws two conclusions. Since the Church is founded on Christ, it follows that everything that the apostles received from Christ as the gospel of salvation is part of the cornerstone of faith. By the same token, Old Testament prophecies of Christ and all truths revealed by God about salvation also belong to the foundation of faith, preparing Christ’s advent and flowing from Christ as from a timeless wellspring. Sancta Clara emphasizes that Christ’s gospel includes not only the teachings of faith that are recorded in scripture but also oral tradita, since “Christ bound the Apostles to the content of his teachings, not to their mode of delivery.”24 Indeed “everything taught by Christ, prophets and Apostles” belongs to Christ and thus to the foundations of faith. Implicitly, the divine cornerstone of faith is all at once perfectly simple and inexhaustible. After establishing that Christ (and all that belongs to Christ) constitutes the true foundations of faith (fundamenta), Sancta Clara turns to fundamentalia. The basic problem is that some theologians extend the list

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of fundamentalia too far, while others shorten it too drastically. An example of the latter is the very learned Dialogist (Thomas White) who insists that fundamental doctrines must be limited strictly to beliefs without which it is absolutely impossible to accede to salvation. White cites such doctrines as Christ’s incarnation, the Trinity, and the unity of God’s church as his own strict examples of fundamental doctrines, since all three must be believed in order for the sacramental life to be possible. Other types of beliefs, White argues, may greatly facilitate the pursuit of salvation but are not indispensable for salvation and therefore must not be counted as fundamental (fundamentalia). Sancta Clara will reject both extremes and frame his own approach: “As for myself, I judge that we must treat fundamental doctrines differently and more rigorously.”25 Much of Systema fidei is devoted to explaining Sancta Clara’s theory of what counts as a fundamental doctrine. Upfront, Sancta Clara frames a “universal rule.” “Fundamentalia,” he says, “are beliefs that belong necessarily and evidently to the foundations of Faith or that stem from them necessarily and evidently. And these beliefs contain all that is required regarding matters of Faith, according to Proverb 22. And I say ‘necessarily’ because any doctrine that derives only probably from the foundations does not impose an obligation and is not fundamental.”26 A key feature of Sancta Clara’s solution will thus be to invoke logical coherence as a first criterion through which to restrict the number of fundamental doctrines. Implicitly, logical deduction is viewed as a warrant that God’s Word is allowed to speak for itself, without human distortion. By citing Proverbs 22, moreover, which warns against adding to God’s Word (“do not transgress the ancient boundaries that your fathers established”), Sancta Clara implies that his primary concern, like White’s, is to restrict fundamentalia not only to what is objectively contained in Christ but to what the patristic age has interpreted and transmitted to be objectively contained in Christ. A double restriction on fundamental doctrines, in effect, has already been imposed. Still in chapter 5, Sancta Clara outlines further restrictions to be imposed on what may be included among fundamentalia. As Lérins points out, logical deduction from revealed divine truths does not, as such, suffice for a doctrine to be counted as a fundamental doctrine of faith.27 Only a small subset of these deductions will ever become fundamentalia. Sancta

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Clara briefly evokes three additional criteria for doctrines to be counted as fundamental. First, over and above being derived by strict logic from Christ’s apostolic teaching, a doctrine is not de fide unless it is positively and actually defined by the Church as such. Second, no doctrine will be positively defined by the Church to be de fide unless there is an actual and urgent need to define it. Third, an actual and urgent need to define a doctrine arises only if the Church is threatened by schism. 28 The whole purpose of a general council, Sancta Clara concludes, is indeed “to seek Christ.”29 Doctrines are defined by the Church to be fundamental to the Faith if and only if their immediate relevance to salvation puts the unity of the Church at risk in case of a conflict that cannot be overcome. Habemus Christum primo: implicitly, the most fundamental doctrine is that the Church must “seek Christ” by first preserving the unity of Christ’s faith in communion. The Church can tolerate internal disagreement over all sorts of issues, but it cannot be torn asunder by competing and incompatible interpretations of the actual means of Christian salvation. The Church’s power to declare Christ’s faith under duress is thus really the power to preserve Catholic communion. Since fundamentalia are doctrines that are immediately necessary for salvation, it follows at once that whole classes of truths may be safely dismissed as possible candidates for Church definition. In chapter 6, Sancta Clara inquires whether the Church has the authority to define “philosophical matters, as such” and answers firmly in the negative. The Church may not determine any philosophical question on the basis of scripture, or ever turn a purely philosophical doctrine into a fundamental doctrine of faith. The chief reason for excluding purely philosophical truths from the Church’s authority to define doctrines, Sancta Clara says, is simple. There is no divine promise of special assistance on God’s part with regard to interpreting scripture for the purpose of natural philosophy. 30 As Augustine and almost all theologians explain, the Holy Spirit teaches us only what is needed for our salvation—not how the cosmos is shaped or what motions belong to the stars.31 To illustrate his point, Sancta Clara cites Galileo’s heliocentric astronomy favorably and shows that Galileo’s theory is no less compatible with faith than Aristotle’s geocentric universe. Sancta Clara also warns against the tendency to confuse true doctrines of the Faith, which by definition exceed human reason, with philosophical

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speculations aimed at making these true doctrines rationally accessible. A case in point is transubstantiation. The Aristotelian model of transubstantiation, Sancta Clara stresses, is no more than a human attempt to make a divine mystery less incomprehensible. The Aristotelian explanation of the Eucharistic mystery possesses no more intrinsic authority than more recent mechanistic models that have been proposed by talented new philosophers. Without citing either Descartes or White, Sancta Clara favorably describes the new mechanistic philosophy and its elegant way of accounting for transubstantiation.32 Sancta Clara emphasizes that the benefit of isolating natural philosophy from the defining authority of the Church works in both directions. As Galileo and White correctly argue, Catholic faith must not be made hostage to the uncertainties of philosophical speculation. The integrity of faith depends on separating the Church’s magisterium, which is aimed at teaching the means to gain heaven, from a purely human and philosophical magisterium, which is aimed at elucidating the structure and causal coherence of the physical world. Since scientific theories are by their very nature provisional, liable to be disproved and replaced, it is imprudent for the Church to endorse any given scientific theory with finality. For the sake of the authority that the Church exercises by divine right with regard to Christian salvation, the Church must abstain from defining philosophical matters. Indeed, Sancta Clara concludes, no doctrine must be included among fundamentalia unless God himself shows that it is immediately concerned with salvation, even if it is determined in one way or another by a general council.33 Having clarified that fundamentalia are narrowly limited to doctrines that teach us how to gain heaven, Sancta Clara now returns to the foundations from which fundamentalia are logically deduced in order to explore the controversial question of the comparative authority of scripture and tradition.34 In five consecutive chapters, Sancta Clara shows that the wish to rely on scripture as the rule of faith (Chillingworth’s wish) forces us to have recourse to tradition since tradition provides the most reliable hermeneutic key with which to unlock the meaning of scripture (chapter 7). Traditions are indispensable if scripture is to suffice as a rule of faith.35 Sancta Clara is eager to dispel the notion that the idea of having recourse to traditions was invented by the Roman Church for its own advantage.

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The tradition of relying on traditions to interpret scripture predates the Roman Church. Jewish rabbis, for example, Abravanel, teach that oral traditions are needed to disclose the true and legitimate meaning of scripture. Not all traditions, however, are de fide. No one is obliged to believe even a perfectly true tradition unless it has been explicitly declared by the Church to be de fide. A fortiori, a tradition that is uncertain and derived only as a probable testimony cannot ever be de fide, as Cano and Cusanus point out and as Trent confirms, since Trent does not require adherence to nonfundamental doctrines, asking only that they not be despised (chapter 8). It thus matters, Sancta Clara now emphasizes, to distinguish between what the Church firmly believes and what the Church piously believes. Implicitly, mere “determinations” issued by the Church fall short of the criteria required for authoritative definitions, yet they are valuable as “pious beliefs.” They do not command or require belief, yet they deserve respect. With regard to declaring the Faith, however, only traditions that the Church firmly believes are equal to scripture in authority (chapter 9).36 Thus no other foundation is really required, Sancta Clara concludes, than “the church’s constant Apostolic Tradition,” by which he means scripture together with its transmitted meaning and together with the transmitted distinction that allows the Church to judge what is de fide and what requires only pious respect. Before advancing further, Sancta Clara clarifies a few more issues. He rejects the view that God’s promise of infallibility was given only to the apostles (Laud’s argument) and affirms that the divine promise applies to the living Church (chapter 10). He then returns to the debate over the authority of scripture and defends scripture against Dialogist White (chapter 11). White, Sancta Clara says, is so eager to defend the authority of tradition over scripture that he fails to consider that scripture, just as much as tradition, benefits from being transmitted through simple reproduction, undisturbed by human reasoning. By White’s own argument, then, scripture is as reliable as tradition and is just as immune, on the whole, from becoming progressively distorted with time.37 Nor is translation a significant problem, even if there are minor discrepancies. Sancta Clara himself saw a Greek manuscript of the New Testament in the Magdalen Library at Oxford, in which 1 John 2:23 lacked its usual final clause (“who knows the Son, also has the Father”).38 Faulty manuscripts are easily

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recognized and discarded. As long as scripture is taken holistically (as White himself advises), with a proper sense of context and consensus, mistakes are avoided. Sancta Clara illustrates what he means by citing modern Socinians, who, based on having discovered a single defective Arian text in King James’s royal library, rashly jumped to the conclusion that the Nicene Fathers had simply invented the doctrine that “Christ and the Father are one.” In the case of the Old Testament, the texts are substantially the same, especially, Sancta Clara remarks, “when it comes to passages that confirm Christ’s doctrine, since Jews have paid relatively little attention to them. Nor do Rabbis accuse Christians of having introduced alterations.” Scripture, in short, if approached properly, has no less authority than tradition and corroborates tradition. White is right, however, to stress that not everything that is affirmed in scripture counts as a divinely revealed truth. As both Maimonides and Pico della Mirandola point out, all sorts of natural philosophy and history are intermingled with supernaturally revealed truths.39 Thus if White simply means to emphasize that scripture is inadequate for faith without the safeguard of tradition, his point, Sancta Clara concedes, is well taken. Implicitly, the “Church’s constant Apostolic Tradition” includes the transmitted ability to judge what in scripture is divine and what is human and thus fallible. We are now on newly solid ground. Sancta Clara has established that the fundamenta of faith consist strictly of supernatural truths that are (1) revealed by God for the purpose of salvation and (2) are transmitted by the “church’s constant Apostolic Tradition,” which includes scripture taken jointly with its Catholic meaning. The initial claim, that Christ is the cornerstone of faith, is thus reinforced, since the fullness of God’s plan for the redemption of human beings is wholly revealed in Christ. The parameters of faith, Sancta Clara concludes, will be fixed principally by scripture, tradition, and conciliar definitions. The first two constitute the very foundations of faith (fundamenta), while conciliar definitions clarify the fundamental doctrines of faith (fundamentalia). What more must be said about fundamentalia? Chapter 12 is pivotal to Sancta Clara’s argument. After explaining that general councils are called for the purpose of safeguarding the unity of God’s church, Sancta Clara makes three important points. First, useless and superfluous things

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must not be defined authoritatively.40 Second, councils may warn against a given error without actually condemning it as a heresy. A council may also declare, with regard to two opposite opinions, which one of the two is more consonant with faith, without defining an actual article of faith. Such determinations are basically no more than helpful opinions. They belong to what Erasmus calls “scholastic conflicts” and must not be admitted as de fide. Aware that moderate English Protestants are fond of Erasmus, Sancta Clara points out that Erasmus affirms that there is a gradation in things to be believed, ranging from the indubitable articles of faith that are expressed in the Nicene Creed to sundry Scholastic articles, among which, Erasmus says, all sorts of heretical views are undoubtedly found. Erasmus argues, further, that errors of a low degree are unimportant and negligible. Errors of a middle degree are more serious and deserve a stiffer penalty, yet they do not deserve death, “as it benefits my soul not to deny to others the right to say what they want.” Only in the case of the most serious errors, Erasmus concedes, is the death penalty warranted.41 After reminding the reader that even Erasmus assumed the death penalty as a matter of course, so that the rejection of religious persecution is more a question of a generational prise de conscience than it is of religious affiliation tout court, Sancta Clara sets aside the whole issue of persecution to focus on “middle errors.” According to Sancta Clara, Augustine’s authority may be cited in support of Erasmus’s tolerant attitude with regard to “middle errors.” Augustine writes in Super Genesim, chapter 2, that “we must not rashly adopt a belief in the case of obscure things; lest perhaps truth become manifest later.” Are “middle errors” to be tolerated precisely because they contradict nothing that is infallible? Modern doctors go so far as to speak of two different types of infallibility, namely, (1) a true and absolute infallibility belonging to authentic articles of faith and (2) a sort of figurative infallibility belonging to canonical determinations.42 As Castellio correctly states in his Disputatio 15, “On the Authority of Councils,” the Church is susceptible of erring when a council pronounces anathema in areas outside the Faith, since there is no divine promise in such matters: “Ecclesia militans fallit quia in his non constat de promisso divino.”43 In other words, the Church’s mere determinations and warnings, falling short of the infallibility of faith, may well turn out to be wrong and thus do not put Catholics under the same obligation as fundamentalia.

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This brings us to Sancta Clara’s third and boldest point, which is that internal acts of belief are, by their very nature, irreducibly private. Sancta Clara argues that “Councils, even General Councils, do not want the anathemas annexed to decrees to be understood literally, but rather to be taken with a grain of salt, so to speak (cum grano salis, ut loquitur).” Since everyone, even Church Fathers, agree that the Church cannot effectively punish internal acts, the only reasonable way of interpreting the anathemas that are annexed to decrees is to interpret them as warning those who do not believe this or that doctrine of the peril in which they put their soul, not as actually passing judgment.44 Ultimately, each individual is accountable to God alone, in the immediate privacy of his conscience. By emphasizing that internal acts simply escape the scrutiny and thus the jurisdiction of the Church, Sancta Clara carves out a safe haven for individual autonomy. Faced with the Church’s fallible determinations and warnings, every Catholic is free to think for himself in the silence of his heart. Presumably, the Protestants of Great Tew will welcome Sancta Clara’s point about internal acts and be reminded that such dissenters as the Jansenists, though opposed by powerful factions, remain in communion with the Roman Church. After both clarifying that Church determinations are not binding and that internal acts of belief cannot be policed by the Church, Sancta Clara is ready for the substance of chapter 12. General councils, he now affirms, have the authority to issue infallible definitions of the Faith provided the definitions in question are deduced logically from true revealed principles that belong securely to the foundations of faith. More precisely, God’s promise of infallibility, which supernaturally preserves the Church from error, applies only to deductions in which “the consequence is identical with the antecedent”—which is to say, only if the doctrine to be defined is derived analytically a priori from supernaturally revealed truths.45 Thus, according to Sancta Clara, when councils define doctrines, they simply bring to light what is latently and objectively contained in God’s supernaturally revealed Word (Christ). Councils simply bear witness to Christ’s faith. They do not create it. Fundamentalia are thus logically of one piece with God’s immediately revealed truths (fundamenta). Although fundamentalia are infallible in their authority, they possess a lesser degree of infallibility than God’s immediately revealed truths in

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scripture and tradition, Sancta Clara says, since fundamentalia depend on the premises.46 Does Sancta Clara view fundamentalia as less immediately necessary for salvation than fundamenta because Christ himself did not choose to spell them out as such in so many words? Or does Sancta Clara mean to imply that, whereas God’s immediately revealed truths (fundamenta) generate true doctrines that inherit the certainty of their revealed premises, the generated true doctrines in question (fundamentalia) cannot, in turn, serve as new premises for further secure deductions—at least for further deductions to which God’s promise of infallibility applies? There seems to be some hesitation on Sancta Clara’s part with regard to how far the certainty that belongs to revealed truths propagates to further and further conclusions. It is, he says cautiously, “quite probable” (valde probabilis) that a special kind of immediate evidence is required: if the necessity of a conclusion does not “burst forth from the premisses, once these premisses are correctly understood and weighed,” then it is “not of Faith, nor ever can be without a new revelation, which cannot be conceded.”47 Sancta Clara is clearly reluctant to allow human reason the same unrestricted deductive range in the realm of faith that it enjoys in the realm of geometry, where premises are naturally self-evident rather than supernatu rally revealed. Indeed it is because of the supernatural origin of the premises of faith, Sancta Clara insists, that it is more reasonable and wiser to adhere to the authority of the Church than to our own feeble reasoning.48 The authority of the Church is more trustworthy than human reasoning precisely because it requires stricter criteria for defining fundamentalia than the purely axiomatic criteria that apply to geometry. Once again, Sancta Clara seems to exceed Chillingworth in the scope of his fallibilism since he casts doubt on the competence of human reason to unravel Christ’s teaching open-endedly. Unlike Chillingworth and others, however, Sancta Clara insists that both the revealed premises (fundamenta) and the doctrines that are derived analytically from them immediately and defined by the Church as doctrines of the Faith (fundamentalia) are infallibly true.49 There is a further restraint to be imposed on fundamentalia. In chapter 13, Sancta Clara concedes (once again, implicitly, to Chillingworth and members of Great Tew) that Church Fathers are not always reliable. There is indeed a constant danger of introducing into faith some purely human

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doctrine that does not spring immediately and objectively from God’s Word. The solution, Sancta Clara says, is to add an additional requirement. The Church must not spontaneously define every single logical consequence of Christ’s explicit teaching as a doctrine of the Faith.50 Rather, for the Church to take action, there must exist an immediate and urgent necessity to clarify the Faith. For a doctrine to be defined as a fundamental doctrine (and thus be preserved from error by God) not only must it be, for its part, derived evidently from a supernaturally revealed truth, not only must it be immediately relevant to salvation, but it must also, on the part of the Church, urgently need definition in order to prevent schism. Unless there is an immediate danger to the unity of Catholic communion, councils must refrain from exercising their power to define the Faith authoritatively (and thus infallibly).51 Sancta Clara’s argument, explicitly drawn from the Council of Florence and from Bessarion, is basically that councils, though empowered to define articles of faith, must avoid embarrassing the future.52 Future controversies, essentially unforeseeable, must not be solved in advance. God’s church must limit the number of its binding doctrines to what is immediately necessary for its mission to survive here and now: “rarò igitur ad novas definitiones accedere solent Concilia.”53 God’s promise of assistance is thus nothing other, Sancta Clara concludes, than God’s own divine will to teach the Church “every necessary truth” that it requires in order to keep both its apostolic unity and its faith. Two key features deserve emphasis. First, in the face of an emergent doctrinal crisis, God does not supply some new ad hoc revelation, as though something lacked in Christ’s gospel. Instead, God assists the Church when the Church declares the infallible faith that is already contained, either formally or virtually, in scripture and tradition.54 Second and just as importantly, God’s assistance, which is identical to God’s will, remains wholly external to human faculties. No infused gift of infallibility is ever bestowed on the Church, either on the Church assembled in general council or on its prelates and chief pastor, the bishop of Rome. No infallibility is ever transferred to the Church or to anyone in the Church, even provisionally. The very same Church council that is preserved by God from error when it defines a fundamental doctrine of faith under urgent necessity is wholly fallible in its other theological and canonical determinations. The argument that Sancta Clara supplies in order to rule out any possibility of an infused gift of infallibility is Scotist. Even supposing a super-

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naturally infused gift of infallibility, Sancta Clara says, it would not result in infallible definitions, since it would be implemented and exercised by fallible human beings.55 God’s promise, in effect, secures infallibility for fundamentalia precisely because it is a promise to intervene extrinsically to preserve the Church from error when the Church is forced by urgent necessity to define what it means to adhere to Christ. The Church, in short, has a sound revealed basis upon which to claim that the definitions framed under duress for the sake of preserving unity are infallible, granted that human beings are fallible both individually and collectively. Councils remain fallible with regard to all merely probable deductions, and also with regard to logically valid deductions that do not immediately concern salvation, since even human laws, otherwise, would have to be counted among “infallible” doctrines of the Faith.56 Implicitly, Sancta Clara agrees with Chillingworth that there are all sorts of important truths that do not require infallibility in order to be secure. To the extent that such truths are the best available to human effort and cannot be appealed to a higher authority, some might be tempted to call them “infallible” in a figurative sort of way, but this risks undermining the true supernatural infallibility that characterizes the fundamenta and fundamentalia of faith. With regard to matters that do not directly pertain to salvation (“circa Fidem seu in appendicibus Fidei”), the Church has no special promise of inerrancy and is on an equal footing, in effect, with other purely human authorities. Sancta Clara emphasizes that many things are wrongly proposed as de fide that are not. Only a very small subset of what the Church teaches is authentically de fide and thus infallible. Theological doctrines, in particular, which mix human reasoning with divine truths, are wholly fallible.57

DEGREES OF ADHERENCE

Having established strict criteria for the Church to exercise its power to define infallible doctrines of faith, Sancta Clara now turns to what is required of the faithful. First, is it permissible to doubt conciliar determinations regarding superficial and superfluous matters? Does doubting Church teachings in such matters make a person suspect of heresy?58 Sancta Clara’s answer is nuanced. On the one hand, Sancta Clara makes room for

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respectful dissent. If someone who is without prejudice reluctantly judges, on serious grounds and after careful examination, that a conciliar ruling regarding something that is not immediately relevant to salvation is doubtful, he is not required to adhere to it firmly and absolutely, as he would be required to do if it were an article of faith.59 Sancta Clara thus defends, at the very least, the right to remain silent — the right to honor one’s own innermost conscience, so long as it is without arrogance and stubbornness. In addition to careful examination, Sancta Clara urges, the support of some qualified Catholic doctor is also an important safeguard in the case of private doubt. Clearly, what Sancta Clara means is that Catholics are under no obligation to hold probable opinions to be de fide once the opinions that are proposed to them for belief have been reliably established to be merely probable. (The papal deposing power comes to mind.) On the other hand, Sancta Clara is deeply committed to the authoritarian structure of Catholicism, which he regards to be indispensable for preserving Christian communion across geographical regions and cultures. Catholic Christians, Sancta Clara insists, are not expected to interpret God’s Word individually, each man honing his own exegetical skills according to his talent, in the way that Rabbi Meir says that Jews indeed are called to interpret the Talmud.60 Does Sancta Clara mean to imply that the Christian mysteries, as such, present greater challenges to human reason than the Mosaic law, even as these mysteries require a higher unity of communion? Perhaps unexpectedly, Sancta Clara insists that Catholics must adhere to Church decrees even with regard to superficial and purely human matters. He recognizes that he will now encounter fierce Protestant resistance. Opponents of Roman Catholicism, he acknowledges, are quick to rail against this Catholic requirement as an intolerable requirement of “blind” obedience.61 The whole idea of submitting one’s own private judgment of conscience to the Church flies in the face of a Protestant emphasis on the dignity of personal conscience. How does Sancta Clara justify adhering to Church authority in fallible matters? First, it helps to distinguish between internal and external acts. With regard to external acts, there is no debate, Sancta Clara points out, since every Church decree is binding on the external behavior of Catholics, down to the last detail. With regard to internal acts, however, Sancta Clara develops a new distinction. He insists, first, that absolute adherence is required with regard to doctrines that are defined absolutely. Thus inwardly

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and outwardly, no Catholic may safely doubt the doctrine of the Trinity— at least not without jeopardizing his salvation and incurring the suspicion of heresy. Yet a number of Catholic doctors, Sancta Clara concedes, argue that internal adherence is owed more absolutely to the teachings of the apostles ( fundamenta) than to the teachings of the present-day Church ( fundamentalia). Moreover, as we saw, Sancta Clara views both fundamenta and fundamentalia as infallible, but he also concedes that fundamentalia have a sort of derivative or “caused” authority, which is precisely why fundamentalia need God’s divine assistance in order to be preserved from error. Since God lends his assistance only to doctrines that are already contained analytically in Christ’s Word and only if they are urgently needed in order to preserve the unity of God’s church, adhering to fundamentalia, in Sancta Clara’s view, is simply adhering to God’s will to preserve the Church and thus, in effect, adhering to God’s providence. To Sancta Clara, both fundamenta and fundamentalia deserve and require absolute internal adherence from Catholics—granted that internal acts cannot be judged except by God. The Church thus cannot excommunicate anyone who remains inwardly skeptical of a fundamental doctrine and who, in effect, “denies God’s providence and promise” in the privacy of his or her heart.62 The problem, however, is not the requirement that Catholics submit mentally to fundamental doctrines, but the requirement that they submit mentally to “light and superfluous” decrees. Indeed what we now expect from Sancta Clara is to be told that Church decrees that concern only “light and superfluous things,” which are purely human decrees and benefit from no divine promise of infallibility, do not require that we adhere to them internally. Instead, we are explicitly told otherwise. Citing Scotus, Sancta Clara insists that faith itself is threatened if Catholics do not adhere internally to what the Church decides regarding even peripheral matters. Conclusion: no one can be excommunicated as a heretic for refraining from internal adherence to either infallible or fallible Church decrees, but Catholics are nonetheless required to adhere to all of them, not only externally but internally.63 Is this Sancta Clara’s final word on the matter? In a separate chapter, chapter 17, Sancta Clara tackles the problem of freedom of belief: “de libertate credendi.” Opponents of Roman Catholicism, he acknowledges, passionately object to the tyranny that Rome exerts over the inner conscience

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of the faithful. Rome, they say, requires a particularly abject form of blind obedience since Rome orders the faithful to believe conciliar decrees without at the same time putting forth sufficient reasons to justify believing in them, as though humans were at liberty to command the intellect’s assent.64 Conceding the difficulty, Sancta Clara says that he must answer the combined force of three arguments. First, there is a purely rational argument against him. As Aristotle correctly points out, human beings cannot assent or dissent at will to what they perceive, much less assent to something that is devoid of evidence with the perfect firmness that is required for doctrines of faith.65 Second, there is an argument from scripture. The apostle Paul states unambiguously: “We do not rule as lords over your Faith” (Non dominamur supra vestram Fidem) (2 Cor. 1:24)—using the Greek word katakupien, which is equivalent to saying “we do not tyrannize” over your faith. Thus Paul seems positively to forbid the Church from ordering the faithful to submit blindly to Church authority.66 Third, there is the authority of Augustine. Against the accusation that is leveled by heretics that the Catholic Church “imposes a yoke” of doctrine on the faithful without sufficient explanations, Augustine insists that God’s church “opens a fount of teaching” so that “all may come to glory.”67 Implicitly, Augustine draws a key distinction between a tyrannous exercise of power that stunts individual growth and a providential exercise of authority that liberates individuals for higher and higher perfection. The challenge that faces Sancta Clara, in other words, is reasonable (Sancta Clara’s position contradicts Aristotle) and serious (it also contradicts Paul and Augustine). Sancta Clara concedes, first, that Aristotle’s point about intellect and will is “very true.” Adding Augustine’s authority to Aristotle’s, Sancta Clara agrees that it is not in our power to change what we perceive. Consequently, we cannot make ourselves believe something at will, without motive.68 Yet, although the will cannot order the intellect to perceive things to be other than they are, the will may command the intellect to reflect and to weigh the evidence of what is perceived before assenting or dissenting. Thus the will is free to play a sort of critical adjunct role in determining the intellect’s assent. Three possible types of internal adherence emerge from combining will and intellect: (1) a purely rational and perfect adherence based on intrinsic rational self-evidence, (2) a rational and perfect adherence of faith based on perfect trust in the

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extrinsic authority proposing the object despite the intrinsic obscurity of its terms, and (3) a rational adherence of lesser degree based on the objective lack of intrinsic self-evidence in the object and lack of trustworthiness in the extrinsic source presenting the object. All three types of adherence, Sancta Clara now explains, are found in Catholic belief. The mind adheres to fundamentalia based on their intrinsic demonstrative evidence and adheres to fundamenta based on trusting God’s authority. The mind, in turn, adheres with reservation and to a lesser degree to doctrines that are merely probable.69 The key to Sancta Clara’s solution is that internal acts of adherence come in a latitude of degrees. Catholics are free to adhere to what the Church teaches with more or less internal reservation, yet still adhere to all Church decrees, as required. In particular, Sancta Clara’s theory nowhere rules out internal adherence of degree zero—precisely the case of silent dissent. Let us construct a concrete example to illustrate what Sancta Clara’s solution implies. Suppose I do not believe in prayers for the dead. According to Sancta Clara, as long as I abstain from declaring the doctrine to be positively false and from setting up an alternative church in which the practice is dogmatically banned, I sufficiently adhere to the Catholic doctrine, granted that my inner adherence is of the smallest degree possible. I both follow my inner conscience and submit to the Church. I am free in my heart to refrain from praying for the dead so long as I do not deny to others the right to do so, as their conscience dictates. With regard to fundamentalia, Sancta Clara allows two options. Those who grasp the intrinsic evidence of fundamentalia have no need to rely on extrinsic authority in order to adhere to them firmly. Others, in contrast, have the option of safely trusting the Church’s authority. What Sancta Clara means is that Catholics who are not competent to recognize the logical self-evidence of fundamentalia are free to command their intellect to ponder God’s promise regarding the authority of God’s church in critical matters of faith and thus are able to elicit in themselves a firm and perfect assent.70 Sancta Clara, however, fully appreciates the difficulty of the second option. No one must deny, he admits, that it is always problematic to advise someone to submit to authority.71 The very difficulty of such obedience has prompted some theologians such as Prosper of Aquitaine to argue (De vocatione gentium, II, c. 2) that there is special merit in submitting to pure

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authority. As for Sancta Clara, he prefers to argue that believers benefit from special grace that allows them to know that what they do not understand is true, and thus to believe it firmly.72 Catholic believers, he implies, do not obey the Church “blindly” since God himself facilitates their adherence and bolsters their trust. It is in the case of unbelievers, Sancta Clara says, that it matters to establish the Church’s infallibility in matters of faith. Unless an authority is infallible, it cannot prompt the perfect adherence that is required for acts of belief, namely, acts that are free from doubt. No fallible authority, no matter how impressive it is, has the power to elicit anything higher than the level of adherence that is appropriate for an opinion, since otherwise a cause would be able to produce an effect nobler than itself.73 A clear implication of Sancta Clara’s argument is that no one is required to adhere fully to what is established only by a fallible, human authority. No human truth is infallible. Moreover, no Catholic ought to adhere perfectly to fallible determinations. Only God’s authority, instructing us how to win heaven, either through scripture or through conciliar definitions, warrants adherence in the highest degree. In arguing that it matters on pastoral grounds to defend the infallible authority of the Church, does Sancta Clara adequately answer the members of Great Tew? Implicitly, someone like Chillingworth, who is well versed in scripture and skilled in logic, has no real need of the Church’s infallible authority since he is able, in principle, to adhere fully to both fundamenta (based on his faith in scripture) and fundamentalia (based on logic). By denying the Church’s infallibility, however, does Chillingworth deprive less gifted human beings from access to the means of salvation? Sancta Clara’s argument, at this point, is that God’s promise of infallibility is aimed primarily at winning souls away from crippling doubt. By promising that the Church will be supernaturally preserved from error with regard to what is necessary for salvation, God gives the humblest human beings a sound reason to adhere to the Church’s teaching and thus a firm ground for acts of belief. De libertate credendi: paradoxically, the infallible authority of the Church frees us to believe in man’s supernatural destiny, known by divine revelation. It also frees us from granting the same high level of belief to what derives from human authority. To those who deny that Church councils have sufficient authority for the faithful to command their intellect to adhere to conciliar decrees,

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Sancta Clara says that he will show, in a later chapter, that the Church and its councils have exactly the same authority. Moreover, councils often supply reasons for its definitions and decrees, hoping to avoid ruling over consciences despotically. In a third and final argument against the charge that Rome demands blind obedience, Sancta Clara points out that councils do not tell the faithful simply to believe. Councils implicitly tell the faithful to examine what they believe and discuss the foundations upon which faith is built, so that the evidence of their beliefs shines forth. Indeed it is culpably negligent, Sancta Clara concludes, to fail to study the reasons behind Catholic doctrines.74 In subsequent chapters, Sancta Clara further elaborates both the strict criteria required for Church definitions to be de fide and the latitude of internal adherence that allows Catholics to believe necessary truths absolutely but also to adhere to lesser propositions with appropriate reserve, according to their true conscience. In chapter 18, in particular, Sancta Clara clarifies that not everything that councils determine is de fide. Many conciliar decisions are issued out of prudence and must be taken (like anathemas earlier) with a grain of salt (cum grano salis).75 Such decisions are fallible and do not command the same degree of assent on the part of the faithful as doctrines of the Faith. Thus while we must obey all decrees just as we must obey all civil laws, and while it also behooves Christian humility to acquiesce to the decrees of councils in light matters, we each have a personal responsibility, nevertheless, to adhere to various doctrines proportionally, as our conscience dictates. Sancta Clara even sketches a process whereby a qualified person might challenge a conciliar decree in an orderly way.76 Although Catholics may adhere to Church teachings through greater or lesser degrees of assent, no individual Catholic is allowed to prefer his own private opinions absolutely, over the judgments of the Church (chapter 20). If a general council is legitimately assembled, there is ample evidence based on scripture, patristic testimony, and even philosophical principles that what it decrees to be de fide cannot be fallible, just as the sun cannot be eclipsed everywhere at once, and just as a building, as Vitruvius remarks, cannot stand unless a central pillar firmly and reliably bears the weight (chapter 21). Consequently, schism is pure folly, especially the En glish schism, since it cuts Christians off from Christ’s infallible guidance (chapter 21). What general councils define authoritatively simply is the faith of God’s church (chapter 22).

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HOW COUNCILS REPRESENT THE CHURCH

On what basis do councils represent the universal Church and how do councils acquire their authority? Councils represent the whole Church because, as Jacques Almain explains, the prerogative that every individual Church member possesses to bear witness to Christian faith is transferred to councils. Consequently, Sancta Clara says, it is important to emphasize that the reception of conciliar decrees by local bishops serves as an indispensable sign of their soundness and of the Church’s unity. Popes in the past sometimes took the initiative to have conciliar decrees approved by local churches before finalizing them, “so that the unity of the Church be everywhere served.”77 By right, it is the whole assembly of Christians dispersed across the world and in communion with one another to whom faith is entrusted. This is why Sancta Clara’s “learned friend Bacon, alias Southwell, theology professor to the English Jesuits of Liège,” invokes Augustine’s authority in his work Analysis fidei to imply that Church decrees must be validated by Christians throughout the world.78 Celotius, in turn, speaks of the “passive infallibility” of the whole Church.79 Church decrees, however, need not be explicitly endorsed. It suffices that they be welcomed and implemented. For example, by taking measures against Lutherans in England, Henry VIII implicitly anticipated and preendorsed the Council of Trent’s condemnation of Lutheranism. Francis de la Mirandula, in turn, argues that decrees are legitimately Catholic if they are framed by councils or by the pope, so long as they are endorsed by the Church everywhere, universally. Gerson specifies that only decrees that are universally received by the Church count as necessary for salvation. Thomas White, in turn, with the approval of Parisian doctors, says that definitions are legitimately de fide if they enjoy the consensus of the whole Church, whether they have been framed by councils or by the pope.80 Vincent of Lérins and Ambrose, moreover, agree that the consensus of the whole Church is the ultimate basis of true faith. What is the reason, then, for the wide consensus that the consensus of the whole Church is the ultimate basis of faith? The answer is that whatever power a council possesses to define the Faith was given to it in the first place by the universal church. Thus unless the Church, in turn, accepts the council’s decrees, the council cannot be said to have received its power

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from the whole Church. Citing Jacques Almain once again, Sancta Clara agrees that the members of the universal church delegate their Christinstituted prerogative to attest to the Faith to councils without ever abdicating it, so that the Church, in principle, may recall and void a council’s authority. Yet Sancta Clara also favors a “less rigid” meaning of “representation.” Councils, he argues, are not mere “images” of the universal church, but “represent” the Church by making it possible for the Church to act as a coherent agent—all the more authoritatively in that the council is more universally representative.81 This explains, Sancta Clara says, why Church doctrine and conciliar doctrine are one and the same thing and that the consensus of the whole Church is assumed to underlie conciliar definitions.82 Councils act in the name of the Church because they simply are the Church: “Concilia sint ipsa Ecclesia.” Indeed, while jurisdiction is based in the whole Church, only a council representing the whole Church is able actually to exercise it. Both the power to define matters of faith and the power to frame guidelines belong by right to the whole assembly of Christians, but these powers cannot be exercised unless a representative council is convened to act. Jacques Almain is perfectly right to say that “the privilege of the Church is transferred to the Council that represents it immediately.” 83 Implicitly, God’s promise of inerrancy applies to conciliar definitions in matters of faith because councils are the very means whereby the Church as a whole and in its unity adheres to Christ’s teaching. This is all the more evident, Sancta Clara concludes, in that the primary function of a council is to bear witness to the Faith, not fabricate it. Paris doctors have recently affirmed with unanimity that the sole and constant function of councils is to preserve the faith of the universal church.84 It follows from the fact that councils are empowered to act in the name of God’s church that heretics must not be admitted to councils. Schismatics, on the contrary, must be welcomed with special sensitivity (chapter 24). Analogously, Catholic laymen must refrain from attending heretic churches, but they must treat schismatics with moderation (chapter 25). The best mark of the legitimacy of a general council is really the reception afforded its decrees by various local bishops, since universal reception, whether explicit or implicit, confirms that the councils speak for the whole Church (chapter 26). It also follows that a general council is fully authoritative even if a number of bishops fail to attend, as long as

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everyone has been convoked, from every region (chapter 27). Sancta Clara concludes his discussion of the transferred authority of councils by drawing three conclusions. First, it is an article of faith (infallible and necessary for salvation) that the universal church cannot err in matters that are necessary for salvation. Second, cum Concilia sint ipsa ecclesia, it is also an article of faith (infallible and necessary for salvation) that councils cannot err in matters of faith and thus that Catholics must adhere to all that is defined by councils to be necessary de fide. Third, the infallibility of general councils in matters of faith requires no separate definition since it is included in all articles of faith that are infallibly defined.85 In other words, God’s (infallible) promise that the Church will not err in matters of faith is really the promise that general councils are supernaturally preserved from error whenever they legitimately define matters of faith in the name of all Christians.

IMMUTABLE AND EVOLVING CATHOLIC D O CTRINE

From chapters 29 to 36, Sancta Clara examines a number of adjunct issues. First, what exactly is the role of the pope and to what extent is the pope infallible? The answer is based on understanding that the pope’s basic responsibility is to watch over the implementation of conciliar decisions (chapter 28). General councils must ultimately settle matters of faith, but the pope is entitled to act on his own to prevent old heresies from erupting again, thus saving the Church from the burden of having to convene general councils unnecessarily.86 Councils (Florence and Trent) define the pope to be Christ’s vicar and the doctor and father of all Christians, so that the pope’s solemn decrees must not be rashly resisted, as they aim at maintaining the peace. The pope must refer all “graver matters” to a council, yet he is encouraged to settle incipient controversies in the bud so as to prevent further discord. The pope’s authority as chief pastor, in short, seems largely to be a matter of assessing problems as they arise and solving them if possible, calling a council as a last resort. His role in the Church seems to require prudence rather than infallibility. The pope is entitled, Sancta Clara asserts, to prohibit a new doctrine that he judges to be dangerous, even adding censures. Moreover, in doubt-

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ful matters, the pope may declare “res Fidei,” by which he simply clarifies what is as stake for the Faith, since, as Aquinas asserts, the authority of the universal church resides primarily in the pontiff: “Authoritas Ecclesiae universalis principaliter residet in Summo Pontifice.”87 Sancta Clara seeks above all to emphasize the benefits that befall God’s church by having a chief (executive) pastor while avoiding the danger of empowering the office excessively. When the pope speaks ex cathedra, Sancta Clara says, he signifies his adherence to the councils and bears witness to the unity of God’s church. Presumably, the pope in this case speaks infallibly, but only because God’s promise of inerrancy already applies to the conciliar judgements that the pope endorses and implements. The unity of the Church is preserved by the fact that simple priests cannot convene a synod without a bishop. The autonomy of the Church, in turn, is safeguarded because laymen cannot participate in councils (chapter 29). Laymen have a role to play, however, especially kings and rulers, since they are helpful in the logistical aspects of organizing a council, providing protection, infrastructure, and so on (chapter 30). There are many different types of councils—local, regional, national—and all have a purpose, yet (contrary to Laud’s claim) only general councils are qualified to define matters of faith. Under special circumstances, however, a national council acting with the pope’s authority may define matters of faith (chapter 31). Implicitly, if a national English council defined the Catholic sense of the Thirty-nine Articles, the pope would have the authority to ratify the result and declare the English schism to be ended, without having to convene a general council. At every step, in short, stability and flexibility are advantageously balanced. Patristic authority must generally be followed, but only with regard to revealed truths, not with regard to philosophical matters, since consensus in the case of philosophy is no guarantee of truth (chapter 32). By the same token, a pope enjoys no special authority with regard to framing private theological opinions, which he must submit to conciliar examination like every other theologian (chapter 33). Since no revealed truth that is not perfectly certain must be defined de fide, the living Church acting by means of its conciliar definitions has exactly the same authority, Sancta Clara argues, as the patristic Church. This does not imply, however, that the Church is limited to what is contained

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explicitly and formally in scripture and tradition (chapter 34). Indeed, the stability of Catholic doctrine is not incompatible with the power of councils to issue new definitions. In chapter 35, Sancta Clara tackles a key objection that was raised by Lord Falkland: How is it possible for a church claiming infallibility to tolerate a doctrine and later condemn it?88 On the one hand, Sancta Clara concedes, the Church cannot at any time endorse an error regarding matters of faith. On the other hand, if a council decides one day to define the opposite of a tolerated doctrine to be an article of faith, then the previously tolerated doctrine is, ipso facto, declared to be an error, which in turn implies that the Church knowingly and willingly tolerated an error in matters of faith. Sancta Clara’s answer consists in emphasizing once again that councils issue new definitions de fide only under duress. Councils have a responsibility to refrain from solving problems that have not yet emerged: “Ecclesia nihil declarat nisi excitata per Schismata.”89 A sharp distinction must be drawn between, on the one hand, positively endorsing an error and, on the other, permitting a probable opinion negatively as part of a confused mass of yet-undecided matters. Until there is an urgent need to examine a matter and to clarify what God teaches about it as a matter of faith, the matter is simply undecided, which means that various probable opinions about it are permitted until future notice.90 By definition, since probable opinions as such are fallible and thus warrant no more than a low degree of adhesion, Catholics who hold an opinion that is later condemned as heretical are not really in jeopardy of losing salvation. Such errors were never beliefs in the true sense of the term, that is, embraced with the highest degree of adherence. Thus Pope John XXII’s wrong opinion about the state of souls before the general resurrection, cited explicitly by Falkland to impugn the stability of Catholic doctrine, was never more than a wrong opinion. Does this mean that probable opinions can never be defined? Sancta Clara rejects the opinion that probable opinions must be positively declared by the Church to lie forever outside of the Faith. As Sancta Clara points out, if the Church were to confine probable matters to an eternal status of probability, its capacity to meet future emergencies would be compromised. Indeed, if a doctrine were authoritatively defined by the Church to be “probable,” it would, in effect, be classified infallibly as undecidable.91 Sancta Clara rejects the notion of permanently “undecidable”

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doctrines on the grounds that no uncertainty belongs to extramental states of affairs. Doctrines are “probable” simply in the sense that human beings are uncertain (so far) regarding the truth of the matter. A good example of a yet-undecided but not intrinsically undecidable issue is the doctrine of the Virgin’s immaculate conception. Objectively, the Virgin either was, or was not, supernaturally preserved from original sin at conception. From God’s point of view, there is perfect certainty regarding her status. From the human point of view, however, there is uncertainty, which means that there is at least some probability on both sides. The Council of Basel refrained from defining the doctrine ut de fide, admitting it only as a “pious opinion consonant with faith.” The Council of Trent, in turn, saw no urgent need to settle the issue infallibly, leaving the question open for investigation and for a possible future ruling, if circumstances call for it.92 Sancta Clara concludes by recounting how the most recent Franciscan general chapter, held in Toledo in June 1645 and presided over by Giulio Ros piglioso (future Clement IX), put the whole Seraphic Order under the Virgin’s patronage and called on Franciscans to apply themselves with new zeal to elucidate the truth.93 All of this brings Sancta Clara quite naturally to chapter 36 and the procedures through which councils reach their decisions. How many delegates must attend? How are votes counted? Sancta Clara insists that Catholic faith emerges from a veritable consensus, not from a simple majority vote.94 If a notable part of the assembly objects to a definition, the Church must refrain from endorsing it. If there is disagreement, the solution is to engage in free discussion. As long as every country sends a sufficient number of qualified bishops, and as long as the goal is to achieve a true consensus through free debate without intimidation, councils will guide the Church forward. And since the role of provincial councils is not to define matters of faith but to endorse them and promulgate them, provincial councils play their own important role in validating the process. As the living Church meets unexpected challenges to its unity, it learns more and more about the apostolic faith that it has received. Far from deviating incrementally from its pristine faith, God’s church, thanks to the power of its representative councils to act with a single will, is brought to define Christ’s gospel with ever increasing clarity, confident of God’s promise of inerrancy. Every threat that the Catholic Church survives brings it

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new divine assistance and new light. The Church’s mission of clarification is thus a work in progress, shaped continuously by God’s providence so long as it is acknowledged to be open-ended. Sancta Clara’s solution to harmonizing stability and evolution is to argue that the Church is infallible in matters of faith if and only if it renounces closure.

APOSTOLIC FLEXIBILITY

Chapters 37 to 42 delve into specific Roman Catholic doctrines that Protestants reject. The aim is to sort out what is actually de fide in the contested Catholic doctrine and what is merely speculative. In the process, Sancta Clara is eager to show that Protestants are generally more rigid and restrictive in their positions than the Roman Church. Protestants thus endanger the traditional flexibility through which God’s church has survived through the centuries. For example, Protestants dogmatically shorten the list of canonical scriptures rather than allow texts of lesser canonical value, in which the Catholic Church finds a range of welcome considerations (chapter 36). The Protestant rejection of transubstantiation also illustrates the special problem of Protestant rigidity. To what extent and in what sense is transubstantiation de fide? All that is infallibly certain de fide, Sancta Clara points out, is that Christ is present in the sacrament. As Saint Basil “beautifully” put it long ago, the manner in which the presence of Christ is understood is not de fide since it is not necessary for salvation. Faced, however, with controversy over whether or not the substance of the bread remains after consecration, the Church exercised its freedom to declare the Faith more fully by coining the neologism “transubstantiation” in order to assert the common opinion of doctors and saints, Greek and Latin alike, that the bread is wholly converted into Christ’s body.95 Yet no philosophical interpretation of the conversion, as such, is embraced by the Church as de fide. Since the vague and changeable theories of philosophers are fallible, the Church must carefully avoid confusing supernaturally revealed truths (articles of faith) with philosophical explanations supplied by fallible human beings to make revealed truths less perplexing.96 With regard to the Eucharist, no Catholic is required to believe in Aristotle’s theory of

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substances and qualities, even though the Church may find Aristotle’s theory consonant with faith and useful against error. Sancta Clara implies, in effect, that Catholics and Protestants are divided by mere language. If “transubstantiation” is taken simply to mean that Christ, not bread, is on the altar, then it is de fide. If “transubstantiation” is taken as a metaphysical thesis, to mean that God performs the miracle precisely by conserving the “species” of the bread independently of the “substance” of bread, then transubstantiation is not de fide. The metaphysical thesis is not God’s but Aristotle’s—it is human, fallible, and a matter of opinion, open to debate. Catholics have every right to remain skeptical regarding philosophical speculations invoked to explain how the bread is converted in the host. And although it is true that Trent has defined the conversion as a conversion “of substance,” nonetheless the definition leaves the metaphysical question open, since “conversion of substance” is compatible with interpreting the conversion as formal rather than material.97 Suarez goes so far as to say that it is not actually heretical to shun the term “transubstantiation” since “terms, as such, are not the objects of Faith.” The English Jesuit Parsons argued that the term “transubstantiation” is merely appended to the article of faith, apparently in agreement with Stapleton, who affirms that the Church may err in things that are appended to faith rather than of the substance of faith.98 Sancta Clara ends on a patriotic note, citing Gildas Britannorum (sixth century) and Bede on the subject of English reverence for the Eucharist. He also reminds Protestant moderates of Great Tew that Erasmus never denied that Christ, not bread, is present in the host, since Erasmus was willing, along with all Christians continuously from the apostolic age, to adore Christ in the consecrated host.99 In short, Protestant episcopalians should not balk at the Church’s freedom to introduce the term “transubstantiation.” Rather, they should worry about Presbyterian plans to put the priestly office of administrating Communion into the hands of mere deacons and laymen, based on rejecting the Catholic doctrine (chapter 39). A good example of Catholic flexibility is the question of the form of Holy Communion. Is it de fide that Communion must be given to children (chapter 40)? Is it de fide that Communion must be given under both species (chapter 41)? Records show, Sancta Clara explains, that when children were given Communion in the early Church, they were given the cup

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only. This proves that the Church never understood it to be a divine precept that Communion must be given under both species always and everywhere. Rather, the Church understood from the start that it has the authority to show flexibility in the matter and to give Communion sometimes under one species, sometimes under both.100 Since the early Church was free to give Communion to children in the form of the cup only (presumably to avoid choking), the Church is free to decide that Communion under one species suffices for salvation. To “our Adversaries” who object that this was a special instance and that the Church is not allowed under ordinary circumstances to change a ritual that Christ himself instituted under both species, Sancta Clara has a twofold answer. First, since it was in the power of the Church to judge that Communion under one species was advisable in a special instance, then it is in the power of the Church to do so for whole groups and at all times. Second, Christ’s institution of Communion is faithfully preserved by the fact that consecration of the Eucharist is always performed under both species. Once again, what is immutable, infallible, and de fide is carefully distinguished from what genuinely belongs to human prerogative. A similar analysis is made of the sacrament of confession in chapter 42, leading to the conclusion that secrecy is not essential to confession, even if a number of very qualified theologians argue that it is.101 Auricular confession, as such, is not de fide. As long as Christians believe firmly that God’s church is divinely empowered to absolve sins, a range of practices is allowed.102 Based on ancient records, Sancta Clara shows that both auricular confession and public confession are fully consistent with the true essence of the sacrament.103 Implicitly, Protestants who rigidly restrict confession to the public form cripple the Church’s apostolic flexibility. From the start, Catholic freedom to explicate the Faith by means of new terms, or to administer sacraments in a variety of ways, served to preserve the unity of Catholic communion as it expanded geographically and through the centuries, without loss of a core pillar of infallible beliefs.

PERSUASIVE ARGUMENTS

From chapters 43 to 48, Sancta Clara tackles a number of further issues that Protestants reject, hoping once again to distinguish what the Church

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“firmly” believes from what the Church “piously” believes. Chapter 43 examines whether, and to what extent, purgatory is de fide. There are many indications, Sancta Clara says, that the idea of a place of expiation after death has existed in the Church from the beginning. The belief that the souls of the deceased benefit from prayers because they are neither damned nor yet beatified has distant intimations in the book of Maccabees, but rests chiefly, according to Scotus, on Saint Paul’s statement in Corinthians 3—“sic tamen quasi per ignem.” The whole concept of purgatorial fire, found also in Basil and others, inspired Scotus and other Scholastics to speculate wildly, but since what matters here is to determine what is de fide, Sancta Clara says that he will not discuss opinions: “Sed dum de Fide agitur, opiniones non recenseo.”104 Pope Urban VIII refrained from treating purgatory as a material place, defending instead the belief that those who have died in a state of fidelity but burdened with sins can still hope in God’s mercy. A key testimony in favor of purgatory is the early English belief in masses for the dead after a consultation with Pope Gregory I.105 Jewish rabbis (Maimonides, Isaac Abravanel) and all modern Israelites, moreover, posit a place of temporary punishment or expiation, with the consequence that they, too, offer prayers for the dead. Rossensis (John Leslie, bishop of Ross, 1527– 96), in turn, says that the doctrine of purgatory is embraced by Greeks and by Latins, but that the Roman Church received it only gradually. The doctrine, in short, far from being a novelty, is particularly ancient, as Pico della Mirandola attests in his work on the Jewish Kabbalah and as Philo Judaeus attests in his erudite book De antiquitatibus biblicis.106 What sort of knowledge of the things of faith is possible out of purely natural principles and how far does reason help in the case of purgatory? The medieval Franciscan Roger Bacon, a great scrutator of nature, Sancta Clara reports, was convinced that we can have some rudimentary knowledge of purgatory by natural means. Since our infirmity stems chiefly from original sin, if we avail ourselves of supernatural truths as our first principles, we are able, through ordered reasoning, to reach a quasi-scientific knowledge of matters that we would not otherwise investigate, especially as such matters are all interconnected (“intra se concathenata”).107 The only natural knowledge that we have of God, Sancta Clara points out, is the knowledge that we have reflexively of our own inner substance, from which we are able to extrapolate by degrees to God’s existence, but only as

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we grow older and more stable and more capable of grasping purely intellectual truths.108 In a similar way, we might be able to form a rational notion of purgatory by postulating that the mental images that we have of our sins remain permanently fixed before our mind’s eye at the moment of death (since they have no opposites to corrupt them and cannot be escaped through distraction). These images cause the soul terrible grief in the frozen “now” of eternity.109 Such a theory finds support in both Basil and Origen, who speculated that the fire of purgatory is nothing other than memory inflicting punishment on our souls. Aristotelians might object that we have no purely intellectual memory and thus that our capacity to grieve over our sins vanishes at death, but Sancta Clara says that he will answer this objection in a later chapter based on invoking the hypothesis of Platonic species. For now, Sancta Clara concludes that, since souls after death are powerless to change and thus powerless to free themselves from the grievous memories of their sins, any relief in their torment must rightly be attributed to God’s mercy.110 It also follows from this theory that anyone who dies in the very act of loving God will remain in this act for all eternity and thus cannot be damned.111 Indeed as “our Vega” (Andreas de Vega, Franciscan, d. 1560) correctly teaches, a dying person is justified by an act of loving God, so that it is really important to elicit such acts from the agonizing. And again, if we combine faith with Plato’s theory, Sancta Clara points out, we are led to conceive that it is possible for memories to be preserved in the mind’s apex, where they encounter no opposing factors and cannot be destroyed. Implicitly, the importance of persuasive philosophical arguments is that they lead to better pastoral care for the dying. More recently, Kenelm Digby has philosophized deeply on how thoughts are immobilized in souls that are separated from the body in his famous treatise on bodies and human souls, book 2, chapter 11.112 Thomas White, in turn, has promoted a similar theory in a book explicitly based on Digby’s principles, namely, Institutionum peripateticarum ad mentem Kenelmi Digbaei. In book 5, lecture 1, White states that “whatever inheres in the soul of a man at the instant of his death remains in the separate soul. Therefore all of his judgments, whether speculative or practical, will remain.” Similarly, in lecture 4, section 10, he concludes that “our life in infinity will be a collection of all of the soul’s dictates, and however a man

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managed himself in this life, so will he be afterwards forever, in eternity.”113 In support of Digby’s and White’s theory, Sancta Clara cites the “wise author” of the work known as Theology of Aristotle, book 9, chapter 5, along with Proclus and even Pythagoreans—all of whom validate Roger Bacon’s speculation that something can be known about purgatory even by purely natural means. Sancta Clara concludes the whole discussion by praising the Council of Trent for treating the subject of purgatory with “holiness and caution.” Citing a whole paragraph from session 25, Sancta Clara interprets Trent to affirm that purgatory is a pious rather than a firm belief, since the decree shows more concern with avoiding superstitious excesses than with anathematizing doubters. To the extent that Trent determines that “souls detained in Purgatory are helped by the suffrages of the faithful, masses, prayers, alms and other works of piety,” the Church encourages Catholics to continue such pious practices, “in accordance with the institutes of the church,” but refrains from defining anything about purgatory infallibly. Rather, Catholics are implicitly invited to reason philosophically about the state of separate souls and to develop persuasive arguments in support of the traditional pious practices that aim at obtaining relief for souls in purgatory. The same is true of the invocation of saints (chapter 44). Trent declares it to be a “good and useful” practice in conformity with “the constant belief of the primitive church,” but does not claim it to be necessary for salvation.114 Catholics may safely ask saints to intercede for them, but they are not required to affirm that the practice is efficacious as long as they do not positively deny it. Suarez concurs and writes, correctly, that “the invocation of saints is not necessary for salvation in the sense of being required to gain access to Christ the mediator.”115 White, in turn, says in his Paris-approved Catechism, conference 15, that “it is far more excellent to pray to God then [sic] to saints, since God exceeds saints infinitely in power as well as in charity.”116 Thus it is obvious that Trent exercised proper restraint and that the Church stands clear of the superstition that heretics attribute to it. In connection with invoking the intercession of saints, Trent goes so far as to warn that true religion sometimes turns into superstition and that such debasement must be scrupulously avoided. Sancta Clara emphasizes that “we, today, must certainly acknowledge and deplore the same

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superstitious tendencies that Augustine denounced in his own times (Of the morals of the Catholic Church, chapter 34), yet we must also worry lest religion itself be destroyed when we destroy superstition.”117 The Church venerates saints as human beings who have been translated into heaven, which is not mere fancy. Nor are Christians alone in their belief that blessed souls intercede for them. As rabbis attest, the same belief is found among ancient Jews, who were always punctilious about excluding intermediaries. Modern Jews also linger at the tombs of the dead in order to request their prayers. Abravanel cites a Jewish sage who says that we must petition the dead to bring us mercy. What else is implied but our own invocation of saints?118 Does this mean that God’s church sanctions irrational practices? Sancta Clara first dismisses the objection that there are no separated souls and thus that there are no saints in heaven before the final resurrection (the thesis of mortalism). He then tackles the more difficult objection that saintly souls in heaven cannot possibly hear our petitions since we are so far from them here on earth.119 Sancta Clara supplies two religious authorities, Raphael De la Torre (De religione, art. 4, d. 3) and Hugh of St. Victor (De sacramentis, pt. 16, c. 2), who argue on slightly different grounds that the difficulty is hardly insurmountable since God indubitably hears our prayers, which is really what matters.120 Nevertheless, Sancta Clara says, “it is actually more consonant with philosophical principles, as I will show, to posit that Blessed Souls can hear the prayers of suppliants. As my learned friend Brother Hauzeur correctly teaches in his Exorcisms, blessed souls hear the prayers of even the most distant suppliants and do so through their own proper powers. For corporeal distance, namely a material interval, neither aids nor impedes a purely spiritual action. Material distance affects only material actions, as the terms themselves imply.”121 Some philosophers, Sancta Clara adds, hold that blessed souls can be in many spheres at once, even that they are ubiquitous.122 Without going so far, it seems “altogether probable” (omninò videtur probabile) that separated souls are able, at the very least, to radiate out (effundere) over great distances, as theologians assert of angels. A very apt model of the angelic nature is suggested to us by light (which is the quasi soul of the universe) since light that is enclosed in a lantern spreads out through the lantern’s opening to illuminate at a far

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distance. Such light, moreover, is not weakened or dissipated at its source, since it illuminates just as steadily whether the lantern is shut or open. Why not, a fortiori, philosophize in the same way about the soul, which is purely spiritual? Strictly speaking, light is not spiritual, yet it manifests a certain immateriality by traversing the boundaries of place: “What, I say further, prevents us from speculating that the soul illuminates only within bodily limits while it is in our opaque bodies, yet, when separate, makes itself present on earth from heaven in a purely spiritual way? What prevents this, I do not know.” (The souls of the English Franciscan martyrs come to mind.) Sancta Clara adds that, since the soul, like light, is capable of filling bodies of any size or shape, it follows that a soul is capable of extending linearly to whatever distance you wish to assign. Souls of saints thus “easily hear our prayers across great distances.” Philosophy, in short, supports theology to the extent that philosophy is able to suggest that there is no impossibility to the claim that saintly souls in heaven can make themselves present to distant places.123 Granted that the model of light provides a possible solution for the obstacle of distance, why should we be willing to concede the possibility that disembodied souls have cognition? Sancta Clara’s answer is to invoke the hypothesis of innate Platonic ideas, to which he devotes a separate chapter (chapter 45).124 On Aristotle’s theory, as Sancta Clara has already acknowledged in his discussion of purgatory, not only does new empirical cognition cease at death, but memories of past perceptions also vanish, since intelligible species are stored as phantasms in the imagination, not in the intellect. Aristotle’s theory, Sancta Clara already conceded, precludes the idea of a purely intellectual memory.125 Are there innate ideas in the human soul? Sancta Clara argues that the hypothesis of innate ideas suffices for us to be able to surmise that pure intellections and a purely intellectual memory are possible.126 In support of the hypothesis, he cites, among others, Digby and White, most expressly White’s Institutionum peripateticarum ad mentem Kenelmi Digbaei of 1647, book 4, lecture 10, where White concedes that reason, as such, is innate, based on Socrates’s experiment with Meno’s slave boy.127 Sancta Clara also cites the Louvain physician Thomas Fienus (or Feyens, 1567–1638) before concluding that saintly souls in heaven, like angels, are capable of pure intellections of particular and contingent facts, based on innate ideas.128

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In short, although it is not required de fide to believe that saints in heaven and angels hear our prayers, it is permissible, indeed “good and useful,” to pray to saints and angels that they intercede on our behalf, so long as superstition and idolatry are avoided. Nor is it unreasonable to believe in the efficacy of such prayers based jointly on the constant tradition of the Church and the fact that rational arguments may be supplied to dispel improbability. As for the veneration of images, crosses, and relics, the same cautious endorsement based on constant tradition backed by at least some rational arguments applies (chapter 46).129 Sancta Clara refers the reader to his Problematibus for a full discussion, emphasizing the honoring of martyrs through relics since the days of the primitive Church and citing Dionysius as a basis for the pious love of holy images.130 Sancta Clara again invokes the opinion of rabbis, whose authority is all the more weighty in the matter in that “the Talmud indeed asserts that all images are prohibited.”131 Menasseh Ben Israel (On Creation, problem 28) teaches that “wise rabbis” restrict the prohibition to images that offensively promote human dominion and power, such as those that depict a rod or a worldly globe in human hands. In commenting on Exodus (question 3, 20), Menasseh says that God’s prohibition simply aims at stopping idolatry.132 Other rabbis have approached the matter differently. Rabbi Isaac (Luria) and Rabbi Arama (Isaac ben Moses) say that Jews are allowed to make images of things that do not exist visibly in the world, such as winged cherubs and angels, but not images of beings, such as emperors. “Thus the reader will see that at least some images were admitted in churches since the start,” so that the Church cannot be charged with having introduced them as a novelty. And since Jews interpret God’s commandment against graven images in a flexible way, Puritans ought to adopt a less rigid position also. There is no record, moreover, that either Christ or any of the apostles condemned images. Finally, Damascene’s view may be invoked, namely, that God simply meant to prohibit pagan images and thus to prevent sculpted representations of God before Christ’s birth. In short, Sancta Clara implies that Puritan rejection of religious art attests to a sort of destructive contempt for artistic genius rather than to some commendable return to the purity of the primitive Church. Provided superstition is avoided, there is a perfectly sound basis for religious art and for the pious veneration of relics and crosses, as the reader will find abundantly documented in Sancta Clara’s earlier work.

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THE PAPACY

Does the issue of the papacy, however, represent an insurmountable obstacle to moderate Protestants wishing to return to the Roman Church? Systema fidei ends with two chapters on the papacy, dedicated, as we saw, to Digby. Recalling how Francis Windebank used to stumble against “the supposed divine origin of the Roman papacy,” Sancta Clara implies that chapters 47 and 48 fulfilled Windebank’s dying request that Sancta Clara settle the matter in writing.133 The appendix “De papatu” proceeds through two carefully crafted quaestiones. First, is it an article of faith that the papacy of the Roman Church is of divine right and that it extends beyond particular churches to the universal church? Sancta Clara starts by pointing out that the first question leads to confusion. It may be interpreted in two very different ways. Does it ask (1) whether the pope occupying the Roman see is pontiff by divine right (sensum specificativum), or does it ask (2) whether occupying the Roman see, as such, is a divinely ordained basis for the pontificate (sensum reduplicativum)?134 The two meanings, Sancta Clara says, stand a world apart. The second, “reduplicative” meaning, Sancta Clara explains, implies that Saint Peter settled in Rome by divine command and thus could not have settled anywhere else. Some very serious doctors hold this view, Sancta Clara concedes, yet Saint Peter, in fact, first settled in Antioch, without apparently violating God’s will. Thus with regard to the “reduplicative” meaning, “both views,” affirmative and negative, Sancta Clara judges, “are consistent with Faith.” Consequently, it is not de fide that Rome, as such, was selected by God to be the pontifical see. Nor is it de fide that Rome became the pontifical see as a result of Saint Peter’s purely human choice. The Church, in effect, suspends judgment on the matter of whether or not Rome, as such, was instituted to be the Holy See by God. With regard to the “specificative” meaning, however, there is no room for diversity of opinion, Sancta Clara affirms, since it is an article of faith that the Roman papacy is by divine right, as defined by the Council of Florence, session 25. Many passages of scripture, corroborated by saintly testimonies and by councils, show that it has always been the constant tradition of the Church to associate Peter, the prince of the apostles, with the Roman see. What is de fide is (1) that God instituted the papacy in the person of Saint Peter and (2) that God ordained that Saint Peter’s successors

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as popes also succeed him as bishops of Rome. What is de fide is that Peter’s historic see, namely, the Roman see (as it happens), must be occupied, jure divino, by Peter’s successors. Does the papacy extend not only over each and every particular church taken singly, but over the universal church as such? At first blush, Sancta Clara appears to defend a strongly papalist position, since he argues, against Jacques Almain, that the papacy extends over the universal church taken as a whole. On closer inspection, however, Sancta Clara’s answer is more nuanced. He starts by conceding that, metaphysically speaking, a whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, but morally speaking, which is the relevant approach in the case of the question asked, simple inductive reasoning suffices, which means that “the universal church” is nothing other than the sum of all particular churches. Implicitly, by defining the universal church in this narrow fashion, Sancta Clara is able to appear to refute Almain’s conciliarist position without actually refuting it. How? Sancta Clara’s conclusion that the pope’s jurisdiction extends over the universal church defined as the sum of all particular churches does not imply, for example, that it extends over the universal church “assembled in its Councils.”135 Sancta Clara’s second quaestio on the papacy tackles the Jansenist and Anglican claim that both Peter and Paul were simultaneously popes.136 Interpreting it as an attack on the monarchy of the Church, Sancta Clara starts by citing Gerson against “foolish Catholics” who assert that there can be more than one pope at any given time. Nonetheless, Sancta Clara concedes that some passages in Irenaeus and also in Bellarmine provide support for the notion of a divided episcopate at Rome in the primitive Church. The solution, Sancta Clara argues, is to allow that there is no contradiction between holding that Peter was constituted pope by Christ and that the two apostles jointly founded the Roman Church. Peter’s divinely instituted primacy, in short, does not imply that Paul and the other apostles were denied active authority in God’s church. Peter’s jure divino papacy is compatible with Paul’s jure divino episcopacy. The clear definition of the papacy that was framed by the Council of Florence does not preclude saying that Paul, along with Peter, was “master of the whole habitable earth.” Indeed Catholics may safely hold that all of the apostles were “masters of the earth,” provided that Peter is acknowledged to have ruled

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over them. Sancta Clara’s solution, in short, is to imply that the pope’s stewardship over the Church includes protecting and preserving the many jure divino episcopal pillars upon which the Church rests and through which it expands. The net outcome of Sancta Clara’s two quaestiones on the papacy is to emphasize that the benefits of monarchical government include a strong institutional defense of episcopacy. Far from undermining the authority of local bishops, the Roman pontiff serves to coordinate and bolster episcopal authority against forces that would dismantle episcopacy altogether. Papal government of God’s church is largely executive and judicial rather than legislative since the pope’s main function is to watch over the implementation of conciliar definitions and decrees in each and every local church. The pope acts on Christ’s behalf as Peter’s heir and successor, but is not Christ—who alone is the true pontiff of God’s church “taken in its full latitude,” namely, as “the assembly of all human beings in communion with Christ’s Faith.”

PAX ERIT

As though wishing to emphasize the pastoral aim that guided his effort, Sancta Clara concludes Systema fidei by urging his English compatriots to find grounds for Catholic reconciliation in the solutions that he has developed to tackle divisive issues. “If our compatriots accept the interpretation of the controversies such as I have presented them in this book,” Sancta Clara confidently writes, “there will be Peace (Pax erit).”137 Did Sancta Clara mean for Systema fidei to serve as a Roman Catholic analogue to Joseph Hall’s Peace-maker (1645) and Pax terris (1647), where Hall calls for Christians to cling to what is indispensable for salvation and tolerate each other’s differences otherwise?138 As though mindful of Protestant sensibilities at every turn, Systema fidei strives to present Roman Catholicism as committed to the same purity and leniency (mansuetudo) as the English Church. First and foremost, Systema fidei asserts that Christ, not Peter, is the cornerstone of the Catholic Church, thereby validating the cherished English notion of a seamless “Church of Christ” going back to the apostles. Second, Systema fidei argues that the Church of Christ is infallible only in

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defining what is necessary for salvation, never in other matters. To the narrow extent that God’s Catholic Church is infallible, the infallibility in question derives from God’s extrinsic assistance, not from any infused virtue possessed by human beings. Nor is the belief that God’s church is infallible in necessary matters a human speculation, but, rather, it is based clearly on scripture, namely, on God’s own promise. A third and crucial point is that the Roman Catholic Church is fully as committed to distinguishing between true doctrines of the Faith and mere opinions as Protestants.139 In a subtle tour de force, Sancta Clara manages to show that the notion of “fundamental doctrines” (dear to English Protestants) is precisely the best way to defend the infallibility of Church councils (dear to Roman Catholics). Sancta Clara, however, avoids resorting to the controversial term of adiaphora, “indifferent” doctrines. Instead, he shows that various types of Church decrees warrant various degrees of assent—thus making ample room within the Roman Church for “tender” Protestant consciences. In matters that are not indispensable for salvation, a range of personal adherence is permissible, including adhering by degree null to especially dubious practices, which allows individuals to follow their own conscience without breaking the unity of Catholic communion. No conscientious Catholic, Systema fidei argues, is ever required to adhere to fallible human decrees as though these fallible decisions were supernaturally revealed truths upon which salvation depends. No conscientious Catholic is required to embrace mere theological speculations, such as those that are concocted out of philosophy to explain the Eucharist, with the same perfect certitude (faith) with which he simply believes that the host is Christ’s body: hoc est corpus meum.140 On the other hand, conscientious Catholics will refrain from positively contradicting Church decrees aimed at preserving unity, including Church decrees that are concerned with purely ecclesiastical decisions (cup to the laity) and with permissible pious practices (prayers for the dead). Rather than cut themselves off from Christ’s church, conscientious Catholics will dissent from these fallible decrees in the privacy of their hearts (a solution also endorsed by Joseph Hall).141 As for papal rule over the Church, Catholics are required to hold only what the Eastern Church holds in agreement with the Western Church. Catholics are free to think of Paul and Peter as equal cofounders of God’s church, provided Peter’s appointment by

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Christ as chief pastor is acknowledged to descend to Peter’s successors, who, ipso facto, are entitled to occupy the Roman see. No Catholic is required to believe de fide that the pope is above general councils. No less than Joseph Hall, Sancta Clara hoped to promote “the Churches Peace” as essential to Christian life.142 Like Hall, Sancta Clara hoped to shun both “that vague liberty of interpretation, which submits to no restraints of pious moderation” and despotic attempts to impose mere theological opinions on Christians as doctrines of the faith.143 The whole point of Systema fidei is to argue that the Roman Church is uniquely equipped by its structure and authority to promote the “latitude not incompatible with safety” aimed for by Hall. The Roman Church, Sancta Clara claims, relies on ecumenical councils not only to define matters of faith infallibly in the face of schism but also, just as importantly, to refrain from settling disputed doctrines prematurely when no immediate threat exists. The Church, therefore, acts with benevolence (mansuetudinè) with regard to errors that do not explicitly contradict conciliar definitions regarding matters of faith. As Hall himself acknowledges, peace is often maintained by the Roman Church through the method of “imposing silence on both parties,” which means, for example, that such bitter opponents as Dominicans and Franciscans, who hold opposite views regarding the Immaculate Conception of Mary, remain in communion with each other.144 Catholic capaciousness results from the fact that the Roman Church urges rules of behavior both private and public that are much like Hall’s “rules of peace.”145 Individual Catholics are urged to cultivate a “meeke and humble temper,” to “obey their spirituall Guides,” to refrain from being obstinate, to practice fraternal charity, to comply with fellow Catholics “so far as they may,” and, above all, to “let fall their own interest for the publick.”146 With regard to public measures, Systema fidei also bears a close affinity to Hall’s Peacemaker since it defends the right of the Roman Church to maintain religious peace by “suppressing the beginnings of spirituall quarrels,” and by “laying sure grounds of Religion by Catechising” and even “imposing silence in some cases upon Pulpits and Presses.”147 The main difference is that Hall calls on civil authority to legislate that “sure grounds of Religion be laid in the hearts of Gods people” and to intervene as soon as religious strife threatens public welfare.148 In contrast, Systema fidei appeals to the

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state’s help only logistically, to help convene ecumenical councils. Sancta Clara implies that the Roman Church has sufficient apostolic resources to ensure that “differences of opinion not beget alienation of affections.”149 Systema fidei makes no attempt to defend the Roman Church against the charge that it has often resorted to force to persecute its enemies. Instead, Sancta Clara implies that persecution is not essential to God’s church. In all fallible matters, individual Catholics are not only allowed, but positively encouraged, to adhere to opinions only as conscience dictates. The chief restraint that is put on the liberty of conscience of Catholics by God’s church, Sancta Clara argues, is the requirement that no mere human opinion be treated as infallible. Once this basic Catholic truth is made clear, Catholic philosophers like Galileo, Descartes, and Digby, who make no claims whatsoever concerning salvation, are free to investigate the structure of the physical universe and the nature of bodies and of physical motions — provided that they not presume to invalidate doctrines of the Faith based on their latest theories.150 Systema fidei implies that the Roman Church holds fewer doctrines to be de fide than the Church of England, while allowing permissible beliefs (pilgrimages, invocation of saints) that are useful to piety. Implicitly, general councils protect a rich patrimony of Christian customs and artistic creativity against clever but single-minded individuals such as Chillingworth. Who, then, Sancta Clara implies, is guilty of wishing to tyrannize over the faithful? The Roman Church that allows the invocation of saints without requiring it, or the various Protestant churches that forbid it? Who is more guilty of idolatrous ceremonialism, the English Church that requires that the laity be given the cup or the Roman Church that holds it to be a flexible matter, best left to human decision exercised in context? Pax erit: Rome’s answer to Christians who do not like holy images is simply that they respect (tolerate) those who do. Systema fidei implies that adhering to Christ by adhering to Catholic communion teaches Christians to cherish human differences. The charity of living with “the whole assembly of those in communion with Christ’s Faith” is meritorious in itself and cultivates toleration. Whereas schismatics and heretics tend to form bonds only with those who agree with their own narrow views, Catholic communion embraces a wide array of different human temperaments and vocations. Protestant friends of Great Tew should return to the

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Roman Church, Sancta Clara implies, not only to be saved from schism but also to help keep alive the diversity and disputational culture of the Old Religion. Nor is joining the Eastern Orthodox Church a better option, Sancta Clara adds, since the Greek Church sides with Rome on all of the doctrines that English Protestants reject and diverges more than Rome does from the English articles of religion.151

SANCTA CLARA AND JEREMY TAYLOR, AGAIN

How does Systema fidei compare to Jeremy Taylor’s treatise on religious diversity and toleration, Theologia eklektike, subtitled A discourse on the liberty of prophesying (1647)? Like Sancta Clara, Taylor denies that Christian unity requires unanimity of opinion in matters that are not necessary for salvation. So long as human beings, Taylor says, have “such a variety of principles, such severall constitutions, educations, tempers and distempers, hopes, interests and weaknesses, degrees of light and degrees of understanding,” it will be impossible to reduce them to conformity. 152 Like Sancta Clara, Taylor argues that the solution is to recognize that there is no intrinsic harm in disagreeing over “legitimate matters.”153 And just as Sancta Clara consciously took the risk of being accused of inappropriate moderation, Taylor fully expected to be accused of promoting religious “indifferency” and sought to prove that freedom of conscience in “legitimate matters” does not imperil Christian fervor. Like Systema fidei, Taylor’s Liberty of prophesying allows diversity of opinions in speculative matters but does not allow disagreement in fundamental “matters of Creed.” Like Sancta Clara, Taylor carefully distinguishes articles of faith, to which all Christians must fully and unconditionally adhere if they hope to be saved, from “doubtfull Disputations” and “indifferent” matters, where diversity of opinion is permissible. 154 Unlike Sancta Clara, however, Taylor gives no credit to the Roman Church for championing the distinction or for invoking it to protect speculative freedom. Rather, Taylor blames the Roman Church for the rise of dogmatic intransigence. Rome, he says, departed from the “eclectic” benevolence of the early Church and initiated the policy of imposing human opinions as articles of faith on all Christians, thus producing schismatics

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and heretics who were then violently persecuted.155 Sancta Clara and Taylor, in other words, disagree on how to interpret the historical record. Sancta Clara interprets the Roman Church to have been legitimately engaged in clarifying doctrines of the Faith for the sake of preventing schism, while Taylor interprets the Roman Church to have been cynically engaged in corrupting Christ’s Faith for the sake of political hegemony. What does Taylor take to be the rule of faith? Taylor argues that the Nicene Creed, as such, suffices to define the whole of Christian faith. 156 In sharp contrast to Sancta Clara, Taylor explicitly denies that the logical consequences of the Nicene Creed are themselves articles of faith and denies that ecumenical councils have the authority to make them so.157 Since Sancta Clara, however, concedes that fundamentalia do not put Christians under exactly the same absolute obligation as fundamenta, and since Taylor’s advocacy of personal reason as the safest guide makes it difficult to see how the Nicene Creed can be rationally separated from its own logical implications, the difference between the two views may well be more apparent than real.158 According to Taylor, heresy never applies to “pious persons.”159 Would Sancta Clara disagree? Since Sancta Clara counts anyone in communion with God’s church as a “pious person,” and since the only requirement for being in communion with God’s church, apart from good mores, is to refrain from contradicting Church doctrines absolutely, it follows that Sancta Clara’s view, once again, is closer to Taylor’s “minimalist” approach than first appears. Anyone who lives sacramentally, adheres to the Nicene Creed, and refrains from condemning what the Church teaches, that is, one who tolerates Roman teachings, is not a heretic by Sancta Clara’s standard—or by Taylor’s standard. Taylor indeed will concede that Roman Catholic doctrines, though false, are not “criminall” or idolatrous.160 Like Sancta Clara, Taylor appreciates that “Expounding Scripture” is intrinsically difficult, but since Taylor denies that traditions, fathers, or Church councils are sufficiently reliable to determine obscure passages of scripture authoritatively, he concludes that the obscurity of scripture is what most argues in favor of individual freedom in speculative matters (“liberty of Prophesying”).161 In Taylor’s view, since there is no infallible way to settle differences of opinions regarding passages in scripture that do not teach clearly and evidently what is necessary for salvation, every Chris-

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tian is free to interpret these passages according to his own conscience. Would Sancta Clara disagree? According to Taylor, “liberty of prophesying” means, first and foremost, that no individual Christian, or faction of Christians, is allowed to interpret an obscure passage of scripture conclusively and impose the interpretation on all other Christians as God’s Word. Like Taylor, Sancta Clara emphasizes that freedom to speculate about “undefined” matters implies that no purely private opinion must be imposed on the community of faithful. What Sancta Clara adds is the notion that Church councils, in theory, serve very effectively to protect diversity of opinions regarding undefined doctrines. Once Taylor has set aside the Nicene Creed as the rule of faith to which all Christians must adhere, he has little recourse but his own private eloquence to persuade Christians that every other matter is “indifferent” and that they must therefore respect each other’s diverse views. Sancta Clara, in contrast, adopts a rule of faith that includes the living church and thus includes a collective process for clarifying what is de fide and what is not. The Roman Church, Sancta Clara implies, is actually in a better position than any Protestant church to provide institutional protection for minority views in “indifferent” matters. Perhaps aware of the institutional weakness of his advocacy, Taylor culminates Liberty of prophesying by calling for civil governments to protect religious pluralism. Not only is it “lawfull for a Prince to give toleration to severall religions,” it is the best and the most Christian policy. Civil authorities have the responsibility to maintain public safety and thus have jurisdiction over citizens’ actions, but they have no just grounds to persecute anyone for private beliefs.162 According to Taylor, princes have a welldefined mandate to secure public safety but also to protect the autonomous sphere where God interacts with private conscience. Religion, Taylor says, is “superinduced” to temporal government, implying that temporal government is organized for its own autonomous civic ends, independently of religion, but not without a positive duty to safeguard what lies above its mandate, namely, each citizen’s inner religious journey.163 Christian princes have a duty to protect all law-abiding citizens equally, including Anabaptists, papists, and Jews.164 By the same token, no doctrine may be tolerated that is inconsistent with piety and the public good.165 To the extent that Anabaptists have valid arguments against paedobaptism,

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they deserve to be tolerated, but their rejection of the death penalty, of armies, and of public oaths “make it impossible for Princes to rule” and thus cannot be tolerated or viewed as “Christian” since “the Religion of Jesus Christ is the best establisher of publicke communities.”166 As for papists, the long list of their false opinions attest more to the irrational and emotional character of their religion than to their “criminality,” since indeed the foundations of faith are sound in the Roman Church.167 Upon close examination, papists can even be discharged of idolatry.168 And even though papist doctrines tend in general to encourage moral laxity, the only papist opinions that must be banned absolutely are the ones that threaten governments, such as the doctrine that the pope may annul oaths pledged to God or man, or absolve subjects of their allegiance to their natural prince. As long as papists give credible proof that they reject such treasonous doctrines, there is no just ground upon which to persecute them “since the temporall power ought not to restraine prophecyings, where the publick peace and interest is not certainly concern’d.”169 In sharp contrast to Systema fidei, however, where schism is strongly condemned, Taylor seems to give up entirely on the project of Christian unity. Or does he? Taylor denies that the fact that there are “severall sects of Christians” implies that God’s church, as such, is fragmented into “severall Religions.”170 Since the Nicene Creed remains whole and cannot be fragmented, Christians remain united by God’s truth, even though they find themselves divided physically because of human opinions in “indifferent” matters, which are “no part of God’s worship.”171 In God’s eyes, the various sects that make up Christianity are as seamless as Christ’s coat. Consequently, there is no real reason to work on reuniting the various Christian churches. Instead of reunion, Taylor advocates intercommunion.172 Since the various “pieces” of Christianity adhere to the Nicene Creed, there is no just ground to refuse any fellow Christian at all at God’s communion table.173 It follows that the only schismatic church is the church that denies communion to other Christians simply because these other Christians hold different opinions in indifferent matters.174 Presumably, Taylor’s chief target is the Roman Church. By denying Communion to nonpapists and by requiring that papists abstain from Communion in the English Church, Rome has implicitly cut itself off from Christian unity. Taylor insists, however, that intercommunion must be “regulated accord-

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ing to the laws” of each church, lest some “unlawfull” condition be embraced over and beyond the Christian mystery.175 Does he have transubstantiation in mind? Since Systema fidei argues very explicitly that the term “transubstantiation” is immaterial so long as a communicant believes that hoc est corpus meum, it seems, once again, that Systema fidei and Theologia eklektike (Liberty of prophesying) are perhaps not as far apart as first appears. Sancta Clara, however, goes further. He argues, in effect, that intercommunion should not only be “regulated according to the laws” of each church but should include an end to schism. His argument is that God’s church, governed by ecumenical councils and ruled by the bishop of Rome, alone benefits from God’s promise of infallibility in matters of salvation. Precisely because there is no question of “infused” infallibility delegated to human beings, any part of God’s church that cuts itself off from the whole forsakes its vital tie to God’s promise. As Sancta Clara puts it, “it follows from the doctrine that the church (defined as the assembly of all human beings in communion with Christ’s faith) cannot err, at least regarding what is necessary for salvation, that schism, i.e. visible separation from the universal church, cannot be justified.”176 Sancta Clara, moreover, supplies a clear argument to justify claiming that God’s church is the Roman Church. Since all churches were in communion with the Roman Church in apostolic times, he says, “either there has never been a true universal church anywhere or the Roman church was the true universal church all along” and “is the only church of Christ today.” In the case of England, “since England received her Faith from the Roman church and was in communion with Rome until Henry VIII, either the Roman church is Christ’s true church or we have never been members of the true church, which is horrible to contemplate.”177 Sancta Clara avoids saying that the English Church was ruled by Rome until Henry VIII, or dependent on Rome, or under Rome’s authority. It suffices to point out that both churches were in shared communion to make the point that they constituted God’s church indivisibly, or not at all. Taylor concedes that his project of restoring Christian unity through intercommunion is not likely to succeed concretely, since “few Churches that have fram’d bodies of Confession and Articles, will endure any person that is not of the same confession.”178 How well does Systema fidei argue

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that Roman Catholicism provides a credible alternative? Does the Roman Church, in theory, offer a credible model of Catholic capaciousness — of how to reconcile unity and diversity, authority and private conscience? Especially in light of the Blasphemy Ordinance of 1648 and of the perception by many English Protestants that Presbyterians meant to be every bit as authoritarian as the defunct “prelatical” English Church, did Systema fidei succeed in arguing that the Roman Church, for all its past mistakes and crimes, possesses the experience and organization that make it best able to “restrain tyranny without giving license to mere opinions”?179

T H I R T E E N

Hobbes Modestly Accosted

Joseph Hall’s cry for the government to enforce orthodoxy (1645) followed by Jeremy Taylor’s plea for the government to protect freedom of conscience (1647) speaks of the unsettled conditions in England, but it also calls attention to the problem of the government’s role and duties in religious matters. When and why did Sancta Clara decide to reflect seriously on Thomas Hobbes and to encourage a public discussion of Hobbes’s ecclesiological and political views? In Paris between 1645 and 1646, Sancta Clara could not have been ignorant of the respect that Thomas White and Kenelm Digby felt for Hobbes’s philosophical acumen or of the warm support that Hobbes received from Father Mersenne and his scientific circle.1 Since Hobbes had given Digby a copy of the 1642 edition of De cive, it is far from impossible that Sancta Clara became acquainted with Hobbes’s ecclesiology as early as 1645. Was Sancta Clara aware of the controversy between John Bramhall and Hobbes over determinism and free will? In the small community of English exiles in Paris, it is unlikely that Sancta Clara failed to inform himself of a debate that touched on an issue of burning interest to him as a Franciscan and disciple of Scotus. Most importantly, Bramhall’s distress and the defiant effort of exiled Anglicans to keep up their Catholic-like 343

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worship in makeshift rooms of private homes must have touched him deeply.2 Did Hobbes really blame the Laudian church and its quest for semiautonomy for Charles’s troubles? As one of Queen Henriette-Marie’s official beadsmen, Sancta Clara must have learned of Hobbes’s appointment as Charles’s tutor in 1647 at the urging of Henriette-Marie’s favorite, Henry Jermyn.3 For all Sancta Clara knew, the “Louvre” Royalists found it expedient to encourage a more Erastian view of religion, empowering the king to modify the structure of the Church of England as he pleased in order to accommodate either Presbyterians or Independents, as opportunity dictated. From 1647 to 1650, Sancta Clara served as guardian of St. Bonaventure’s in Douay.4 With multiple occasions to visit Brussels, he may have interacted with Bramhall personally. Like Bramhall, Sancta Clara supported Ormond’s Royalist coalition of Anglicans and moderate Catholics in Ireland against Rinuccini’s papalist hard-liners.5 While living in Brussels, Bramhall agreed to participate in a live debate with Roman Catholics on the topic of purgatory and prayers to the saints, very similar to a debate in which Sancta Clara personally participated.6 In his writings, Bramhall will cite Sancta Clara’s Deus, natura, gratia often and warmly, praising Sancta Clara as “our learned and ingenuous countryman.”7 In 1649 and 1650, Bramhall was in a difficult predicament. Deposed bishop-in-exile of a suppressed national church that viewed itself as a legitimate member of God’s Catholic Church, Bramhall refused to be labeled a schismatic or a heretic. He stubbornly insisted on submitting his doctrine “to my spiritual Mother the Church of England and in a higher degree to the Catholic Church, when it shall declare itself in a true and oecumenical Council.”8 Bramhall just as staunchly refused to identify the Catholic Church with the existing Church of Rome, even taken broadly to include “all other Churches of that Patriarchate or of its communion.”9 In other words, Bramhall’s commitment to Catholic unity consisted in submitting his views obediently to a fictitious Catholic Church that might theoretically emerge one day from a hypothetical future general council empowered to supersede the fraudulent decrees of Trent. No wonder “English Romish Priests” felt that the conditions were ripe for “withdrawing their countrymen from the communion of the Church of England,” as Bram hall himself bemoaned.10 Sancta Clara’s argument in Systema fidei, chap-

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ter 21, that the Roman Church “was all along the true church from which schismatics have fallen, or else there never has been a true church, so that the Roman church today must be the only Church of Christ,” was aimed directly at refuting Bramhall’s position.11 As we shall see, however, Sancta Clara did not wish to “withdraw his countrymen” individually from the Church of England so much as pursue his own true dream of corporate reunion. What new arguments could be adduced? Sancta Clara understood that Bramhall yearned for Catholic unity and that Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of prophesying promoted religious toleration not only for the sake of survival but out of a deeper desire to restore some form of Christian communion.12 While reflecting on the predicament of his wounded Anglican friends, Sancta Clara also had before him the dramatic example of Hugh Cressy’s Exomologesis, published in Paris in 1647 and aimed at “maintaining Catholique Unity against the sacriledge of Schism.”13 Cressy, who had been a loyal Anglican and a frequent member of Great Tew, had converted to Roman Catholicism in 1646 while in Rome, on Christmas Day. Following his conversion, Cressy had studied theology with Henry Holden in Paris and then taken up residence in Douay. In Exomologesis, Cressy denounced the “scandal of disunity” and emphasized the deep connection that existed between Roman Catholic unity and supererogatory vocations. It was above all the holiness of religious orders, Cressy argued, that stood as proof that “Catholique Unity is a daughter of Heaven.”14 Exomologesis explicitly calls attention to Sancta Clara’s theology. In the context of narrating his own cautious apprenticeship of Roman Catholic doctrine, Cressy explains that he decided to avoid the “suspicious moderateness” of “Cassander, Franciscus de Sta. Clara, etc.”15 Instead, he decided safely to turn to the uncontroversial theologian Stapleton.16 Although appearing to be hostile, Cressy’s rejection of Sancta Clara’s “suspicious moderateness” actually reminds the English reader that Sancta Clara walked in the revered footsteps of the sixteenth-century Flemish humanist George Cassander, who had tried to minimize the differences between Protestant and Catholic doctrines for the sake of reunion and peace. Like Sancta Clara, Cassander had opposed excessive papal claims and defended the legitimacy of giving the cup to the laity.17 Sancta Clara’s moderation, in other words, is not without Catholic precedent. And what did

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Cressy discover when he so prudently turned away from Sancta Clara in favor of Stapleton? He discovered that Stapleton actually differs little from Sancta Clara when it comes to the specific question of restricting Roman infallibility. Using Stapleton as a standard of Roman orthodoxy, Cressy went on to cite “Other Catholiques,” such as Panormitanus (Niccolò de’ Tudeschi) and Waldensis (Thomas Netter), who circumscribe the infallibility of general councils much more narrowly than Stapleton, yet who have “not hitherto been censored, that I know of.”18 Cressy concludes, very much like Sancta Clara, that general councils are not infallible without the implicit consensus of the whole Church. Conciliar definitions, Cressy emphasizes, must be received by local Catholic churches “in order to be called the Faith of the universall church” and thus be counted as authentically infallible.19 By the end of Cressy’s discussion, Sancta Clara’s “suspiciously moderate” theology is in fact indirectly validated.20 Cressy even went out of his way to specify that he never meant to “praeferre” Stapleton to the “disparagement of any other.”21 Would Cressy’s eloquent condemnation of schism, combined with a commitment to conciliarism, suffice to move Bramhall’s heart? When the second edition of Hobbes’s De cive appeared in Amsterdam in 1647, both Bramhall in Brussels and Sancta Clara in Douay had compelling reasons to obtain a copy. The new edition of De cive was prefaced with a letter of praise by the Roman Catholic priest Pierre Gassendi, who serenely dismissed Hobbes’s religion by means of a single short parenthesis. Gassendi implied that Hobbes’s political ideas could be endorsed by Roman Catho lics independently of Hobbes’s religion.22 Perhaps the Catholic reception of Hobbes could be taken a step further as an opportunity to reflect on the internal structure of the Church as a social body in its own right. Whatever the immediate source, or sources, of Sancta Clara’s turn to Hobbes, Sancta Clara’s detailed discussion of De cive in his 1650 Treatise of the Schism of England would turn out to be one of the earliest published reactions in English to Hobbes’s ideas prior to the publication of Leviathan.23 Sometime between 1648 and 1650, Sancta Clara decided to expand chapter 21 of Systema fidei into a full-length monograph on the schism of England. What is new in Sancta Clara’s 1650 effort to end the English schism is a carefully crafted threefold argument based on Hobbes. As we will see, while joining the effort to combat Hobbes’s Erastianism, Sancta

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Clara will invoke Hobbes to emphasize, first, that the Roman Catholic Church is possessed of the same unity and stability that characterizes an instituted “Hobbesian” commonwealth. He will then argue, second, that a radical separation of spiritual authority from temporal authority is more conducive to civil peace—more Hobbesian—than Hobbes’s own Erastian solution. Third, Sancta Clara will draw on Hobbes to argue that the duty of a proper Hobbesian sovereign is to regulate autonomous religious bodies, not teach religion. Let us review the immediate context of Sancta Clara’s new appeal to Anglicans to end their schism. By 1648, when Systema fidei appeared, depicting exactly the kind of ideal “Catholic church of Christ” for which Laud had fought and for which Bramhall yearned, the community of Little Gidding lay deserted, its chapel plundered, its organ smashed, its buildings partially destroyed.24 The queen’s chapel at Somerset House, in turn, had been ransacked and locked shut.25 Gone was the Rubens Passion of Christ that Sancta Clara remembered above the altar, gone was the crucifix in the garden, gone was the garden, gone were the French brethren with their bushy beards and their capuchons.26 The friary itself had also been destroyed—replaced by an ordinary London town house with two high gables.27 The chapel of Hampton Court had also been vandalized, its oak railings torn down, its stained-glass windows ruined.28 In Gloucester, Godfrey Goodman’s episcopal palace had been ransacked. Laudian divines in England now practiced their solemn rituals in secret.29 How could Anglicans not view their separation from Rome in a new light, now that new and even more uncompromising schismatics had managed to “subvert the fundamentall government of Church and Common-wealth” and “cast all into the Chaos of confusion”?30 At Oxford, where a Parliamentarian soldier had shot off the Virgin’s head on the portal of St. Mary’s Church, Anglicans and Royalists such as Thomas Barlow devised ways of resisting their Parliament-appointed Visitors rather than act against their conscience.31 They continued to conduct sacramental worship in college chapels, selfconsciously fortifying themselves with Latin prayers.32 Did Sancta Clara learn of the resistance at Oxford, or even witness it? There is evidence that Sancta Clara was back in London, perhaps only briefly, in November 1648, since it was in “our residence in London” (Londini in residentia nostra) that he drafted a dedication of Systema fidei to

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the Benedictine François de Calonne, abbot of Anchin.33 Earlier that same year, in January, a new ordinance had been passed to intensify the search for “Papists and delinquants” in the London area. The seals and locks on the queen’s chapel had been ordered broken so that the chapel could be further cleansed of its idolatrous past and refitted to suit the austerity of a Protestant service.34 There is no record of it, but it is not impossible that Sancta Clara was in London when “the poor king of England lost both his crown and his life.”35 In any event, Sancta Clara was in London six months after the regicide, on August 6, 1649, dedicating a treatise on the Immaculate Conception of Mary to his old friend Count Rossetti. 36 Jeremy Taylor, in turn, who had suffered physical violence and imprisonment, published that same year An exhortation to the Imitation of the Life of Christ, hoping to preserve a “portion of the holy fire” that was fast disappearing from England.37 Three months after Charles’s execution, episcopal church government in England, already effectively struck down, was officially buried, and Royalists were required to profess their allegiance to the new government.38 In Edinburgh, Presbyterian Scots were willing to support King Charles II on condition that he endorse the Presbyterian Covenant. Bramhall, in Flanders, published a scathing indictment of Presbyterians, using language against Presbyterianism that seems at times to be drawn right out of Hobbes’s De cive.39 In London and in Paris, Sancta Clara’s “Blackloist” friends, namely, Thomas White, Henry Holden, and Kenelm Digby, continued secret negotiations with Cromwell’s Independent party to obtain religious toleration for Roman Catholics—prompting the Presbyterian party in Parliament to banish Digby from England.40 By March 1650, Cromwell had established control over most of Ireland. The exiled king had no choice but to negotiate with the Presbyterian Scots, despite Bramhall’s strong misgivings.41 On May 1, 1650, less than a week after Montrose’s defeat at Carbisdale, an agreement was reached between the king and the Scottish envoys at Breda. By June, Charles II was sailing towards Scotland, forced to swear to uphold the Covenant en route as a condition for setting foot on Scottish soil.42 It was not inconceivable that the Stuart monarchy could be restored without the restoration of a national episcopal church. In August 1650, Sancta Clara was elected provincial of the English Franciscans for the second time. Pierre Marchant, freshly bruised from his efforts to defend Peter Walsh and the Ormondist Catholics in Ireland,43

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presided over the English Franciscan chapter that elected Sancta Clara, which met in Nieuport. Sancta Clara did not attend the chapter but sent instead a letter requesting that Franciscan missionaries in England be dispensed from fasting during Advent, on the grounds that noble patrons found it difficult to provide special meals for the friars and that Protestant servants, noticing the friars’ fasting, became suspicious. No longer protected by the Crown, Franciscan missionaries who were lodged in private homes could not afford to be detected.44 Marchant granted the dispensation and signed it with his own hand.45 Sancta Clara himself had perhaps found refuge in Lord Baltimore’s home “in Wild Street, near London,” where John Lewgar, now a widower and a priest, had taken up residence in 1648.46 Alternatively, it was perhaps at this time that five houses on Fleet Street in London were bequeathed to the English Franciscans by the Catholic recusant William Lindsey.47 In a treatise on missionaries published in Douay in 1651, John Gennings praised Sancta Clara for his tireless efforts in shaping and defending the English Franciscan mission.48 In December 1650, Sancta Clara’s Treatise of the Schism of England appeared in London under the author’s name of “Philip Scot.” Until recently, the identity of Philip Scot had remained a mystery.49 We now know that Sancta Clara was the true author because Philip Scot’s Treatise of the Schism of England repeats whole paragraphs of Systema fidei, chapter 21, verbatim, and because a Latin version of the same treatise is extant, Tractatus de Schismate, speciatim Anglicano, in the first volume of Sancta Clara’s Operum Omnium Scholasticum et Historicum, published in Douay in 1665 under Sancta Clara’s own supervision.50 The date of the Latin Tractatus de Schismate cannot be ascertained with any precision since the two first approbationes, by the theologian Leonard Stockis in Spada and by Marchant in Ghent are dated, respectively, August 6 and September 18, but without a year. Nor does the Latin dedication help much, since Tractatus de Schismate is dedicated to Sancta Clara’s “friend and patron, the most wise and noble Lord de Bois, Canon of Namur,” presumably Bishop Engelbert DuBois (?), who died in 1654. Whether the Latin version was written before the English version or vice versa, the two texts are essentially one and the same. There is, however, a difference in the title. Unlike the Latin Tractatus de Schismate, the 1650 Treatise of the Schism of England makes a point of advertising in its title that Hobbes is discussed: A Treatise of the Schism of

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England. Wherein particularly Mr. Hales and Mr. Hobbs are modestly accosted.51 The discussion of John Hales is hardly surprising, since Hales published a treatise on schism in 1642, but why is Hobbes involved? Hobbes’s relevance to the break between Rome and Canterbury clearly breaks new ground. The title page of A Treatise of the Schism of England also advertises that the work is published permissu superiorum. Not only is no attempt made to conceal the fact that the author is Roman Catholic, an implicit message is conveyed in favor of Roman Catholic authoritarianism, enduring source of unity and security at a time when English Protestantism appeared to be particularly rudderless.52 The English version of Sancta Clara’s treatise, moreover, is dedicated to “both the Universities.” The dedication calls for a debate over the En glish schism—and over Hobbes—to be conducted “in their next Scholastick Olympics.”53 The author praises “the Universities” for making “large progresses in the school of wisdom,” but explains that obtaining “pure wisdom” requires that God be sought “with a pure soul.” This cannot be done, he says, unless submission “without any limitation” is made to “those commanding oracles (as the Ancients call them) which God by his holy Spouse propoundeth to our obedience.” Such indispensable submission requires, in turn, knowing “which is the only Church, whence all wisdom as from a pure source flowes.” The aim of Treatise of the Schism of England is thus explicitly to “inable the Reader” to know which is God’s true church and, therefore, to recognize where submission is appropriate for the purpose of seeking God with a pure heart.54 Since both Hales and Hobbes are cited in the title, the reader must assume that rebutting arguments framed by Hales on the one hand and by Hobbes on the other will help critically to discover which is God’s “only church.” The Hobbesian axiom that submission is due to proper authority, however, is evoked and endorsed from the start. Both Hales and Hobbes, the reader is told, will be “modestly” accosted. The choice of word might be innocuous, but it might also reflect Sancta Clara’s careful reading of De cive. In De cive, chapter 3, section 14, Hobbes derives the right to be treated with “moderation” from the natural law (reason) that tells us that others have the same rights as we claim for ourselves.55 To violate a person’s natural right to be treated fairly, Hobbes says, is to act immodestly. Sancta Clara, who read De cive in assiduous detail, could hardly have failed to be moved by Hobbes’s basic argument that

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reason seeks peace as its proper end and that we are rationally bound, for the sake of peace, to treat one another with moderation. The first two chapters of Treatise of the Schism of England simply expand what is set forth in Systema fidei, chapter 21. Against Bramhall, chapter 1 defends the “paradoxical” claim that the Roman Church, “taken in the latitude of her Communion, is God’s onely Church.”56 As we saw in Systema fidei, the key argument is that all Christian churches were in communion with Rome at the time of Gregory the Great, when “St. Austin the Monk” was sent to evangelize England, so that either the Roman Church and all the churches in communion with Rome constituted God’s church, or else “Christ had no true church upon the earth.” Either England received her faith from God’s church and belonged to God’s church as one of its members up until Henry VIII or else England was never redeemed “from the darkness of infidelity.”57 As proof of English fidelity, Sancta Clara then cites not only William of Newbridge but also stained-glass windows, graves, churches, “altars still in some places extant,” monasteries, hospitals, colleges—and also unwritten English statutes and customs, “conveyed from hand to hand,” including fast days, holidays commemorating miracles obtained by invoking particular saints, annual pilgrimages, solemn prayers for the dead, and perpetual masses—all of which attest to England’s “constant memory” without innovation or change of faith.58 From this ancient universal faith, Henry VIII rebelled. He broke with Rome and cast the English Church into schism. The fateful rebellion gave rise over time to countless subdivisions of schism, which many Protestants labor now to “patch up together”—yet they never so much as think of the option of reuniting with Rome, even though the Catholic root “diligently seeketh the bough that is broken from her,” asking only that “the bough likewise shall labour to close up the breach.” 59 For the incomparable benefits bestowed in the past and for the patient efforts exerted in the present for Catholic reunion, the Roman Church deserves a second hearing. Chapter 1, in short, refutes Bramhall by emphasizing England’s deep genetic ties to the Roman Church. It also hopes to play on the emotions of the Anglican reader by fostering a sense of regret and by provoking an impulse of gratitude.60 Chapter 2 establishes that “Catholics may certainly be saved.”61 The proposition that “Catholicks in the Church of Rome remaining shall attain unto eternal salvation” is sufficiently proved based on chapter 1, Sancta

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Clara says, but it is also affirmed by many Protestants “of no small account,” including Morton, Hooker, Robert Soame, Barlow, Laud, Taylor, Chillingworth, King James, and Potter.62 Testifying that he has personally discussed the matter in all sincerity with a number of qualified Protestant divines, Sancta Clara concludes that “all Protestants of any moderation who are not poysoned with the tincture of rigid Calvinism freely confess that Catholicks in their religion may be saved.”63 He then points out that Chillingworth goes so far as to grant the possibility of salvation to anyone who “seriously labours” to “deduce a probable sense” out of scripture. Chillingworth’s liberalism, however, cannot be endorsed in toto since Chillingworth contradicts scripture and the Creed by denying that unity of communion is necessary for salvation.64 Chapter 2 thus accomplishes three goals. It reminds Anglicans that salvation is possible in the Roman Church; it reminds Anglicans that they share much that is precious with Roman Catholics but not with “rigid Calvinists”; and it rejects the option of Chillingworth’s laissez-faire model of inclusiveness by reminding Anglicans that the unity of Christian communion is fundamental to salvation. Chapter 3 seeks to prove that “schism is an enormous crime.” For this purpose, Sancta Clara draws a direct analogy between schism and political rebellion. Schism, he writes, is sedition against the Church. It is no less culpable in its sphere than political sedition against the civil commonwealth in the political sphere. According to Sancta Clara, Christians have the same moral obligation to adhere to God’s church that subjects have to adhere to the state. In what sense are the two analogous? Like political sedition, schism is essentially a crime of disobedience. Just as rebellious subjects are morally at fault for withdrawing their obedience from the state that protects them, schismatic Christians are culpable if they separate themselves “from the head, which is Christ” by withdrawing from Catholic communion. As a result of setting themselves adrift, moreover, schismatics are inevitably prompted to “erect altar against altar.” Schismatics rapidly degenerate into heretics, as heresy is simply “an inveterate schism.”65 The Hobbesian flavor of Sancta Clara’s “obedience” argument is readily apparent. Sancta Clara recognizes, however, that Hobbes has framed a powerful new argument that exonerates the Church of England from the charge of schism. Explicitly citing De cive “Chapter 17, n. 21, 22,” Sancta Clara explains that “Mr. Hobbs” subjects ecclesiastical matters so thoroughly

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to the civil magistracy that schism is inconceivable so long as a Christian commonwealth remains obedient to the civil magistrate. Hobbes’s Erastianism precludes schism in the Roman Catholic sense since it recognizes no Christian obligation beyond the obligation, all at once religious and political, to the civil sovereign. In “Chapter 18, n. 13,” Hobbes writes that he “will have the Prince supreme even in spirituals,” which means that religious schism is strictly defined as an internal breach within the commonwealth, against the prince. On Hobbes’s theory, religious schism is a wholly domestic matter. It is not merely analogous to political sedition, it is political sedition. As we will now see, far from rejecting Hobbes’s theory of political obligation, Sancta Clara exploits it to defend a dualist model in which church and state are rigorously separate. Sancta Clara’s objection to Hobbes is that the same sort of Hobbesian obligation that binds citizens to their civil sovereign binds Christians to God’s universal church. Sancta Clara explains: “The truth is, he [sc. Hobbes] is so zealous in his structure of a civil Common-wealth (wherein he hath some excellent things) that he either neglects, or reduceth the spiritual commonwealth or Church almost to a Platonical inexistent Idea.”66 According to Sancta Clara, Hobbes has articulated an exceptionally good theory of political stability by defining the structure and unity of commonwealths. What is wrong about Hobbes’s political theory is simply that it denies that there is a second kind of commonwealth, namely, the “spiritual commonwealth” that is God’s church. Bramhall is perhaps also indirectly targeted, since he reduces God’s church to a “Platonical inexistent idea” by professing to submit his views to a purely ideal Catholic Church that exists only in a hypothetical future. Sancta Clara justifies rejecting Hobbes’s Erastian model in favor of a dualist model by appealing jointly to natural reason and to scripture. What Hobbes fails to recognize is that the offices of ecclesiastical magistracy and civil magistracy have “real and specifical differences.” Hobbes’s project of making the prince supreme in spiritual matters, though motivated by a commendable desire for civil unity and peace, contradicts a rational capacity in us to discriminate among human faculties. In other words, at a first level, intellectual honesty prevents us from endorsing Hobbes’s model. Hobbes’s model also contradicts Saint Paul, as “the ingenuous Reader” will concede if only he compares the grounds of Hobbes’s

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theory with Hebrews 5. Church tradition, furthermore, weighs against Hobbes, since boundaries between ecclesiastical and temporal magistracies have “alwayes been acknowledged.” Citing Athanasius’s appeal to Hosius of Cordoba, Sancta Clara provides a historic precedent for separating the spiritual sphere of the Church from the temporal sphere of the state: “Neither is it lawful for us on earth to hold the Empire,” Hosius wrote to Emperor Constantius, “nor hast thou (O Emperor) power over incense and sacred things.” As a matter of historical record, spiritual prerogatives belonging to the ecclesiastic magistrate have always exceeded the private “internals” that Hobbes allows as a limit to the temporal magistrate.67 Saint Ambrose also directly contradicts Hobbes, since he writes that “the temple of God cannot be Caesars right.” Sancta Clara concludes that “all Christians grounded upon Scripture” have always taken the Church to consist essentially of spiritual men, whereas civil commonwealths are made up of Christians considered strictly as members of a temporal body. The dualist model, in short, implies a double identity with which English Catholic recusants have long been familiar. As civil persons, Catholic Christians are fully and exclusively subject to the civil magistracy of their own country in all civil and temporal things, but as spiritual persons, they might also be subject to ecclesiastical power seated in a foreign country, as “spiritual things are not circumscribed by space.” Once again citing Ambrose, Sancta Clara points out that “my own temporal Prince” (who is not subject to anyone in temporal matters) might well “be a fellow subject with me” in the spiritual realm, which is “wholly of another and higher nature, though Mr. Hobbs denies it, which I wonder at.”68 According to Sancta Clara, a person’s civil status and political obligation are not changed or abrogated by spiritual membership in a universal church, provided there be a clear, even radical separation of temporal and spiritual offices, purposes, powers, and spheres of obligation. Thus whereas a Christian bishop, he says, uses supernatural means that are granted to him by supernatural authority for the sake of supernatural purposes, a Christian ruler uses natural powers that belong to him by the law of nature for the sake of securing temporal peace and security for his natural subjects. The two “commonwealths” are distinct. In truth, if Hobbes had only “taken St. Paul along with him in framing his new model

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of a Christian City,” he would have avoided the error of holding that all authority resides in princes, since “no Christian can be ignorant of the authority which the Holy Ghost giveth to Praelates regere Ecclesiam Dei to govern the Church of God.” Contrary to Hobbes’s claim that the Christian Gospel is merely declarative and instructive, the spiritual government of God’s church “is a government,” endowed with a regitive power, as attested by the rulings that were issued by the apostles. Hobbes himself concedes that pastors have the power to execute spiritual sentences, such as excommunication. Yet he argues that the sovereign must pass sentence first, just as he argues that absolution, although administered by priests, must actually be decreed by the sovereign. Hobbes’s key error, in effect, is to hold that “the Church hath her power from temporal power” rather than immediately from God.69 On the contrary, as Saint John Damascene proves, Paul’s model of Christ’s church involves no mention whatever of kings. Remarkably, Sancta Clara voices his confidence that Hobbes will modify his view. Once “Mr. Hobbs” becomes aware of the scriptural and patristic passages that favor the spiritual autonomy of God’s church, he will not possibly reject them. Since Hobbes’s argument for collapsing the Church into the state stems mainly from his fear that ecclesiastical autonomy poses a threat to civil peace, we should not, Sancta Clara says, take too much notice of this aspect of Hobbes’s theory, lest Hobbes be misinterpreted as aiming to destroy Christian religion altogether. More importantly, the fact that a ruler as despotic as the “great Turk” allows the patriarch of Constantinople to exercise autonomy in spiritual matters should provide Hobbes with sufficient reassurance that the spiritual autonomy of God’s church is compatible with the security of the state. Contrary to what Hobbes affirms, it is thus perfectly possible, Sancta Clara concludes, for a national church to be described as “schismatic” because of a “defect of obedience” with regard to God’s universal church/spiritual commonwealth, “without breach of duty to the Prince.”70 And just as rebellious subjects are cut off from the sovereign’s protection, schismatic Christians are cut off from the benefits of God’s grace. As Saint Jerome explains, schisms “exceed all other crimes” because “they cut and divide the great and glorious body of Christ,” literally dismembering the church for which Christ died. Unity is vital to God’s church because it is the very essence of Christian charity to be ruled spiritually by Christ and thus to prefer Christ’s unity over our

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own immediate private interests and judgments. Indeed, Augustine warns in De trinitate, book 15, that whoever fails to value the unity of God’s church does not have God’s charity.71 And although it is undoubtedly true that many individual English Protestants may be saved in virtue of “invincible ignorance,” nonetheless the conclusion cannot be avoided that schism “separateth us from the love of Christ, and consequently from heaven.”72 Implicitly, it is the duty of Anglican prelates and of Hobbes’s former student, King Charles II, to put an end to the English schism and to seek reintegration of England’s apostolic church into God’s Catholic commonwealth. In chapter 4, which describes the fierce hatred that separates Protestants and Catholics, Sancta Clara again appeals to Hobbes. Specifically, he cites De cive, chapter 13, section 5, to defend freedom of religion. According to Hobbes, Sancta Clara explains first, a prince who tolerates a religion in which his subjects cannot gain heaven clearly acts against his conscience.73 Consequently, the only circumstance under which a ruler may legitimately prevent his subjects from practicing the religion of their choice is when the ruler believes that his subjects are jeopardizing their salvation. Sancta Clara points out somewhat maliciously that Hobbes implies that Queen Mary Tudor acted like a good Hobbesian sovereign when she acted to suppress the spread of Protestantism. In sharp contrast, Anglican monarchs who persecute Roman Catholics are guilty of barbarity since Anglicans believe “that Salvation may be had in our church.” It follows from Hobbes’s statement that Anglican monarchs have a duty of conscience to allow Roman Catholics the free practice of their religion. Sancta Clara is explicit that religious toleration follows logically from Hobbes’s argument: “therefore according to Mr. Hobbs they should not disquiet their subjects in using their liberty in their religion.”74 What should we make of Sancta Clara’s appropriation of Hobbes to defend toleration for Roman Catholics? The passage from De cive that Sancta Clara cleverly cites to make his point will be dropped from Leviathan, as though Hobbes had thought better of the idea that princes should monitor their subjects’ chances of salvation.75 The full context of De cive, chapter 13, sheds light on Sancta Clara’s reading of section 5. In section 4, Hobbes emphasizes that citizens form a political commonwealth voluntarily, not only for the sake of physical safety but also for the

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sake of living as fulfilling a temporal life as the human condition permits. Temporal magistrates, therefore, would be acting against the law of nature, which is to say against reason and against the citizens’ trust in their government, if they did not strive to procure, to the extent that it is possible by means of laws, an abundance of goods for the citizens, not only for the necessities of life but for happiness.76 In section 6, in turn, Hobbes includes the private pursuit of wealth consistent with public security and the enjoyment of “harmless liberty” among the key benefits of living in an instituted civil commonwealth.77 If Sancta Clara read section 5 in light of the two adjacent sections, he naturally read it to mean that there is no restriction on religious freedom except the prince’s conscience. Hobbes implies, therefore, however indirectly, that Roman Catholics, like other subjects, should have the right to prosper and to enjoy the “harmless freedom” of practicing their religion in the privacy of their homes, since no English monarch believes in his conscience that Roman Catholicism prevents a person from gaining heaven. Sancta Clara points out next that most English Protestants who claim freedom of religion for themselves on the grounds that they have a “tender conscience” refuse to grant the same freedom to Roman Catholics, even though Roman Catholics have a special title to “tenderness of conscience” since they fear offending God by changing religion. For no other reason than their fidelity to the religion of their ancestors, English Roman Catholics are hunted down, despoiled of their property, and savagely butchered—their “quarters set up upon gates and citadels for fouls [sic] to devour.”78 As though elaborating on Hobbes’s list of the natural laws that promote human peace, Sancta Clara argues that persecuting Roman Catholics amounts to parricide and desecration of the dead. The dead, Sancta Clara implies, are no less members of the commonwealth than the living, which means that they are owed civil protection and peace. The natural law that commands us to honor our parents, moreover, does not terminate when we become adults but puts us under a permanent obligation.79 By persecuting Catholics with relentless savagery, Protestants attest to a “venemous and bloudy rancour even against their own Parents.”80 Parricide, regicide, and a breach of the natural law that obliges us to honor the dead will continue to fester, Sancta Clara implies, as long as Roman Catholics are denied freedom of conscience.

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To those who argue that Catholics are outlawed on political rather than religious grounds, Sancta Clara answers that religious persecution has always disguised itself under the mantle of public security. Roman emperors, in particular, tried to stop the growth of Christian culture by issuing multiple edicts, including barring Christians from schools on the pretext that Christians had no right to benefit from pagan masters since they rejected pagan beliefs.81 In the case of Protestant England, ironically, the reverse applies, since “all your learning is ours.” English colleges were founded by Roman Catholics. The fields of philosophy, theology, canon law, civil law, and physics were instituted by Roman Catholics, yet Roman Catholics are pitilessly excluded from universities.82 Is there not, however, a new moral inclination among English Protestants to put an end to persecution? Some Protestants advocate religious toleration, Sancta Clara concedes, but they typically refuse to include Roman Catholics. Others are willing to “abolish all persecution from Catholicks in blood and fortune,” but only under the condition that Roman Catholic children be torn away from their parents and raised as Protestant—an abominable policy that violates reason and God’s law.83 Fortunately, “there is yet another sort,” Sancta Clara now reports, “who seem more tender than all the rest.” These “more tender” tolerationists “pretend to reduce all to an Henoticon, or Unitive; namely, that we may all inoffensively [sic] retain our own faith, referring the examine of all differences to Gods court.” They base their project of universal freedom of religion on the argument that it is God’s prerogative alone to judge religious error and fidelity, just as it is God’s prerogative alone to bestow faith.84 Sancta Clara greets these “tender” tolerationists with cautious optimism. He warns that actions speak louder than words, yet concedes that “if they proceed consequently to their principles, many un-christian-like animosities” will vanish.85 Moreover, the political example of France and Holland, he concludes, proves that religious toleration is a good means to secure citizens’ loyalty and thus to ensure public peace.86 Sancta Clara engages Hobbes once more before the end of chapter 4. Some Anglicans, Sancta Clara points out, deny that there is any real schism between themselves and Catholics on the grounds that they agree on fundamental Catholic doctrines but reject only dubious opinions, starting with the alleged doctrine of papal supremacy. In response, Sancta Clara decides to refute Hobbes’s argument that the very notion of a Catholic pa-

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pacy is absurd. In De cive, chapter 17, section 26, Hobbes “denieth that there is, or can be a Rector of the universal Church, by whose authority the whole Church may be convocated” since “to be a rector in that sense over the Church is to be rector and lord of all Christians in the whole world, which is not granted to any but God.”87 Does Hobbes have a valid point? Hobbes’s argument, Sancta Clara says, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Christian principles. Since the “Supreme Pastor of the Church” is appointed only to “preserve the church in integrity of faith” and is given no political dominion by God over the world, the pope’s power is narrowly confined to the power to “convocate Bishops to a general deliberation and determination of what is necessary for salvation.”88 Contrary to what Hobbes imagines, the pope’s “power is spiritual, his weapons are spiritual, the objects to which he tends are spiritual.” Papal rule is limited by God’s express word to the spiritual realm, which means that the pope “commands without prejudice to temporal rights.” Conversely, in temporal matters, “Princes are simply supreme.” Princes are soundly given “the sword of justice” by God and cooperate with God to rule their temporal dominions as they judge best, independently of the pope.89 The two distinct “commonwealths” coexist without rivalry because they do not overlap. The spiritual commonwealth is of a “higher” nature altogether than the civil commonwealth, which means that there is no conflict in jurisdiction.90 The genuinely “regitive” power that God’s church exercises over Christians pertains strictly to spiritual riches and transgressions.91 Nonetheless, Sancta Clara says, Hobbes considers that the pope’s narrowly spiritual rule over Christian churches is “too much” and therefore rejects subordinating national churches to a supreme pastor.92 Does Hobbes actually show, Sancta Clara asks, that a purely spiritual subordination to an extraterritorial spiritual pastor is inconsistent with the temporal welfare of a commonwealth? Surely, if “every city is supreme to itself in Spiritual and Ecclesiastical matters,” as Hobbes urges, a monstrous confusion will emerge instead of Christ’s spiritual kingdom and in violation of the Apostle’s Creed, which calls for a communion of saints.93 Far from being threatened in their autonomy, temporal kingdoms are better conserved if they subject themselves to universal Christian principles. Each commonwealth is conserved in its own national character and political right, as Augustine and Orosius proved against the gentiles. Nor does

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Hobbes sufficiently substantiate his hypothesis, in chapter 17, section 22, that Rome’s spiritual claim over local Christian churches is simply a vestige of the Roman Empire. He merely affirms it, without proof. Yet the cases of Ireland and Scotland, which were never part of the Roman Empire, clearly contradict it.94 In a more Hobbesian vein, Sancta Clara argues, next, against arbitrary rebellion. Jurists, he points out, agree that whatever is set up by a legitimately constituted body cannot be annulled by a lesser body. The pope’s patriarchal power over England was set up by a series of general councils and thus cannot be abolished except by a general council. To “our country-men” who argue that England had the right to withdraw from the Roman Church because of the pope’s cruelty (which is to say because the pope failed adequately to preserve their spiritual lives and interests), Sancta Clara answers that the grievance ought to have been “examined by a General Council and the parties on both sides heard.” Otherwise, Sancta Clara warns, “if it be lawful for subjects to withdraw themselves from the obedience of their superiours as often as they pretend tyranny, or what oppression soever, so that they themselves be actors and judges in their own causes, it is to be feared that subjects of princes, or whatsoever soveraignties, by this occasion will lay hold on easie pretences of Rebellion.” In other words, if the principle is good in the one case, then it applies universally, which means that any province may justly and lawfully withdraw itself from their prince or “Soveraign magistracy” on the mere charge of tyranny, without proof.95 By withdrawing from God’s church on its own unilateral decision, based on a mere charge rather than on a legitimate ecclesiastic judgment, the Church of England has made itself guilty of schism and rebellion. Although Sancta Clara does not explicitly cite De cive, chapter 12, section 3, it seems that Hobbes’s argument against tyrannicide, namely, that no civil society is safe if a private judgment accusing a ruler of tyranny suffices to exonerate subjects from obedience, looms large in the background of Sancta Clara’s argument. Nonetheless, Sancta Clara ends chapter 4 by acknowledging the possible importance of a key Protestant charge, namely, that Rome is unlawfully tyrannical because “as they say, we forbid a discussion of our tenents [sic] by the light of reason.”96 Is Rome guilty of suppressing the use of reason in matters of faith and thus of ruling despotically over the consciences of the faithful?

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Chapter 5 refutes the charge by examining the role of reason with regard to faith. Sancta Clara cites De cive, chapter 12, almost at once in order to frame the context of his discussion. In De cive, chapter 12, Hobbes draws up a list of various internal causes that lead to the dissolution of a civil polity, in which he includes speculative errors that incline subjects to rebel. Among these errors, Hobbes cites the “common teaching” that faith stems from privately infused grace rather than from “study and natural reason.” This “common teaching” is dangerous, Hobbes says, because it encourages anarchy and irrationality. It teaches that everyone is a potential prophet who can judge for himself how to act, or not to act, based on private inspiration, without regard for laws and reason. Sancta Clara starts by voicing a very strategic surprise: Does Hobbes really mean to reject the Christian doctrine that faith is supernatural?97 In his eagerness to stop the “mad” view that Christian faith is acquired through supernatural inspiration, Hobbes would have faith result exclusively from rational study.98 Sancta Clara’s task, then, is to show that Hobbes’s fear of infused faith stems from his inability to harmonize faith and reason properly.99 Far from having no role in the acquisition of Christian faith, reason helps to establish that Christian faith is supernatural and to probe its doctrines. The first logical question that reason asks about a thing, namely, an sit? (“Does the thing exist?”), is doubly useful to Catholic faith because reason answers the question with regard to God by demonstrating that God exists but also reveals by its very infirmity that what is known about God (Catholic faith) is supernatural in origin. Reason indeed shows that Christ’s wisdom surpasses human wisdom in depth, breadth, and simplicity. Through the ages, moreover, Christ’s wisdom has generated angelical holiness, martyrs, and miracles. None of this would be true if Catholic faith were not revealed and inspired by God.100 And though it is true that the first Christians to whom divine revelations were made were prophets, the special infused grace through which Christians today are moved to believe in transmitted Christian doctrines is of a different nature. Contrary to Hobbes’s fear, no formal revelation is involved, “as schoolmen at large demonstrate in the tract of Faith [Systema fidei] and as is evident in itself.”101 Implicitly, reason and tradition converge solidly to correct Hobbes’s error. The key is that infused faith includes a personal trust in God’s church as the supernaturally assisted repository of God’s prophecies. Far from breeding self-appointed prophets, infused faith

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unites individual Christians into a single communion of saints—into a spiritual commonwealth that is as coherent and well governed as Hobbes’s ideal commonwealth. With regard to the second question of “Logick,” namely, quid sit?, reason also plays an important role since it strives to penetrate the meaning of God’s revealed truths through theological speculation.102 In sharp contrast to the rationalism advocated by Hobbes or by Chillingworth, however, Catholic theology regards natural reason to be the handmaid of faith, meaning that the aim of reason is to probe and preserve the plenitude of what God has revealed, not rule over faith by declaring what is and what is not acceptable to reason.103 According to Sancta Clara, Hobbes, like Chillingworth, “gives no limits to reason” since he holds that reason must independently validate Christian doctrines before they are embraced. The result of holding that only per se nota doctrines are worthy to be believed is that mysteries such as the Trinity are called into question. 104 Chillingworth and other Socinians, for example, doubt “the deity of the Son and of the Holy Ghost” and, more generally, “profess that Scriptures are to be understood according to each man’s small reach of reason.” They assume that nothing is contained in scripture that exceeds our natural understanding and requires supernatural aid from God.105 Sancta Clara had set out at first to refute Hobbes and Chillingworth together, but he now brings to light a sharp difference between the two. In De cive, chapter 17, section 28, Hobbes concedes that scriptures require interpretation and argues that interpreting scriptures is the prerogative of the state alone “in juridical and philosophical things.” Regarding “purely supernatural matters,” however, such as the nature of Christ, sacraments, and worship, Hobbes, Sancta Clara points out, “speaks more reason then [sic] any others of these new ones.”106 Hobbes indeed upholds apostolic authority over both individual “Enthusiasts” and private independent reasoning. Sancta Clara praises Hobbes for advocating that “the universal reason of the Church, delivered by the hands of the ancients,” must take absolute precedence, even sovereign precedence, over “private spirits” and “private reason.” The sovereign, according to Hobbes, must rule in spiritual matters not according to human reason, but according to the authority of an uninterrupted apostolic episcopacy derived from Christ through the imposition of hands.107 Hobbes explicitly upholds the doctrine that

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Christ promised infallibility in necessary doctrines to the apostles and their successors.108 In other words, Hobbes, as Sancta Clara interprets him, is a sort of minimalist dualist and a true churchman when it comes to the purely spiritual doctrines of Christian faith.109 We recognize Sancta Clara’s characteristic desire to find common ground with an opponent, no matter how slight. In 1650, moreover, where exactly is the apostolic church to whose authority in spiritual matters Hobbes would have his sovereign submit? Sancta Clara’s aim in chapter 5 seems to be to convince Hobbes himself of three conclusions. First, Christian truth is not like philosophical truth. Christian truth is known through the apostolic authority that conserves it, whereas philosophical truth is known through individual reasoning and thrives on innovation.110 Second, Chillingworth’s private rationalism poses the same public threat as the charismatic fideism that Hobbes so fiercely (and correctly) opposes. Third, the most plausible candidate for the apostolic magisterium that Hobbes himself advocates as an alternative to religious irrationality is the Catholic magisterium of God’s church. Since Hobbes agrees that “the profoundness of Christian mysteries exceeds the shallow reach of our reason,” he is in a good position to appreciate that “Catholick tenents [sic] must by a great necessity be always constant because they depend not upon our daily changeable reasons but upon the unvariable word of God, revealed and delivered by the Church.”111 Perhaps hoping to reassure Hobbes further that “supernatural inspiration” need not lead to “apostasy from reason” if a proper apostolic authority is in place, Sancta Clara adds that the Catholic magisterium teaches supernatural truths that exceed, but never contradict, human reason.112 The Catholic Church, in short, successfully harmonizes private reason and divine revelation, infused grace and apostolic authority. Sounding now a lot like Hobbes, Sancta Clara blasts “those men and others of the same tribe who make the glimmering of their reasons the rules of Faith and Religion.” He warns that they will inexorably fall into superstition and become ever more “lunatick,” following their “brain-sick fancies” under the rise and waxing of fitfull stars, as Tycho Brahe predicts.113 In short, Hobbes would do well, Sancta Clara implies, to recognize that Socinians are every bit as “swollen in their imaginations” as the dangerous charismatics whom he abhors.114 On solid Hobbesian grounds, the reverence for apostolic

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authority that is nurtured by God’s church suffices to vindicate it. Sancta Clara is careful to declare that “We Catholicks” adhere first and foremost to holy scriptures, then to holy councils and ancient fathers, without any mention of papal rule.115 What matters, from a Hobbesian viewpoint, is that “We Catholicks” do not “dare to defame Apostolic authority rashly and presumptuously,” implying, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, that Catholics fully understand the importance of setting aside private views of “good and evil” in favor of sovereign authority. Chapter 6, which is billed as a “digression” to refute John Hales’s Treatise on Schism, tacitly addresses Hobbes too. Woven into discussions of historical material, a few clear references to Hobbes stand out. Hales’s main argument, Sancta Clara says, is that schism is really a reciprocal, symmetric phenomenon and “cannot be imputed to one place more than another.” At first blush, it seems that Hales bolsters Hobbes’s conclusion that no national church may be branded meaningfully as “schismatic,” granted that Hales reaches the conclusion by different means. 116 Sancta Clara, however, is quick to point out that schism is not properly a “separation for Heresie or Error in point of doctrine, but in point of disobedience.”117 Disobedience, Sancta Clara now emphasizes, “is no trivial matter, as all common-wealths will easily conceive, being that nerve upon which all order depends.” Implicitly, the spiritual commonwealth that is God’s church imposes an obligation of obedience on its members that is analogous to the political obligation that binds the citizens of a temporal polity to the sovereign. Contrary to Hales’s claim, the early Christians who refused to submit to the decree of the Council of Nice regarding the celebration of Easter acted seditiously and thus deserved sanctions.118 Rebellion breaks the unity of Catholic communion, which is fundamental to Christian salvation. In the case of Henry VIII and the English schism, the crime was not to challenge various apostolic doctrines but to erect, for political and personal motives, a new “altar of division” against the old Catholic altar of “unity with Christ.”119 Moreover, Hales’s ecumenical solution to restoring Christian unity, which is to engage in broad intercommunion with Christian sectarians who are not demonstrably insincere, fails to safeguard Christians sufficiently from eternal damnation, since a perfectly sincere heretic will lead a person astray just as surely as a hypocrite.120 Once again, the Hobbesian element in Sancta Clara’s critique of Hales is

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clear. In the spiritual realm, as in the temporal realm, self-preservation is best achieved by submitting to a sovereign power (God’s church) that acts authoritatively for the salvation of all. Even though Hales appears to agree with Hobbes that “Schism is impossible,” Sancta Clara presents Hales as an anti-Hobbesian religious libertarian, bent on destroying the very notion of sovereign authority in favor of a proliferation of private views. Hales’s Treatise on Schism “speaketh many things which seem distructive to Christian Faith.”121 One of the key charges that Sancta Clara levels against Hales is that Hales makes assertions without proof. For example, in the case of images, Hales simply affirms that images are idolatrous without attempting to establish it by rational argument—in contrast to “Mr. Hobbs, who will force me afterward to joyn issue with him in it.”122 Implicitly, Hales shuns the compelling force of rational argument as much as he shuns the idea of coercive authority in his ecclesiology. As though fearful that Hobbes might find a superficial affinity between his own conclusions and Hales’s Treatise on Schism, Sancta Clara seems to be eager to point out that Hales is subtly an “apostate of reason” whose approach to problems radically diverges from Hobbes’s own geometry-inspired approach. When Hales writes that “Schism is impossible,” he does not mean to argue that church and state are so fused that no global church/state is conceivable, he simply means that ecclesiastical unity is hopeless. When Hales writes that we owe no obedience to Christian superiors as such but only respect, he does not argue that Christ’s kingdom lacks temporal jurisdiction because it is “not of this world,” but he simply opines that spiritual authority, as such, is unenforceable. When Hales condemns images as idolatrous, he does not, like Hobbes, supply an argument about God’s infinitude, he simply repeats a prejudice. Despite superficial similarities, the two men have radically divergent commitments and agendas. Chapter 7 aims at establishing that Protestants are responsible for the English schism. Sancta Clara starts by stating a general axiom that assigns blame for sedition in a very Hobbesian fashion: “In any Commonwealth governed by the same Prince, or Soveraignty and by the same laws,” if a few men “withdraw themselves from the obedience of authority” and set up conventicles and make their own laws “while the rest of the body remains in the ancient manner of government,” then the few men “receding

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from the Body with their adherents” are rebellious and responsible for the division.123 In the spiritual commonwealth that is God’s church, a division of this kind occurred when a few Protestants withdrew from communion with Catholics and gained disciples. Protestants, therefore, are responsible for the English schism. Sancta Clara next expands on Hobbes in an interesting way. According to Sancta Clara, God’s church is a spiritual commonwealth “consisting of divers Kingdoms,” including, until recently, England. The various kingdoms that adhere to God’s universal church obey distinct temporal princes and are governed by their own distinct civil laws and statutes, yet they are united spiritually in faith and in God’s worship. Until the schism, England and other kingdoms were “sanctified by the same sacraments” and acknowledged the “same spiritual rector, the Bishop of Rome.” Sancta Clara’s move to depict commonwealths as members of God’s church extends Hobbes’s argument for instituting commonwealths to a new level. Sancta Clara implies that God’s Catholic Church provides a sovereign of a higher order—a new artificial person (spiritual sovereign) that results from the collective transfer of religious judgment made by artificial persons (temporal sovereigns). The argument emphasizes respect for the temporal autonomy of princes, but it also presents the Catholic Church as transcending temporal enmity and thus as serving to unite sovereign nations (artificial persons) spiritually through shared values, starting with the shared value of valuing shared values and the possible peace that shared values might help to procure. Indeed, a possible weakness of Hobbes’s approach in De cive is that a state of nature—of war of each against all—appears to obtain among nations. Does reason, therefore, not dictate that nations form a spiritual commonwealth and submit themselves with regard to spiritual matters to the sovereign authority of a universal rector? Or so at least Sancta Clara implies when he creatively depicts God’s church as “consisting of autonomous and diverse kingdoms.” In 1649 and 1650, when both English Royalists and Parliamentarians were negotiating for papal support, or at least for papal neutrality, Sancta Clara had good reason to reflect on the possible implications of Hobbes’s political theory for international peace.124 Again invoking a Hobbesian argument in favor of submitting to a universal spiritual authority, Sancta Clara shows that the Roman Church

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has always exercised a “supreme obliging power” in the spiritual realm regarding doctrine and morals.125 In this regard, however, Sancta Clara concedes that Hobbes raises a weighty objection against Rome. Hobbes argues, correctly, that the apostolic clergy must be able to “give an account” of Christian doctrines. Hobbes’s charge is that Rome imposes a “heavy yoke” by requiring prelates and priests to understand and believe every truth that is declared by the Church.126 Citing Matthew 11, Hobbes concludes that Rome has turned Christ’s doctrine into a burden, contrary to what is written in the Gospels.127 Sancta Clara starts by pointing out to Hobbes that, according to Saint Augustine, “a whole lifetime imployed in nothing else” would not “suffice for a perfect understanding of Christian profundities.” Surely Christian doctrines are “not so vulgar as Mr. Hobbs would have them.”128 The solution that Sancta Clara offers to Hobbes is to embrace the distinction that Jewish rabbis make between fundamental doctrines (“roots”) and derivative doctrines (“branches”). The distinction is explained, Sancta Clara says, by Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel “in the beginning of his Treatise of the creation.”129 Similarly, Sancta Clara urges, some doctrines “in the Christian Religion” are simply or absolutely necessary since “heaven is not to be gotten” without them, but these doctrines indeed are “not so many.” Other doctrines, Sancta Clara explains, are contingently necessary, meaning that they are not required de fide until the Church is prompted to define them to be de fide for the sake of preventing schism. Even then, the obligation consists in not overtly denying the newly defined doctrine, regardless of private belief. “Surely,” Sancta Clara concludes, “this is no great burden.”130 Once the burden of Catholic doctrine is limited to necessary doctrines and is shown, therefore, to be evangelically “light,” the question of Rome’s coercive power can be addressed. Drawing on his previous characterization of Socinians as seditious, Sancta Clara goes on to refute Chillingworth’s claim that individual Christians are entitled to their own religious beliefs in the sense of pursuing them and advocating them publicly. Christians, Sancta Clara insists, are required to bring their doubts and grievances to the public tribunal of God’s church before acting on them. If the Church did not possess the power to rule over spiritual matters and to require obedience to its decrees, Christ would have failed to provide his

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church with the means necessary for self-preservation.131 Christ has endowed his church, Sancta Clara insists, with a full and real “regitive power” in spiritual matters. It follows from this “regitive power” that God’s church is not merely “a body of all Christians,” which is to say, in Hobbesian terms, a mere multitude of private Christian believers. God’s church is precisely the body “of all who joyn in the unity and integrity of faith.” In Hobbesian terms, the Church is God’s people, following the transfer of private judgments in spiritual matters to the Church’s authority—or so at least Sancta Clara’s conspicuous use of the term “regitive power” suggests.132 Sancta Clara implies, moreover, that there is a process of redress in the spiritual commonwealth, which, by providing an alternative to rebellion, makes rebellion all the more culpable. Sancta Clara now calls attention to a key inconsistency in Hobbes’s approach to religious authority. In De cive, chapter 18, section 2, he says, “Mr. Hobbs requires two vertues necessary to salvation: Faith and Obedience.” Faith, according to Hobbes, boils down to believing that Jesus is Christ. Obedience, in turn, boils down to professing externally the articles of the Creed, even if the articles are not believed internally by the person professing them externally.133 In the name of obedience, Sancta Clara exclaims, Hobbes requires that I profess to believe what I do not believe and am not required to believe! Hobbes, in effect, makes lying indispensable to Christian salvation. When Hobbes tries to clarify his argument in his annotation to section 6, all he manages, Sancta Clara says, is to “utter evident contradictions.” What Sancta Clara means is that Hobbes defends himself by arguing that lying (“professing what I do not believe”) is an action that is mandated by justice since I owe it God to “have the will to live righteously.” Then in chapter 18, section 14, Hobbes says that it suffices that a person endeavor to believe the articles that he must profess to believe, along with any other articles that the state/church decides that he must profess.134 Sancta Clara expresses amazement at Hobbes’s doctrine: “Is not this to put a lie upon himself, for a man to profess to beleeve what he doth not beleeve? Nay, is not this to put a lie upon Christianity?”135 At the same time, Sancta Clara praises Hobbes for refusing to exclude from heaven someone who “does not internally assent to articles declared by the Church yet does not positively contradict these articles or refuse to grant them if commanded.”136 Hobbes’s moderation, Sancta Clara says, is

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commendable. Hobbes’s position here is “more modest, then [sic] I have yet found in any of our Country-men.” What Sancta Clara evidently means is that there is perhaps a good way to interpret Hobbes’s bungled doctrine. Although it “cannot be digested by a reasonable man that I may profess what I do not beleeve,” if Hobbes simply means that a person is not barred from heaven for withholding perfect internal assent to various articles of the Apostle’s Creed provided he not reject these articles absolutely and that he allow them to stand as probable opinions, then there really is nothing wrong with Hobbes’s doctrine of “external obedience.” Indeed Sancta Clara’s own doctrine in Systema fidei of exercising “degrees of assent” with regard to Church doctrines, combined with the obligation to tolerate the opinions of others when they are not condemned by the Church, is really very similar to what Hobbes advocates. Nonetheless, Sancta Clara feels compelled to point out that Hobbes’s reductive approach to internal belief (“Faith”) fails to protect Christians sufficiently from aberrations, since a charismatic leader may very well believe “IESUM ESSE CHRISTUM” and not condemn fornication or other deviant behaviors.137 Hobbes’s reductionism, moreover, deprives Christians of the many benefits, “which we beleeve to be obtained” by Christ. Granted indeed that implicit faith suffices to win heaven in the cases that Hobbes cites, namely, the cases of the thief, the eunuch, and the “two thousand converted by Saint Peter,” “these extraordinary cases are nothing to the ordinary course of Gods providence,” which prefers to work gradually through instruction, “as God’s church in her Councils has always affirmed.”138 Implicitly, Sancta Clara warns Hobbes that reducing Christian faith to “faith in Christ nakedly understood” smacks of the charismatic, irrational attitude that Hobbes so correctly condemns and wishes to replace with study and reason. Two more of Hobbes’s views are “modestly accosted” before the end of chapter 7. According to Hobbes, “the points now in controversy for the most part concern onely contention for a worldly Kingdom.” In Hobbes’s view, Christians fight over dogma and over philosophical issues such as free will (e.g., Bramhall) as an excuse to gain political power and for the sake of establishing political control over others.139 Sancta Clara responds by pointing out that Herod, too, flamed the fear that Christ had come to seize temporal power. Convinced that he faced a political rival rather than

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a spiritual redeemer, Herod preemptively caused “much innocent blood to be shed.” Appealing to Hobbes “not to stir up this old false plea against Christianity,” Sancta Clara emphasizes that “Christ hath assured all men that his Kingdom is not of this world.”140 The solution to Hobbes’s concern, in other words, is to separate spiritual and civil powers so radically that no temporal ruler need feel threatened by the genuine theological questions that inevitably emerge and require the Church’s spiritual authority in order to be solved. Hobbes, however, is the first to reject this solution. He calls, instead, for a complete fusion of state and church in “his Eutopia,” desiring that even the hearing of confessions and the interpreting of scriptures be entrusted to the civil magistracy.141 Implicitly, Hobbes’s fear that religious factions are really political factions in disguise leads him paradoxically to politicize religion thoroughly. Sancta Clara discreetly touches on the burning-hot problem of de facto legitimacy through the prism of ecclesiastical matters.142 Some En glish Protestants, he says, defend the Church of England by arguing that, even if Henry VIII and his accomplices were guilty of rebellion/schism at the time of the break with Rome, the independent Church of England is now a fait accompli and has acquired a sort of automatic legitimacy based on the sheer passage of time—“as when a Kingdom is unjustly obtained, yet it may be justly possessed by future heirs.”143 Sancta Clara answers that he begs to differ. First, for all commonwealths, the passage of time, as such, is not sufficient for a government to acquire legitimacy. What is also required is that the previous ruler relinquish his claim, explicitly or implicitly. As long as the previous sovereign pursues his just claim, no de facto government replacing it can be legitimate. This principle is especially important in the ecclesiastic case, Sancta Clara argues, since, “if naked countenance of possession can give title,” nothing would prevent “Heretiks and Turks” from replacing Christian institutions by force. Moreover, in the case of God’s church, which is instituted in its universal unity by God, there cannot be any possible statute of limitations beyond which God’s authority is renounced. Thus no de facto legitimacy can ever be accorded to an ersatz, man-made church.144 Sancta Clara means perhaps to imply that Anglican Royalists in 1650 (Bramhall and Edward Hyde) are in a very bad position to argue against de facto governments since they themselves defend a de facto English

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Church. At the very least, a negotiated restoration of Charles II based on upholding the historic legitimacy of his royal title should imply a toleration of Roman Catholics based on the historic legitimacy of Rome’s spiritual title. The same reasoning that applies to political kingdoms applies a fortiori to God’s church. Or is it possible to argue that English Protestants had just cause to rebel from Catholic authority? In chapter 8, his final chapter, Sancta Clara tackles the question of the legitimacy of Protestant grievances with the utmost respect. He cites Hales’s argument that responsibility for schism cannot be assigned automatically to the dissenting minority since the dissenters, however few, may have real grounds for withdrawing from the “common-weale or body of the Church.”145 English Protestants thus defend themselves from the blame of being schismatics on the grounds that they separated themselves from the Catholic Church “rightly and worthily, for the intolerable errors and damnable doctrines which then infected it.” They acted piously—in obedience to God’s own command in Revelations 18.146 The question is all the more interesting in that Hobbes in De cive, chapter 3, section 14, appears to affirm that there are certain inalienable rights, such as the right to life, implying that there might be just cause for rebellion against a sovereign who would deprive citizens of these basic rights. In the case of the Protestant argument against Rome, Sancta Clara says, the “intolerable errors” that prompted Protestant withdrawal all boil down to the charge of idolatry. Implicitly, the Protestant claim is that every Christian has an inalienable spiritual right to refuse idolatrous practices. Hobbes, as we will see, features prominently in Sancta Clara’s response. Sancta Clara first exonerates the Catholic Eucharist from idolatry. Catholic veneration of the consecrated host, Sancta Clara explains, does not “terminate” in the species of bread and wine but in God’s invisible divinity. Consequently, nothing material or finite is worshipped. Turning next to the vexed question of images, Sancta Clara explains that no visible, material thing is ever worshiped, but, rather, the material artwork serves only as a device, or means, to direct devotion to God’s invisible divinity. Thus it is “evident,” Sancta Clara concludes, that “the Church of Rome is injuriously defamed of Idolatry.”147 It is at this point that Sancta Clara makes Hobbes into his main interlocutor, first praising Hobbes for his “book De Cive” and his “singularly deserving” philosophy. How did

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Hobbes, Sancta Clara then wonders in astonishment, come to be so rash in judging that the Roman Church is guilty of idolatry?148 First, Hobbes’s own statements about images, Sancta Clara points out, are inconsistent. In De cive, chapter 15, section 18, Hobbes says that if the state commands us to worship God in an image, we are bound to obey. In the annotation that he added to the same passage, Hobbes acknowledges that what he says in section 18 contradicts what he says in section 14, where he asserts that natural reason suffices to prevent us from worshipping God in an image since an image obviously limits God to finitude. Hobbes’s original solution in section 14 was to argue that the state commanding us to worship God in an image is guilty of idolatry, but that we, the obedient citizens complying with the state’s command, are not. But then in the annotation to chapter 15, section 18, Hobbes now specifies that if God commands us explicitly not to worship Him in an image, then the state’s command must be resisted. And in chapter 16, section 10, Hobbes says that God expressly forbids images. He also reiterates that images are against natural reason, as stated in chapter 15, section 14. Sancta Clara concludes that Hobbes has a serious problem: “These seem to be strangely inconsistent propositions.”149 Does the state have the right to command me to do something that violates natural reason? Do I, conversely, have the right to resist a command that violates God’s express command? Does Hobbes imply that I have an inalienable right to follow my natural conscience if and only if the dictate of my natural conscience is expressly corroborated by God’s revelation? Sancta Clara unravels the knot as follows. Since Hobbes holds that idolatry is against the light of reason and is “therefore inherently wicked,” it follows that if I obey a magistrate who commands me to worship God in an image, I obey an inferior, arbitrary human power rather than reason. In other words, I depose my own private, rational conscience in favor of an extrinsic human authority. But since the magistrate, per hypothesis, has a legitimate authority over me only because I have rationally transferred my own right of self-preservation to the state in exchange for security, it follows that the magistrate’s command to act against reason “cannot be obligatory.” The state cannot make idolatry lawful or command me, against the light of my own reason, to worship a finite God. The solution to Hobbes’s inconsistencies, Sancta Clara implies, is to affirm that abstaining from act-

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ing irrationally is just as inalienable a right as the right to water, air, and life’s necessities.150 The state to which I rationally submit for the sake of peace and security cannot rationally require me to act irrationally, which is to say that the state cannot command me to act against reason and against my own rational conscience.151 In other words, Sancta Clara denies that God’s express corroboration is required for me to disobey a public command to act against reason. All human beings, not just God’s chosen people, are required to abstain from actions that contradict reason. At the heart of Sancta Clara’s response to Hobbes is a strong endorsement of innate reason, the instrument of peace.152 A second approach to solving Hobbes’s confusion is to contest his premise. Granted that natural reason suffices for us to know that God is not finite and that idolatry is wicked, is Hobbes justified in claiming that the worship of God by the use of images is idolatrous and is expressly forbidden by the Decalogue? Hobbes asserts it, but does not prove it. Drawing on standard arguments in defense of the use of holy images, Sancta Clara argues that reason, like material creation, points beyond itself to a transcendent cause, namely, to God’s infinity of goodness.153 In “like manner,” Sancta Clara concludes, “we easily ascend by the use of pictures, neither can we do otherwise if we use our reason. So that there is no danger of Gods confinement, and therefore no idolatry.”154 Reason, in short, suffices for us to know God’s absolute transcendence. As though refuting Hobbes’s fears, God himself did not hesitate to depict himself through finite material images, such as “talking and walking with Adam, which are acts of a corporeal and finite creature.”155 Implicitly appropriating Hobbes’s argument that it is usually better to give the state the benefit of the doubt than to introduce conflict, Sancta Clara now points out that, even if the use of images constituted idolatry and the Church commanded it, rebellion (schism) would not be warranted since collective unity and peace matter more than “a bit of darnel” in the Church/sovereign.156 Appropriating Hobbes’s doctrine of internal beliefs, Sancta Clara adds that individual Christians cannot be compelled to commit idolatry in their hearts since “the Church cannot reach the minde.”157 Divine law very explicitly forbids schism, but “no man is or can be compelled to beleeve untruths.”158 Sancta Clara’s theory of private dissent, namely, of internal adherence of degree zero, thus provides a solution

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to the Protestant argument that Rome “doth force her Proselites to beleeve falsehoods.”159 It also serves as an alternative to Hobbes’s confused theory that an individual is required to profess to believe what he does not in fact believe if commanded by the state. Does Sancta Clara’s solution simply replace Hobbes’s “lying” with dissimulation? Are Protestants justified in claiming that Rome fosters hypocrisy? If I “cannot perceive” the truth of Catholic doctrine after a diligent and sincere examination, is it not “hypocritical” and therefore “unlawful” for me to adhere to that church? Even on the hypothesis that I falsely believe that Rome teaches and commands false doctrines, must I not follow my own conscience and refuse to obey? Sancta Clara concedes that the objection is not trivial. He dissolves it, however, on thoroughly Hobbesian grounds. Surely, Sancta Clara argues, “Christians are obliged by the law of God and reason to depose their own false judgments, in obedience to God and his Church, else this will open a gap to all itching ears (of whome we are premonished) to introduce each man his fancy, and prefer it before the wholesome doctrins [sic] of Christ delivered by his Church.”160 Moral theory indeed wisely allows “timorous consciences” to “depose” their own judgment and to allow themselves, despite their own reasoning, to be directed by the authority “of such, whom they know to be more learned then themselves.”161 Not only does Sancta Clara solve the problem by appealing to a key axiom of Jesuit moral theory, but he then shows that Hobbes endorses the very same axiom. In De cive, chapter 15, section 13, Hobbes indeed affirms that “unusquisque rationem privatam, rationi totius civitatis submittere potest.”162 At the very heart of Hobbes’s theory is a rational defense of the moral right to decide rationally to “depose” one’s private judgment in favor of the public judgment of the sovereign, without moral conflict or fear of hypocrisy. Hobbes, however, argues that every person has a rational right to “depose” his own private judgment in favor of the state’s judgment not only in civil matters but also in religious matters. According to Hobbes, every person, at least in a deliberately instituted commonwealth, has transferred to the state his right to judge matters in both spheres, for the sake of peace and security. If Hobbes is right that private reason may rationally be submitted to the public judgment of the civil magistrate for the sake of peace, Sancta Clara now swiftly concludes, “how much more will this be con-

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cluded in respect of spiritual Magistracy, to whom this power is conveyed, not from the people, but from God, as Christianity teaches!”163 In other words, Sancta Clara refutes Hobbes’s Erastianism on soundly Hobbesian grounds. The key lesson of Hobbes’s De cive regarding the rational transfer of private judgment for the sake of unity and peace applies a fortiori to the spiritual case of God’s church, which is the spiritual commonwealth that God has instituted. For the sake of unity and peace in the spiritual realm through which eternal salvation is secured, individual Christians have a rational right to “depose” their own private doubts and embrace Catholic teaching, without fear of hypocrisy. Sancta Clara’s correction of Hobbes, in effect, consists in pointing out that whereas there is a rational basis for transferring my private right of judgment regarding temporal security to the state, there is no rational basis for transferring my private right to determine God’s worship to the state. What reason dictates to me and to every human being, Sancta Clara now says, is not only that God must be worshipped but that God must be worshipped in the best way.164 In our present state, however, as soul and body are indivisibly conjoined, we have no recourse but to deduce our knowledge of God from creatures, which means that we cannot know God’s will regarding divine worship.165 Consequently, human communities worship God by their own fallible human light, “differing from each other and everyone from truth in determining God’s worship.”166 By arguing that individuals must submit to the state regarding God’s worship, Hobbes basically advocates that “blind men turn to an inquest of blind men to determine the colour of things.”167 Hobbes’s argument is all the more incoherent in that Hobbes himself “rightly teaches” in chapter 15, section 14, that God’s will wholly transcends human reason and is thus utterly unknown and unknowable to us.168 It follows, “as Christian divines most reasonably hold,” that “supernaturally revealed truths must be communicated to mankind to direct them to God’s worship.” No worship is pleasing to God, Sancta Clara concludes, except what God Himself teaches. It follows that “Mr. Hobbs must retract his injuriously translated power to his Commonwealth and teach his Disciples to seek this knowledge from God, even under the law of nature.”169 Reason, in short, dictates that we must submit our private decisionmaking to the state in civil matters, but reason does not dictate that an

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analogous transfer must be made in religious matters, where God’s transcendent will alone brings light. Once God has revealed to mankind how he is to be worshipped, however, reason dictates that individuals transfer their own private judgment in religious matters to God’s church and submit to God’s authority, “as now Catholicks observe in all worship exhibited to the Divinity.”170 Those who “cannot overcome their own tenuous reasons by overpoising [sic] them with so great authority as the Church” are doomed to discord and misery—to a state of spiritual wretchedness and disunity that resembles nothing more than Hobbes’s state of nature.171 The key to Sancta Clara’s argument is the rational human right, affirmed by Hobbes, to depose one’s private judgment in favor of a higher authority for the sake of security and peace. Sancta Clara identifies the right in question with “Christian humility” and defends it as a solution to the Protestant dilemma of conscience. A Christian who follows his own conscience against God’s church exposes himself to “misery,” but he is equally miserable if he obeys God’s church against his own conscience. The solution is to understand that it is conscientious to submit to the authority of God’s church by setting aside one’s own “tenuous reasons.” Presumably, Sancta Clara means that a treatise like his own Systema fidei, which explains the origin, nature, and infallibility of God’s church in matters of salvation, provides the rational basis that is needed for Christians to submit to the authority of God’s church in good conscience—just as Hobbes’s De cive provides the rational basis that is needed for human beings to submit to the authority of the state for the sake of self-preservation. With Hobbes’s De cive in one hand and Sancta Clara’s Systema fidei in the other, no monarch will fail. The Hobbesian character of Sancta Clara’s argument in favor of submitting private judgment to the authority of the Church as a separate spiritual commonwealth distinct from the civil state is further strengthened when Sancta Clara accuses rebels (schismatics) of acting on their own private judgment of good and evil. They must instead refer their doubts to a public process culminating with a judgment on the part of the Church. Just as Hobbes warns that the state alone is authorized to judge good and evil once the state has been instituted through the transfer of private judgment, Sancta Clara points out that acting on private doubts against the Church is tantamount to confusing mere allegations with actual convic-

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tions: “if it should be lawful for everyone to accuse the Church his mother of heresy and to leave her without any other discussion of the cause, a gate should be open to all heresies and the Church of God would be trodden under foot.”172 Just as Hobbes’s state is threatened internally by any private arrogation of the public right to judge good and evil, God’s church, Sancta Clara implies, requires that private accusations be examined and proved by a legitimately ecclesiastical process, lest Catholic unity be dissolved. Perhaps English schismatics will object that the national church, namely, the Church of England, is sufficiently rooted in apostolic tradition to be able to judge heresies on its own authority? Sancta Clara answers that indeed “every nation may witness what they have received,” but “they cannot make infallible discernments in matters of Faith without the supreme judgment of the whole church, in whose onely mouth there can be no errors.”173 Once again, the Hobbesian flavor of Sancta Clara’s argument is conspicuous. No Christian multitude or aggregation of national churches will ever have the authority to rule infallibly on matters of Christian salvation. Only God’s church, as such, speaking for God’s people with a single voice, benefits from God’s immediate promise and assistance. Indeed, since “many things are conveyed to posterity which are not matters of Faith,” the authority of the Church speaking through its general councils is indispensable to determine what is, and what is not, essential to Christian salvation. Sancta Clara considers a final objection, drawn, it seems, from a Protestant close to Chillingworth and to Great Tew. The objection is that a general council is of no use for the authoritative settling of doubts since many Roman Catholic authors doubt that the authority of a general council is infallible. Sancta Clara does not name his Protestant author, but cites him verbatim at length. The unnamed Protestant author appeals to Cressy’s Exomologesis, “folio 443,” praising Cressy for limiting the authority of general councils to what is reasonable, in sharp contrast to the infallibility that is emphasized “in D. Stapleton and D. Stratford,” and in a recent book “made by a Countryman of ours in Latine, called Systema fidei.” Let us start by noting that the anonymous Protestant implicitly exonerates Sancta Clara from heterodoxy since he clarifies that Sancta Clara, like Stapleton, upholds conciliar infallibility. Speaking as “Philip Scot,” Sancta Clara answers mischievously that Cressy must be forgiven for such “suspicious

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moderation.” Cressy’s words, Sancta Clara insists, lend themselves to a “more favourable gloss” when read in context. Cressy wrote Exomologesis soon after his conversion and surely did not “intend to play the master” when he wrote as a neophyte. Citing a single passage from Cressy’s book, out of context, proves nothing. Like the works of many revered Catholic authors, Cressy’s book is full of “good things intermixt with other passages more harsh as he seems to express them.”174 The Protestant strategy of brandishing isolated statements to prove that there is discord among Roman Catholic authors fails. It flounders on the fact that Catholic authors always have the option, after developing their own private opinions, of submitting them to the Church’s authority. The point is that Catholic unity does not require speculative uniformity but practical obedience. In other words, the ideas that Hobbes promotes in De cive for the sake of civil unity and security have long been implemented in the spiritual commonwealth that is God’s Roman Catholic Church. Sancta Clara concludes that “our countrymen are bound under the pain of Schism and rebellion to reunite themselves unto the Church of Rome, their mother (as King James of famous memory calls her).” Anglicans have a duty to “discuss the causes of their revolt” and to “weigh and ponder the reasons of the Catholicks.”175 They are required simply to “return to the Church their mother,” not to give up their grievances or the hope of achieving reform. Indeed they must trust that a general council will be convoked “where their cause may be heard and decided.”176 According to Sancta Clara, in other words, the kind of submission to authority that Hobbes promotes for the sake of unity and peace is better achieved if a credible process of redress is instituted along with the institution of the commonwealth. In the spiritual commonwealth that is God’s church, there is a structural means to an orderly debate, at least in principle. A Hobbesian state would be all the more protected against internal rebellion if it were possessed with a process of redress, through which grievances could be examined and judged by public authority. Hobbes, in short, should not confuse mixed government with divided government. As a “Theam” (“theme”) for Oxford and Cambridge to debate at their “Scholastic Olympicks,” what could be more urgent than the advisability of instituting venues for peaceful political change? One of the very first grievances that could be addressed in a peaceful, orderly manner is the issue of religious freedom. Does the sovereign really

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have a mission to determine Christian faith, as Hobbes sometimes implies, contradicting himself at other times? Sancta Clara ends with a powerful but strangely evangelical exhortation. Since we human beings are “drownded in sordid bodies” and “ensnared in the delights of the flesh,” we find it difficult, he says, to “look with the eyes of Faith upon the objects of eternal felicity promised to those who confess and follow Christ Jesus.”177 What it means to follow Christ, Sancta Clara reminds his countrymen, is to recognize our sins and embrace “tryals of patience.” It means to heed Saint Paul—to “hear the great Zealot of Peace thundering out to the Churches of Ephesus,” beseeching us to walk “in all humility and mildness, with patience supporting one another in charity, careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of Peace.”178 The first step towards healing Christian fragmentation is to forbear religious persecution by state authority.

F O U R T E E N

The Piety and Equity of Soul-Freedom

Let us now probe the wider context of Sancta Clara’s Treatise of the Schism of England. What were Sancta Clara’s aims? On more than one occasion, Sancta Clara refers the reader back to Systema fidei, as though the arguments raised against the English schism and against Hobbes’s Erastianism should be viewed in light of a new depoliticized Roman Catholicism that was wholly irenic and wholly restricted to its spiritual mission. Quite apart from the secret “Blackloist” project that will be discussed in this chapter, three historic developments in the immediate background help to explain why Sancta Clara felt that he could convincingly defend his own Catholic dualist model to his compatriots. First, there was the promising initiative of the Franciscan Peter Walsh in Ireland, who had defied the papal envoy Rinuccini and rejected political Catholicism in a detailed manifesto, all with Pierre Marchant’s support.1 Second, there was the hard-won 1648 Treaty of Westphalia.2 The importance of the Treaty of Westphalia in curtailing political Catholicism is perhaps best measured by Pope Innocent X’s wrath, expressed in the bull Zelo domus Dei, which slams the offending clauses of the treaty as null and void.3 Innocent’s fury made little dif380

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ference. Catholics in German lands asserted their right to keep faith with heretics and to make political promises that Rome could not annul.4 When Innocent X sent Zelo domus Dei to his nuncios in August 1650, Emperor Ferdinand III suppressed its printing and distribution outside of his own hereditary territories.5 It seems that Juan Caramuel’s Pax licita of 1648, proving that faith must be kept with heretics and that religious toleration must be embraced as the lesser evil, had an impact on Catholic rulers.6 Third and last, but by no means least, there was the example of Maryland. Maryland provided an immediate and concrete illustration of the depoliticized Catholicism that was championed by Sancta Clara in Treatise of the Schism of England.7 Sancta Clara’s friend John Lewgar had personally fought to exclude Jesuit missionaries from intervening in civil affairs and had obtained a concordat in 1647.8 Not only had Lord Baltimore and his Catholic advisors succeeded in insulating civil government in Maryland from Church meddling, they had also introduced legislation in 1649 to protect freedom of conscience for all Christians. In December 1650, Lewgar, living in London at Lord Baltimore’s residence, was struggling to help Lord Baltimore keep his charter against both hostile Parliamentarians and Royalists.9 The plot thickens when we learn that William Davenant, Henry Jermyn’s protégé and Hobbes’s friend, had been sent to Maryland in February 1650 by the young king-in-exile, Charles II. Davenant had been appointed to replace Baltimore’s man as lieutenant governor, ostensibly to keep Maryland in the Royalist camp. Very providentially for Lord Baltimore, Dave nant was intercepted on the high seas by Parliamentarians. A handwritten letter by Charles was found on his person, asserting that Lord Baltimore “doth visibly adhere to the rebels of England.” Thanks to the letter, a hitherto hesitant Parliament decided to continue Baltimore’s title to Maryland.10 Hobbes, working in Paris on Leviathan, would likely have known of Baltimore’s creative engagement with the Commonwealth and of Davenant’s arrest and eventual confinement to the Tower of London.11 All three of the living authors discussed in Treatise of the Schism of England, namely, Hobbes, Hales, and Cressy, had close ties to Great Tew and may well have known one another personally.12 Cressy, who had joined the English Benedictines in 1649, had recently dedicated a work of spiritual exercises, Arbor virtutum, to Lucius Cary’s Benedictine sister

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Dame Mary.13 Could a purely spiritual Catholicism stripped of political power turn out to be, if not compelling, at least tolerable to the surviving members of Great Tew? Coincidentally, in August 1650, Cressy’s fellow Benedictine Patrick Cary, Lucius Cary’s brother, had written to Edward Hyde to ask him to contact two other members of Great Tew, Gilbert Sheldon and Henry Hammond, on his behalf. Patrick Cary wanted Hyde to intercede with the new Lord Falkland (Patrick’s nephew) for an annuity, as he planned to return to England.14 Sheldon, at the time, corresponded frequently with Hobbes’s friend Robert Payne, in the hope of moderating Hobbes’s anticlericalism.15 In this context, Sancta Clara’s defense of Cressy in A Treatise of the Schism of England is significant for two reasons. First, Cressy had turned to Henry Holden for approval of Exomologesis in June 1647, the very summer that Holden and his Blackloist collaborators had joined forces with other English Catholics, including Jesuits, Benedictines, and Franciscans, to seek Catholic toleration from Cromwell—only to fall victim to political forces beyond their control.16 In the spring of 1648, after Rome had withdrawn its support from the initiative, Holden’s Blackloist faction had defiantly urged English Catholics to stand up for themselves and to reject political Catholicism in exchange for toleration.17 Even after the king’s execution in January 1649, Cromwell sought, and obtained, new secret negotiations with the Blackloists.18 In March 1649, Kenelm Digby arrived in London to pursue the effort. The Blackloist negotiations fell through in August 1649, largely because Cromwell gave up on the idea of neutralizing Irish Catholics by granting them religious toleration and resolved instead to subdue Ireland by force.19 Both Digby and the more dévot Wat Montagu were banished by Parliament soon after Cromwell left for Ireland.20 In September 1650, shortly after Cromwell’s victory at Dunbar, fears of a new “popish plot” were fanned by the publication in Edinburgh of a monograph claiming to reveal The king of Scotland’s negotiations at Rome.21 By December 1650, when A Treatise of the Schism of England was published, Cromwell was back in London and back in command. By evoking Cressy’s Exomologesis, Sancta Clara indirectly evoked Holden and the Blackloist negotiations, along with his own “suspicious moderateness” in historic continuity with the irenic and antipapalist George Cassander whose conciliatory writings had once prompted Chillingworth to convert to the Roman Church.22 The mention of Cressy supplied a symbolic trait

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d’union between Great Tew, the Catholic efforts for toleration in 1647 and 1649, and the unsettled present. Would Cromwell have a reason to resume negotiations in favor of Catholic toleration? Would the recalcitrant universities, in turn, support freedom of conscience for all law-abiding citizens, including Roman Catholics? We will see that Sancta Clara’s appropriation of Hobbesian ideas to defend the Roman Catholic Church as a safe spiritual commonwealth confined to a narrowly spiritual mission is embedded in a multipronged defense of religious toleration. We will also see that Sancta Clara’s project overlapped with Blackloism but differed from it in a key regard. A second possible reason to evoke Cressy and Great Tew was to remind Hobbes that the great John Selden, also a member of Great Tew and one who, like Hobbes, was notoriously wary of clerical power, had defended Catholic toleration in Parliament in 1647.23 Far from contradicting Selden’s anticlericalist outlook, Catholic toleration served it. Religious pluralism required a strong government because it required state protection. We saw that Jeremy Taylor, who also advocated Catholic toleration and religious pluralism, had reached the same conclusion. After his victory over the Presbyterian Scots at Dunbar (September 3, 1650), Cromwell helped to pass the Act for the relief of religious and peaceable people (September 27, 1650), thus taking an important step in blocking the type of autonomous clericalism that both Hobbes and Selden opposed.24 Cromwell, it seems, hesitated for geopolitical reasons to shut the door on a broad policy of religious toleration because he was personally committed to a religious settlement on the stricter model of John Cotton’s New England congregationalism, championed by his own chaplain John Owen.25 Who, then, are the tenderhearted tolerationists invoked in A Treatise of the Schism of England ? Sancta Clara gives us an important clue. These “tender” tolerationists, he explains, argue that “we may all inoffensively retain our own faith, referring the examine [sic] of all differences to God’s court.”26 Their hallmark is the conviction that judgment in spiritual matters belongs only to God. Provided citizens live peacefully and abide by the law, they are entitled to follow their conscience in matters of religious worship, without fear of human interference. The civil magistrate, in short, has neither a duty nor a right to persecute anyone on the basis of religion because he has no authority to judge what offends or pleases God.

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Two 1649 publications in which this argument is very conspicuously advanced serve to illustrate the many pamphlets that were written in the same vein. The first is by the General Baptist Henry Danvers, who had participated earlier in the debates that resulted in the Agreement of the People of October 1647.27 Entitled Certain quaeries concerning liberty of conscience, the short, five-page manifesto was published by the notoriously radical Giles Calvert and appeared in London on March 27, 1649.28 Through eleven “queries,” Danvers rejects the hypothesis that civil magistrates have a duty to persecute blasphemers, idolaters, and heretics. If civil administrators are essentially civil in nature, Danvers asks, what qualifies them to be judges and governors in spiritual matters? The hypothesis that civil magistrates have a duty to put blasphemers to death is demonstrably absurd since it implies that civil magistrates must put all Jews to death and force all “Towns, Kingdoms and Nations” in the world to renounce their gods. Moreover, if civil magistrates have a duty to punish heretics, then Queen Mary is an exemplary monarch since she did nothing more than discharge her duty.29 Furthermore, there is no basis to assume that the law instituted for Israel by Moses against blasphemers must continue in the church of Christ. Where exactly does the Gospel warrant establishing a compulsory national church? The apostle Paul teaches that families must live in peace together, mixing unbelievers and believers, infidels and Christians, without forcing anyone’s conscience. Since commonwealths are made up of families, should Paul’s apostolic doctrine not apply to commonwealths? The chief cause of religious strife, of war and conflict, is the mistake of giving civil magistrates the power to judge and suppress heretics. Christ taught us, instead, to use “gentlenesse and meeknesse” towards all men. How many passages in scripture command us not to judge one another! Is God not the sole judge of what is done against Him? Moral example and patient exhortation, not fire and the sword, or fines and penalties, are the proper Christian means to discourage blasphemy and heresy Danvers appeals to the Agreement of the People, which established the basic axiom that no one who does not disturb the public peace is to suffer religious coercion. The true duty of the magistrate is to protect freedom of conscience by preventing a priesthood from acquiring political power and usurping God’s prerogative with regard to consciences.30 Danvers concludes with an explicitly anticlerical warning. Any form of established

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priesthood is bound to result in persecution, conflict, and violence. Danvers, in short, assumes that civil government (at least in the age of grace) is instituted solely for the purpose of securing civil peace and prosperity, not for the purpose of promoting supernatural salvation. He also assumes that the Gospel commands mutual toleration. Since it is God’s prerogative to direct the human conscience by immediate inspiration or chastisement, religious coercion by the state or by any human being is nothing short of a transgression against God. By citing the Agreement of the People, however, Danvers introduces a subtle tension in his plea for universal freedom of conscience. The 1647 Agreement and the 1649 Agreement differ in their treatment of Roman Catholics. The 1647 Agreement endorses the project of a noncoercive public religion, funded by the public treasury, with freedom of conscience for private worship by nonconformists. It makes no mention whatsoever of Roman Catholics, either positively or negatively. In contrast, the second draft of the Agreement, published by Giles Calvert and presented to Parliament in January 1649, specifies that the public religion that is to be funded out of the state treasury cannot be “Popery or prelacy” and that freedom of conscience for private worship does “not necessarily extend to Popery or Prelacy.”31 Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism are put on a par—both demonized and excluded. Did English Catholics, who, as we know, had collaborated with the army agitators who framed the 1647 Agreement, decide to mobilize against the threat of being excluded from a general toleration? This is precisely what a second short manifesto suggests, published on March 20, 1649. Its title nicely summarizes its content: Liberty of Conscience asserted; Or, persecution for religion condemned by the laws of God, nature, reason. Its anonymous author describes himself to be “a well-wisher to the kingdoms good.”32 At first blush, our well-wisher does not seem to be a Roman Catholic since he explicitly states that he bears “no affection” for papists.33 Many of his arguments resemble Danvers’s arguments. No human being is qualified to usurp God’s sole prerogative over the human soul. God commands us to be tolerant—to allow “the tares” to be mixed in among “the wheat.” Clericalist elites empowered by the state are a chief cause of religious war. The duty of the civil magistrate is to protect “all men professing Christ” from persecution.

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Liberty of Conscience asserted differs from Danvers’s Certain quaer ies, however, in important ways. It shows a greater desire to approach the question systematically and with a more historical emphasis. The text starts by lamenting how little Christians heed Christ’s precept to love their neighbors. It deplores the fact that present-day Christians have vastly “degenerated” from the primitive Christians who would have “given their lives” for the “spiritual good of their brethren” rather than “violate any man’s conscience” by inflicting penalties and fines “for dissenting only in points of Faith.” As though grieved by the incessant fighting of Christians among themselves, God himself, the author says, has providentially stepped in: “It hath pleased the Lord now at last to infuse the like tenderness into the brests of many conscientious and well-affected people of this Nation, who see, I doubt not, the deformity of the passionate proceeding of those who would ruine all men that agree not with them in belief.”34 God has singled out “conscientious” and “well-affected” Englishmen and women as a new vanguard Christian elite to bring about religious toleration. Encouraged by God’s intervention, the author plans to write down key arguments in support of these well-affected people. He will help to advance “the freedom and incoercencie [sic] of religion, in respect of all men professing Christ.” His goal, in particular, is to prove that religious persecution is “repugnant to the laws of God, Nature and Reason” and thus that no Christian is allowed “to persecute another in respect of Tenets and exercise of Religion.”35 A general philosophical argument for toleration is thus woven into a distinctly Christian argument for toleration by Christians of other Christians. The first argument is drawn from Parliament’s declaration of February 17, 1649, which was designed to resist Presbyterian pressure. Since religion is supernatural and “is a thing intrinsecall between God and the soule,” it cannot be judged by natural reason. It follows that “no human power” is qualified to coerce anyone with regard to religion or to “restrain men from believing what God suffers their judgments to be persuaded of.” In other words, not only is it God’s prerogative to illuminate, guide, or chastise the individual soul as he pleases, there is no rational standard by which to judge the validity of supernatural (religious) beliefs. As a corollary, the second argument states that there is an absolute duty to respect one’s own religious conscience. Since it is a “damnable sin” to swerve in

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matters of religion from the dictate of conscience, even in the case of an erroneous conscience (Rom. 14:23), it is a “heinous crime” to coerce a person to do so through fines and threats.36 Two further arguments follow. First, since faith is supernatural, it is God’s prerogative alone to convert a person to supernatural faith, which means that human coercion in matters of faith is repugnant to God’s law. By the same token, God commands us to “suffer the tares to grow together with the wheat” and teaches us meekness and gentleness—which means that persecution directly violates God’s command.37 Finally, the author warns that Presbyterians intend to establish a national church that is just as coercive as the old “prelaticall” Church of England, and he concludes by urging Parliament to adopt a “Generall Act of Indempnity [sic] to all men professing Christ.”38 Unlike Danvers, our “well-wisher” explicitly raises the problem of including Roman Catholics. His language suggests an immediate concern with the recent restriction added to Agreement of the People: “There are some, I hear, even of the well-affected, who scruple at the universality of the Freedom of Conscience I have spoken of, and that principally in regard to the papists, whom they esteem idolaters and inconsistent with the Civill Government.” The author answers, first, with a legal argument. Practically speaking, it is impossible to craft penal laws that apply exclusively to papists. Any restriction imposed on freedom of conscience by law will put everyone at risk.39 History amply shows it, since recusancy laws enacted under Elizabeth against papists were used under Charles to persecute dissident Protestants.40 Recently, moreover, Presbyterians have cunningly accused the army of “swarming with Popish Priests, Jesuits and Jesuited Papists” in order to deprive their opponents of their native liberties.41 The author goes further. In order to make sure that Independents and sectaries will not cave in to demands to exclude Roman Catholics from a general indemnity, he decides to “remove the two obstacles” that disqualify Roman Catholics, namely, idolatry and civil disloyalty. His first argument is that there is a “reasonable doubt” that papists are not culpably idolatrous in God’s eyes. His point is that it cannot be proved with perfect certainty that God judges sincere Roman Catholics who follow their conscience to be knowingly guilty of idolatry.42 The author’s second argument it that Reformed Protestants are so strictly bound by the Gospel’s command of love that they are forbidden in conscience from persecuting

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even idolators—as their behavior in the Indies, which is so conspicuously more Christian than that of Roman Catholics, attests. The author’s overall argument has a remarkably legal flavor, as though argued from the bar. On the one hand, there is a “reasonable doubt” in favor of papists regarding their idolatrous practices. On the other, there is perfect certainty that persecution of idolaters is prohibited to true (“godly”) Christians by the Gospel. Consequently, it is morally safest to refrain from persecuting Roman Catholics. As for the question of civil obedience, the author confidently affirms that “every religion can be made to be consistent with civil laws,” citing the example of Jews, Turks, and Christians living peacefully with one another, and citing the religious pluralism of France, Holland, Germany, and Switzerland.43 Thus there are no sufficiently good grounds for excluding law-abiding Roman Catholics from a general act of indemnity—while there are compelling reasons to include them. Not surprisingly, the Commonwealth censor, Theodore Jennings, showed some anxiety over the text. He refused to grant his imprimatur without the addition of the statement that “visible idolatry publikely manifested by prophanenesse and worshipping of God by Images” cannot be tolerated by the magistrate.44 Jennings perhaps worried that the author might have more affection for papists than he avowed. Let us turn for a possible answer to The Christian Moderator, published in 1651, sometime after July 2.45 The author, who gives his name (“since parliament requires it”) as “William Birchley,” presents himself to the reader as a firmly antipapist Protestant.46 Birchley’s real name, however, is believed to be John Austin, a Roman Catholic convert and secular priest. A close friend of Thomas White, Austin interacted with Digby in Rome in 1645– 46.47 Much like the anonymous author of Liberty of Conscience asserted, Birchley summarizes the content and structure of his treatise in the title: The Christian Moderator. Or, Persecution for Religion Condemned; by the Light of Nature, the Law of God and Evidence of our own Principles. Even more strikingly, Birchley starts his text with the same appeal, quasiverbatim, to “our Saviour Christ’s precept of mutual love to all that professe his Name” with which Liberty of Conscience asserted starts.48 Birchley, moreover, also follows his anonymous predecessor in lamenting that we have become “degenerated from the primitive believers, who would rather have given their own lives, to perswade their enemies to piety, then sought

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to take away the lives of their Brethren, to force them to hypocrisie.”49 And like his anonymous predecessor, Birchley goes on to herald the dawn of a new hope: “Yet hath it pleased the Lord Christ in our days . . . to infuse the like tendernesse into the breasts of many conscientious and godly-minded people of this Nation, (who seeing the deformity and unreasonablenesse of those cruel maxims, that preach ruine and destruction for the least difference in belief ) cease not to pray unto the God of heaven, and sollicite the Governors of the earth, that an impartial freedome and absolute incoercencie in matters of Religion may be firmly and irrevocably established, for all that professe the Gospel of Christ.”50 Finally, again like his anonymous predecessor, Birchley explains that his short treatise is motivated by the wish to encourage the new tenderness infused by God into “well-affected” tolerationists by proving that persecution is “repugnant to the Light of Nature, the Law of God, and the Evidence of our Principles.”51 In short, it seems that the anonymous Liberty of Conscience asserted of March 1649 is a first draft of Birchley’s Christian Moderator of 1651. Thus it seems that Roman Catholics must be included among the “tender” tolerationists cited by Sancta Clara in A Treatise of the Schism of England alongside godly Independents like Danvers. Was the anonymous Liberty of Conscience asserted written in connection with the “Blackloist conspiracy” to obtain Catholic toleration from Cromwell in the spring and summer of 1649? The Blackloist negotiations with Cromwell started in earnest when Digby and other unnamed “Romanists” arrived in London in March 1649, coinciding with the publication of Liberty of Conscience asserted. The militantly anti-Anglican statements that are found in Liberty of Conscience asserted alongside antiPresbyterian statements might help to explain, in turn, the animosity of the “old” royalists like Hyde towards Blackloists and Henriette-Marie’s worry that Blackloists might jeopardize the (favored) Presbyterian-Scottish “option” for restoring Charles II.52 Thus if our hypothesis is right, if the Blackloist “conspiracy” produced Liberty of Conscience asserted, it seems that the anti-Anglicanism of the Blackloists, rather than the fact of negotiating with the regicide Cromwell, provoked the wrath of “old” royalists. During 1650, John Austin was in contact with Thomas White, offering to help prepare White’s “Divinity” for publication in London.53 The “Divinity” in question is presumably White’s Institutionum sacrarum, which would

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be published in 1652 and warmly dedicated to Sancta Clara.54 White’s dedication to Sancta Clara, moreover, must have been written before the summer of 1650 since White describes Sancta Clara as “ex-Provincial” of the English Franciscans. Indeed, by August 1650, Sancta Clara was no longer “ex-Provincial” since he had been elected to a second three-year term as provincial. The point is that White thought highly of Sancta Clara’s Systema fidei and that White, Sancta Clara, and John Austin seem to have been closely associated between 1650 and 1652. Sancta Clara and Austin were both in London in 1651. Both, apparently, were keenly interested in “tenderhearted” tolerationists. Does anything suggest that they joined forces? A remarkable feature of The Christian Moderator is that it contains one of the earliest published references in English to Hobbes’s Leviathan.55 In The Christian Moderator, as we will see, Hobbes’s Leviathan is specifically invoked to exonerate Roman Catholics from idolatry (!!) and thus indirectly to promote Catholic toleration. Many of the arguments of Liberty of Conscience asserted are reproduced in The Christian Moderator, but they are considerably expanded. In particular, a whole section is added on the problem of identifying “the signes of tender consciences” in order to distinguish the sincere religious dissenter (who deserves civil protection) from the licentious person (who does not).56 The criteria for recognizing persons with authentically “tender consciences,” Birchley explains, are that they are law-abiding, steadfast in their religious beliefs, and patient in the face of persecution. They take obligation seriously—both political obligation and religious obligation. Just as they submit themselves to civil authority in temporal affairs out of political obligation, so they submit themselves to what they regard to be God’s authority in spiritual matters (including meekness under persecution) out of religious obligation. Their religious beliefs are not flighty. Their religion provides them with a “steddy judgment” against frivolous whims and incites them to make charitable gifts on their death bed. As examples of such authentic “tender consciences,” Birchley cites the Protestant nonconformists who were “imprisoned and persecuted by the late Prelates” (Prynne comes to mind) and “those precious servants of the Lord, who by a voluntary banishment left their friends and country to plant the liberty of the gospel amongst the savage heathens of America” (John Davenport comes to mind).57

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At this crucial point, a new voice is introduced. Birchley says that a friendly visitor, reading his criteria approvingly, pointed out to him that the designation of “tender consciences” also applies to papists.58 The friendly visitor not only cited Roman Catholic constancy, chastity, and patience, but he also put Birchley in direct touch with a “moderate and discreet Papist” who would be able to answer all of Birchley’s doubts about Roman Catholic beliefs. The elaborate conceit implies that the Protestant author, “Birchley,” would be in a position to examine Roman Catholic beliefs and evaluate the “tenderness” of Catholic conscience without appearing to be “popishly affected” himself.59 Conversing now with the “moderate and discreet Papist” to whom he has been introduced, Birchley explains that he (Birchley) is determined to be impartial and to champion toleration for all “tender consciences.” He worries, however, about including Roman Catholics on two familiar grounds. First, if Roman Catholics are idolaters, surely they must be suppressed since idolatry brings God’s wrath upon the whole commonwealth. Second, if Roman Catholics obey a foreign ruler who has the authority to rescind their oaths, surely they cannot be trusted as fellow citizens and must be suppressed in the name of public safety. Should Roman Catholics, then, be granted toleration? After denouncing the persecution of Roman Catholics in England, Birchley’s Catholic interlocutor starts by postulating the following selfevident principle: “If any Opinion be probably true, persecution in that case is certainly unlawful, because otherwise both sides, for both are probable if one be, might justifiably persecute one another, to the utter destruction of all Society.”60 Presented with perfect generality, the axiom summarizes Preston’s and Sancta Clara’s welding together of speculative uncertainty and moral probabilism, which is now invoked for a new purpose. Once the axiom is agreed, as Birchley’s “discreet” papist knows, the burden is shifted to the would-be persecutors. All that is required of the papist is to show that there is a “reasonable doubt” in favor of the Roman Catholic use of holy images, however slender. The papist now defends the Roman practice. He starts by calling attention to the difficulty of expressing respect, reverence. The root cause of misunderstanding, he explains, is that bodily gesture is less “copious” than language in its semantic expressiveness, just as language, in turn, is less

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“copious” than thought. Thus we use the same title of “most Mighty” to honor both kings and states, which we readily distinguish mentally, and we use the same limited repertoire of gestures—kneeling, bowing, baring our head—in very diverse circumstances, such as before parents, upon entering Parliament, and so forth. Drawn from John Selden and more immediately from Hobbes, the anonymous papist’s argument serves to defuse the whole question of Roman Catholic gestuelle by placing it in a broad context of human social practices and of human infirmity. Delighted by this approach, the Protestant Birchley responds positively by citing scripture in support of the moral innocence of “falling on the ground” or “putting off one’s shoes” to honor the “excellencie” of an angel. Indeed there is no difference, the Protestant Birchley concludes, between the respect that Roman Catholics show to “Churches, altars, Pictures” and so on, than the respect that “we” show to various dignitaries, since indeed we would not hesitate to reprieve anyone who took a shot at the public image of Cromwell that had been erected at Temple Bar.61 The next argument is of great interest. It is voiced by the Protestant Birchley as a corollary of the first argument and as an application of the probability axiom. Birchley says that, like papists, he “thinks it probable, not certain” that the second commandment was intended to target widespread pagan rituals, such as sacrificing to man-made deities fashioned out of materials, not to discourage “such kind of reverence as the Jewes by Gods own appointment used before the Ark and Cherubins.” In short, there is at least a reasonable doubt in favor of the Roman Catholic interpretation of the second commandment. The argument from Liberty of Conscience asserted has been developed, clarified, and strengthened by appealing to what we might term the Preston – Sancta Clara probability axiom. It is at this point that the Protestant Birchley corroborates the conclusion further by invoking Hobbes. Birchley points out that the distinctions underlying the papist’s defense of images coincides perfectly with the “Opinion of the learned Mr. Hobs in his Leviathan, folio 360” and cites a whole paragraph from Leviathan verbatim. Like the papist, Hobbes makes a clear distinction between worshipping a “place or image” and simply showing it respect or marking it as “holy.” Hobbes, moreover, argues that the second commandment targets holy places or images that are

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set up on one’s own private authority, not what is dedicated “by the authority of them that are our sovereign Pastors.” Birchley concludes, with palpable delight, that “the learned Protestant [sc. Hobbes] absolutely clears Papists from idolatry.”62 As for Hobbes’s alternative attempt to convict Roman Catholics of idolatry by charging that prayers to saints in heaven are idolatrous since there are no such saints in heaven before the resurrection, Birchley dismisses it as based on Hobbes’s private and idiosyncratic mortalism.63 Once again, the axiom of probability applies. Since it cannot be demonstrably proved that there are no saints in heaven, Hobbes fails to prove that Roman Catholics are idolaters, which means that they cannot be persecuted on grounds of idolatry. Birchley then recounts that, as soon as he read the passage from Hobbes’s Leviathan to his papist recusant interlocutor, the papist recusant in question showed him “the very words of the Councel of Trent,” which he said “differed nothing at all from Mr. Hobs and very little from me.”64 There follows a verbatim citation of Trent, session 25, along with an explanation from the papist recusant, who clarifies that no “Church Councel” anywhere uses the phrase “religious worship” for anyone but God. Moreover, the papist recusant now explains, although the Church allows the use of holy images, nowhere are images imposed as necessary. Let us notice that, whereas Birchley shows enthusiasm for Hobbes and cites him as an authority, the mysterious recusant treats Hobbes with respect but implies that Hobbes’s judgment is valid in this specific instance because it is corroborated by Trent and by his own (the recusant’s) authority. Unlike Birchley, the recusant does not affirm Hobbes’s authority, as such. He merely agrees that there is a convergence between Hobbes, Trent, and himself on the permissibility of using images under a proper understanding. The next question is whether or not Roman Catholics are guilty of idolatry in honoring the Eucharist. Birchley’s narrative reports that “the Recusant was obliged to go into the Country” (the initial conversation took place in London) and thus decided to tackle the problem of the Eucharist in a letter. The recusant’s letter starts by reiterating the probability axiom against persecution, summarized now in the succinct principle that “Probability exempts from persecution.”65 The papist recusant establishes, first, that there is at least a reasonable doubt in favor of transubstantiation. He then argues that, even supposing that transubstantiation is

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false, Roman Catholics are not guilty of idolatry since they direct their adoration to the invisible Christ, not to the “species” of bread and wine. Thus at most Catholics are factually mistaken, not morally idolatrous. The Protestant Birchley is especially pleased with this second argument since, he says, the Reformed churches of France approve a similar reasoning, as attested by Daillé’s Apology, chapter 11. Birchley then recommends that Roman Catholics explicitly “profess” that their adoration terminates in Christ, not in any created entities like bread or wine, since this would clarify that they are deceived in theory, not idolatrous in fact. (Presumably, the recusant’s letter is itself a good example of what “professing” the correct Catholic attitude might look like.) Birchley concludes that papists should no more be barred from English communion than Lutherans—especially as Protestants in New England and Virginia, he says, “abhor to destroy the natives, though confessedly idolators, but rather strive to convert them by holding out the truth in love.”66 Is Birchley tacitly singling out Roger Williams as a model Protestant or is he being sarcastic? Readers like Hobbes, or Independents such as Milton or Henry Vane Jr., would have been well aware that majority opinion in Virginia and New England had not really “abhorred” to destroy natives. Compared to both (Anglican) Virginia and (Congregationalist) New England, Maryland, as a matter of fact, had a slightly more benign record. The thought of the Indies introduces the last problem, namely, “whether Papists are inconsistent with Civil Government.” Once again, the problem is tackled by letter, as though the intention was to supply a material document. The papist recusant takes a very systematic approach. He divides the problem into (1) the question of “Commerce and Conversation” with social equals and (2) the question of loyalty to the state. The first question boils down to whether it is safe to enter into contracts with Roman Catholics. The answer is simply to “disclaim absolutely that scandalous opinion that no Faith is to be kept with Hereticks.” Since no Church council ever mentions such a doctrine, Roman Catholics are free to give whatever assurances are required, such as expressly denying that engagements, promises, and contracts may ever be lawfully broken. As for the second question, the papist recusant explains that Roman Catholics are bound both by the natural law and by their religion to obey civil magistrates. They must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s on

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pain of eternal damnation. Roman Catholics are obligated to obey the state not only out of fear (self-preservation) but also out of conscience. In sharp contrast, he points out, Lutherans and Calvinists incite political rebellions under the pretext of religion, foisting innovations in order to “extinguish an ancient religion whereof the people are universally in quiet and immemorial possession.”67 Moreover, as the case of Switzerland attests, or Holland, peaceful cohabitation is perfectly possible once persecution is abandoned. In Holland, especially, where “long and dangerous wars with Spain, the chief protector of the Catholic faith” might reasonably justify the magistrate’s repression of Roman Catholics, toleration has produced instead increased security and “exceeding benefit” for all.68 The recusant’s letter ends with an eloquent description of the cruel severity that has been unleashed against Roman Catholics in England. English Catholics have been deprived as a group of their native rights because of the crimes of a “few discontented and desperate spirits.” On account of conspiracies that their religion condemns, “their posterity to this very day” is punished by the most harsh and severe proceedings. May God inspire the English state and Englishmen to stop blaming the Roman Catholic religion as such for the faults of individual Roman Catholics and may God inspire English Catholics, in turn, to have no faults “but our religion.”69 Like the anonymous author of Liberty of Conscience asserted, Birchley responds by expressing his confidence that “there is no Religion in the world, but by good Laws against breach of peace and due execution of them, may be made more consistent with any Kingdom or Commonwealth whatsoever.”70 Experience proves as much, since Jews are known to live peacefully under the government of Christians and Christians under the government of Turks.71 Birchley, however, goes on to add a detailed account of the secret 1647 negotiations with the army, including a full citation of the “Three Proposals” that were designed to enable Roman Catholics to reject the pope’s power over civil rulers as being “no part of their Faith or Religion.” He emphasizes that English Catholics subscribed to these proposals in sufficient number and “quality” to “represent the whole body of them in this Nation.”72 Moreover, he points out that, as a matter of practice, “we trust Papists in all Negotiations, as indifferently as Prot estants, nay even our Travellers and Merchants beyond Seas (where the

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Papists are masters) converse and traffique securely with them.” Indeed, in his own “small experience of the world,” Birchley testifies that he has encountered, at worst, papists who were physically unable to pay their debts because of sequestrations, never papists who were “taught by their religion to deceive their Creditors.” Implicitly, if English papists were restored to their native rights and property, they would contribute to reviving the economy.73 Finally, how can Roman Catholic doctrines be regarded as intrinsically “destructive to civil Society” if English political institutions and the liberties contained in the Magna Carta were framed when “their Religion governed the land”? And though it is true that papal power has often been abused “to support a temporal interest,” it is equally true that papal power has also been used positively for the purposes of diplomacy, as “is evident to those that know History.”74 Birchley concludes the section on Roman Catholic “consistency with Civil Society” by warning against shortsighted rabble-rousers and by urging impartiality. There are no good grounds against the toleration of Roman Catholics and many good reasons in its favor. Toleration of Roman Catholics would bring about a more just and secure civil peace, not only domestically in England but in all of Europe, since freedom of conscience for Catholics in England would not only secure good relations with Catholic princes but also secure the good treatment of Protestants in Catholic lands. And whereas Roman Catholics would be grateful simply to be allowed to worship in private without fear of persecution, neither the “Prelaticall” party nor the Presbyterian party ought to be trusted because they have more dangerous ambitions. Unlike English Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians seek to regain the despotic power that was wrenched from their hands.75 Like his anonymous predecessor of Liberty of Conscience asserted, Birchley delivers a scathing indictment of the past abuses of the Anglican clergy and warns that Presbyterian enslavement will be even more tyrannical.76 Most especially, he denounces the Presbyterian oath of abjuration as “flatly contradicting the known Laws of the Land” since it “forces a free-born English-man to accuse himself.”77 We start to see two slightly different outlooks emerge. Birchley’s Black loist agenda seeks to secure toleration by adapting Roman Catholicism in England to an Erastian model compatible with Hobbes’s parameters of civil sovereignty.78 Consequently, Birchley is ready to sacrifice the schis-

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matic Church of England as intrinsically political. Blackloism, in effect, aimed at replacing the dismantled Anglican hierarchy with a new Roman Catholic hierarchy. In contrast, the mysterious recusant seems most concerned with the spiritual unity of the Catholic Church. His aim is to make Roman Catholic practices and beliefs acceptable to Protestants so as to prompt Anglicans to return to the Catholic fold. His aim is to reconcile the Anglican hierarchy to Rome and thus include the “prelaticall party” in a joint settlement. Although both projects overlap in seeking civil protection for the private practice of Roman Catholicism in England, the precise status of the apostolic and schismatic English Church is viewed with different eyes. Birchley concludes the whole manifesto by proposing “a consciencious way of settling religion.” First, based on the principle that the aim of religious orthodoxy is to help believers to gain heaven, not help a clerical elite to gain power and wealth, a basic creed must be established of “positive, evident and fundamental” articles to be taught publicly by the state. Second, the public religion must not be compulsory. Law-abiding dissenters must not be coerced by the threat of prosecution or fines. They must be allowed to abstain from public worship and to conduct their own preferred form of worship in private. Third, every effort must be made to foster the civil loyalty of “disaffected” parties, including the loyalty of papists, since every human being has a natural instinct of self-preservation and will naturally exercise it if existentially threatened. Fourth, papists and dissenters should be allowed to raise questions and debate. Birchley cites Cromwell in example: “Let us use the same gentleness here in En gland that his Excellency the Lord Generall practices in Scotland towards those that are not only otherwise minded in Religion, but contrary minded in civil concernments, and actually in arms to maintain their opposition.” To be specific, Cromwell set the right example by “inviting them to conferences, and himself with admirable temper and moderation manages the discourse, allowing free liberty of reply to the adverse party, without passion, bitterness or threatening.”79 Lastly, and most importantly, the legal category of treason must never again be abused for the cynical purpose of licensing religious persecution—as recently seen in the execution of the Jesuit Wright, drawn and quartered at Tyburn as a traitor on May 19, 1651.80 How unworthy of the

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English Commonwealth to fail so conspicuously to uphold its own avowed commitment to freedom of conscience—indeed to fail to be as tolerant of dissident religious views as Catholic France, where public debates between Catholics and Protestants are conducted “peaceably and civilly”!81 Birchley ends with a passionate plea for a “generall Act of Conscience-indemnity” to be “established as a fundamentall and unalterable Law of the land, for all that professe the Gospell of Christ.” Persecution of Christians by Christians, at the very least, must stop. Toleration must be secured through a permanent act of legislation.82 What suggests that Sancta Clara collaborated with John Austin on The Christian Moderator? Internally, we recognize a number of arguments and approaches that have long been dear to Sancta Clara. The expository device of introducing a “moderate and discreet” papist to tackle Protestant objections in sensitive matters of theology seems to be more than a convenient fiction. It allows a seasoned theologian versed in the decrees of the Council of Trent to “speak in his own voice” and to adjust Roman Catholic doctrine to Protestant sensibility with persuasive authority. We note also that the device of including the recusant interlocutor allows Birchley to report that a consensus had been successfully reached in 1647 with regard to depoliticizing Roman Catholicism, uniting Jesuits, secular priests, Benedictines, and Franciscans. Finally, the detailed accounts of court proceedings against English Catholics suggests a collaborative effort of information gathering. As provincial for his order, Sancta Clara would have had a duty between 1650 and 1653 to visit every Franciscan house in England. As chief fund-raiser for St. Bonaventure’s, moreover, he would have been keenly interested in Catholic sequestration. There is a small but very explicit piece of evidence that Sancta Clara collaborated with Austin on the project of obtaining an “Act of soul Indemnity” from the Commonwealth. A new augmented version of The Christian Moderator was published in August 1652 and contained the first draft of a text that has long been attributed to Sancta Clara, his Explanation of the Roman Catholicks Belief. Whether or not Sancta Clara joined Austin’s effort at an earlier date, it thus seems fairly certain that Sancta Clara was actively engaged, alongside his Blackloist friends, in seeking Catholic toleration from Cromwell at least since the spring of 1652. The enhanced Christian Moderator of 1652 also contains a signature Sancta Clara feature,

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namely, a list of recent English converts to Rome, urged as proof that persecution is as ineffective as it is immoral. The narrator, Birchley, says that the list was presented to him indeed by the same “discreet and moderate Papist” that helped to clarify Catholic doctrine in 1651. Even though no converts are named that were not already publicly known, the claim is made by the anonymous papist recusant that there are many more new Roman converts whose names must remain hidden for their protection. The reinforced message of 1652 to Cromwell was clear: grant English Catholics toleration, and you will gain new allies rather than new opponents. To Rome, the signal was equally clear—moderate Protestants were willing to return to the Roman Church following the demise of the schismatic Church of England and deserved to be welcomed with special charity. A new opportunity ought to be seized to work constructively with Cromwell (Spain’s policy) in order to obtain Catholic toleration in England—perhaps even to restore the Stuart monarchy (France’s preferred option) peacefully through Cromwell’s strength.83 Published when Roger Williams and Henry Vane Jr. were closely engaged in a similar offensive to convince Cromwell to embrace universal toleration, “yea, even for Papists and Jews,” the enhanced Christian Moderator of August 1652 explains that the most pressing need since the publication of 1651 is to argue for the inclusion of Roman Catholics in a general policy of “mutuall forbearance” because they alone continue to be persecuted in England “for their Conscience only.”84 The Protestant Birchley tells the reader that he is guided in this merely by the principle of charity, “which absolutely commands my spirit.” He then cites a petition “that fell by chance into my hands,” addressed by Roman Catholics to Parliament in February or March 1652 and “delivered to many persons.” In it, Roman Catholics praise the “quiet and settled condition” of the Commonwealth and ask that laws against them be reconsidered. They request, moreover, “the permission of clearing their Religion from whatsoever may be inconsistent with Government, which will assuredly be done to full satisfaction.”85 To this end, Birchley recounts, “divers” Roman Catholics “of considerable quality” who were “then in town” drew up a written document. They “unanimously agreed” upon the following “Paper” explaining Roman Catholic belief in order “to declare and witnesse to the world the perfect consistency of their Religion, both with civil Government and civill

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society.”86 The “Paper,” or Explanation, clarifies four key aspects of Roman Catholic doctrine to which Protestants object. It addresses (1) the undervaluing of scripture, (2) the overvaluing of Church authority, (3) invocation of saints and angels along with the worship of images, and, “above all,” (4) the “proud opinion of Merits.” Birchley’s account implies that the Explanation was drawn collectively. Revealingly, however, it also characterizes the Explanation as merely “preparatory to a more full and perfect clearing of their Faith” from “prejudices and misunderstandings”— implying that a full treatise was pending. Since much of the text of the Explanation is found verbatim in Sancta Clara’s Enchyridion of Faith, which was approved for publication in November 1653, and since Sancta Clara himself gave a copy of the Explanation to Thomas Barlow at the Bodleian in 1655 with “by Fran. A Sancta Clara” written in his own hand on the cover, it is likely (1) that Sancta Clara led the drafting of Explanation in 1652 and (2) that the fuller version announced by Birchley refers to Enchyridion of Faith. Why do these details matter? To the extent that Sancta Clara was centrally involved in the effort to secure Catholic toleration from Cromwell in 1652, the notion of a narrowly Blackloist conspiracy to reach accommodation with the de facto Republican government by betraying the interests of the Roman Church and of the Royalist party must be reassessed. Rather, a coalition of English Catholics—secular priests, religious priests, and laymen—joined forces to reject the kind of political Catholicism that was the target of Hobbes’s Leviathan. As we will now see, Sancta Clara’s Explanation of the Roman Catholicks Belief, whether or not it was initially drafted as a collective document, doubles up, throughout its many editions, as a surreptitious oath of civil allegiance. Organized in four parts, the “Paper,” or Explanation, that was delivered by papists “to divers persons of quality for their particular satisfaction” has the form of a profession of faith. In it, Catholics start by affirming what Cromwell and gospelers believe: “We believe the holy Scripture to be of divine inspiration and infallible Authority.” The need for the authority of the Church is reduced to the fact that scripture is difficult to interpret. Church authority is narrowly confined to “free” general councils, allowing for the status of specific councils to be brought into question: “We therefore professe (for the ending of controversies in religion and settling of peace in

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our Consciences) to submit our private judgment to the judgment of the Church, represented in a free Generall Council.” Not a word is uttered about the pope, the Roman see, or the notion that the Church is God’s kingdom on earth. Instead, what is affirmed is simply the very Hobbesian principle that submitting one’s private judgment to an agreed-upon sovereign, in this case a “free General Councill,” is a reasonable way to avoid incessant conflict and secure peace.87 Similarly, in the next paragraph, the whole question of saints and holy images is made secondary to the fundamental doctrine that Roman Catholics adore and worship only God, the Blessed Trinity. Because Roman Catholics adore only God, they ask for angels and saints to intercede for them only in the same innocuous sense in which they ask “prayers from one another here on earth.” Holy images, in turn, are not “worshipped” but simply treated with “respect” as instruments to “assist our memories and excite our affections.”88 The “proud opinion of Merits” is treated in third place. Once again, Roman Catholics have a chance to clarify that their fundamental doctrine is staunchly Augustinian, closer to Protestant doctrine than is generally recognized: “We firmly believe that no force of nature, nor dignity of our best works, can merit our Justification, but we are justified freely by grace, through the Redemption that is in Jesus Christ.” In conformity with the many passages of scripture in which God promises heaven “to those who live through the spirit” by “the assistance of God’s grace,” Catholics also believe that God chooses freely to “recompense with everlasting glory the faith and obedience of his servants.” In other words, Catholics trust that obeying God’s commandments with the help of God’s grace is God’s own freely chosen means for his faithful servants to gain heaven. Faith in God’s promise of reward is not the same as neglect of God’s grace.89 Finally, in fourth place, Catholics profess a firm belief in the moral law, which was “so solemnly delivered to Moses upon the Mount, so expressly confirmed by our Saviour in the Gospel, and containing in itself so perfect an Abridgement of our whole duty both to God and man.” Since Catholics believe that the moral law “obliges all men to proceed with faithfulness and sincerity in their mutual contracts one towards another,” they implicitly hold that the moral law is known by natural reason and is rationally binding. Since the moral law was also confirmed by Moses and by Christ, moreover, Catholics believe that they “are most strictly and

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absolutely bound to the exact and entire performance of our promises, made to any person of what Religion soever” under pain of eternal judgment. Catholics are especially bound in conscience to obey promises made “to the Magistrates and Civil Powers under whose protection we live, whom we are taught by the Word of God to obey, not only for fear, but conscience sake; and to whom we will most faithfully observe our promises of duty and obedience, notwithstanding any dispensation, absolution, or other proceedings of any foreign Power or Authority whatsoever.” Consequently, “we utterly deny and renounce that false and scandalous Position, that Faith is not to be kept with Hereticks, as most uncharitably imputed to our practices and most unjustly pinned upon our Religion.”90 No direct mention is made of any papal deposing power, yet the oath stipulates that no one is authorized to suspend the moral law or to dispense citizens either from their duty or from any oath of loyalty to civil magistrates that might be required of them as citizens. Unlike the Jacobean oath, the new oath that is woven into the Explanation is suited to express loyalty to all magistrates “under whose protection we live” rather than framed narrowly to commit Catholics to a reigning Stuart monarch and his successors. The new oath thus implies both that civil matters, as such, fall wholly under the natural confines of the moral law, and that Roman Catholics recognize no restriction on their political obligation to the magistrates and civil powers who protect them. Catholics, in other words, implicitly affirm (1) that states are human institutions governed by God’s moral law and (2) that the authority of God’s church is strictly spiritual and extends only to matters of Christian salvation. The “Paper” ends with a special profession of personal integrity by Roman Catholics regarding their own succinct Catholic profession of belief: “These we sincerely and solemnly professe, as in the sight of God, the searcher of all hearts, taking the words plainly and simply, in their usuall and familiar sense, without any Equivocation or mental Reservation whatsoever.” Did Sancta Clara and his associates hope that their opponents in Rome would simply fail to notice that they had framed a new oath? Published as part of an effort by radical Protestants to obtain a universal act of toleration, The Christian Moderator of 1652 shares a number of key features with Roger Williams’s Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody (April 28, 1652) and with Henry Vane’s Zeal Examined (June 25, 1652).

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There are also important differences. Vane chose to focus on idolatry as the most extreme religious offense, but he did not take the path of exonerating Roman Catholics of the offense. Rather, as though addressing John Milton’s sole reason for excluding Roman Catholics from religious toleration, Zeal Examined argues that civil magistrates have neither a duty nor a right to persecute “even” idolaters. Consequently, civil magistrates have no authority to persecute or fine any law-abiding citizen on religious grounds alone. The Presbyterian opponents of radical toleration, however, did not hesitate to accuse Vane and Williams of collaborating with “Jesuits, papists and apostates.” On September 21, 1652, the alarm was sounded by “certain stationers, citizens of London,” who urged Parliament to suppress the many “popish” and “blasphemous” books that were being published in England “in the English tongue” to “seduce the citizens of this Commonwealth unto the popish religion, or that which is worse.”91 A Beacon Set on Fire singles out the special threat posed by popish books that urge reunion with Rome as a condition for salvation (e.g., Sancta Clara’s Treatise of the Schism of England). It also singles out popish books that (1) interpret the aim of the Commonwealth to be to disestablish religion (i.e., to grant freedom of religion to all) and (2) boast of the many recent converts to Rome (e.g., The Christian Moderator of 1652).92 Both Treatise of the Schism of England and The Christian Moderator are cited in the annotated “catalogue of Popish Books that have been published in the English Tongue” within these three last years.93 The Christian Moderator is cited last and its contents denounced in detail, suggesting that it may have served as the immediate trigger of A Beacon Set on Fire. What most offended the Presbyterian stationers of London was Birchley’s strategy of deceit. They accuse Birchley of “putting a painted Glos upon the foul face of Popery, to make it appear otherwise then it is.”94 The Presbyterians point out angrily that The Christian Moderator nowhere acknowledges the dangers of papism. Nowhere does the pseudonymous author prove that toleration of Protestants would be secure under a Roman Catholic majority. Papists, the Presbyterians insist, have never shown the toleration towards Christians of a different belief that they strive to obtain for themselves. Papists are not to be trusted when they claim to be moderate. Whatever they may say to the contrary, papists are bound to believe in “the Popes supremacy and Churches Infallibility” until a “Popish-General-Council” decrees otherwise.95

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If The Christian Moderator of 1652 is the last book cited in the popish list, Hobbes’s Leviathan, in turn, is the first book cited in the blasphemous list, as though Birchley’s appeal to Leviathan to “maintain prayer to Angels and Saints departed” had convinced the Presbyterian stationers that “Atheists” and papists were allied to destroy the Protestant religion in England. Whatever their differences, both Hobbes and “Birchley” seemed to agree in rejecting an autonomous Protestant clergy empowered by the state to teach and enforce Christian doctrine. Atheists such as Hobbes and papists such as Birchley were thus evidently prepared to use one another in the short term to prevent a Presbyterian settlement. When sectarian radicals responded two weeks later in The Beacons Quenched (October 8, 1652) that Presbyterians demonize Birchley as a papist simply because he advocates toleration,96 the Presbyterian reaction, attributed to Francis Cheynell, was swift. Cheynell meant to be devastating. “No wise man,” Cheynell exclaims indignantly, “will doubt” that the author of The Christian Moderator “is a Papist, though he now and then transforms himself into the appearance of a Protestant, as the Devil sometimes changeth himself into the shape of an Angel of light.” Moreover, Cheynell reports, “It is known, and can be proved if need be, that Sancta Clara, that famous, or rather infamous Priest, presented one of them to a ladie, who told it to a reverend Minister of this Citie; and withal, said that he was the Author of the book.”97 A thirdhand report is hardly to be treated as evidence, yet the Presbyterian (Cheynell) says that he is willing to back up what he has revealed. At the very least, we have confirmation that Sancta Clara was closely associated with The Christian Moderator and with the “infamous” strategy of depicting Roman Catholicism as a moderate religion that does not actually contradict Protestant doctrine, provided misunderstandings are cleared up. Sancta Clara likely played a key role in framing the précis of Roman Catholic doctrine that doubles up as an oath of civil allegiance— and personally helped to disseminate it to various “persons of quality,” including the treacherous “Ladie” who reported him to a London minister, who in turn alerted Cheynell. Under its modest appearance, the four-part Explanation of the Roman Catholicks Belief is no simple statement of Catholic doctrine. It is, rather, designed to raise Roman Catholic consciousness. The four parts are layered in such a way as to form a ladder of spiritual perfection, a scala perfec-

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tionis, made up of four distinct meditative degrees. The pastoral aim is to purge Roman Catholics of superstition, illuminate their souls with charity, and strengthen their resolve to seek heaven through a distinctly moderate via unitiva. By the same token, it serves to initiate Protestants and schismatics into the spiritual life of God’s “Catholic church of Christ.” Let us be guided up Sancta Clara’s spiritual ladder. Phase 1, on the Church, purges the neophyte of anxiety by focusing the attention on God’s promise not to abandon Christians to their own infirmity. Awed by God’s infallible Word, the neophyte is plunged into humility. He correctly fears that he will stumble and go astray if he relies on his own private judgment to interpret God’s gospel, in isolation from Christians everywhere who, like him, seek heaven in fear and trembling. Private judgment is not rejected as such. Rather, the neophyte is encouraged to form his own private judgment of God’s will based on scripture, but also to form the judgment that God’s will requires him to submit his isolated human judgment to the whole Catholic Church, out of a rational predilection for peaceful unity and out of charity for those who might be led astray by relying exclusively on their private judgment. As a result, the neophyte, no matter how clever, no matter how well educated, is convinced that, if he wants to be Christian, with the fullness of Christian charity, he must become Catholic. He is now purged of the selfish but anguished pride of solitary self-reliance. He is no longer the victim of the superstition that he must interpret God’s gospel on his own and cling to his private judgment on pain of damnation. He understands, to his relief, that the Catholic who submits his private judgment to the authority of a free general council does not act against his conscience, or act “blindly.” Guided by reason to seek the peace and unity of the Christian communion, he makes the reasonable choice of setting aside his own private judgment in favor of trusting God’s own promise to assist the Church as a whole. By the end of phase 1, not only is the Catholic neophyte comforted to recognize that he values God’s Word no less than the most “godly” Protestant, he also recognizes that acting for the benefit of God’s whole church out of a personal desire for heaven manifests the very essence of rational dignity and freedom. By the end of phase 1, in short, the Catholic neophyte adheres firmly to God’s church precisely because he believes that God’s Word is infallible. He is ready for the next meditation, step 2.

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Step 2, via illuminativa, focuses the heart and mind on the mystery of God’s trinity. In adoring the Trinity, the Catholic adores God’s incomprehensible interpersonal plenitude. The revelation of God’s trinity strengthens Catholic “abhorrence” for worshipping creatures, but it also inspires a new expanded charity. Since the triune God infinitely surpasses any human concept of divinity and is adored rather than understood, interpersonal charity takes on a new meaning. By soliciting prayers from God’s angels and saints in heaven, Catholics do nothing less than include God’s own chosen elect in God’s worship. Not only are Catholic intercessions to saints and angels not idolatrous, but they express the Catholic’s faith in God’s mystical body. God’s angels and saints in heaven are most especially members of God’s church. Their prayers cannot be less welcome to God than the prayers of pilgrim Christians here below. As for holy images, Catholics attribute no inherent virtue or power to them but use them instrumentally. By the end of phase 2, the Catholic reader is “assisted in his memory” with regard to God’s incomprehensible Trinitarian mystery, and is “excited in his affection.” Comforted to know that he is no more idolatrous than “goldly” Protestants, the Catholic now knows that he may safely find solace in beauteous shapes and tapers that help him think of heaven. If he feels distracted by worldly cares, the Catholic may safely collect himself before an image of Mary tota pulchra in order to direct his prayers to God with a more focused fervor. In the spring of 1652, it seems that a spiritual rapprochement with regard to these pious practices had perhaps emerged, however tenuous. In May, Roger Williams published Experiments of the Spiritual Life, in which he drew on Francis of Sales to devise “spiritual bouquets,” exemplifying the usefulness of meta phors (“pictures”) to nurture piety. Henry Vane, in turn, pointed out in Zeal Examined (June 1652) that Catholic recourse to saints denotes humility rather than idolatry.98 As a result of step 2, the Catholic now “remembers” God with a pal pable new serenity, which means that he is ready for step 3, a meditation on God’s promise of heaven. Conscious of the infinite distance that separates him from the Trinity, the Catholic now “firmly believes” that “no force of nature” can lift him up into God’s love and presence. Catholic “hope of eternal glory” is based, therefore, wholly on “God’s mercy and the merits of Christ Jesus.” The key, for Catholics, is that faith and obedi-

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ence cannot be divorced. Faith includes trusting God’s explicit promise to “recompense” the “faith and obedience of his servants” with everlasting glory. God’s promise of heaven, which is designed to “invite us and provoke us” to obey the commandments, attests to God’s “bountiful” love, since we are rewarded in excess of our capacities. And since it is God’s grace that makes possible the very actions that God freely rewards, Catholics recognize that they are, “as for themselves,” never more than “unprofitable servants” when they have “done all of the things that are commanded of them, having done nothing which was not their duty.” The trust that God’s servants place in God’s promise of heaven involves no idolatrous self-will. By the same token, we note that Catholics are not required to profess anything at all about supererogatory works. After step 3 presents the via unitiva that leads the Christian pilgrim to God through grace, step 4 returns full circle to natural reason in order to contemplate the moral law in a new light. Since Christ explicitly confirmed the moral law and since the moral law contains a précis of our “whole duty to God and man,” Catholics profess that they “firmly believe and highly reverence” it, implying an enhanced gratitude for natural reason as a divine gift. Does obeying the moral law, which obliges all men universally to treat each other with justice, suffice to gain a beginning of divine favor? Is obeying the moral law, as such, “rewardable,” or is obeying it in faith, which is to say, precisely out of love for God, the critical factor? Catholics, it seems, are encouraged in step 4 to embrace the moral law with new fervor. Trusting that God will reward moral actions with a super excess of grace, Catholics welcome every chance to obey the moral law and to do unto others what they would have done unto themselves. Consequently, Catholics believe that they cannot be absolved from their oaths by “any foraign Power or Authority whatsoever” and deny the “scandalous Position that Faith is not to be kept with heretics,” which clearly contradicts the universal character of the moral law. Moreover, Catholics have a special incentive to act with sincerity in pledging their fidelity or in professing their beliefs since they already live “in the sight of God, the searcher of all hearts.” No single point is particularly new. On the contrary, Sancta Clara would be the first to say that what is professed in his Explanation represents immutable Catholic doctrine, purified of accretions and purged of human opinions. The exercise of professing Catholic belief is valuable

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because it allows Roman Catholics to take personal satisfaction in their beliefs. They are given a chance to voice their beliefs as their very own, to take personal responsibility for them. In yet a new, augmented reedition of Christian Moderator II, the “satisfaction” that Catholics find in their religion will be cited as one more reason why Catholics should not be forced into apostasy.99 Over and above the political advantage of clarifying Catholic doctrine to Protestants, the Explanation clarifies Catholic doctrine to Catholics, providing them with a new kind of spiritual security. In a sense, Sancta Clara’s pastoral project of teaching Catholics their own core beliefs overshadows the more obvious purpose of supplying them with a convenient oath of civil allegiance. Roman Catholics who personally adhere to the fourpart statement of Explanation profess themselves, in effect, to be spiritual Catholics who hope for heaven, not political Catholics who will become entangled in political plots hatched by factions in the Roman court for purely temporal reasons. The Explanation is thus a subtle but far-reaching tool for inciting Catholic autonomy. It avoids the issue of denying the pope’s deposing power by making no explicit mention of the pope whatsoever. It begins with a clear submission to the Church’s authority in spiritual (supernatural) matters, but it ends with an equally clear rejection of submitting to any “foraign” prince in civil matters. Catholics firmly embrace the moral law as their only God-given and God-approved guide to civil obligation—which is conspicuously close to Hobbes’s position. To what extent is the Explanation credible as a profession of Roman Catholic belief? In November 1652, a long and detailed refutation of The Christian Moderator was published in London. It was written by an Anglican calling himself “E. Lee.” Titled Legenda Lignea with an answer to Mr. Birchleys moderator, the book denounces “the Author of this mix’d and patch’d piece,” which, Lee says, should be called The Jesuit Insinuator rather than The Christian Moderator.100 Not only does Lee heap contempt on Birchley’s deceit, he accuses Roman Catholics of cynically exploiting England’s turmoil. Roman Catholics, Lee says, seek to infiltrate sectarian groups and to fan the flames of division in order to gain a new foothold of power.101 Appalled that “Roman actors” have grown so confident of late as to “plead their Interest and cause, at least for a toleration of their Religion,” Lee warns that The Christian Moderator is “like a venemous potion, being

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full of dangerous ingredients, as well as infectious dissimulations of truth, reason and conscience.”102 Birchley’s main strategy, Lee explains, is first to destroy the unity of the Protestant English Church through religious toleration, then promote Roman Catholic unity to fill the vacuum. Lee explains that Birchley champions religious pluralism only because he is convinced that Roman Catholicism will triumph once Protestant Christianity has been fragmented into myriad sects.103 Far from accepting Birchley’s argument that the Roman Catholic Faith differs from Anglican Protestantism only by “degree,” Lee rejects it as an outrageous imposture.104 As for the Explanation, Lee dismisses it wholesale by pointing out that private Catholics have no authority whatsoever to “explain and determine their private sense and judgment, in points exceedingly controverted on all sides” and are obliged by their papist religion to endorse “even the weakest Canon of the Council of Trent” under pain of anathema.105 Birchley’s fraudulent attempt to depict Roman Catholics as reasonable, Christian, and autonomous in their conscience, Lee concludes, is a farce. What Lee rejects, in other words, is the very idea that Roman Catholics could be weaned of their old superstitious and persecutory attitudes. Lee denies the possibility that English Catholics, in particular, might become the vanguard of a mature and spiritual Catholicism suited to bloom in a postWestphalian Europe. Lee’s harshest words are directed at the Roman Catholic converts whom Birchley cites as proof that the penal laws of England are ineffective. All of them are scum, Lee says, plagued by personal disorder, motivated by greed and ambition—miserable disloyal wretches without gratitude to their Holy Mother the Church of England, in which they were baptized and confirmed. Far from attesting to the apostolic character of the Roman Church, these despicable converts attest to human weakness under trial and to Roman deceit and manipulation. Implying that the long-suffering Church of England will triumph in the end, Lee cites two reverse converts: Patrick and Henry Cary. As we know, Patrick Cary was in correspondence with Edward Hyde from Rome. Our Protestant author “Lee” may well be a coalition of Anglican divines led by Bramhall or Gilbert Sheldon—just as “Birchley” is likely the name of a collaborative group of Roman Catholics.

F I F T E E N

Enchyridion of Faith

The full version of Sancta Clara’s effort to explain Roman Catholic belief to his English compatriots in their own mother tongue first appeared in 1654, a year into the Protectorate. Bearing the title An Enchyridion of Faith, or Handbook of Faith, the book describes the author as “Franciscus Coventriensis,” Francis “of Coventry.”1 The quaint decision to identify himself through his native town allowed Sancta Clara to avoid using his notorious name but also gave him a chance to celebrate his Midlands roots. By 1654, Coventry had been turned into “a sternly disciplined city.”2 As though attempting to contain the madness of the moment by invoking a broader perspective, Sancta Clara cast himself in the lineage of the vanished Coventry Greyfriars whose “fair church” stubbornly survived in the form of its steeple.3 In a climate of unrelenting penal prosecution against English Catho4 lics, Enchyridion of Faith aimed at transmitting the essence of Sancta Clara’s suspiciously moderate Catholicism to a broad vernacular audience. As we shall see, it also aimed at rallying Anglicans around their own suppressed prelates and at inspiring Anglican leaders to seek readmission into Catholic communion.5 Throughout the work, Francis Coventriensis playfully cites the many treatises of a mysterious “S. Cl.,” most especially 410

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“S. Cl. his Systeme,” as clues to his identity.6 Enchyridion of Faith also refers the English reader to Deus, natura, gratia (renamed Problemata) and to Apologia episcoporum. It also cites Sancta Clara’s most recent Latin works, namely, a short Scholastic discussion of the Immaculate Conception, De definibilitate controversiae Immaculatae Conceptionis (1651), and a treatise on natural philosophy, Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico (1652). Significantly, Enchyridion also incorporates in its content much of the Explanation of Catholic Belief (1652) and recommends Philip Scot’s Treatise of the Schism of England (1650). 7 When Sancta Clara translated Enchyridion of Faith into Latin, he gave it the title of Summa veteris theologiae, emphasizing the notion of a perennial “old” theology undistorted by novelties. Along with Pierre Marchant, Martin Denys, Regius Professor of Theology at Douay, approved the Latin version on June 19, 1657, just two months after approving Hugh Cressy’s compendium of Augustine Baker’s views of contemplative prayer, Holy Wisdom.8 In 1665, Sancta Clara would dedicate Summa veteris theologiae to the theology faculty of the University of Douay, who accepted the homage.9 The charge that Sancta Clara’s theology should be dismissed as insufficiently Catholic is thus answered for posterity by the endorsement of qualified Roman Catholic censors. The first edition of Enchyridion of Faith was marred by garbled passages and required a long page of errata. A second edition, “much augmented with most grave matters,” appeared in 1655. More polished than the first, the second edition was conveniently divided into numbered “dialogues” mapping out the successive topics. By comparing the two editions not only with each other but with Explanation of Catholic Belief, it becomes clear that the 1655 version of Enchyridion of Faith is really the master copy—from which the 1652 Explanation of Catholic Belief was cribbed as a short abstract and from which the first edition of Enchyridion was hastily produced as an abridged version in 1654. The 1655 edition contains sections that were deliberately cut from the 1654 edition, most notably on such ecclesiastic topics as the validity of Anglican orders, the celibacy of clergy, intercommunion, and the relation of the pope to general councils. Perhaps the full version was circulated privately to woo Anglicans as early as 1652, in the context of La Milletière’s effort to convert the young exiled king. 10 Sancta Clara then extracted the Explanation of Catholic Belief from his manuscript in collaboration with other English Catholics to obtain

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religious toleration from Cromwell in 1652 and published a truncated version focused narrowly on defending the Christian legitimacy of Catholics in 1654.11 Did Sancta Clara then reissue Enchyridion of Faith in its full version in 1655 to coincide with Cromwell’s treaty with Mazarin12 but also to mark himself off from Thomas White’s provocative endorsement of Hobbes and of Cromwell? In the event, we will see that the timing of Enchyridion was not innocuous. Since the 1655 edition is not only augmented but carefully corrected, it is all the more curious that “S. Cl. his Systeme” is oftentimes rendered as “S. Clement his Systeme” or as “S. Clem. his Systeme.”13 Whether a zealous typesetter decided to fill out the name according to his own fancy, or whether “Francis of Coventry” himself intended to introduce yet a new disguise, is impossible to tell. Perhaps Sancta Clara was cautioned to hide his name. Perhaps he meant to subvert the whole idea of authorship to punish himself for a propensity for vainglory. Perhaps he wished to invoke Saint Peter’s first successor, or, better yet, to invoke Clement of Alexandria, who had been demoted from the Roman martyrology in 1585 by Pope Clement VIII, but who was still venerated in the French church and preserved in the Church of England. Perhaps “Fran: Covent” meant simply to emphasize that all teachers of moderation, including Sancta Clara, partook in the clemency of Saint Clement—and that a papal decision to demote Saint Clement hardly sufficed to erase him from Christian hearts. Through a labyrinth of disguises, a palpable feeling of homecoming marks Sancta Clara’s voice as Francis of Coventry. He had already adopted the name earlier in a philosophical treatise of 1652, Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico, in which he interwove colorful personal vignettes with discussions of Epicurean atoms and comets. In Enchyridion of Faith, in turn, Francis Coventriensis candidly reveals that the personal “design of his whole life” was to free himself from worldly tasks in order to pursue a life of contemplation. The two books that Sancta Clara signed as “Francis of Coventry” were explicitly designed to be companion pieces. The first, Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico, was composed in Latin, Francis explains, for the purpose of initiating students into “the admirable structure of this whole materiall World.” The second, Enchyridion of Faith, was composed “in our own Language” for the purpose of initiating students into “the immateriall World of Christianitie.”14 Sancta

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Clara’s explicit division of God’s creation into “materiall” and “immateriall” worlds suggests a concern for grappling with Hobbes’s freshly restated materialism in De corpore (1655), which was denounced as atheistic by, among others, John Wallis.15 On strictly philosophical grounds, Sancta Clara makes two important concessions to Hobbes. While personally endorsing an immaterialist view of the human soul, he courteously points out that a materialist view of the soul is neither new nor indefensible, as though wishing to show that the metaphysical debate, in itself, is not the important test of atheism.16 Again in Hobbes’s favor, Sancta Clara argues that revelation is indeed required for God’s extracosmic existence to be proved philosophically. Aristotle, in particular, had no incentive to prove God’s radical transcendence and actual infinity of power since he had no suspicion that the universe had been created ex nihilo.17 Sancta Clara’s answer to Hobbes’s challenge, drawn from Scotus, is marvelously conciliatory: God’s radical transcendence and creative power can be proved philosophically, but the very idea of God’s radical transcendence and creative power does not suggest itself naturally to natural reason.18 It requires revelation. Implicitly, refuting Hobbes’s “atheism” would require something more than fresh philosophical arguments. What Sancta Clara’s Paralipomena philosophica and Enchyridion really have in common, as we shall see, is a new interest in miracles. Indeed, the two companion pieces composed by Francis Coventriensis to explore God’s material and spiritual creation culminate with a narrative of the story of Miguel Juan Pellicero, whose limb was miraculously restored in Calanda, Spain, in 1640. Sancta Clara had certainly finished a first draft of Enchyridion of Faith by November 1653, when it was approved by his Franciscan confrère Lawrence à S. Edmundo and by the Franciscan bishop of Kilmacdaugh, Hugo de Burgo, episcopus duacensis, who took refuge in London in 1653, shortly before his death.19 Enchyridion of Faith was also approved by Sancta Clara’s old friend and onetime near-victim Nicholas Day—who wrote that he took special delight (“delectio”) in reading it. Sancta Clara’s letter of dedication, to “Lady Willoughby,” is dated January 1, 1654, “from my Cell in Douay.” Francis Coventrian explains that the chief aim of Enchyridion is to “sweeten differences” among Christians. He also explains that Lady Willoughby herself requested the dialogical

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format as “most profitable” to the aim of reducing differences. Through question and answer, Francis Coventrian says, he will “calcinate our holy Faith from humane Commixtures.” His aim is “to serve all human beings” by “delineating the whole structure of our holy Faith.” Presenting a cleansed, purified Faith, Enchyridion in itself embodies a “reformed” Catholicism that emerges dialogically from the interaction between two fictional interlocutors, a (Roman Catholic) “Master” and a (Church of England Protestant) “Disciple.” The Catholic “Master” listens to objections, then faithfully imparts what he himself has received through authoritative teaching, including, most importantly, how to reason about transmitted authority and how to set just limits on what is religiously binding. The Protestant “Disciple,” in turn, never memorizes anything “blindly” but makes his way cautiously into Catholic doctrine by raising objections and probing the Master’s answers. Implying that the Catholic Faith is threatened equally by the two extremes of credulity and obstinacy, Francis Coventrian presents “calcinated” or reformed Catholicism as a living patrimony and collective work in progress—a shared participation of all Christians in a supernatural revelation that is embraced incrementally through discussion and private reflection, never in violation of personal assent. Sancta Clara’s distinctive “Catechetical dialogue” subverts its own didactic format to suggest that the Catholic Faith is structured more like a language to be shared creatively than like a multiplication table to be committed to memory.20 The Catholic Faith is acquired by means of a live initiation into a tradition that transmits as many nuances as it conveys parameters and principles. In a decade when various Christian sects sought furiously to define a “list” of Christian “fundamentals,” Sancta Clara presented Catholic belief instead as a dynamic cultural manifold. A striking feature of Enchyridion of Faith is that it starts where Treatise of the Schism of England leaves off, namely, with Sancta Clara’s critique of Hobbes’s argument that the state should determine God’s worship. Enchyridion of Faith ends, in turn, by encouraging the Disciple to read Treatise of the Schism of England.21 To what extent does Enchyridion of Faith include among its many aims the hope of refuting Hobbes’s assault on Roman Catholicism in Leviathan? The question is not arbitrary, for two reasons. First, by 1654, Hobbes’s refutation of Bramhall’s doctrine of free will had been published in London.22 Although Hobbes denied that he had

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authorized the publication, his denial did little to mitigate its impact or assuage Bramhall’s distress. Bramhall’s Anglican doctrine, Hobbes effectively argued, could not be distinguished from Roman Catholic doctrine.23 The issue was all the more sensitive in that “Popery and Prelacy” were now routinely coupled, as despondent Anglicans bent on defying Cromwell recognized.24 Perhaps Francis of Coventry thought that it would be useful to Anglicans and Romanists alike for an inclusive Catholic catechism aimed at “serving all human beings” to stand up to Hobbes’s attack—and discover new reasons to form a united front by healing the English schism. A second reason to suspect that Enchyridion of Faith contains a refutation of the final chapter of Leviathan is that Thomas White, who was back in London by 1655, had grown increasingly interested in appropriating Hobbes’s ideas. Both in his theological work De medio animarum statu (1653), which Sancta Clara challenged in writing,25 and in his Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655), White showed a strong affinity to rationalize Catholicism in light of Hobbes’s scientific approach.26 Dedicated to Kenelm Digby at a time when Digby was collaborating with Cromwell,27 White’s Grounds of Obedience and Government was right away linked to Hobbes.28 Edward Hyde, in particular, published an anonymous but scathing response, accusing White and Digby of gross disloyalty to the Royalist cause.29 By 1655, Henriette-Marie in Paris was much annoyed with Digby, as John Cosin reported to an English visitor who conveyed it to William Sancroft.30 In the context of Cromwell’s precarious Protectorate,31 White’s very Hobbesian axiom that “the people hath alienated all right of judging or medling in government” in favor of the magistrate32 was widely interpreted as an attempt to urge English Roman Catholics to submit to Cromwell in exchange for toleration of Roman Catholic worship under the supervision of a Roman Catholic clergy appointed and controlled by the Protectorate.33 White defended the legitimacy of instituting a new government when adequate protection of life and property could not be afforded by the old government and agreed with Hobbes that a citizen’s liberty consists narrowly in not being governed “in his private affairs.”34 The fact that White’s Hobbesian political views were published in 1655, the same year that the treaty between Cromwell and Mazarin was concluded and that the Stuart king was expelled from French soil, may not be purely coincidental.35

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Contrasting sharply with the Blackloist project, Sancta Clara’s En chyridion of Faith aimed at saving the suppressed Church of England through reunion with Rome, thereby preserving Christian teaching from state control. Enchyridion ends with a very precise appeal to Anglican leaders to take concrete steps towards reunion, suggesting that Sancta Clara was in personal communication with at least some of them. He certainly stayed in close touch with Godfrey Goodman, who had been “plundered, spoyled, robbed, and utterly undone” by the civil war and had taken refuge in London since 1650.36 After 1652, Goodman lived in “the Church-yard of Saint Margarets in Westminster,” under the care of Sibilla Albiongly, widow of the late dean of Canterbury and a personal protégée of William Cavendish, third Earl of Devonshire, Hobbes’s patron and onetime student.37 Goodman wrote to Cromwell in 1653 that there was an urgent need for public authority to crack down on Socinians and for the mysteries of Christian religion to be “explicated according to the ground of philosophy.”38 In the spring of 1655, Sancta Clara may have attended Jeremy Taylor’s sermons, given on Paul’s Wharf, where Anglicans congregated illegally to receive Communion according to their suppressed liturgy. Among those attending Taylor’s sermons and involved in trying to keep the episcopal church afloat by funneling money to exiled bishops, was a not-toodistant kinsman of Sancta Clara’s, George Davenport, who had been William Sancroft’s student at Emmanuel College in Cambridge.39 Since the Enchyridion was aimed at just these sorts of distressed Anglicans, it is not impossible that the two relatives came into contact. Writing to Sancroft in 1655, George Davenport expressed interest in Taylor’s project of a comprehensive treatise on guiding doubtful consciences in matters both civil and religious. Sancta Clara, in turn, who had a long-standing commitment to guiding the doubtful, perhaps reached out to his old friend and discussed Taylor’s Ductor dubitantium, along with his own Enchyridion. In 1655, when Anglican loyalists like Sancroft had become convinced that the “church here will never rise again though the kingdom should,”40 Roman Catholicism was perceived to be making “considerable” progress in England, prompting new persecution and a new enforcement of the abjuration oath.41 Cromwell and the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, whom Birchley’s papist interlocutor cited with such appreciation in The Christian Moderator, were conducting negotiations to readmit Jews

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to England and thus to implement some form of religious pluralism.42 Hobbes, once again, is indirectly implicated. Sancta Clara’s friend Thomas Barlow, serving as Bodleian librarian since 1653, contributed to the debate over the readmission of Jews at the invitation of “a person of quality.” Barlow had developed a keen interest in Hobbes’s books, which he read “constantly as they came out.”43 Sancta Clara, who visited the Bodleian regularly, thus had a number of reasons to want both to counteract Hobbes’s indictment of Roman Catholicism and to reach out once again to Anglicans in view of ending the schism. Sancta Clara likely knew that Barlow’s admiration for Hobbes did not prevent him (Barlow) from raising funds for the suppressed Church of England and from defending episcopal government in his correspondence with Henry Hammond.44 If Anglicans were readmitted to Catholic communion as a block (as Sancta Clara urged), they would be freshly empowered to defend a dualist model against Hobbes and eventually to “return” religion to England (as Taylor hoped). The Blackloist alternative of rival “gallican” bishops without apostolic ordination would be thwarted. Enchyridion of Faith opens with the (Roman Catholic) Master’s summary of the rational preambles of faith. Reason suffices to establish that God exists and that God alone must be worshipped. Reason also suffices for us to know that we cannot honor God in the best manner without knowledge of God’s will.45 The (Protestant) Disciple chimes in, declaring himself to be “well satisfied in all of these rationall Aphorisms.” The Disciple himself goes on to prove the divine origin of Christian faith based on multiple arguments, confirming the Master’s claim that Christian faith informs humankind supernaturally of God’s will. Surprisingly, the Disciple cites monastic vocations as proof of the supernatural origin of Christian faith and equates monastic vocations with the miracles of the first Christian age. Proof that Christian faith is of divine origin, the Protestant Disciple says, includes “the angelic purity of monks and holy virgins” and the “majesty of miracles,” which “done in God’s name are Verbum Dei, in some sort his Word.” The Disciple is thus willing from the start to expand a Protestant sola scriptura position to embrace not only miracles but supererogatory vocations as authentic proofs of God’s revelation. Moreover, historic stability, universality, and continuity of the Christian church also attest to the supernatural character of Christian doctrine.46

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Since Christian truths are demonstrably divine in origin, they are per se more certain and infallible than any “naturall verity,” granted that natural reason cannot reach them on its own.47 From the start, the Catholic Master and the Protestant Disciple agree that Christian faith carves out a special spiritual realm in which natural reason is of limited recourse, which means that civil magistrates, as such, have no particular authority regarding spiritual matters. Who, then, is qualified to interpret Christ’s supernatural gospel and on what grounds? The very first question confronting the Christian conscience, the Master concludes, is to decide what will serve as the sovereign authority that will safely guide Christians to heaven. The overarching quest of Enchyridion is to find a reliable Rule of Faith.

THE RULE OF FAITH: WE ARE THE CHURCH

Is it not safest to determine Christian belief on the sole basis of scripture? Ostensibly seeking to probe “the causes of our separation,” the Protestant Disciple challenges the Master to refute the Protestant charge that Roman Catholics are guilty of minimizing the authority of scripture.48 The Master answers that, on the contrary, “we highly reverence the Holy Scriptures, believing them all and each to be the Word of God” and to be “sufficient in themselves.”49 The problem, the Master explains, is that not everyone is capable of safely extracting from scripture what is needed for salvation. Implicitly, a very real issue of brotherly love is involved, which Protestants, in their eagerness to promote individual responsibility, overlook.50 Because scripture is “liable to divers senses,” the Master says, the “constant Tradition” of the Church is required for the divine sense to be safely known in points of faith, conformably to Vincent of Lérins’s “Golden Rule”— “Quod semper, quod ubique, et quod ab omnibus.”51 The question is not whether the Holy Scriptures contain all that is necessary for salvation (they do) but whether all Christians are equally capable of guiding themselves to salvation based solely on God’s written Word (they are not). A communitarian approach must be revived to balance Protestant individualism with brotherly charity. Consequently, a new and critically important question is raised. How inclusive a community must God’s church be? Will a tightly knit covenanted congregation not suffice for Christian charity to flourish? Will a carefully bounded and isolated national church

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not provide a sufficiently safe rule of faith for Christians of all levels of ability and education? According to the Master, the Church’s fundamental reliance on “constant Tradition” forbids the fragmentation of Christian culture into separate churches. The reason, the Master explains, is that “Nothing passeth the test of Faith with us, which is not Catholique in order to the universality of persons, of place and of time.”52 Christian faith requires that Christian communion be universal. God’s Catholic Church cannot be broken up into independent national churches. A fortiori, self-reliant “covenanted” churches also miss the point. Citing Thomas More, the Master specifies that tradition is nothing other than “the living Gospel of Faith, which is infused into the hearts of the faithfull throughout the Universall Church.”53 The Church’s “constant Tradition” depends on, and calls for, the full plenitude of a shared communion. The Master emphasizes that the “Vincentian Rule of Faith” serves “against all emergencies,” since it provides criteria upon which to exclude gross distortions of Christ’s gospel—provided, of course, that “persons suspected or declared heterodox” are not “admitted to the inquest.”54 In other words, the Vincentian Rule serves, first and foremost, to set extrinsic limits on the field of faith. At a higher level, three features of the Vincentian Rule are essential to the determination of faith. First, virtual points of faith, namely, points of faith that are logically included in formal traditions (written or oral) are admissible.55 Second, the historic record, as such, does not need to be complete for a point of faith to pass the test.56 Third and most importantly, as “Lerinensis puts it in his Rule, and we out of him [sic],” the criterion of universality is based on redundancy of information, not on head count: “All not everyone, the universalitie not every particular, is required to testifie anything to be Catholique.”57 Provided that there is no grave testimony to the contrary, a recurrent propensity of belief that is stable over time and disseminated throughout various Christian lands may suffice for the Church to be able, if required, to admit something as “Catholique.”58 Foregoing scientific exactness does not mean sacrificing the notion of truth. Redundancy ensures that authentic beliefs survive noise pollution and accidents of transmission over time. The Master illustrates what he means. If “some particular doctors” are found who “speak dubiously or perchance erroneously” against a given belief, their opinion does not count as testimony and should simply

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be ignored. The fact that some individual persons “here and there” may have taught, or may teach today, some things contrary to faith, “as it were by chance,” should “not be taken notice of” and “cannot be thought to interrupt the universality of the Church.”59 Vincent de Lérins’s Golden Rule serves as an effective test precisely because various testimonies, or types of evidence, must be accorded a different weight, or value, in light of a robust core of information that is sufficiently self-corroborating to conserve its coherence over time and space. Because Christian beliefs inherit their clout through the accumulated history of how strongly and widely they are believed, the “living Gospel of Faith” that is supernaturally infused “into the hearts of the faithfull throughout the Universal Church” allows the Church as a whole to recognize what is deeply believed and what is casual.

THE DUALIST MODEL

For clarification of how to apply the Vincentian Rule, the Master refers the Disciple to “Saint Clem.’s Treatise of the Definibility of the Controversy of the blessed Virgin’s immaculate conception,” where, he says, the notion of Catholic universality is “fully explained.” Written in Latin for a Scholastic audience, Sancta Clara’s De definibilitate controversiae Immaculatae Conceptionis simply expands chapter 35 of Systema fidei. It was published in Douay in 1651 and dedicated to his old friend “Count” Rossetti, who, as we remember, had collaborated with Sancta Clara in London in the halcyon days of the reunionist effort. Sancta Clara’s treatise De definibilitate asks whether there are sufficient grounds for the Church to be able to define the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary as an article of faith, if the need arises. Sancta Clara’s analysis argues that the doctrine of Mary’s privilege meets the criteria of Vincent de Lérins’s Golden Rule since (1) it is not a trivial matter, (2) it is “consonant” with scripture, and (3) its contradictory has never been positively affirmed as a point of faith by the fathers.60 Having thus established that the doctrine is not excluded by Lérins’s Golden Rule, Sancta Clara then applies Scotus’s famous axiom that all excellence must be attributed to Mary in the absence of a positive reason not to do so. In other words, Sancta Clara takes as his premises (1) the general truth of Mary’s excellence, firmly believed by Christians

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everywhere since apostolic times, and (2) the fact that belief in Mary’s immaculate conception has never been decisively rejected; thus combining the two premises, he concludes, like Scotus before him, that the doctrine of Mary’s privilege complies with the Church’s “constant Tradition.” We recall that Lord Falkland cited the very issue of Mary’s immaculate conception as proof of Rome’s depravity in introducing man-made ideas into the Catholic Faith based on the lobbying efforts of political factions.61 Sancta Clara’s Catholic Master implies now that the Treaty of Westphalia must work both ways: setting firm limits on the political power of the Roman Catholic Church must be coupled with defending the Church’s prerogative and autonomy in the sphere of spiritual doctrine. Given the accidents of history and of geographic isolation, the testimony of a single Christian, or monument, or liturgy, may thus fully count under some circumstances as expressing “what has always and everywhere been believed by all.” Conversely, “incidental” discrepancies among Church Fathers are not obstacles to “universality.”62 Since the testimony of a few grave doctors who have reflected deeply about a matter carries more weight than the casual opinions of others, the Church may, at times, safely adhere to a minority viewpoint and declare it to be a matter of universal faith.63 In De definibilitate, Sancta Clara systematically rejects restrictive interpretations of what is included in the Church’s “constant Tradition.” When threatened by schism or heresy, the Church is free to define articles of faith that were hitherto known only “obscurely.”64 What the Church does is weigh testimonies from all four corners of Christendom and from Christian history in order to clarify what it is that Christians have always and everywhere believed, bolstering the coherence and stability of Christian faith with newly defined articles.65 Catholics, the Master explains, put their trust in universality. Other Christians, disregarding the unity of faith, cling to particularity. Protestants typically extract a particular passage out of a particular Church Father in order to try and refute a specific article of the Catholic Faith, but they show no regard for context.66 As Lérins recognized, the essence of the Catholic Faith lies in its internal density. Lérins’s Golden Rule allows the Church to preserve the immutable patrimony of apostolic faith despite the upheavals of history, the shortcomings of human memory, and the unpredictable challenges of human reason.

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At the Disciple’s prompting, the Master explains that two conclusions follow from the “constancy of Tradition.” First, the living Church suffices today to bear reliable witness to the Catholic Faith. As the Master points out, “if the church shall once or in any age fail to know what she hath received, all fails.”67 Only the extinction of the Church—precisely what it faces if it continues to fragment—would spell the demise of Christ’s apostolic gospel. Second, it follows that “there are two sorts of universal Traditions,” namely, traditions that are and have always been perfectly manifest (e.g., articles of the Creed) and traditions that are nebulous (“cloudy”) until a specific crisis prompts the Church to examine them and “declare” what is God’s teaching as a point of faith.68 As long as the unity of Christian communion is not in danger, there is no need to subject “nebulous” beliefs to a process of clarification.

THE HOBBESIAN ROLE OF COUNCILS

It also follows from the Vincentian Rule of Faith that a distinction must be made between the Church’s faith and the Church’s mere doctrines (dialogue 3). The Church’s decision that Sunday worship be in Latin, for example, though motivated by grave considerations, can be changed, or dispensed, if other grave considerations arise, without altering Christian faith (dialogue 4). Remarkably, the Master concludes dialogue 4 by drawing an explicit parallel in this regard between civil commonwealths and the spiritual commonwealth of the Church. Just as a civil magistrate is entitled to the obedience of citizens when he has sufficiently good reasons (“probable motives”) to issue a command, so the spiritual magistrate is entitled to the obedience of Christians “upon probable motives.” Indeed “if probable reason is not security enough both for Church and Commonwealth in their practical results, all mankind would be reduced into inextricable perplexities, since clear demonstrations even in naturall things are very rare.”69 The Disciple agrees. In most “practicall matters,” he concurs, there is no need for demonstrative certainty. Explaining that a syllogism involving “practicall objects” yields at best a soundly probable conclusion since sense data is not immune to deception, the Disciple readily endorses the parallel between Church and civil commonwealth: “if

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this [sc. probable conclusion based on empirical conditions] is sufficient in subjects to warrant their results, as it is, then surely it is much more sufficient in Magistrates Spirituall and Temporall, who have besides this, Authority to back their decrees and challenge obedience to them.”70 Implicitly, just as political obligation in the civil sphere requires of citizens that they obey the civil magistrate in spite of private doubts, so spiritual obligation in the spiritual sphere requires of Christians that they obey the Church even in doubtful matters. The pragmatic flexibility enjoyed by the Church in matters of doctrine moves the Disciple, however, to raise an urgent objection. If all Christians have a voice in shaping tradition, who decides what is faith and what is mere doctrine? The Master answers that, “when difficulties cannot be overcome, our final remedy now and always hath been to recur to Generall Councels, as the Monuments of all ages witness.”71 In other words, it follows from the Vincentian Rule that true general councils are needed for the universal church to be able to speak with a unified voice with regard to deciding what is, and what is not, a matter of faith (dialogue 5). Once again, the Master’s language is pointedly Hobbesian: “You will easily see,” he tells the Disciple, “that the trial of our Faith is not to be had from the Schools or any of their Doctors, no not [sic] from any particular Church if dissenting from the rest, but most completely and finally from the Church universall sufficiently represented in general Councils, who in a supream and inerring degree can decide controversies out of holy Scripture and universal Traditions which both are the adequate source of our Faith.” The civil/ spiritual commonwealth parallel now implies that, just as the Church has a legitimate claim of authority over all Christians because it represents all Christians taken indivisibly as God’s people in safeguarding the Faith, so a legitimate civil sovereign must represent and protect all citizens as a collective whole, not just a faction or elite (Protestants, for example, to the detriment of Catholics).

THE CHURCH’S STRICTLY SPIRITUAL MISSION

A second overarching implication of dialogue 5 is that the Catholic Church is a purely pastoral institution. The Catholic Church is exclusively

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concerned with teaching God’s gospel in view of heaven and for the sake of God’s future kingdom of glory. God’s church on earth is a pilgrim church. God’s church is not God’s kingdom of glory on earth—as Hobbes accuses the Roman Church of claiming to be.72 Without directly addressing Hobbes’s root accusation against the Roman Church, the Master provides what is needed to refute it. Instituted by God to transmit Christ’s faith through a “constant provision of pastors and doctors,” God’s church has as its sole mission to prepare souls for a kingdom that is not of this world. God’s church is “a kingdom of Grace,” the Master insists, a “kingdom of promise.” Since unity of communion, however, is a pastoral necessity for this kingdom of grace, God’s church must be governed coherently by its own spiritual means for its own otherworldly purpose. The Disciple agrees. General councils and restraints of obedience within the Church are required by the Church’s pastoral mission, the Disciple concedes, namely, to preserve the integrity of Christ’s faith, since “if the Fountain be infected, the Rivers must relish of the source.”73 The Disciple now understands that the integrity of Christian faith depends vitally on the unity of Catholic communion. He concludes that anyone who fails to grasp it is simply crippled by prejudice “from our cradles nourished.” Reflecting on the many ways in which personal upbringing and affection for one’s parents distort a person’s judgment, the Disciple vows to become intellectually mature by outgrowing inbuilt misconceptions.

HOBBES AND JANSENISM

Still, there are serious objections to Roman Catholicism that warrant careful scrutiny. The Disciple asks, next, whether the Roman Church is not guilty of “expunging” God’s second commandment, which prohibits graven images. The Master responds by challenging the Disciple, in turn, to produce evidence that any general council has ever annulled God’s second commandment. Is the charge, then, not another example of Protestant prejudice? Dialogue 6, serving as a turning point, introduces all at once a standard list of Roman Catholic practices that offend the Protestant Disciple (worship of angels and saints, transubstantiation, purgatory, the pope’s power in “temporalls,” etc.) and the Master’s strategy for a solution, which

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is to distinguish what is de fide from what is not: “I have told you that every practice of the whole Church doeth not argue a matter of Faith.” The subsequent twenty-one dialogues that make up Enchyridion of Faith serve to illustrate, case by case, the key importance of distinguishing “points of Faith from other doctrines.”74 As we will see, the Master subtly presents the “points of Faith” as coinciding with what Hobbes argues is “necessary for a Mans Reception into the Kingdom of Heaven,” namely, “Faith in Christ and Obedience to Laws.”75 Conversely, the Master also shows that many “other” Roman Catholic doctrines are, in turn, prudent, useful, reasonable, adaptive, inoffensive, pious, permissible—at least in so far as they are taught and supervised by the Church. Thus, for example, the Church commends the practice of asking for angelic prayers but does not command it (dialogue 7).76 Key paragraphs from Explanation of Catholic Belief are now incorporated into the discussion verbatim, but controversial Catholic practices are presented as objects of scrutiny. The new context is designed to check that the Church acts prudently in allowing these contested practices since (1) no general council has felt an urgent necessity to forbid them and (2) they have been in wide use among Christians everywhere since apostolic times.77 Implicitly, there are insufficient grounds to deprive Christians of these immemorial religious practices or to condemn them wholesale as pagan relics.78 Comparing Enchyridion of Faith’s dialogue 7 to Leviathan’s chapter 45 suggests that Hobbes, in effect, set up his own graven picture of God’s will instead of submitting his judgment to apostolic authority. In sharp contrast to Hobbes, the Master carefully reviews the historical record of the Christian use of holy images, its continuity with ancient Judaism, and with Trent’s careful assertion that there is no divinity in images. The Master then refers the Disciple to “S. Cl. his Treatise of Councils and Problemes” for a fuller discussion.79 The Disciple, satisfied, declares that “all reasonable persons” will accept the Master’s “wholesome doctrine.” He has, for his part, already been “convinced by the former books wherein S. Cl. largely declares the sense of the old Church.”80 What of justification and merits? If dialogue 8 defends “the merit or rewardableness” of good works chiefly by drawing on Explanation of Catholic Belief, dialogue 9, added to the 1655 edition of Enchyridion, treats more fully of grace and free will. Dialogue 9 depicts itself as prompted by

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the Disciple’s interest in recent debates over Jansenism, but Hobbes’s Treatise of Liberty and Necessity against Bramhall also stands in the immediate background. Is it, for example, a point of Catholic faith that Christ died for all men? The Master asserts that it is indeed the doctrine, but not formally the faith of Holy Church, that Christ died for all men. Holy Church teaches that Christ’s passion “prepares” all persons universally, not only the faithful but also “some others,” with a “measure of grace” that suffices to bring about salvation. A person’s “perverseness” of will, however, or other causes, may inhibit a person’s active cooperation with sufficient grace and thus prevent a happy outcome.81 The Master implicitly leaves room for a nonmetaphysical Hobbesian “freedom from compulsion” combined with Hobbesian necessity since nothing prevents “perveserness of will and other causes” to result deterministically from prior causes. The Master also emphasizes that Calvinist denial of Christ’s universal redemption is not in itself an obstacle to salvation. (A Calvinist like Thomas Barlow, for example, might find himself in the minority, but his view would not constitute grounds for excommunication.) Three degrees of sufficient grace, the Master explains, may be usefully distinguished. The “weakest” or “remotest” degree is imparted to us when “God by commanding admonisheth to do what we can.” The weakest degree of sufficient grace is thus really the respect that we feel subjectively in our conscience for God’s commandments. Presumably, respect for God’s law includes the respect that prompts us also to comply with reason’s dictates, such as reason’s dictate to seek peace and to obey our civil sovereign. Implicitly, Thomas White and Hobbes both have a stake in affirming that respect for reason is a prerequisite for rational behavior, which means that they uphold at least some degree of sufficient grace against Jansenists.82 Dialogue 9, indeed, implies that grace starts with the willingness to act rationally, as Hobbes’s political philosophy requires.83 Without having to agree over a metaphysics of volition, Hobbes and the Master agree that it is meaningful to say of a given person that he or she cooperates with reason, or obeys God’s positive law. Regardless of whether deliberate actions attest to an immaterial faculty or simply describe material events, obedience and disobedience to the natural laws of reason or to God’s laws are equally important to God’s church and to Hobbes—or so at least the Master implies.84 The Catholic doctrine of sufficient grace is thus as inde-

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pendent of Scholastic philosophy as Hobbes’s doctrine of political obligation. And it requires no more than Hobbes’s “freedom from compulsion” in order to be able to assign moral responsibility. If respect for God’s commandments suffices for us to obey them as far as we can, a second, higher degree of sufficient grace prompts us, the Master now explains, to ask for the grace to want to do “what we cannot,” which is to say to want to act “rewardably” in God’s eyes.85 Presumably, this second degree of sufficient grace coincides with Christian faith properly speaking, or at least with believing, as Hobbes would put it, that “Jesus is the Christ.” Indeed to ask for the grace to want to act rewardably in God’s eyes is equivalent to believing in Christ’s promise of heaven.86 So far, the Master and Hobbes, it seems, see eye to eye. Finally, the third and highest degree of sufficient grace is the grace to ask for the divine help that is required to perform the actions that God freely promises to reward. Technically, this third degree of sufficient grace is the grace to ask for efficacious grace. Efficacious grace itself transcends the hierarchy and is equivalent to “saving grace.” Taken in its threefold sense, sufficient grace, the Master concludes, “prepares” all human beings for salvation, which is what God’s church teaches when it affirms (Trent) that “God died not only for our sins but for the sins of the world.” For further discussion of whether or not Trent meant to define the universality of sufficient grace as a point of faith or as mere doctrine, the Master refers the Disciple to “the Systeme.”87 Let us note that the doctrine of the universality of sufficient grace fits well with the mission of God’s church here and now to prepare all believers for heaven—the only mission that Hobbes accepts.88 Moreover, the Master’s depiction of sufficient grace agrees with Hobbes in placing the “righteousness” of good works in the willingness to obey God’s commandments rather than in the works as such. In short, both Hobbes and the Master concede that there is a sense in which it is correct to say that “Faith onely justifies” while also affirming that “Faith and Obedience are both Necessary to Salvation.”89 As for efficacious grace, the Church teaches that “through the merits of Christs passion,” there is “such a measure of grace given to some” that they are very certainly converted. Implicitly, a person who receives efficacious grace not only wants to obey God’s commandments but actually obeys them, and obeys them precisely because they are God’s

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commandments. Presumably, Hobbes means to endorse the Protestant doctrine that only God’s elect are redeemed and that their obedience flows from their faith, in conformity with the requirement that “Faith onely justifies.” The Roman Church, however, insists that such supernatural conversions, however powerful, never “compel the will” or “destroy our liberty.”90 In Hobbesian terms, “freedom from compulsion” coexists with saving grace. The necessity that saving grace introduces into voluntary action does not make the action any less voluntary. In this context, the Master summarizes the outcome of the Jansenist controversy. Remaining pointedly neutral as to whether or not the offending propositions that are attributed to Jansenius were actually “culled” out of Jansenius, the Master cites Pope Innocent X’s condemnation of the Jansenist theses (1653) and Innocent’s letters to Valentine Randour affirming, against some monks under Randour’s care, that efficacious grace and free will cannot be separated in God’s saints. Catholic doctrine insists that both efficacious grace and free will coexist indivisibly in every good work.91 How this is possible, admittedly, defies human logic.92 Implicitly, the conflict between Catholics and Protestants regarding the irresistibility of God’s converting grace is really a disagreement over the difficult problem of human freedom—not over the infinity of God’s power. Since the Roman Church does not teach that efficacious grace is given universally to all, moreover, there is a basis to agree with Protestants in denying that “the merit of Christs passion” is “communicated to everyone for whom he dyed,” although the Master quickly adds that the doctrine “for ought I know is nowhere defined clearly and formally as a matter of Faith.”93 If saints fall from grace, does it mean, as some claim, that they lack saving grace? After citing various speculations, the Master stresses that Pope Celestine, for one, wisely chose to suspend judgement on the matter.94 Implicitly, the pope’s role as chief pastor includes the wisdom of siding with no human opinion and of reminding Christians that “God’s councels cannot be known and therefore are not to be searched into, except when and where he pleased to reveal them.”95 The unity of Catholic communion is sometimes best preserved by modesty and docta ignorantia. Implicitly, the more Christians learn to live with their different opinions without breach of charity, the less need there will be on the part of the Church to define new doctrines.

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THE MORAL LAW

Does the Catholic Church agree with Protestants that even the best actions of infidels are sins? After clarifying that rational acts prior to justification are not formally sins but sins only in the negative sense that they “avail not” to “eternall living,” the Master is prompted by the Disciple to clarify “how the moral law binds, and why.” Dialogue 10 starts with the relevant paragraph from Explanation of Catholic Belief, adding “the very words of the Church in the Councel of Trent, Session 6, Canon 20” as proof that “there is no hope of being admitted to our Communion for anyone who shall not acknowledge the obligation of Gods Commandments, that is the moral law.”96 The Master elaborates on the fact that honoring contracts is explicitly required in the second table and asserts that Christians have a special obligation to keep their promises. The reason that there is no “definition in the Councels touching the obligation of promises to heretiques” is that no one has ever challenged the “illimitable obligation of Gods Commandments.”97 Therefore, the Master concludes, “we utterly denie and renounce the false and scandalous position That faith is not to be kept with heretiques as most uncharitably imputed to our Practices and most unjustly pinned upon our Religion.” Among those whom the Master rebukes as uncharitable is Hobbes, who denounced Roman Catholics for disregarding the law of nature with regard to heretics.98 Mindful perhaps of Barlow’s prejudice in Hobbes’s favor on this particular matter, the Master adds Augustine’s authority to the text of Explanation of Catholic Belief, affirming that “we profess with S. Augustine that faith is to be kept even with enemies, Epistle 205.” Delighted to learn that Roman Catholics are decidedly Ciceronian in their firm commitment to keeping their promises to all men without exception, the Protestant Disciple is moved to ask whether the “obligation of the Decalogue or Moral Law” is known by unaided reason or precisely by divine revelation. Since the “whole Decalogue is so clearly conformable to the Law of Nature,” is it not “written in our hearts,” as scripture declares, “drunk in with our very Souls,” so that it “needs no revelation to shew that it obligeth?” The Master answers by distinguishing natural obligation to the moral law from supernatural obligation to the same moral law. Since the Decalogue indeed “doth flow” from the dictates of the law of nature, all human beings know by natural reason that they must obey the Decalogue.

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What is known through God’s supernatural revelation, that is, through faith, is that the punishment for disobeying the Decalogue is eternal damnation. Very much like Hobbes, the Master implies a double perspective on the moral law. Whereas the natural consequences of disobeying the natural law, namely, disorder, war, insecurity, brutality, and so on, suffice for human beings to act rationally and honor their mutual contracts and build a civil society, the supernatural consequence of disobeying the natural law, namely, eternal death, which is to say exclusion from God’s future kingdom, is known only through faith. In other words, both Sancta Clara and Hobbes agree that Christians, as such, have a reinforced stake in obeying the moral law.99 Let us point out that supererogation, which the Master carefully avoids in his discussion of good works,100 is quite unexpectedly invoked by Hobbes in Leviathan in the context of proving that obedience to the civil sovereign is commanded by the natural law on pain of eternal death.101 As Sancta Clara and Thomas Barlow would have noticed, Hobbes cites “the Fryer’s supererogatory vow of Obedience” as paradigmatic of what every citizen ought to accord the sovereign based on reason’s command to set aside private judgments for the sake of the common peace. Implicitly, the presence of “Fryers” in a Hobbesian commonwealth might provide the benefit of example. Seizing the opportunity to draw an irenic conclusion, the Disciple concludes dialogue 10 by emphasizing that we must “proceed very tenderly in our mutual conversation” lest we offend God and jeopardize our eternal happiness.

THE MASS

The Disciple’s call to mutual good treatment —Hobbes would say “modesty”—could not come at a better time. The Disciple is ready to inquire about the Mass (dialogue 11). According to Hobbes, the Catholic Mass is no better than a form of pagan magic, based on twisting the simple notion of “consecration” into conjuration and enchantment.102 The Master responds by defending the Mass in three stages. First, in dialogue 11, he defends the belief that the Mass is a sacrifice. Prefigured through sym-

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bols of bread, wine, lamb, and ox in the Old Testament, the “terrible and unbloody Sacrifice of Christ’s body” in the Mass is and always has been so universally believed by all Christians everywhere and so clearly confirmed by liturgies and general councils that no article of Christian faith is less in doubt.103 As though borrowing Hobbes’s own philological method of examining how a same word is used and reused, the Master argues that Christ’s very command at the Last Supper—facite, “do you this”—has the same meaning of setting up a sacrifice as the statement in 1 Kings 18:23, where the Vulgate reads: ego faciam bovem alterum, “I will do (sacrifice) another ox.” Indeed, the Latin verb facere, the Master points out, is used in both Kings and Luke to translate the Greek poiein.104 Moreover, it is also a point of faith that the holy sacrifice of the Mass is propitiatory for the living and the dead, meaning that Christ’s sacrifice upon the cross is represented, commemorated, and applied to us by the Mass for the remission of sins.105 “For further proof out of clear Antiquity,” the Master concludes, “I must refer Schollars to S. Cl. his book cited.”106 In connection with defending the Mass, dialogue 12 defends the doctrine of purgatory as having been always and everywhere connected to the Mass. The Master cites the fact that liturgies include the constant custom of praying for the dead, “not doubting through Gods mercy to relieve them.”107 Although the Master does not mention Hobbes, he implicitly targets the contempt that Hobbes heaps on “all the Histories of apparitions and Ghosts, alledged by the Doctors of the Roman Church, to make good their Doctrines of hell and Purgatory.”108 The Master’s point is that the pious practices of Christians facing unbearable loss should not be callously suppressed by intellectuals such as Hobbes, granted that the Church has a duty of vigilance. Beyond the bare notion that departed souls remain redeemable, nothing is defined de fide. Speculations about purgatorial fire or about motion and change in the aevum of eternity are certainly of dubious worth since, as Aristotle explains, “our knowledge of immaterial substances is as the sight of a bat which is blind in the clearest light.”109 It is perhaps more rational to suspend judgment about apparitions and ghosts pending further investigation than rashly to dismiss all such phenomena as fraudulent or as old wives’ fables.110 Saint Gregory and the Venerable Bede (as Hobbes also reports) did not question “authenticall apparitions” of immaterial souls.111 Saint Thomas Aquinas, in turn, speculated that

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such appearances are angels or produced by angels. For further discussion, the Master refers the Disciple to his De mundo, where curious phenomena connected with melancholy are documented. The Disciple, in turn, concedes the Master’s key point, namely, that Christians generally trust in the efficacy of prayers for the dead.112 Implicitly, Sancta Clara’s answer to Hobbes is that the Roman Church does not provoke, but instead helps to contain, the tide of human superstition. Rome does not invent ghosts for the sake of profit as Hobbes argues. Rather, Rome weaves the magical ideation that emerges out of human grief into a safe, shared fabric of consolation and healing. Goblins and ghosts of the pagan imagination have been tamed and transformed. The Roman Church helps the living to live with the dead and to live without them—to bear their absence and their reproaches. The Disciple welcomes the Master’s strategy: “Sir I approve your method of annexing Purgatory to the holy sacrifice of the Masse, it having such dependency upon it as to the practice of prayings for souls departed.” Moreover, the Disciple justifies the ancient Christian belief by means of an interesting analogy. Should we dimiss, he asks, the idea of a mathematical continuum simply because we do not understand how such a density of points is possible? Aristotle, when treating of the continuum, “saith that it is weakness to leave Truth for difficulty of arguments.” The Disciple’s argument resembles nothing more than Bramhall’s own argument against Hobbes, namely, that “we ought not to desert a certain truth for not being able to comprehend the certain matter of it.”113 How much more “ought this to be said for holy faith,” the Master adds, “and if observed, how much quietnesse would follow in the Church now molested by every inching pen!”114 Given human nature, it is more reasonable to allow a grieving mother to pray for the soul of her deceased child than to berate her for her credulity. The Disciple’s Bramhallian call for not deserting truth simply because it lacks adequate rational support nicely introduces dialogue 13, which tackles the offensive doctrine of transubstantiation—Hobbes’s foremost example of how the Roman Church has perverted scripture in order to turn the pious notion of consecration into pagan superstition. The Master starts by clarifying that the word “transubstantiation” is not, as such, an article of faith. Rather, as the Council of Trent explains, the word is simply

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the “most apt expression” to describe the Eucharistic conversion.115 Christians are required to believe de fide only that what was bread and wine prior to consecration is converted into the body and blood of Christ by God’s power at the words of consecration. Rather than address the question of whether this belief is tantamount to magic, the Master quickly cites Beza in support of the logical connection between affirming that Christ’s body and blood are really present in the host and concluding that the bread and wine have been substantially changed.116 In other words, the problem is really the mystery of the real presence— which the Protestant Beza does not deny, and which is indeed a point of universal Christian faith, since it has always been “the undoubted belief of all,” affirmed “by all Churches” and “expressed in all Lyturgies” since the beginning, confirmed by scripture, Church Fathers, widespread testimonies, and more.117 The Master emphasizes that even the most casual anecdotes attest that Christians have always believed unanimously in the real presence, unreflectively.118 Implicitly, the Master refutes Hobbes’s condemnation of transubstantiation by challenging Hobbes on his own turf. What does it mean to hold that “Jesus is the Christ” along with all that is “consequent thereunto,” as Hobbes advocates?119 Consecration in the nonmiraculous sense that Hobbes intends, namely, to mean that the bread and wine are set aside for God’s use as mere symbols, fails to do justice to the mystery of God’s incarnation.120 There is room for conciliation, however, since Hobbes’s notion of consecration needs only to be raised to its transcendent limit. When it is God Himself who consecrates the Passover bread and wine to His own use by giving up His own body and blood in sacrifice, the finite notion of consecration is raised to an incommensurably higher order, Trinitarian and miraculous. The Mass, in effect, fulfills all previous types of consecration, sacrifice, and commemoration. The Mass is God’s own perfect self-consecration and self-sacrifice, timelessly re-presented and efficacious. The Catholic who believes that Christ is miraculously present in the host simply believes that Jesus is the Christ “and all that is consequent thereunto”—whereas Hobbes and his fellow Calvinists, who interpret the host to be a mere symbol, a figure of “ordinary speech,” deny Christ’s divinity. Far from being absurd, fraudulent, magical, and idolatrous, the Catholic Eucharist makes manifest to believers Christ’s revelation that

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“our senses must not be our guides.”121 The fact that transubstantiation fits poorly with natural philosophy, Aristotle’s or any other’s, is hardly an obstacle to Christian belief.122 In the second half of dialogue 13, the Disciple is encouraged to recall the winning arguments that the Master had at some earlier time presented viva voce before a Protestant bishop, apparently in the Disciple’s presence. The Disciple recounts how the term “transubstantiation” was introduced gradually by Church councils for the sake of rejecting competing doctrines, such as “companation” and “simple panation” (Calvin’s view, defended by Hobbes).123 Since a “loud silence” greeted the neologism throughout the Christian world, we can be sure of its conformity to Christian faith. In contrast to other conciliary declarations, which were greeted by protest, “in Transubstantiation the whole world met.”124 The burden of proof, in short, is on those who deny the aptitude of the term.125 As for Protestants who insist that Communion in both kinds for all Christians is a point of faith—thereby unwittingly revealing their belief “in the reality of Christs body and blood in the Eucharist”—the Master says that their position is needlessly rigid. The form of Communion, as such, is simply a matter of ecclesiastic practice and may be freely adapted to circumstances (dialogue 14). Since Christ is fully given in each kind, the host fully suffices, but there is no divine commandment either in favor or against Communion in one kind. The form of Communion, however, is not indifferent, since “we all know that obedience is better than Sacrifice.” As though implicitly addressing Hobbes, the Disciple reiterates the Master’s axiom that “probable grounds” suffice for subjects to be obliged to obey a “Spirituall or politicall Authority”—as “all Commonwealths indeed must confesse.”126

HOW SACRAMENTS WORK

Dialogues 15 to 20 explore Catholic sacraments further, implicitly address ing Hobbes’s objections. Hobbes, as we know, denounces confession as part of Rome’s cunning strategy to increase its temporal power, since confession allows the Roman clergy to know beforehand what policies princes plan to pursue. Indulgences, in turn, are simply a source of wealth.127 Confession is a sacrament, the Master explains, for two reasons. First, it is a point of

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faith that God has left in his church the power of absolving sincere penitents. Second, it is at least a very probable point of faith that confession is “appointed by God as the ordinary means for our safeguard after shipwrack”—as Saint Jerome puts it. The Master focuses on the spiritual relief that is afforded by confession to the person who has no place to turn and no hope (“shipwrecked”).128 The format of confession, as such, however, is not a point of faith. For further discussion, the Master simply refers the Disciple to “S. C. his Systeme.”129 As for indulgences, they simply extend the Church’s power of absolution. The Church has a power of diminishing penances “upon our accompts,” nothing more. In particular, it is not a point of Catholic faith that indulgences are effective for the dead, as many Protestants wrongly assume.130 Does the Master, however, address Hobbes’s key objection, namely, that Roman Catholic sacraments are basically spells?131 Prompted by the Disciple to justify the large number of Catholic sacraments, the Master starts by defining a sacrament as “a sign effectively signifying, by Gods institution, invisible Grace.”132 Where God’s grace is given by God’s own divine institution and signified by God’s own appointed sign, there is a sacrament. In other words, as Hobbes correctly argues, when a building is set apart for God’s use, there is merely a consecration, no sacrament, since nothing intrinsic to the building is supernaturally changed. In contrast, baptism involves something more. Baptism is a sacrament, not just a consecration in Hobbes’s sense, because God Himself acts supernaturally to consecrate the child to Himself by communicating sufficient grace to the child to remove the most debilitating aspect of original sin.133 The Disciple, however, while satisfied that baptism, the Eucharist, and penance involve sensible signs that were indeed instituted by God, objects that the remaining four Catholic rituals are not as clearly “instituted by God.”134 The Master readily concedes that the Gospels make little mention of sacraments beyond baptism, Communion, and penance—indeed he concedes that the Gospels are remarkably “silent” with regard to confirmation and extreme unction. The best solution is furnished by what the Council of Trent “defineth” as a “great truth,” namely, that not all seven sacraments must be regarded as having equal dignity. Some sacraments (baptism, the Eucharist) “participate of the nature of Sacrament more nobly then others.”135 Marriage and holy orders, which are not indispensable for salvation, participate less in the nature of sacrament—which

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leaves conceptual room, perhaps, to equate them with consecration in Hobbes’s sense, provided that at least some infusion of supernatural grace is not positively denied. The “magical” character of Roman Catholic sacraments is further refuted in four new sections added to the 1654 edition, in which the Master clarifies the nature of Catholic priesthood. Is paedobaptism, the Disciple asks first, a point of Catholic faith (dialogue 17)? Aware, no doubt, that discord over infant baptism had wreaked havoc among New England Congregationalists, the Master eagerly cites Trent’s authority in favor of paedobaptism, based on “evident” scripture.136 The Master’s strategy is shrewd. Scripture as such is far from evident without the help of the Church’s “constant Tradition” and the record of apostles “baptizing whole families.”137 Implicitly, even the Gospel sacrament par excellence, baptism, fails to foster unity among Christians if the attempt is made to define it based on sola scriptura, divorced from “the old faith of our ancestors.”138 Since, moreover, it is a Catholic point of faith that inamissible grace (grace that cannot be lost) is conferred by God on the soul of the baptized child or person, the Church forbids rebaptizing anyone. Catholic faith thus affirms that all baptized Christians are members of God’s church and called to election. In sharp contrast, the (puritanical) Novatianists insisted on rebaptizing the fallen and wished to limit membership in their church to saints.139 As for the rituals involved, some (Saint Denis, Saint Cyprian) have affirmed that “the water must be blessed by the priest,” but the Master suspends judgment as to whether any particular ceremony associated with baptism is a matter of faith.140 Implicitly, a twofold response to Hobbes is provided. First, since the rituals of salt and oil are not points of faith but simply conventions, the Roman Church does not use them out of Levitical self-aggrandizement, as Hobbes charges, but merely out of custom. On the other hand, since baptism involves supernatural grace that is given once and for all, it is best performed by a priest, whose special sacerdotal grace serves as a warrant. But if baptismal grace is conferred to a child simply because a priest performs certain acts, then it seems that the effect is largely mechanical, which is to say magical, as charged. How far, asks the Disciple, is the priest’s intention required for a sacrament to be valid (dialogue 18)? The problem is that the Council of Trent denies that a priest can deliver a valid sacrament if he does not intend to do so, or at least does not intend to do

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“what the Church doth.”141 The idea of imposing a sincerity condition on officiating priests, the Disciple correctly recognizes, raises a dilemma. On the one hand, if the priest’s sincere intention is required for a sacrament to be valid, then no Catholic can trust in his or her salvation.142 On the other hand, if an insincere priest could deliver a valid sacrament, the effect would basically be “magic,” as Hobbes charges. The Master’s solution is to defend the view that was adopted at Trent, namely, that performing the prescribed speech acts (the prescribed sacramental gestures and words) attests to a sufficient intention of doing so and, therefore, suffices to ensure a valid sacrament.143 Thus a priest who is riddled with inner doubts or who actually disbelieves Christian tenets may nonetheless deliver a valid sacrament simply by going through the sequence of prescribed motions, since indeed these motions are deliberate and the performing of them means that he intends to perform them. The innermost thoughts of the priest need not be taken into consideration as long as they do not interfere with his deliberate performance of Church rituals. (An automaton performing the same gestures and emitting the same sounds would not deliver a valid sacrament.) The Master next raises the interesting question of whether a sacrament is valid if the gestures are performed in jest. The Church, it seems, for practical security, prefers to err on the side of affirming that exterior actions, as such, suffice for sacraments to be valid. The Church, however, does not censure doctors who urge that the condition of sincerity must include the visible seriousness with which the exterior acts are performed.144 The Master concludes by referring the Disciple to chapter 14 of “Saint Clement his Systeme.”145 Implicitly, Hobbes’s scathing dismissal of Roman Catholic sacraments as little more than spells has been transformed by the philosophical dialogue between Master and Disciple into an opportunity to investigate performatives, that is, speech acts that bring about the state of affairs that they describe.

ANGLICAN ORDINATION

If the intentional performance of exterior actions suffices for valid sacraments to be delivered, the Disciple now asks, does this not imply that the Protestant clergy and bishops of the Church of England are validly ordained (dialogue 19)?146 The Master welcomes the question, which has

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been agitated “since the beginning of the schism.” He starts by citing the recent controversy over the case of Stephen Goffe, pointing out that Goffe was in fact reordained at Paris, “as all others have been.” Why cite Goffe so prominently? Goffe had been ordained by Bishop Laud, who had himself been made bishop by (among others) Bishop George Montaigne, who, in turn, had been made bishop by (among others) Marc Antonio de Dominis, who had received episcopal ordination in the Roman Church according to the full Roman rite.147 Goffe thus believed, like Laud, that his orders complied fully with the requirement of uninterrupted apostolic succession. After Goffe had been reconciled to the Roman Church in 1651 and had completed his novitiate at the Paris Oratory, the question arose of whether, in fact, he needed to be reordained before exercising the functions of a priest. The Sorbonne examined the question and judged that he did not need to be reordained (according to one report) or (more likely) judged that the matter had to be referred to Rome, where it was decided that Goffe must be reordained, which he was, in 1654.148 The case was not only fresh in everyone’s mind in 1655, but it also brought Rome’s rejection of Anglican orders in particularly sharp focus. What exactly were the grounds of Rome’s rejection? Had the archbishop of Spalato lost the grace that had been conferred upon him to ordain priests? If so, why? Sancta Clara had multiple reasons to know Goffe’s case well. Not only had Goffe attended Merton College (1624), he had grown close to Father Philip and to Henriette-Marie by the mid-1630s, when Father Philip gave Sancta Clara personal support. Goffe, moreover, had come into bitter conflict with John Davenport in the Netherlands in the early 1630s over the issue, ironically, of ordination.149 Goffe had reported to Gilbert Sheldon in April 1635 that John Davenport’s partner in Puritan mischief, Hugh Peter, had been reordained by the godly of Amsterdam as a public show of Congregationalist rejection of Anglican ordination.150 In 1651, when the issue of Goffe’s Catholic ordination emerged, Hobbes’s fiercely anti-Catholic views in Leviathan were published and added to the controversy. Hobbes rejected the very notion of Roman Catholic priesthood as essentially satanic and utterly contrary to “the peaceable Societies of Mankind” and responsible for keeping humankind in darkness by means of a vast web of nonsense.151 By 1655, moreover, when the new improved

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Enchyridion of Faith appeared, Goffe’s embrace of “darkness” was vividly present to English readers since Birchley’s opponent, the author of Legenda lignea, had heaped special opprobrium on Goffe, “the eminent Apostat and false Brother.”152 In response, the Master starts by making three remarkably irenic points. First, the Roman Church nowhere declares that the forms of Anglican ordination are invalid or decrees that it is heresy to regard them as valid. Indeed, as “Saint Clement shewes largely” (i.e., Sancta Clara), the forms may be termed “unlawful” but not invalid. Implicitly, neither the Sorbonne doctors who defended the possible (probable) validity of Goffe’s Laudian orders nor Goffe himself, who believed that he was validly ordained, did anything wrong against Catholic faith. Second, the question of apostolic succession, as such, is a matter of empirical fact, to be established based on historical records, not a matter of faith. Third, “Saint Clement” (i.e., Sancta Clara) put it exactly right in his “paraphrase upon the six and thirtieth Article” when he concluded that “their ordination for as much as concerns their form and matter, will be valide, if there is nothing else to hinder it.”153 Having laid out these three points, the Master will now “endeavour” to show that Anglican ordinations are, in his opinion, invalid according to “the clear sense of the ancient and present universall church.”154 The key, obviously, is that there is a “hindrance.” In the ritual of Anglican ordination, the ministers “betray a want of due intention by their exterior manner.”155 Protestant bishops have very explicitly rejected the power of sacrificing, that is, of changing the elements of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Consequently, when they ordain priests, they do not intend to confer a sacerdotal power super corpus Christi verum, which is “the first and principall part of Ordination.”156 Since Protestant bishops expressly profess that the sacrifice of the Mass is “a pernicious imposture,” they most certainly do not intend to “do as the Church doth” and ordain actual priests. By denying the priestly power to offer Christ’s true blood and body by way of propitiation, Protestant “Bishops reject the constant Faith of the universall Church,” as all general councils attest, along with “all ancient Greek, Arabick and Latine liturgies, whereof the most famous Library of Oxford (our most dear Mother) giveth the learned Reader authentic

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copies.”157 Anglican ordination, in effect, fails to satisfy the condition of sincerity because Anglican bishops intend to ordain ministers instead of priests. Since they expressly intend to oppose the Church, they cannot be interpreted as intending to “do as the Church doeth.”158 And since Anglican ministers have no power over corpus Christi verum, it follows that they have no spiritual jurisdiction over corpus Christi mysticum, which means, in particular, that they cannot judge that sins are absolved in penitents.159 Implicitly, the Master emphasizes that Catholic ordination, by conferring real sacerdotal power to priests (to administer valid sacraments) and real episcopal power to bishops (to ordain priests) actually empowers priests and bishops to act as pastors in their own right, with a measure of autonomy with respect to the state, but also with respect to the pope, who is thus really only chief pastor, not “monarch,” contrary to Hobbes’s analysis.160 In detailing the dark motives behind Rome’s false doctrines, Hobbes also denounced clerical celibacy as a means for the pope to wield power over kings, since clerical celibacy prevents kings from claiming ecclesiastical authority along with temporal authority.161 Keenly aware of Protestant intransigence on the matter, the Disciple inquires, next, whether clerical celibacy is a point of Catholic faith (dialogue 20). The Master answers unequivocally that it is not. Neither scripture nor universal tradition, he says, provides sufficient grounds for the Church to determine that clerical celibacy is a point of faith. Consequently, clerical celibacy is only a point of ecclesiastic law. As such, the pope may lawfully “dispence” from it “where there is just occasion.”162 Yet clerical celibacy has long been practiced and exerts a sort of spiritual pull on Christians who are called to the priesthood. What motivates clerical celibacy, the Master suggests, is an irrepressible thirst to imitate the example of the apostles, passed down from generation to generation as an expression of respect for the apostolic calling.163 In other words, far from being a papist plot to subvert Christ’s mission and usurp temporal power, clerical celibacy manifests an intimate call to perpetuate an evangelical imitatio Christi from age to age—signifying a (supererogatory) commitment to a kingdom that is not of this world. Nothing, the Master implies against Hobbes, manifests the purely pastoral and otherworldly character of God’s church more than clerical celibacy.164

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INTERCOMMUNION AND CIVILITY

The Disciple expresses great satisfaction with the Master’s “sincerity and moderation” regarding these controverted issues and “begs leave” to raise a final question. Is it lawful for Roman Catholics to attend churches in England? The question is not a matter of faith, he concedes, but it is still “a grave question” (dialogue 21). In response, the Master explains, first, that actions, like words, take their meaning from convention and use.165 Someone who would utter the sound “panis” to mean “stone” or who would act without regard for established conventions would not be acting immorally in any absolute sense but would simply be incomprehensible to, or misunderstood by, his own linguistic/cultural community.166 Worse, someone who had the presumption to challenge ingrained customs for purely idiosyncratic reasons, would “justly be esteemed not fit for humane conversation.”167 The Master illustrates what he means with a remarkably Hobbesian example: “As for example, to teach it lawfull in a well-constituted Commonwealth to take away our neigbours goods, because at the first all things were common, or such like.”168 In other words, the Master’s premise is that words and actions take their meaning from an implicit agreement among the members of a given community to use signs, verbal or not, in publicly sanctioned ways. Members of the community agree to set aside the originary “indifferency” of utterances and gestures and to abide by customary use for the sake of public intercommunication, just as the members of a “well-constituted” commonwealth agree to renounce their originary right to all things for the sake of public peace. Once the premise is laid, the Master argues that, in the specific context of England, attending a Protestant church is generally taken as a profession of adherence. It follows that a Roman Catholic, or anyone who judges that the Protestant church is “unlawfull or schismaticall,” must refrain from attending Protestant services, since his mere presence in the congregation would be taken to signify that he is Protestant. His attending the Protestant church would be a form of deceit—“which is a sin of a most heavy nature.”169 The Master, in short, urges Catholic recusancy in England on civil rather than on theological grounds. Citizens, he implies, owe each other a certain transparency with regard to their religious identity.

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Even though Parliament has rescinded the obligation to attend church and thus taken away the legal distinction between Protestants and recusants, there is still a moral obligation to abide by the public assumption that whoever attends a Protestant church is indeed Protestant. Immensely reassured, the Disciple praises the Master’s sincerity and rejoices to learn that the Master clearly disapproves of “mentall reservations as being destructive to humane conversation.” Words and actions, as the Master so eloquently teaches, “are to be used and valued according to their common acception.”170 Strikingly absent from the Master’s response is any mention of a Roman Catholic, religious requirement of recusancy. No papal prohibition against attending Protestant services is cited. According to the Master, the question is wholly civil and wholly a matter of civil honesty.

THE PAPACY

The Master’s general rule of public sincerity comes at a timely moment since the Disciple is now ready to turn to the most vexing question of all—the question of the pope’s power. Citing Paolo Sarpi’s bitter account of the Council of Trent, the Disciple warns that Protestants are deeply prejudiced against papal power. What exactly is the faith of the Church concerning the pope’s power? In Leviathan, Hobbes had denounced the Fourth Lateran Council and Bellarmine for affirming the pope’s deposing power.171 In five dialogues, the Master puts the whole problem of the pope’s “deposing power” to rest without ever mentioning it by name. In dialogue 22, the Master gives an overview of the pope’s role as chief pastor, based on examining conciliar statements. Trent, he says, “declareth the main thing” in the matter of the pope’s power since Trent “enjoyins all Pastours” to teach “all of the things” that the Roman Church “doth ordain” and to have them be obeyed by the faithful. Pope Pius added, but only on his own prerogative, which is not binding on the faithful, that this includes “obedience to the Pope as Christs Vicar” (dialogue 21).172 The pope has a number of responsibilities. His very first office is simply to “provide Pastors for the church.”173 The pope is also responsible “for determining matrimoniall impediments and dispensations, for calling Councils to convene, for confirming Conciliar decrees and clarifying doubts, for fixing criteria

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for examining Bishops, for creating Cardinals and Bishops,” and, generally speaking, watching over “the Church’s common good.” The pope, in other words, is really less the sovereign than the chief executive of a spiritual community that is actually governed by general councils. As for the limits of the pope’s executive power with respect to civil matters, they are nicely illustrated by the case of the Tridentine decree against private dueling. In principle, when Trent outlawed private dueling with the unanimous support of civil rulers, the pope became responsible for implementing the policy, namely, by judging violations and by enforcing sentencing on papal lands and on territories that are held from the Church.174 However, since the decree against duels is not a matter of faith, the conciliar decree made no mention at all of the pope.175 Consequently, the Master says, we should not include implementing the decree against duels among the pope’s responsibilities. Implicitly, the Church in its spiritual capacity advises civil rulers to outlaw dueling and gives the policy its spiritual support, but leaves the implementation of it open to a variety of arrangements out of consideration for different civil magistrates who will judge how best to approach the matter locally. What matters, the Master says, is that the decree against dueling was adopted by Trent with the full support of lay princes and was designed to help, not hinder, temporal administration. Similarly, the Master points out that the (merely canonical) decree that was framed much earlier by the Lateran Council “absolving the vassals of temporal Lords from their fidelity” in extreme cases of contempt of Church censures for heresy was “made with the consent of Emperors, Kings, Princes, etc.” The aim of the decree was explicitly to preserve the peace of the Church and thus to cooperate with civil rulers in establishing civil peace, not to disrupt civil government.176 Happy with the Master’s temperate tone and reasonable outlook, the Disciple concedes that “so great a body as God’s church” must necessarily have a governing hierarchy and a head in order to function smoothly, like any commonwealth. The Lateran decree, he also concedes, confers no absolute “deposing power” by divine right on the rope, rather, it goes out of its way to preserve the sovereignty of civil rulers and to frame a cooperative alliance between the pope and magistrate for the sake of preserving civil peace. Moreover, the Disciple recalls, a canonical decree does not impart actual points of faith—as the Master has already emphasized.

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What, then, are Catholics required to believe concerning the pope’s power over civil magistrates? In dialogue 23, the Master calls attention to the “solemn silence” of general councils with regard to any power at all that is allegedly given to the pope over civil magistrates. Not only is there no positive power given by God or by the Church to the pope to disturb temporal rulers, but there is also a clear and explicit general point of faith that Christ’s kingdom is “not of this world.”177 The Disciple “applauds the Councels for their loud silence” since it amounts to denying the pope a deposing power. He also confirms the firm belief that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world by citing the story of Emperor Domitian, who, upon learning that Christians had no intention to take over his dominions, ordered an end to their persecution.178 In short, if the Disciple, like Thomas Barlow, was versed in Hobbes, he was fully satisfied by the Master’s answer, which is (1) that Catholics believe as a matter of faith that God’s church is a purely spiritual commonwealth and (2) that no belief in a papal deposing right is required of Catholics as a matter of salvation. Is it a point of faith, the Disciple worries, that the pope has the authority to define new points of faith? Dialogue 24 tackles the question of papal infallibility by reducing it to a pragmatic authority to frame indubitable “Cathedratical” definitions when the Church is threatened by schism and a general council cannot be convened in time. In principle, the Master explains, general councils are the ultimate recourse in judging matters of faith, but they are difficult to organize. Consequently, a measure of flexibility is needed, and the pope is given the power to solve conflicts by issuing authoritative rulings in the form of solemn decrees, encyclicals, and epistles condemning innovations.179 The basis of the pope’s special “Cathedratical” power is the natural law. The pope’s power to issue authoritative rulings stems from the rational axiom “that to whom any power is given, to him inevitably is given whatsoever is necessary for the conservation and execution of it.”180 As supreme head of the Church (by divine right), the pope is empowered (by natural right) to make supreme decisions for the sake of the common good and is entitled to be obeyed. In other words, the spiritual commonwealth that is the Church benefits from the same authoritarian structure of a “well-instituted” Hobbesian commonwealth. In particular, during intervals between general councils, the pope serves as a sort of Lord Protector. The Master specifies that “all necessary power for the preservation of the

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peace of Gods Church after the dissolution of the councel” belongs to the pope by universal acknowledgment.181 However, if a conciliar decree is not universally accepted by all Christians and meets with resistance in some local churches, the pope must organize a committee to evaluate the matter further, even call a new general council if necessary. The pope is a chief executive acting in the name of the councils and working for the benefit of the whole Church rather than an absolute sovereign simpliciter, whose will is reason enough.182 Is it not a point of faith, the Disciple objects, that the pope is above general councils? The question is all the more urgent in that different councils seem to have issued contradictory rulings on the matter (dialogue 25).183 The Master answers that the pope’s superiority to councils is by no means an article of faith. Indeed the question is not conclusively determined by the Church, “there wanting sufficient tradition and consent.” Consequently, it is permissible for Catholics to hold either opinion. No Catholic is required to believe that the pope is above councils, or vice versa, as a matter of salvation.184 As for evaluating the weight of conflicting conciliar statements, the Master refers the disciple to “S. Cl. his Systeme,” where rules are laid out to discern conciliary definitions from other propositions, along with criteria to distinguish truly universal councils from others. The rules are sufficiently important for the Master to give a brief summary. First rule: councils intend chiefly to settle heresies, not delve into uncontested issues. Second rule: conciliar proceedings must be orderly, which means that councils must not be bullied into precipitous conclusions. Third rule: conciliar decrees must be accepted by local churches everywhere, at least tacitly. Fourth rule: the whole Church, as such, must be adequately represented; bishops must be sufficiently numerous, sufficiently educated, and sufficiently close in their views to their grassroots constituents that they speak for all Christians.185 As the councils cited by the Disciple fail to past the test, their “pretended definitions” can safely be ignored. It follows that there are more open-ended questions than is generally recognized and that these may be disputed without “manifest note of error or breach of Fraternall charity”— granted that some theologians tend to argue aggressively and fiercely, while others manage to stay engaging and lighthearted.186 Implicitly, just because a theologian sounds more authoritative than his opponent does not mean that his position is de fide.

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INFALLIBILITY

Encouraged to learn that Catholics are free to debate opinions that have not been defined by true general councils to be points of faith, the Disciple now requests that the Master show him, based on universal tradition and scripture, that councils are infallible as a matter of faith. As the Master is aware, the idea “hath been very much opposed” by Protestants—by “many of ours,” the Disciple says, as though to remind the Master that he is not yet won over.187 Dialogue 26, added to the 1654 edition, is thus crucial. Presumably, the question must be addressed because, if councils are infallible and the pope is the supreme executor of infallible conciliar decrees, then the pope might as well be infallible, for all practical purposes—and who, indeed, will not “readily obey him in whatever he commands?”188 The Master answers, first, that, just as God’s existence is implicitly believed by anyone who believes God’s testimony, so the infallible veracity of God’s testimony is implicitly believed by anyone who believes Catholic articles of faith.189 The Protestant Disciple concedes that articles of faith that are based immediately on God’s revelation are infallibly true, but general councils do not limit themselves to defining only necessary articles of faith. If they also decide other doctrines, where they might err, who will (infallibly) decide what is infallible and what is not? The Master explains that there are at least four different types of necessity.190 The only infallible conciliar definitions are those that are both necessary in themselves (ex parte objecti) and necessary to the Church (ex parte Ecclesiae). In other words, under threat of schism the Church is compelled to examine a given matter carefully and to clarify what in it, if anything, is necessary for salvation.191 The Holy Ghost, moreover, assists the Church proportionally to the seriousness and necessity of the matter.192 The Disciple, invited to respond, asks: “What if I could demonstrate that a Conciliar definition is erroneous?” Since not all conciliar decrees are “equally” inerrant, maybe we could weed out the errant ones by disproving them. The Master responds, first, that such a project is unlikely to bear fruit, since (1) council members are typically well versed in logic and since (2) proving a proposition to be false in rigorously logical terms (as opposed to showing that it is merely probable) is not easy. The Disciple’s aim, however, which is simply to emphasize that it is not impossible for a

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general council to be mistaken in “inferior points,” is directed at the delicate question of obedience. The Master argues, in effect, that infallibility in all matters is not required for Church councils to command the respect and obedience of the faithful. Even if we are convinced that the Church is mistaken in some inferior decision, we must still “comport ourselves with all modesty and, as it were, knowingly erre, as to exteriours.”193 Keeping his own private judgment to himself, a Catholic is free to submit to the “great Authority” of the Church in his external behavior without requiring that all Church decisions be individually proved by logical deduction from first principles. Rather, in the same way that the practitioner of a subalternate science (e.g., optics) supposes that the principles that he adopts from a higher science (e.g., geometry) are true without requiring that they be proved, the Catholic simply trusts that the Church has derived its decisions on good grounds. “As well in unnecessaries as necessaries,” the Master concludes, “there is required in all the faithfull a submissive obedience simply to all Church definitions.”194 The Disciple, in turn, has an overarching Hobbesian insight. The supreme question facing Christians is “whether points of Faith are to be resolved upon each man’s particular judgment in the interpreting of Scriptures, or whether the last resolution is to be had from the whole Churches exposition of them most authentically declared in her Councels deduced by constant line either in terms or necessary consequence from clear Scriptures or Traditions.”195 The communitarian solution, which requires that individuals set aside their own private judgment for the sake of the peace and unity of the spiritual commonwealth, is precisely, the Disciple now “sees,” what the Church adopts as the “Basis or Systeme of Faith.”196

ROMAN VERSUS CATHOLIC

But why should the Roman Church be identified as the Catholic Church?197 The Protestant Disciple (now sounding very much indeed like Bramhall) takes “just offense” at what seems to be a blatant self-arrogation of the title of “universal.” Did Pope Gregory not protest when the patriarch of Constantinople styled himself “Ecumenical Patriarch,” implying that other

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patriarchs were not ecumenical?198 Although the Disciple makes no direct mention of Hobbes, his indignation implicitly corroborates Hobbes’s argument that the Roman Church claims universality simply because it is “no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire.”199 The Master answers by appealing to the testimony of ordinary language. Historical accounts and grassroots anecdotes show that the terms “Roman” and “Catholic” have always been “synonimized” spontaneously by a wide variety of Christians. The Roman Church has always been acknowledged as “mistress and mother in point of dignity and authority,” thus standing quite naturally for all of the churches encompassed in her communion. Consequently, the “Roman Church” as a term signifies the apostolic Church in its full universal latitude. The Master emphasizes the fact that the Council of Chalcedon, which was made up mostly of Greeks, offered the title of “universall Bishop” to Pope Leo. Regardless of whether Pope Leo accepted the title or not, the offering of it, as such, bears witness to the deep-seated belief of Christians—which is what matters most. For “further satisfaction,” the Master recommends that the Disciple browse through “a small Treatise of the Schisme of the Church of England,” where it is concluded “out of undeniable premises” that “Rome with her communicants” is alone “Catholique.”200 In others word, the Disciple’s question is really about schism and whether or not being in communion with the Church of Rome matters for salvation.201 To prove that it does, the Master makes an epistemological argument. Faith, unlike science, is characterized by obscurity. What is known to God is inevident to us. Nonetheless, the axiom is per se nota that what God himself reveals is true. It follows that truths of the Faith are absolutely certain if they rest evidently on the authority of God’s revelation. Since the Church defines the Catholic Faith based on scripture as it is interpreted by constant tradition, the Catholic Faith contains only what God has authoritatively revealed. Thus it is even more legitimate to affirm the truths of the Catholic Faith than to affirm the truths that are based on evident demonstration in natural philosophy.202 Those who object that faith is incompatible with demonstration mean only that truths of faith cannot be made self-evident through rational demonstration from first principles. Their objection does not rule out the kind of evidence that belongs to the truths of the Catholic Faith, namely, that they are evidently true because they are revealed by God

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as constantly certified by God’s church.203 “Whence it followeth,” the Master concludes, “that not to adhere to Catholick Faith in each particular upon these motives is highly culpable.”204 In short, since the authority of God’s church alone gives us reliable access to supernaturally revealed truths that guide us to heaven, and since God’s church is nothing other than the whole community of Christians taken as a timeless manifold that speaks with a single voice through true general councils, it follows that adhering to God’s church is equivalent to adhering to God’s Word. Consequently, it is irresponsible, even reckless, for Christians to split off into private sects or to seek salvation by their own private lights. The method of the Vincentian Rule requires that all Christians communicate with one another and send as wide a representation as possible to general councils of what is believed semper, ubique et ab omnibus. To break up God’s church into national churches that are subjected to a civil magistrate spiritually would be to defeat the indispensable universality of the Christian communion—or so at least the Master implies in explaining why the Catholic Church is “Roman” and why schism is selfdefeating. By the same token, the Blackloist project is implicitly destructive, not only because it weakens spiritual ties with Rome but more importantly because it does not take the Christian legitimacy of the historic Church of England into consideration.

REUNION

The Disciple asks in the last dialogue what prospects there are for reunion. How far may Catholics yield to Protestants? “How far may an accommodation be used for so great an end as repiecing our Blessed Lord’s unwoven Garment?” The Master seizes upon the Disciple’s final question to repudiate the notion of accommodation and replace it with his own more nuanced ideal of conciliation. What is the difference? The Master first cites Richard Mocket’s talk of “mutual yielding” in God and the King as what he means to replace.205 He then explains that “conciliation” is the term used by “Saint Clemence” (!) in his “Problemes” to describe the goal of reconciling (conciliare) the English articles of religion to the decrees of the Catholic Church. The key is that conciliation means to reduce (reducendos) the

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schismatic articles back to the determinations of the Church from which they were drawn, not reduce the determinations of the Church to the schismatic articles that are set up against her.206 Conciliation, in short, is asymmetric. Based on the Vincentian Rule, conciliation defends capaciousness over confessionalism. Conciliation aims at reintegrating sincere and anxious Christians into a truly universal Church that includes all Christians. According to the Master, accommodation implies a lowering of standards, resulting in a middling religion in which nobody actually believes.207 Like the notion of yielding or the idea of “compounding peace,” it connotes a legalistic arrangement, a negotiated compromise in which two opponents strike a bargain for the sake of some immediate, pragmatic advantage. Secretly, neither partner gives up his own stubborn views. Each tolerates the other, but hopes secretly for future advantage, when he might succeed in gaining the upper hand.208 In contrast, conciliation achieves a peace in which Christians set aside their private views and doubts with a clear conscience, out of love for the unity of God’s church. As the master explains, a helpful tool in achieving conciliation is the Scholastic distinction between what is faith absolutely, fides simpliciter, and what is faith under opinion, fides sub opinione. By fides sub opinione, all that is meant is what some private individuals believe to be faith, but it has not been determined to be faith by the Church, either because there has not been any urgent necessity to do so, or because it is not immediately related to salvation, or because scripture and traditions taken jointly do not provide sufficient grounds for a determination.209 Consequently, Catholics may differ from one another with regard to fides sub opinione without heresy and without breach of communion.210 The “conciliatory” advantage of the distinction is that no “indifference” is invoked. Christians may passionately believe all sorts of things to be de fide sub opinione and engage one another in debate, but they must not accuse one another of heresy in these matters, or seek to exclude their opponents from Catholic communion, or set up an alternative church, or even judge each other’s opinions.211 “Condescendency in matters of Opinion,” the Master explains, “is charitable and reasonable.”212 By “condescendency,” the Master means a shared willingness to give up one’s own claim to occupy the high ground of fides simpliciter for the sake of unity. Such self-restraint on all

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sides does not violate reason (and thus personal conscience) since the matters are inherently obscure and beyond the power of human reasoning. Rather, it promotes charity since it forestalls the temptation to cut oneself off from one’s brethren.213 Presumably, an advantage of practicing conciliation is that mutual love, rather than correct belief in obscure matters, is affirmed practically to be de fide simpliciter. As for fides simpliciter, which all Christians are bound to believe, there can be no “inflection or accommodation” since Catholic faith is “one, true, singular, perfect, inviolable, to which nothing can be added or diminished.” Conciliation, in other words, poses no threat to the infallible core of Catholic faith. Conciliation requires only that the Catholic Church be sufficiently wise to discern matters of faith from matters of opinion and sufficiently capacious to include under its universal protection all of the diverse opinions for which no Christian may claim certainty. Concretely, conciliation, the Master says, requires two steps. On the part of the schismatics, it requires that they give up their isolated sense of righteousness and take the initiative of publicly declaring their adherence to Catholic faith. 214 In the present instance, they must, for example, send letters to Catholic bishops in which they “clearly subscribe to the definitions of the Councell of Trent.”215 Presumably, this includes subscribing to Trent’s decision to leave many matters undecided, such as whether episcopacy is jure divino or not, and permitting the use of images as a pious practice. On the part of the Catholic Church, conversely, conciliation requires that the love of Catholic unity trump animosity, which means that moderation must prevail. As Pope Leo himself stressed, the Catholic Church must “show all meekness to such who return” and take the initiative to reintegrate them into Catholic communion.216 In the context of advocating obedience on the part of the faithful and moderation on the part of the Church hierarchy, the Master explicitly condemns persecution as “from the Devil,” citing Saint Gregory of Nazianzus.217 The “old Christian way,” the Master reminds the Disciple in words that recall Birchley, consisted in using “mildness” to “work upon the affections,” rather than “with violence to attempt hypocriticall conversions.” Implicitly, harshness only breeds hatred, making reunion more difficult to achieve. Conciliation, in short, emerges out of the sidelines of a dark history to become the chief policy of a depoliticized Catholic

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Church—a Church that has been liberated by the Treaty of Westphalia from wielding temporal power, and which is now free to be God’s church and pursue its spiritual mission exclusively. Is there also an impact on English Protestants? As the situation stands, the Master says, the problem is that the Protestant opponents of Catholic faith in England have generally “so misunderstood” the whole question of schism that they have moved the conflict from the intellectual sphere, where debate is possible without destroying “mutuall friendship and neighbourly tenderness to each other,” to the sphere of willful action. In other words, what should have remained a matter of opinion and debate (presumably as it was under Charles I and Henriette-Marie) has been turned into a matter of rebellion and principle—a great “battle in heaven” between Michael and the dragon, demonizing Catholics. Consequently, whereas the “proper weapons of our battles” should be ink and pen, Protestants instead have resorted to hanging and quartering, “against all Christian charity.” 218 The Master says that his own aim, which he has “learned out of S. Cl.,” is to abide by Saint Augustine’s method of “assaulting the heart with tender incisions of soft pens,” not with knives.219 The Disciple bursts into applause: “Sir, all good persons applaud your Spirit of meekness in this important business!” He promises to read the Treatise of Schism and anticipates that it will corroborate the Master’s argument that the unity of Catholic communion is essential to Catholic faith. What the Disciple now requests as the crowning gift of the Enchyridion of Faith is the account of “the great miracle” that occurred in Spain, where a limb was restored to an amputee, a young man whom Lord Ambassador Hopton saw in Madrid with his very own eyes walk on two legs. Implicitly, the whole Enchyridion of Faith culminates in God’s Word— since we know from the first dialogue that God speaks through miracles. “I will give you the History itself,” says the Master, “which is sufficient to convert the whole world.”

S I X T E E N

Religio philosophi

Sancta Clara first learned about the miracle of Calanda in France in late 1645 or in 1646 from the “noble Scot and Protestant” Sir Walter Stuart and from Sir Arthur Hopton, Charles’s ambassador to Spain. Stuart and Hopton had recently returned from Madrid, where the miracle had been publicly celebrated at the court of Philip IV in 1641.1 Sancta Clara reports that he sometimes joined Stuart and Hopton for dinner at a common table (likely in Rouen) and “seriously and repeatedly” discussed the marvelous event of Calanda with them.2 Impressed that Protestants were convinced of the veracity of the Spanish miracle, Sancta Clara became increasingly fascinated by the story. In 1652, he published a full narrative of the miracle in the original Spanish as an appendix to his treatise on natural philosophy, Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico. In the main body of the text, amidst discussions of Epicurean atoms and atmospheric phenomena, Sancta Clara inserted a chapter on the general topic of miracles. He emphasized that miracles have the advantage that they contradict Aristotelian necessitarianism and thus provide the Christian phi losopher with a special opportunity to explore new philosophical principles. In the context of the task of distinguishing miracles from mere wonders, Sancta Clara implied, new theories of nature based on chemical 453

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principles, atomism, and Van Helmont’s experiments (which Sancta Clara says he saw personally) took on a vital importance. No philosophical door into the operations of nature should be dogmatically shut.3 Philosophically, one of Sancta Clara’s chief aims in De mundo (as he later refers to it) was to warn his students against both a culpable credulity on the one hand and a rigid skepticism on the other.4 The Christian philosopher, Sancta Clara urged, has a duty to refrain from believing every old wives’ tale, but he also has a duty to keep an open mind and to recognize true miracles when they occur. How, then, does the Christian philosopher learn to discriminate between rare effects (“marvels”) and actual miracles?5 In 1652, when Sancta Clara published his De mundo, debates over miracles, atomism, and atheism were closely interlaced and fraught with anxiety. The same year, Walter Charleton published The darkness of atheism dispelled by the light of nature, in which he argued that Epicurean atomism could be reframed to comply with Christian belief by including God’s creative agency ex nihilo and God’s continued providence.6 In particular, Charleton explained that, since God is “an absolute monarch,” God “can at pleasure alter, transcend, or pervert” the statutes that he had freely created to govern material events and bring about “any extraordinary effect, which his providence hath decreed, of universal, or particular benefit.”7 Charleton refrained from claiming that new miracles had in fact occurred since the close of the apostolic age, but he insisted that new miracles could occur based on the fact that God had, in the past, “frequently manifested his Supremacy by working effects as well above as against the establish and customary power of natural Agents” and that “the fountain of his energy” had not “dryed up.”8 Charleton aimed to show that atomism, once it was corrected to replace random motion with God’s laws, did not in itself preclude divine miracles, past, present, or future. Thus, whereas Hobbes’s Leviathan warned that claims of recent miracles were part and parcel of a Roman Catholic plot to keep the human mind in darkness, Charleton’s Darkness of atheism dispelled warned instead that new mechanistic theories of matter (such as Hobbes espoused) had to pass the test of allowing for the possibility of miracles. Mindful perhaps of the complexity of the English debate both philosophically and theologically, Sancta Clara chose to reveal on the cover page of his De mundo that he had studied at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where Hobbes and Charleton had both studied.

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Another philosopher who was attracted to Epicurean atomism in the early 1650s but who was equally wary of atheism was Robert Boyle.9 Boyle was convinced that the chief reason to embrace the Christian religion was “the Truth of the Miracles of Christ, & his Apostles.”10 He argued that Epicureans and materialists who balk at the idea of “the Life of the Soul separate from the Body betwixt the days of death and Judgment” (e.g., Hobbes) are best answered, not by rational proofs, but by the evidence of Christ’s miracles. Philosophical attempts to deny spiritual agents and divine miracles were misguided. According to Boyle, “Pomponazzo” [sic] was “justly question’d by the Inquisition for denying the Immortality of the Soul.”11 In his De mundo, coincidentally, Sancta Clara explicitly refutes Pomponazzi while speaking favorably of Epicurean atomism and citing Epicurus on everything from clouds to comets.12 Like Charleton, Sancta Clara argued that Epicurean atomism could be reframed to accommodate God’s miracles safely. He then went on to supply examples of recent miracles, including the case of John Trelille at St. Maddern’s well in Cornwall in 1640, which had been brought to the attention of Charles I and his loyalists at Oxford.13 But the greatest example by far of divine intervention was the case of Miguel Juan Pellicero. In 1654 and again in 1655, Sancta Clara published an English translation of the miraculous story of Calanda as an appendix to Enchyridion of Faith, along with the names of the official examiners and the signatures certifying its authenticity. At the end of the main text, the Disciple, as we saw, carefully documents the circumstances through which the narrative of the miracle was handed down to the Master from eyewitnesses: “I desire to see the History of it Authenticated with the subscription of the Examinours, who presented it to the King of Spain, when my Lord Embassadour Hopton was there, and as you told me, he saw the young man in the court: All which he witnessed before very many of our Nobility and gentry, as a thing not to be questioned.”14 Hopton, it seems, was personally present at court in Madrid in late 1641 when Philip IV publicly knelt down before the poor peasant of Calanda and kissed the youth’s miraculously restored leg.15 In order to disseminate the story as faithfully as possible, Sancta Clara relied on the Spanish account that had been written by the Dominican friar and historian Tomás Tamayo de Vargas immediately after the event in 1640 and inserted into the 1641 edition of the sixteenth-century Dominican

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Alonso Venero’s Enchiridion o Manual de los tiempos.16 Not only was the central claim astonishing—an amputated limb had been restored—but every detail had been scrupulously checked by an official investigation.17 The fact that the miracle of Calanda had happened within recent memory and had been so carefully documented raised a special challenge for Anglicans and other Protestants. As we saw with Charleton and Boyle, Protestants never denied miracles tout court. What most Protestants denied was that new miracles had occurred, or could occur, or would have any reason to occur, after the close of the apostolic age.18 As a prominent case in point, Hobbes reaffirmed the Protestant doctrine in Leviathan in 1651, insisting that the age of miracles, as such, was closed—sealed once and for all by the historical advent of Christ’s gospel. God had no further reason to perform miracles, Hobbes explained, since Christian scripture fully sufficed for Christians to know their duty to God and man.19 Were all English Protestants equally convinced? Boyle, who moved to Oxford in 1656 and developed close ties with both Thomas Willis and Thomas Barlow, apparently hesitated to be as dogmatic about it as Hobbes. Writing to Hobbes’s friend Henry Stubbe a decade later, Boyle would point out that he (Boyle) had never met with “any cogent proof that miracles were to cease with the age of the apostles.”20 As early as the 1650s, Boyle showed a deep interest in miracles—and grew increasingly eager to invoke divine interventions as empirical facts against atheists and to distinguish divine miracles from diabolical deception.21 The case of Anne Green at Oxford in December 1650 had perhaps brought the problem to the fore. Accused of infanticide, the hapless servant Green had been hanged at the gallows and her body transported to Dr. Clerke’s anatomy room for dissection, where she unexpectedly regained consciousness and revived. Green’s resuscitation was explicitly described as “miraculous” by Richard Watkins in Newes from the dead, or, A true and exact narration of the miraculous deliverance of Anne Greene (1651). Forty-one poets, including Christopher Wren and a young Anthony Wood, had been inspired to celebrate Greene’s marvelous revival in verse.22 One of the poets was Joseph Williamson, a future secretary of state, who interpreted Greene’s resuscitation as a clear refutation of the Protestant denial of postscriptural miracles and as a divine call to return to God’s Catholic Church.23 At the very least, the Oxford physicians who

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were set to dissect Anne’s body but instead nursed her back to health, William Petty, Thomas Willis, Ralph Bathurst, and Henry Clerke, were confronted with a curious event that brought them much public attention.24 The problem for Presbyterians and Anglicans was that charismatic sectarians were avid for divine “signs.” Someone by the name of Burdet also published an account of Green’s story in 1651, calling her case A Wonder of Wonders and emphasizing the supernatural character of her cure. According to Burdet, Green had acted in a distinctly “godly” manner at the scaffold. She had publicly forgiven her enemies and entrusted her soul to “sweet Jesus.” Burdet was convinced that Green had been brought back from the dead. He affirmed that she was fully deceased when she was placed in the surgeon’s coffin for transportation and when she was laid out on the dissection table at Dr. Clerke’s house. She then “suddenly” began to breathe. Fourteen hours later, she spoke. She urged the doctors to “behold God’s Providence” and she pointed out that no such “remarkable deliverance” had happened in 300 years, “since the ceasing of Miracles.” She herself then interpreted the meaning of God’s mercy to her. God meant to show his displeasure with English justice and to bring about its reform. By intervening to restore her life, God called for corrupt juries in England to be stopped. When Anne’s enemies sought to have her hanged all over again, her protectors, apparently soldiers in the New Model Army, objected that “God’s great hand” had intervened to save her. They insisted that no further punishment be inflicted on her.25 Thus, although miracles, as such, could not be admitted, “miraculous deliverances” on God’s part could not be ignored. To probe the context more deeply, let us add that William Petty and Ralph Bathurst, who collaborated in nursing Green back to life, were both admirers of Hobbes.26 With the publication of Leviathan a few months later, they became explicitly aware that Hobbes rejected “fictitious Miracles” and that he characterized them as a strategy on the part of the Roman Church to increase its power by exploiting human ignorance and credu lity.27 Thomas Willis, in turn, who was a close friend of Boyle, actively supported royalist and Anglican resistance at Oxford.28 Although no explicit mention of Green’s case is made, it is not impossible that it was one of the factors prompting Sancta Clara to discuss miracles in his De mundo of 1652. As though alluding implicitly to Green’s case, Sancta

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Clara denied that a valid claim of miraculous resuscitation can be made unless the corpse produces a detectable stench.29 If the corpse does not smell, Sancta Clara explained, mere apoplexy, or catatonic depression, cannot be ruled out.30 Two further features suggest that Sancta Clara was mindful of the Oxford context when discussing miracles in De mundo. First, atheists are an explicit target. Miracles, Sancta Clara argued, powerfully refute natural philosophers who encourage atheism by embracing Aristotle’s cosmic determinism or Pomponazzi’s reductive naturalism. Second, in citing miraculous cures such as the recent case of John Trelille in England or the case of the crippled Hans Clements, who was cured in Flanders in 1604, Sancta Clara made a point of emphasizing that “numerous” English Protestants had witnessed the cures and confirmed their miraculous character. 31 In particular, Sancta Clara reported that “our most noble compatriot D. Sheldon” was living for a period of time in Dinant where he had a chance to examine the scars of a young man who had been miraculously healed of the effects of torture in 1630 through the intercession of Our Lady of Faith.32 What member of the Sheldon family this was—whether it was the Roman Catholic Edward Sheldon or his son Ralph, who traveled together with their families to the Continent in 1625 and who in 1652 were back in England struggling to survive in the face of penalties, or whether it was a Protestant relative of the Church of England Gilbert Sheldon, who in 1652 was struggling to keep the outlawed Anglican communion afloat and corresponding with Roger Payne over Hobbes’s anticlericalism, is not specified.33 Sancta Clara’s point was that reliable witnesses could be produced and that Protestants were well aware of recent miracles through firsthand accounts. In both the 1654 and 1655 editions of Enchyridion of Faith, Sancta Clara limited himself to spreading the story of the miracle of Calanda in English translation.34 Apparently confident that the bare facts of such a great miracle would “convert the whole world” at God’s own chosen pace, Sancta Clara turned to adjunct tasks. In 1658, he published a handbook for Franciscan missionaries, Manuale missionariorum. Written over a number of years, the Manuale was approved by George Perrot in London as early as June 1656, and by the theologians Charles Bertrand of Ypres and Martin Denys of Douay in the spring of 1658.35 The goal of Manuale missionario-

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rum was to help Franciscan missionaries avoid unnecessary scruples. Sancta Clara stressed, for example, that religious vows are made against deliberate actions, not against inner (involuntary) feelings. A Franciscan is vowed to celibacy, not to impassibility. Chaste celibacy is, of course, required of Franciscan friars as it is of all unmarried Christians—but Franciscan friars vow supererogatorily never to marry, not to be free of all human feelings of lust.36 The comfort of conjugal life is what is renounced in advance, for the sake of a higher angelic love—a view that is not terribly different in essence from Boyle’s call for celibacy in Seraphyck Love (1659). A second noteworthy aspect of Manuale missionariorum is that it includes a chapter-length discussion of Juan Caramuel, refuting some of Caramuel’s “lax” views regarding religious poverty but without condemning them.37 Far from fostering superstitious and morally blind friars, Sancta Clara’s humanistic Franciscanism called for open-mindedness and stood at the vanguard of responsible moral reasoning. In 1654, Bramhall had expressed the view that reformed monastic orders in which blind obedience was replaced with enlightened moral conscience would be compatible with Church of England doctrine.38 In June 1670, William Rogers of Lincoln’s Inn donated a copy of Sancta Clara’s Manuale missionariorum to University College, Oxford.39 In 1659, as part of the effort to defend the civil rights of Roman Catholics, Sancta Clara anonymously published a short monograph entitled A Clear Vindication of Roman Catholics from a foul aspersion. Sancta Clara’s authorship is attested by Anthony Wood, who recorded on the copy at the Bodleian Library that it was written by his “good friend, Francis a Sancta Clara or Father Davenport.”40 The seven-page Clear Vindication was prompted by a specific threat. Roman Catholics were accused, most especially by William Prynne and by Richard Baxter, of infiltrating Independents and Quakers for the purpose of destabilizing England’s religious settlement. Part of the charge was that Catholics had received a special papal dispensation to lie about their religion.41 Calling on God as his witness, Sancta Clara denied that the pope has any power to grant a dispensation to “dissemble” for political ends.42 Since a very similar piece, attributed to the Irish Franciscan Redmond Caron, was published on May 11 the following year (1660), it seems that Sancta Clara was again at the heart of a collective effort.43

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When did Sancta Clara return to the miracle of Calanda? By 1659, when A Clear Vindication of Roman Catholics appeared, the Protectorate had given way to a precarious Parliamentarian rule. Pamphlets called for the return of the king. Plans for a peace with Spain were afloat, and Edward Hyde’s correspondent, the Jesuit Peter Talbot, was in London negotiating secretly on Spain’s behalf.44 In November, Henriette-Marie sent Henry Jermyn and Wat Montagu to negotiate support for a Stuart restoration from Mazarin at Dax.45 By November 25, Montagu could write to Mazarin from Bordeaux that Charles II was resolved to follow Mazarin’s advice exactly and in the utmost secrecy. Montagu also informed Mazarin that Charles had initiated negotiations with Monck.46 In this unsettled but promising context, Sancta Clara published The Result of a Dialogue concerning the middle-state of souls, based on live debates with Thomas White about purgatory. At the time, White was accused of heresy by Jesuit opponents and was eager to defend his right to speculate about theological matters that were undefined by councils.47 The theological issue was complicated by the fact that Parliament’s oath of abjuration, enacted in 1643 but reissued by Cromwell in 1656, required suspected Roman Catholics to deny purgatory. Was Blacklo’s philosophical refutation of the efficacy of prayers for souls in purgatory politically suspect? Sancta Clara aimed at keeping the discussion friendly and hoped to refute White’s opinion on White’s own philosophical grounds. In a published response, White called Sancta Clara “his much esteemed Friend,” praised him for his mastery of “Divinity,” and thanked him for his “civility.” 48 By the time Sancta Clara gave a copy of his Result of a Dialogue on purgatory to Barlow on October 12, 1660, the Commonwealth had collapsed. The monarchy had been restored; Oxford was giddy with fresh hope.49 When he conversed with Barlow at Oxford in October 1660, Sancta Clara perhaps learned that Boyle had recently urged Barlow to write a monograph on religious toleration. When Barlow eventually complied with Boyle’s request, he adopted a stern attitude towards papists but carefully distinguished between law-abiding Catholics, “as I know some are,” and treasonous Jesuits, whose commitment to the papal deposing power was incompatible with public safety.50 Sancta Clara’s Result of a Dialogue touches indirectly on the problem of miracles. Dedicated to Henry Arundell of Wardour, who would be restored to his title and estates in December 1660, Sancta Clara criticizes

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White’s philosophical argument that souls in purgatory cannot benefit from prayers since there is no succession of time in purgatory and since souls are indivisible entities. On the contrary, Sancta Clara replies, what is impossible naturally, is supernaturally possible to God.51 Every soul that is “eased” by God’s mercy in purgatory is, in effect, “miraculously” eased. Far from proving that prayers for souls in purgatory are futile, White’s arguments prove that souls in purgatory are changed and redeemed only by divine intervention. God alone has the infinite power that is required for the instantaneous mutation of indivisible entities. To restrict God’s power to what is possible by created means is to deny God’s providence. Perhaps alerted by Sancta Clara’s gift and alarmed by its implication, Barlow would go out of his way the following year (1661) to condemn purgatory as “idolatrous.”52 White, in turn, replied by engaging Sancta Clara in discussions of paradoxes related to time and “aeviternity.”53 A last element of context must be cited before we turn to Sancta Clara’s monograph on miracles. In 1659, a work was published in England on the Holy Life of Philip Nerius in which a long passage from Sancta Clara’s chapter on miracles in De mundo is cited, with explicit reference and page number.54 What is cited, in English translation, is Sancta Clara’s account of Trelille’s miraculous cure.55 Joseph Hall’s account of the same miracle in The Invisible World (1659) is also cited in full, immediately following Sancta Clara’s text, as though confirming Sancta Clara’s account independently.56 The compilation of texts that make up A Holy Life of Philip Nerius also includes a translation from Augustine, De civitate Dei, 22.8, where Augustine discusses miracles and affirms the veracity of postapostolic-age miracles. Last but not least, the book contains a very detailed account of recent miracles at Port-Royal, starting with the miraculous cure of Pascal’s niece in 1656. Translated from the French, this last text opens with the statement that “of all outward things there is nothing that so much awakens our faith, and strengthens our hope, as Miracles; which render visible to us (as it were) the invisible presence of God.”57 Sancta Clara’s account of Trelille follows the account of the French miracles, implying perhaps the hope that Catholic shrines in England, like Port-Royal in France, might be destined to receive divine favors. Who compiled these texts and integrated them into a single book with continuous pagination? Whoever it was admired Philip Neri, had access to a copy of Sancta Clara’s De mundo, and was keenly interested in

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defending postapostolic-age miracles. Whoever it was also felt strongly that the best authority to invoke in defense of postapostolic-age miracles was Augustine, and that an English version of Augustine’s De civitate Dei, 22.8, was urgently needed—precisely the text that Sancta Clara recommends to his students in De mundo.58 So far, Abraham Woodhead, living in London in the 1650s, fits the description. We know from a letter written by Woodhead to Dr. Wilby in February 1652 that Philip Neri’s miracles played a key role in Woodhead’s conversion to Roman Catholicism.59 William Rogers, in turn, will list “Nerius” among Woodhead’s publications.60 Another possibility is that the Roman Catholic Ralph Sheldon, who in 1656 was living in Holywell outside of Oxford and who died in London in 1658– 59, took the initiative of collating Woodhead’s “Nerius” with other texts in order to constitute a dossier in defense of miracles, which was then published by his son Edward in honor of his father. As for the detailed Port-Royal account, a possible source is Wat Montagu, whom Sancta Clara cites as his own source for the details of an earlier French miracle in De mundo.61 The French text itself might have been written by Ludovic Stuart d’Aubigny, who had been educated at Port-Royal des Champs. Montagu had good reason to help document the miracles of Port-Royal since Henriette-Marie had personally gone to Port-Royal to revere the relic of the Holy Thorn in August 1656.62 The sister of one of Henriette-Marie’s attendants, moreover, Margaret Carré de Mercay, who was a Franciscan nun at Vernon in Normandy where Sancta Clara had visited a decade earlier, had also been miraculously cured by the Holy Thorn relic at Port-Royal.63 Was Sancta Clara involved in some way in this compilation? In the letter of February 1652 cited above, Woodhead voiced his dislike of Cressy’s “strange violence” against Luther and Calvin, implying that he preferred Sancta Clara’s irenic approach. To connect Woodhead to Sancta Clara in 1659 would seem gratuitous except for the fact that Sancta Clara likely knew the recusant Sheldons who had ties with Woodhead’s University College at Oxford and for the fact that Woodhead’s young admirer, William Rogers, would later introduce Anthony Wood to Sancta Clara, in August 1669.64 In 1656, moreover, some sort of Franciscan-sponsored school where Anthony Le Grand had been appointed to teach philosophy had taken root in or near London. In 1657, Adam Batten had been ap-

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pointed to join him.65 If Le Grand and Adam Batten used Sancta Clara’s De mundo to instruct their London students, as very likely they did, the question of miracles would have been at the forefront of their teaching, and Sancta Clara’s account of Trelille’s miraculous cure would have been readily available to Catholics in the London area like Woodhead. In the event, it seems that a group of Roman Catholics in London and Oxford had become intensely interested in miracles. In 1659, as our compilator was keen to emphasize, Joseph Hall’s own endorsement of Trelille’s miraculous recovery at St. Maddern’s well was published posthumously in Hall’s The invisible world discovered to spirituall eyes. Hall cast doubt on Roman Catholic reports of divine interventions, but he saw no reason to reject the invisible ministry of angels — “insensible helps from them in such manner, as that by the effects, we can boldly say, here hath been an Angel though we saw him not.” In Hall’s view, Trelille had undeniably benefited from angelic help: “Such was that (no less then miraculous) cure, which at S. Madernes in Cornwall, was wrought upon a poor Cripple, whereof (besides the attestation of many hundreds of the neighbours) I took a strict and personal examination.”66 To Hall, Trelille’s miraculous cure was simply a matter of fact. What did it imply? The “invisible assistance of good angels in restoring Human health and in preserving us against bodily harm,” Hall argues, warrants that we “pray to God the favor of their assistance and protection.”67 Angels protect us most especially from spiritual harm, from temptation and sin, so that we must strive to avoid displeasing them.68 As for the saints in heaven, Hall says, we have no reason to deny that they might dwell close to their friends on earth invisibly after their bodily death—“as Saint Teresa of Avila told her Carmelite confessor that she would most certainly do.”69 Like his close friend the physician Thomas Browne, author of Religio medici (1643), who attended Hall on his deathbed in 1656, Hall also believed firmly in the invisible activity of bad angels, demons, and witches. To deny that evil spirits “cloath themselves with the appearances of visible shapes, not of meaner creatures only, but of men, both living and dead” was simply to deny well-authenticated matters of fact.70 Strictly speaking, however, Hall did not depart from Protestant doctrine regarding divine miracles since he attributed Trelille’s cure to angels, not to God. The problem, obviously, was how to distinguish between the effects wrought by

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good spirits and bad spirits—especially since evil spirits, Hall warned, may assume the appearance “even of the good Angels themselves.”71 The many undeniably “preter-naturall” cures operated by charms and talismans are “diabolicall,” Hall insisted, and must be rejected, no matter how effective physically.72 “Let me be sick,” Hall prays, “rather then receive help from such hands!” After the Restoration, Sancta Clara once again focused on the project of bringing his favorite “miraculous history” to public attention. He first published a Latin version of Enchyridion of Faith in 1661, dedicating it, as we saw, to the entire theology faculty of the University of Douay. Duly appended to Liber dialogorum seu summa veteris theologiae was a Latin translation of the story of the miracle of Calanda, eliciting much enthusiasm from Sancta Clara’s approbatores, especially from Pierre Marchant. The miracle seems to have strengthened Sancta Clara’s confidence in his own irenic approach to religious dialogue. With new fervor, he urged his Franciscan brethren to eschew all harshness and “ensnare souls through love.” Liber dialogorum was also approved on November 15, 1660, by Angel Mason “in London, in our residence.”73 At the Franciscan intermediate chapter that was held in Valladolid in June 1661, the English Franciscan province consolidated its success by requesting, and obtaining, the right to confer doctorate degrees in divinity to its own members.74 The right was promptly exercised in London on behalf of both Sancta Clara and Angel Mason, who were made Sacrae theologiae doctores by the English Franciscan intermediate chapter.75 When the validity of the chapter was challenged by an official Roman visitor, Henriette-Marie and her chaplains, Philip Thomas Howard, Wat Montagu, and Ludovic Stuart d’Aubigny, flew to the English friars’ defense.76 Sancta Clara was now in an exceptionally good position to expand chapter 4 of his De mundo into an independent treatise devoted to miracles and to the miracle of Calanda in particular. He gave it the title Religio philosophi peripati discutienda, perhaps in tribute to Thomas Browne’s popular Religio medici, which had inspired numerous responses and had been republished in London in 1659 with Kenelm Digby’s commentary of 1643.77 For our purposes, it is helpful to recall three chief criticisms that were leveled by Digby at Religio medici. First, Digby warned against pitting natural philosophy against biblical miracles. As a case in point, he re-

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jected Browne’s attempt to explain “the miracle of the Brazen Serpent” naturalistically by arguing that “that Image worked by Sympathy, and was but an Aegyptian trick to cure their diseases without a miracle.”78 The problem, Digby explained, was that Browne meant to use natural philoso phy against the notion of miracle, rather than use natural philosophy to discern miracles more accurately. Second, voicing his own personal skepticism regarding the existence of witches, Digby rejected Browne’s assumption that denying witches implies atheism.79 Third, Digby questioned Browne’s assertion of a “Universal Spirit” (or World-Soul) as a “wilde Fancy” prompted by a misinterpretation of “Hermetical Philosophers” and a wrong-headed impulse to reify a merely nominal concept.80 Sancta Clara will address all three issues. Sancta Clara’s Religio philosophi was approved on February 10, 1662, by Angel Mason “in London, in our residence,” and a few weeks later in Nieuport by Lawrence à Sancto Edmundo. It was also approved in Douay by the theologian and chancellor of the university, Matthias Gertman. When Religio philosophi appeared in print, the author was described, surprisingly, as “Pater Frater Franciscus Davenportus, vulgò A S. Clara.” Not only was Sancta Clara’s original surname given openly as his chief name, he was also described as “theologian” to Queen Catherine of Great Britain: “Magnae Britanniae Reginae Catharinae Theologus.”81 How, why, and when was Sancta Clara appointed “theologian” to Catherine of Braganza? The new queen arrived in England from Portugal in May 1662. Kenelm Digby, Henriette-Marie’s chancellor, might have sponsored Sancta Clara for the appointment, which would explain Sancta Clara’s explicit praise in Religio philosophi of the newly formed Royal Society. Alternatively, HenrietteMarie’s grand almoner, Philip Thomas Howard, might have sponsored him, since Religio philosophi is dedicated to Thomas Howard’s brother, Henry Howard, future Duke of Norfolk. On the other hand, Henry How ard’s wife, Anne Somerset, daughter of Edward Somerset, is cited by name in Religio philosophi as a tertiary Franciscan and as a saintly soul, suggesting a more complex web of ties and a desire to mend bridges among English Roman Catholics divided by the French– Spanish war.82 The subtitle of Religio philosophi declares that the work plans to present “the great miracle that Christ brought about in Calanda” by examining it in the light of Aristotle’s principles.83 In a preface to the “learned

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Christian reader,” Sancta Clara explains that the book has ripened through time. Over the years, Sancta Clara says, various “gleanings of religion” published in English by physicians and lawyers (presumably including Browne’s Religio medici and John Botrie’s Religio jurisconsulti) inspired him to want to subsume some aspects of natural philosophy into the structure of Christian religion by “using Aristotle’s own weapons against him.” Now, at last, he has a perfect opportunity to finalize his long-overdue project and go public. Why? Having learned about the great miracle of Calanda from the Protestants Walter Stuart and Arthur Hopton during England’s “troubles,” he has been urged by friends to formulate his opinion “not about the fact of the matter, which no one denied, but about its miraculous essence.” The miracle of Calanda, in short, is a pretext for Sancta Clara to show that Christian truths have a fertile role to play in the dismantling of Aristotelian natural philosophy and in the elaboration of post-Aristotelian science. What Sancta Clara will do in Religio philosophi, he says, is rely on the philosophical principles that he “abundantly absorbed” when he was a youth at Oxford, “our shared Alma Mater,” and on which he had continued to reflect as he grew more mature. He had even sketched a first draft of the project of improving Aristotle’s natural philosophy by “using his own weapons against him,” and he had shown the draft for criticism to the great Robert Fludd (sometime before 1637, year of Fludd’s death). Sancta Clara concludes the preface by saying that he is now finally in a position to offer the result of his long years of reflection to all Christian philosophers.84 The aim of Religio philosophi is to grasp the essence and meaning of miracles by examining the possibility of miracles rationally. In more than one respect, Sancta Clara’s “Aristotelian” discussion of the miracle of Calanda overlaps with Edward Stillingfleet’s discussion of miracles in A rational account of the grounds of Christian faith, also published in 1662, then revised and augmented in a new edition of 1663. Stillingfleet’s treatise defends the miracles of scripture as undeniable empirical facts and argues that they initially provided a soundly rational basis for the first Christians to believe in the divine nature of Christ’s doctrine. What he rejects, in the name of these same undeniable miracles, is the possibility of ulterior miracles, which would imply, he says, that Christ had delivered an incom-

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plete doctrine. Sancta Clara will certainly agree with Stillingfleet that “God, who never doth anything but for very great purposes, will never alter the course of nature merely for satisfaction of mans vain curiosities.”85 Unlike Stillingfleet, however, Sancta Clara will show that there is no need to fear demonic deception or a challenge to scripture if God performs new miracles today and in the future. We must now review the details of the miracle of Calanda, as narrated in Sancta Clara’s Spanish, English, and Latin accounts. In 1637, a poor Spanish youth, Miguel Pellicero, left his parents’ hometown of Calanda to go work on an uncle’s farm. There, Miguel suffered an accident in which his right leg was crushed by a cart wheel. Miguel was brought to the hospital of Valencia, where remedies were applied without avail. Because of a personal devotion to the Virgin of the Pillar, Miguel asked to be taken to Saragossa. In Saragossa, he was admitted to the general hospital, where surgeons judged that his injured leg was too full of gangrene to be saved. They gave Miguel spirits to drink, amputated his right leg four inches below the knee, cauterized the wound, and buried the severed tibia in a designated place in the cemetery. Miguel was then fitted with a wooden peg and given crutches. He spent his days in the church of the Virgin del Pilar, most especially in the chapel of Hope, where he begged for alms. Once a day, on his own initiative, he took some oil from the Virgin’s lamps to rub his stump, imploring the Virgin’s aid. Miguel continued to see the surgeon who had performed the amputation and complained of pain. The surgeon warned Miguel that the daily oil rub might interfere with healing but did not forbid the pious practice because of the spiritual comfort that it gave him. After living as a beggar for two years in Saragossa, Miguel decided to go home to see his aging parents, who had had no news of him. His journey to Calanda was long and difficult. In Calanda, his parents rejoiced at his return and gave him a burro (donkey) so that he could go to neighboring towns to collect alms. On the night of Thursday, March 29, 1640, feeling more pain than usual, Miguel took off the wooden peg from his stump in the presence of his parents and of two neighbors. He asked to retire for the night. Calling on the Virgin’s protection and watched over by his mother’s tears as he dragged himself across the floor, Miguel went to go lie down on a bedding that had been set up for him on the floor because his

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usual bed was occupied that night by a billeted soldier. In the middle of the night, Miguel’s mother decided to check on him. Seeing two legs stick out from under the cover, she thought that a second soldier had taken up residence in the house and called her husband. The two parents lifted the cover and discovered that their son’s leg had been restored. They woke him. The air was full of the perfume of roses. Pulled out of his sleep, Miguel reported that he had been transported in dream to the chapel of the Virgin of the Pillar. The next day, friends and neighbors rushed to see Miguel’s leg. An official account was taken down in writing. Within a month, Miguel was sent to Saragossa, where a formal inquiry into the event was organized by the bishop. After witnesses were questioned and details of the story were checked, the commission ruled that Miguel’s leg had been miraculously restored through the intercession of the Virgin of the Pillar. The official narrative concludes by emphasizing that the miracle occurred providentially within the time that the surgeons who cut off Miguel’s limb and the many witnesses who could vouch for Miguel’s identity were still alive. Implicitly, God wrought a miracle that could not quickly be dismissed.86 Conscientious as he was about credulity, Sancta Clara was convinced that the miracle of Calanda sufficed, as such, to “convert the whole world.”87 In contrast, Stillingfleet would remain thoroughly unimpressed. “Think not,” he writes in A rational account of the grounds of Protestant Religion (1665), “that we are of such easy faith, that the pretended growing out of a leg in Spain . . . will perswade us to believe your church infallible. It is always believed, your miracles are most talked on where people are most ignorant, and therefore most apt to be deceived.”88 According to Stillingfleet, since Christian doctrine is now safely recorded in scripture, recent events claiming to be miracles can only be fraudulent or satanic.89 How does Religio philosophi proceed? Sancta Clara’s stated purpose is to satisfy friends who “consulted him as to his judgment, regarding, not the veracity of the replantation, which cannot be denied, but regarding its miraculous essence.”90 Adopting the approach sketched earlier in De mundo, Sancta Clara’s Religio philosophi is organized into two disputationes. The first disputatio asks whether miracles are admissible according to the philosopher (Aristotle), and whether natural processes alone could have sufficed to restore Miguel’s leg.91 The second disputatio, in turn, asks

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about the aim of miracles and about the Antichrist’s false miracles.92 Taken together, the two disputationes encompass the problem of miracles as both a philosophical challenge and a theological question. The key to Sancta Clara’s strategy in disputatio prima is that the discussion is narrowly focused on the case of Miguel’s restored limb. The best way to investigate miracles, Sancta Clara implies, is not to list a myriad cases of fraud, which tell us only that miracles are rare, but to examine a single credible case on its merits. Sancta Clara starts with a preliminary investigation into Aristotle’s Prime Mover. On the one hand, Aristotle correctly argues that “there must be a first term in any essentially ordered sequence” and concludes that there is a first cause. On the other hand, it is not easy to make room for the possibility of miracles within Aristotle’s framework because Aristotle does not seem to attribute omnipotence to the first cause independently of the whole scale of secondary causes. Christian philosophers, however, mainly Scotus and followers of Aquinas, have boldly refuted Aristotle’s limited theory of a prime mover by affirming that God, the first being, transcends the universe radically and is necessarily of infinite intensity of power.93 God is thus fully capable, either by immediate action or by means of secondary causes, of bringing about anything at all that is not inherently self-contradictory. Sancta Clara implies that if Aristotle had enjoyed the benefit of revelation, Aristotle would have been the first to concede that the first cause, God, is limited in his causal agency only by logical incoherence.94 What Sancta Clara means is that Christian philosophy does not contradict Aristotelian philosophy so much as use Aristotelian weapons to expand its scope by adding two ideal endpoints to the Peripatetic framework, namely, zero (nihil) and actual infinity (God). In contrast, Thomas Browne in Religio medici proferred a vague theory of God’s omnipotent activity based on a skeptical humbling of human reason, not on affirming reason’s capacity to conceptualize the transfinite case.95 Since we are sure that the replantation of Miguel’s leg is a matter of fact, Sancta Clara now says, we must investigate its possible causes. Did nature, which is to say, God acting with the ordered sequence of secondary causes, suffice to produce it? Or, if the replantation transcends the whole of nature either in substance or in the way in which it was brought about, how could it have been produced?96 Sancta Clara formulates the questions so as to include a cluster of related issues. First, he defines

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nature, in effect, as God’s ordinary providence—not as a radically selfsubsistent system of causes and effects that exists independent of God’s will. Second, he argues that miracles express God’s special providence and are addressed to us and meant to be recognized. Miracles are not meaningless whims upon which we might stumble by chance. They are performed to teach us, move us, change us. Consequently, third, Sancta Clara insists that God’s causal action in bringing about a miracle invites us to philosophical reflection. It follows from the way in which the question is posed that God does not so much “alter the course of nature” (as Stillingfleet puts it) when he performs miracles as use the course of nature in an unexpected and supernatural way in order to manifest his supernatural providence to us. Does nature, God’s ordinary providence, suffice to explain the restoration of Miguel’s leg? Sancta Clara turns, first, to vegetation, trees, husbandry, and the art of grafting, dear to Digby, but also to Samuel Hartlib and to his Oxford friend Ralph Austin.97 Could Miguel’s leg have simply grown back, like the limb of a tree, through some kind of inherent material propensity? After much discussion of cases of natural growth in trees, stones, crystals, and worms, Sancta Clara rules out the possibility of natural regeneration on the ground that the human body is far too heterogeneous. Trees and worms regenerate naturally because they are relatively homogenous. They do not possess highly differentiated organs. In the case of a human being, no inherent material propensity would “know” how to grow a “right leg from the knee down” rather than, say, an arm, or a new kidney. Unlike mineral growth in the case of Scaliger’s stalactites, an adult human leg has tissue, veins, muscle, skin, nerves. Consequently, an adult human leg cannot be grown anew out of the body’s own material resources. That a human limb might regenerate all at once, moreover, without incremental degrees of growth, would strike Aristotle as utterly preposterous. The restoration of Miguel’s leg thus lies beyond the resources of growth that inhere in the matter of plants and “less noble” animals.98 As for “spirits” or rays of atomic effluvia that flow out of all things and pervade the universe and help to conserve everything on earth and in the heavens (as Scotus taught long ago at his own alma mater, Oxford), Sancta Clara refers the reader to various chapters of his De mundo, especially to the chapter on the putrefaction of bodies, to establish that rays, as

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such, are powerless to preserve a severed body part from deterioration or to restore it to a living body. Moreover, as the philosopher shows in “2 De Anima, text 26,” the soul through its power of imagination (phantasia) cannot move just any body, but only its very own living limbs. Experience teaches us that no person can move a severed limb, or indeed any dead part of the body. All the more is the human imagination powerless to move an amputated limb that is far away and utterly decayed.99 Invoking the kinds of “sympathetic” cures that are favored by Campanella and described by Nathaniel Highmore in History of generation, Sancta Clara praises the new Royal Society that has been formed at Gresham College under the patronage of Charles II for the sake of encouraging experimental philosophy.100 Implicitly, the Royal Society has an important role to play in the eventual discerning of miracles. Sancta Clara’s immediate and explicit point seems to be that the powers of the imagination, like the powers of cosmic and earthly rays, are potent under suitable conditions, but they are not infinite.101 Since Miguel’s leg was restored suddenly and as a whole, rather than incrementally and over time, the Peripatetic philosopher must concede that it surpasses the finite character of natural causes, including the efficient power of “rays.” The finite power of rays and of the imagination, which are semimaterial, leads to the more difficult question of whether the immaterial soul by its own power forms the body: “an Anima sit virtus formatrix corporis.” Adapting Aristotle’s views in De animalibus 9 to their own speculations, the physicians Thomas Fienus (professor at Louvain, d. 1631), William Harvey, and Walter Charleton affirm that (1) the soul is a power distinct from the imagination and that (2) it is a formative power that shapes the body as a home for itself.102 Otherwise, they argue, the intellectual soul would be united to its body through a sort of accident, which is impossible.103 Sancta Clara concedes that Aristotle in De animalibus 13 says that the main power of the soul is emitted with the sperm and that this power is the soul itself, which is separate from matter. Sancta Clara concedes further that, if it is separate from matter, it must be intellectual and immortal. An immaterial agent of open-ended power would thus go forth and generate its material home. In De generatione animalium 2, chapter 3, Aristotle seems at first blush to support this view since he says that the soul “comes from outside.”

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There are, however, many ways to interpret Aristotle’s meaning. Aristotle could mean that the soul, which is to say, the body’s formative power, is not immaterial, but requires the spermatic emission in order to be produced, so that it is produced by God through an action that is intermediary between creation and ordinary production. This is how Scotus interprets the passage—correctly, in Sancta Clara’s view.104 A second possible argument is to say that these physicians interpret Aristotle wrongly to imply that the soul is immaterial when really the soul has flexible dimensions rather than no dimensions at all. Others take spiritus to mean a vegetative, or sensitive spirit, containing seminally the organic forces through which the body is formed.105 A further problem with arguing that the intellectual soul is the power that forms and adapts the body to itself is that the intellectual soul is part of the soul/body composite, which means that the part would bring about the whole of which it is a part as its efficient cause.106 Our own Charleton, Sancta Clara says, draws on the admirable prince of all physicians, William Harvey, to stress that man develops out of an egg, the same as a chicken.107 As Harvey establishes beyond a reasonable doubt, the only difference is that, in the case of the chicken, the egg is external to the hen. In both cases, the embryo is “produced” and acquires new perfection out of a preexisting entity. Sancta Clara acknowledges the appeal of Charleton’s theory, its congruence with Aristotle, History of Animals, 7.7, and its economy, since otherwise an animal would have to have a succession of different souls at different stages of maturity. Sancta Clara even adds a firsthand experience: he himself has seen caterpillars in autumn make their cocoons and lie inside them until they emerge the next year as butterflies. In addition to the “spirit” that is included in the sperm according to Aristotle, there is also a heat that is derived from the power of celestial bodies, so that a man is really generated by “a man and the sun.” As Scotus explains, however, personal individuality in the strict sense comes from a soul that is numerically one per se, not through some extrinsic principle like matter. It follows that, in Miguel’s case, Miguel’s radically personal soul would have had to be involved, raised above all cerebral rays and powers of the imagination through some powerful upheaval, resulting in the amazing feat of bringing back to itself without physical means a limb that had been buried far away. Thus Miguel’s soul, by itself, could not have accomplished the restitution of the limb.

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Having identified the Scotist haecceitas that is implicated at the heart of Miguel’s cure and having hinted that some kind of ecstatic upheaval was involved, Sancta Clara cites the case of Saint Francis in rapture. As Bonaventure points out, the stigmata were not impressed on Francis’s body either through a natural power or through any created skill but rather through the admirable power of the spirit of the living God.108 Similarly, neither Paracelsus, nor Ficino, nor Digby with his sympathetic power would dare to claim that the restitution of a limb, such as occurred in Miguel’s case, could occur naturally. Paracelsus makes great and silly claims for his “mumia,”109 which physicians use in multiple cures, but the cure requires direct physical contact each time. Sancta Clara warns that what is mysterious, even demonic, to one human generation, such as a magnet’s power to attract iron at a distance, which was mysteriously occult to Roger Bacon, becomes a matter of routine knowledge to a later generation. Cosmic rays, for example, suffice to account for the reports that a centipede, if cut up into pieces, will attract itself back together and coalesce. Sancta Clara says that he does not know exactly what to make of Fludd’s dream of a “world soul” and how Fludd and his followers meant to cite its operation in the case of wonders. Did they have Averroes’s separate intellect in mind? Or simply cosmic radiation? In any event, could such a “world soul” really explain the restitution of a severed limb without the contact of physical causes? All philosophers, including Paracelsus and Roger Bacon, would laugh at the idea that an amputated tibia, decayed and buried for years, could, without any material cause, rise up from its grave, transport itself to a new place, and reintegrate itself to the body. Talismans and human skill in chemistry must now be ruled out. Sancta Clara starts by pointing out that Aristotle would not have believed the accounts of “magicians” in the biblical story of Moses.110 Could some sort of seminal principle be extracted chemically from human ashes, as it has been done experimentally in the case of frogs? Why could the human form not be extracted, likewise, from human ashes? Sancta Clara sees no reason to deny that new frogs can be produced by human skill from the seminal material contained in frog ashes, but this will not, he says, give us back our leg. Doctor Dee’s beautiful success in generating a fly with cosmic rays also falls short of what is needed for limb regeneration. “Our case,” Sancta Clara concludes, “surpasses all natural principles.” Implicitly,

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not only nature acting naturally but nature that is intentionally manipulated by human or spiritual agents cannot bring about the replantation of Miguel’s severed limb at a distance. Part of the story is that the severed tibia was buried. Was it naturally or supernaturally preserved from putrefaction, Sancta Clara wonders? Was a new tibia created? Or was the old tibia revived? Was it revived before replantation, which is to say, miraculously, or did it revive naturally once it was restored by becoming conformed to Miguel’s soul? In other words, did the leg become a living leg only when it became Miguel’s leg? The question matters because it involves the extent of God’s intervention. Just how much is miraculous in Miguel’s story? In this section, Sancta Clara wants to emphasize that not every “marvel” must be interpreted to be a miracle. He cites the 1656 report of an English captain who discovered a whole petrified city in Africa and argues that this was likely caused naturally by a spirit of salt extracted from the earth. The problem is that many natural effects, such as rare astrological effects, are attributed by “light” men all too easily to demons. The new “Epicureans” who have refurbished Democritus’s atoms cannot explain Miguel’s leg, since their principles imply that everything happens mechanistically, according to material configuration and reconfiguration. The whole point of natural philosophy, Sancta Clara concludes, is to know the causes of things as exactly and veridically as possible so as to be able to discriminate between what is produced naturally and what is produced artificially by honest industry, and thus to recognize also what is produced artificially by fraud. Science will allow falsehood to be detected and removed. Only the truth of art and nature will be maintained. This is why Roger Bacon and other eminent philosophers labored to probe nature’s most hidden secrets through experiments and reason. Paracelsus, in contrast, undermines piety by seeing miracles everywhere.111 In the case of Miguel’s leg, Sancta Clara now argues, natural processes must have been suspended—as they were in the case of Saint Francis’s stigmata. Did God, in particular, induce a supernatural sleep? The evidence for it is that Miguel felt exceptionally drowsy on the night of the miracle and could not be awakened easily by his parents after it took place. The very depth of Miguel’s sleep seems to rule out morbid melancholy since depressive patients seem to sleep poorly, but the question must be carefully

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investigated. Some indeed might argue that melancholy produces such strange and powerful paroxysms that even a leg might be restored in a powerful fit of “enthusiasm.” If this is true, might melancholia suffice to suspend natural processes and make room for marvelous effects? There are philosophers who argue that a lot of bile mixed with a bit of heat suffices to “render the mind divine.” Examples abound of poets and painters who achieve extraordinary effects as a result of such divine madness. Sancta Clara cites the case of Van Dyck, who painted a stunning portrait of Charles I on horseback at the very apogee of his genius. The result is marvelous, certainly, but is it miraculous?112 Sibyls, who were intoxicated with physical vapors, made obscure predictions but rarely produced wondrous effects ad extra. Sancta Clara cites “our compatriot Dr. Nathaniel Highmore” and the “famous Dr. Thomas Willis at Oxford” on the causes and symptoms of melancholia, conceding that melancholiacs lose sensation, for example, in various parts of the body.113 After discussing Highmore’s and Willis’s work at length, Sancta Clara concludes, however, that even in the case of profound melancholia, natural processes are not suspended to the extent that a leg could be naturally regenerated. Nor do magical arts and arts of necromancy suffice to explain Miguel’s case.114 Sancta Clara turns, next, to dreams. Are dreams sent by God? And how were dreams involved in Miguel’s case? Miguel saw the Virgin appear to him in dream. The truth of the Virgin’s visitation is attested by the fact that the promise that she made to him, to restore his leg, happened as promised. The miracle of Miguel’s restored leg, it seems, bears witness to the prior miracle of the Virgin’s visitation in Miguel’s dream. Sancta Clara, however, urges caution and cites the case of William Foxly, who, according to Richard Baker, fell asleep in 1546 for fourteen days and could not be “waked with pinching or burning.”115 Presumably, what suggests that Miguel was plunged into a more-than-natural slumber on the night of the miracle and that natural processes were supernaturally suspended is that the Virgin supernaturally appeared to him and made a promise that was fulfilled. The content of the dream, rather than the depth of the sleep, weighs in favor of a supernatural intervention. Was the replantation of each and every part of Miguel’s leg miraculous? Does God always act at an instant when acting miraculously?116 What can be learned from cures that have occurred during holy pilgrimages?

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Did restoring the tibia involve an act of creation?117 Behind Sancta Clara’s inquiry into the miracle of Calanda is really a deeper question—one that was also raised at Oxford by the case of Anne Greene. Exactly what aspect or aspects of the cure were supernatural? Exactly when and at what pivotal point, or points, did God intervene? As the official ruling in the case of the Calanda miracle attests, there was considerable puzzlement over the fact that Miguel’s replanted limb was not immediately in a perfect operational state. At first, the limb was cold and contracted, with dysfunctional nerves and bluish toes. Time had been required for Miguel to recover the use of his leg—contrary to what might be expected from a divine intervention.118 Since God is omnipotent and his immediate works are perfect, why was the leg not immediately healthy? It appears that God chose to limit the miracle very precisely to the actual (instantaneous) replantation—allowing the recovery of the leg to proceed according to natural laws. Although Sancta Clara makes no mention of it, a similarly “economical” divine intervention occurred, if at all, in the case of Green’s revival, since the human skill of doctors was needed to nurse her back to full recovery. Does the case of Miguel Pellicero imply that, if a severed limb is successfully replanted, then nature will suffice to take over and restore functions? Sancta Clara cites pilgrimages to holy shrines and reports of miraculous cures in which illness was removed instantaneously, which suffices to prove that no secondary causes were involved. He concludes that the instantaneous character of Miguel’s cure suffices to establish it as miraculous. Moreover, the lovely perfume of roses that filled the room proves that the cure occurred through the ministry of angels (a detail that leads Sancta Clara to digress into many “beautiful things” about odors and optics and to cite Anne Somerset, Henry Howard’s wife, who was a saintly melancholic and a Franciscan tertiary).119 Sancta Clara then evokes various other miracles, including the miracle of the Holy Thorn that occurred at Port-Royal in 1656.120 At the very moment that the eye touched the relic, the infection vanished. Who doubts, he says, that the girl’s infected eye was miraculously cured?121 He goes on to refer the skeptical reader to Augustine, De civitate Dei, book 22, for confirmation that miracles have occurred after the apostolic age and cannot be dogmatically rejected on a priori grounds. The miracle of Calanda, Sancta

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Clara concludes, was a great miracle. It is dangerous to doubt true miracles because they powerfully manifest God’s providence.122 Since Aristotle had no knowledge of God’s providence or any reason to suspect God’s promise of supernatural beatitude, he had no reason to consider the possibility of miracles. Since he knew nothing of God’s creation of the world ex nihilo or of God’s true infinity, he had no reason to recognize that God’s providence includes not only God’s guiding intellect but also God’s commanding will. Aristotle thus failed to recognize that God is not only the final cause of all things but also their efficient cause. Indeed, God’s commanding will and guiding intellect are the actual and efficient cause of all things universally. God really causes all effects, down to the last detail. Over and above the material and spiritual order described by the principles of Aristotle’s philosophy, God’s providence reveals itself also in miracles, confirming that a higher spiritual order exists with its own operations and principles. It is hardly surprising that the details of this order should be unknown to us, since it is too noble for our understanding. 123 Sancta Clara’s theory implies that the Christian philosopher is called to investigate all levels of God’s providence so as to be able the better to cooperate with God’s will both with regard to God’s physical creation and with regard to God’s plan for human redemption. Miracles come in two basic sorts. Sometimes God brings about an effect that does not exceed the natural order but brings it about without natural causes (miracle quoad modum). At other times, God brings about an effect that is supernatural in substance (miracle quoad substantiam). The prudent scientist is best qualified to discern whether a given event is caused supernaturally. Thus the premise that miracles are possible prompts the Christian philosopher to scrutinize natural causes with new zeal and to test their scope experimentally. Ultimately, however, the key to recognizing a miracle is to understand how it manifests God’s providence—to grasp what it signifies that is both meaningful and good.124 Sancta Clara’s theory implies that a miracle, by its very essence, cannot be trivial or irrelevant to human salvation. An unexplained event, as such, does not qualify as a miracle. Theological criteria must also be brought to bear. This brings us to disputatio 2, which addresses the purpose of miracles and refutes the false miracles of Antichrist.125 Section 1, closely based on De mundo, asks whether miracles can be performed to confirm falsehoods,

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especially in matters of religion.126 Sancta Clara starts with the axiom that God is Truth. Like Stillingfleet and other Protestants, Sancta Clara affirms that miracles were performed by Christ and by the apostles to provide us with assurance that what was revealed to us was God’s truth, adding, “even though we might not understand it.”127 God’s miracles prompted the first Christians to believe that God’s gospel is true, not to judge truly about its content. It follows that miracles by their very essence always confirm God’s truth, whether they are recent or whether they were performed at the beginning of the evangelical age.128 Sancta Clara denies that there is any valid scriptural basis upon which to reject present-day miracles. He right away clarifies, however, that new miracles do not impart new truths. Rather, present-day miracles confirm the same infallible truth that miracles confirmed in the apostolic age, that is, they confirm the divine and Catholic truth that is transmitted by God’s apostolic church. Otherwise, new articles of Catholic faith could in theory be framed every day, as often as there were miracles or new truths revealed, which is wholly against the true system of faith (as Sancta Clara has explained, he says, in his treatise on councils, or Systema fidei, chapter 3).129 The fact remains, nonetheless, that a true miracle is, in some sense, God’s Word: “miraculum est quoddam Dei verbum.”130 Consequently, a present-day miracle puts us under an absolute obligation to believe the truth that it asserts—lest we say that God’s Word is, or could in any way be, false.131 Implicitly, Christians who privilege scripture must include miracles as integral to God’s revelation. As though agreeing with Stillingfleet’s argument that the first Christians would have been irrational to believe in Christ’s doctrines if miracles had not been supplied to confirm their divine origin, Sancta Clara concedes that logicians require us to justify the conclusions that we reach by citing the grounds upon which we reach them. He also cites Augustine, De civitate Dei, 22.9, to corroborate Stillingfleet’s view that Christian faith is rational because it was initially confirmed by miracles. And he concludes by citing Alexander of Hales (“noster Alensis”), who argued that “it is permissible to say that Christ could have lied if he had wanted to, but he could not have wanted to lie and thus was unable to lie.”132 The veracity of God’s miracles, attesting the veracity of God’s Word, flows out of God’s own infinite veracity. Sancta Clara now tackles objections. Does Deuteronomy 13 not imply that it is possible for a prophet to attest to a falsehood since we are warned

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not to believe prophetic signs that contradict God’s law? Sancta Clara answers that this passage must be interpreted as a per impossibile argument— a counterfactual.133 Does the book of Revelation not warn that the Antichrist will perform miracles? Sancta Clara answers that the Antichrist will perform only pseudomiracles, not true miracles.134 How about the book of Job? Does God not allow the devil to produce fire in the sky and other things? The answer, as Augustine says in De civitate Dei, 20.10, is that these were merely wonders, not miracles. Sancta Clara devotes the next section to analyzing what lies within the devil’s power and within demonic power, arguing with Augustine that demonic power never exceeds what God allows it to be. Since it is susceptible of more and less, demonic power is essentially finite. It operates only through natural causes, never supernaturally. In the last stages of the world, when secondary causes suffer a sort of meltdown (tabescentia) and chaos increases, it will no doubt be very difficult to distinguish demonic wonders from true miracles. Nonetheless, just as celestial intelligences operate only under the first cause and within limits, as Aristotle argued, so the devil and demons fall infinitely short of God’s power. Neither angels nor demons can suspend natural processes by their own power. Sancta Clara appropriates the idea of a World Soul in order to emphasize that demonic meddling is necessarily limited. As all philosophers ancient and modern agree, including Copernicus and Galileo, who make the earth into a star, something like Averroes’s unifying Intelligence governs all bodies and all motions in the womb of the earth according to their proper natures, so that these motions cannot be disrupted by the devil. Disrupting them, indeed, would require an actual miracle. Implicitly, the World Soul is nothing other than God’s ordinary providence, which is to say, nature taken coherently as a symbiotic whole. The devil and demons bring about strange wonders only through God’s permission and only through their knowledge of how to manipulate secondary causes. Demons cannot perform miracles, properly speaking, which only God has the power to perform.135 Sancta Clara goes on to deny that all sorts of magic tricks are “done by the devil” and that “witches can fly.” Superficial and impious people are simply credulous—easily convinced by imaginary tales that diabolical spells are effective and that evil women flit about in the air. As Augustine speculated, powerful sleeping potions can induce dreams of flying. The

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Council of Ancyranum, prior to Nicaea, asserted that all of the things associated with witchcraft are purely imaginary. No one should be so gullible as to believe that people are sometimes changed into animals, as Apuleius pretends. Indeed, Aristotle’s principles imply that such transformations are impossible. Both Augustine in De civitate Dei, 15.18, and “our Matthias Felisius” in his Sentences Commentary totally destroy the merit of all of these ridiculous confabulations.136 Implicitly, although Aristotle’s philosophical framework fails to recognize God’s infinity and commanding will, it suffices soundly to rule out superstition. Not only Thomas Browne but also staunch Protestant rationalists such as Stillingfleet and Joseph Glanvill are, in effect, culpably superstitious. Sancta Clara concedes that it is difficult to distinguish miraculous states from morbid states in cases of deep melancholia. Much experience and acumen are required to examine a given set of circumstances so as to trace unusual states or claims of strange visions to their proper source. In investigating an event, the assumption must always be first to look for natural causes. God’s ordinary providence is inexhaustibly worthy of investigation. In the case of the Saragossa inquiry that was conducted into Miguel Pellicero’s cure, the presumption was always in favor of natural causes. The Christian philosopher has a duty to form opinions soberly and with modesty. He must not rashly believe what the crowd believes.137 What matters is that God alone has the power to perform true miracles and that God never attests to a falsehood. Whether or not true miracles have occurred among pagans or heretics, no true miracle has ever been performed to confirm a falsehood, at least to Sancta Clara’s knowledge. Richard of St. Victor affirms it absolutely: God cannot perform a miracle to confirm an error. Following this firm conclusion, Sancta Clara supplies the story of Calanda. The theory of miracles argued in Religio philosophi makes two salient points. The first is philosophical. Once Aristotelian nature (timeless and deterministic) is reconceptualized as God’s ordinary providence, miracles do not “contradict” nature so much as reveal a higher order of divine governance that confirms God’s gospel and man’s supernatural dignity. Does the possibility of miracles hurt the project of science? On the contrary, Christian philosophers have an added incentive to investigate every causal detail of God’s ordinary providence through experiment and reason. Scientific inquiry allows them to appreciate in manifold detail what God has

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ordained to unfold through predictable natural causes. This knowledge, in turn, allows them to appreciate what God has ordained to be possible through the intentional industry of creatures, who have the free agency to manipulate natural causes in new inventive ways. Finally, scientific inquiry allows them to discern effects that God brings about supernaturally to confirm Catholic faith, namely, miracles, which serve to fortify their commitment to charity and to guide their inventiveness morally. Sancta Clara’s second point is theological. Since God alone performs miracles and since miracles by definition confirm Catholic faith, one of the important messages that a miracle conveys is that Christian philosophers must stop living under a superstitious fear of demons and witches. As Sancta Clara puts it, miracles really remind us that the devil is only finitely potent regarding our affairs. The miracle of Calanda, in particular, confirms that keeping the faith of God’s church and praying for divine help through the Virgin’s intercession are more valuable forms of activity than persecuting witches and clinging to talismans. Who, really, is superstitious? The Catholic who believes that God’s power can redeem souls in purgatory, or the rationalist who has no doubt that witches exist and must be burned? Religio philosophi weighs into a larger debate.138 It rationalizes miracles first by subjecting them to rigorous philosophical scrutiny then by turning them into sociological phenomena, but in the precise sense that a physically inexplicable event is recognized to be a miracle precisely because it confirms Catholic faith and is interpreted by witnesses and by the Church to do so.139 Does Sancta Clara’s theory that a miracle is “in some sense God’s Word” allow room for exegetical flexibility? Who determines exactly what truth of Catholic faith is confirmed by a given miracle? Stillingfleet, for example, interpreted Catholics to be claiming that the miracle of Calanda confirmed the infallibility of the Roman Church in some special way. Antonio de Fuertes y Biota interpreted it to confirm that miracles are possible.140 A second Spanish author interpreted it to prove the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh.141 In the case of Calanda, moreover, must we assume that the physical replantation of Miguel’s leg, as such, contains the essential meaning of God’s intervention? Sancta Clara’s caution that “the Christian philosopher must be cautious and not follow the opinion of the crowd” invites perhaps a latitude of interpretation. God’s Word, as we know, is “not always understood.”

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What appears to be miraculous to the crowd may hide a deeper miracle. Suppose that Miguel fell deathly ill on his way from Saragossa to Calanda. Suppose that, before dying, he gave his peg and crutches to some other youthful beggar who was of his own age and build, whom he encouraged to go to Calanda and find his parents and become their son in his place. Would we say, like Stillingfleet, that “the miracle of Calanda” was a hoax? Or would we say that a different kind of miracle occurred—a miracle of compassion? On this version of events, the new Miguel is the same Miguel symbolically, in a higher order of charity in which self and neighbor are not distinguished. Thanks to the Virgin’s protection, the majority of the witnesses (“maior numerus testium”) believed that the same Miguel had recovered his leg, and they swore on their oath that he was the youth whose leg had been amputated.142 Strictly speaking, the official investigation does not document that Miguel’s leg was restored. It documents that a majority of the people involved in the event believed in their conscience that Miguel’s leg was restored and believed that this manifested the Virgin’s power of intercession and God’s love. Is the consensus in itself not miraculous enough? Suppose, conversely, that Miguel lied about the amputation in the first place—that he swaddled his broken leg so as to obtain more alms: Is it any less true that a family recovered a son and that a village was filled with joy, all because of the Virgin’s compassion for wretches? The official inquiry, by documenting every concrete detail, successfully shrouds the event in mystery. Sancta Clara’s firm conclusion that God alone performs true miracles and that true miracles confirm the truth of Catholic faith implies, in a sense, that the meaning of the miracle of Calanda exceeds its own empirical parameters. It may be true that a miracle occurred in Calanda regardless of what really happened to Miguel’s leg. One eyewitness, Gaspar de Bracamonte, made no mention whatsoever of the Roman Church, interpreting Miguel’s story simply as a proof of God’s power and mercy.143 Just as wisely, King Philip IV of Spain left the interpretation undefined, announcing, as he prepared to kiss Miguel’s leg, that the miracle meant for the faithful to rejoice and believe rather than reason and dispute.144

S E V E N T E E N

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Was Queen Catherine’s theologian involved in the secret 1662 effort to end the English schism? To the extent that the plan involved Ludovic Stuart d’Aubigny at its center, there is some reason to suspect that Sancta Clara was at least aware of it. English Franciscans worked closely with d’Aubigny. In February 1663, signing himself Frater Franciscus Venantius (“Brother Francis Hunt”), Sancta Clara joined his confrères in requesting that Barberini entrust their difficulties with Rome to “the Lord d’Aubigny, High Almoner to both Queens.”1 The very same month, the queen’s secretary, Richard Billings, was in Rome with a request to make d’Aubigny into a cardinal, but also, more importantly, with a letter written by Charles II outlining conditions for a reunion of the Church of England with Rome. The king’s letter called for the archbishop of Canterbury to be created primate of the three kingdoms and for Anglican bishops to keep their bishoprics and their wives.2 Speaking as the supreme head of the Church of England, the king professed adherence to the Roman Catholic faith in matters of doctrine and endorsed the decrees of the Council of Trent—much as Sancta Clara had urged in his Enchyridion of Faith as the necessary first 483

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step to be taken to end the English schism. Remarkably, Roman condemnations of Jansenism were also explicitly endorsed, as they were in Sancta Clara’s Enchyridion, even though d’Aubigny himself was known to sympathize with Jansenism and corresponded with Antoine Arnauld.3 Historians have not been able so far to determine who drew up “this extraordinary Latin document.”4 The proposal for reunion also included the stipulation that some religious orders would be allowed to flourish in England provided they subject themselves to English episcopal authority. Since Benedictines were explicitly cited, along with “friars who took care of the sick” (Franciscans) and even Jesuit educators, the plan was perhaps favored by England’s regular missionaries as an alternative to Blackloism, namely, one that would appeal to the Anglican hierarchy by empowering it rather than compete with it. However serious and whatever its origin, the plan to have Rome ratify the Anglican Church (as George Morley, among many others, termed it)5 in exchange for a modicum of doctrinal unity regarding fundamentals bears a close resemblance to the “plot” evolved by Sancta Clara and the Benedictine Dom Price in the mid-1630s. Was the plan supported by Anglican churchmen close to Hyde? Richard Baxter became convinced that Bramhall, Sheldon, Heylyn, Morley, and Thorndike, inspired by Grotius and anxious to restore the unity of “the Universal political Church,” wished to place the Church of England under “foreign jurisdiction.”6 In Baxter’s view, the Laudian efforts to achieve corporate reunion with Rome in which “Fr. De Sancta Clara alias Davenport” had played a key part were simply resumed after the Restoration by Sheldon and other “Chief Agitators” who were aware of Charles II’s bias towards Catholicism.7 The Anglican leaders whom Baxter names as wishing to put the Church of England under the spiritual jurisdiction of a unified Catholic Church conspicuously shared a fear of Hobbes’s Erastian arguments.8 Baxter’s charge hardly suffices as evidence of a serious Anglo-Catholic initiative on the part of Charles II’s prelates, but Queen Catherine’s Franciscan theologian may well have entertained fresh hopes. The Jansenist campaign against Jesuits since the 1650s had suggested the possibility that Roman Catholicism might reform from the inside and discard papal infallibility and other key obstacles to reunion.9 The mysterious Anglican prelate “H. H.,” who signed the preface of the Jansenist pamphlet A Jour-

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nall of all Proceedings between the Jansenists and the Jesuits (1659), had voiced a cautiously optimistic view. There was good reason, he wrote, for Anglican leaders to hope for “an union amongst us all” if Jesuit “extravagances” were checked on the Roman side and if “we,” in turn, did not succumb to pride and “fly farther from them as they come nearer to us.”10 Although H. H. may well be Henry Holden (posing as an Anglican prelate), we cannot rule out the possibility that H. H. refers to Henry Hammond, who signed the preface of an earlier work with his initials, “H. H.”11 Against Hobbes, Hammond was particularly eager to defend the distinctive spiritual powers that are conferred on the clergy through apostolic ordination—the very backbone of the dualism that Hobbes rejected and that Sancta Clara affirmed as unconditionally as did Thorndike.12 George Morley, in turn, emphasized to Baxter in 1662 that episcopal authority in spiritual matters derived from God, not from the sovereign.13 Not surprisingly, given the concessions that were demanded for the sake of protecting English ecclesiastic autonomy from Roman oversight, Pope Alexander VII rejected the initiative. The Earl of Bristol blamed Clarendon for the whole business. Bristol accused Clarendon of trying to promote a Catholicism under Roman jurisdiction in England and tried to have him impeached in August 1663.14 Both Charles II and Clarendon, it seems, remained deeply offended by the pope’s rejection. By September 1664, the English strategy of threatening Rome with the possibility of supporting Blackloism had gained the upper hand, replacing the apparent effort to end the English schism on favorable terms for Canterbury.15 In 1665, d’Aubigny was duly promoted to the cardinalate, but he died before receiving the biretta. The party of “Reconcilers,” as Heylyn termed Catho lics who believed in the possibility of ending the English schism and among whom he explicitly cited Sancta Clara, suffered an important setback.16 Anglican bishops soon mounted a concerted offensive against toleration.17 Citing Thorndike as a key theorist of the Anglican campaign against religious toleration, Baxter would characterize the Anglican party as “French Papists” who “trust wholly to a Coalition and to Force,” as opposed to “the Italians,” who “can design no way for their advantage but a Toleration (unless they get the Government).”18 In 1665, when the bubonic plague invaded London and took the life of John Lewgar as he cared for victims, Sancta Clara was elected to serve

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as provincial for a third term. He again signed his name in the official capitular register as “Franciscus Venantius.”19 The decision to adopt the name “Hunt” was apparently not casual. In 1667, still serving as provincial, he would be “Mr. Hunt” when he received alms for the upkeep of the Douay friary.20 It was also as “Mr. Hunt” that he arranged for a Mr. Slaughter and his wife, Lady Gage, to invest money in a Paris bank for the benefit of the Douay friary.21 Most revealingly, in August 1670, he would again be “Father Hunt” when he received Anne Hyde, Duchess of York, into the Roman Church.22 From August 1670 to November 1672, he regularly signed letters to Anthony Wood as “F. Hunt.”23 In December 1678, he was living in Somerset House under the name of “Mr. Hunt.”24 Sancta Clara thus had some sort of stake in keeping, even formalizing, the alias that he had first devised for himself between 1640 and 1642 when living in hiding near Poling. Memories of Saint Venant from Ypres come to mind, but Sancta Clara’s decision to go by the name of “Hunt” after the Restoration and during the last eighteen years of his life remains enigmatic. Two important developments marked the Franciscan chapter meeting of 1665. First, thanks to Sancta Clara’s personal tenacity, the English Franciscan province had officially regained its title as fourth in rank within the Franciscan Order. This meant that the English provincial had precedence over all other Franciscan provincials except for the provincials of France and Rome. Sancta Clara had worked long and hard to establish the relative seniority of the English Franciscan province and to have it recognized. Eagerly appropriating John Selden’s critical methods, he had dug through archives, collected documents, examined chronicles in the Bibliotheca Arundeliana, and compared sources, all for the sake of proving that Brother Agnello and his first Franciscan friars had reached England in 1219 or 1220 at the latest, not in 1223 or 1224, as had been wrongly assumed.25 In 1661, Sancta Clara had republished his Fragmenta vel Historia Minor Provinciae Angliae Fratrum Minorum of 1658 and circulated a separate monograph entitled De praecedentia Angliae.26 A first bid to obtain recognition of the prestigious rank of the English province at the general chapter of Valladolid in 1661 was left unresolved. In 1664, however, at the general chapter meeting in Rome, the English brethren succeeded in their quest. Sancta Clara appended a copy of the official decree issued in Rome on June 13, 1664, to the “augmented and corrected” third edition of his

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Manuale missionariorum, which he published in his Operum Omnium in 1665.27 As Brother Anthony Parkinson would report with some puzzlement a few generations later, Sancta Clara was “profuse” on the subject, even though it seemed contrary to the Franciscan spirit of humility.28 Perhaps a second decree, issued at the same 1664 general chapter in Rome and also appended verbatim to Sancta Clara’s Manuale, sheds some light on why Sancta Clara was eager to establish English Franciscan precedence. The second decree states that no Franciscan friar could reside in England except under the jurisdiction of the English province.29 This meant that a well-policed Franciscan community could now flourish within English borders under the authority of the English provincial, without fear of being infiltrated, or politicized, or derailed, or usurped by factions and foreign powers.30 In 1665, this meant, in particular, that Queen Catherine’s Portuguese Franciscans, the “reverend Fathers of Arrabida,” came under Sancta Clara’s authority. Between 1665 and 1667, during Sancta Clara’s term as provincial, a small friary was built by Queen Catherine for the Portuguese Franciscans, abutting the chapel that Inigo Jones had designed at St. James’s. Samuel Pepys, who visited the friary in January 1667, reported favorably on the friars’ clean little cells adorned with pictures and stocked with books, their “pretty library,” “fine garden,” and “good life.”31 In his Fragmenta narrative of English Franciscan history, Sancta Clara had emphasized that the first Franciscan missionaries had settled in En gland only by the king’s leave and under the king’s protection.32 Franciscans posed no political threat to the English sovereign, Sancta Clara insisted, because they had always conceded the sovereign’s right to regulate religious life within his temporal borders. Franciscans, moreover, soon became cherished by all classes of English society because they stood aloof from politics.33 Devoted to caring for the sick and to praying for the dead, Greyfriars were all the more effective as peacemakers because they abstained from political partisanship.34 In his Manuale missionariorum, Sancta Clara stressed, in turn, that the obedience paid by Franciscan friars to their provincial and by their provincial to ordinary episcopal authority promoted civil peace and benefited the state, citing Juan Caramuel in support, as though deliberately resisting Jansenist efforts to demonize the famous probabilist.35 Much like d’Aubigny and like Luke Wadding in Rome, Sancta Clara sought to decrease factionalism among Catholics by

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adopting a courteous approach to all points of view and by maintaining an irenic distance.36 Under his new term as provincial, English Franciscans would be committed to pursuing a strictly spiritual life within a framework of visible submission to both civil and ecclesiastical powers. Franciscan irenicism took on the hue of adaptive resistance. In 1665, Anglican bishops, who were once again sitting and voting in the House of Lords, aimed at achieving hegemonic unity of religion in England, sometimes appropriating Hobbesian arguments to defend the exclusive legitimacy of the Church of England against both Protestant nonconformists and Catholic recusants.37 As d’Aubigny had explained to Roman authorities, the Anglican hierarchy would never allow a rival Roman clergy on its own turf: “a Roman Catholic bishop in partibus, or a Roman Catholic bishop of Canterbury, York or London, was out of the question.”38 The best Blackloists could hope for was the creation of schismatic Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland and Tangier.39 Unlike his Blackloists friends, Sancta Clara never wished to turn Roman Catholicism into a Christian sect. He never turned his back on the Church of England. Like Thorndike and Jeremy Taylor, Sancta Clara considered the Church of England to be the only legitimately apostolic church in the land and regarded the English monarch as its jure divino “nurse.” Again like Taylor, but also like Thorndike, Sancta Clara had become convinced that the best way to defend a robust dualist model against Hobbes was to limit the authority of the Church strictly to spiritual matters. 40 Consequently, again like Taylor, Sancta Clara had turned his focus to holy living as the key to restoring Christian unity. Both Taylor’s Unum necessarium and Sancta Clara’s Manuale missionariorum promoted “the practice of repentance” as more fruitful to the redemption of England than credal wrangling. Taylor even urged a revival of voluntary good works, incurring the blame of semi-Pelagianism.41 In the preface of the Latin version of his Enchyridion, which was first printed in 1661 then reprinted in 1665 in his Opera Omnia, Sancta Clara outlined his vision for the English Franciscan mission after the Restoration. More than ever, he explained, English Franciscans were called to “ensnare souls affectionately.”42 Their chief calling was simply to live the evangelical life of their rule on English soil. With the Manuale missionariorum in one hand and the Summa veteris theologiae in the other, Francis-

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cans tending God’s vineyard in England were well prepared to combine practical holiness with doctrinal moderation, spreading harmony and avoiding offense. In 1661, Sancta Clara’s younger confrère and kindred soul John Vincent Canes published Fiat lux, in which he called for controversies to be set aside in favor of holy living. In 1665, Canes published Diaphanta, reiterating the view that “controversies about Religion are vain and fruitless” and urging a return to practical piety.43 In 1668, the Portuguese friar Antonius à Sancto Bernardino living at the St. James friary published a spiritual work, Vita minorica ad pristinum statum restituta, which was officially approved by Sancta Clara and by Angel Mason. The aim of Vita minorica was to present the Franciscan rule in its true purity and explain why reform had become necessary. Threatened by atheism and marred by debauchery and new superstitions, England in the late 1660s needed the sweet nourishment of Franciscan simplicity. As Sancta Clara had stressed in his Fragmenta vel Historia Minor, English Franciscans had always favored strict observance. Their joyful austerity combined with humility had been their special hallmark, and the key to winning English hearts.44 Combining spiritual universalism with a keen sense of locality, English Franciscans embodied a sort of originary via media on the margins of English parish life, where religious uniformity had become the sole and overarching aim.45 Sancta Clara’s project of focusing on holy living brings us to a third important matter that was transacted at the 1665 chapter meeting. Lady Juliana Walmesley, sister-in-law of Sancta Clara’s confrère Francis Osbaldeston, had made a gift to the English Franciscan province of a stone residence known as the Old Hall, in the village of Osmotherley (Yorkshire). The 1665 chapter formally accepted it.46 Lady Walmesley, who had been a patron to the English Franciscans throughout the Protectorate and had financed the restoration of the York friary in 1637, was related by marriage and family to a number of prominent recusant families with roots in Yorkshire. As Sancta Clara appreciated more than anyone, there was near Osmotherley the ruin of a small chapel dating back to the fifteenth century and known as the shrine of Our Lady of Mount Grace or, more simply, as Lady Chapel. Nearby was a holy spring with healing powers. Early in the sixteenth century, a saintly Franciscan hermit, Thomas Parkinson, had lived in a small cell near Lady Chapel, clinging to his

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Franciscan calling despite adversity and Protestant attempts to dissuade him. The shrine had attracted a surge of pilgrims during the reign of King James. In 1642, Mary Ward had visited Lady Chapel in the belief that prayers that had been offered there on her behalf had cured her of an illness. Lady Walmesley’s gift, which included a garden, a field, outhouses, and an estate producing twenty pounds annually, meant that English Franciscans would be in a position to implant themselves at Mount Grace to care for pilgrims and perhaps witness miraculous cures if any were to occur.47 The Franciscan friary of Mount Grace might blossom into an English Port-Royal—abject, sublime, and eloquent. In 1665, Protestant England was enamored of Pascal’s Provincial Letters.48 Boyle, Oldenbourg, and Williamson followed Jansenist developments in France closely.49 Sancta Clara wasted no time in cooperating with Providence.50 He appointed Father William Shepheard as superior of Old Hall, placing him under the guidance of Father Francis Osbaldeston, who was guardian of the York friary. Since the provincial had a solemn duty to visit all of the residences of the province, Sancta Clara may well have escorted William Shepheard up to York and then to Osmotherley in 1666—year of the London fire and year of a new parliamentary offensive against Thomas White and Hobbes because of their rationalized theories of hell, against which Sancta Clara had written so mildly and respectfully, without condemnation.51 A few years later, Sancta Clara would add new information about early Franciscan convents in Yorkshire in a Supplement to his Historia Minor (1671). In the project of restoring English Catholic culture, feeding a hidden rhizome of Catholic imagination mattered as much as writing books. What Sancta Clara understood that White did not was that prayers for the dead were hard for Protestants to give up because they served to cultivate memory. The point was not narrowly to philosophize but to invest the English landscape with spiritual value. The new Franciscan community at Lady Chapel embodied Sancta Clara’s vision of a discrete flowering of supererogatory life. There were numerous Roman Catholics in Yorkshire, but there were also Protestant dissenters and persecuted Quakers, devoted to the inner light.52 As a result of the Act of Uniformity, Sancta Clara knew, a number of sincere Christians found themselves cut off from the Church of England, starved for greater closeness to the Gospel. The charismatic d’Aubigny himself had

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set the example of reaching out to Quakers with brotherly charity, even enticing Gilbert Latey to visit the queen’s chapel at Somerset House.53 When Latey saw the altars and candles, he was moved by “the Power of the Lord” to draw a sharp contrast and to praise the saints who enjoyed only the “living altar” of their hearts and prayers. One of the queen’s priests, far from rebuking him, told him that “there is no greater state attainable than what you speak of.”54 Sancta Clara must have been aware of the persecution of Quakers, since meetings in London were disrupted by foot soldiers who marched the saints off to jail.55 In Sancta Clara’s view, Franciscan friaries disseminated throughout England might help contain the Evangelical drift away from England’s apostolic religion and eventually complement the Church of England, without offense. Like Bramhall, Thorndike saw no reason why religious orders should not be readmitted under the supervision of the Church of England.56 In 1668, the year that a comet was seen that “made the sky soe light that one might see to read,”57 Sancta Clara and his brethren celebrated his golden jubilee, marking a brief moment of plenitude, even prosperity, for the English Franciscan province. That year, Father John Cross published the exquisitely Salesian Philotea’s Pilgrimage to Perfection, described in a Practice of ten days’ solitude. Soon after, Father Antoine Le Grand reached out boldly to the new philosophers of Cambridge and Oxford with his Epicure Spirituel (1669), building on Sancta Clara’s own “taming” of Epicurean atomism in Paralipomena philosophica, which had been republished in 1667 along with Religio philosophi and its praise of Thomas Willis and Walter Charleton.58 Continuity and stability were also signified by the fact that Sancta Clara lived at Somerset House. In August 1669, Anthony Wood came to visit Hugh Cressy there and was “conducted by William Rogers of Lincoln Inn to Mr. Davenport (commonly called Sancta Clara) who had an apartment in the same house.”59 Wood described the meeting as congenial and reported having “great discourse” with Sancta Clara. He characterized Sancta Clara as “a complaisant and free man” and later visited him “often” when in London. Within a year, Wood and Rogers dined with Sancta Clara in Sancta Clara’s apartment, enjoying “good discourse and freedom” over a “good fish-dinner” and white wine. Wood likely regaled his companions with descriptions of Ashmole’s “rarities,” which he had seen just a few days earlier.60 Rogers, in turn, may have discussed the

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spiritual progress of Abraham Woodhead, who, as we know, had created a secluded community of scholars in Hoxton while enjoying the income of an Oxford fellowship. As Woodhead’s remarkably nonconfessional Motives to Holy Living attests, the vocation to live inoffensively as a contemplative Roman Catholic on the margins of the schismatic but apostolic Church of England had emerged as an informal but viable option. In December 1669, the papal envoy Abbot Claudio Agretti, canon of Bruges and minister-apostolic in Belgium, visited London on a special mission to report on ecclesiastic matters. Cardinal Barberini had specifically asked him to investigate whether appointing a Roman bishop for England, as urged by the secular priests of the English chapter and as rejected by the English Franciscans, was advisable. Agretti described Sancta Clara as the main leader of the English Franciscans and characterized him as “old and astute (scaltro).”61 Keenly aware of parliamentarian hostility against Roman Catholics, Agretti also reported that Sancta Clara possessed “many friends among the heretics in Court and Parliament.”62 Sancta Clara had evidently achieved a modus vivendi with Anglican bishops and Protestant magistrates. Whereas Blackloists (led now by Humphrey Ellis, who had been White’s student) continued to call for state-sponsored religious toleration and for Roman bishops to be appointed for England, provoking Anglican ire, Sancta Clara advised against it from a mysterious position of safety.63 Sancta Clara undoubtedly remained in contact with White until White’s death in 1676, which means that he remained vividly involved in the complex reception of Hobbes’s ideas.64 Convinced on Hobbesian grounds that the English sovereign had a legitimate right to govern the En glish Church in all but purely spiritual matters, Sancta Clara may have taken the oath of supremacy, but there is no hard evidence that he did. Why was Sancta Clara selected to be the one to receive Anne Hyde into the Roman Church? In her written conversion statement, the Duchess of York reports that her prejudice against Romanists suffered “scruples” in November 1669 when she read Peter Heylyn’s History of the Reformation and learned that the English break with Rome had occurred chiefly for reasons of ambition and greed. She discussed the matter with Archbishop Sheldon and Bishop Blandford, who told her that there were “many things in the Roman Church” that they wished had been kept, such as confession and prayers for the dead.65 Her desire to be a Catholic increased, and she told it

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to a Catholic (Lady Cranmer?) who “brought a priest to me” (Sancta Clara) in January 1670. The more Anne “spoke” to the priest, the more she “was confirmed in her design.” Father Hunt (Sancta Clara) received her into the Roman Church in August 1670. Only three persons other than the king and Anne’s husband, James, Duke of York, knew of her conversion: Sancta Clara, her dresser Lady Granmer, and a Mr. Dupuy, the duke’s servant.66 The Duke of York had told the French ambassador of his wife’s plan to convert. Anne’s father, exiled in France, quickly got wind of it.67 His arguments against his daughter’s deserting the Church of England included the very Hobbesian notion that it meant becoming “disobedient to the ecclesiastical and Civil Laws” of her country, even renouncing her “subjection to the state, as well as to the Church,” both of which “are grievous sins.” To embrace the Roman religion, moreover, was to “divest” herself of her “Natural reason” and “captivate the dictates” of her “own conscience” to the “Impositions of an Authority which hath not any pretense to oblige or advise you.”68 Thus blending Hobbesian zeal for civil obedience and hatred of Roman “darkness” with Jeremy Taylor’s own Hobbesian argument that the pope has no claim on the conscience of anyone in England, Clarendon hoped to save his daughter and royal son-in-law from a fateful step that would bring a “greater storm against the Roman Catholicks, than modest Men can wish.”69 Individual defections from the Church of England in favor of Rome by members of the royal family, Clarendon predicted, would only fuel the most powerful and self-righteous antipapism. Implicitly, the only way to help Roman Catholics in England without destabilizing “State and Church” (Clarendon typically treated the two as indivisible) was patiently to pursue efforts to end the English schism by convincing Rome to reform and to ratify the English articles of religion and hierarchy. Presumably, the choice of “Father Hunt” was meant to mitigate the damage. Two facts suggest it. First, Lady Cranmer was the wife of Caesar Cranmer, whom Clarendon described favorably as “a man of parts,” implying an almost transcendent loyalty to the interests of the English Crown.70 Second, the presence of Bishop Blandford at Anne Hyde’s death implies a remarkably conciliatory atmosphere in which only “political Romanism” was rejected. Blandford apparently gave a “short exhortation” and asserted that Anne was in no spiritual danger since her conversion to

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Roman Catholicism had been purely spiritual, not tainted by political motives.71 Implicitly, Blandford gave an ecclesiastical dispensation allowing Anne to receive Communion from Father Hunt. Father Hunt, in effect, gave Roman Catholic last rites to Anne Hyde with Blandford’s knowledge and by his leave. Perhaps recusancy itself was being reframed to fit the dualism embraced by Sancta Clara and by Anglican prelates of the “French papist” party in response to Hobbes. As long as Roman Catholics were dispensed (by an ordained Anglican minister or bishop, not by the state) from the obligation to receive Communion from an Anglican cleric, they could listen to Anglican sermons, participate in prayers, even take the oath of supremacy. Five months after Sancta Clara received her into the Roman communion, Anne Hyde still had prayers of the English Church read to her daily.72 From her point of view, it seems, she did not change religion or reject the Anglican Church so much as expand her Catholicism to include the Catholic Mass and transubstantiated host. Roman Catholics, in other words, could become quasi-assimilated into the established Church of England, protected by the Anglican hierarchy on its own terms, rather than through state-sponsored toleration. There was at least one prominent Quaker, William Penn, who suspected danger and felt urgently moved to denounce Sancta Clara’s conciliatory project. In 1670, the same year that “Father Hunt” secretly received Anne Hyde into the Roman Church, a twenty-six-year-old William Penn, recently converted to Quakerism, published two books. Penn’s first book advocated “the great case of liberty of conscience.” Penn advocated religious toleration, but he was wary of including Roman Catholics because they, he argued, could not be trusted. Penn’s second book refuted Sancta Clara’s Explanation of Catholic Belief, which had just been reprinted in a fourth edition. Eager to vindicate Protestant truth against “Romish emissaries” who had learned to “mask their sanguine looks,” Penn accused the anonymous author (Sancta Clara) of deliberate deceit. A dangerous new type of papist had emerged, warned Penn, who sought to minimize the intolerant character of the Roman Church and to emphasize the Christian identity of Roman Catholics. In particular, and as an example, the papist claim in the Explanation of Catholic Belief that papists “own but one mediator Christ Jesus” had to be rigorously unmasked as a sinister strategy to seduce gospelers.

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Penn explained that, even though he was a Quaker, he wished to help the Church of England in undertaking “an Enervation of the Romans Faith,” or “at least a detection of their Craft, their horrid Cousenage, and present way of insinuation amongst the People.”73 By the same token, Penn urged Anglican Protestants to focus their wrath on deceitful papists rather than on fellow Protestants, whose only crime was to follow their conscience with uncompromising sincerity. Penn apparently worried that sectarian Protestants might fall for the option of joining a seductive fringe Catholicism aimed at peaceful pietism. Like Sancta Clara, Penn likely knew of Gilbert Latey’s friendly intercourse with “Lord Obaney” (d’Aubigny) in the 1660s.74 In Maryland, where Jesuits and Quakers mingled freely, common ground was found in valuing practical piety, and intermarriage and conversion were frequent.75 In 1671, Stillingfleet, in turn, accused Roman Catholics of making “a false representation both of the doctrines and practices of their Church.”76 In particular, he rejected the notion that Roman Catholics enjoy a special unity that eludes Anglicans. In support of his view, he cited eight pages from “F. Davenport, al. Sancta Clara.”77 Sancta Clara, he argued, demonstrates that Anglicans no more differ from one another or from Rome in points of faith than do Romanists.78 Thus the chief difference between Rome and Canterbury, Stillingfleet concluded, was political and concerned civil power. By claiming a political “deposing power” and by undermining oaths and contracts, Rome encouraged political treason and civil strife, whereas Canterbury, properly governed by the civil sovereign and illuminated by scripture, promoted civil loyalty and peace.79 Regardless of their aversion for Hobbes’s materialism and possible atheism, Stillingfleet and other Anglican divines were not loath to embrace Hobbes’s criticism of Roman Catholicism as a kingdom of irrational darkness and to appropriate Hobbes’s Erastian arguments for the sake of defending the temporal autonomy of the English Church against Rome.80 Jeremy Taylor, for example, emphasized that bishops are not superior to princes81 and that the bishop of Rome, in particular, cannot issue a command that is binding on the conscience outside of his own narrow temporal jurisdiction.82 This meant that recusancy, in particular, was not binding on the conscience of English Catholics. As for the pretenses of the Church of Rome to depose princes, they were simply “as invalid as can be wish’t.”83

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It seems that Hobbes’s ideas were subjected to a double standard. If Hobbes was interpreted to mean that the English sovereign could act effectively to secure the Church of England against Rome and against dissenters, his theories were sound. If he was interpreted to mean that any ruler who seized power could act arbitrarily and without regard for England’s laws and apostolic church, his theories were dangerous and atheistic. As Clarendon made clear in 1676,84 a Hobbesian sovereign acting without grounding in the natural law and without the spiritual authority of the Church of England was illegitimate, tyrannous, and unworthy to be obeyed.85 By 1676, Father Antoine Le Grand had also weighed into the Hobbesian fray by developing a Cartesian approach to correcting Hobbes. Hobbesian arbitrariness and irreligion could be effectively contained by upholding a Cartesian doctrine of the rational soul against Hobbes’s materialism.86 As Sancta Clara himself had argued in A Treatise of the Schism of England, a proper grasp of the spiritual dignity that is conveyed to all human beings by innate reason sufficed to set limits on what the sovereign could command. Ralph Cudworth would develop this line of attack on Hobbes in The true intellectual system of the universe, published in 1678.87 A vivid picture of Sancta Clara after the Restoration emerges from The Sincere popish convert, a pamphlet that was not published until 1681. The Sincere popish convert contains a letter that was addressed to Edward Stillingfleet in 1678. The anonymous author explains that he (the author) had been seduced more than fifteen years earlier into converting to the Roman Church. He now repented his conversion and desired to be readmitted into the Anglican communion. Pleading his case, the author tells his story. In 1661 or 1662, he had returned to London from Cambridge, where he had lived a dissolute life of pleasure, and found himself intellectually confused and spiritually aimless. A Catholic “gentlewoman of his acquaintance” urged him to speak to someone of her own faith. Consequently, he was “introduced to one of the most Grave, Subtle, and Acute Fathers then in the Nation (one whose works I perceive you are not wholly a Stranger to), I mean Father Franciscus à Sancta Clara: with whose winning discourse I was extreamly taken, and to whose extraordinary Civilities I must always account myself extraordinarily obliged.”88 The author had little chance, he says, of resisting Sancta Clara’s arguments and charm, to which far mightier men than he had succumbed, such as Bishop Goodman of Gloucester. So he converted to Roman Catholicism: “For about

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nine or ten years I was wholly immured up, forced to comply with and swallow everything; durst not propose any Scruples for fear of being suspected heretically inclined.” At the end of 1671, however, he started to have doubts. He began to read Protestant authors, such as Stillingfleet, Tillotson, Lloyd, and others. Still, he hesitated to leave the Roman communion and continued in it for several years, partly because of the advantages that it brought him, partly because he feared retribution if he renounced it. What eventually decided him was the horrible revelation of the popish plot. He was able at last to break away, eager now to declare publicly that he detested Roman doctrines, especially the doctrine of the papal deposing power, which is “manifestly inconsistent with the Peace and Safety of our English Nation.” The political character of Roman Catholicism, in the end, proved to be the decisive factor in his rejection. There was another aspect of Roman Catholicism that proved important in convincing him to reject the Roman communion. Just as troubling as the deposing power, the author says, is the “Trick of Equivocation” or “Refined Art of Lying”—which the Roman Church has never officially condemned. The author explains that he used to think that equivocation was only practiced by a small and distinct group of Catholics, namely, by Jesuits. To his horror, he learned otherwise from Sancta Clara. The occasion was the arrest of a Jesuit. When asked by the magistrate if he was a priest, the Jesuit protested that “he was a married man, with a wife and children”—meaning that “his Breviary was his wife and his Penitents his Spiritual Children.” The author, scandalized, as “all were who heard of it, both Protestants and Romanists,” wrote expressly to his “old Learned Friend Father Franciscus à Sancta Clara” to ask him for his view. Contrary to what he expected, Sancta Clara answered that the Jesuit had done nothing wrong or unbefitting “an Honest man.” 89 From that moment, the author says, the “snare was broken.” The author lost his respect for Sancta Clara and was able wholeheartedly to reject Roman Catholicism. Consequently, he was now eager to obtain Stillingfleet’s help in being received again into the “Bosome of my ancient Mother the Church of England.” In concluding, the author reveals that he is the author of The case of interest or usury as to the common practice (Thomas Seymour) and that he was born in Holborn, Stillingfleet’s own parish. The letter is signed December 15, 1678—shortly after the execution of Edward Coleman and the impeachment of five popish lords.90

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Before examining Sancta Clara’s “unexpected” answer, we must briefly review a few details. Thomas Seymour had been a Roman Catholic for approximately ten years before he started to have doubts in 1671, when he sought out Protestant critics of Rome, yet he remained undecided for “several” more years. In 1673, at the request of a scrupulous young widow who wished to regulate her affairs “according to the severest Principles of Conscience,” he published The case of interest or usury as to the common practice, in which he condemned usury on the grounds that it was clearly forbidden by scripture.91 His “small Tract” was viciously attacked “by the Jesuitical Party, who look’d on it as purposely written to affront their Trade!” Seymour was threatened with excommunication. It thus seems that Seymour had adopted a rigorist Jansenist attitude in 1673 with regard to usury, which Pascal had also condemned and which Jesuit casuistry allowed.92 In 1675, English priests were expelled from England by a decree of Parliament, but Seymour clearly knew that Sancta Clara had remained in his apartment at Somerset House, where indeed the Franciscan chapter met from 1674 to 1677.93 Thus Seymour’s Jansenism likely became compounded with anxiety over Roman Catholic disregard for civil obedience, which the now widespread fashion for Hobbes had made a matter of renewed importance. Then sometime in 1678, Seymour asked Sancta Clara’s opinion about a Jesuit who used equivocation to deceive the civil magistrate about his priestly status in order to prevent arrest. He was so shocked by Sancta Clara’s answer that “the snare was broken.” Shortly afterwards, in December 1678, with the flaring up of the popish plot, Seymour decided that it was not “safe” to die in communion with Rome and officially petitioned Stillingfleet to be readmitted into the Anglican communion. Since he emphasized that he could not come into London without special permission (he was still officially Roman Catholic), we should presume that Sancta Clara’s residence in London troubled him as basically treasonous.94 If we analyze Seymour’s account carefully, we discover that two factors determined his decision to quit the Roman Church: his personal experience that Jesuits excommunicate sincere Christians who follow scripture and his discovery that even notoriously moderate Roman Catholics like Sancta Clara condone immoral practices that violate civil security— exactly the two bases upon which Hobbes constructs his urgent plea in Leviathan against “the kingdom of Darkness.” Indeed in spite of the

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doubts that plagued him in 1671, Seymour did not actually leave the Roman communion until he became convinced by Sancta Clara’s unexpected approval of equivocation that Roman Catholics form what Hobbes characterizes as A confederacy of Deceivers.95 Although Seymour singled out Jesuits as his opponents with regard to the question of usury, we should remember that Sancta Clara had long favored setting up alms that were given to the English Franciscan province in such a way as to be increased by earned interest.96 Seymour perhaps knew it and was troubled. In the event, he had a latent motive to check Sancta Clara’s moral integrity further, seizing on the opportunity to ascertain Sancta Clara’s view of equivocation when hearing that a Jesuit used “the Refined Art of Lying” to avoid arrest. Revealingly, Seymour reports that he fully expected Sancta Clara to condemn equivocation, since it was shocking to “Protestants and Catholics alike.” When Sancta Clara defended the Jesuit’s action, Seymour was astonished but also disabused. The hope of isolating Jesuits in order to salvage a “good” Roman Catholicism collapsed. Seymour now saw Roman Catholicism in thoroughly Hobbesian terms—as a sinister clerical plot to deceive rulers, keep human reason in darkness, encourage lying, and incite feeble-brained believers into civil rebellion. Sancta Clara’s brief answer—that the Jesuit did nothing “unbeseeming an honest man”—is thus best interpreted in a Hobbesian context. Indeed, by emphasizing what “beseems an honest man,” Sancta Clara removed the discussion from a theological framework (namely, what would “beseem” a Christian, or a Catholic) and transferred it to the realm of civil ethics. What are the boundaries and requirement of civil honesty? Instead of addressing, or excusing, “Jesuit” equivocation, Sancta Clara turned the matter into a question of Hobbesian self-censorship.97 According to Hobbes, citizens have “an obligation to self-censor their speech and acts according to the requirement of peace.”98 The specific issue of Hobbesian dissimulation had been brought vividly to the fore by the Scargill affair in 1669. In renouncing his Hobbesian views publicly, Scargill had been asked to swear that his recantation was “unfeigned” and not simply a Hobbesian act of civil submission, concealing his true beliefs.99 The parallel with the clause that ends the Jacobean oath, aimed at preventing papist equivocation, was obvious. Was the Jesuit in question simply concealing his true beliefs as an act of civil submission? According to Hobbes, citizens have a

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responsibility to signal to each other, through word and gesture, that they respect shared civil conventions that secure peace.100 On this very ground, as we know, and as Seymour knew, Sancta Clara had argued during the Interregnum, when recusancy laws were lifted, that Catholics ought not to attend Protestant churches since it implied publicly and deceitfully that they were Protestants. After the Act of Uniformity, however, the case was perhaps different, since civil obedience to an act of Parliament was involved. In 1678, during a flare-up of mass hysteria, what does civil obedience require of an honest man? Like Hobbes, Sancta Clara held that inner beliefs cannot be policed by external authority, either by the state or by the Church. Outer conformity was all that could ever be commanded. In a Jansenist pamphlet belonging to John Evelyn’s “Mystery of Jesuitisme” project, Caramuel was explicitly denounced for promoting a similar view, namely, for arguing that the “church can neither command nor prohibit any action that is done in secret.” One of the accusations was that Caramuel’s “doctrine may produce in the Schooles a heresie not unlike that of the Independents in England.” 101 Sancta Clara would have immediately recognized that Caramuel and Hobbes were being demonized with the same brush for distinguishing a private sphere of beliefs and actions from public actions that fall under the magistrate’s (or the cleric’s) jurisdiction. From Sancta Clara’s point of view, the case of the lying Jesuit provided an opportunity to conciliate “Jesuit” equivocation, Caramuel’s defense of personal privacy, and Hobbesian self-censorship in such a way as to grasp a place of overlap and discern what was possibly “honest” in all three doctrines. Secrecy, privacy, and self-censorship, moreover, could be usefully compared to the Anglican doctrine of the late Jeremy Taylor, who argued that a lie is not a lie when it is “charitable and useful.”102 All of these doctrines rested on an implicit “just cause” argument but also touched on the ambiguous nature of human language.103 After all, Sancta Clara himself had spent a lifetime exploiting linguistic ambiguity for the sake of conciliating differences and achieving social peace. In Hobbes’s case, selfcensorship must certainly conceal itself in order to meet its Hobbesian goal: if a person remains silent but rolls his eyes or winks and lets it be known that he is hiding his inner beliefs, he does not present himself as peaceful. The lying Hobbesian, no less than the lying Jesuit, must deceive

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his interlocutor. Had the lying Jesuit remained silent, he would have provoked the magistrate’s wrath and been interpreted to acquiesce to the charge. Perhaps Henry Wilkinson was not wrong to group Sancta Clara together with Hobbes and with the Unitarian John Biddle in a 1671 letter to Anthony Wood, urging Wood to drop them from his Oxford catalogue because they were “unsound in their judgment and dissolute in their conversations”?104 All three men had investigated the power and limits of human language. For a Jesuit priest to think “out loud” of his Breviary as his wife is not really more deceptive than interpreting the fifteenth English article of religion (“Of Christ alone without Sin”) as compatible with the doctrine of the Virgin’s immaculate conception. In both cases, the honest and the irenic are free to interpret the communication in a “benign” sense. Rather than fuel public fear and recklessly collude with cynical political agents who wished to profit from the crisis, the lying Jesuit acted honestly by keeping his priestly vocation secret as something that his immediate audience was not in a position to grasp without hatred and irrational prejudice. He took it upon himself to shape his speech in such a way as to calm the situation. He conveyed the truth that he, too, had ordinary family cares and human affections. He exercised self-censorship for a “charitable and useful” purpose. Unlike a religious fanatic, he resisted the temptation to validate himself through martyrdom. He attested that his religion, as such, was not so important that it trumped his duty as citizen and the immediate need for public harmony. Thus instead of blind obedience, either to the civil magistrate or to any external authority in Rome, the Jesuit acted by his own personal moral light in response to a concrete set of circumstances. Inwardly, however, he never denied or doubted or repudiated the value of his priestly calling. By exercising self-censorship without selfsuppression, he acted towards the civil magistrate with exactly the same degree of obedience that Sancta Clara in Systema fidei requires of Catholics towards the Church—or that the Act of Uniformity required of English Christians. Since civil society, like the Church, cannot command more than outward conformity, in both cases self-censorship is a sufficient sign of obedience. By the same token, Sancta Clara produced an answer to Seymour that did not necessarily convey Sancta Clara’s full view of the matter but that defied Seymour’s expectation and thirst for factionalism. Sancta Clara

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insisted on judging a specific case and a specific man acting in specific circumstances, rather than join a frenzied mob in scapegoating a “Jesuit.” Let us add that Father Le Grand, who by now was guardian of London and thus Sancta Clara’s immediate superior, was in a position to defend Sancta Clara’s answer on Cartesian grounds. In Discours de la Méthode, part 6, Descartes states that his duty to the Church regarding Copernicanism was limited to outward conformity, namely, to refraining from publication (self-censorship). He was not required to change his own inner belief that heliocentrism is true and compatible with Catholic faith (selfsuppression).105 On the other hand, by answering Seymour as he did, Sancta Clara went out of his way to court arrest. In December 1678, when Seymour wrote to Stillingfleet that Sancta Clara condoned the practice of equivocation, Sancta Clara’s identity was known, as was his residence at Somerset House, where Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey had allegedly been murdered by fanatic papists two months earlier. On November 8, weeks before Seymour’s letter was written, Somerset House had been searched. By answering Seymour’s query in writing, Sancta Clara put a damaging document into the eventual hands of enemies. There is some evidence that suggests that John Sergeant was willing to help the English state to prosecute Jesuits.106 Did Sancta Clara, at the advanced age of eighty, seek martyrdom? Sancta Clara’s Benedictine friend Thomas Pickering, a fellow chaplain of Queen Catherine, had been arrested in September 1678 and was accused of attempting to assassinate the king.107 In October, the Benedictine James Corker, also Sancta Clara’s friend and fellow chaplain of Queen Catherine, had been arrested. Did Sancta Clara hope to join them, or did he incriminate himself in the hope that his self-incriminating verdict against selfincrimination might reach them and deter them from self-incrimination? Thomas Pickering was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn on May 9, 1679. Three months later, in August, Sancta Clara’s Franciscan confrère Father John Wall was executed. As far as we know (and Wood would have inquired and reported it) Sancta Clara was not arrested, or even questioned. Over a year later, against all odds, he died peacefully in his lodgings in Somerset House on May 26, 1680. He passed away in the morning, inter filiorum suorum preces—“surrounded by his sons’ prayers.” Because of the popish plot, Somerset House was under close vigilance. It was

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therefore unadvisable to have Sancta Clara’s remains transported out of Somerset House to St. Ebbe’s in Oxford, as he had wished, to be buried in the soil of the first Oxford Franciscans, next to Nicholas Day. Nor would Queen Catherine allow Sancta Clara’s remains to be buried in the crypt of Somerset House, next to John Canes.108 Threatened with repudiation by Parliament and physically assaulted on her way to Mass by hostile Londoners, Queen Catherine had few options. She had to act as discretely as possible, without calling attention to the papist priests who were still living in the forgotten corners of her palace. She decided that Sancta Clara’s corpse should be interred in the nearby church of St. John’s of the Savoy, which belonged to her by right of her duchy of Lancaster. The church had been given over to a French Protestant congregation that followed the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and submitted to the Anglican bishop of London — to the wrath of the true Calvinists of Threadneedle Street and to the delight of English gentry who flocked to St. John’s to hear the French minister. It must have been at twilight, on a transparent May evening, that Sancta Clara’s brethren, disguised as courtiers with periwigs and stockings, led perhaps by Le Grand, dared to carry the coffin across the courtyard, past the Queen’s Catholic chapel, into the sloping graveyard of the Savoy. Rebuilt in the early sixteenth century from the ruins of a fourteenth-century chapel that had been vandalized by Wat Tyler, the chapel of St. John the Baptist of the Savoy was itself already a relic of England’s history in 1680, hybrid and off-key, haunted by suppressed memory. Its ceiling, which would be destroyed by fire in 1860, was made out of oak and pear tree, as though the essence of England’s countryside had been condensed in its carvings.109 Unlike Somerset House, which was torn down in the eighteenth century, St. John of the Savoy survives to this day, strangely spared through centuries of urban renewal. With its burial plot of wild roses and weeds, it sits incongruously in the shadow of a large luxury hotel, hidden by vast buildings, far from the bustle of commerce—a mute, undecipherable fragment.

E P I L O G U E

Writing to Anthony Wood in September 1670, Sancta Clara summarized his lifelong project by stating, “I follow my constant stile of moderation with truth in all things.”1 At the heart of Sancta Clara’s Catholic advocacy lay the “axiom of Moderation” that Sancta Clara developed out of Franciscan Scotism combined with the arguments of English Benedictines who supported him. Merging moral probabilism with speculative theology, Sancta Clara affirmed that it is morally permissible to defend/endorse a credible speculative opinion against the opinion of a majority, provided that the credible opinion in question not be rationally disproved or explicitly condemned by a true general council. Sancta Clara’s axiom of moderation furnished the basis for a capacious, inclusive Catholicism harboring a wide diversity of vocations and spiritual perspectives. Motivated by a desire to empower Catholic conscience against blind obedience, it favored a reasoned faith, but without turning reason dogmatically into a new idol. Armed with his axiom, Sancta Clara set out to restore Catholic communion in England by tackling the great theological and ecclesiastical controversies of his day. A Roman Catholic convert who defended the orthodoxy of his native English Church, a Franciscan friar who defended jure divino episcopacy, and a champion of experimental science who believed in miracles, Sancta Clara opposed factionalism at every turn and promoted Catholicism as a shared manifold of practice and discovery. Whereas his Blackloist friends focused on rationalizing Catholic doctrine and subjecting Roman Catholic clergy to English civil jurisdiction, Sancta Clara focused instead on reviving English Franciscan life within the ecclesiastic jurisdiction of Canterbury. His own idea of purifying Catholicism consisted in “gently bathing” contested doctrines so as to bring out the flexible latitude of Catholic belief and to defend the rich artistic practices that Catholic belief inspires and protects. Like Scotus, he applied verbal 504

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analysis to dissolve conflict whenever possible. He invoked Scholastic culture to show that much of Catholic theology is speculative, uncertain, and maybe even inherently undecidable. He concluded that Christians are called to preserve the unbroken communion of God’s church through mutual tolerance and self-restraint. Episcopal structure, Sancta Clara argued, is designed to respond to local conditions adaptively so as to protect human freedom, preserve peace, and foster diversity against local tyrants and mob rule. In Systema fidei, Sancta Clara went beyond his contemporaries’ concern for the principle of reasonable doubt. He emphasized the equally important legal principle of not embarrassing the future by solving problems before they arise. Through his careful investigation of general councils, Sancta Clara raised questions of political science and reached three decisive conclusions: all human truths are fallible, only God is infallible, and only supernaturally revealed truths that are held by all Christians everywhere and declared by true general councils to be indispensable for salvation are infallibly certain. After discovering Hobbes, Sancta Clara clarified that God’s church, charged with preserving and transmitting the supernaturally revealed truths that lead to heaven, must be radically divorced from political factions and shorn of temporal power. In retrospect, we recognize that Sancta Clara was guided all along by the allegory dreamed up by Innocent III of Saint Francis propping up God’s damaged and tilted church. Sancta Clara also became interested in the psychological mechanisms of prejudice. In Religio philosophi, he urged his students to cultivate scientific knowledge in order to resist superstition and oppose the persecution of witches. He called for the Royal Society to examine rare events scientifically lest mere prodigies be mistaken for miracles. By the same token, he attempted to make Protestants aware of their prejudice against Roman Catholics, underscoring the close connection between prejudice and superstition. Under pressure, late in life, Sancta Clara refused to scapegoat Jesuits out of convenience and refused to demonize Jesuit moral teaching when Jansenism was in fashion. In the process of wrestling with Protestant prejudice, Sancta Clara reeducated English Catholics about their own faith. He showed them that Catholicism is neither treasonous nor inherently persecutory. Catholicism is not inherently despotic, or inimical to human reason, or infantile.

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His student John Vincent Canes continued the effort, clarifying the meaning and scope of Roman infallibility against Protestant (and Catholic) misconception.2 Who read Sancta Clara and transmitted his “constant stile of moderation” to later generations and to new shores? In 1672, meeting at Somerset House in Sancta Clara’s presence, English Franciscans decided to accept Lord Baltimore’s invitation to expand their mission to Maryland, supplementing the Jesuit mission.3 Since Father Massey lived in Governor Calvert’s home and, since Franciscans received special support from Maryland magistrates, copies of Sancta Clara’s works were likely imported to America at an early date.4 Among the Benedictines who came in close personal contact with Sancta Clara was James Maurus Corker, who stands out with special importance among Sancta Clara’s spiritual heirs because of his Roman-Catholick Principles in reference to God and the King (1680).5 Corker’s treatise summarized the contents of Sancta Clara’s Explanation of Catholic Belief in order to clarify that genuine Roman Catholic beliefs are largely consistent with Protestant beliefs.6 In the eighteenth century, through Joseph Berington, Corker’s Principles was revived under the slightly modified title Roman Catholick Principles in Reference to God and Country.7 As Thomas Clancy has pointed out, Father Étienne Badin, the “first priest to be ordained in the U.S.,” and an early missionary to Kentucky, composed his own expanded version of Corker’s Principles in The Real Principles of Roman Catholicism in Reference to God and Country, published in Bardstown, Kentucky, in 1805. Badin’s work consisted in reprinting Berington’s version of Corker’s arguments and adding a detailed commentary. In 1835, Badin published a onepage summary of his Real Principles, giving it the revealing title of Some Protestant Misconceptions. Thus the very essence of Sancta Clara’s approach, which was to challenge Protestant misconceptions so that Roman Catholicism could be seen in a mild and reasonable light, received a second life in the New World. In England, John Bramhall, Richard Baxter, and Edward Stillingfleet were instrumental in ensuring that Sancta Clara’s irenic approach would reach future generations of Church of England divines. Bramhall praised Sancta Clara’s moderation. Baxter retold the whole story of Sancta Clara’s irenic effort at the Caroline court and the vicious opposition he encoun-

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tered from his coreligionists, especially from Jesuits. Stillingfleet, in turn, cited eight whole pages verbatim from Sancta Clara’s Paraphrastica expositio, a possible source of Newman’s famous argument in Tract 90 that the articles of the Anglican Church “are patient of a Catholic interpretation.”8 In retrospect, we see that Sancta Clara’s life and works gave rise to three interconnected but distinct trends within Catholic theology. First, Sancta Clara’s hope of ending the English schism through mutual “conciliation” was revived by the French priest Le Courayer in eighteenth-century England and pointed in the direction of the Oxford movement. Second, Sancta Clara’s effort to counteract Protestant demonization of Roman Catholicism led to the convivial, engagé Catholicism of John Gother, Richard Challoner, and Bishop Cheverus in Boston. Last, but by no means least, the French philosopher Pierre Bayle praised Sancta Clara’s arguments against religious persecution in his influential Commentaire philosophique (1686).9 An anonymous English translator made Bayle’s Commentaire philosophique available to English readers as soon as 1708, in a version that mysteriously enhanced the French text by adding that Sancta Clara is “worth” consulting on the subject.10 Bayle also cited Sancta Clara’s irenic efforts at moderation in his best-selling Dictionaire historique et critique (1696).11 The French Protestant pastor Pierre Allix, in turn, who was popular in London in the 1680s and was made a doctor of divinity by Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1690, cited Sancta Clara twice in his Réflexions critiques et théologiques (1686). Bayle’s arguments against persecution were revived by Sancta Clara’s champion Joseph Berington in The rights of dissenters from the established church, principally to English Catholics (1789). All three trends deserve detailed exploration. Ultimately, however, it is really Sancta Clara’s legend that continued to haunt the English and Protestant imaginations. Like a dense symbol of suppressed aspirations and loss, the figure of Sancta Clara as the “suspicious moderate” kept alive a special English wound with regard to possibilities that were not pursued, roads that were not taken. Without this living spiritual wound, complacency would settle in, and a certain type of recurrent impulse to religious self-invention would not be possible. Stranded between utopic imagination and sacramental yearning, the Quaker Joseph Henry Shorthouse, who converted to the Anglican Church in 1861 at the age of twenty-seven, resurrected Sancta Clara in his pastiche

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novel, John Inglesant, published in 1881. Although Shorthouse mistakenly featured Sancta Clara as a Jesuit, he captured the essence of Sancta Clara’s problematic appeal, fueled by skepticism and tension. Like Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding, Shorthouse recognized, Sancta Clara wished to nurture England’s distinctive way of spirituality without becoming insular, sectarian. Sancta Clara dreaded the prospect of England being invaded and dominated by Continental forms, but he also dreaded being cut off from a Catholic patrimony of theology, art, music, and diversity of vocations. Sancta Clara’s conciliatory approach, Shorthouse understood, was directed first and foremost at himself. His personal investigation into theology allowed him to heal himself and to make a place for himself in the unbroken communion of the Catholic Church—but only by keeping a space open, unresolved, for the anguish of personal conscience.

N O T E S

. Anti-Catholicism and the Sanctity of Conscience 1. William Overton, A godlye and pithie exhortation, made to the iudges of Sussex (London, 1579?), unnumbered pagination. 2. Ibid.: “I will referre it to your own knowledge and conscience that you have a duty to rise up against Roman Catholicism.” 3. See The English Romayne Lyfe. Discovering: The lives of the Englishmen at Roome: the orders of the English Seminarie: the dissention betweene the Englishmen and the Welshmen; the banishing of the Englishmen out of Roome: the Popes sending for them againe: a reporte of many of the paltrie Reliques in Roome, their Vautes under the grounde: their holy Pilgrimages: and a number of other matters, worthy to be read and regarded of every one. There unto is added, the cruell tiranny, used on an Englishman at Roome, his Christian suffering and notable Martirdome, for the Gospell of Iesus Christe, in Anno 1581. 4. Citing from Anthony Munday, The English Roman Life, ed. Philip J. Ayres (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 24– 28. 5. Ibid., 38– 39 and 42– 44. 6. Ibid., 18–19. 7. Charles Dodd (Hugh Tootell) and Mark A. Tierney, Dodd’s Church History of England from the Commencement of the Sixteenth Century to the Revolution in 1688 (London: C. Dolman, 1840), 3:36 and 37. See also the Jesuit Robert Parsons’s argument against occasional conformity, A briefe discourse containing certaine reasons, why Catholikes refuse to goe to church (1601). 8. The Act Against Recusants (1593), 35 Elizabeth, cap. 2, in Documents Illustrative of English Church History, ed. Henry Gee and William John Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 498– 508; Dodd and Tierney, Dodd’s Church History of England, 3:75–170, and appendix 11, p. xl, and appendix 38, p. ccxv. A useful summary of penal laws against Catholic recusants is found in Elliot Rose, Cases of Conscience: Alternatives Open to Recusants and Puritans under Elizabeth I and James I (London: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 11–14. 9. The Act Against Recusants (1593), 35 Elizabeth, cap. 2, 499.

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510 Notes to Pages 3– 5 10. A true and perfect relation of the whole proceedings against the late most barbarous traitors, Garnet a Iesuite, and his confederates (London, 1601), unnumbered pagination. 11. Pope Pius V’s 1570 bull Regnans in excelsis against Elizabeth, which also explicitly absolved “the nobles, subjects and people of the said realm” from oaths and “from any duty arising from lordship, fealty and obedience,” was posted on Bishop’s Gate in London and confirmed by Sixtus V in 1588. See Thomas Norton, A disclosing of the great bull and certain calves that he hath gotten, and specially the monster bull that roared at my Lord Byshops gate (London: Iohn Daye, 1570). 12. John Bruce, Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and others in England during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Camden Society, 1861), v. See also Tierney’s commentary in Dodd’s Church History of England, 3:29– 31. 13. The arraignment, tryal and condemnation of Robert Earl of Essex and Henry Earl of Southampton, at Westminster the 19th of February, 1600 and in the 43 year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth for rebelliously conspiring an endeavouring the subversion of the government, by confederacy with Tyr-Owen, that popish traytor and his complices (London, 1679), 16. 14. Ibid., 5, 12, 15, and, especially, 21, where Cecil confronts Essex: “Your religion appears by Blunt, Davies and Tresham, your chiefest Councellors for the present, and by promising Liberty of Conscience hereafter.” 15. Dodd’s Church History of England, 4:8n. 16. Stefania Tutino, Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), chap. 3. 17. Dodd’s Church History of England, 3:47– 56. 18. Ibid., 53 and 55– 56. The moderate priests came to be known as “Appellants” because they appealed to Rome against George Blackwell. 19. Bruce, Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland, introduction, xxxiv– xxxvi. 20. For Catholic optimism at the advent of the Stuart monarchy, see Dodd’s Church History of England, 4:35– 37, along with Tierney’s extensive footnotes. See also Alice Hogge, God’s Secret Agents (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 300–309. For a more nuanced view, see the account of reactions in Oxford, described by Gabriel Powel in A consideration of the papists reasons of state and religion, for toleration of poperie in England (Oxford, 1604), 4: “Some of the simpler sort crying out in expresse terms alas! alas! how shall the poore catholickes do now! We are all undone!” 21. Bruce, Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland, 61. For Northumberland’s role in presenting the petition to James, see Mark Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 128. 22. Reprinted in Dodd’s Church History of England, vol. 3, appendix 8, lxxii– lxxvi.

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23. The Catholics’ Supplication, in Dodd’s Church History of England, 4:lxxiii: “The gates, arches and pyramids of France proclaimed the present king pater patriae et pacis restitutor because that kingdom, being well nigh torn in pieces with civil wars, and made a prey to foreign foes, was, by his provident wisdom and valour, acquieted in itself, and hostile strangers expelled; the which he principally effected by condenscending to tolerate them of an adverse religion to that was openly professed.” 24. Ibid., 4:lxxiv. 25. James’s letter to Cecil, in Bruce, Correspondence of James VI of Scotland, 37. 26. Mark Nicholls, “Treason’s Reward: The Punishment of Conspirators in the Bye Plot of 1603,” The Historical Journal 38, no. 4 (1995): 822. 27. Gabriel Powel [1576–1611], The Catholikes supplication unto the Kings maiestie; for toleration of catholike religion in England with short notes or animadversions in the margine. Whereunto in annexed parallel-wise, a supplicatorie counterpoyse of the Protestants, unto the same excellent maiestie. Together with the reasons on both sides, for and against toleration of divers religions (London, 1603), 18, margin gloss 35: “As if the Pope by one word were not able to dispence with all this; and to cause any Papist to doe any thing even at a becke under payne of the greater damanation of bodie and soule, in case of refusall.” 28. Powel, “Catholikes reasons,” in ibid., 20. 29. Ibid., 21– 25. 30. Ibid., 35. 31. Basilikon doron (Edinburgh, 1599), in Political Works of James I, ed. Charles McIlwain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), 16. See further John J. LaRocca, S.J., “‘Who Can’t Pray with Me, Can’t Love Me’: Toleration and the Early Jacobean Recusancy Policy,” Journal of British Studies 23, no. 2 (1984): 22. 32. Letter to Cecil, in Bruce, Correspondence of James VI of Scotland, 36. For the role of conscience in conserving religion, see Basilikon doron, 13. 33. Letter of James to Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, dated from Hatfield March 24, 1603, in Bruce, Correspondence of James VI of Scotland, 76. 34. Cf. LaRocca, “‘Who Can’t Pray with Me, Can’t Love Me,’” 22– 36. 35. The Trew Law of Free Monarchies; or, The Reciprock and Mutuall Duetie betwixt a Free King, and His Naturall Subjects (Edinburgh, 1598), in Political Works of James I, 59: “We never read that ever the Prophets perswaded the people to rebell against the Prince, howsoever wicked he was.” 36. See James’s letter to Cecil, in Bruce, Correspondence of James VI of Scotland, 36: “I wolde be sorie that catholikes shoulde so multiplie as thay micht be able to practice thaire olde principles on us.” 37. Cited by Nicholls, “Treason’s Reward,” 829. 38. See “Epistle to James,” in A survey of the new religion detecting manie grosse absurdities which it implieth. Set forth by Matthew Kellison, doctor and Professour of Divinitie. Divided into eight books (Printed at Douay, 1603), unnumbered pagination. Kellison writes, at the start of the dedication: “All rejoyce at your coronation.”

512 Notes to Pages 7–10 39. Ibid.: “I think now to be the very time, when the Legates of the Kings of the earth, in their Lordes and Masters name, wish you a long and prosperous Raigne, to salute you from the Great Monarche of heaven, whose Legate I am, in that I ame a Preest, though a miserable sinner, in that I am a Manne, and your Maiesties lowest subjecte, in that I am an English man.” 40. Ibid.: “I offer myself as your maiesties most lowly and faithfull servaunte; which is a guifte so great, be ye giver never so vile, that ye great King of heaven requireth, yea desireth no more at our handes, but esteemeth that we give all, when we give ourselves and that we give noe litle, when we give our All.” 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. “A Protestation of Allegiance made by thirteen missioners to Queen Elizabeth, January 31, 1603, in Dodd’s Church History of England, vol. 3, appendix 36, clxxxviii. 44. Ibid., 47. 45. John Colleton, A Supplication to the Kings most excellent Majestie, wherein, severall reasons of state and religion are briefely touched; not unworthie to be read, and pondered by the lords, knights, and burgeses of the present parliament, and other of all estates. prostrated at his Highnes feete by true affected subiects (English secret press, 1604), 9–10: “The permission of the libertie wee intreate, is, neyther in reason of state, a thing hurtfull, nor by the doctrine of Protestants unlawfull to be granted. . . . And the favour we sue for, is but the benefite of that position which they held for most true and scripturall.” 46. Ibid., 48– 49. 47. Ibid., 49: “Then they will all ioyne in one supplication to the Pope, for recalling such priestes out of the Land, whosoever they might be or how many soever.” 48. Matthew Sutcliffe, The supplication of certaine masse-priests falsely called catholikes (London, 1604); and Gabriel Powel, A consideration of the papists reasons of state and religion, for toleration of poperie in England intimated in their supplication unto the King’s Maiestie (Oxford, 1604). 49. John Lecey, A petition apologeticall, presented to the Kinges most excellent Maiesty, by the lay Catholikes of England, in Iuly last (1604), chap. 5, 20. 50. Ibid., 35: “And this same oath and protestation, our Priests so permitted, shall take before they shall be admitted into our howses, otherwise they shall not have releise of us.” 51. See Dodd’s Church History of England, vol. 4, appendix 20, cxiii – cxxi. The oath is contained in clause 15, cxvii– cxviii. 52. Tierney cites James’s description of his purpose to “make a separation between so many of my subjects who, although they were otherwise popishly affected, yet retained in their heart the print of their natural duty to their sovereign, and those who, being carried away with the like fanatical zeal that the powder traitors were, could not contain themselves within the bounds of their natural allegiance” (Dodd’s Church History of England, 4:69).

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53. See, e.g., The oaths of supremacy and allegiance, published by authority (London, 1660), 3. 54. Robert Cecil, An answere to certaine scandalous papers, scattered abroad under colour of a Catholicke admonition (London, 1606), unnumbered pagination: “They which had divided themselves for conscience sake from all Communion with us in our Religious offices, would yet have tuned their harps, to have ioyned with us in chearfull Songs for this our happy deliverance.” 55. Ibid., C3. 56. Ibid., D. Equivocation will be discussed in a later chapter. For a sense of the debate in 1606, see Michael L. Carrafiello, “Robert Parsons and Equivocation, 1606–1610,” The Catholic Historical Review 79, no. 4 (1993): 671– 80. 57. Cecil, An answere to certaine scandalous papers, E3. 58. Ibid., F. 59. William Overton, A godly and pithie exhortation, unnumbered pagination. For Overton’s active suppression of Catholics within the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, see Articles to be inquired of in the ordinarie visitation of the right reverende father in God William, Lorde bishop of Coventrie and Lichfielde (London, 1584), art. 7. 60. For the hard-liner Protestant view that Catholic recusancy implied blind fanaticism, see, e.g., Thomas Morton, An exact account of Romish doctrine in the case of conspiracy and rebellion out of the expresse dogmaticall principles of popish priests and doctors (London, 1605), 5: “6. In Parents. The father must disinherit his sonne, if he will be a Protestant. 7. In Children. A Priest returning into England, if his father bee a Protestant, hee may denie him to bee his father.” For an insightful discussion of the Calvinist Protestant view, see Tutino, Law and Conscience, 117– 32. 61. Marie-Claude Tucker, “Barclay, William (1546–1608),” and Nicolas Royan, “Barclay, John (1582–1621),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2008); hereafter cited as ODNB; all ODNB entries accessed in August 2016. See also William Barclay, De regno et regali potestate adversus Buchanaun, Brutum, Boucherium et reliquos Monarchomachos (Paris, 1600), and Tutino, Law and Conscience, 168– 69. 62. Paolo Sarpi, A full and satisfactorie answer to the late unadvised bull, thundred by Pope Paul the Fifth, against the renowned state of Venice being modestly entitled by the learned author, Considerations upon the censure of Pope Paul the Fifth, against the commonwealth of Venice; by Father Paul of Venice, a frier of the order of Servi. Translated out of Italian (London, 1606), 64– 65 and 73– 75. James cites Sarpi in his defense of the oath, dated 1607; see King James, Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus Apologia pro iuramento fidelitatis, adversus duo brevia P. Pauli Quinti, et epistolam Cardinalis Bellarmini, ad G. Blacvellum (London, 1608), 71. 63. Sarpi, A full and satisfactorie answer, 10–12. 64. See the second edition of Matthew Kellison’s A Survey of the New Religion (Douay, 1605), augmented with, an Epistle to James’s Privy Council, sec. 9, 5:

514 Notes to Pages 13–16 “Our religion commandeth us to honour our Prince, such as we al acknowledge most willingly King James to be; it teacheth us also, not for fear only, but for conscience to obey him in al temporal and civil matters, and so to give to God and his Holy Church what belongeth to them that we forget not to yield to Cesar what apparteneth to him. And besides Religion nature urgeth us to follow nature, that is to be kind to our countrie and not like ungrateful byrds to stayne the nest wherein we were hatched, nor as monstrous members to seke the destruction of that body of which we are parts and members.” 65. Ibid., 7. 66. Citing James I’s 1606 speech to Parliament, in Political Works of James I, 281. 67. William Perkins, The whole treatise of the cases of conscience distinguished into three bookes: the first whereof is revised and corrected in sundrie places, and the other two annexed. Taught and delivered by M.W. Perkins in his holy-day lectures, carefully examined by his owne briefes, and now published together for the common good, by T. Pickering Bachelour of Divinity (Printed by Iohn Legat, Printer to the Universitie of Cambridge, 1606). 68. Ibid., bk. 2, chap. 13, 379. 69. Ibid., 380 and 383. 70. Ibid., 385. 71. According to James Franklin, The Science of Conjecture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 69, “Jean Gerson seems to have been the first to introduce the term, occasionally still heard in English, ‘moral certainty’ (certitudo moralis) to mean a very high but not complete degree of persuasion.” 72. Perkins, The whole treatise of cases of conscience, bk. 2, chap. 13, sec. 2, 386. 73. See Perkins’s indecision in ibid., 394: “Thus the most and best Divines doe hold [that oaths taken under duress must be kept], but for my part, I leave it in suspense.” 74. Ibid., 387. 75. Ibid., chap. 13, sec. 3, 392. 76. Ibid., 395– 96. 77. Ibid., 395– 97. 78. Ibid., 397. 79. Ibid., 398. 80. De potestate papae Guillermi Barclaii, liber posthumus (Mussiponti, 1609), caput 30, 231– 45, especially 233: “Summus pontifex nihil praecipere vel dispensare potest contra jus naturale et divinum. Atqui subjectio et obedientia Principibus et superioribus debita, est de jure naturali et divino. Ergo summus Pontifex contra eam nihil praecipere vel dispensare potest.” 81. See James’s refutation of Bellarmine’s claim that the Jacobean oath implied denying papal supremacy in spiritual matters, in King James, An apologie for the oath of allegiance (London, 1609), 80.

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82. E. Coke, The Declarations and other Pleadings contained in the Eleven Parts of the Reports (London, 1659), 587; cited in David M. Jones, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth Century England (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1999), 70. 83. Ibid. See further Jones’s conclusion in Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth Century England, 102– 3.

. In the Clink 1. For Chillingworth, see Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 74 – 82; and Henry Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought, 1630–1690 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), 15– 32. Neither author discusses Dom Preston and his coreligionists at the Clink. 2. The papal breve is cited in An apologie for the oath of allegiance first set forth without a name and now acknowledged by the author, the right high and mightie prince, Iames by the grace of God King of Great Britaine (London, 1609), 13. See, further, Johann P. Sommerville, “Papalist Political Thought and the Controversy over the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance,” in Catholics and the “Protestant Nation”: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England, ed. Ethan Shagan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 162– 84. 3. Mr. George Blackwel, (made by Pope Clement 8. Arch-priest of England) his answeres upon sundry his examinations together, with his approbation and taking of the Oath of allegeance; and his letter written to his assistants and brethren, mooving them not onely to take the said Oath, but to advise all Romish Catholikes so to doe (London, 1607). 4. See Bellarmine’s letter, in both the original Latin and in English translation, in A large examination taken at Lambeth, according to his Majestie’s direction, point by point, of M.G. Blakwell, made Arch-priest of England by Pope Clement 8, Upon occasion of a certaine answere of his, without the privitie of the state, to a letter sent unto him from Cardinall Bellarmine, blaming him for taking the oath of Allegeance. Together with the Cardinals letter, and M. Blakwels said answere unto it. Also M. Blakwels letter to the Romish Catholickes in England, as well ecclesiasticall as lay (London, 1607). 5. Ibid., unnumbered pagination: “Ne in minimo quidem articulo fluctuasse me memini, qui certo et definitive ad sublimem majestatem et summam authoritatem Sedis Apostolicae pertineret.” 6. Ibid.: “nihil certi de Pontificis authoritate circa temporalia hactenus ab Ecclesia definitum est.” 7. Ibid., 157. 8. Ibid., 159.

516 Notes to Pages 19 – 20 9. Ibid., 160: “So there is no cause (for ought I know or can judge) why I should not still persevere in the approbation of the lawfulness of the said oath, and continue my former admonition to you for the submitting of yourselves to it, when it is exacted of you.” 10. Ibid., 161– 62. 11. See “M. Blackwel’s Letter to the Romish Catholickes,” in A Large examination, 148. 12. Dodd and Tierney, Dodd’s Church History of England, 5:76. 13. The full title of Robert Parsons’s refutation of Triplici nodo is as follows: The judgment of a Catholicke English-man, living in banishment for his religion. Written to his private friend in England. Concerning a late booke set forth, and entitled; Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus, or, An apologie for the oath of allegiance. Against two breves of Pope Paulus V to the Catholics of England; & a letter of Cardinall Bellarmine to M. George Blackwell, Arch-priest. Wherein, the said oath is shewed to be unlawfull unto a Catholicke conscience; for so much, as it conteyneth sundry clauses repugnant to his religion (Saint-Omer: English College Press, permissu superiorum, Anno 1608). 14. Ibid., 13. 15. See Warmington’s own account of his arrest in the preface to A moderate defence of the Oath of Allegiance (London, 1612). 16. The Letters and memorials of William, Cardinal Allen (1534–1594), ed. T. F. Knox (London, 1882), 374– 75. The list of the members of Cardinal Allen’s household in 1594 includes as entry 6: “Guglielmo Warmintono, sacerdote, maestro di casa et servitore da principio del Cardinalato.” 17. Peter Holmes, “Warmington, William,” ODNB. 18. Warmington’s own account in the preface to A moderate defence of the Oath of Allegiance : “I enter’d somewhat more deeply into the controversie of the oath of allegiance then before whilest I was at libertie, I had done. And presently consulting with some of my brethren whom I found there prisoners before my coming, I thought it very expedient to informe the Popes Holiness of the lamentable state of our countrie and what miseries and imminent dangers such Catholickes as would refuse the Oath were likely to fall into.” 19. See (the new archpriest) Birkhead’s letter to his assistants dated August 16, 1611, in Dodd’s Church History of England, vol. 4, appendix 33, clxxvi. The other priests at the Clink who are listed as having been deprived of their faculties for “scandalously persisting” in defending the oath are George Blackwell, Anthony Hebburne, Richard Sheldon, and William Collier. 20. A moderate defence of the Oath of Allegiance wherein the author proveth the said Oath to be most lawful, notwithstanding the Popes breves prohibiting the same; and solveth the chifest objections that are usually made against it; perswading the catholickes not to resist soveraigne authoritie in refusing it. Together with the oration of Sixtus 5 in the Consistory at Rome, upon the murther of Henrie 3 the French

Notes to Pages 20 – 22

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King by a friar. Whereunto also is annexed strange reports or newes from Rome. By William Warmington Catholicke priest, and oblate of the holy congregation of S. Ambrose (London, permissu superiorum, 1612). 21. Ibid., 7. 22. Ibid.: “And can any man marvell, that the Pope is therein named? . . . Some haply think themselves bound to obey him whatsoever he command, for that in their opinion he cannot err in commanding.” 23. Ibid., 8: “If you could satisfy us (say you) that nothing is therein contained against any article of faith; and that we may disobey his Holiness (who prohibiteth the taking thereof ) without danger of mortall sinne, you shall do us a singular pleasure.” 24. Ibid., 21– 22. 25. Ibid., 37. 26. Ibid., 36: “By which you may learne, and may secure your conscience, that the doctrine of deposition of princes, either directly or indirectly, ordinarily or extraordinarily, causally or by consequence, was never in such sort decreed in the Councell of Lateran, or any other Councell to this day: nor ever defined by any Pope ex cathedra (as some take it) in Consistorie, tamquam res fidei formaliter, as a matter of faith.” 27. Ibid., 38: “Some good Authors not only doubt whether the Pope alone may determine or define matters of faith, but plainly seeme to say, such a determination does not bind; and so he cannot without a generall Councell. Determinatio solius Papae (saith Gerson) in his quae sunt fidei, non obligat, ut praecise est talis ad credendum. The determination of the Pope alone, in matters of faith, as it is precisely such, bindeth not to beleeve.” 28. Ibid., 42– 43. 29. Ibid., 57– 58 and 61. 30. Ibid., 61. 31. Ibid., 116–17. 32. Ibid., 119: “It is a most certain principle in both divinitie and reason that what a man ex animo thinketh to be true, he may truly say, yea and sweare too.” 33. Ibid.: “For answere you shall first understand, that a man may abhorre or detest a doctrine as he would detest yea heresie itself, yet not affirme the doctrine which he so detesteth to be heresie.” 34. Ibid., 120. 35. Ibid., 63. 36. Sir F. G. Warner, Catalogue of the MSS and Monuments of Alleyn’s College at Dulwich (London: Longmans, 1891), 29, item 47 (fol. 67), dated March 9, 1608: “Howseholders two hundred and one: of them being watermen one hundred and more of handy trades; besides one hundred and one verie poore people widows and others all being readye to take and nott one of them fitt to geve”; cited by E. J. Burford, In the Clink (London: New English Library, 1977), 106.

518 Notes to Pages 22 – 25 37. A vivid picture of the contemporary underworld of vagabonds, beggars, criminals, and prostitutes is found in The belman of London; bringing to light the most notorious villanies that are noew practiced in the kingdome: profitable for gentlemen, lawyers, merchants, citizens, framers, masters of households, and all sorts of servants to marke, and delightfull for all men to read (London, 1608). 38. Thomas Preston, A Theological Disputation concerning the oath of allegiance (London, 1613), 252. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid.: “He oftentimes avouched to mee and to others that hee should for the aforesaid causes [shortness of breath and obstructions] be taken away sodainly.” 41. Ibid.: “After he was come into his owne chamber, he fel into a sudden sowne, but by the diligence of those priests who incontinently were present, he was brought to himself againe, and after he had put off his clothes and was laid in bed, he humbly craved those Ecclesiasticall rites which usually are given to those who are extremely sicke, if they judge it requisite.” 42. Ibid., 253: “I omit to speake how religious, and without blame his conversation was after hee had taken the Oath, for of this all those who have lived with him in prison can give sufficient testimonie.” 43. Ibid.: “After he had written a book in defence of the oath, he was wholly deprived of that common Almes which by the benevolence of some good persons is sometimes sent to those who are detained in prions.” 44. Calendar of State Papers (Domestic), 1626, I Charles I, 31c87; cited by Burford, In the Clink, 123. 45. Maurus Lunn, “English Benedictines and the Oath of Allegiance, 1606–1647,” Recusant History 10 (October 1969): 151. 46. Preston’s biographer Anselm Cramer suggests Shropshire. See Cramer, “Preston, Roland [name in religion Thomas; pseudo. Roger Widdrington] (1567–1647), Benedictine monk,” ODNB. 47. See Rev. E. J. Mahoney, The Theological Position of Gregory Sayrus, O.S.B., 1560–1602 (Ware: Jennings and Bewley, 1922), 14–15. 48. On Preston’s involvement with Dom Sigebert Buckley, sole survivor of the Westminster Benedictines, see R. H. Connolly, “The Buckley Affair,” Downside Review 49 (1931): 49– 74. 49. For the date of 1608, see “Admonitio ad Lectorem,” in Apologia Cardinalis Bellarmini pro jure principium. Adversus suas ipsius rationes pro auctoritate papali principes seculares in ordine ad bonum spirituale deponendi. Authore Rogero Widdringtono Catholico Anglo (Cosmopoli [i.e., London], 1611), 3. For Preston’s pos sible connection with the Venetian ambassador, see Cramer, “Preston, Roland.” 50. On the Dominican School of Salamanca, including most prominently Francis Vittoria (1492–1546), Melchior Cano (1509– 60), Dominico Soto, and Bartholomew of Medina (1527– 81), see Th. Deman, “Probabilisme,” in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique (Paris: Library Letouzey, 1936), vol. 13, cols. 457– 70.

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51. Bartholomew of Medina, Commentaria in primam secundae (Salamanca, 1577), I–II.19.6. 52. For a succinct and state-of-the-art introduction, see Rudolf Schüssler, “On the Anatomy of Probabilism,” in Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity, ed. J. Kraye and R. Saarinen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 91–113; and R. Schüssler, Moral im Zweifel, Band II, Die Herausforderung des Probabilismus (Paderborn: Mentis Verlag, 2006), 94– 96. See also Robert A. Maryks, Saint Cicero and the Jesuits (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 107– 25. 53. Gabriel Vasquez, Commentaria ac disputationes in iam-IIae Sum, theol. S. Th. Aq. Dis. LXII, c. iv, t. 1 (Venice, 1608), 353; cited by Deman, “Probabilisme,” col. 470. 54. Gregory Sayrus, Clavis Regia Sacerdotum Casuum Conscientiae, sive Theologiae Moralis thesauri, 7th ed. (Antwerp, 1619), lib. 1, c. ii; cited by Mahoney, The Theological Position of Gregory Sayrus, 67– 70. 55. Ibid., lib. 1, c. iii; cited in Mahoney, The Theological Position of Gregory Sayrus, 70. 56. Apologia Cardinalis Bellarmini pro jure principum, sec. 464, p. 354. 57. Ibid., sec. 468, p. 356. 58. Ibid., sec. 469, p. 357. For the “possession principle,” see Schüssler, Moral im Zweifel, 96–100. 59. Ibid., sec. 470, p. 359. 60. Lunn, “English Benedictines and the Oath of Allegiance,” 150 and fn. 33. 61. Rogeri Widdringtoni Catholici Angli Responsio apologetica ad libellum cuiusdam Doctoris Theologi, qui eius pro jure principum apologiam tanquam fidei Catholicae aperte repugnantem, atque ethnicismum sapientem, falso, indocte, et seditiose criminatur (Cosmopoli [i.e., London], 1612). For a discussion of Schulcken as Preston’s opponent, see David Lunn, English Benedictines, 1540–1688 (London: Burns and Oates, 1980), 46– 47. 62. Ibid., “Praefatio ad lectorem,” sec. 9. 63. The full title is informative: A theologicall disputation concerning the oath of allegiance dedicated to the most holy father Pope Paul the fifth. Wherein all the principall arguments which have hitherto been brought by Cardinal Bellarmine, Iacobus Gretzer, Leonard Lessius, Martin Becanus, and divers others, against the new oath of allegiance, lately established in England by act of Parliament, are sincerely, perspicuously, and exactly examined. By Roger Widdrington, an English Catholike. Translated out of Latin into English by the author himselfe, whereunto hee hath also added an appendix, wherein all the arguments, which that most learned divine Franciscus Suarez, hath lately brought for the Popes power to depose princes, and against the aforesaid oath of allegiance, are sincerely rehearsed, and answered (London, 1613, permissu superiorum). 64. A theologicall disputation, chap. 10, sec. 2, 187 (emphasis added). 65. Ibid., 198; Preston’s account of Vasquez is found in chap. 10, sec. 2, 187– 200.

520 Notes to Pages 29 – 33 66. A copy of the decree wherein two bookes of Roger Widdrington an English Catholick are condemned, and the author commanded to purge himself; and a copy of the purgation which the same Roger Widdrington sent to his Holiness Pope Paul the fifth (London, permissu superiorum, 1614), 25. 67. Ibid., 18. 68. See, e.g., ibid., 20. 69. Ibid., 21. 70. Ibid., 236. 71. Ibid., 23. 72. A cleare, sincere, and modest confutation of the unsound, fraudulent and intemperate reply of T. F. who is knowne to be Mr. Thomas Fitzherbert now an English Jesuite (London, 1616). 73. A copy of the decree wherein two bookes of Roger Widdrington an English Catholike are condemned, 30: “Neither am I prest on [“pressed on”] to write against T. F. or any other to shew my wit, as hee falsely affirmeth. . . . I neither am, nor ever will be ashamed to be prest on [“pressed on”] to write against this T. F. or any other.”

. A Youth from Coventry 1. Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses (1691), 2:481. Since Wood was himself not yet fifteen when he matriculated at Merton College in May 1647, he may have paid special attention to this detail. 2. Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, antiquary, of Oxford, 1632–1695, described by Himself, collected from his diaries and other papers by Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900), 2:168– 69, 191– 92, 198, and 400. See also J. B. Dockery, Christopher Davenport: Friar and Diplomat (London: Burns and Oates, 1960), 134; and Wood’s description of Christopher Davenport as “my good friend” inscribed on the title page of one of Christopher Davenport’s English works, A Cleare Vindication of Roman Catholicks from a Fowle Aspersion, printed in 1659 (in frontispiece of Dockery’s book). 3. For Wood’s raptures upon reading Dugdale’s book, see Wood, Life and Times of Anthony Wood, 1:209. 4. For William Dugdale’s education at the free grammar school of Coventry from 1615 to 1620, see Wood, “Fasti Oxonienses,” in Athenae Oxonienses (1691), 2:693. 5. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 1:427: “Dr. Bagshaw died and was buried at Paris, after the year sixteen hundred twenty and five as I have been informed by Franc. A Sancta Clara, who remembered and knew the Doctor well, but had forgotten the exact time of his death.” 6. Citing Bernard William Henderson, Merton College (London: F. E. Robinson, 1899), 95.

Notes to Pages 33– 34

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7. The librarian, Thomas James, in a speech to King James in 1611, counted “French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danes, Bohemians, Polonians, Jewes, Ethiopians and others”; cited in Charles Edward Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford (New York: Longmans Green, 1924), 2:129n2. 8. See J. R. L. Highfield, Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, 1603–1660 (Oxford: The Boydell Press, 2006), xi; and Mordechai Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 47– 48. 9. Citing Highfield, Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, xii. As Highfield explains, Saville’s boast was an exaggeration, but indeed “there were more than twenty fellows in all years except one (1619) and on two occasions (in 1608 and 1609) the number had reached twenty-eight.” 10. The Chamberlain Letters: A Selection of the Letters of John Chamberlain Concerning Life in England from 1597 to 1626, ed. Elizabeth McClure Thomson (New York: Putnam, 1965), 98. 11. William Camden, Britannia sive Florentissimorum regnorum Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae (London, 1607), 267. English translation by Philemon Holland, Britain, or A chorographical description of the most flourishing kingdoms, England, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1610), 377. 12. See Holland’s son Abraham’s doleful description of Coventry as a “luckless Cage, Wherein you have bin cooped up all your ag”; cited by John Considine, “Holland, Philemon (1552–1637),” ODNB. 13. He thus appears as bachelor of arts and probationer fellow in the first year of James I’s reign, 1603, the nineteenth year of Henry Saville’s wardenship, and under “Magistri in artibus” in 1607; see Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, 1603–1660, 4 and 42. 14. Mallet, A History of the University of Oxford, 2:240, and fn. 4, on the Stat utes of 1607 and 1610. 15. Citing Henderson, Merton College, 189. See also Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis 1603–1660, xxiv, and 92: “quod experientia compertum esset rem esse noxiam bonis moribus collegii et ad corrumpendam veterem disciplinam plurium tendere.” The initial decision to admit twelve commoners or “pentioners” is on page 44. 16. Henderson, Merton College, 190. The conditions imposed on the six commoners include that “they must be sons of knights, baronets and gentlemen. Each must present a silver cup, value 5 pounds, to the College. All must attend disputations and lectures. None may enter the Masters’ garden unless accompanied by a Master.” 17. Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, xxiv and xxv. Highfield reports that gentlemen-commoners were required to “give a piece of silver of at least 10 ounces on admission” and “pay caution money of 50 shillings.” For the two youths’ status as battelers, see Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 2:485. For more on the status of batteler, see Thomas Salmon, The Present State of the Universities, and the Five

522 Notes to Pages 34 – 36 Adjacent Counties (1744), 423: “The Commoners I presume are so called from their communing together, and having a certain Portion of Meat and Drink provided for them, denominated Commons. The battelers are entitled to no Commons, but purchase their Meat and Drink of the Cook and Butler.” 18. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 2:485. 19. Ibid.: “Their parents being unwilling.” 20. For more on the emergence of “polite learning” and its impact, see Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, 29– 30 and 190– 213. 21. See Saville’s decision to require a cautionary deposit from commoners on March 19, 1611. In Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, 62. 22. Reginald W. Ingram, ed., Coventry (Records of Early English Drama) (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1981), 390. 23. Francis Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 20. 24. Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, 71. 25. Ibid., 73. 26. Ibid., 84. 27. Wood, “Fasti Oxonienses,” in Athenae Oxonienses, 1:817, where Wood states that, on May 28, 1614, a completely different Christopher Davenport, who had studied in Dublin, is received B. A.: “This Person was no writer, as I can yet learn, yet I set him down, lest posterity take him to be the Christopher Davenport who was now (1614) a Student in Merton College.” 28. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 2:485. Wood’s account is inconsistent, implying in Christopher’s entry that John transferred early to Magdalen Hall while Christopher continued at Merton College (485), but stating in John’s entry that John stayed two years at Merton College as Samuel Lane’s pupil (333). 29. Ibid., 2:485 and 333: “John Davenport, elder brother to Christopher Davenport.” 30. See A. Wood, The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford, ed. John Gutch, from manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford, 1792–1796), bk. 1, 354, Anno 1625: “John Davenport, sometime of Magdalen Hall (brother to Christopher Davenport commonly called Franciscus à Sancta Clara).” 31. Wood states that Christopher was “the son of John Davenport by Elizabeth Wolley his wife,” which is clearly wrong since Elizabeth Wolley married John the Puritan; see Athenae Oxonienses, 2:485. 32. Alternatively, Wood may have used the term “brother” loosely. This interpretation, however, is unlikely, given the careful distinctions drawn by Wood between “brother” and “kinsman,” or between “nephew” and “near of kin.” See, e.g., Wood, “Fasti Oxonienses,” Athenae Oxonienses, 1:817 (William Hakewill is described as Thomas Bodley’s “Kinsman” while Laurence Bodley is described as Thomas Bodley’s “Brother”), and 1:819 (Edward James and Thomas James are described as “Brethren,” while Francis James is described as “near of kin” and Richard James as “their Nephew”).

Notes to Pages 36 – 37

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33. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 137– 38; and A. P. Cambers, “Davenport, Christopher (c. 1595–1680),” ODNB. Bremer also argues that Christopher was John’s nephew, the son of John’s older brother, Barnabas (Building a New Jerusalem, 26). Bremer, moreover, believes that Christopher the future Franciscan was the same Christopher Davenport who studied in Dublin and received his Oxford degree in 1614, contrary to Wood’s express warning not to confuse the two. 34. Following Dockery, Chambers, in ODNB, states that Christopher was “the eldest of three children of Barnabas Davenport and Mary Glover.” Yet the final record posted by Robert Ralsey Davenport (before his premature death in July 2010) indicates that Barnabas Davenport was christened on July 17, 1586, and that his wife, Mary Glover, was born ca. 1597, making them unlikely candidates for being Christopher’s parents. 35. Parish Registers of Holy Trinity, Coventry, Warwickshire Record Office, TG 7 (1986): 132. 36. “The City of Coventry: Crafts and Industries: Modern Industry and Trade,” in A History of the County of Warwick, vol. 8, The City of Coventry and Borough of Warwick, ed. W. B. Stephens (London: Victoria County History, 1969), 162– 89. 37. “The City Annals or Mayor’s lists of the City of Coventry,” in F. B. Burbidge, Old Coventry and Lady Godiva (Birmingham: Cornish Bros., 1952), 233. 38. For two examples of multiple marriages (four times and three times) in Henry’s family background, see, e.g., Bernard Burke, A Genealogical and heraldic dictionary of the landed gentry of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Henry Colburn, 1847). 39. For Henry Davenport’s second marriage, to Elizabeth Bennett, see The Visitation of the County of Warwick in the Year 1619. Taken by William Camden, Clarencieux King of Arms, ed. John Fetherston (London, 1877), 373: “Henricus Davenport de Coventry = Elizab. Fil. Tho. Bennett de Ebley in Com. Glouc. Uxor 2.” For the Bennett family of Ebley Court, see “Stonehouse: Economic History,” A History of the County of Gloucester, vol. 10, Westbury and Whitstone Hundreds (1972), 276 – 84: “John Bennett held the mills in the early 16th century and his son William after 1536. He or a later William was working the fulling-mill in 1578 and his son Thomas in 1580. Thomas, who built Ebley Court in 1587, died c. 1598 and his son Leonard in 1621.” At this time, Coventry drapers were importing cloth from Gloucester to be finished in Coventry. 40. Sancta Clara, Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico, Authore P. Francisco Coventriensi Anglo (Antwerp, 1652), caput 6, tertius, 119: “in muliere praegnante pater absens ob semen suum alteratum in matre, saepissime patitur dolores partus et naturalium progressuum in formatione infantis; sic pater meus longe distans, ut mihi retulerunt uterque parens.” 41. See Robert Davenport, “Descendants of Edward Davenport of Henbury and Coventry”; online file available at “The Davenport Index,” http://homepages .rootsweb.ancestry.com/~nvjack/davnport/. Thomas Davenport had a first son,

524 Notes to Pages 37– 41 William, born 1559 in Coventry, who died after 1578 in Coventry; then a second son, William the Younger, born 1564 in Coventry, who died after 1578. Thus they were alive together with the same name. 42. Ibid. Henry named a first Henry (his son by Winifred), who was christened at Holy Trinity in March 1594 and died before 1619, and a second Henry (his son by Elizabeth Bennet), who was born between 1600 and 1619 and who died 1658. 43. N. J. Higham, The Origins of Cheshire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 174. 44. Deeds and papers relating to lands at Stoneleigh, DR 18/10/95/13, January 29, 1562: “Bond in penal sum of 200 lbs. from Thomas Damport, Coventry, clothmaker. To Sir Thomas Leigh to perform covenants in assignment of lease, dated 22 August 1560, of the site of the monastery of Stoneleigh.” 45. Henry’s fourth son, Christopher, by his first marriage is depicted as married (to Frances Higenson) and Henry’s two Christopher grandsons (sons of Edward and Barnabas) were born, respectively, in 1612 and 1614. 46. Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem, 55. 47. See “The MS. Annals of the City of Coventry,” printed in Burbidge, Old Coventry and Lady Godiva, 233. 48. Ibid., 236. 49. “The City of Coventry: Crafts and Industries: Modern Industry and Trade,” 162– 89. 50. “The MS. Annals of the City of Coventry,” 236. 51. Burbidge, Old Coventry and Lady Godiva, 148– 49; and Richard L. Greaves, Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 311. 52. W. Dugdale, The antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated (London, 1656), 95: “I now come to speak of that stately Cross here, being one of the chief things wherein this City most glories; which for workmanship and beauty is inferior to none in England.” 53. For Mary Stuart’s captivity in Coventry, see John Daniel Leader, Mary Queen of Scots in captivity: a narrative of events from January, 1569 to December, 1584, whilst George Earl of Shrewsbury was the guardian of the Scottish Queen (Sheffield: Leader and Sons, 1880). 54. “The MS. Annals of the City of Coventry,” 236– 37. 55. Mary Dormer Harris, The Story of Coventry (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1911), 165. 56. Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem, 20– 21; and Thomas Cooper, The Romish spider, with its web of treason (London, 1606), 4. 57. History, gazetteer, and directory of Warwickshire, 481. For a sense of the meaning attached to floods by contemporaries, see God’s Warning to his people of England (London, 1607), which describes the great flood of Bristol and Gloucester in January 1607.

Notes to Pages 41– 44

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58. For Coventry drapers and mercers, see Ronald M. Berger, The Most Necessary Luxuries: The Mercers’ Company of Coventry, 1550–1680 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 143– 45. 59. Two entries from the Coventry Leet Book capture the problem: “1538. John Cotton, mercer, Mayor. Fryer Forrest Hanged and Burned in Smithfield. All images pulled down and Pilgrimages forbidden, and a large English printed Bible placed in every Church for all men to see.” And further: “Anno 1547 the Lord Protector and the rest of the Councell sent Commissions unto all parts of the Realme willing them to take all images out of the Churches for the avoiding of Idolatry”; both reprinted in Burbidge, Old Coventry and Lady Godiva, 227 and 228. 60. See K. R. Wark, Elizabethan Recusancy in Cheshire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), 3:49, and fn. 2: “Judging by the list of fines imposed between June 1580 and July 1583, Christopher Davenport of Woodford is the possible recusant.” 61. Ames’s 1611 letter is found in The Coventry Leet Book: or Mayor’s Register, ed. Mary D. Harris (London 1909, 1913; Klaus Reprint, New York, 1971), pts. 3– 4, 834 – 35. For the reaction of Coventrians, see “The City Annals or Mayor’s Lists of the City of Coventry,” in Burbidge, Old Coventry and Lady Godiva, 338. 62. John Considine, “Holland, Philemon (1552 –1637),” ODNB. Holland became “usher, or junior of the two full-time masters” at the Coventry free school in 1579. 63. Citing Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem, 19. 64. Wood, History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford, bk. 2, 288– 89, reports that Laud was ostracized: “It was a scandal for any person to be seen in his company, or to give him the usual compliment or time of day as he passed the streets.” 65. See the list of theological disputation topics in Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, 45. 66. For Samuel Lane’s status in 1607, see ibid., 43. For the office of dean, see G. H. Martin and J. R. L. Highfield, A History of Merton College, Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 266– 67, cited here verbatim. 67. Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, ed. H. Foley (London: Burns and Oats, 1875– 83), 2:382. 68. Ibid., 2:182. 69. Recounted by Wood, History of Oxford, 1:305 (an. 1610). 70. In 1604, Saville made Lane “bacchalaureus Williot” (Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, 20.) 71. See 1609, “magister Lane variavit in his questionibus,” in Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, 51. 72. Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, 47– 48; and Richard Westman, “The Astronomer’s Role in the Sixteenth Century,” History of Science 18 (1980): 129 (cited by M. Feingold).

526 Notes to Pages 44 – 46 73. Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, 48; and Adam Mosley, “Chamber, John (1546–1604),” ODNB. 74. Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, 49 and fn. 13. 75. Following Michael Foster’s suggestion in “Thomas Allen (1540–1632), Gloucester Hall and the Survival of Catholicism in Post-Reformation Oxford,” Oxoniensia 46 (1981): 103. For Saville’s friendship with Thomas Allen, see Michael Foster, “Thomas Allen, Gloucester Hall and the Bodleian Library,” Downside Review 100, no. 339 (1982): 116– 37. In March 1613, at Bodley’s funeral, Allen’s student, the antiquary Brian Twyne, cited Galileo’s telescopic observations; see Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, 73. 76. Foster, “Thomas Allen (1540–1632),” 104 and fn. 27. 77. Ibid., 124. Foster cites the following remarkable anecdote about the Reede family of Bonsil Castle, Herefordshire: “About the year 1600 their sleep was plagued by visits of a restless spirit and they were advised, perhaps by the Scudamores of Holme Lacy, to consult Allen. After studying the matter, his opinion was that the only way to pacify the intruder was to obtain the bones of a Lord Beauchamp who had formerly owned the Castle. When this was done the trouble ceased. The bones, enclosed in a cedar box, were kept by the Reedes, whence they passed to the Sheldons.” 78. Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, 88. 79. Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship, 190– 213. 80. Francis Mason, Of the consecration of the bishops in the Church of England with their succession, jurisdiction, and other things incident to their calling; as also of the ordination of priests and deacons. Five books, by Francis Mason, Batchelour of Divinitie, and sometimes fellow of Merton Colledge [sic] in Oxford (London, 1613). 81. Mason, Of the consecration of the bishops in the Church of England; Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 1:393. 82. Andrew Clark, ed., Register of the University of Oxford, (1571–1622), 2:177: “1614. I. In Vesperiis: 1. An mundus inferior regatur a superiore? Aff.; 2. An ex observatione siderum de futuris dari possit conjectura? Neg.; 3. An Jesuitae corruperint omnes scientias? Aff.” 83. Foster, “Thomas Allen (1540–1632), Gloucester Hall and the Survival of Catholicism,” 109. 84. Register of the University of Oxford, (1571–1622), 2:209: “1613. In vesperiis Danielis Price: 3. Papistica religio in libera protestantium republica non est toleranda.” Doctoral candidates were required to present an in vesperiis lecture debating important questions on the eve of commencement. 85. Wood, History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford, bk. 2, 321. 86. Ibid. 87. See the letter sent by John “Club Foot” Hales to Protector Somerset after entertaining Queen Elizabeth at his home, Hales place, in Coventry; cited by William Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, 1:146.

Notes to Pages 46 – 48

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88. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 2:485: “So that having spent about two years among the Mertonians, he [Christopher] by the invitation of some Rom. Priest then living in or near Oxon, went to Douay an. 1615.” 89. Martin and Highfield, A History of Merton College, Oxford, 16 and 34. 90. Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, 83: “Eodem etiam die magister Napper ballivus de Holliwell, Oxon’, Witny, London computavit in saccario.” 91. See, e.g., Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 170– 71. 92. Catholic Record Society, Publication (London, 1905), 1:134. 93. Ibid. From Edmund Napper’s family papers: “This was for recusancy, or for harbouring priests.” 94. Ibid.: “Wm. Napper went to Douay, where he assumed the surname of his great great grandmother, Anne, daughter of John Russell. He took the habit at the English Franciscan Monastery at Douay under the religious name of Marianus in 1639.” 95. Cited by Foster, “Thomas Allen (1540–1632), Gloucester Hall and the Survival of Catholicism,” 104. 96. As Foster points out in “Thomas Allen (1540–1632), Gloucester Hall and the Survival of Catholicism,” Allen was “a Church Papist of the most circumspect— not a Counter-Reformation, nor even a Marian, Catholic but a survivor from Reformation Renaissance humanism.” 97. See, e.g., Harris, The Story of Coventry, 264: “The gifts of Sir Thomas White, mayor of London and founder of S. John’s College, Oxford, whom Mary knighted for his loyalty at the time of Wyatt’s rebellion, surpassed the rest. At the time of their greatest need, in 1543, he lent the corporation 1400 pounds, wherewith they purchased certain lands and tenements confiscated at the Reformation.” Christopher’s grandfather Edmund was Coventry Sheriff in 1541 and magistrate in 1543; see The Coventry Leet Book, pt. 3, 768. 98. William Dugdale, who sat in the very same choir stalls as a schoolboy, would write, in Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), 105, speaking of the Reformation: “At which time the church itself, though a most beautifull Cathedrall, And the mother-Church of this City, scap’t not the rude hands of the destroyers; but was pull’d in pieces and reduc’t to rubbish.” 99. C. E. Mallett, A History of the University of Oxford (London: Methuen and Co., 1924), 2:71– 72 and 174– 78. For White’s charity to Coventry, see Alexandra Shepard, “White, Sir Thomas (1495?–1567),” ODNB. For the close connection between White’s Coventry annuities and St. John’s College, see Harris, The Story of Coventry, 264; and Mallett, A History of the University of Oxford, 2:176. 100. Christopher’s great-grandmother was Emma Blount, of Blount’s Hall, “about a mile to the west of Uttoxeter”; see Francis Redfern, History of the Town of Uttoxeter, 330. See also T.W. Whitley, The Parliamentary Representation of the City of Coventry (Coventry: Curtis and Beamish, 1894), 49, where Christopher’s

528 Notes to Pages 48 – 49 great-grandfather and namesake is described as married to “Emma, daughter of William Blunt, of Burton-on-Trent.” In the earlier Warwickshire quarterly magazine, The Old Cross, ed. William George Fretton (1879), Emma is described as “daughter and heiress of John Blunt, of Burton-upon-Trent, County of Stafford.” For Allen’s Uttoxeter family, see Foster, “Thomas Allen (1540–1632), Gloucester Hall and the Survival of Catholicism,” 101– 2. 101. Register of the University of Oxford, 2:212: “In Comitiis (10 July). 1. An sinodi Tridentinae judicium sit infallibile? Neg.; 2. An Tridentini possint cum vere Catholicis conciliari? Neg. 3; An contra Tridentinos citra haeresim liceat asserere homines justificari sola imputatione justitiae Christi? Aff.” There follows the statement: “13 April 1615, Samuel Lane, M. A. Mert., was dispensed to respond to the Doctors in Theology in the Comitia, and to count this for his B. D.” 102. See ibid. Lane, as we see, was supposed to prepare three arguments: (1) denying that the judgment of the Council of Trent is infallible; (2) denying that Tridentine positions are reconcilable with true Catholic positions; and (3) affirming, against Trent, that it is permissible to hold that justification is based solely on Christ’s justification without falling into heresy. 103. Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, 8: “Iunii 10 sigillata est praesentatio ad rectoriam de Ibston magistro Lane.” 104. For the early association of Merton College with Gamlingay, see Martin and Highfield, A History of Merton College, 17. 105. Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, 91. Merton College owned substantial property in Gamlingay, Cambridgeshire, and disposed of the half rectorship. 106. In a book of philosophy published in 1652, as we will see, Christopher describes himself on the title page as “formerly a student at Magdalen Hall.” Wood specifies that “Christopher continued longer [than John] in the College [Merton], especially upon Sir Henries [sic] recess to Eaton, but upon his return withdrew.” He reports Christopher’s stay “among the Mertonians” to have been “about two years.” 107. John Rouse Bloxam, A Register of the Members of St. Mary Magdalen College, Oxford (London: H. Frowde, 1894–1915), 3:117–19. 108. The Register of the University of Oxford, 11:210: “Omnia non-renatorum opera sunt peccata.” 109. Richard L. Greaves, “Pemble, William (1591/2–1623),” ODNB; and Feingold, “The Mathematical Sciences and New Philosophies,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4, Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 388, 451, 468– 69. 110. See, e.g., his characteristic tone in De origine formarum (published posthumously at Oxford in 1669, based on his Magdalen Hall lectures), 17: “Vide enim, Terrae gleba macerata in aqua . . . Quaeritur hic an forma terrae post tot praeparationes maneat tamen integra et invariata usque ad ipsissimum transmutationis momentum? Quis sanae mentis affirmaverit?” 111. Ibid., 20.

Notes to Pages 49 – 51

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112. Ibid.: “Nec quisquam qui veritatem e puteo extrahat, praeter Zabarellam repertus est.” 113. The Register of the University of Oxford, 10:212. In vesperiis, Samuel Clarke affirmed that royal power comes immediately from God and denied that the pope has either the authority to depose princes or the power to absolve a subject from his oath of loyalty. 114. See Vernon G. Wilkins, “Field, Richard (1561–1616),” ODNB. 115. Richard Field, Of the Church, Five Books (Oxford, 1635), bk. 5 (originally published separately in 1610), chaps. 48– 52, and appendix to bk. 5, 61 (“whether generall Councels may erre.”) 116. Ibid., bk. 3, chap. 43, “Of universality,” 169. 117. Ibid., bk. 3, chap. 6, 81; and appendix to bk. 5, 883: “Yet we have not departed from the Romane Church wherein our Fathers lived and dyed, but onely from the faction that was in it.” 118. Ibid., bk. 3, chap. 41, 161. 119. Ibid., bk. 4, chap. 2, 344; and The Fifth Book of the Church (London, 1610), appendix, pt. 2, 30– 31: “I will require no other consent of Fathers then [sic] Vincentius Lyrinenses doth, who will have us onely to followe that doctrine of the Fathers, as certaine, which all with one consent, have holden, written and taught, that have written of such things.” 120. Field, Of the Church, Five Books, bk. 4, chap. 2, 344: “They will object that every one of the Fathers was subject to error. I confesse it; but yet God according to his promise, as I have above declared, was so to direct and governe them, that they should not all erre.” 121. Ibid., “The Epistle Dedicatory,” 3: “I thought it my dutie to offer to your Graces censure, before they [my labours] should present themselves to the view of the world; that so, either finding approbation, they might the more confidently make themselves publike, or otherwise be suppressed, like the untimely fruit, that never saw the Sunne.” 122. Michael Questier, “Crypto-Catholicism, Anti-Calvinism and Conversion at the Jacobean Court: The Enigma of Benjamin Carier,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47, no. 1 (1996): 45– 64. 123. Richard Field, The Fifth booke of the Church, pt. 2, 30– 31. 124. Citing Foster, “Thomas Allen (1540–1632), Gloucester Hall and the Survival of Catholicism,” 118 and fn. 124. 125. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England, 331– 32. 126. John Gennings, The Life and Martyrdom of M. Edmund Gennings, priest (St. Omers, 1614), 93–100. 127. Thompson Cooper proposes “1614 or 1615”; see Thompson Cooper and Rev. G. Bradley, “Gennings, John (c. 1576–1660),” ODNB. 128. Following Questier’s intuition that the English Church had lost the power to accommodate a sufficiently diverse array of spiritual paths; see Questier, “Crypto-

530 Notes to Pages 51– 55 Catholicism, Anti-Calvinism and Conversion at the Jacobean Court,” 58– 59. The emergence of Nicholas Ferrar’s religious community of Little Gidding in 1626 seems to corroborate Questier’s intuition and also to underscore that the absence of religious orders, most especially, may have weakened the English Church. 129. See, e.g., Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England, 202, 207, 221. 130. See Anne Hope, Franciscan Martyrs in England (London: Burns and Oates, 1878), 107, who reports, based on Angel Mason’s Certamen Seraphicum, that Nicholas Day “was on the mission in England when the new Province was founded, and was transferred to it.” 131. Reported by Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 2:486. 132. Letter from the Archduke Albert of Flanders to the Magistrates of Douay, dated January 4, 1616 (N. S.); cited by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 19. (N. S. is “New Style,” Gregorian calendar, adopted on the Continent but not in England.) 133. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 20; citing de Soto’s application to Douay of February 18, 1616 (N. S.). Dockery also reports that de Soto sent Hugo Cavellus to Douay as his representative. 134. Peter Guilday, The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent, 1558–1795 (London, 1914), 1:287. 135. For the key importance of letters of recommendation for admission to the English College of Douay, see Third Douay Diary, ed. Edwin H. Burton (London, 1911), 1:133 (where it is recorded that a Thomas Bullin sought to be admitted without a letter and was rejected) and 341. 136. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England, 324 and 337. 137. Third Douay Diary, 136– 37: “Die 10 Augusti. Eodem die Christophorus Davenporte (hic Lathroppus nuncupatus) postquam logicam ut alumnus per annum frequentasset, e Collegio, ut Habitum Franciscanorum susciperet, recessit.” 138. Peter J. Amade, Beggars, Iconoclasts, and Civic Patriots: The Political Culture of the Dutch Revolt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 126– 32. 139. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 18. . Franciscan Probabilism and the Gift of Conscience 1. See Sancta Clara’s later praise of de Soto’s efforts in his Fragmenta vel Historia Minor (1658 ed.), 126. 2. For de Soto’s relationship to the Infanta Isabella, see Cordula van Wyhe, “Court and Convent: The Infanta Isabella and Her Franciscan Confessor Andrés de Soto,” Sixteenth Century Journal 25, no. 2 (2004): 411– 45. 3. A. de Soto, La contemplacion del Crucifixo (1613), 9–10; cited by van Wyhe, “Court and Convent,” 419. 4. Mgr. Paul Guérin, “Sainte Isbergue ou Giselle, Vierge, et Saint Venant, Martyr,” in Les petits bollandistes vies des saints (Paris, 1888), 6:84– 89.

Notes to Pages 55 – 59

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5. The canonization process concerning Saint Venant was conducted from 1608 to 1612. Pierre Paunet, who will be made bishop of St. Omer at Isabella’s request in 1628, will found a special fraternity in honor of Saint Venant. See also Eugène Van Drival, Légendaire de la Morinie, ou Vies des saints de l’ancien Diocèse de Thérouanne (Boulogne, 1850), 282; and Van Drival, Vie abrégée de sainte Isbergue, vierge (Arras, 1865), 103. 6. Servio Dirk, Histoire littéraire et bibliographique des Frères mineurs de l’observance (1886), 216–18. 7. Lucien Ceyssens, “Pierre Marchant OFM: Son attitude devant le jansénisme,” Franciscana 20 (1965): 26– 65. See also Thomas O’Connor, Irish Jansenists, 1600–1700 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008), 71. 8. Dirk, Histoire littéraire et bibliographique, 217. 9. Pierre Marchant, Tribunal sacramentale et visibile animarum in hoc vita mortali (Ghent, 1642), “Prologus ad lectorem.” 10. Ibid., tomus 1, tractatus 1, quaestio 3, conclusio 1, 2– 3. 11. Ibid., quaestio 9. 12. Ibid., 22. 13. Ibid., tractatus 5, titulus 4, quaestio 4, 206. 14. Ibid., 166. 15. Ibid., 168. 16. Ibid., tractatus 5, titulus 5, quaestio 1, 213. 17. Ibid., conclusio 2, 214. 18. Ibid., quaestio 3, conclusio 1. 19. Ibid., 216. 20. On this doctrine, see M. Dubois-Quinard, Laurent de Paris: Une doctrine du pur amour en France au début du XVIIème siècle (Rome: Bibliotheca SeraphicoCapuccina, 1959), and Kent Emery Jr., “The Carthusians, Intermediaries for the Teaching of John Ruysbroeck during the Period of the Early Reform and in the Counter-Reformation,” Miscellanea cartusiensia 4 (= Analecta catusiana 43) (Salz burg, 1979), 100–129. 21. Marchant, Tribunal Sacramentale, 226. 22. Ibid.: “Pro quo pono 2 regulas. I. Omnis opinio ut sit vere probabilis, debet conformari principiis et praeceptis charitatis Dei et proximi in substantia, fine et ordine.” 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Citing Andrés de Soto’s letter of appointment, dated October 13, 1619, translated by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 22. 26. Citing Dockery’s account, Christopher Davenport, 23, based on the Acta Capitulorum, I. A. 27. See Aidan Clarke, “Sir Piers Crosby, 1590–1646: Wentworth’s ‘Tawny Ribbon,’” Irish Historical Studies 26, no. 102 (1988): 142– 60. 28. Ibid., 151; based on Calendar of patent rolls, Ireland, James I, 454.

532 Notes to Pages 59 – 62 29. Micheàl MacCraith, “The Political and Religious Thought of Florence Conry and Hugh McCaughwell,” in The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Alan Ford and John McCafferty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 183– 202. 30. See Rubens’s portrait, painted in Antwerp in 1625, in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence. See also Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 190. Marcus draws analogies between the Infanta and the Isabella of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. 31. See Benignus Millett, The Irish Franciscans, 1651–1656 (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1964), 106–16. See also Anthony van Dyck’s Vision of Saint Anthony, painted ca. 1629, which celebrates the blending of theological learning and piety. 32. MacCraith, “The Political and Religious Thought of Florence Conry and Hugh McCaughwell,” 183– 202, especially 192– 202. 33. Ibid., 195. MacCraith states that “McCaughwell then leaves it up to the reader himself to decide who are the civil authorities and the lawful commands they impose.” For a recent discussion of Scotus and the emergence of personal autonomy, see Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 293– 94. 34. Scotus, Quaestiones super libros Aristotelis de anima, in Ioannis Duns Scoti Opera Omnia (Lyon, 1639), tom. 2, disputatio 3, 6 and 13. 35. See Sancta Clara’s 1652 Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico, cap. 6, 115–16: “ut contendit Bonaventura et D. Subt. De Anima cum Magistro meo Cavello.” 36. Supplementum ad Quaestiones Scoti in libros de Anima per fratrem Hugonem Cavellem, in Ioannis Duns Scoti Opera Omnia (1639), tom. 2, 634. 37. Ibid., 635 (sectio 6) and 640 (sectio 10). 38. Ibid., 640 (sectio 10). 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid.: “Dividitur in probabilem, et improbabilem. Illa nititur ita sufficientibus rationibus, ut sequens eam non censeatur imprudenter agere.” 41. Ibid.: “potes contra propriam aliorum probabilem opinionem sequi, sed tunc magis proprie fidem sequeris.” 42. Ibid.: “Ut eam sequatis, in conscientia, testes sint fide digni.” 43. Ibid.: “Fides humana est assensus propter testimonium hominis, vixque differt ab opinione; quia utraque nititur medio obsuro fallibili. Differt tamen . . .” 44. Ibid.: “Differt tamen ab opinione in firmitate, quia saepe excludit omnem formidinem, ut cum credo mundum fuisse ante me, vel Romam existere.” 45. Ibid. Cavellus refers the reader to 3. d. 25. Existius sequitur, num 5. 46. Ibid., 641: “Si nullus actus eliciatur, dubium erit negativum, atque multum refert hoc advertere, quia tale dubium in rei fidei non facit haereticum, sed requiritur dubium esse positivum.”

Notes to Pages 62 – 64

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47. Ibid.: “Differt a formidine, quia haec est actus reflexus, quo judicas oppositum forte esse verius, et non excludit assensum unius partis. Unde cum formidine de opposito licet aliquid facere, sed non cum dubio.” 48. Ibid.: “Si tamen dubius sis per intrinseca principia, potes alteram partem sequi per extrinseca. Verbi gratia, ex aliorum sentencia.” 49. Ibid.: “Si enim licet contra propriam opinionem sequi aliorum, multo magis licebit, quando tantum dubitas.” 50. Ibid., sec. 15, 650: “In quo consistat libertas voluntatis? . . . Nota quarto: libertatem formaliter non esse in judicio indifferenti. Nota quinto: voluntatem esse causam totalem suorum actuum.” 51. Ibid., sec. 18. 52. The Third Douay Diary (Year 1616), 132. The entry immediately above Christopher Davenport’s entry of August 28 states that John Pickford was admitted on August 12, age twenty-eight, from Cornwall. Like Christopher, Pickford was assigned to study logic starting October 1. 53. The Third Douay Diary (Year 1622), 202 and 395– 96. 54. Ibid., 202: “Ecclesiam instruxerunt, et quotidie expectant ejusdem consecrationem.” 55. Ibid.: “Finis hujus Collegii est fratres doctos et pios erudire in messem Anglicanam unde et profitentur se apperturos scholas, praeserti, Sacrae theologiae.” 56. Ibid.: “studiosi eorum interim scholas partum Sancti Benedicti frequentant.” 57. Ibid.: “Nihilominus aliquot fratres miserunt in Angliam viros non indoctos.” 58. Ibid.: “Vivunt autem pie et modeste et probo exemplo.” 59. See Bernard de Meester, “Biographie du nonce,” in Correspondance du nonce Giovanni-Francesco Guidi di Bagno (1621–1627), ed. Bernard de Meester (Brussels and Rome: Palais des Académies/Institut Historique Belge, 1938), Première Partie (1621–1624), v– xvi. 60. Ibid., 968– 69. 61. See, e.g., Bagno’s letter of February 19, 1625, requesting that the abbot of Grimbergen open his library to a young English convert seeking to write a book against Calvinism. In Correspondance du nonce Giovanni-Francesco Guidi di Bagno, pt. 1, 602; and Bagno’s letter of support, dated August 29, 1624, for the Douay theologian James Pollet, who, as we will see, will approve Sancta Clara’s first treatise in May 1625 (in ibid., 521). 62. See Bagno’s letter, dated January 5, 1624, urging abbots to develop philosophy schools in Correspondance du nonce Giovanni-Francesco Guidi di Bagno, pt. 1, 409. 63. See Bagno’s letter of September 2, 1623, to Francesco Barberini, in Correspondance du Nonce Giovanni-Francesco Guidi di Bagno, 349. 64. Ibid., 359.

534 Notes to Pages 64 – 66 65. Ibid., 369. 66. Ibid., fn. 5; citing Barberini’s answer to Bagno, dated November 1, 1623. 67. Peter Rietbergen, Power and Religion in Baroque Rome: Barberini’s Cultural Policies (Leyden: Brill, 2006), 143. 68. Correspondance du Nonce Giovanni-Francesco Guidi di Bagno, 380 (letter by Bagno to the bishop of Arras, November 11, 1623). 69. Thaddeus, The Franciscans in England, 1600–1850 (London: Art and Book Co., 1898), 36. 70. Correspondance du Nonce Giovanni-Francesco Guidi di Bagno, 460. 71. Ibid., 465. Bagno’s letter about Tobie Matthew to Francesco Barberini, dated May 4, 1624. 72. Ibid., 407. Bagno’s letter of January 4, 1624, encourages Jean Hemelarius, canon in Antwerp, to work on converting Grotius. 73. Ibid., 601– 2 and 769, respectively. Bagno’s letters to Rudesind Barlow, dated February 1, 1625, and August 2, 1626. 74. Ibid., 413. Bagno’s letter to Barberini, dated January 11, 1624. 75. Ibid., 424. Barberini’s letter to Bagno, dated February 3, 1624. 76. Ibid., 462. Bagno’s letter to Barberini, dated April 27, 1624. 77. Ibid. Bagno’s letter to Barberini, dated May 4, 1624. 78. Ibid., 943– 44. Bagno’s letter to James I, king of England. 79. Ibid., 488. Bagno’s letter to Barberini, dated June 22, 1624. 80. Ibid., 944– 48. In a letter written in cipher, dated July 10, 1624. 81. Ibid., 948– 50. Bagno’s letter to Barberini, dated August 10, 1624. 82. See Henriette-Marie de France, reine d’Angleterre: Étude historique par le comte de Baillon (Paris, 1877), 34, where Count Olivares’s reaction is reported as follows: “if the Pope grants the dispensation, we will send an army to Rome and burn the Holy See to the ground.” 83. Correspondance du nonce Giovanni-Francesco Guidi di Bagno, 610. Bagno’s letter to Barberini, dated March 15, 1624. For Bagno’s view of Richelieu, whom he had met in Avignon, see Bagno’s letter to Barberini of February 1, 1625 (ibid., 592). 84. Ibid., 629. Bagno to Antonio Barberini, letters of April 19, 1625, the second in cipher. 85. Ibid., 630. 86. Ibid., 68– 69, and fn. 1. Bagno to Antonio Barberini, May 1625. 87. Citing Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 28, fn. 4; based on Archives of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fidei, vol. 347, f. 128. 88. For the quarrels between Franciscan Recollects and Capuchins over dress, see Francesco Barberini’s letter to Bagno of March 30, 1624, in Correspondance du nonce Giovanni-Francesco Guidi di Bagno, 449. 89. Cited by Rietbergen, Power and Religion in Baroque Rome, 32. 90. One of the few images of the Franciscan monastery of Aracoeli prior to its demolition in 1888 is Pierre-Henri de Valencienne’s oil on paper View of the Convent of Ara Coeli with Pines, painted in the 1780s, in the Louvre, Paris.

Notes to Pages 67– 69

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91. See the Portrait of a Franciscan Monk of the Monastery of Santa Maria in Aracoeli (ca. 1625) by Ottavio Leoni (1578–1630) in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon. 92. Luke Wadding, Annales minorum (Florentia: Ad Claras Aquas [Quaracchi], 1933), tomus 36 (1623–1627), 265. 93. Ibid., 305. 94. See Sancta Clara, Fragmenta vel Historia Minor, 2nd ed. (Douay, 1658), 127; translated and cited by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 27. 95. Ibid. 96. Cited by Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to AD 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 334 and fn. 3. 97. Dan Hofstadter, The Earth Moves: Galileo and the Roman Inquisition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 123– 24; and Maurice Finocchiaro, Defending Copernicus and Galileo: Critical Reasoning in the Two Affairs (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 72– 76. 98. Santa Maria Maggiore was featured in Saint Philip Neri’s itinerary of seven pilgrim churches for visitors seeking a plenary indulgence during a Holy Year. See, e.g., the 1599 map by Giacomo Laura and Antonio Tempesta, which was reissued in 1621 (now in the public domain and available online). 99. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 28; and Wadding, Annales minorum, tomus 36, 305– 6. 100. See The English Franciscan Nuns (1619–1621) and The Friars Minor of the same Province (1618–1761), ed. Richard Trappes-Lomax, Publications of the Catholic Record Society, vol. 24 (London, 1922), “Necrology,” 261. 101. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 18, fn. 5. 102. Sancta Clara’s own testimony in Fragmenta vel Historia Minor, 2nd ed. (1665) (1st ed. 1644) (Douay), 65. 103. Third Douay Diary, 238. 104. William Laud’s diary, June 16, 1625, in The history of the troubles and tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God and blessed martyr William Laud, Lord Arch-Bishop of Canterbury, wrote by himself during his imprisonment in the Tower; to which is prefixed the diary of his own life (London, 1695), 19. 105. Ibid., diary of June 24, 1625. 106. Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in England, 2nd ed. (London: Cass, 1965), 1:513, cites Salvetti, envoy of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who recorded on July 1, 1625, that the solemn fast decreed by Parliament consisted in “staying in church all day singing psalms, hearing sermons, the one shortly after the other, and making I know not how many prayers, imploring God for stoppage of the plague.” 107. D. A. Kirby, “The Radicals of St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, London, 1624–1642,” The Guildhall Miscellany 3, no. 2 (1970): 98–119. 108. Debates of the House of Commons in 1625, ed. S. R. Gardiner (Camden Society, 1873), 1– 25, June 25; cited in Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain, 1:513–14.

536 Notes to Pages 69 –73 109. Dodd’s Church History of England, 5:160. 110. Citing Sir Thomas Fanshawe, June 25, in Debates in the House of Commons, 26. 111. Richard Montagu, Immediate addresse unto God alone First delivered in a sermon before his Maiestie at Windsore. Since revised and inlarged to a just treatise of invocation of saints. Occasioned by a false imputation of M. Antonius De Dominis upon the author, Richard Montagu (London, 1624). 112. Debate in the House of Commons in 1625, 33– 35 and 70– 71. 113. Ibid., July 7, 47– 51. 114. Richard Montagu, An Answere to the late Gagger of Protestants, chap. 16, 108; and Appello Caesarem (running title: An Appeale to Caesar), pt. 1, chap. 10, 95– 97. See also “Mr. Pym’s Report on Mr. Montague’s Books,” delivered to Parliament in April 1626, in Debates in the House of Commons in 1625, 11 ff. 115. Montagu, An Answere to the late Gagger of Protestants, chap. 16, 112; and Montagu, Appello Caesarem, pt. 1, chap. 10, 99. 116. Montagu, An Answere to the late Gagger of Protestants, 114. 117. Ibid.: “But experience sheweth, and Scripture cleareth it, there is free will: therefore fatall necessity is not at all. As true as Gospel.” 118. Ibid., chap. 16, 116; and Montagu, An Appeale to Caesar, 98. 119. Epistolium continens confutationem duarum propositionum astrologicarum cum principiis adversus iudicariam astrologiam. Per F. Franciscum à Sancta Clara Provinciae Angliae, et S. Theologiae lectorem apud FF. Minores Recollectos Anglos in Collegio D. Bonaventurae Duaci (Douay: Ex Typographia Baltharis Belleri, Anno 1626). The front cover includes the citation: Notata sunt commercia haereticorum cum Magis quamplurimis, cum Circulatoribus, cum Astrologis (Tertullian, De praesciptione adversus haereticos, chap. 43). 120. Montagu, An Appeale to Caesar, pt. 1, 89. 121. Tertullian, De praesciptione adversus haereticos, chap. 43. 122. Epistolium continens confutationem. Six approvals are listed, dated from May 4 to May 13, 1626. John Gennings is listed as “Custos” of the English province. 123. Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, Bibliographie (Brussels: Oscar Schepens, 1944), tome 5, 1463. 124. See Bruno Neveu’s pioneering analysis in “Quelques orientations de la théologie catholique au 17ème siècle,” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 16 (1994): 35– 47. 125. Epistolium continens confutationem, 13. 126. Ibid., 14. 127. Ibid., 24. Compare with John Chamber, A Treatise against Judicial Astrologie (London, 1601), chap. 11, 50, where Chamber also cites Nigidius. As Chamber studied at Merton College, and as Chamber’s friend George Carleton published a defense of Chamber’s rejection of judicial astrology in 1624, Sancta Clara may have had these two authors in mind.

Notes to Pages 74 – 80

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128. Ibid., 26. 129. Ibid., 28. For Pico della Mirandola’s critique of judicial astrology and its reception at the University of Louvain in the sixteenth century, see Steven Vanden Broecke, The Limits of Influence: Pico, Louvain, and the Crisis of Renaissance Astrology (Leiden: Brill, 2003). “Reverendissimus Malderus” is Johannes Van Malderen (1563–1633), doctor at the University of Louvain and bishop of Antwerp. 130. Epistolium, 35. Compare to George Carleton, Astrologomania: The madness of astrologers (London, 1624), chap. 4, 25, where Carleton insists that true predictions are achieved “by the helpe of Satan.” 131. Epistolium, 31– 38. George Carleton concedes the point about free agents in Astrologomania, chap. 8, 71. 132. Epistolium, 45. 133. Ibid., 46 – 47. The reference to Delrio is marked as bk. 4, chapter 3, quaestio 2. 134. Ibid., 47– 50. For Scotus on astronomy and medicine, see Joannis Duns Scoti Opera Omnia, 23 (Paris: Ludovic Vivès, 1894), Reportata Parisiensia, bk. 2, dist. 14, q. 3, p. 6. 135. Epistolium, 51. Sancta Clara is likely relying on a version of Scotus’s Reportata Parisiensia that is close to the text published by Luke Wadding in Scoti opera omnia (Lyon, 1639), published again by Ludovic Vivès in Paris in 1894. In book 2, distinction 14, question 3, Scotus asks “whether stars act upon anything within the inferior realm?” 136. Ibid., 52. Cf. Scotus, Reportata Parisiensia, bk. 2, dist. 14, q. 3: “Quamquam appetitus sensitivus inclinat ad unum, potest voluntas eligere contrarium, quia nulla stella, nec aliqua creatura potest causare effective actum in voluntate, nisi ipsamet” (ed. Vivès, 1894, vol. 23, bk. 2, p. 61). 137. Epistolium, 52. 138. Ibid., 54. 139. Ibid., 55– 56. 140. Ibid., 63. 141. Ibid., 64. 142. Franco Mormando, Bernini: His Life and His Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 294; William Shea and Mariano Artigas, Galileo in Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 149.

. “Problematicall Supererogation” 1. “Mr. Pym’s Report on Mr. Montague’s Books, Delivered in the Second Parliament of Charles I, Lune, 17 Aprill, 1626,” in Debates in The House of Common in 1625, ed. S. R. Gardiner, vol. 6, appendix 4, 179– 86; see most especially 180 and 182. 2. Ibid., 180.

538 Notes to Pages 81– 83 3. Andrew Foster, “Durham House group (act. 1617–1630),” ODNB; and Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 183 and 369. 4. Montagu, A New Gagg for an Old Goose (1624), “To the Reader,” unnumbered page. 5. Montagu, Appello Caesarem (1625). 6. Ibid. 7. Montagu, A New Gagg, “To the Reader”: “If a man should collect the private opinions of private men, which are the differences in Schooles among Schollers: nay, of the Master of Controversies, or of Sentences, and impute them unto the Church of Rome, the Faith of Rome, this Gagger (if hee know what to doe) and his gagle would refuse them, disclaime them, thinke themselves wronged, proclaim themselves belied, as Bellarmine doth often in the like case.” 8. Ibid., 98. 9. Ibid., chap. 20, 157. 10. Ibid.: “There are opinions, and defended, but not of all Protestants, nor of the Church of England, but opposed and refelled at home, abroad, as this fellow cannot but know, if he know anything in these points: which for the major part are fitter for Schooles then [sic] popular discourses: and may be held or not held, without heresie either way.” 11. Ibid., 157– 58: “That faith once had (the propounded Conclusion) cannot be lost, may be interpreted, and is, moe ways then [sic] one. Whether not lost at all; whether totally or finally lost. Men are divided in this Tenent. Some suppose neither totally nor finally.” 12. Ibid., 164. 13. Ibid., 158: “I determine nothing in this Question positively, which the Church of England leaveth at libertie unto us, though the learndst in the Church of England assent unto Antiquitie in their Tenent.” 14. Ibid.: “which for the major part are fitter for Schooles then [sic] popular discourses.” 15. Montagu, Appello Caesarem, 21– 22. 16. Ibid., 23: “Have you not read in that Passage these words, which any honest plain man would have cast into the Information but yourselves: I DETERMINE nothing in the question POSITIVELY?” 17. Ibid., 26– 27: “They will not contest for the Roman schools, I knowe; as little for the Lutherans, I suppose. It is confessed on all hands, that they hold falling from grace and losing of faith had, and detest the contrary opinion as hereticall. For the Tenet of Antiquity, I cannot bee challenged. St. Augustine, etc.” 18. Ibid., 29– 30. 19. Debates in the House of commons in 1625, appendix 6, 182: “Whereas the Articles of the Church of England denieth the falleing from grace, Mr. Montigue affirmeth that men after grace maie fall and rise againe . . . He hath misreported and perverted the Articles of our Church on this point.”

Notes to Pages 83– 84

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20. William Prynne, The perpetuitie of a regenerate mans estate. Wherein it is manifestly proved by sundry arguments, reasons and authorities. That such as are once truly regenerated and ingrafted into Christ by a lively faith, can neither finally nor totally fall from grace. It is also proved, that this hath beene the received and resolved doctrine, of all the ancient fathers, of all the Protestant churches and writers beyond the seas, and of the Church of England. All the principall arguments that are, or may be objected against it either from Scripture or from reason, are here likewise cleared and answered (London, 1626), “The Epistle Dedicatorie,” 3. 21. Joseph Hall, Via media, The Way of Peace (London, 1626); reprinted in The Works of the Right Reverend Joseph Hall, D.D., ed. Philip Wynter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1863), 9:490– 519. 22. Ibid., 499: “Now then let us take a short survey of the particular differences, and call each part to the nearest verge of an accord.” 23. Ibid., 497. 24. Ibid., 498: “If any man herein complain of a usurpation upon the conscience, and an unjust servitude, let him be taught the difference betwixt matters of faith and scholasticall disquisitions. Those have God for their author; these, the brain of men. . . . Those are contained in scriptures, either in express terms or irrefragable consequences; these are only deduced thence by such crooked inferences as cannot command assent.” 25. Ibid.: “In these, the heart may be free, the tongue may be bound.” 26. See Daniel Featley, A parallel: of new-old Pelgiarminian error [a translation of Parallelismus nov-antiqui erroris Pelagiarminiani] (London, 1626). For Hall’s tolerance of “works of preparation” that are conditions of, but do not cause, conversion, see Hall, Via media, 493: “The grace of God doth not use to work upon a man immediately by sudden raptures but by meet preparations.” 27. Featley, A parallel, “To the Reader.” Featley says that the “Pelgiarminian” doctrine of human freedom implies the “universalist” view that Christ died to save all of humankind. 28. Ibid., 7. 29. George Carleton, An examination of those things wherein the author of the late Appeale holdeth the doctrines of the Pelagians and Arminians, to be the doctrines of the Church of England (London, 1626), 13 and 14–15. 30. Ibid., 109 and 117. 31. Ibid., 96 32. Anthony Wotton, A dangerous plot discovered By a discourse, wherein is proved that Mr. Richard Montague, in his two books; the one, called A new Gagg; the other, A just appeale; laboureth to bring in the faith of Rome, and Arminius, under the name an pretence of the doctrine and faith of the Church of England. A worke very necessary for all them which have received the truth of God in love, and desire to escape from error (London, 1626), “Dedication to Parliament.” 33. Ibid.: “A catalogue of the erroneous points which are contained in N.’s books. His points of the Popish faith,” 17.

540 Notes to Pages 85 – 89 34. See, e.g., Francis White, A Replie to Jesuit Fisher’s Answer (1624): “These two things I am sure of: One, that your [sc. the Roman Church’s] peremptory establishing of so manie things, that are remote Deductions from the Foundation, hath with other errors, lost the Peace and Unitie of the Church, for which you will one day answer.” 35. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 233n26, describes A Catholic Appeale to Protestants as “virtually an official publication of the Church of England.” 36. Thomas Morton, A Catholic Appeale to Protestants (1610), lib. 5, chap. 4, sec. 2, 590. 37. Ibid.: “And why may not this, Go sell, and give, and follow me, be held for at least an Evangelicall and temporal commandement?” 38. Ibid: “Not, but that we allow the distinction of precept and counsel, but that all Christians are not absolutely counseled to give all away; but to imitate the merchant, who in a desperate tempest, rather casteth all his goods over boord, than he will hazard his life.” 39. Ibid., 591– 94. 40. Ibid., 591. 41. Ibid., 534. 42. White, A Replie to Jesuit Fisher’s Answer, 521– 34. 43. Ibid., 521 and 526. 44. Ibid., 521. 45. Ibid., 532. 46. Ibid. 47. Joseph Hall, The olde religion a treatise, wherein is laid down the true state of the difference betwixt the reformed and Romane church, and the blame of this schism is cast upon the rue authors: serving for the vindication of our innocence, for the settling of wavering minds, for a preservative against popish insinuations, 2nd ed. (London, 1628). 48. Ibid., 14. 49. Ibid., chap. 6, 34. 50. Ibid., chap. 6, sec. 3: “In very reason, where all is of mere dutie, there can be no merit. For how can we deserve reward by doing that which if we did not, we should offend? All that we can possibly do, and more, is most justly due unto God by the bond of our Creation, of our Redemption; by the charge of his royall law; and that most sweete law of the Gospel. Nay, alas, wee are farre from being able to compasse so much as our dutie.” 51. “Disputation XII. On the Law of God,” in The Works of Jacob Arminius, 2nd ed., trans. James Nicjols and William Nichols (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1986), 1:538. 52. Montagu, A New Gagg, 103. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid.

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56. See, again, Morton, Appeale to Protestants, 593: “That which in God’s indulgence is matter of counsel, is, in regard of his strict justice, which saith, Be ye perfect, a case of precept, especially by individuall circumstances, and consequently so an act of duty, and not of desert.” 57. Montagu, Appello Caesarem, 220. 58. Ibid., 222. 59. Ibid., 224. 60. Arnold Hunt, “Featley [Fairclough], Daniel (1582–1645),” ODNB. 61. Daniel Featley, Second Parallel, together with a Writ of Error Sued Against the Appealer (London, 1626), 16–17. 62. Ibid.: “Though this point touching Evangelical Counsels may seem to bee of no great consequence, yet to the Romanists it is a point fundamental: for upon it they build their treasury of superaboundant satisfactions. And Leech after hee had first suckt this thinner and purer blood, afterwards greedily swallowed the most corrupt and ranke blood of Popery.” 63. Anthony Wotton, A Dangerous plot discovered, chap. 18, 119– 20. 64. Ibid., 124. 65. Ibid., 113–14. 66. Hunt, “Featley [Fairclough], Daniel (1582–1645)”; cited from a letter by Joseph Mede conserved at the Bodleian Library of Oxford, Harley MS 39, fol. 318. 67. “Two biographies,” edited by the Rev. J. E. B. Mayor, Cambridge, 1855, with the title Nicholas Ferrar, Two lives; by his brother John and by Dr. Jebb (a friend and contemporary), in The Storybooks of Little Gidding, xxiv. 68. The Arminian Nunnery, or, A briefe description and relation of the late rected monasticall place, called the Arminian Nunnery at Little Gidding in Huntingtonshire humbly recommended to the wise consideration of the present Parliament: the foundation is by a company of Farrars at Gidding (London, 1641). 69. J. Ransome, “Prelude to Piety: Nicholas Ferrar’s Grand Tour,” The Seventeenth Century 1 (2003): 1–13. 70. Jane Frances Mary Carter, Nicholas Ferrar: His Household and His Friends (London, 1892), 54– 56. 71. See “Two biographies,” in The Storybooks of Little Gidding, xx. 72. Alden T. Vaughan, “‘Expulsion of the Savages’: English Policy and the Virginia Massacre of 1622,” William and Mary Quarterly (Third Series) 35, no. 1 (1978): 57– 84; Nicholas Ferrar’s contributions are described on page 70, based on the Virginia Company records. 73. Citing Archbishop Abbott’s characterization of John Davenport, reported by Bremer in Building the New Jerusalem, 62. See also Stanley Johnson, “John Donne and the Virginia Company,” English Literary History 14, no. 2 (1947): 127– 38. For John Davenport, who preached to the company in November 1621, see 134 and fn. 24; and Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem, 55– 57. John Donne preached on November 13, 1622.

542 Notes to Pages 95 – 98 74. Cited by Alden Vaughan, “Expulsion of the Savages,” 70, based on Edward Waterhouse, A Declaration of the State of the Colony and Affaires in Virginia (London, 1622), 12. 75. Vaughan, “Expulsion of the Savages,” 77. 76. Abstract of the Proceedings of the Virginia Company of London, vol. 11, ix. 77. Michael J. Braddick, “Cranfield, Lionel, first earl of Middlesex (1575–1645),” ODNB. 78. See the letter of February 2, 1631, written to Mary Ferrar by Mary and Anna Collet. In the section “Inscriptions and Letters,” The Storybooks of Little Gidding, lii. 79. The Arminian Nunnery, respectively 10 and 8. 80. Another key influence on Nicholas Ferrar, according to John Ferrar, through Nicholas’s early schoolmaster Mr. Brooks, who “followed the example of Io. Gerson, the famous chancellor of Paris”; see “Two biographies,” in The Storybooks of Little Gidding, i. 81. See Nicholas Ferrar’s translation of Juan de Valdés, The Hundred and ten considerations of Signior John Valdesso treating of those things which are most profitable, most necessary, and most perfect in our Christian profession. Written in Spanish, brought out of Italy by Vergerius, and first set forth in Italian at Basil by Coelius Secundus Curio, anno 1550. Afterwards translated into French, and printed at Lions in 1563, and again at Paris 1565. And now translated out of the Italian copy into English, with notes. Whereunto is added an epistle of the authors, or a preface to his divine commentary upon the Romans (Oxford, 1638), consideration 77, 199– 201. Note that George Herbert’s letter to Ferrar, serving as preface, and stating to be “returning your Valdesso with many thanks,” is dated September 29, 1632. 82. Ibid., 201: “And so this conclusion is made, that they, who while they think not of it, speak most christianely, and when they would bring themselves with human industry to have confidence, to believe, and love, find most difficulty in this, are true Christians.” 83. Ibid., consideration 74, 189. 84. Ibid., 198. 85. Ibid., 76– 77. 86. Ibid., consideration 22, “How we are disenamoured of the world and enamored of God,” 72– 77. 87. Ibid., consideration 27. 88. Ibid., consideration 57, 145. 89. Ibid., consideration 29, 70: “That to believe with difficulty is a signe of vocation.” 90. Ibid., consideration 56, 143– 44. 91. Ibid., 144. 92. The Arminian Nunnery, 4– 6. 93. See Nicholas Ferrar’s translation of Leonard Lessius, Hygiasticon, Or, the Right course of preserving life and health unto extream old age together with sound-

Notes to Pages 98 –101

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ness and integritie of the senses, judgement and memorie (Cambridge, 1634), “Letter of Dedication to D. Rumold Colibrant.” 94. Ibid.: “For besides that it brings Health and long life, it doth wonderfully conduce to the attainment of wisdom, to the exercises of Contemplation, Prayer and Devotion and to the preservation of Chastitie and other vertues. And withal causeth all these employments and functions to be peformed with marvelous ease, and exceeding great consolation.” 95. Ibid., 12. 96. Ibid., 27. 97. Ibid., 127. 98. Ibid., 185– 86. 99. See Leonard Lessius, Treatise on Chastity (St. Omers, 1621). The English translation is dedicated to Anne Vaux and her widowed sisters. 100. Ibid., 82. 101. The Arminian Nunnery, 6. 102. Ibid., 3. 103. James Wadsworth, The English Spanish Pilgrime. Or, A new discoverie of Spanish popery, and Jesuiticall stratagems With the estate of the English pentioners and fugitives under the King of Spanies dominions, and elsewhere at this present. Also laying open the new order of the Iesuitrices and preaching nunnes. Composed by Iames Wadsworth Gentleman, newly converted into his true mothers bosome, the Church of England, with the motives why he left the Sea of Rome (London, 1629), 72– 74. 104. Citing from the English translation of Marcos de Lisboa, The chronicle and institution of the Order of the seraphicall father S. Francis conteyning his life, his death and his miracles, and of his holie disciples and companions (St. Omers, 1618), bk. 8 (“Life of Saint Clare”), 610. 105. Wadsworth lists nine monasteries and convents (The English Spanish Pilgrime, 72) to which must be added the new convent of Poor Clares founded in Ayre in May 1629, “chiefly by means of Father Francis of St. Clare, alias Christopher Davenport,” as reported by Edward Petre, Notices of the English colleges and convents established on the continent after the dissolution of religious houses in England (Norwich: Bacon and Kinnebrook, 1849), 86. 106. Claire Walker, “Radcliffe, Margaret (1582x5–1654),” ODNB. 107. Petre, Notices of the English colleges and convents established on the continent, 82. 108. Richard Trappes-Lomax, ed., The English Franciscan Nuns, 1619–1821, and the Friars Minor of the Same Province, 1618–1761 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1922), 7. 109. Marcos de Lisboa, The chronicle and institution of the Order of the seraphicall father S. Francis conteyning his life, his death, and his miracles, and of his holie disciples and companions. Set foorth first in the Portuguall, next in the Spanish, then in the Italian, lastlie in the French, and now in the English tongue (St. Omers: John Heigham, 1618). The English translation is attributed to William Cape. The letter

544 Notes to Pages 101–104 of dedication, mysteriously signed “CLA FRA” (some have interpreted this to mean “Francis Clare,” i.e., Sancta Clara) starts: “As salamanders . . .” 110. As reported by Wadsworth, The English Spanish Pilgrime, 72. 111. See, e.g., Placid Spearitt, “The Survival of Medieval Spirituality among the Exiled Black Monks,” American Benedictine Review 25 (1974): 289– 93. 112. Petre, Notices of the English colleges and convents established on the continent, 86; and Walker, “Radcliffe, Margaret (1582x5–1654),” ODNB. 113. James Gaffney, Augustine Baker’s Inner Light: A Study in English Recusant Spirituality (Scranton, PA: Scranton University Press, 1989). 114. A. F. Allison, “Franciscan Books in English, 1559–1640,” Recusant History 3 (1955): 27, declares, without proof, that the “dedicatory epistle is by Francis Davenport, OFM” 115. See Lisboa, The chronicle and institution of the order of the seraphicall father S. Francis, “To the Reader,” unnumbered page. 116. Ibid. 117. Ibid. 118. See Saint Clare’s response to Pope Gregory IX, in Lisboa, The chronicle and institution of the order of the seraphicall father S. Francis, bk. 8, 634: “Holy Father, I shall be very joyfull if it please your holinesse to absolve me of all my sinnes. But to free me from performing the Counsailes of God, I will accept no absolution.” 119. Ibid., bk. 8, chap. 1, 610. 120. Ibid., chap. 12, 639: “Of the fervent and perfect prayer of the Virgin S. Clare.” 121. Ibid., chap. 17, 644: “Of the spirituall doctrine wherewith S. Clare nourced [sic] and elevated her daughters.” 122. Ibid.: “First she taught them to cleare their soules of all rumours of the world that they might freely attain to the high secrets of God.” 123. Ibid., bk. 8, chap. 21, 665 and 643, respectively. 124. Ibid., bk. 8, chap. 1, 613: “this spirituall generation of the imitators of the life and counsailes of Jesus Christ.” 125. Ibid., bk. 8, chap. 21, 665. 126. Ibid., 670– 71. 127. See Alberto Porqueras-Mayo, “Un soneto olvidado de Lope de Vega,” Hispanic Review 29, no. 4 (1961): 332– 34; and Ann Nickerson Hughes, Religious Imagery in the Theater of Tirso de Molina (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984), 46– 69. 128. Ronald E. Surtz, The Guitar of God: Gender, Power and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 6. 129. Antonio Daza, The historie, life, and miracle, extasies and revelations of the blessed virgin, sister Ioane of the Crosse, of the third order of our holy Father S. Francis (St. Omers, 1625), 82– 83.

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130. Ibid., chap. 10, 85– 95. 131. See, on this phenomenon, Isabelle Poutrin, “Les chapelets bénits des mystiques espagnoles (XVIe et XVIIe s.),” Mélanges de la Casa Vélasquez 26, no. 262 (1990): 35– 54. 132. Cited by A. K. G. Paterson, “Tirso de Molina y Sor Juana de la Cruz,” in Teatro para canoniza: Immagine e rappresentazione, a cura de Luara Dolfi, 5, from Emanuel Valle de Moura, De incantationibus seu ensalmis (Evora: L. Crasbeeck, 1620). 133. See the approbationes at the end of The Historie, life and miracles of sister Ioanne, of the crosse. For the edition used by Bell, see Porqueras-Mayo, “Un soneto olvidado de Lope de Vega,” 332– 34. Bell’s translation includes Lope de Vega’s sonnet, translated by his Franciscan companion Ludovick à Sancto Francisco. 134. “Epistle Dedicatorie,” in The historie, life, and miracle, extasies and revelations of the blessed virgin, sister Ioane of the crosse. 135. Thaddeus, The Franciscans in England, 1600–1850, 67. 136. Daza, The historie, life, and miracles of Ioanne of the crosse, 62– 74. 137. A short relation, of the life, virtues and miracles, of S. Elizabeth called the peacemaker. Queen of Portugal Of the third rule of S. Francis. Canonised by Pope Urban the VIII the 25 of May. Anno 1625. Translated out of Dutch; by Sister Catharine Francis, Abbess of the English Monasterie of S. Francis third rule in Bruxelles (Brussels, 1628), “Letter of Dedication” by Francis Bell, A2. 138. Ibid., A2– A3; and Jos Blom and Frans Blom, The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Series 1, Printed Writings, 1500–1640: Part 4, vol. 2, Catherine Greenbury and Mary Percy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), “Introductory Note,” ix– xiii. 139. See “The Book of Clothings” (1628), 44, in Richard Trappes-Lomax, The English Franciscan Nuns (1619–1821), and the Friars Minor of the Same Province (1618–1761), 15. 140. See Francis Bell’s “Letter of Dedication” in A short relation, of the life, virtues and miracles of S. Elizabeth, A3. 141. A short relation, 4. 142. Ibid., 12–13: “it pleased God to shew by a miracle how pleasing the sobriety and abstinence of this his hand maide was unto him.” Twice, God turned “water miraculously into good wyne.” 143. Ibid., 16 (she kissed the diseased foot of a poor woman and the sore was immediately healed) and 19– 21. 144. Ibid., 30. 145. Ibid., 32. 146. Ibid., 38. 147. Ibid., 43 (a heavy stone is miraculously removed); 45 (the river Tagus is miraculously parted to make way for her; she cures a blind girl by the touch of her hand); 60– 61 (miraculous cures occur at her tomb).

546 Notes to Pages 108 –113 148. Cited from Michael Questier, “Introduction” to Newsletters from the Caroline Court, 1631–1638: Catholicism and the Politics of the Personal Rule, ed. M. Questier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1– 4. 149. Kellison’s book was approved for publication in May 1629 by the theologian Edmund Straford in Douay. For the August conference between Bishop Smith and his opponents, see Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 466– 67. 150. A Treatise of the Hierarchie and Divers Orders of the Church against the Anarchie of Calvin. Composed by Matthew Kellison, Doctour of Divinitie (Douay, 1629), “The Epistle Dedicatorie to the Catholiques of England,” sec. 12, unnumbered page. See, in particular, “the seculars must honour the Regulars as helps,” and section 1: “Without a Bishop you can be no particular church.” 151. Ibid., sec. 20. 152. Ibid., 298– 301. 153. Ibid., 299; citing Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2-2, q. 1, a.1, ad. 5. 154. Ibid., 304: “If he give all he shall please God, because he followeth his counsaile; if he do not, he shall not displease him, because he doth not against his commaundement.” 155. Ibid., 317–18. 156. Ibid., 322– 23. 157. Ibid., 326. 158. Ibid., 329. 159. Ibid. (emphasis added). Compare to 327: “The Bishop by his state is obliged to expose his life for his flock . . . as other Pastours also are obliged”; see also 326: “Bishops and Prelates are in a state of perfection already acquired.” 160. Ibid., 332– 34. 161. Ibid., 340– 42. 162. See J. H. M. Salmon, “Gallicanism and Anglicanism in the Age of the Counter-Reformation,” in Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 155– 88. 163. Kellison, A Treatise of the Hierachie, chap. 15, 393 and 415. 164. Ibid., 403; and Salmon, “Gallicanism and Anglicanism,” 165. 165. Ibid., 391. . Deus, natura, gratia 1. For further information, see A. F. Allison, “Richard Smith’s Gallican Backers and Jesuit Opponents: Some of the Issues raised by Kellison’s Treatise of the Hierarchy, 1629,” part I, Recusant History 18 (1986– 87): 360– 65. 2. See, e.g., Third Douay Diary, 275, record for June 11, 1629: two secular priests left the English College to become Carmelites in Louvain in such secrecy that Kellison himself only learned of their decision on the eve of their departure,

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but the Benedictine Rudesind Barlow and Sancta Clara had already been approached and had kept the secret. See also 277, record for August 22, 1629, the admission of Bishop Smith’s nephew. 3. Kellison, A Treatise of the Hierarchie and divers orders, “The Epistle Dedicatorie,” unnumbered page: “onlie in your Churches and at your service (which our consciences cannot brooke) we appear not.” 4. Note the new term for the English Church. In 1634, Sancta Clara uses both Anglica and Anglicana (Latin) to refer to the Church of England. I think that there is a legitimate sense in which the Arminian movement among English Protestant divines, gathering momentum with Laud around 1625, gave rise to a new understanding of the Church of England as “Anglican.” There was a desire to emphasize the Catholic doctrine of the Church of England and its hierarchy, and a desire to create some distance towards Calvinist and Lutheran countries/churches. 5. M. Lunn, “Benedictine Opposition to Bishop Richard Smith, 1625–1629,” Recusant History 11 (1971– 72): 1– 20. 6. Michael Questier, Catholicism and Community, 43– 39 and 464– 65. 7. Maurice Nédoncelle, “Un Moine turbulent: John Barnes,” in Trois aspects du problème anglo-catholique au XVIIème siècle; avec une analyse des XXXIX articles d’après Chr. Davenport et J.H. Newman (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1951). 8. Ibid., 10; based on a letter addressed by Barnes to Sir George Goring; cited in Dodd’s Church History of England, 4:97. 9. Nédoncelle, “Un Moine turbulent,” 11. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 36: “Les Bénédictins de Douai ont dû agir avec le sentiment que Barnes compromettait, par sa démesure, la thèse irénique dont ils étaient euxmêmes les partisans et au succès de laquelle ils s’employaient.” 12. Ibid., 31– 36, for Nédoncelle’s discussion of Barnes’s De Antiquae Ecclesiae Britannicae Libertate atque de legitima ejusdem Ecclesiae exemption à Romano Patriarchatu and Catholico-Romanus Pacificus. 13. Augustine Baker, Apostolatus Benedictinorum in Anglia (Douay, 1626). 14. Thaddeus, The Franciscans in England, 1600–1850, 107, lists among Heath’s works “Summa 4 librorum Sententiarum ad mentem Doct. Subtilis” and “Logica ad mentem Doctoris Subtilis.” 15. See L. Rosato, “Ioannis Duns Scoti doctrina de Scriptura et Traditione,” in De Scriptura et Traditione, ed. C. Balić (Rome, 1963), 236; citing Scotus, Lectura 1, d. 11, n. 17. 16. On this subject, see Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150–1350 (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 140– 43. 17. As Chillingworth himself wrote to Gilbert Sheldon; cited in The Works of W. Chillingworth (London, 1820), 1:3. 18. The Book of Clothings, 19: “the third of September, 1631, the Rd. father fr. Francis a Sta. Clara, Comissarie Provinciall on this side of the seas, custos of the province, etc. visited this Cloyster.”

548 Notes to Pages 115 –118 19. See Charles’s instructions to Buckingham, June 1626; cited by Thomas Birch, The court and times of Charles the first; illustrated by letters, incl. Memoirs of the mission in England of the Capuchin friars, by C. de Gamache (London, 1848), 121n1. 20. Ibid., 122, based on Pory’s letter to Rev. Joseph Mead. 21. Nédoncelle, “Un Moine turbulent,” 10 and fn. 2. 22. David Lunn, “The English Cassinese (1611–1650),” Recusant History 13 (1975): 62– 69. 23. Anne Hope, Franciscan Martyrs in England, 123– 25, based on Angel Mason’s Certamen seraphicum provinciae Angliae (Douay, 1649). 24. See Sancta Clara’s explanation of article 37, in Paraphrastica expositio articulorum confessionis Anglicanae: The Articles of the Anglican church paraphratsically considered and explained by Franciscus A. Sancta Clara, ed. and trans. Frederick George Lee (London: John Hayes, 1865), 105: “Sic D. Raynoldus licet Puritanus . . . et alii eorum doctissimi, quibuscum de hoc egi” (“So says Dr. Reynolds, though a Puritan . . . and others of their most learned men with whom I have discussed the point”). 25. See Adrian Johns, “Coleman Street,” Huntington Library Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2008): 37. See also Bremer, Building the New Jerusalem, 83–108. 26. In his diary, for February 13, 1632(3), William Laud wrote: “The feoffees, that pretended to buy in Impropriations, were dissolved in the Chequer-Chamber. They were the main Instruments for the Puritan Faction to undo the Church.” For John Davenport’s role in the “Feoffees of Impropriations” and the trial that ended the initiative, see Ethyn W. Kirby, “The Lay Feoffees: A Study in Militant Puritanism,” Journal of Modern History 14, no. 1 (1942): 1– 25. 27. Citing Randy Robertson, Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England: The Subtle Art of Division (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 49. 28. Calendar of state papers: domestic series, of the reign of Charles I. 1633–1634 (London: Longman and Green, 1863), preface, viii. 29. Ibid., April 22– 23, 1633, 26– 27. 30. Laud’s diary, for April 13, 1633: “This April was most extream wet, and cold and windy.” 31. Bremer, Building the New Jerusalem, 103. 32. Reprinted in Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, xxxiv: “Haec opinio mea, melius judicio me submittens.” 33. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 21 and fn. 4; see also D. McRoberts, “The Scottish National Churches in Rome,” The Innes Review, vols. 1– 3 (1950): 115. 34. Reprinted in Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, xxxiv: “sperans inter Protestantes saltem moderationes, fructui futurum.” 35. Cathaldus Giblin, OFM, “Aegidius Chaissy, OFM, and James Ussher, Protestant Archbishop of Armagh,” The Irish Ecclesiastical Record 85 (June 1956): 393– 405.

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36. Ibid. For the possibility that Chaissy was sent to England for this purpose, or at least in this hope, and had been substituted for the Spanish Capuchin Zachary of Saluzzo, who had impressed Charles in 1623 in Spain, see Philip Hughes, “Conversion of Charles I,” Clergy Review 8 (August 1934): 113– 25; cited by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 47n2. 37. Giblin, “Aegidius Chaissy,” 395. 38. Reprinted in Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, xxxiv. 39. See John Southcot to an English secular priest at Paris, April 24, 1633, in Michael Questier, Newsletters from the Caroline Court, 1631–1638 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 173– 75. For the Paris context, see Jacques Gres-Gayer, “The Magisterium of the Faculty of Theology of Paris in the Seventeenth Century,” Theological Studies 53 (1992): 424– 50, most especially 429– 31. For John Southcot’s kinship with Thomas White, see Questier, Newsletters, 8n26. 40. Reprinted in Lee, Paraphrastica expositio: “Librum hunc inscriptum Deus, Natura, Gratia, etc., vidi, legi, perlegi. Quid multa? Electione sententiarum, explicatione sacrarum Scripturarum et sanctorum Patrum, soliditate argumentorum, resolutionum pondere, claritate, methodo, stylo Scoto dignissimum reperi.” Signed Thom. Blaclous, S. Theol. Professor, undated. 41. John Southcot to Peter Biddulph, April 26, 1633, in Questier, Newsletters, 177. 42. Sara Mendelson, “Digby [née Stanley], Venetia, Lady Digby (1600–1633),” ODNB. 43. A. K. Wheelock Jr., “Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby, as Prudence,” in Van Dyck, Paintings, ed. Wheelock, Susan Barnes, and Julius S. Held (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1991), 253– 54. 44. See “Anglicanism” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. C. G. Herbermann, 1:500: “The abbots and priors of England in their letter to Innocent IV, in 1246, declared that the English church (Ecclesia Anglicana) is ‘a special member of the Most Holy Church of Rome’”; based on Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, in The Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, ed. Henry R. Luard (London: Longmans and Co., 1872– 83), 4:531. 45. Reprinted in Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, xxxv: “Immo ut publicetur cum priori in commune bonum aeque necessarium censeo: et quo citius, melius: publicatio enim operi expeditior non erit nociva, sed valde commoda. Actum hac 11 Julii, 1633. Tho. P. S. Theol Profess.” 46. Ibid.: “Facultatem facio, quatenus, cum salutaris obedientiae merito, tractatum de justificatione et problematibus annexis praelo mandare, ut poteris citius, cures. Vale, Deum pro nobis oraturus. Fr. Joan. Gennings, Angliae Mnr.” 47. John Southcot to Peter Biddulph, June 14, 1633, in Questier, Newsletters, letter 46, 186. 48. John Southcot to Peter Biddulph, July 19, 1633, in Questier, Newsletters, letter 49, 191.

550 Notes to Pages 120 –125 49. Ibid., 192. 50. Ibid.: “The king hath discountenanced the puritans exceedingly in his journey and refused to hear puritan ministers preach in severall places.” 51. See J. E. Acland, Little Gidding and Its Inmates in the Times of King Charles I (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1903). 52. Questier, Newsletters, fn. 906: “Southcot had recently sent ‘a long relation’ to Bichi, the nuncio in Paris ‘of the like matters.’” Cardinal del Bagno ascribed the restoring of crosses in churches directly to Laud. 53. John Southcot to Peter Biddulph, July 19, 1633, in Questier, Newsletters, letter 49, 194– 95. 54. Anthony Milton, “Martin, Edward (d. 1662),” ODNB. 55. Southcot to Biddulph, August 16, 1633, in Questier, Newsletters, letter 51, 199. 56. See Laud’s diary, August 4, 1633, 49. 57. Southcot to Biddulph, August 16, 1633, in Questier, Newsletters, letter 51, 199. 58. Ibid.: “I cannot learn what that minister is who hath sent his book to the Venetian ambassador in Rome to be shewed to His Holiness and I doubt there is some trick in it.” The Venetian ambassador in 1633 was Alvise Contarini, fresh from serving as ambassador in France, where he advocated a Venice– France alliance against the Habsburgs. 59. See Laud, The history of the troubles and tryal of William Laud (1695), 35: “Then followed the charge of Sancta Clara’s Book. First then, they Charge that I had often Conference with him while he was writing his Book Intituled Deus, Natura, Gratia. No, he never came to me, till he was ready to Print that Book. Then some friends of his brought him to me. His suit then was, That he might print that Book here. Upon Speech with him, I found the Scope of his book to be such, as that the Church of England would have little Cause to thank him for it. And so absolutely denied it.” 60. George Leyburn to Richard Smith, April 29, 1634, in Questier, Newsletters, letter 59, 220. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 221: “Here it is reported for certayne and was told Father Philip [Henriette-Marie’s confessor] that the nuncio there says that he is soe far from condemning the booke that he doth not finde any point which may deserve a censure. I praye informe yourself.” 63. George Leyburn to Richard Smith, May 22, 1634, in Questier, Newsletters, letter 60, 222. 64. See Relation donnée par M. de Fontenay au retour de son ambassade d’Angleterre au mois de juin 1634; reprinted in Leopold von Ranke, A History of England principally in the seventeenth century (1875), 5:449. 65. Title page of Deus, natura, gratia, 1st ed. (1634).

Notes to Pages 125 –134

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66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Reprinted in Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, xxxi. 69. Ibid., xxxii. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. F. à Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia, 2nd ed. (Lyon: Antoine Chard, 1634[?]), problem 37, 323. 73. Ibid., problem 16, 131. 74. Ibid., problem 1, 3. 75. Ibid., 5. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., problem 2, 8. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 9. 80. Ibid., 15. 81. Ibid., problem 5, 35. 82. Heather Wolfe, ed., Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters (Cambridge: RTM, 2001). 83. Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (London, 1632), preface, sect. 2, p. 3. 84. Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia, problem 5, 38. 85. Ibid., 39. See also problem 9, 45. 86. Ibid., problem 7, 41. 87. Ibid., problem 11, 69. 88. Ibid., 70. 89. Ibid. Cf. Tractatus doctissimi viri Guilielmi Whitakeri de peccato originali (1600), liber secundus, caput 3, 136. 90. Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, article 10, 10–11. 91. Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia, problem 12, 72. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. Ibid., problem 15, 110. 95. Ibid. Sancta Clara refers the reader to Summa theologiae 2-2, q. 1, art. 4. 96. Ibid., 111. Sancta Clara cites de Soto, de Vega, Alvarez, Bonaventure, and Herera. 97. Ibid., 113. 98. Ibid., 114. 99. Ibid., 116. 100. Ibid., 119. 101. Ibid., 121. 102. Ibid., 123.

552 Notes to Pages 135 –143 103. Ibid., problem 12, 131. 104. I thank Jean-Luc Solère for calling my attention to Pierre Bayle’s citation of this passage in Commentaire philosophique. 105. Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia, problem 20, 15. 106. Lee, Expositio Paraphrastica, article 12, 14. 107. Ibid., article 13, 15–16. 108. Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia, problem 26, 215. 109. Ibid., 232. 110. Ibid., problem 30, 257– 69. 111. Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, 23. 112. Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia, problem 27, 232; cited again in Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, 23. 113. Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, 24. 114. Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia, problem 32, 221. 115. Sancta Clara refers the reader to Scotus, Ordinatio 3, distinctio 36, quaestio unica. See Allan B. Wolter, Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 412. See further Douglas C. Lagston, “The Aristotelian Background to Scotus’s Rejection of the Necessary Connection of Prudence and the Moral Virtues,” Franciscan Studies 66 (2008): 317– 36. 116. Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia, problem 36, 312. 117. Ibid. Cf. William Covell, A Just and Temperate Defence of the Five Books of Ecclesiastical Policie by R. Hooker (London, 1603). 118. Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia, problem 36, 312. 119. Ibid., 313. 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid., 314. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid., 315. Note that the Douay–Rheims translation and the King James Version differ in how the Greek gnōmē is translated into English. The Douay– Rheims Bible (1) translates it as “counsel,” while the King James Bible (2) translates it as “judgment.” Compare (1) “Now, concerning virgins, I have no commandment of the Lord: but I give counsel, as having obtained mercy of the Lord, to be faithful”; and (2) “Now concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord: yet I give my judgment, as one that hath obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful.” 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid., 316. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., 317. 130. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 143–152

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131. Ibid. 132. Ibid. 133. Ibid., 318. See Sermon 16 on the New Testament. 134. Ibid. 135. Ibid., 319. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid. Cf. Eiusdem D. Richardi Smythei confutatio quorundam articulorum de votis Monasticis Petri Martyris Itali, Oxoniae in Anglia Theologiam proficientis (Louvain, 1550). See also J. Andreas Löwe, Richard Smyth and the Language of Orthodoxy (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 144. 138. Ibid., 320. 139. Ibid., 321. 140. Ibid., 322. Article 14 states, in fact: “They do for His sake more than of bounden duty is required.” 141. Ibid.

. A Detailed Look 1. Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, xxviii. 2. S. R. Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), chap. 13, 75: “No man hereafter shall either print, or preach, to draw the Article aside any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof; and shall not put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal and grammatical sense.” 3. Ibid.: “(In order that) the churchmen may do the work that is proper to them, the Bishops and Clergy, from time to time in Convocation, upon their humble desire, shall have license under our broad seal to deliberate of, and to do such things as, being made plain by them, and assented unto by us, shall concern the settled continuance of the doctrine and discipline of the Church of England now established.” 4. Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, article 23, 42. 5. Cf. Richard Montagu, Appello Caesarem, chap. 16, 110. 6. See The judgment of the Apostles and of those of the first Age, in all points of doctrine questioned between the Catholickes and Protestants of England, as they are set down in the 39 Articles of their religion. By an old student of Divinitie. At Doway, 1632. 7. The title page of the 1633 edition of Rogers’s book explains the content in revealing detail: “The faith, doctrine, and religion, professed, and protected in the realm of England, and dominions of the same. Expressed in thirty-nine articles, concordably agreed upon by reverent bishops, and clergie of this kingdome, at two severall meetings, or convocations of theirs, in the yeeres of our Lord, 1562 and 1604. The said articles analised into propositions, and the propositions proved to

554 Notes to Pages 152 –167 be agreeable both to the written Word of God, and to the extant confessions of all the neighbor churches, Christianly reformed. The adversaries also of note and name, which from the apostles daies, and primitive Church hitherto have crossed, or contradicted the said articles in generall, or any particle, or proposition arising from any of them in particular, hereby are discovered, laid open and confuted. Perused, and by the lawful authority of the Church of England, allowed to be publike” (London, 1633). 8. Thomas Rogers, The Catholicke Doctrine of the Church of England (1633), 30. 9. Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, 5. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., and 6. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 7. 14. Ibid., 52. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., article 36, 89. 17. Ibid., 90. 18. Ven. P. Fr. Stephani d’Aluin Ordinis Minimorum Sancti Francisci de Paula, Tractatus de potestate episcoporum, abbatum, aliorumque Praelatorum, Editio secunda (1614), chap. 22, 250– 51. The book was prohibited “until corrected” on September 2, 1620. See Index librorum prohibitorum, 1600–1966, ed. J. M. de Bujanda and M. Richter (Centre d’études de la Renaissance) (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 2002), 65. 19. Presumably, Tractatus de regia protectione et oppressorum a causis judicibus ecclesiastici (1627). Sancta Clara refers the reader to pt. 1, c. 1, praelud. 3, n. 122. 20. Cf. Suarez, De primatu summi pontificis, liber 3, cap. 5. 21. Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, article 37, 100. 22. Martinus ab Azpilcueta (Navarro), Enchiridion sive manuale confessariorum et poenitentium (Antwerp, 1575), chap. 27, no. 70. 23. Presumably, Practica criminalis canonica: novissime recognita, interpretantur a doctore Ignatio Lopez de Salsedo (Antwerp, 1593). 24. Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 148. 25. Sancta Clara refers the reader to André Duval, De suprema Romani pontificis in ecclesiam potestate (1614), pt. 3, fol. 405. 26. Sancta Clara refers the reader to Harpsfield’s Historia Anglicana ecclesiastica, republished in Douay in 1622, sec. 14. 27. Sancta Clara refers the reader to book 4, chapter 34. In J. B. Malou’ s edition of De immunitate ecclesiastica, in Opuscula sex inedita (Opera Omnia, vol. 240), the relevant passage seems to be in book 2, chapter 1, 272. 28. Sancta Clara refers the reader to Fulvio Pacciano, Consilia, responsa, relationes et allegationes juris (1605), number 24; and to Camillo Borelli, De Regis

Notes to Pages 167–174

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Catholici Praestantia, ejus Regalibus, Juribus, et Praerogativis Commentarii (1611), chap. 503, nos. 26 and 27. 29. Cf. In coena Domini, finalized by Urban VIII in 1627. 30. De primate summi pontificis (1581), bk. 3, chap. 1, num. 4. 31. Sancta Clara cites Morla’s Emporium quaestionum utriusque juris, pars 1, titulus 1, de legibus, folio 7, in paraphrase. The 1599 Valencia edition reads: “Quia cum Regnum illi commissum sit, necessario omnia censentur commissa, sine quibus Regnum gubernari non potest.” Cf. the “Necessary and Proper Clause” of the U.S. Constitution, art. 1, sec. 8, cl. 18. 32. Lee, Paraphrastica expositio, article 37. 33. Martinus ab Azpilcueta, Enchiridion sive manuale confessariorum et poe nitentium (Antwerp, 1575), chap. 27, no. 69. 34. Sancta Clara cites Gerson verbatim. On the context of Gerson’s tract “Is it licit in matters of Faith to appeal from the Decision of the Sovereign Pontiff?” (1418), see James Louis Connolly, John Gerson: Reformer and Mystic (Louvain: Librairie universitaire, 1928), 186– 87. 35. Francis Bremer reports, e.g., that John Davenport considered that the “surplice does not agree with the spiritual worship of God” and was “popish apparel.” John Davenport also disapproved of bells. In 1626, he had the great bell of St. Stephens’s melted down; see Bremer, Building the New Jerusalem, 70 and 76, respectively.

. A Conspiracy (English Suite) 1. Edward Knott, Charity mistaken, with the want whereof, Catholickes are unjustly charged for affirming, as they do with grief, that Protestancy unrepented destroys salvation (St.-Omer, 1630), conclusion. 2. See John Southcot’s letter to Peter Biddulph in Rome, dated August 16, 1633, in Questier, Newsletters, 199. Southcot seems to be answering Biddulph’s query when he writes: “I cannot learn what that minister is who hath sent his book [sc. “Father Francis’s book”] to the Venetian ambassador in Rome to be shewed to his Holiness.” 3. Niccolò Barozzi and G. Berchet, Relazioni degli stati Europei lette al Senato dagli ambasciatori Veneti nel secolo decimosettimo (Venice: Pietro Naratovich, 1877), vol. 2, pt. 2, 253– 55. 4. See the article “Contarini, Alvise,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1983), 28:82– 91. 5. See, e.g., Contarini’s dispatch of July 10, 1628, where he blames France for depriving the Huguenots of La Rochelle of their freedoms and adopting a policy of intolerance as part and parcel of a new rapprochement with Spain. 6. Alvise Contarini, Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, vol. 20, 1626–1628, ed. Allen B. Hinds (London, 1914); British

556 Notes to Pages 174 –175 History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/venice/vol20 (henceforth, State Papers, Venetian), dispatch of November 6, 1626, in cipher: “I repeat that the two nations will never be united by ties of friendship or of political interests.” 7. Ibid., Contarini, dispatch of March 9, 1628, in cipher: “As the result of my last audience, the king has sent me a very liberal passport and has expressed the fullest confidence in me.” 8. Ibid., Contarini, dispatch of June 30, 1628: “Although I recognized that I had no right to dissuade or recommend its relief, yet he might consider the expense and the risks, which might induce the Spaniards to form some design against His majesty himself, such as they possibly have in their eye.” 9. Ibid.: “I said that the Huguenots would treat for peace whenever his majesty covertly allowed them to do so. This course would be the easiest and safest, as the Most Christian would scarcely treat about his own subjects with foreign powers. The example might some day prove injurious to his Majesty himself.” 10. Ibid.: “I took the occasion to observe that the more the princes on the right side go to ruin by dissensions among themselves, the more the Austrians profit by ties of blood, interest and joint policy, progressing alike by war, artifice and bribery towards universal monarchy.” 11. Ibid.: “He inclined more to France, on account of their relationship, nearness and similar interests. It seemed a great thing to me that he should declare that with regard to Spain he had no other interests than that of his friends, as he had never spoken thus before.” 12. Ibid., Contarini, dispatch of May 29, 1628, in cipher: “Scotland warmly urges peace with France. . . . I will encourage this disposition, which suits the common weal, and ought to prove profitable if reason ruled.” 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid, Contarini, dispatch of July 10, 1628. 15. Ibid. 16. William Laud, The history of the troubles and tryal of William Laud (1695), 4:327: “Monsieur S. Giles is a great scholar and a sober man.” See also 328: “Mr. S. Giles did so good services to the State, that he lost himself in France, and durst not go thither when the French were sent away. All this while the man was unknown to me, till his Majesty one day at S. James’s told me this, and that he was a priest, and that it lay upon him in honour to allow him some maintenance.” 17. Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 22:31, Contarini to Zorzi Zorzi, Venetian ambassador to France, April 18: “I rejoice that we can at last witness the fruits of our labour of eight months, the peace between the 2 crowns.” See also dispatch 237, September 19, 1629, in which Contarini describes the signing of the treaty at Fontainebleau. 18. Ibid., Contarini, dispatch to Venice of July 27, 1629; and Charles, letter to Venice of July 30, 1629.

Notes to Pages 175 –176

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19. Dockery, translation of Codices Barberini Latini, 8620, CVII. 7, January 23, 1636/7, in Christopher Davenport, 82. 20. See, e.g., Contarini’s dispatch to Venice of February 28, 1631, in Barozzi and Berchet, Relazioni degli stati Europei lette al Senato, vol. 2, pt. 2, 274. See also 254, Contarini’s successor as Venetian ambassador to France, Giovanni Soranzo: “Il signor Cardinale ha parlato della sua attitudine con termini d’ammirazione e di lode.” 21. Barozzi and Berchet, Relazioni degli stati Europei lette al Senato, vol. 2, pt. 2, 265– 66 (“tutto in cifra”), and 270– 71. 22. Contarini from Lyon to the Venice Senate, September 13, 1630, in State Papers, Venetian, vol. 22, 509, speaking of Charles and his government: “They are a poor lot and ruin others as well as themselves.” 23. See, e.g., Pierre Blet, Richelieu et l’Eglise (Versailles: Via Romana, 2009), 120 – 21. See also Bagno’s letter to Jocher, secret agent of the Duke of Bavaria, May 17, 1630; cited by Gustave Fagniez in Le Père Joseph et Richelieu (1577–1638) (Paris, 1894), 524. 24. See Barozzi and Berchet, Relazioni degli stati Europei lette al Senato, vol. 2, pt. 2, 27. 25. Ibid.: “Nell’ aprile partiva il Contarini per l’Inghilterra.” Or is this perhaps a misprint for “per Roma”? 26. Vicenzo Gussoni, dispatch from London to Venice of April 16, 1632, in State Papers, Venetian, vol. 22. 27. See the dispatch of the Venetian ambassador to the Netherlands, Alvise Contarini di Fernando (not di Tomasso), of May 6, 1632; in State Papers, Venetian, vol. 22, 1629– 32. 28. “Contarini, Alvise,” Dizionario biografico, 85; and N. Barozzi and G. Berchet, Relazioni degli stati Europei lette al Senato dagli ambasciatori Veneti nel secolo decimosettimo (Venice: Pietro Naratovich, 1877), serie 3, vol. 1, 353– 405. 29. See Van Dyck’s magnificent portrait of Bentivoglio, dated 1623, now in the Pitti Palace in Florence. 30. Jules Speller, Galileo’s Inquisition Trial Revisited (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008), 136– 37 and 361– 62. See also Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 251 and 351. 31. Speller, Galileo’s Inquisition Trial Revisited, 131– 32. 32. Auguste Leman, Urbain VIII et la rivalité de la France et de la maison d’Autriche de 1631 à 1635 (Paris: Champion, 1920), 336 ff. 33. Ibid., 336, letter of Francesco Barberini to Bichi, November 13, 1632; see also Leopold von Ranke, The History of the Popes: Their Church and State in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century (New York: Colonial Press, 1901), 263. In a footnote, Ranke cites Contarini’s report of Spain’s interest in Ludovisi’s suggestions and efforts for a council. 34. Ludwig Pastor, The History of the popes: from the close of the Middle Ages. Drawn from the secret archives of the Vatican and other original sources, 2nd ed.

558 Notes to Pages 176 –178 (St. Louis: Herder, 1899–1953), 10:414. See also Auguste Leman, Recueil des Instructions Générales aux nonces ordinaires de France de 1624 à 1634 (Paris: E. Champion, 1920), 30– 32. 35. Pierre Blet, “Le Plan de Richelieu pour la réunion des Protestants,” Gregorianum 48 (1967): 100–129. 36. Blet, Richelieu et l’Eglise, 67. 37. See Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, vol. 1, article “Amyraut.” 38. Ibid.; and [Various authors], A New and general biographical dictionary (London: W. Strahan, 1784), 1:216. 39. Blet, “Le Plan de Richelieu pour la réunion des Protestants,” 101– 2. 40. Ibid., 102. In Blet’s translation of Codices Barberini Latini, 8081, f. 21v-22, Bichi writes: “Their decision and example would win over the people. Afterwards, one would proceed against stubborn ministers as disturbers of the public order against the decision of the majority.” 41. Lettres choisies de M. Richard Simon, vol. 1, lettre 2, 9–12, and lettre 5, 19– 21. 42. See Blet, “Le Plan de Richelieu pour la réunion des Protestants,” 103. 43. Ibid.: “Au besoin, on emploierait aussi la force.” 44. Blet, Richelieu et l’Eglise, 127. 45. See Bagno’s instructions, in Auguste Leman, Recueil des Instructions Générales aux nonces ordinaires de France de 1624 à 1634, 141– 42: “[Le cose d’Inghilterra] sono state sempre raccomandate principalmente a chi risiede in Francia.” 46. Philip Hughes, “The Conversion of Charles I,” Clergy Review 8 (1934): 115 and 117n8. 47. Orthodoxa consultatio de ratione verae fidei et religionis amplectenda. Ad serenissimum Carolum Walliae principem, Jacobi I. magnae Britanniae regis filium . . . in suo in Hispanias adventu. In duas partes distributa-e. In qua regulae ad veram, catholicam, atque orthodoxam fidem tum agnoscendam, tum amplectendam: ex sacrarum scripturarum fontibus: conciliorum auctoritate; veterum partum monumentis; variis que rationibus hastae, et concinnatae traduntur. Auctore R.P.F. Zaccharia Boverio Salutiensi ([Cologne], 1626). 48. Questier, Newsletters, 221. 49. Questier, in introducing Newsletters, 23, attests: “In 1631, George Leyburn became Henrietta’s chaplain thanks to her two closest clerical advisers, Robert Philip and William Thompson, OFM.” 50. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 83n3, reporting that Bichi’s approval of a new edition was dated June 1634, in Westminster Archives, 27:445. 51. E.g., Roman d’Amat, “Bichi, Alessandro,” in Dictionnaire de biographie française, tome 6 (Paris, 1954), 398; and René Pinarel, Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1920), 207– 8 and 265– 68. 52. E.g., Philippe Tamizey de Larroque, Les correspondants de Peiresc, vol. 8, Le Cardinal Bichi: Lettres inédites écrites à Peiresc (1632–1637) (Paris: Picard, 1885),

Notes to Pages 178 –181

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“Avertissement”: “le cardinal Bichi a deux grands mérites à mes yeux, sans parler de tous ses autres mérites: il a beaucoup aimé la France et beaucoup aimé Peiresc.” 53. Ibid., see Bichi’s letter to Cardinal Barberini, dated from Toulouse, October 31, 1632. 54. Ibid., 106– 7. 55. See John Southcot’s letters to Peter Biddulph of April 26, 1633, and of June 7, 1633, in Questier, Newsletters, 175 and 181, respectively. 56. Caroline Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 19– 37. 57. Blet, Richelieu et l’Eglise, 211–14. 58. Gordon Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome: A Study in 17th-Century Diplomacy (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, Ltd., 1935), 114 and fn. 1. Alessandro to Barberini, from Vienna, January 7, 1633, in Codices Barberini Latini, 7049, ff. 4– 7. 59. Ibid.; Hughes, “The Conversion of Charles I,” 113– 25; and Joachim Johann von Rusdorf, Mémoires et négotiations secrètes de Mr. de Rusdorf (Leipzig: Wegand, 1789), 1:157– 72. 60. Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, July 9, 1633: Alvise Contarini, Venetian ambassador at Rome, to the Inquisitors of State. 61. John Southcot to Peter Biddulph, February 15, 1633, in Questier, Newsletters, 154: “The Jesuits’ followers give it out that we shall shortly have a persecution, perhaps to terrify only and to hinder his Holiness’s resolution about our bishop whose rettourne they feare.” 62. A good example is John Southcot’s letter to Peter Biddulph of June 22, 1632, which mentions the Humillima narratio pleading for episcopal authority and cites wayward religious practices by Benedictines, who allowed Catholics to have their children baptized in Protestant churches (see Questier, Newsletters, 96 –101). 63. Relation donnée par M. de Fontenay au retour de son ambassade d’Angleterre au mois de juin 1634; reprinted in Leopold von Ranke, A History of England principally in the seventeenth century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1875), 5:449: “Tobie . . . s’offre de vouloir aymer et server la France, pourveu qu’elle l’assiste en ce dessein.” 64. John Southcot to Peter Biddulph, June 22, 1632, in Questier, Newsletters, 99. 65. John Southcot to Peter Biddulph, March 6, 1633, in Questier, Newsletters, 163. 66. Blet, Richelieu et l’Eglise, 230– 33. 67. Peter Guilday, The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent, 1558–1795 (London: Longmans, 1914), 1230– 33; and E. L. Taunton, “Bradshaw [alias White], John [name in religion Augustine of St. John] (1575/6–1661),” ODNB. 68. The English Benedictine building and garden are now occupied by the Schola Cantorum. 69. George Leyburn interpreted Jones to be deliberately two-faced regarding the oath; see Leyburn to Smith, April 8, 1635, in Questier, Newsletters, 250.

560 Notes to Pages 181–182 70. Letter from Leander Jones (John Jones, alias Scudamore) to Windebank, August 26, 1634, in MSS Clarendon, unpublished Clarendon State Papers (at the Bodleian Library), vol. 6 (August 1, 1634– June 19, 1635), 20. Jones’s letter is listed and briefly summarized as item 379 in the Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers Preserved in the Bodleian Library, ed. O. Ogle and W. H. Bliss (Oxford: Clarendon, 1872), 1:49. It is published in State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon (Oxford, 1767), 1:128. See, further, Jones’s letter to Windebank of November 15, 1634, with details of how to get letters to Selby safely, in State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:169. 71. Leander to Windebank, November 13, 1634, in State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:167– 68; listed as item 403 in Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers, 1:53. See also the letter by an otherwise unknown Thomas Williams, written from Paris to Archbishop Laud on August 30, 1634, warning of Richelieu’s design to infiltrate England through the queen’s Capuchins (State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:142– 43). 72. Instructions for Captain Arthur Brett, sent to Rome by our dearest Consort the Queen, Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers, 1:73– 74 (item 560); and State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:354– 55. Hampton Court, October 28, 1635, signed and dated by Charles. 73. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 117 and 127. Stirling’s letter to Alessandro d’Alès is mentioned in Douglas’s petition to the pope, Codices Barberini Latini, 8656, ff. 58 – 60; cited by Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 127, fn. 1. 74. Ibid., 177, Codices Barberini Latini, 8656, ff. 1 and 81. 75. Ibid., 122, as Bagno wrote to Barberini on October 29, 1633, Codices Barberini Latini, 8656, ff. 10– 30. 76. Ibid., Bagno to Francesco Barberini, from Ghiaggiolo, October 29, 1633, Codices Barberini Latini, 8656, ff. 10– 30. 77. Ibid., 288, fn. 2. D’Alès to “Molto Illustrissimo Signore,” perhaps Barberini, June 2, 1628, Codices Barberini Latini, 7048, f. 48. See further Jones’s reasons in favor of creating an English cardinal, written by Price, State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:133– 37. 78. Ibid., 122. 79. Ibid., Bagno’s letter to Barberini of October 29, 1633, Codices Barberini Latini, 8656, ff. 10– 30. 80. Ibid., 126, Bagno’s letter to Barberini, dated November 22, 1633, from Ghiaggiolo, Codices Barberini Latini, 8656, ff. 82– 83. 81. Ibid., 123, d’Alès to Bagno, October 21, 1633, Codices Barberini Latini, 8656, ff. 32 – 33. 82. Ibid., Douglas’s petition to Urban VIII. 83. Ibid., 126: “His majesty, in his regard for the Pope, had ordered to plead in his stead those closest to his person and his crown, viz. the Queen, the principal Catholics of Scotland and the Scottish Secretary of State.”

Notes to Pages 182 –185

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84. Ibid., 128, Douglas to Bagno, enclosed with a letter from Alessandro d’Alès dated November 16, 1633, Codices Barberini Latini, 8656, f. 94. 85. Ibid., 133. 86. Ibid., 140, Bagno’s letter to Barberini of December 21, 1633. 87. Ibid., 138. 88. Ibid., 128. 89. Ibid. 90. Michelle Dobbie, “Henrietta Maria, Political Intrigue, and Early Modern Diplomacy,” Lives and Letters 2, no. 1 (2010): 12. 91. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 122; Bagno’s letter to Barberini of October 29, 1633. 92. Questier, Newsletters, 172. 93. Ibid., 177, Southcot to Peter Biddulph, August 26, 1634. 94. Sancta Clara, Religio philosophi (1662), 49. 95. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 143. 96. Ibid., 147; based on Panzani’s Diary, Arch. Vat., Nunz. D’Inghilterra, 34, ff. 3, 23– 24. 97. Ibid., 148. 98. Georges Dethan, Mazarin et ses amis (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1968), 104– 5 and 133– 45. Dethan reports (104) that Mazarin would one day describe Bichi as “the most devoted and loyal friend that I have in the world.” 99. Ibid., 105 and 347, fn. 2. 100. Leman, Urbain VIII et la rivalité de la France et de la maison d’Autriche de 1631 à 1635, 417– 39. 101. Memoirs of Panzani, 192. 102. Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, January 9, 1634– 35, 1:58 (item 439): “Project de Traité entre le Roi d’Angleterre, le roi très chrétien, et les provinces Unis du Pays Bas.” 103. Bichi’s letter to Barberini of September 25, 1633; cited by Leman, Recueil des Instructions Générales aux nonces ordinaires de France de 1624 à 1634, 183– 84, fn. 2. See also John Southcot’s letter to Peter Biddulph (agent of the English secular clergy in Rome) of June 14, 1633: “For persecution we have as great a calme as ever we had, God continue it long. The grand aulmoner hath certified so much to the nonce in Paris of late as I heare, which will have some authority with it” (in Questier, Newsletters, 186). 104. Michelle Dobbie, “Henrietta Maria, Political Intrigue, and Early Modern Diplomacy,” Lives and Letters 2, no. 1 (2010): 1–16. 105. Letter by the Scottish Minim Francis Maitland of May 5, 1634, in Archives of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, Scritture riferite nelle Cong. Gen. Acta, vol. 134, f. 228; cited in Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 66– 67. 106. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 170 and fn. 2 107. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 67 (from Archives of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, Cong. Gen. Acta, 10:150, 151).

562 Notes to Pages 185 –187 108. Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, 1:54 (item 408) (dated here November 22); printed in full in State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:171. 109. See R. J. M. Van de Schoor, The Irenical Theology of Théophile Brachet de la Milletière (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 33. 110. La Milletière’s 1634 publication was translated into French in 1635, with the title Discours des moyens d’establir une paix en la Chrestienté pour la réunion de l’Eglise prétendue réformée à l’Eglise Romaine. Proposez à Monseigneur le Cardinal Duc de Richelieu par le sieur de la Milletière (Discourse on the means to establish peace in Christendom by reuniting the so-called Reformed church with the Roman church. Proposed to Monsignor the Cardinal-Duc of Richelieu by Sir de la Milletière). For more information on Richelieu’s involvement in this irenic publication, see Van de Schoor, The Irenical Theology of Théophile Brachet de la Milletière, 33– 58. 111. Van de Schoor, The Irenical Theology of Théophile Brachet de la Milletière, 57– 58. 112. Ibid., 35. 113. David Baird Smith, “Jean de Villiers Hotman,” Scottish Historical Review 14, no. 54 (1917): 147– 66, especially 164– 66. 114. Leman, Recueil des Instructions Générales aux nonces ordinaires de France de 1624 à 1634, 184. Bolognetti’s instructions are dated April 1, 1634. 115. Ibid.: “non si lascerà di pensar continuamente al modo di vantaggiar questo negotio.” 116. Questier, Newsletters, 249, fn. 1148. 117. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 67; based on Panzani’s diary. 118. Ibid. 119. Ibid., citing Codices Barberini Latini, 8633, f. 135. 120. Ibid., 68 and 69; based on Public Record Office, London, January 16/26, 1635. 121. Edward Knott, Charity Mistaken (1630), which was answered by Chris topher Potter, Want of Charity justly charged, on all such Romanists, as dare (without truth or modesty) affirme, that Protestancie destroyeth salvation (1633), and which Knott refuted, in turn, with Mercy and Truth (1634). 122. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 70, based on Public Record Office, London, January 30/February 9, 1635. 123. H. Burton, For God and the King, sermon preached November 5, 1636. 124. Respectively, Peter Heylyn’s answer to Burton, A Brief and Moderate Answer, 123, and Laud, The history of the troubles and tryal of William Laud (1695), 385. 125. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 250, fn. 97. 126. Sancta Clara, “Epistolium apologeticum lectori Catholico et pacis Christianae studioso,” in Deus, natura, gratia (1635 ed.). 127. Bichi’s permission for a second edition was written to Sancta Clara in June 1634, while both of the new approbations were dated July 1634 and delivered in London. Once he had received Bichi’s permission, Sancta Clara sought the new approvals.

Notes to Pages 187–193

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128. See the subtitle of “Epistolium apologeticum”: “ubi non (ut solebant Puritani) ad duram literam sistitur, sed indies ad sensus meliores et probabiliores inclinator.” 129. Sancta Clara, “Epistolium apologeticum” (italics added). 130. Ibid. 131. On the question of Roman Catholic heterogeneity and its appeal to Caroline divines, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 229– 62. 132. E.g., the following passage in “Epistolium apologeticum”: “Ego, salva fide, vias quas excogitare potui suaviores, ad bonum pacis, ob horrorem schismatice, humiliter propono; opiniones quidem, aliquando non adeo communes, refero, quas subinde non ut proprias amplector, sed dum de discrimine in fide agitur, illas tanquam ab Ecclesiae toleratas, ad nostratium conciliationem insinuo, secundum illud Cusani, Oportet infirmitati hominum plerumque condescendere, nisi urgat contra aeternam salutam.” 133. Thomas Chouneus [Chowne], Collectiones theologicarum quarundam conclusionum: ex diversis authorum sententiis, perquam breves sparsim excerptae (London, 1635), collectio 6, 13–16. 134. Ibid., collectio 7, 21– 22; and collectio 8, 23. 135. Ibid., collectio 11, 31– 33. 136. Ibid., collectio 12, 35. 137. Ibid., collectio 16, 45– 46. 138. Ibid., collectio 17, 47. 139. Ibid., collectio 13. 140. Ibid., collectio 14, 39. 141. Ibid., collectio 15, 42. 142. Laud will be charged with licensing Chowne’s book; see Laud, The history of the troubles and tryal of William Laud (1695), 391 (Day 19 of his trial): “The Fourth Charge is out of Chouneus his Book, p. 45 and 46. Licensed by my Chaplain Dr. Braye, where (they say) ‘tis said, That Rome is a True Church and differs not in Fundamentals.” 143. Sancta Clara’s manuscript discussion of Chowne’s Collectiones is listed as item 435 in the Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, 1:58: “censura de quibusdam capitibus in libro inscripto Collectiones theologicarum.” The editor notes that the manuscript is in the same hand as the paper printed in State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:90– 91, which is endorsed by Windebank as “Mr. Damport.” I checked in MSS Clarendon that the handwriting is indeed the same. For further analysis, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 250, fn. 96, which provides an excellent and precise summary of the additions made by Sancta Clara to the 1635 edition of Deus, natura, gratia. 144. Jones’s letter to Windebank (?) of May 4, 1635, in MSS Clarendon, vol. 6 (August 21, 1634– June 19, 1635), 270; See also Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, 1:62 (item 476) (endorsed by Windebank, “Leander”).

564 Notes to Pages 193–194 145. Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, 1:62 (item 476) (undated), and 1:63 (item 489) (May 9, 1635); and State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:271– 72. 146. For the emphasis on civil disloyalty, see Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, 1:43 (item 340) (May 12, 1634); and State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:89. 147. William Howard of Nathworth, first cousin of the Earl of Arundell; see R. E. Grun, “A Note on William Howard, Author of a Patterne of Christian Loyaltie,” Catholic Historical Review 42 (1956– 57): 330– 40. 148. See Windebank’s rough draft of October 29, 1634, reporting Courtney’s arrest to Charles, State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:159; Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, 1:52 (item 395). 149. See Jones’s letter to Windebank of August 26, 1634, MSS Clarendon, 6:20; and State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:159. 150. See Selby’s letter to Jones from Rome, dated November 13, 1634, and transmitted by Jones to Windebank; Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, 1:53 (item 403); and State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:167– 68. 151. Leyburn’s letter to Smith, July 1, 1634, in Questier, Newsletters, 226: “I heare also that Mr. Preston, Father Francis, Don David, and Mr. Howard doe often meet together.” 152. Leyburn’s letter to Smith of July 12, 1634, in Questier, Newsletters, 231. 153. Ibid.: “I heare that all the ministers shall be consecrated anew by some bishop made by Bishop Spalato. The bishop of Canterbury that is now was consecrated bishop by him.” 154. Leyburn to Smith, May 8, 1635, in Questier, Newsletters, 255. See also Jones’s answer to Windebank concerning bishops, in Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, 1:62 (item 473) (dated April 15, 1635); and State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:252. 155. Sancta Clara’s letter to Luke Wadding of November 18, 1635; cited by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 70; in Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Charles I (1635), 488. 156. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 167. 157. MSS Clarendon, 6:173; item 434 in Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, 1:58; and State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:207–10: “instructions relating to the reconciliation of moderate papists and Protestants” followed by Jones’s oath of allegiance. 158. The Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani, 177; and Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 171 and fn. 1 (citing Public Record Office, Roman Transcription, Panzani to Barberini, April 10/20, 1635). For Panzani’s success in preventing this new publication, see William M. Brady, The Episcopal succession in England, Scotland and Ireland (1822), 3:100; citing Relazione dello stato della Religione cattolica in Inghilterra: data alla Sanctita di N.S. Urbano VIII da Gregorio Panzani nel suo riturno de quell Regno l’anno 1637.

Notes to Pages 195 –197

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159. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 151. 160. Ibid., 152 (citing from Panzani’s letter to Barberini, June 10/20, 17/27, 1635) and 175 (citing Panzani’s letters to Barberini of March 12/23, April 3/13, June 3/13, 1635). 161. Ibid., 153, fn. 3. Panzani to Barberini, August 8, 1635: “la Rosa britannica cerca di parterciparne, desiderosa forse un giorno di dare soavissime pascole alle Api Urbane.” 162. The Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani, 172; and Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 171. 163. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 76, fn. 4. 164. Clarendon State Papers, 71, item 539. 165. Cited by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 72; State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:336– 37. 166. Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, 1:74 (item 566); and State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:360. 167. Southcot to Biddulph, November 20, 1635, in Questier, Newsletters, 265. 168. See F. Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem, 103– 7. 169. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 175; based on Panzani’s letters to Barberini of March 23, April 13, and June 13, 1635. 170. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 355. 171. “Secret Instructions for captain Arthur Brett, sent to Rome,” in Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, 1:73– 74 (item 560); and State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:354– 57, Hampton Court, October 28, 1635. 172. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 158. 173. Ibid.; and Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, 74; State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:357. 174. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic series, Charles I, 1635, 488. The letter is cited almost entire by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 70. Thomas Joseph Shahan (founder of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC) published the whole letter in an article on Sancta Clara, “Christopher Davenport — The Brother of New Haven’s Founder a Franciscan Friar,” United States Catholic Historical Magazine 2 (April 1888): 153– 63. 175. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 70; Shahan, “Christopher Davenport,” 159: “I desire much that no other order should surpass our holy order in acts of true Christian fidelity or zeal to our country.” 176. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 42; and Southcot to Peter Biddulph, November 20, 1635, in Questier, Newsletters, 264– 65. 177. Citing from Leyburn’s letter to Smith of December 9, 1635, in Questier, Newsletters, 268. See also Caroline Hibbard, “Henrietta Maria’s Somerset House Chapel and the Topography of London Catholicism,” in The Politics of Space: European Courts, c. 1500–1700, ed. Marcello Fantoni, George Gorse, and Malcolm Smuts (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2009), 317– 37.

566 Notes to Pages 197– 201 178. David Daniel Rees, “Jones, John [name in religion Leander a Sancto Martino] (1575–1635),” ODNB. 179. See Laud’s diary record for December 1, 1635: “Many Elm-Leaves yet upon the Trees; which few Men have seen,” in Laud, The history of the troubles and tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God and blessed martyr William Laud (London, 1695), 1:52. 180. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 74; reported to Barberini by Panzani in a letter of January 29, 1636. Presumably, Barberini was annoyed because the whole controversy over Sancta Clara’s book had quieted down in Rome, as Selby had attested to Jones in May 1635 (State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:272– 73). 181. See Sancta Clara’s letter to Panzani of April 2, 1636; cited by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 72: “I am amazed when I reflect on the news which your Lordship sent me from Rome the day before yesterday. I like your frankness and forthrightness; at the ill-will of my detractors and of those murmurers, I am surprised.” 182. Citing from Dockery’s translation of Codices Barberini Latini, 8636, f. 285, in Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 73– 74. 183. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 57; reported to Barberini in a letter of January 27/February 6, 1636. See also Geoffrey Soden, Godfrey Goodman, Bishop of Gloucester, 1583–1656 (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1953), 246– 49. 184. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 182. 185. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 55; based on Public Record Office, 31/9/17, February 3/13, 1636. 186. Ibid., 56 and fn. 2 (February 17/27, 1636). 187. Barberini to Panzani, March 26, 1636, in Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 56– 57 188. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 364; citing Public Record Office, MS 31/9/17B: Panzani to Barberini, February 10/20, 1636. 189. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 355– 66. 190. Ibid., 363 and 366. 191. Sancta Clara, Apologia episcoporum seu sacri magistratus propugnatio (Cologne, 1640), chap. 6, 201; Sancta Clara cites chapter 54 of the Council of Nicaea, “which we have in translation from the Arabic by Turriano and Alphonse Pisano.” 192. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 108– 9, and appendix E, 150– 53 (where Dockery provides a translation of the document). The document, conserved in Codices Barberini Latini, 8620, CVII 7, is dated January 23, 1636/37. 193. Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 355 and fn. 126. 194. Ibid., 356– 61. 195. For the “instructions,” see Questier, Newsletters, 272– 79. Brett never made it to Rome. For Brett’s misadventures, see Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 157.

Notes to Pages 202 – 205

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196. Hence, also, Charles’s determination that Rome must accept the existing Jacobean oath, established by Parliament, or a sufficiently close version of it to dispense with having to convene Parliament; see Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 273. 197. Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers, October 1638 – March 1639, 136. The paper is in Sancta Clara’s handwriting and is endorsed “Damport” by Windebank. 198. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 52; citing Panzani to William Hamilton, May 18/28, 1636. 199. Ibid.; citing Barberini to Panzani of May 25/June 4, 1636. 200. See Sancta Clara’s letter of January 23, 1637, to an unidentified “My Lord,” perhaps Barberini (?); cited entire in translation by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 82– 83. 201. Barberini to Panzani, June 5, 1636; cited by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 75. 202. Ibid. 203. See “Instruction concerning the present state of the Protestant Church of England, May 1636”; reprinted in Questier, Newsletters, 274. 204. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 157. 205. Questier, Newsletters, 280– 81, Leyburn to Smith, July 3, 1636. 206. Ibid., 290, fn. 1337. 207. Ibid., 306, Leyburn to Smith, January 19, 1637. 208. Ibid., 288, fn. 1304. 209. Ibid., 288– 89, Leyburn to Edward Bennet, September 3, 1636. 210. Ibid.; and Margaret Forey, “Strode, William (1601?–1645),” ODNB. 211. Questier, Newsletters, 290, Leyburn to Edward Bennet. 212. Ibid. 213. Ibid., and 93. Letter to Smith of September 7, 1636: “I see clearely that the moncks and the fryers here doe desire nothing more than union with the clergie, for they see that the Jesuits doe but comply with them for their owne ends.” 214. Ibid., 291, fn. 1348. 215. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 38; citing Con to Barberini, November 26, 1636. 216. Sancta Clara’s handwritten Latin notes, in MSS Clarendon, 6:136– 38, endorsed by Windebank “Damport,” but undated; summarized in Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, 1:56 (item 425), as follows: “A Comparison in nine heads of the Powers of the King in temporal matters, the Pope in Spiritual, and God in both, with eight cases wherein the temporal sword must be subordinate to the spiritual.” The full Latin text is printed in State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1:90. My English translation of it is appended at the end of this chapter, titled “Three Seats of Power in One Harmony.” 217. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 38. Dockery cites the Public Record Office 31/9/126, f. 126.

568 Notes to Pages 205 – 209 218. For God and the King. The summe of two sermons preached on the fifth of November last in St. Matthewes Friday-streete. 1636. By Henry Burton, minister of Gods word there and then (Amsterdam: J. F. Stam, 1636), 32– 33. 219. Ibid., 40– 41. 220. Ibid., 41– 44, 46– 50, and 56 ff. 221. Ibid., 68– 69. 222. Ibid., 117–18. 223. Laud’s diary, in Laud, The history of the troubles and tryal of William Laud (1695), 54. 224. Questier, Newsletters, 300, Leyburn to Smith, November 24, 1636. 225. Ibid., and 302, Leyburn’s letter to Smith of December 27, 1636. 226. Ibid., 301. 227. Ibid. Note that Sancta Clara’s and Price’s plan to restore their religious orders in England under the ecclesiastic control of Canterbury had the immediate advantage of providing a counterweight to Richelieu’s influence through the queen’s French Capuchins. Selby, as we saw, had warned Windebank about Richelieu’s design in November 1634. 228. Ibid., 304, Leyburn to Smith, January 19, 1637. 229. Ibid., 305. 230. See Sancta Clara’s letter to an unidentified “My Lord,” dated January 23, 1637; Codices Barberini Latini, 8620, CVII, 7; cited and translated by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 82– 83. 231. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 83. 232. Ibid., 113; citing a letter from Con to Barberini of June 1637. Dockery reports that Sancta Clara’s election as provincial for England was held on June 19, 1637, presided over by Peter Marchant. Leyburn, however, wrote to Smith that “Father Frances, as I heare, is made superior in Father Perkins’ place” (John Gennings) in a letter of 19 January 1637 (Questier, Newsletters, 304). 233. E.g., Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 244; citing Con to Barberini, August 4/14, 1637. 234. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot. 235. Albion, Charles I and and the Court of Rome, 268– 71. 236. Ibid., 270. 237. Ibid., 275; citing Con to Barberini, April 14/24, 1637. 238. Ibid., 280; citing Con to Barberini, July 27/August 6, 1637. 239. Questier, Newsletters, 305, Leyburn to Smith, January 19, 1637. 240. Albion, Charles I and and the Court of Rome, 273. 241. Questier, Newsletters, 305, Leyburn to Smith, January 19, 1637. 242. Arnold Oskar Meyer, “Charles I and Rome,” American Historical Review 19, no. 1 (1913): 22. 243. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 280 (citing Con to Barberini, August 4/14, 1637) and 282 (citing Con to Barberini, March 16/26, 1638). 244. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, 60– 64.

Notes to Pages 209 – 216

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245. Ibid., 63. 246. Ibid., and fn. 114, 262. 247. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 281; based on a letter from Con to Barberini, March 9/19, 1638. 248. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 113; citing Con to Barberini, June 1637. 249. Con to Barberini, July 27/August 6, 1637, reporting telling to Charles: “I ask your Majesty, am I to declare myself the enemy of the Jesuits to please some monk or friar showing little obedience to the Holy See and, in consequence, a bad servant of your Majesty?”; cited by Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 280. 250. Ibid. Con’s account to Barberini of Charles’s response is typically selfserving, but conveys what Charles really retained: “The Jesuits are as pernicious as the Puritans.” 251. Questier, Newsletters, 308, Leyburn to Smith, February 23, 1637. 252. See, in particular, Knott’s 1634 answer to Christopher Potter, Mercy and Truth. Or Charity maintained by Catholiques By way of reply upon an answere lately framed by D. Potter (St.-Omer, 1634), and A direction to be observed by N.N. if hee meane to proceede in answering the booke entitled Mercy and truth (London(?): English secret press, 1636). 253. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, 68. 254. Questier, Newsletters, 307– 8, Leyburn to Smith, February 23, 1637. 255. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 280; based on Con to Barberini, August 4/14, 1637. 256. Ibid., 278. 257. Ibid., 218; “Laud maintained that he knew that Con had had orders from Rome to send Father Knott away.” See also Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, 68. 258. Questier, Newsletters, 307, Leyburn to Smith, February 23, 1637: “I confesse they complye mightily with him.” 259. See Laud’s diary, and Leyburn’s letter to Smith of June 14, 1637, in Questier, Newsletters, 316. 260. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 112 and 114. 261. See Paraphrastica expositio articulorum confessionis Anglicae, article 36, “De episcoporum et ministrorum consecratione”: “Notavit doctissimus Kellison (cui multam tribuo, et ex multis titulis debeo) quod etc.” . Apologia episcoporum 1. Apologia episcoporum, “Letter of Dedication.” 2. Ibid., “Paraenesis ad lectorem Christianum,” unnumbered page: Sancta Clara cites Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed, pt. 1, chap. 31. 3. Ibid.: “nempe affectum altercationem.” 4. For the special importance of Cyprian among Anglicans, see, e.g., John Spurr, “‘A Special Kindness for Dead Bishops’: The Church, History, and Testimony in

570 Notes to Pages 217– 223 Seventeenth-Century Protestantism,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Pauline Kewes (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 2006), 317. 5. Apologia episcoporum, chap. 1: “De anarcharum politicismis.” 6. Claire Cross, “Penry, John (1562/3–1593), religious controversialist,” ODNB. 7. Apologia episcoporum, chapter 1, 4–11. 8. Ibid, 12. For Christopher Goodman, see Jane E. A. Dawson, “Goodman, Christopher (1521/2–1603),” ODNB. 9. Apologia episcoporum, chap. 1, 12. 10. Ibid., 18. 11. Ibid., 21– 22. For Edward Wightman’s radical views and sad fate, see Stephen Wright, “Wightman, Edward (bap. 1580?, d. 1612),” ODNB. 12. Ibid., 23. 13. E.g., Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem, 155– 66. 14. Apologia episcoporum, 24– 25. 15. Ibid., 25. 16. Ibid., 26: “Nowhere more elegantly than by Gelasius, in his chapter ‘Valentinianus,’ d. 63.” 17. Ibid., 27. Georgius (1355–1450), whose enthusiasm for Plato inspired Cosimo de Medici to found a Platonic academy in Florence, died in the Peloponnesus, but his remains were “carried to Rimini and placed in the church of St. Francis”; see W. Turner, “Georgius Gemistus Plethon,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911). 18. See John Selden, De successionibus in bona defuncti and De succession in pontificatum Ebraeorum, published jointly in London in 1636 and dedicated to Laud. Sancta Clara’s citation from Selden’s 1623 Eadmeri Historiae Novorum, bk. 1, 20, hints at familiarity with the members of Great Tew. 19. Apologia episcoporum, chap. 2, 34– 35 and 40. 20. Ibid., 40. 21. Ibid., 42. 22. Ibid., 46: “Scotus alium dicendi modum amplectitur, nec improbabilem, cui etiam Delphinus noster astipulatur, nimirum quod pullulante Ecclesia, omnes Presbyteri errant Episcopi, unde termini absque ulla ad invicem confusione (quam tantum abhorret Vasquez) unum et idem materia alia et alia dignitate affectum significare facit, quemadmodum aliae voces diversas diverso respectu vim eidemque subject indistinct applicatae solent.” 23. Ibid.: “Scotus tamen ut assolet in rebus magnae difficultatis et moment, id solum modestè et dubitanter affirmat”; and 47: “Scotus uti dixi subdubiè hanc opinionem amplectitur.” 24. Ibid., 50. Sancta Clara refers the reader to Selden’s annotations to Eadmer, folio 164. 25. Ibid.: “Nescio si quid sublimius cogitari potest.” 26. Ibid., chap. 5, subsection 1, 59, where Sancta Clara cites Augustine against the Donatists.

Notes to Pages 223– 239

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27. Ibid., 61. 28. Ibid., 64. 29. Ibid., 85. 30. Ibid., 86: “Non tunc positum experieris, quid amplius habes pro indubitatis et ubique agnitis fidei veritatibus.” 31. Ibid., 88. 32. Ibid., 90. 33. See, e.g., Felix Bungener, John McClintock, and David Dundas Scott, History of the Council of Trent (Harper, 1855), “Summary of the Decrees and Canons,” xxxiii– xxxiv. 34. Apologia episcoporum, 94. 35. Ibid., 95. 36. Ibid., 98. 37. Ibid., 100. 38. Ibid., 104– 5. 39. Ibid., 105. 40. Ibid., 107. 41. Ibid., 114. 42. Ibid., 123. 43. Ibid., 125. 44. Ibid., 127. 45. Ibid., 128– 40. 46. Ibid., 143. 47. Ibid., 144. 48. Ibid., 146. 49. Ibid., 150. 50. Ibid., 125: Sancta Clara made the point earlier, “independently.” 51. Ibid., 166. 52. Ibid., chap. 6 (“An Episcopatus sit ordo?”), 173. 53. Ibid., 190– 91. 54. Ibid., 192– 93. 55. Ibid., 195. Theodore Balsamon (fl. 1178– 95) wrote a commentary on Photius that was published in Latin at Paris (1615) and at Basle (1620). 56. Ibid., 205. 57. Ibid., 211–13. 58. Ibid., chap. 7, 219. 59. Ibid., 221: “Nihil aliud contendit, quam quod Episcopi non deberent recedere ab illius sedis obedientia, ut declarat contextus et testator glossa.” 60. Ibid., 222: “Hi omnes jurisdictionem spiritualem in Episcopos aliosque Ecclesiae Praelatos immediate à summo Pontifice derivari, et in ipsum solum modo à Deo immediate opinantur.” 61. Ibid., 223: “Secunda igitur opinio specie tenus magis perspicua est, et multo clarior, quae Episcopos ad suam vocari partem Ecclesiasticae sollicitudinis

572 Notes to Pages 239 – 246 de jure divino affirmat. In hoc Scotus (ut superius dixi) problematicus videtur, huic tamen parti multo propensior.” 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 225. 64. Ibid., 226. 65. Ibid., 227: “Sensu igitur quaestionis erit huius modi: utrum sacerdos in Episcopum ordinatus, virtute ordinationis suae, sive in ipsa ordinatione, annexam habeat externam jurisdictionem de jure divino; vel an ab Ecclesia derivatam, ut emendicatam?” 66. Ibid., 228. 67. Ibid., 229: “Optime igitur hanc doctrinam explicat subtilissimus Henricus à Gandavo, Quod. 9, q. 22, qui postquam tractaverat de potestate Episcoporum quoad ordinem ex jure divino. Circa illa autem agit de jurisdictione, et dicit. Hic duo sunt consideranda, sc. acceptatio et eius executio.” 68. Ibid., 240. 69. Ibid., 241– 42. 70. Ibid., 243. 71. Ibid., 250– 54. 72. Ibid., 259– 61. 73. Ibid., 261. 74. Ibid., 262. 75. Ibid., 264. 76. Ibid., 267. 77. Ibid., 268– 69. 78. Ibid., 278. Sancta Clara ends: “In hoc consistit omnis ferma hodierna altercatio.” 79. Ibid., chap. 8, 302: “Diversae formae electionum pro dignitate temporum et rationum nunc à populo et clero, nunc à clero ad petitionem populi, nunc ab Imperatoribus et Regibus, nunc à canonibus solum.” 80. Ibid., 306. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 307. 83. Ibid., 307– 8. 84. Ibid., 309. 85. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 59; citing Godfrey Goodman’s will, “Somerset House.” 86. Caroline Hibbard reports: “Some claimed that Trélon (Henriette-Marie’s Capuchin chaplain) traveled to Rome (1639) to procure permission from the pope for Catholics to attend Protestant services. Some missionaries tolerated this practice, as Rossetti had complained, and Laud never lost an opportunity to argue that papal agents were unnecessarily unyielding on this point”; see Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, 142 and 284, fn. 58.

Notes to Pages 247– 250

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. Spars of a Shipwreck 1. William Laud, The history of the troubles and tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God and blessed martyr William Laud, Lord Arch-bishop of Canterbury (London, 1695), 385 (Day 18, July 17, 1644). 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid.: “Nor did I then know him to be a Priest.” 5. Ibid., 374. This was the content of the “Twelfth Original Article”: “He hath Trayterously endeavoured to cause Division and Discord between the Church of England and other reformed Churches.” 6. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 171. 7. Kenelm Digby, A Conference with a Lady about choice of Religion (Paris, 1638), 86. Digby’s letter to Laud is not extant but is known from Laud’s answer, reprinted in Laud, The history of the troubles and tryal of William Laud (1695), 610 –15. 8. Digby, A Conference with a Lady, 87–108. 9. Citing Joong-Lak Kim’s insightful study, “The Character of the Scottish Prayer Book of 1637,” in The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and David L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 14– 32; see especially Kim’s assessment of Laud’s aim (29). 10. Laud, A speech delivered in the Star-Chamber, on Wednesday, the XIVth of June, MDCXXXVII, at the censure of John Bastwick, Henry Burton and William prinne; concerning pretended innovations in the church. By the most reverend Father in God, William, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury his grace (London, 1637), 5 and 6. 11. Christopher Dow, Innovations unjustly charged upon the present church and state (London, 1637), which answers Burton and was ready for publication by June 1637. 12. A relation of the conference, between William Laud, then, Lrd. Bishop of St. Davids; now Lord Arch-Bishop of Canterbury; and Mr. Fisher the Jesuite (London, 1639), “Dedication,” which is dated 1637. 13. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 114; based on Goodings, Annals, anno 1639. 14. Apologia episcoporum (Cologne, 1640): “Authore Reverendo admodum P. F. Francisco a S. Clara, Provinciae Angliae Fratrum Minorum ministro provinciali, et olim apud Duacenses lectore Theologie primario, nunc vero Serenissimae Reginae Magnae Brittaniae à sacris” (italics added). 15. Divine and Politic observations . . . upon some lines in the speech of the Archbishop of Canterbury, pronounced in the Star Chamber, 14 June 1637, 2, 3, and 25. 16. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 96; and Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 189.

574 Notes to Pages 250 – 254 17. Con to Barberini, May 4/14, 1638; cited in Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 190. 18. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, 62. 19. Con to Barberini, April 6/16, 1638; cited by Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 282. William Howard had recently been knighted in 1638. 20. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 238, Con to Barberini, June 1638. 21. Ibid., 283– 85. 22. Ibid., 283, Barberini to Con, January 1, 1639. 23. Cathaldus Giblin, “Aegidius Chaissy, OFM, and James Ussher, Protestant Archbishop of Armagh,” The Irish Ecclesiastical Record 85 (June 1956): 393– 405, who reports (397– 98) that Chaissy “enjoyed a high reputation at Oxford University, where he was lecturing by virtue of a permission granted him by a brief of Urban VIII.” 24. William Laud, “An Historicall Account of all material transactions relating to the University of Oxford,” in The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1847), vol. 5, pt. 1, 14– 29. 25. Ibid., 157. 26. Laud, The history of the troubles and tryal of William Laud (1695), 381 (Day 18, Laud’s answer to the third charge). 27. For a summary of the charges leveled against Laud regarding this statue and the Parliamentarian soldier who fired at it, see Sir Thomas Graham Jackson, The church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1847), 63; see also 127– 28 for details about the 1637 porch. 28. See John Spurr, “Taylor, Jeremy (bap. 1613, d. 1667),” ODNB. See also Reginald Heber’s biography of Jeremy Taylor, in Heber, The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor, with a Life of the Author by the Right Reverend Reginald Heber (London: Longmans, 1854), xx. 29. Heber, The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor, cl: “Its very faults belong to the history of the time, and increase our respect for his subsequent and more illustrious labours.” Heber also notes that “this sermon, which at first appeared separately, was never, I believe, reprinted by Taylor during his lifetime.” 30. John Sergeant, recalling Sancta Clara’s conversation. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 60; citing “The Literary Life of the Rev. John Serjeant,” Catholicon, III (July–Dec. 1816), 10. 31. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 2:400. 32. Ibid.; see also “The Literary Life of the Rev. John Serjeant,” Catholicon, III (July–Dec. 1816), 10; cited by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 60. 33. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 2:400: “wherein several things were put in against the Papists by the then Vicechanc.” 34. John Sergeant; cited by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 60. 35. Heber, e.g., dismisses Sancta Clara’s account to Wood as an old man’s failure of memory; see Heber, The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor, xxi.

Notes to Pages 255 – 257

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36. Cf. Jeremy Taylor, Unum Necessarium, or The Doctrine and Practice of Repentance, chap. 10, sec. 4 (“Of Ecclesiastic Penance”), in Heber, The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor, 7:445: “God pardons the man, and the priest by his office is to tell him so, when he sees cause for it, and observes the conditions completed.” 37. Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 74. 38. Cf. Taylor, Unum Necessarium, 423. Taylor summarizes the “very useful effects and ministries of repentance” as follows: “These are, Sorrow for sins, commonly called contrition, Confession of them, and satisfactions; by which ought to be meant, an opposing a contrary act of virtue to the precedent act of sin, and a punishing of ourselves out of sorrow and indignation for our folly.” 39. Ibid., 445: “The priestly absolution is only a solemn and legal publication of God’s pardon already actually past in the court of heaven.” 40. Ibid., 446. 41. Taylor, “Gunpowder Plot sermon given at St. Mary’s,” 53. 42. Ibid., 51. 43. Ibid., 57. 44. Ibid., 58. 45. Ibid., 53. 46. Ibid., 59. 47. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 235. 48. Venetian ambassador, Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, February 5, 1639. 49. See Mark Charles Fissel, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaigns against Scotland, 1638–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 50. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot, 121– 24. 51. Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, February 12 to May 27, 1639. 52. Ibid.; and Laud’s diary entry for April 3 and June 4, 1639, in The history of the troubles and tryal of William Laud (1695), 3:232. 53. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 93; citing Con to Barberini, August 23/September 2, 1639; and Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 189n4; “Al P. Fransisco de Sancta Clara hò parlato chiaro, rappresentando quanto si era ingannato nella sua pastata impresa” (Codices Barberini Latini, 8644, f. 398). 54. Albion, Charles I and the Court of Rome, 189n4; citing Con to Barberini, August 23/September 2, 1639: “Egli m’hà promesso di non mettere più penna in carta in quella, ò simile materia.” 55. Citing from the Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, issue 9 (London, 1883), 343. For Rossetti’s interactions with Chaissy, see also Giblin, “Aegidius Chaissy, OFM, and James Ussher,” 396– 97. 56. Giblin, “Aegidius Chaissy, OFM, and James Ussher,” 396 and fn. 6; citing Rossetti to Barberini: “Questi [i.e., Ussher] parlò meco alle longa in casa del signore Conte D Arundel.” 57. Hall’s letter is reprinted in George Lewis, A Life of Joseph Hall, D.D., Bishop of Exeter and Norwich (London, 1886), 313–15.

576 Notes to Pages 257– 259 58. Ibid., 315–17. 59. Ibid., 320 and 323, respectively. 60. John Milton, Of Reformation in England (London, 1641), bk. 1, 3. 61. Joseph Hall, Christian Moderation, frontispiece, in The Works of Joseph Hall, 6:385: “Recensui dissertationem hanc de moderatione Christiana, duabus partibus absolutam, quarum altera de moribus agit, altera de doctrina; utraque et bonis moribus, et doctrinae Ecclesiae Anglicanae consentanea.” Oct. 4. 1639 Imprimatur, Jo. Alsop. 62. Hall, Christian Moderation, bk. 2, sec. 10, in The Works of Joseph Hall, 6:468. 63. Ibid., 386: “Rules for moderation in judgment.” 64. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, April– August 1640, 10. 65. Memoirs of Sir Benjamin Rudyerd (London, 1841), 159– 60: “And Sancta Clara hath published, that if a synod were held, non intermixtis Puritanis, setting Puritans aside, our articles and their religion would soon be agreed.” For a useful study of Rudyerd’s views on religion, see David L. Smith, “Sir Benjamin Rudyerd and England’s ‘Wars of Religion,’” in The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland, 52– 73. 66. Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, December 21, 1640. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. See Laud’s articles of impeachment, “The Seventh Additional Article,” in Laud, The history of the troubles and tryal of William Laud (1695), 379. 70. Citing Wood’s biography of Christopher Davenport in Athenae Oxonienses, vol. 2, 486: “Our author S. Clara did at that time abscond.” 71. For a factual outline of Richard Carpenter’s life, see William E. Burns, “Carpenter, Richard (1604/5–1670),” ODNB. 72. Citing from Richard Carpenter’s title: Experience, historie and divinitie. Divided into five books. Written by Richard Carpenter, vicar of Poling, a small and obscure village by the sea-side, neere to Arundel in Sussex. Who being, first a scholar at Eaton Colledge, and afterwards a student in Cambridge, forssok the University, and immediately travelled, in his raw, green and ignorant years, beyond the seas; and studied in Flanders, Artois, France, Spain, Italy; and at length received Orders in Rome, by the hands of the Popes Substitute: and was sent by the Pope into England, to pervert souls; where he preached, and labored in that perverse way, the space of a yeare or upwards; and is now at last, by the speciall favour of God, reconciled to the faire Church of Christ in England. Printed by order from the House of Commons (London, 1641). 73. For a full discussion, see Alison Shell, “Multiple Conversion and the Menip pean Self: The Case of Richard Carpenter,” in Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, ed. A. F. Marotti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 154– 97. 74. Carpenter, Experience, historie and divinitie (1641), preface, unnumbered page.

Notes to Pages 259 – 266

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75. Ibid. 76. Joseph Gillow, A literary and biographical history, or, Bibliographical dictionary of the English Catholics; from the breach with Rome, in 1534, to the present time (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1999), 2:25, states only that Sancta Clara “is recorded as serving the mission in the neighbourhood of Arundel Castle.” Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 115, mentions the new alias of “Hunt,” presumably based on Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 1:437. 77. Carpenter, Experience, Historie and Divinitie, preface, unnumbered page. 78. Ibid., 240. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., bk. 5, chap. 19, 320: “Mr. Carpenter, An old acquaintance of yours, sends his hand, accompanied with his heart to you, although he dares not trust you, either with his person, or name.” 81. Ibid. 82. For the debate over abolishing episcopacy, see, e.g., Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler, “Early Political Prose,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 26– 78. For vandalism against Communion rails and stained-glass windows in English churches in 1640 and 1641, see John Walter, “Popular Iconoclasm and the Politics of the Parish in Eastern England, 1640–1642,” The Historical Journal 47, no. 2 (2004): 261– 90. 83. Carpenter, Experience, Historie and Divinitie, 323. 84. Ibid. 85. Sancta Clara, Fragmenta vel Historia minorum (1644). 86. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 1:437 (entry for Richard Carpenter). 87. Ibid., 2:486; citing Wood’s words. 88. Laud’s diary, in The history of the troubles and tryal of William Laud (1695), 62– 63. 89. Ibid., 63; entry for February 25, Friday. 90. Florence S. Memegalos, George Goring (1608–1657): Caroline Courtier and Royalist General (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). See also True Newes from Portsmouth being Colonell Goring his Speech, delivered to the Soldiers in Portsmouth, before his shutting up the gates; Wherein he labours to withdraw their hearts and minds from their fidelitie to the Parliament. Also, the Information of a Coachman, given into the House, concerning his carrying down many Gentlemen and moneyes to Portsmouth. With the discovery of the Earl of Portland, and Sir Kenelm Digby, and Mr. Weston his brother as Agents and Actors in the betraying and delivering up of the said Town of Portsmouth (London: Printed for John Cave, August 13, 1642). 91. Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 2, 1640–1643 (London, 1802), Brit ish History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/commons-jrnl/vol2, 760. 92. Featley’s “Advertisement to the Reader, touching the Author and the Argument of the ensuing Discourse,” Virtumnus Romanus, unnumbered pagination.

578 Notes to Pages 266 – 274 93. See “Great Remonstrance of December 1641,” printed in appendix in Thomas May, The History of the Parliament of England, which began November the 3rd 1640, 254, requesting “That his Majesty be pleased to grant a starting Commission to some choice men named in parliament to discover the counterfeit and false conformity of papists to the Church, by colour whereof persons much disaffected to the true Religion have been admitted into places of greatest authority and trust in the kingdom.” 94. Safeguard from Shipwreck, in Virtumnus Romanus, 65 and 73– 74. 95. Ibid., 75– 77. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid., 105. 98 . Ibid., 79. 99. Ibid., 80. 100. Ibid.: “If this man live, we may perchance in time have broached a quaternitie in divinis; but I hope that God will prevent his hereticall humor.” 101. Ibid., 75. 102. Ibid., 76. 103. Ibid., 109. 104. Ibid., 112. 105. Ibid., 119. 106. Ibid., 123: “For the Parliament is not supreame governor of the Churches of the realm.” 107. Ibid., 117: “Not to forme another church, but to reform that church which was before and restore Religion to her puritie.” 108. Ibid., 119: “ No other oath at all in sense, but the former only abridged in words.” 109. Ibid., 136. 110. Ibid., 121– 22. 111. Ibid., 126. John Winter took both the oaths of allegiance and supremacy on May 1641, at Parliament’s urging. See Andrew Warmington, “Winter, Sir John (b. 1600, d. in or after 1676),” ODNB. 112. Ibid., 127– 28. 113. Ibid., 137: “In the meane time (maugre all censures) I will thanke God, that he hath enabled me to helpe my distressed friend at a dead list, by counseling and instructing to a lawfull (I had almost said meritorious, but I feared more anger) and discreet act.” 114. Ibid., 138. Biblical citation is from Romans 14:3. 115. For an analysis of Bullaker’s trial, see Susannah Brietz Monta, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 223– 24. 116. Virtumnus Romanus, 28– 29. 117. Clarendon State Papers, vol. 6, 138.

Notes to Pages 274 – 279

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118. See Franciscus à Sancta Clara, Tractatus de schismate, speciatim Anglicana, in Opera Omnia (Douay, 1665), 2:47. 119. William Chillingworth, Reply of the London petitioners to the late answer to their petition for peace (York, 1642). 120. Ibid., 79. 121. Ibid. 122. See the biography serving as preface to Henry Heath’s posthumous Soliloquies or the document of Christian perfection (Douay, 1674): “These qualities disposed him most aptly to the study of theology and divine things; in which the same master under whom he had made so great progress in virtue (and who was no less subtile in Theological speculations than eminent in Religious practices, to wit, the very Reverend Father F. Francis a Sancta Clara) was his Master again, in Scholastical Divinity.” 123. Francis Bacon, “Of the dignity and advancement of learning,” bk. 3, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Shedding, Robert Ellis, and Douglas Heath (Boston, 1863), 8:423: “Antiquities, or remnants of histories, are (as was said) like the spars of a shipwreck; when, though the memory of things be decayed and almost lost, yet acute and industrious persons, by a certain persevering and scrupulous diligence . . . contrive to recover somewhat from the deluge of time”; cited in Shapiro, A Culture of Fact, 39. 124. François de Marsys, Histoire de la persecution présente des Catholiques en Angleterre (Paris, 1646). 125. Sancta Clara, Historia minorum (1658 ed.), 128– 29.

. Debate over Infallibility 1. Safeguard from Shipwreck, 80 2. See, e.g., Karen Britland’s comments on Henriette-Marie’s court-in-exile in Britland, “Exile or Homecoming?” in Monarchy and Exile: The Politics of Legitimacy from Marie de Médicis to Wilhelm II, ed. Philip Mansel and Torsten Riotte (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 125– 27. 3. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 123. Dockery speculates that Sancta Clara spent time in Paris in the early 1650s, but mid-1640s seems more accurate, given that Sancta Clara was certainly in London much of the time in the 1650s and given the firm date of October 1645 for Sancta Clara’s presence in Evreux, Normandy. On the other hand, he may have traveled back and forth in the 1650s. 4. Henry Waast Barthelemi, Histoire de l’Abbaye de Pontigny, ordre de Cîteaux (Avallon: E. Odobé, 1882), 211. 5. Sancta Clara, Systema fidei, approval by F. Edmundus Vinot, Minister Provincialis: “Nos Frater Edmundus Vinot Ordinis Minorum Regularis observantiae Doctor theologus, Almae provinciae Franciae Minister provincialis et in eadem

580 Notes to Pages 279 – 282 cum potestatis plenitudine R. Patris Generalis Commissarius ac Vices gerens praesentium vigore facultatem facimus R. Patri ac Fractri Francisco a S. Clara, etc. Datum in Conventu nostro Vernonensi, tempore visitationis nostrae, Anno domini 1645, die 22 Oct.” For Louis IX and Marguerite de Bourgogne, see Edmond Meyer, Histoire de Vernon et de sa châtellenie (Les Andelys: Editions Delcrois, 1876), 134; and Michael Robson, The Franciscans in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), 168. 6. Sancta Clara had written a history of English Franciscans based on examining primary sources. It was first published in 1644 as Fragmenta seu Historia Minor Provinciae Angliae FF. Minorum, in Douay. Many new and augmented editions of this historical work would follow. 7. The monument was destroyed during the French Revolution, but a drawing of it survives in Andrew Coltee Ducarel, Anglo-Norman antiquities considered in a tour through part of Normandy (London, 1767), 92. 8. Ibid., 93: “A un chacun de vous que dulcement pries a Dieu qu’il lui donne paradis.” 9. Cf. Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Siedentop develops, in effect, the thesis that was sketched earlier by Alexis de Tocqueville. 10. A good summary of the debate is found in Henry Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), 16– 32. 11. Busterlode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (1732), 73– 74. 12. George Perrot’s approval of Sancta Clara’s Manuale missionariorum (1658). 13. Edward Knott, Mercy and Truth. Or Charity maintained by Catholiques (St. Omer, 1634), pt. 1, chap. 3, title: “That the distinction of points fundamentall and not fundamentall, is neither pertinent, nor true in our present Controversy. And that the Catholique visible church cannot erre in eyther kind of the sayd points.” 14. William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants, chap. 2, pt. 1, 112. 15. Ibid., 113. 16. Ibid., chap. 3, 125. 17. See John Southcot’s report about “one Lugar” to Fitton (Peter Biddulph) on January 10, 1634, in Questier, Newsletters, 213 and fn.; and Michael Mullett, “Lewgar, John (d. 1665),” ODNB. 18. Mr. Chillingworths letter touching infallibility (London, 1662), 12 (printed as XII). (Chillingworth died in 1644.) 19. Ibid., 4 (printed as IV). 20. Of the infallibility of the Church of Rome, a discourse written by the Lord Viscount Falkland (Oxford, 1645), 7: “At least, why shall not I be excused by the same reason, though I believe not a Councell to be infallible, since I never heard that any Councell hath decreed that they are so? Neither, if it have, can we be bound by that Decree, unless made certain some other way that itself is so.”

Notes to Pages 282 – 286

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21. Ibid., 5: “But I doubt whether Councells be fit deciders of Questions; for such they cannot be, if they beget more, and men have cause to be in greater doubts afterwards (none of the former being diminished) then they were at first.” 22. A discourse of infallibility with Mr. Thomas Whites’s answer to it, and a reply to him by Sir Lucius Carey late Lord Viscount of Falkland (London, 1660). (Lucius Cary died in 1643.) 23. William Laud, “Conference with Fisher,” in The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1847), 2:37. 24. Ibid., 32. Laud’s full citation of Bellarmine is as follows: “The probation of the church can make it known to all that the object of divine faith is revealed from God and therefore certain and not to be doubted; but the church can add no certainty, no firmness to the word of God revealing it.” 25. Ibid., 107. 26. Ibid., 247, sec. 32. 27. Ibid., 252– 54, sec. 33, considerations 1 and 2. 28. Ibid., 254– 55, consideration 3. 29. Ibid., 266. 30. Ibid., 285, consideration 7. 31. Ibid., 286. 32. Ibid., 288; see also 170, where Laud cites Gerson to argue that provincial councils may reform both doctrine and discipline. 33. Ibid., 290– 93. 34. Ibid., 297. 35. For a summary of Thomas White’s authorship of Rushworth’s Dialogues, or The judgment of common sence in the choice of religion, see George H. Tavard, The Seventeenth-Century Tradition: A Study in Recusant Thought (Leyden: Brill, 1978), 158– 59. 36. Rushworth’s Dialogues (Paris, 1654), dialogue 1, sec. 6, 28. 37. Ibid., and 32. 38. Ibid., 32. 39. Ibid., 30. 40. Ibid., 34. 41. Ibid., dialogue 1, sec. 8, 49 (images) and 57 (religious orders). 42. Ibid., 49; the premise is also stated earlier (19– 21). 43. Ibid., dialogue 1, sec. 9, 57 and 60. 44. Ibid., dialogue 1, sec. 12, entitled: “That good Institutions are not to be given over for small inconveniences; That the abuses are to be mended, not the things taken away; and therefore the party which broke Communion is to return to the other”; citation is at 79 (italics added). 45. Ibid. 46. For White’s “Answer to Lord Faulklands discourse of infallibility,” see Thomas Triplett’s 1651 London publication: Sir Lucius Cary, late Lord Viscount of Falkland, his discourse of infallibility, with an answer to it, and his Lordships reply,

582 Notes to Pages 286 – 289 never before published together with Mr. Walter Montague’s letter concerning the changing of his religion answered by my Lord Falkland. 47. Lucius Cary, Of the Infallibility of the Church of Rome (1651 ed.), 9–12. See also White, “Answer to Lord Faulklands discourse of infallibility,” in Thomas Triplett, Sir Lucius Cary, late Lord Viscount of Falkland, his discourse of infallibility, with an answer to it (1651), new pagination, 4 (objection). 48. Ibid., 14–15. 49. Ibid., 9. 50. Ibid., 22– 23: “The word necessary itself, is also used for very convenient, and hence from necessary in that sence, to absolutely necessary.” See also 20: “When there is fire for them that disagree, they need not bragg of their Uniformity who consent.” 51. White, “Answer to Lord Faulklands discourse of infallibility,” 35: “As for the two places concerning the Popes and Councels infallibility, it is not to my purpose to meddle of them, because on the one side, the way I have begun, there is no need of those discourses; and on the other, I should engage myself in quarrels betwixt Catholique and Catholique.” 52. Ibid., chap. 1, especially 4– 5: “If we look into the immediate progresse and joints of the descent, we cannot finde where it can misse, for the doctrine being supernaturall, and not delivered by mans skill or wit, the first and main principle of it can be no other, then to know what was delivered them by their Teachers, a thing not surpassing the understanding of any sensible wise man.” 53. Ibid., chap. 1, 1– 7. 54. Ibid., chap. 3, 10–11. 55. Ibid., 13. 56. Ibid., 17–18. 57. Ibid., chap. 3, 23: “How cometh it to passe, that something which at first bindeth not the churches belief, afterwards cometh to bind it?” 58. Ibid., 24. 59. “The Lord Faulklands Reply, to the Roman Infallibilitie, refuted,” in Thomas Triplett, Sir Lucius Cary . . . his discourse of infallibility (1651 ed.), 65– 66. Cary mentions two “Embassadors,” the bishop of Carthage and Luke Wadding, as “pressing, nay almost tearing a Definition from his Holiness about it.” 60. Ibid., 82. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 83– 84. 63. Ibid, 83: “sub evangelio (which must mean when the Gospel was preacht).” 64. Cf. W. Chillingworth (d. 1644), “An Answer to some Passages in Rushworth’s Dialogues,” in The Works of William Chillingworth, 7th ed. (London, 1719), 55: “Horantius and out of him Franciscus a Sancta Clara teach us that under the Gospel there is nowhere extant any precept of Invocating Saints, and tells us that the Apostles reason of their giving no such precepts was, lest the converted gentiles

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might think themselves drawn over from one kind of Idolatry to another. If this reason be good, . . . then the Apostles did neither command nor teach, nor advise, nor persuade the converted Gentiles to invocate Saints: how then in God’s name comes invocation of Saints to be an Apostolick Tradition?” 65. For a good summary, see Tavard, The Seventeenth-Century Tradition, 173: “In the first place, White’s approach sounds surprisingly modern. One of the problems he faces squarely is exactly the one to which attention has been drawn in recent years: Is all revealed doctrine in Scripture? His answer is a definite yes, qualified from the standpoint of how Scripture is read.” 66. “The Lord Falklands Reply,” in Triplett, Sir Lucius Cary . . . his discourse of infallibility (1651), 111; citing Sancta Clara, Deus, natura, gratia, 1st ed. (1634), 296. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 112. 69. Ibid., 114. Further discussion of this debate is found in Kurt Weber, Lucius Cary, Second Viscount Falkland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 213– 74. 70. Drawing, sometimes verbatim, on Joseph Colum Hayward, The Mores of Great Tew: Literary, Philosophical and Political Circle (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1981).

. Systema fidei 1. Systema fidei, “Dedication to Lord Kenelm Digby,” 505. See also Digby’s letters from Rome to Henry Holden and others in Robert Pugh, Blacklo’s Cabal discovered (1680), and Giovanni Nani’s dispatch to Venice of February 14, 1645, in Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, vol. 27. 2. Systema fidei, “Dedication to Lord Kenelm Digby,” 505– 6. 3. Martin de Barcos published three tracts promoting the two-popes view in 1645 (“De l’autorité de St. Pierre et de St. Paul” and “Grandeur de l’Eglise de Rome qui repose sur l’autorité de St. Pierre et de St. Paul”) and in 1646 (“Eclaircissements sur quelques objections que l’on a formées contre la grandeur de l’Eglise de Rome”), all three in defense of Antoine Arnauld’s statement in De la fréquente communion (1643) that “St. Peter and St. Paul are the two heads of the Roman Church.” 4. See the account of Rinuccini’s interaction with the Catholic Confederation on September 18, 1646, in William Dool Killen, The Ecclesiastical History of Ireland (London: Macmillan, 1875), 2:70– 80; and Millett, The Irish Franciscans, 1651–1665, pt. 1, 57, and pt. 2, chap. 6, 418– 64. Granted that it was not until 1647 that Peter Walsh “gained an undesirable prominence as a result of some sermons preached by him in Kilkenny in which he urged support of the supreme civil authority and opposed the policy of Rinuccini,” Walsh was teaching philosophy in Kilkenny in November 1646, when Rinuccini was coldly received by the Ormondists.

584 Notes to Pages 292 – 294 For Marchant’s sympathy for Walsh and the Ormondist faction, see Millett, The Irish Franciscans, 1651–1665, 422. 5. Killen, The Ecclesiastical History of Ireland, 2:76– 77. 6. Matthias Hauzeur’s positive judgment of Systema fidei explicitly describes the work as treating “de sacris conciliis et Papatu Romano” and states that the whole work is worthy to be published. 7. Systema fidei, 504. 8. Valentine Randour, Pro veritate et aequitate pontificiae censurae epistola secunda Valentine Randour, Doctoris e facultate S. theologiae Duacena ad Ex. D. Libertum Fromondum insignis ecclesiae D. Petri decanum et doctorem e Facultate S. Theologiae Lovaniensi (dated October 6, 1650). See also Randour’s statements in support of the papal bull In eminenti in 1648, when he was dean of the University of Douay; cited by Christophe Coudrette, Dissertation sur les bulles contre Baïus (Utrecht, 1737), 168: “Valentine Randour, Doyen de la Faculté de Douay . . . dit entre autre choses que le Pape ne peut errer sur la foi, ni sur les moeurs, lorsqu’il enseigne toute l’Eglise; que le jugement du S. Siege ne tient l’infallibilité que du saint esprit; que le successeur de S. Pierre est juge de toutes les controversies.” In François Vinchant, Annales de la province et comté du Hainaut (Mons, 1852), 5:248, Randour is described as an “excellent humanist, philosopher and theologian, skilled in Greek and Hebrew.” 9. At least according to Charles-Louis Pollnitz, writing a century later; see Pollnitz, Amusemens des eaux de Spa (Amsterdam, 1734), 2:70. 10. Systema fidei, immediately after the front page: “In illi infatigabile labore è ruderibus Antiquitatis, fundamenta et fundamentalia Fidei Catholicae denudaveris.” 11. The full title page of Systema fidei reads as follows: Systema fidei seu Tractatus de Concilio Universali, ubi tàm ex principiis Scholasticis quam Monumentis veterum: praesertim Magni Orbis Magistri Augustini, Quidditas et potestas concilii, cum singulis vel apicibus de hac re desideratis enucleantur: Divina Authoritatis Scriptorum et Traditionum declaratur. Fidei structura delineatur, Ubi innumera antiqua examinantur. Distinctio fundamentalium et non fundamentalium in rebus ad spectantibus disutitur. Abstrusiora quaedam ex naturae Penetralibus exponuntur, quibus anima humana immortalis asseritur. Sacrum Tridentinum vindicator. Appendix: De origine Papatus Romani, et an Petrus et Paulus fuerint simul Papae. 12. Systema fidei, title page. Sancta Clara refers to Athanasius’s Letter on the Opinion of Dionysius, paraphrasing the content of the whole letter. See, further, Athanasius: Select Works and Letters, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (series 2, vol. 4), ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wallace (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 172– 87. 13. Systema fidei, chap. 1, 3– 4. 14. J. R. Milton, “Chillingworth,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 7:307– 9; and Charles Larmore, “Scepticism,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2:1145– 92, especially 1159: “A fallibilist notion of certainty was attractive to a number of English thinkers as well, such as William

Notes to Pages 295 – 301

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Chillingworth and John Wilkins.” See also Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty, 79– 82, and Henry Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty, 15– 31. 15. Systema fidei, chap. 2, 6: “doctissimus Conterranei nostri Doctoris Holden amici mei.” 16. Ibid., chap. 2, 8. 17. Ibid., chap. 4, 22– 23. For Jacques Davy Du Perron, see W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 124– 54. For Falkland’s special regard for Perron, see Hayward, The Mores of Great Tew, 130. 18. Systema fidei, chap. 4, 24: “Non ponit praeceptum de Sabbatho inter invariabiles legis radices (quod observare debent judaizare volentes Sabbatharii, quorum multi sunt in Anglia).” For Joseph Albo (ca. 1380–1444), see, e.g., Ehrlich, Dror, “Joseph Albo,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/albo-joseph/. 19. Systema fidei, chap. 4, 24: “Denique inter Haebraeos videbitur esse regula valde communis.” 20. Ibid., 25. 21. Ibid., chap. 4, 28. 22. Ibid., chap. 5, 29. 23. For a brief synopsis of Scotist Christology, see Richard Cross, “Franciscan Thought and Piety,” in Jesus in History, Thought and Culture: An Encyclopedia, ed. James Leslie Houlder (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 2003), 294– 99. A more detailed discussion is found in Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 127– 29; Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 183– 205; and Cross, Duns Scotus on God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 216– 22. 24. Systema fidei, chap. 5, 30; “Nam Christos eos ad rem, non ad modum obligavit.” 25. Ibid., 33: “Ego verò adhuc aliter et aliquanto strictius de fundamentalibus agendum censeo.” 24. Ibid., 35. 25. Ibid., 36. 26. Ibid., where Sancta Clara may be translated as stating: “Thus what I said based on Lerinensis, namely that logical necessity of a conclusion drawn from prior revelations does not suffice, as such, on the part of the thing; what is required above and beyond this is that there be, on the part of the church, an urgent need, which is to say a necessity on the part of the church to make a definition, as the Latin Fathers explained to Bessarion. Our opinion is confirmed by Augustine, De Gen. ad Lit., Bk. II, c. 9, where, after some other matter, speaking of the authority of Sacred Scripture, he says: Many dispute much of these things, which authors of greater prudence, namely the authors in question, omitted as not directly relevant to the life of beatitude.” 29. Ibid., chap. 5, 36.

586 Notes to Pages 301– 308 30. Ibid., chap. 6, 37: “Nullibi enim extat promissum de speciali Spiritus Sancti illustratione, in expositione Scripturae in ordine ad philosophica.” 31. Ibid. 32. For further discussion of Systema fidei, chap. 6, see Anne Davenport, “English Recusant Networks and the Early Defense of Cartesian Philosophy,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 1 (Fall 2012): 65– 86. 33. Systema fidei, chap. 6, 45. 34. This aspect of Sancta Clara’s theology has been nicely studied by George Tavard, “Christopher Davenport and the Problem of Tradition,” Theological Studies 24 (1963): 287– 90; and Tavard, The Seventeenth-Century Tradition, 133– 57. 35. Systema fidei, chap. 8, 60: “Et proinde stat Scripturas sufficere, et Traditiones necessarias esse.” 36. Systema fidei, chap. 9, 83. 37. Ibid., 99. 38. Ibid., 100. 39. Ibid., 106. 40. Ibid., chap. 12, 112. 41. Ibid., 113. Sancta Clara cites a long passage from Erasmus, Apology against Some Spanish Monks (1523). For a discussion of the context, see Cornelius Augustijn, Erasmus: His Life, Works, and Influence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 156– 58. For the importance of Erasmus at Great Tew, see Weber, Lucius Cary, Second Viscount Falkland (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 249– 53; and Hayward, The Mores of Great Tew, 131. 42. Systema fidei, chap. 12, 114. 43. Ibid. See Hans Guggisberg, Sebastian Castellio, 1515–1563: Humanist and Defender of Religious Toleration in a Confessional Age (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). For the importance of Castellio at Great Tew, see Weber, Lucius Cary, 248. 44. Systema fidei, chap. 12, 116. 45. Ibid., 129. 46. Ibid.: “Hactenus de clare et necessario ex revelatis illatis vel inferendis egimus veritatibus, et de illis dictum est, esse infallibilis authoritatis: licet non in eodem authoritatis gradu cum ipsis immediatè revelatis.” 47. Ibid., 121. 48. Ibid., 120: “dico qu d rationabiliùs et sapientiùs est.” 49. Ibid., chap. 13, 132– 33. 50. Ibid., 139: “Non verò ut Conclusiones ex Fidei articulis laboriosè et perplexè educerentur.” 51. Ibid., 136. 52. Citing the phrase used by Justice Frankfurter in the case Northwest Airlines, Inc. v. Minnesota, 322 U.S. 292 (1944). 53. Systema fidei, chap. 13, 139. Sancta Clara also concludes: “Cautissimè igitur (ut saepè dixi) Ecclesia in ordine ad fidem declarandam processit.” 54. Ibid., 137.

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55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 140. 57. Ibid., chap. 15, 173– 75. 58. Ibid., chap. 16, 175– 85: “An sine haeresis macula posit quis dubitare de Determinationibus Conciliorum, in levioribus et superfluis?” 59. Ibid., 175– 76. 60. Ibid., 178. 61. Ibid.: “Sed longè aliter sic agitur, non enim truncis, sed hominibus proponuntur decreta, ut et falsò nobis imponunt Adversarii dum nostrum, ut vocant, caecam derident obedientiam.” 62. See ibid., 181: “Dei providentiam et quidem promissam negat.” 63. Ibid., 185. 64. Ibid., 186. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid.: “Et ideò Apostolus 2. Cor. I. v. 24: Non dominamur supra vestram Fidem. Graecè: katakupien, hoc est quasi diceret non tyrannizamus, etc.; quod tamen simplex et absolute credenda praeceptum videtur sapere.” 67. Ibid., 186: “Et hoc est quod dicit Augustinus, Liber De utilitate credenda, c. 9.” 68. Ibid.: “Dico primò verissimum esse, quod adfertur ex Aristotle; in quantum scilicet dicit actum Fidei non esse sic sub nostro imperio, quasi sine motivis rationalibus pro placito, possimus adhaere huic vel illi veritati. . . . Unde Augustinus: Non est in potestate nostrâ quibus visis tangamur.” 69. Ibid., 187. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid: “negari tamen non debet, quin suam involvat difficultatem, simpliciter credere propter authoritatem.” 72. Ibid., 188. 73. Ibid.: “Ecclesiam esse infallibilem ipsis primò debet efficaciter probari: authoritas enim fallibilis quantacumque fuerit, non potest movere ad actum ultra opinativum; non verò ad actum credenda, hoc est sine omni formidine de opposite; nam produceret effectum nobliorem se.” 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., chap. 18, 189. 76. Ibid., 191– 92. 77. Ibid., chap. 23, 253– 54: “ut ubique unitas Fidei servantur.” 78. Ibid., 255: “Baconus alias Southwell, doctus amicus meus jam citatus, apud Jesuitas Anglos Leodici S. Theol. Professor.” 79. Ibid., 256. 80. Ibid., 257– 58. 81. Ibid., 260. 82. Ibid.: “Ex quo sequitur efficaciùs quod intendebatur, nempè, doctrinam Concilii esse doctrinam Ecclesiae, et consensionem eius supponi ad definitiones Conciliorum, cum Concilio sint ipsa Ecclesia.”

588 Notes to Pages 317– 326 83. Ibid. “Et consequenter ad hoc bene dixit Almaynus, De authoritate ecclesiae, c. 10, paragrapho Ad Secundum, quod Privilegium Ecclesiae transit in Concilium eam immediate representans.” 84. Ibid., 261. 85. Ibid., chap. 27, 306. 86. Ibid., chap. 28, 307: “Concilia non sunt necessaria pro rebus jam ab Ecclesia examinatis ac receptis, sed talia potest papa declarare.” 87. Ibid., 308–11: “Papae distulerunt et retulerunt res graviores ad Concilia. Ad Pontificem spectat determinare quaestiones exortas. In dubiis potest declarare res Fidei.” 88. Ibid., chap. 35, 360. 89. Ibid., 370. 90. Ibid., 375; see also 366, where Sancta Clara cites Augustine’s notion of opinio tolerabilis. 91. Ibid., 362. 92. Ibid., 375. 93. Ibid., 377. 94. Ibid, chap. 36, 374: “Decreta Conciliorum non fiunt ex sentential maioris partis suffragantium.” 95. Ibid., chap. 38, 411–17. 96. Ibid., 414: “Ostenditur Ecclesiam posse antiquam veritatem novis vocibus explicare ad evitandas haereticorum aequivocationes”; and “Declaratur Ecclesiam posse errare in Appendicibus Fidei, unde reijicitur dictum Parsonii.” 97. Ibid., 416. 98. Ibid., 417. 99. Ibid., 421. 100. Ibid., chap. 41, 435– 36. 101. Ibid., chap. 42, 441: “ubi multa vetera discutuntur.” 102. Ibid., 453– 54. 103. Ibid., 454. 104. Ibid., chap. 43, 455– 57. 105. Ibid., 460. 106. Ibid., 461. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid., 462: “Non est alia quam quâ nos nos ipsos cognoscimus.” Interestingly, Sancta Clara cites Pico della Mirandola in support of the notion that “we know of God what our substances represent to us of God’s nature,” instead of Descartes. Similarly, Sancta Clara describes a process of physical maturation and control over bodily appetites that strongly recalls Descartes’s letters to Arnault, yet cites Pico, Ficino, and Roger Bacon in support of his views. 109. Ibid., 464. Sancta Clara cites “Henricus,” presumably Henry of Gand, who describes the damned as “immobilized in desperation” (immobiliter manentibus in desperatione).

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110. Ibid., 465. 111. Cf. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.3.85– 91: “And am I then reveng’d, / To take him in the purging of his soul, / When he is fit and seasoned for his passage? / No. / Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent. / When he is drunk asleep; or in his rage; / Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed.” 112. Systema fidei, 466. Cf. Kenelm Digby, Two treatises in the one of which, the nature of bodies; in the other, the nature of mans soul is looked into in way of discovery of the immortality of reasonable souls (London, 1658 [1645]), The Second Treatise, chap. 11: “Sheweing what effects the diverse manners of living in this world do cause in a soul, after she is separated from the body.” See also the next chapter, 12: “Of the perseverance of the soul, in that state she findeth herself in, at her first separation from her body.” 113. See Institutionum peripateticarum ad mentem summi viri clarissimique philosophi Kenelmi Equitis Digbaei, pars theoretica; item appendix theological de origine mundi. Authore Thomas Anglo ex Albiis East-saxonum (London, 1647), liber 5, lectio 1, 159, and lectio 4, 169. 114. Systema fidei, chap. 44, 470. 115. Ibid. Sancta Clara cites Defensio Fidei catholicae et Apostolicae contra Errores Anglicanae Sectae, presumably from bk. 2, chap. 9. 116. Ibid. Cf. Thomas White, A Catechisme of Christian Doctrine in Fifteen Conferences (Paris, 1637), 205, in the enhanced 1659 edition: “I pray, what obligation have I to pray to Angels and saints?” 117. Systema fidei, chap. 44, 472: “ne in superstitione tollanda tollatur Religio.” 118. Ibid., 475: “Quid verò hic sit aliud quam quod nos vocamus Invocationem sanctorum, intelligere non valeo.” 119. Ibid., 477: “Solent aliqui obijere impossibilitatem, quod sancti in caelis non possint audire nos à terris.” 120. Ibid. 121. Ibid. Cf. Epitome totius doctrinae, per Matthiam Hauzeur, exorcismus 8, 395– 96. 122. Ibid.: “Ad hoc non me latet aliquos philosophos tenere, illas [sc. animas beatas] posse mundi spheras simul presentialiter attingere, imò putant eas ubique esse.” 123. Ibid., 477– 78. 124. Ibid., chap. 45, 479: “An detur species Platonicae, i.e. species quas vocant universales congenitae animabus humaniis?” 125. Ibid., chap. 43, 465: “ideo homo non habet memoriam intellectivam.” 126. Ibid., 496. 127. Ibid., 487: “D. quidem Blaclous, seu ut ubi vocatur Thomas Anglus, in suis Institutionibus peripateticis, l. 4, lec. 10.” Cf. Thomas White, Institutionum peripateticarum ad mentem Kenelmi Digbaei (London 1647), 152. 128. Systema fidei, chap. 43, 496. 129. Ibid., chap. 46, 496 – 504: “De cruce, reliquiis, imaginibus. Quomodo eorum usus Fidem attingat?”

590 Notes to Pages 330 – 335 130. Ibid., 502. By “Problematibus,” Sancta Clara means his Deus, natura, gratia. 131. Ibid.: “Sed ut hactenus in aliis materiis, hic etiam adijciam quid Rabbini de hòc resenserint. (Causa utique non est omninò disparate.) Cum igitur asseritur omnes Imagines prohibitas esse in Talmud et alibi.” 132. Ibid. Cf. De creatione problemata XXX (1635). For the importance of Menasseh in England, see Yosef Kaplan, Henry Méchoulan, and Richard Popkin, eds., Menasseh Ben Israel and His World (Leiden: Brill, 1989), especially 7– 30 and 83–138. 133. Systema fidei, 504 and 505. 134. Ibid., chap. 47, 507: “Haec quaestio (ut notant Scholastici) duplicem ferre potest sensum. Specificatum, hoc est, An Papatus qui residet in Romano Pontifice sit de jure divino? Reduplicativum, hoc est; An Papatus qui et quantum residet in Romano Pontifice, sit de jure divino?” 135. Ibid., 522– 23. 136. Ibid., chap. 48, 526. 137. Ibid., 534. 138. Joseph Hall, Pax terris (1648), in The Works of Joseph Hall (1837), 11:237– 75 (Latin text with English translation by Rev. Peter Hall). 139. For Hall’s commitment to the distinction, see Pax terris (1648), vol. 11, sec. 9, 245. 140. Cf. Systema fidei, chap. 6, 42. 141. Hall, Pax terris (1648), vol. 11, sec. 6, 241. 142. The Peace-maker laying forth the right way to peace, in matter of religion, By Jos. Hall (London, 1645), “The Epistle”: “I speake . . . for the recovery and perpetuation of the Churches peace; A duty, which both our blessed saviour, and his holy Apostles, have so vehemently urged, as if there were no life of Christianity without it.” 143. Hall, Pax terris (1648), vol. 11, sec. 14, 255. Hall, of course, depicts the despotic attempt to impose narrow theological definitions as characteristic of Rome. 144. Hall, The Peace-maker, sec. 25, 213 and 218: “That an Adiaphorus act be decreed for a mutuall indemnity, that neither part might censure or condemn other for their diversity of judgment, both these practices for peace, we might learne of our wise adversaries that guide the helme of the Roman Church.” Hall cites the case of Dominicans and Molinists disagreeing over grace on page 219 and of Dominicans and Franciscans disagreeing over the Immaculate Conception on page 220. 145. Hall, The Peace-maker, secs. 11–17 and 18– 26. 146. Ibid., 78–153. As an example of lack of “modest humility of soul,” Hall appears to cite (84) the case of Marguerite Porète, as attributed by Jean Gerson to “Maria de Valentianas.” With regard to “submissive obedience unto our spirituall guides,” Hall cites Hebrews 13, 17 (85). 147. Ibid., 153. Hall rails against the press as the chief way that “poison” is disseminated (169– 71) and advocates turning to civil authority to maintain religious peace by punishing dangerous errors, libels, and so on. Hall lays down as “an unfailing ground” that “all truths are not fit to be at all times urged” (213).

Notes to Pages 335 – 339

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148. For the conditions of Hall’s appeal to civil authority, see, e.g., The Peacemaker, 189: “It must be the regard to the welfare and peace of the Publick that must regulate all proceedings this way.” 149. Citing Hall, The Peace-maker, 238. 150. Cf. Descartes’s famous last sentence, in meditation 6, namely, that we never forget the “infirmity of our nature.” 151. See Sancta Clara’s two-page appendix on the Eastern Orthodox Church, meant to supplement the discussion of schism at the end of chapter 21, 243, and inserted after chapter 46, without page number. Sancta Clara explains that he “remembered these noteworthy remarks” only after the book was being printed and decided to include them. On the project of Protestant reunion with the Greek Orthodox Church, see W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom, chap. 6, 196– 219. 152. Theologia eklektike. A discourse of the liberty of prophesying. Shewing the unreasonableness of prescribing to other mens faith, and the iniquity of persecuting differing opinions. By Ier: Taylor, DD., chaplain in ordinarie to His Majestie (London: R. Royston, at the Angel in Ivie-lane, 1647), 1– 5. 153. Ibid., 3. 154. Ibid., 7, “The Epistle Dedicatory”: “And although it be a duty of Christianity that we all speak the same thing, that there be no divisions among us, but that we be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment, (I Cor. I.10), yet this unity is to bee estimated according to the unity of faith, in things necessary, in matters of Creed, and Articles fundamentall, for as for other things, it is more to be wished then to be hoped for; there are some doubtfull disputations, and in such the Scribe, the Wise, the Disputer of this World, are most commonly very farre from certainty, and many times from truth. There are diversity of persuasions in matters adiaphorous, as meats and drinks, and holy days, etc., and both parties, the affirmative and the negative, affirm and deny with innocence enough.” 155. Ibid., 26– 31. 156. Ibid., sec. 1, 5: “Of the nature of Faith, and that its duty is completed in believing the Articles of the Apostles Creed.” 157. Ibid., sec. 1, 12–14, and sec. 6, 101– 24. 158. For Taylor’s advocacy of reason, see Liberty of prophesying, sec. 10, 165: “Of the authority of Reason, and that it proceeding upon best grounds is the best judge.” 159. Ibid., sec. 2, 18: heresy “is to be accounted according to the strict capacity of Christian Faith, and not in Opinions speculative, nor ever to pious persons.” 160. Ibid., sec. 20, 250– 51. 161. Ibid., sec. 4, 73: “If we consider that we have no ways of determining places of difficulty and Question, infallibly and certainly, . . . we shall see a very great necessity in allowing a liberty of Prophesying without prescribing authoritatively to other mens consciences, and becoming Lords and Masters of their Faith.” 162. Ibid., sec. 16, 213–15.

592 Notes to Pages 339 – 344 163. Ibid., sec. 19, 247. 164. Ibid., sec. 18 (“A particular consideration of the Anabaptists”), 223– 45, and sec. 20 (“How farre the Religion of the Church of Rome is tolerable”), 249– 61. 165. Ibid., sec. 19, 246. 166. Ibid., 247. 167. Ibid., sec. 19, 249– 51. 168. Ibid., 258– 60. 169. Ibid., 253– 55. 170. Ibid., sec. 16, 213; “For first, it is a great fault that men will call the severall sects of Christians by the name of severall Religions. The Religion of Jesus Christ is the forme of sound doctrine and wholesome words, which is set downe in Scripture indefinitely, actually conveyed to us by plaine places, and separated as for the question of necessary and not necessary by the Symbol of the Apostles.” 171. Ibid. 172. Ibid., sec. 21, 262: “Of the duty of particular Churchs in allowing Communion.” 173. Ibid.: “For whatsoever preserves us as Members of the church, gives us title to the Communion of saints, and whatsoever Faith of beliefe that is to which God hath promised heaven, that Faith makes us Members of the catholick Church.” 174. Ibid.: “To deny to communicate with those whom God will vouchsafe to be united, and to refuse our charity to those who have the same faith, because they have not all our opinions, and believe not everything necessary which we over-value, is impious and Schismaticall.” 175. Ibid., sec. 22, 264. 176. Systema fidei, chap. 21, 238. 177. Ibid., 240. 178. Liberty of prophesying, sec. 22, 265. 179. Taylor’s “Letter dedicatory” to Christopher Hutton, Baron Hutton of Kirby, acts as a synopsis of the treatise, in ibid., 11– 20. . Hobbes Modestly Accosted 1. For the close collaboration between and among White, Digby, Mersenne, and Hobbes, see, e.g., Noel Malcolm, “The Title of Hobbes’s Refutation of Thomas White’s De Mundo,” Hobbes Studies 24, no. 2 (2011): 179– 88. See also Noel Malcom’s short biographies in Malcolm, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), vol. 2, especially 795– 97 (Charles du Bosc), 828– 32 (Kenelm Digby), and 834– 35 (Gassendi). 2. For Anglican services in Paris in the mid- and late 1640s, see Nicholas Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 126– 27. See also Marika Keblusek, “A Tortoise in the Shell: Royalist and Anglican Experience of Exile in the 1650s,” and Sarah

Notes to Pages 344 – 345

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Mortimer, “Exile, Apostasy and Anglicanism in the English Revolution,” in Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1640–1690, ed. Philip Major (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 79– 89 and 91–104, respectively. 3. Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Necessity and Freedom, 147. 4. Thaddeus, The Franciscans in England, 222. 5. For Pierre Marchant’s support of Peter Walsh, see Anthony Brown, “Anglo-Irish Gallicanism, 1635–1685” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 2004). 6. Thaddeus, The Franciscans in England, 125n2. See also Bramhall’s letter “To Miss Cheubien, in the Nunnery,” The Works of John Bramhall (Oxford, 1845), 5:191– 92; and Francis Coventry [Sancta Clara], An Enchyridion of Faith (1653), 66. 7. John Bramhall, “An Answer to M. de la Milletière,” 1653, in The Works of John Bramhall (Oxford, 1842), 1:80. Other references to Sancta Clara are at 1:30, 58, 125, 165– 70, 173– 74; 2:209, 221, 222, 582; and 3:115. 8. Bramhall, “Short Discourse to Sir Henry Vic of Persons Dying Without baptism,” in The Works of John Bramhall, 5:180 (emphasis added). 9. Ibid.: “Neither I, nor any Protestants, do believe, that the Church of Rome, including all other Churches of that Patriarchate or of its communion, is that Catholic Church.” 10. Citing Bramhall’s “Answer to Two Papers [. . .], June 19, 1645,” in The Works of John Bramhall, 5:186. 11. Sancta Clara, Systema fidei, chap. 21, 240; The Works of John Bramhall, 5:180. 12. Cf. Blair Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 71: “The goal of liberty of conscience was very different from that of modern liberalism. It was religious union, which persecution was held to have destroyed: the union of the believer with Christ, and the union of believers with each other. The former was essential to salvation: the latter was necessary to the creation of a Church and commonwealth fit for God’s eyes.” 13. Hugh Cressy, Exomologesis, or A faithfull narration of the occasion and motives of the conversion into catholique unity of Hugh-Paulin de Cressy (Paris, 1647), “Dedication,” unnumbered pagination: “The almost onely argument of this booke is to maintaine Catholique Unity against the sacriledge of schism.” 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 363: “Absteining from relying upon the suspicious moderateness of Cassander, Franciscus de Sta. Clara, etc.” 16. Ibid., 364: “ I fixed upon the judgments of our learned Stapleton, a man seldom cited either by Cardinall Bellarmin, Perron, etc., without a testimony of his profoundness, perspicuity and integrity, and without the least suspicion from any catholique of tergiversation, partiality and unfoundness.” 17. See George Cassander, De sacra communione Christiani populi in utraque, panis et vini specie (Paris, 1616), and Gary Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 104– 5.

594 Notes to Pages 346 – 348 18. Cressy, Exomologesis, 368– 69. 19. Ibid., 369– 70: “Now this opinion maintained by such considerable learned catholiques, and not apparently contrary to any decision of the Church, I found of great convenience as to my selfe to free mee from many difficulties.” 20. Ibid., 371: “Stapleton determined this question with a greater latitude and indulgence then [sic] most writers, and yet notwithstanding hee hath escaped the censure of any, being commended even by those who use much more rigour in it then hee has done.” 21. Ibid., 377– 78. 22. Reprinted in Hobbes, Du citoyen, présentation et traduction par Philippe Crignon (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 2010), 476: “je ne connais pas d’auteur qui explore plus profondément son objet (si je mets de côté ce qui ressortit à la religion).” 23. On the reception of Hobbes prior to Leviathan, see Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 18– 84; Philip Scot is briefly discussed on 71. 24. Horace Skipton, The Life and Times of Nicholas Ferrar (London: A. R. Mowbray, 1907), 179; citing John Ferrar’s note: “These military zealots, in the rage of what they called reformation, ransacked the church and the house. In doing which they expressed a particular spite against the organ. This they broke in pieces, of which they made a large fire.” 25. “22 January 1648,” Journal of the House of Commons, vol. 5, 1646–1648 (1802), 439– 41. 26. Albert J. Loomie, “The Destruction of Rubens’s Crucifixion in the Queen’s Chapel, Somerset House,” Burlington Magazine 140, no. 1147 (1998): 680– 82. 27. Simon Thurley, Somerset House: The Palace of England’s Queens, 1551–1692 (London: London Topographical Society, 2009), 101 and 103 (catalogue 9). 28. Ernest P. A. Law, The History of Hampton Court Palace (London, 1888), 131– 32. 29. Jeremy Taylor, Liberty of prophesying, 1– 3. 30. Citing Clement Walker (Theodorus Verax), Anarchia anglicana (London, 1648), “Letter to the Reader,” 7. 31. Montagu Burrows, ed., The Register of the Visitors of the University of Oxford, from A.D. 1647 to A.D. 1658 (Westminster: Camden Society, 1881), cxxiii; see also 120– 25: “June 1: 1648. Answers of some Trinity Colledge Members.” 32. Worden, God’s Instruments, 93– 95. For the vandalism of St. Mary’s, see Anthony Wood, The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford (1792), 2:452: “Afterwards going by St. Mary’s Church, one of them [London Troopers that came into the City with the Lord Say] discharged a brace of bullets at the stone image of our Lady over the Church porch, striking off her head, and the head of her Child (our SAVIOUR) which she held in her right arm.” 33. Sancta Clara’s dedication of Systema fidei to Dom François de Calonne, dated from London November 8, 1648 (“Datum Londini in residentia nostra 8

Notes to Pages 348 – 349

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Nov. Ann 1648”), in Sancta Clara, Operum Omnium Scholasticorum et Historicum (Douay, 1665), vol. 1. 34. “House of Commons Journal Volume 5: 22 January 1648.” 35. Alvise Contarini, Venetian Ambassador at Munster, to the Doge and Senate, February 26, 1649, in Calendar of State Papers, Venetian. Giles Chaissy was in London at the time of Charles’s execution and had hoped to reconcile Charles to Rome just three hours before Charles’s death; see Cathaldus Giblin, “Aegidius Chaissy, OFM, and James Ushher, Protestant Archbishop of Armagh,” 395– 96 and 396n1. 36. De definibilitate controversiae Immaculatae Conceptionis Dei Genitricis opusculum seu disputatio, auctore P.F. Francisco à Sancta Clara (Douay, 1651), “Dedication.” For the full impact of the eyewitness accounts that Sancta Clara would have heard, see, e.g., Charles V. Wedgwood, A King Condemned (London: Tauris Parke, 2011), 177– 93; and Clive Holmes, Why Was Charles I Executed? (London: Hambledon, 2006), 93– 94. 37. Jeremy Taylor, “An exhortation to the Imitation of the Life of Christ,” in The great exemplar of sanctity and holy life according to the Christian institution described in the life and death of the ever blessed Jesus Christ (1649), “Preface” and “Epistle Dedicatory,” respectively. 38. On the Engagement controversy, see Quentin Skinner, “The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought,” The Historical Journal 9 (1966): 286– 317; and Edward Vallance, “Oaths, Casuistry and Equivocation: Anglican Responses to the Engagement Controversy,” The Historical Journal 44, no. 1 (2001): 59– 77. 39. A Fair Warning to take heed of the Scottish Discipline, in The Works of John Bramhall, 3:241– 87; and Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity, 134– 35. 40. In August 1649. See Jeffrey Collins, “Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649,” The Historical Journal 45, no. 2 (2002): 321 and fns. 106 and 107. 41. Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity, 125– 45. 42. Ibid., 139 and 144. 43. Pierre Marchant’s envoy to Ireland, Redmond Caron, a close ally of Ormond, was replaced in 1650; see P. Marchant, Relatio veridica et sincera status provinciae Hiberniae (ca. 1651). 44. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 120– 21. Dockery reports that Marchant, who presided over the chapter, signed the dispensation on August 23, 1650. 45. Ibid., and Millett, The Irish Franciscans, 1651–1665, 57. 46. Thomas Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1917), 2:17; and Michael Mullett, “Lewgar, John (d. 1665),” ODNB. 47. Thaddeus, The Franciscans in England, 87: “Conspicuous among the early bequest is that of the Fleet houses. Mr. William Lyndsey left us five houses in Fleet Street at the corner of Swan Alley. They were held in trust by some Catholic gentleman.” In Calendar of the Proceedings of the Committee for Compounding, 1643–1660,

596 Notes to Pages 349 – 352 2554, we learn that a William Lindsey, recusant, had five tenements on Fleet Street sequestered, then taken up by a Thomas Wandell, who in September 1650 was seeking to have his rent diminished following a new assessment of the value by “the present London Committee.” 48. John Gennings, Institutio missionariorum (Douay, 1651); cited by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 121. 49. The attribution was first published in Anne Davenport, “Reading Hobbes before Leviathan: The Case of Philip Scot,” Hobbes Studies 27, no. 2 (2014): 105– 25. 50. Operum Omnium Scholasticorum et Historicum, R. Adm. Ac Eximii Patris magistri F. Francisci A S. Clara; quorum indicem exhibit versa pagina. Tomus primus, edition novissimo, correctior et auctior (Douay, 1665). In tomo primo: 1. Systema Fidei, seu Tractatus de Concilio Universalis, et cui annectitur Opusculum de Definibilitate Controversiae Immaculatae Conceptionis. 2. Tractatus de Schismate, speciatim Anglico. 51. On Thomason’s copy, “Amsterdam” is crossed out, “London” and the date “December 5, 1650,” are marked. 52. For an account of the breakdown of ecclesiastic discipline at Oxford in 1650, see Sir Thomas Graham Jackson, The Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon, 1847), 64– 66. 53. Philip Scot [Sancta Clara], A Treatise of the Schism of England, “Epistle Dedicatory.” The phrasing is curious: “The Author Superviving (?) intended to both the Universities, as a Theam to be discussed in their next Scholastick Olimpicks.” 54. Ibid.: “To this the ensuing discourse will inable the Reader.” 55. Thomas Hobbes, De cive, a critical edition by Howard Warrender (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 114: “Vocatur observatio huius legis Modestia.” 56. A Treatise of the Schism of England, chap. 1, title. Cf. Sancta Clara’s Tractatus de Schismate, caput 1: “Ecclesiam Romanam in et pro tota latitudine suae communionis sumptam, seu Ecclesiam Catholicam.” 57. A Treatise of the Schism of England, chap. 1, 12; Cf. Systema fidei, chap. 21, 242. 58. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 10–11. On emergent moves to include ruins and stones as part of historical evidence, see Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 51– 52. 59. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 34– 35. 60. For Thomas Aquinas as a possible source, see A. D. M. Walker, “Gratefulness and Gratitude,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 81 (1980– 81): 39– 55; and Walker, “Political Obligation and the Argument from Gratitude,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 17, no. 3 (1988): 191– 211. 61. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 36. Cf. Tractatus de Schismate, 8, caput 2: “Catholici possunt salvari.” 62. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 38– 45. In the Latin version, Bramhall and Hammond are added.

Notes to Pages 352 – 358

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63. Ibid., 37 and 45. 64. Ibid., 41– 42. Presumably he means the Nicene Creed. 65. Ibid., chap. 3, 46– 49. 66. Ibid., 50– 51 (emphasis added). 67. Ibid., 54. 68. Ibid., 57. 69. Ibid., 60– 62. Cf. Herbert Thorndike’s similar argument in A discourse of the right of the Church in a Christian State (London, 1649). 70. Ibid., 64– 66. 71. Cf. the frontispiece of Deus, natura, gratia. 72. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 75– 76. 73. Cf. De cive, 196. 74. A Treatise of the Schism of England, chap. 4, 80– 81. 75. Citing Philippe Crignon’s commentary, in Hobbes, Du Citoyen, 449n5. 76. Cf. De cive, 196. 77. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 197: Hobbes divides “commoda civium” into four classes: 1. Safety from foreign enemies. 2. Domestic peace. 3. Pursuit of wealth consistent with public security (“ut quantum cum securitate publica consistere potest, locupletentur”). 4. Innocent liberty (“ut libertate innoxiâ perfruantur”). 78. Ibid., 82– 84. 79. Although Sancta Clara does not cite it, cf. De cive, chap. 9, sec. 8, 167: “Ex quo sequitur praeceptum illud de parentibus honorandis esse legis naturalis, non modo sub titulo gratitudinis, sed etiam Pactionis.” 80. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 84: “Is it not parricide thus to profane the urnes of our forefathers?”; and “Their sanguinary proceedings against these (sc. Catholics) clearly maketh known to the world their hearts venomous and bloudy rancor even against their Parents” (85). 81. Cf. Julian the Apostate’s educational ban of 362 AD, cited by Augustine in Confessions, bk. 8, 5.10. 82. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 87. 83. Ibid., 90– 92. Sancta Clara argues that children belong to parents jure naturae, in contrast to lands and goods, which “are appropriated only jure gentium.” He thus implicitly agrees with Hobbes that private property may be requisitioned by the sovereign. 84. Ibid., 93; they argue “that we may all inoffensively retain our own faith, referring the examine of all differences to Gods court, to whom alone, as the gift of faith, so the animadversion or punishment of transgressions in it, proportionably and consequently is to belong.” 85. Ibid., 93– 94. Sancta Clara warns, however, that Emperor Michael Balbus had promised perfect toleration, yet soon after “persecuted Catholicks cruelly.” 86. Ibid., 95: “as the liberty of France in order to Protestants, and Holland to Catholicks manifestly shew.”

598 Notes to Pages 359 – 363 87. Ibid., 103. Cf. De cive, chap. 17, sec. 26, 276. 88. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 103. 89. Ibid., 104– 5. 90. Cf. ibid., chap. 1, 57. 91. Cf. ibid., chap. 7, 198 and 199, where Sancta Clara defends the “regitive power” of the Church against Hobbes, based on Acts 20:28: “Spiritus sanctus posuit episcopos regere ecclesiam Dei.” 92. Ibid., chap. 4, 105– 6. 93. Ibid., 107– 8. 94. Ibid., 109–11: “Scotland and Ireland were most orthodoxly subject to the mitre, though not to the Scepter.” 95. Ibid., 115–16. 96. Ibid., 123: “A main Objection which they use for the Schism is, because as they say, we forbid a discussion of our tenents by the light of reason, which they esteem to be against reason, which should be our guide in all things, and especially in matters of religion.” 97. Ibid., chap. 5, 129. Cf. De cive, chap. 12, sec. 6, 189, and Leviathan, chap. 29, 5. 98. A Treatise of the Schism of England, chap. 5, 129– 30. Cf. Hobbes’s very strong language in De cive, chap. 12, sec. 6, 189: “Opinio haec adeo latè per orbem Christianum diffusa est, ut numerus Apostatarum à ratione naturali penè infinitus sit.” 99. A Treatise of the Schism of England, chap. 5, 125. Sancta Clara gives a synopsis of his answer at the start of chap. 5: “In Philosophy, reason raigneth; here it serveth and consequently is captivated according to the apostle. It is not quite rejected, neither is it admitted out of the bounds of a servant.” 100. Ibid., 131– 32; describing, “intrinsic” and “extrinsic,” respectively, reasons that establish the supernatural character of Christian doctrine. 101. Ibid., 131– 36; see, most especially, 136: “Wherein Mr. Hobbs seems to have erred.” 102. Ibid., 137. In contrast, Sancta Clara says, “our Socinians stick still to An sit.” 103. Ibid., 138: “wherein as is clear, reason is the servant, not mistris.” 104. Ibid., 139. 105. Ibid., 140. 106. Ibid., 141. 107. Ibid., 140– 41. Cf. De cive, chap. 17, sec. 28, 279: “Quaestionibus autem fidei, id est, de Deo, quae captum humanum superant, decidendis, opus est benedictione divinâ . . . per impositionem manuum ab ipso CHRISTO derivandâ.” 108. Cf. De cive, chap. 17, sec. 28, 279: “Infallibilitatem hanc promisit Salvator noster (in iis rebus quae ad salutem sunt necessariae) Apostolis usque ad diem iudicij, hoc est, Apostolis et Pastoribus ab Apostolis successivè per impositionem man uum consecrandis.” Note that Johann Sommerville, Lodi Nauta, and Jeffrey Collins dismiss this anomalous passage of De cive as inconsistent with Hobbes’s broader

Notes to Pages 363– 366

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Erastianism, which makes it all the more interesting to see that Sancta Clara calls special attention to it. 109. For a full discussion of this passage in De cive and its implication with regard to Hobbes’s Erastianism, see Lodi Nauta, “Hobbes on Religion and the Church between The Elements of Law and Leviathan: A Dramatic Change of Direction?,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 4 (2002): 577– 98. 110. A Treatise of the Schism of England, chap. 5, 124– 25: “Philosophy and Faith go upon contrary principles”; and 143– 44: “The sum of all is: that the verity of a philosophical conclusion is demonstrated by the verity of human reason [whereas] the verity of Christian reason is proved by the verity of ancient faith.” Sancta Clara may well have been aware of Pascal’s 1647 preface to New Experiments concerning the Vacuum, where a similar distinction between philosophy and faith is spelled out. 111. Ibid., 143. 112. Ibid., 144: “One verity may be diverse, but never adverse to another. Neither doth Divine contradict human; but often surmounteth it; and therefore it is comprehended by the sparks of our scanted reason, but it fetched from elsewhere.” 113. Ibid., 147– 49. 114. Ibid., 149: “Whatsoever they do not know, they blaspheme; whatsoever like bruit beasts they know, they are corrupted in. They are indeed so swoln in their imaginations, that breaking they corrupt themselves and others.” 115. Ibid., 146. 116. Ibid., chap. 6, 153. See also 169, where Sancta Clara concludes that Hales’s view “would make all Schism impossible, all superiority ridiculous and arbitrary,” and 171, where Sancta Clara reiterates that Hales “falsely concludes that there is no Schism in the Church.” 117. Ibid., chap. 6, 153. 118. Ibid.: “The Quarta-decimans being rebellious to the mandatory decree of Nice, all Catholicks had reason to decline their communion.” 119. Ibid., 157. 120. Ibid., 160– 61: “We must look here upon the heresie, not the mind or intention of the heretick: that not this, damneth the souls of those that communicate or pertinatiously adhere unto it, as St. Augustine often argueth.” 121. Ibid., 171. 122. Ibid., 170– 71. 123. Ibid., chap. 7, 177– 78. 124. E.g., Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers (1869), the content of Robert Meynell’s letter to Cottington, sent from Rome on January 18, 1650: “Favourable report from Cardinal Capponi of the Pope’s disposition towards the King; the next Congregation of cardinals is to determine what steps shall be taken. Notice of negotiations which had been held between the Jesuits, through an Abbot Crelly, an Irish Cistercian, and the Parliament” (2:38– 39, item 215); and Father Thomas Babthorpe’s letter to Cottington, also from Rome, dated July 31, 1650: “Nothing is to be done at Rome now; he cannot say whether they treat through Crelly with

600 Notes to Pages 367– 368 Cromwell, or whether the refusal to help the King is because he is in the hands of the presbyterians, or because they are unwilling to part with money, or because they need the Parliament’s ships to keep the French from looking into Italy” (2:71, item 365). Wilfrid (John Selby) had been corresponding with Hyde from Rome since at least December 1649, reporting in particular that “One Mr. Watson, an Independent, has passed by Leghorn; if he come to Rome he will effect little, for the town abhors the late regicide” (ibid., 35– 36, item 198). 125. A Treatise of the Schism of England, chap. 7, 191: “The Church hath therefore always from the beginning to this day believed and practiced this supreme obliging power in matters of faith and manners.” 126. Ibid., 192– 93. 127. Ibid., 193– 94. Cf. De cive, chap. 18, sec. 8, 288. 128. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 195. 129. Ibid., 195– 96. Cf. Manasseh ben Israel, De creatione problemata XXX (Amsterdam, 1635). In February 1649, Menasseh ben Israel’s “Apology for the honorable nation of the Jews and all the sons of Israel” was published in London under the name of “Nicholas Edward,” and in July 1650, The hope of Israel: written by Menasseh ben Israel, a Hebrew divine and philosopher, dedicated to the Parliament of England and the Council of State. For Cromwell’s efforts to readmit Jews to England, see David Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 89–126. 130. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 196– 97. 131. Ibid., 198– 99: “We must complain to the Church for emergencies, and she hath power to excommunicate if we obey not. If this be true as it is in other crimes and causes, it will easily conclude in the chiefest crime of heresie, else we must blasphemously say that Christ hath made provision for lesser difficulties and not for greater, which is to condemn his omniscience or providence.” Cf. Hobbes, De cive, chap. 6, sec. 13, 142: “Sublatâ enim hâc potentia, unâ tollitur civitas, et redit confusio omnium rerum.” 132. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 199: “This regitive power is confirmed in the acts attributed to the Holy Ghost, Spiritus Sanctus vos consistuit Episcopos regere Ecclesiam Dei. Of this the new testament in doctrin [sic] and practice is aboundant.” 133. Ibid., 202– 3: “besides internal faith, he saith that there is necessarily required a profession of many other articles, which summarily are contracted and compacted into that we call the Creed. As he had touched before, Chap. 17 n. 21 and afterward more fully in his Annotations to the number 6.” 134. Ibid., 203– 4. Cf. De cive, chap. 18, sec. 6, 286; annotatio, 286– 877; and chap. 18, sec. 14, p. 292: “Mirabitur autem forte quispiam, si excepto uno articulo IESUM ESSE CHRISTUM, qui necessarius est ad salutem de fide internâ, caeteri omnes pertineant ad obedientiam tantum, quae quidem praestari potest, etsi quis non internè credat (modo cupiat credere, & externe profiteatur quoties opus est) quaecumque ab Ecclesia proponuntur.”

Notes to Pages 368 – 374

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135. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 204. 136. Ibid., 204– 5: “This last article of external acknowledgement is more modest, then I have yet found in any of our Country-men.” 137. Ibid., 205– 6, where Sancta Clara cites the case of Nicolas, one of the first seven deacons, who “believing in Christ, yet taught it lawful to commit fornication and to eat meat offered to idols.” 138. Ibid., 208– 9. Cf. Hobbes, De cive, chap. 18, sec. 6, annotatio, 287. 139. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 210–11. Cf. De cive, chap. 17, sec. 5. 140. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 212. 141. Ibid., 212–13. 142. See Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 3:277– 80. 143. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 213–14. Cf. Thomas White, The grounds of obedience and government (1655), 135– 41, where White argues that an innocent dispossessed sovereign has a moral duty to relinquish his claim if restoring it brings bloodshed to his people. 144. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 215. 145. Ibid., chap. 8, 216–17. 146. Ibid., 217. 147. Ibid., 222. 148. Ibid., 223: “And here I wonder much at Mr. Hobbs in his book De Cive, who otherwise [is] singularly deserving in moral and socratical Philosophy, would so easily precipitate his judgement in points of this nature.” 149. Ibid., 225. 150. Cf. Hobbes, De cive, chap. 3, sec. 14, 114, where Hobbes affirms that the right to protect one’s body from injury and to benefit from fresh air and water are inalienable rights. Cf. also chap. 3, section 25, 117, where Hobbes condemns drunkenness as “against the natural law” since it impairs the use of reason. 151. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 226– 27. 152. Cf. Hobbes, De cive, chap. 14, section 4, 2074: “Naturalis ea (sc. lex) est, quam Deus omnibus hominibus patefecit per Verbum suum aeternum ipsis innatum, nimirum Rationem naturalem.” For Hobbes’s view of reason in Leviathan, see Philip Pettit, Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 46. 153. A Treatise of the Schism of England, chap. 8, 231: “All representatives are essentially inferior to the Prototypes by many degrees, yet safely conduct us to the knowledge of them without abasing their natures to the Images.” 154. Ibid., 232. 155. Ibid., 234. 156. Ibid., 236. 157. Ibid., 238. 158. Ibid., 239 (italics in the original). 159. Ibid., 237.

602 Notes to Pages 374 – 380 160. Ibid., 240– 41. 161. Ibid., 241: “Neither is it difficult for man, though learned, to depose his own judgment, especially in order to external actions, for it is daily done by all sorts of timorate consciences, who do mangre [sic; as in the French malgré] their own reason, direct themselves by the authority of such, whom they know to be more learned then themselves.” 162. Ibid. Sancta Clara cites the text in Latin. 163. Ibid., 242– 43. 164. Ibid., 248 – 49: “The Law, or light of nature therefore immediately dictates that God is to be worshiped, and none can be ignorant of it, that know the signification of the terms; neither can they be ignorant, that Gods worship must be performed in the best manner.” 165. Ibid., 250. 166. Ibid., 251. 167. Ibid. 168. Ibid., 252. Sancta Clara cites Hobbes’s text in Latin. Cf. De cive, chap. 15, sec. 14, 227: “Quando igitur attribuimus Deo voluntatem, non est intelligenda similis nostrae.” 169. A Treatise of the Schism of England, 253– 54. 170. Ibid., 254: “And therefore we may adhere to so great authority as the Church even in reason.” 171. Ibid., 255: “That they may learn to obey God in his Church, else their condition will be every way most miserable.” 172. Ibid., 259– 60. 173. Ibid., 260 and 263, respectively. 174. Ibid., 261– 62 and 264– 67. 175. Ibid., 269. 176. Ibid., 268. 177. A Treatise of the Schism of England, “An Exhortation of the Author,” 270– 71. 178. Ibid., 272– 73.

. The Piety and Equity of Soul-Freedom 1. Anthony Brown, “Anglo-Irish Gallicanism, c. 1635– c. 1685” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 2004); Tadhg Ó hAnnrachàin, Catholic Reformation in Ireland: The Mission of Rinuccini 1645–1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 253– 54; William Dool Killen, The Ecclesiastical History of Ireland (London: Macmillan, 1875), 2:86– 91; and Peter Walsh, Queries concerning the lawfulnesse of the present cessation and of the censures against all confederates adhering unto it, published in Kilkenny in 1648, with the approval of Thomas Dease, Bishop of Meath.

Notes to Pages 380 – 381

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See also Deana Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in SeventeenthCentury Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 204– 29. For Pierre Marchant, see Benignus Millet, The Irish Franciscans, 1651–1665 (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1964), pt. 1, 57– 58; and pt. 2, 418– 63. 2. The Peace of Osnabrück, October 24, 1648, article 5, e.g., paragraphs 27 and 34, and article 7, paragraphs 1 and 2, in Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: A Sourcebook (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 310 and 312. 3. On Innocent X’s bull Zelo domus Dei and the secularizing impact of the Treaty of Westphalia, see, e.g., Malcolm D. Evans, Religious Liberty and International Law in Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 50– 57. See also Derek Croxton, Peacemaking in Early Modern Europe: Cardinal Mazarin and the Congress of Westphalia, 1643–1648 (Selinsgrave: Susquehanna University Press, 1999), 259– 81; and Konrad Repgen, “Die Proteste Chigis unde der päpstliche Protest gegen den westfälischen Frieden (1645/50): Vier kapitel über das breve ‘Zelo Domus Dei,’” in Staat, Kirche und Wissenschaft in einer pluralistischen Gesellscahft (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1989), 625– 47. 4. The Peace of Osnabrück, article 17, paragraph 3, in Wilson, The Thirty Years War, 319. 5. Melern, Acta pacis executionis publica (Hannover and Tübingen, 1736), 2:18; and John Fletcher Hurst, History of the Christian Church (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1897), 2:556. 6. Julia Fleming, Defending Probabilism: The Moral Theology of Juan Caramuel (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006), 49– 72. 7. See, e.g., John D. Krugler, English and Catholic: The Lords Baltimore in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 152– 91. 8. For Lord Baltimore’s “Concordat” of 1647 with the Jesuit provincial, see Thomas Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America: Colonial and Federal (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1917), 2:17–18. 9. See The Lord Baltemores case concerning the province of Maryland, adjoining to Virginia in America. With full and clear answers to all material objections, touching his rights, jurisdiction, and proceedings there. And certain reasons of state, why the Parliament should not impeach the same. Unto which is also annexed, a true copy of a commission from the late King’s eldest son, to Mr. William Davenant, to dispossess the Lord Baltemore of the said province, because of his adherence to this Common-wealth (London, 1653). 10. In Hobbes’s “Answer” to Davenant, which was dated January 10, 1650, and was published in Paris as The preface to Gondibert (1650), mention is made of “the American sauvages” and a poem is appended by Edmund Waller “To Sir William D’Avenant, upon his two first Bookes of Gondibert, finish’d before his voyage to America.” For biographical details of John Lewgar and of William Davenant, see, respectively, Michael Mullet, “Lewgar, John (d. 1665),” ODNB, and Mary Edmond, “Davenant [D’Avenant], Sir William (1606–1668),” ODNB.

604 Notes to Pages 381– 382 11. For Hobbes’s fall from favor with the Louvre group “at the end of 1651,” see Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity, 145. For Hobbes’s increased alienation from Anglicanism at this time, see the correspondence between Hobbes in Paris and his friend Robert Payne in England, cited and discussed by Jeffrey Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 141– 42. As Collins notes (144), Hobbes appears to have first expressed his desire to return to England to Edward Hyde between March and June 1651. Thus it seems that Hobbes was not rejected by either the Louvre faction or by the “old royalists” until after the publication of Leviathan (see Collins, “Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy,” 25). 12. For Hobbes, see, e.g., Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10–11 and 40. For John Hales, whose Treatise on Schism originated in a letter to Chillingworth, see, e.g., Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 211–13. For Hugh Cressy, see, e.g., Sarah Mortimer, “Exile, Apostasy and Anglicanism in the English Revolution,” in Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1640–1690, ed. Philip Major (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 94– 97. 13. Arbor Virtutum; or, An exact Model, in the which are represented all manner of Virtues, etc. Collected out of Salmanticensis, by Br. Serenus Cressy, for the use of Dame Mary Cary, at Cambray, Oct. 7, 1649. The manuscript is preserved at Ugbrooke, Devonshire. 14. Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers (1869), 2:75 (item 384) (from Douay, August 30, 1650). 15. Jeffrey Collins, “Christian Ecclesiology and the Composition of Leviathan: A Newly Discovered Letter to Thomas Hobbes,” The Historical Journal 43, no. 1 (2000): 217– 31. 16. Thomas H. Clancy, S.J., “The Jesuits and the Independents: 1647,” Archivum Historicum Societas Jesu 40 (1971): 67– 90. For the French-Spanish maneuvering in the background of these secret negotiations, i.e., for the possibility that Mazarin was supporting the Gallican Blackloists in an effort to gain leverage over Innocent X, see Henry Coville, Mazarin et ses démêlés avec le pape Innocent X (1644–1648) (Paris: Champion, 1914), 161– 83. Note that the pro-Spanish Cardinal Francis de Lugo approved the “Three Propositions” in October 1647 (Clancy, “The Jesuits and the Independents,” 78); on the other hand, shortly after Mazarin had obtained a cardinal’s hat for his brother Michele, also in October, the Blackloist initiative lost all support. See, in particular, Digby’s letter to Holden of October 21, 1647, in Pugh, Blacklo’s Cabal, 63: “But I hope better of the Cardinals [Mazarin’s] Prudence and Piety, and of your Churchmen’s [the French church] judgment and courage, then that we shall be abandoned to neglect and sold into the servitude of our enemys at the price of a red cap.” 17. Articles proposed to the Catholiques of England (Paris?), 1648. 18. Jeffrey Collins, “Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649,” The Historical Journal 45, no. 2 (2002): 321.

Notes to Pages 382 – 385

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19. Ibid. 20. Journals of the House of Commons, 6:291 (Die Jovis [Thursday], 6 Septembris, 1649). 21. Charles’s proposals to Innocent X included restoration of ecclesiastic lands in Ireland and Catholic toleration in exchange for a Europewide Catholic effort, led by the pope and financed from Rome, to restore Charles to the English throne by armed force. Two details suggest that Mazarin’s hand is behind the matter. First, an Irish priest, described as “confessor to the Queen of Portugal,” is cited as plotting with Henriette-Marie in Paris and as acting as Charles’s emissary to Rome (the French recognized the queen of Portugal but the Spanish did not). Second, Innocent X is urged to forbid all Catholics, under pain of excommunication, to assist Cromwell or the Commonwealth in any way (Spain officially recognized the Commonwealth in December 1650). 22. Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 248. For Falkland’s regard for Cassander, see Hayward, The Mores of Great Tew, 130 and 138. 23. See S. R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649, vol. 3, 1647–1649 (London, 1891), 212. 24. Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 257; and Journals of the House of Commons, 6:474, “Die Veneris [Friday], 27 Septembris 1650.” 25. Following Jeffrey Collins, who, in The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 132, views Cromwell as wholly committed to Congregationalist Independency. See, also, Cromwell’s letter to John Cotton, “Worthye Sir and my Christian friend,” of October 2, 1651, in Sargent Bush Jr., ed., The Correspondence of John Cotton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 67– 69. 26. Scot, A Treatise on the Schism of England, 93. For the importance of this characteristic position, see Edwin Curley, “Hobbes and the Cause of Religious Toleration,” The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 312 and 328, fn. 14. 27. R. L. Greaves, Saints and Rebels: Seven Noncomformists in Stuart England (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985), 157– 78; and Jeremy Taylor, Liberty of Prophesying, 214: “It is not onely lawfull to tolerate disagreeing perswasions, but the authority of God onely is competent to take notice of it, and infallible to determine it, and fit to judge.” 28. On Giles Calvert’s publishing activities, see, e.g., Ariel Hessayon, “Gold Tried in Fire”: The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution 1608–1659 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 192, 195– 96, 205, and 303. 29. Henry Danvers, Certain quaeries concerning liberty of conscience (1649), 2. 30. Ibid., 5. 31. Section 9, articles 1 and 3, respectively. See Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, selected and edited

606 Notes to Pages 385 – 388 by Samuel Rawson Gardiner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906), chap. 81: The Agreement of the People, http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1434/194364 on 2013-0521. The earlier Agreement of October 1647 is at chapter 74. John Lilburne’s Foundations of freedom, or, An agreement of the People, dated December 15, 1648, includes the first modification ruling out popery as a public religion but says nothing about restricting Roman Catholics regarding private worship. 32. See Liberty of Conscience asserted. Or, persecution for religion condemned; by the laws of God, nature, reason. Published by a well-wisher to the kingdoms good (London: printed for R. A., 1649). (Annotation on Thomason copy: “March 20, 1648,” i.e., 1649 [N. S.].) 33. Ibid., 5. 34. Ibid., 1 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 2. Cf. the preamble to “Matters of Religion” in the 1647 Agreement of the People: “Matters of Religion and the ways of Gods Worship are not at all intrusted by us to any humane power because therein wee cannot remit or exceed a tittle of what our Consciences dictate to be the mind of God, without wilfull sinne.” 37. Ibid., 3. 38. Ibid., 4. 39. Ibid. The basic principle that one person’s freedom cannot be abrogated without risk to all is stated as follows: “It is impossible to couch any penal Statute, touching matters of Faith and Gods worship, in such terms, as it may not easily be made applicable to any godly people whatsoever, when the civill Magistrate shall become disaffected towards them.” 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 5: “This damned lye they foment in order to the persecution of the free-born well-affected People of this Nation, which shall be sure to fall upon us, whensoever they get power into their hands, unless prevented by a fundamentall Law, that no person professing Christ shall be liable to persecution for Religion.” 42. Ibid.: “It is not improbable that God may not impute the sin of Idolatry to the Papists, I mean such as are zealous in their way, and are verily perswaded in their conscience that they serve God aright.” 43. Ibid., 5– 6. 44. Ibid., 6. For Theodore Jennings, licenser and factotum of the Council of State, see Calendar of State Papers, Domestic; Interregnum, 1649– 50, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London, 1875), British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac .uk/cal-state-papers/domestic/interregnum/1649-50, 2:316. 45. The Christian Moderator: Or, Persecution for Religion Condemned; by the Light of Nature, the Law of god and the Evidence of our own principles, Printed for H. F., 1651, 26, where the sequestration “of one Smith, a suspected papist,” on “Wednesday the second of July, 1651” is cited. 46. Ibid., “Postscript,” 28 and 1, respectively: “Since we have so happily shaken off that intolerable Yoke of Popish infallibility, etc.”

Notes to Pages 388 – 389

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47. In a letter by Thomas White to Kenelm Digby, dated December 31, 1650 (and published by Robert Pugh, Blacklo’s Cabal, 103– 4), White implies that Digby knew Austin in Rome: “Whitaker a stationer, who printed my Institutiones Peripateticae, is not so weary of that bargaine, but that he is willing to print my Divinity. Mr. Austen, whom I believe you remember at Rome, promiseth to be correctour.” For more on John Austin, see Stefania Tutino, Thomas White and the Blackloists (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 48. Compare the opening of The Christian Moderator (“When I consider how tenderly our Saviour Christ recommends the precept of mutual love to all that professe his Name . . . I cannot sufficiently wonder, to see most Christians in this present age with fire and sword to persecute each other, only on account of religion”) to the opening of Liberty of Conscience asserted (“When I consider how particularly our Saviour Christ recommended affection, and mutual love to all that professe his Name . . . I cannot sufficiently wonder that those who seem to glory in the possession of his Doctrine should so foulely transgresse this latter Precept . . . while they persecute each other with fire and sword . . . upon account of Religion only.” 49. The Christian Moderator. Or, persecution for Religion Condemned (1651), 1. Compare to Liberty of Conscience asserted. Or, persecution for Religion Condemned (1649), 1: “How much have they degenerated from the primitive Christians in this present age, who would rather have given their own lives for the spiritual good of their brethren, then have sought the violation of any mans Conscience by the least of many penalties we have seen inflicted by Christians upon Christians, for dissenting only in points of Faith?” 50. Ibid., 1. Cf. Liberty of Conscience asserted, 1: “Yet it hath pleased the Lord now at last to infuse the like tendernesse into the brests of many conscientious and well-affected people of this Nation, who see, I doubt not, the deformity of the passionate proceeding of those who would ruine all men that agree not with them in believe.” 51. Ibid. Cf. Liberty of Conscience asserted, 1: “that it is repugnant to the laws of God, Nature and Reason.” 52. For Henriette-Marie’s double-dealing, see The King of Scotland’s negotiations at Rome for assistance against the Commonwealth of England, published in London on September 6, 1650, “to satisfie as manie as are not willing to bee deceived,” especially 3– 4. The support of Mazarin is implied by the fact that the confessor of the queen of Portugal, one of France’s key allies against Spain, is involved. For the anti-Anglican and anti-Presbyterian statements in Liberty of Conscience asserted, see 4: “The Prelates and the Prelaticall party were the principall actors in making the cruell Laws for restraining and compelling mens Consciences in this Kingdom, and now you see Gods Judgement upon them. The Presbyterians design was to continue and execute the same Laws upon the free-born and well-affected People of this Nation, and thereby force their Consciences, and keep thim [sic] in slavery: but the hand of God hath also stopped their course, and will involve them in the same ruine with the Prelates, unless they prevent it by speedy repentance.”

608 Notes to Pages 389 – 395 53. Thomas White’s letter of December 31, 1650; cited in Pugh, Blacklo’s Cabal (1680), 104. 54. See Institutionum sacrarum peripateticis inaedificatarum: hoc est, theologiae, super fundamentis in peripatetica digbaeana jactis, pars theoretica. Authore Thomas Anglo, è generosa albiorum in oriente trinobantum prosapia oriundo. Tomus primus (London, 1652): “Admodum Reverendo Patris P. F. Franc. Davenporto, vulgo à Sta. Clara, Provinciae Angliae FF. Minorum Exministro Provinciali, Olim apud Duacenses Lectore Theologiae Primario, Nunc vero, Serenissimae Reginae Magnae Britanniae à Sacris, etc. Habe (Doctissime partier candidissime Amice) quem biennium te scribis expectare libellum.” 55. Jeffrey Collins cites Austin’s reference to Hobbes in The Christian Moderator of 1651 as “the strongest confirmation of an intellectual commonality between Hobbes and the Blackloists tracing back to the Blackloist conspiracy of 1649”; see Collins, “Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649,” 328. 56. The Christian Moderator (1651), 7: “These few unpolished lines, which I here present for incouragement of tenderness, I desire may not be stretcht to draw in a wild and extravagant licentiousness.” 57. Ibid., 8. 58. Ibid.: “Whilst I was finishing these lines, a worthy friend of mine came to honour me with the civility of a visit; to whom reading these last two or three considerations, he told me, that as he believed the Characters I had given of a tender Conscience were most evidently true, and to all unbiased-minds perfectly satisfactory, yet they were applicable . . . to papists as well as if they had been made for them.” 59. Ibid., 9. Evidently, “Birchley” wishes to avoid giving the impression that he knows and consorts with Catholic priests since he is careful to imply that the “friendly visitor” who introduces him to the papist is himself Protestant. 60. Ibid., 11. “Birchley” says that the papist takes the axiom for granted and that he, Birchley, in turn, “cannot deny it.” 61. Ibid., 12: “No one amongst us but would condemn him for malignant that should shoot at my Lord Generals Picture without Temple Bar.” 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid.: “And though afterwards he condemn praying to saints departed as idolatry, yet it is only upon a particular supposition of his own, that there is yet no such thing as Saints in heaven.” 64. Ibid., 13. Hobbes is shown great respect: “this passage of so famous an Author.” 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 15. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 16. 69. Ibid., 16–17. 70. Ibid., 17.

Notes to Pages 395 – 403

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71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 18. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 19: “the reines of Authority are taken out of their hands, which they had by turns abused into meer whips for their brethren.” For the limited character of the Catholic toleration that Austin seeks, see further 21– 22. 76. Ibid. In particular, Austin denounces the Presbyterian Synodical Act of January 1650 and the stated motives of the June 1651 public fast: “See how their zeale boyles, while they are but a kindling, while we choke the fuell in its owne smoak. How will their fury run over, when the fire shall by any successe be raised into a flame! How will they drowne the whole Countrey in an inundation of more then Antichristian slavery!” 77. Ibid., 20– 21. 78. For the long-term importance of Blackloist Erastianism, see Jeffrey Collins, “Restoration Anti-Catholicism: A Prejudice in Motion,” in England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited, ed. Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 281– 306. 79. The Christian Moderator (1651), 23. 80. Ibid., 24– 25. 81. Ibid., 26– 27. 82. Ibid., 28. 83. As early as the spring of 1650, Innocent X, in conformity to Spanish policy, had a “change of heart” with regard to helping Charles II, believing that “peace with the Commonwealth is the best way to advance Catholicism”; see Cottington to Meynell (April? 1650) and Meynell to Hyde (May 10, 1650), in Clarendon State Papers, 56. Cromwell, in turn, had declared himself in favor of some form of “mixed monarchy” in 1651, and again in October 1652, in Whitelock’s presence. 84. William Birchley, The Christian Moderator, in two parts, or Persecution for religion condemned; by the light of nature, Law of God and evidence of our own principles. With an explanation of the Roman catholic belief, concerning these four points: their church, worship, justification and civill government (London, 1652), 58. 85. Ibid., 60. 86. Ibid., 61. 87. “The Paper, containing certain doctrines of the papists, and by them delivered to divers persons of quality for their particular satisfaction,” in The Christian Moderator (1652), 62. 88. Ibid., 63. 89. Ibid., 63– 64. 90. Ibid., 65. 91. The full title gives a broadside version of the contents: A Beacon Set on Fire: or The humble information of certain stationers, citizens of London, to the parliament

610 Notes to Pages 403– 406 and Commonwealth of England. Concerning the vigilancy of the Jesuits, papists and apostates, (taking advantage of the divisions among ourselves and the states great employment), to (1) corrupt the pure doctrine of Scriptures; (2) Introduce the whole body of popish doctrine and worship; (3) Seduce the subjects of this Commonwealth unto the popish religion, or that which is worse. By writing and publishing many popish books (printed in England in the English tongue within these three last years, therein maintaining the gross points of popery, urging a necessity for all to receive them upon pain of damnation, proclaiming in one of them that the Parliament have discharg’d the people of this nation from the common professed Religion thereof; boasting of many eminent men that are lately converted to their Religion, and expressing the hopes they have of a great flowing in of people unto them ; And Blasphemous books of another nature: all made evident by the catalogue and contents of many of the aforesaid books added hereunto. Published for the service of the Parliament and Commonwealth. Hoping that the Parliament by sufficient laws, and the Lords Ministers and People by their Preaching and Prayers, will set themselves (upon the Alarum that the Enemy gives) to maintain the faith that was once delivered to the saints against all the enemies thereof (London: Printed for the subscribers hereof, 1652). 92. For a full appreciation of the Beacon tracts, see Jeffrey Collins, “Silencing Thomas Hobbes: The Presbyterians and Leviathan,” in Springborg, Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” 478– 500. 93. A Beacon Set on Fire, 13. 94. Ibid.: “Putting a painted Glos upon the foul face of popery, to make it appear otherwise then [sic] it is; Making much mention of a sweet spirit, tenderness, humility, mutual love, etc., merely to abuse the people of this Commonwealth.” 95. Ibid., 13 and 14: “which Points all papists must and do believe, notwithstanding anything they shall say to the contrary.” 96. Thomas Pride, The beacons quenched: or The humble information of divers officers of the Army, and other wel-affected persons, to the Parliament and Commonwealth of England; concerning the Machivilian design of the Presbyterians, now carrying on by the Stationers of London. To bring an odium upon the Parliament and Army, introduce the whole body of Presbyterian doctrine and worship; seduce the good people of this commonwealth unto Presbyterian slavery, than which nothing is worse (London, to be sold by Giles Calvert at the Black spread-Eagle, 1652), 12: “The Subscribers label it [sc. The Christian Moderator] Popish simply because it equally rejects Episcopall bondage and Presbyterian slavery, and holds forth an absolute incoercion in matters of inward belief, which these men [sc. the Presbyterian Subscribers] love not to hear of, nor of any Christian Moderation. Nor hath that Book any word against the State or present Commonwealth.” 97. The Beacon Flameing with a non obstante: or A Justification of the Firing of the Beacon, by way of animadversion upon the book entituled The Beacons Quenched, subscribed by Col. Pride (London, 1652), 17. 98. Respectively, William Rogers, Experiments of the Spiritual Life and Health (1652), 2; and Henry Vane Jr., Zeal Examined (1652), 9.

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99. “Some few Motives, why Roman Catholiques should not be forced out of their Consciences by penalties imposed upon them merely for Religion,” in The Christian Moderator, the second edition revised and augmented (1652), 28: “Since they seriously and constantly profess, that after prayers to God, and diligent reading of his Word, they cannot find the least satisfaction in any other Religion, but that their souls enjoy a perfect peace and serenity in their own; it seems very unsuitable to Christian charity, either to compel them to a Religion, wherein their Consciences cannot live in repose, or restrain them from a Religion, wherein only they find comfort here, and the hope of salvation hereafter.” 100. E. Lee, Legenda lignea with an answer to mr. birchleys moderator. (Pleading for a toleration of popery). And a character of some hopefull saints revolted to the church of Rome (London, 1652), chap. 11, 30. Annotation on Thomason copy: “11 November 1652.” 101. Ibid., chap. 5, 17: “These busie actors have been (in great numbers) transmitted (of late) out of Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and other parts, to scatter their Romish seeds in the three fair gardens of England, Scotland, and Ireland; where (the Scene being so full of various troubles) they have acted a part on every Stage, tugg’d an oar in every barge, whisper’d a Vote into many Councels and got a Quarter in every Army.” 102. Ibid., chap. 9, 28. 103. Ibid. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid., chap. 22, 99–100.

. Enchyridion of Faith 1. An Enchyridion of Faith: Presented in a Catechetical Dialogue, Declaring the Truth of Christian Religion in General. Distinguishing also Points of Faith controverted from other Doctrines. Composed by Fran: Covent. Printed at Douay anno 1654 with Permission and approbation, 230– 31. The running title of the 1654 edition is “A Catechetical Dialogue.” 2. Ann Hughes, “Coventry and the English Revolution,” in Town and Countryside in the English Revolution, ed. R. C. Richardson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 69– 99. 3. Cited by Thomas Sharp, Illustrative Papers on the History and Antiquities of the City of Coventry (Birmingham, 1871), 197: “It seems (says Dugdale) that these Friers had afterwards also many good Benefactors: for so fair a Church as that hath been, by view of the Steeple, yet standing, could not be built without very great cost.” 4. Albert Loomie, “Oliver Cromwell’s Policy toward the English Catholics: The Appraisal by Diplomats, 1654–1658,” Catholic Historical Review 90, no. 1 (2004), 29– 44; especially 32– 33, on Cromwell’s ordinances of January and February 1654.

612 Notes to Pages 410 – 413 5. Once again I’m justifying the term “Anglican” by appealing to The Coventry Leet Book, 781, where Henry VIII (and his successors) are described as supreme head of the “Ecclesia Anglicana.” 6. Thomas White, in answering Sancta Clara’s challenge to him regarding purgatory, will affectionately point out Sancta Clara’s signature method of selfidentification. In his letter of dedication, White calls Sancta Clara his “much esteemed friend” and adds: “For such both your prudence and learning have made you to me, and specially your rich Systeme, the citing whereof in this your Result gave me full notice of your Person”; see Thomas White, Notes on Mr. F.D.’s Result of a dialogue concerning the middle state of souls in a letter from Thomas White (Paris, 1660). 7. Enchyridion of Faith (1654), 303. 8. Martin Denys’s approval of Sancta Clara’s Summa veteris theologiae discipulis meis missionariis propinata is given in Sancta Clara’s Operum Omnium Scholasticorum, vol. 2 (Douay, 1665). Pierre Marchant also approved it at great length in October 1657. For Martin Denys’s approval of Hugh Cressy’s Sancta Sophia, see Augustine Baker, Holy Wisdom: or, Directions for the prayer of contemplation, methodically digested by R.F. Serenus Cressy (Douay, 1657), 9. 9. Sancta Clara’s Operum Omnium, vol. 2. 10. William Prynne, A true and perfect narrative (1659), 86. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 126, speculates, not unreasonably, that “Father D.” might be Sancta Clara. The same year, Sancta Clara published The result of a dialogue concerning the Middle-State of Souls. By F. D. Professor of Divinity. Printed in Paris, permissu Superiorum. 11. Loomie, “Oliver Cromwell’s Policy towards the English Catholics,” 33, cites “an ad-hoc committee of Catholics that included three peers, Arundell of Wardour, Brudenell and Montague” that met privately with “Cromwell to plead for restraint in future anti-Catholic ordinances.” Since Sancta Clara’s confrère and close ally Angel Mason was Henry Arundell of Wardour’s chaplain, Dockery’s speculation that Sancta Clara was likely present at these negotiations is plausible (Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 125). 12. Ruth Kleinman, “Belated Crusaders: Religious Fears in Anglo-French Diplomacy, 1654–1655,” Church History 44 (1975): 34– 46. 13. E.g., Enchyridion of Faith (1655), 18, 85, 91, 104. The title page of the 1655 edition uses the spelling “Enchiridion” but the running title is “An Enchyridion of Faith.” 14. Ibid., “To the Reader,” unnumbered pages. 15. John Wallis, Elenchus geometriae Hobbianae (1655). Further evidence of Hobbes’s reputation as an atheist starting as early as 1651 (Henry Hammond) is found in Jeffrey Collins, “Thomas Hobbes, ‘Father of Atheists,’” in Atheism and Deism Revalued: Heterodox Religious Identities in Britain, 1650–1800, ed. W. Hudson, D. Lucci, and J. R. Wigelsworth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 25– 44. 16. Franciscus Coventriensis, Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico (Antwerp, 1652), caput 4, sec. 3, 125– 26.

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17. Ibid., caput 4, 36– 47. 18. A discussion of this aspect of Hobbes’s atheism is found in Collins, “Thomas Hobbes, ‘Father of Atheists,’” 32, where Collins points out that one of Hobbes’s criticisms of White’s De mundo involved denying that God’s existence can be proved philosophically. 19. William Maziere Brady, The Episcopal succession in England, Scotland and Ireland, AD 1400 to 1875 (Rome: Tipografia della Pace, 1876), 2:163– 65. 20. Compare, for example, to John Davenport and William Hooke, A catechism containing the chief heads of Christian religion (London, 1659), which is aimed at rote memorization. 21. Enchyridion of Faith (1654), 303 and 316. 22. Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity, 190. The full title of the 1654 Hobbes treatise is as follows: Of Liberty and Necessity: A Treatise, Wherein All Controversy Concerning Predestination, Election, Free Will, Grace, Merits, Reprobation, etc., is fully decided and cleared; in answer to a treatise written by the Bishop of Londonderry, on the same subject. 23. Jackson, Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity, 204– 6 24. See, e.g., A Letter concerning the present State of Religion amongst us (London, 1656), attributed to Herbert Thorndike. 25. The result of a dialogue concerning the middle-state of souls. Wherein is asserted, the ancient doctrine of their relief, obtainable by prayers, alms., etc., before the day of judgment. By F. D. professor of divinity. 2nd edition, printed at Paris, 1660. 26. Stefania Tutino, Thomas White and the Blackloists (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 73– 74. 27. Edward Hyde to Clement, January 16, 1654, in Calendar of Clarendon Papers, 2:302: “It is generally believed that he [sc. Digby] has long held correspondence with Cromwell and done him good offices.” See also Lorenzo Paulucci, Venetian Secretary in England, to Giovanni Sagredo, Venetian Ambassador in France, July 2, 1654, in Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, item 284. 28. Beverley Southgate, “‘That Damned Book’: The Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655), and the Downfall of Thomas White,” Recusant History 17 (1985): 238– 53; and Jeffrey Collins, “Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649,” The Historical Journal 45 (June 2002): 327. 29. A letter from a true and lawfull member of Parliament, and one faithfully engaging with it, from the beginning of the war to the end. The letter was published on October 31, 1655, and printed in 1656 (annotation “July 21” on Thomason copy). For the attribution to Hyde, see David L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 278– 79. 30. According to Cosin, the queen said of Digby, “C’est un grand cochin.” George Davenport to William Sancroft, letter of January 15, 1655 (O. S.), in Brenda Past ed., The Letters of George Davenport, 1651–1677 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2011), 46.

614 Notes to Pages 415 – 416 31. On November 14, 1654, Paulucci wrote to Sagredo that the government in England “cannot yet be considered stable” (State Papers, Venetian, item 339). 32. E.g., Thomas White, The Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655), “The eleventh ground,” 78: “Thus is our supreme magistrate or Governour mounted on his Throne of Justice and Soveraignty. Hee hath for his strength, that right the People have bestowed on him; devesting themselves, by this submission, from interposing in Common affaires.” See also “The twelfth ground,” 100: “No wonder, therefore, if rebellion be connumerated with Soothsaying and idolatry, and Obedience preferred before sacrifice, even in the sight of God.” For further analysis, see Tutino, Thomas White and the Blackloists, 65– 81 and 113. 33. Tutino, Thomas White and the Blackloists, 45. 34. White, The Grounds of Obedience and Government, “The fifteenth ground,” 122: “If, by any circumstance they be devolved into the same state of Anarchy that their promise made bindes no more; then Rationality teacheth them and giveth them by force of nature, to institute another Government”; and 126: “Let us look now what is left for the obeying party; and we shall finde, it is to governe their private affaires, as farre forth as they fall not within the verge of the common good or harme.” 35. Ibid., 77: “The Hollanders of late made a peace with the Spaniard; wee, both with the Hollander and the Dane, and are pretending to others.” 36. Citing Goodman’s own description of his fate in the year 1643, reproduced in the appendix of Richard Newcome, A memoir of Gabriel Goodman (Ruthin, 1825), 187. 37. Newcome, A memoir of Gabriel Goodman, appendix, 170; Godfrey Goodman, The two great mysteries of Christian religion (London, 1653), “Letter of Dedication to Oliver Cromwell,” unnumbered page; John R. Brewer’s introduction to Godfrey Goodman, The court of King James the First (London: R. Bentley, 1839), xiv. See also ODNB entries Nicholas W. S. Cranfield, “Goodman, Godfrey (1583–1656),” and Henry Summerson, “Aglioby, William (1641–1705).” 38. Goodman, The two great mysteries of Christian religion, “Letter of Dedication to Cromwell,” unnumbered page. 39. George Davenport to William Sancroft, letter of March 19, 1655 (O. S.), reporting that “Yesterday Sunday Dr Taylor gave us a sermon at the wharfe. I know not whether I told you in my last that he is here to print his Cases of Conscience,” in The Letters of George Davenport, 35– 36, and fn. 36. 40. Letter of William Sancroft to his father, written shortly after Charles I’s execution, in February 1649; cited by George d’Olyly, The Life of William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1821), 1:44– 45. 41. Lorenzo Paulucci to Giovanni Sagredo, May 15, 1655, in State Papers, Venetian, item 70. Paulucci reports that “all the laws and ordinances against the Roman Catholics shall be put in execution, with special instructions to the pursuivants to perform their duties punctually, more especially in giving to all professing

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Catholics over 20 an oath abjuring the supreme authority of the pope over the Catholic church in general, denying transubstantiation, any kind of Purgatory and every honour done to the host, crucifix and other images, etc. . . . By this proclamation the Protector and government aim at putting a stop to the progress of the catholic faith in this country, which is now considerable” (italics added). 42. E.g., Todd M. Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 23– 27. See also Lucien Wolf, ed., Menasseh Ben Israel’s Mission to Oliver Cromwell: Being a Reprint of the Pamphlets Published by Menasseh Ben Israel to Promote Re-Admission of the Jews to England, 1649–1656 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1901). 43. Thomas Barlow to Hobbes, December 23, 1656; cited by A. P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 9, 254. 44. Mordecai L. Wilensky, “Thomas Barlow’s and John Dury’s Attitude towards the Readmission of the Jews to England,” Jewish Quarterly Review (New Series) 50, no. 3 (1960): 256– 68; and Thomas Barlow’s correspondence with Henry Hammond, preserved at Queen’s College Library, Oxford (MSS ccxvii. F. 254) and cited by John William Packer, The Transformation of Anglicanism, 1643–1660, with Special Reference to Henry Hammond (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969), 122. For Barlow’s endorsement of Independency, see Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 239. Thus it seems that Barlow approached a shifting set of circumstances with remarkable prudence. 45. Enchyridion of Faith (1655), “The first Dialogue of the motives of Christianitie,” 1– 2. 46. Ibid., 2– 7. Nine pieces of evidence, in all, are given. 47. Ibid., 7– 9. On page 9, Master concludes: “The cause therefore of Faith being infinitely more certain, as being divine Truth itself, the effect is and must needs be more certain and infallible.” 48. Ibid., “The second Dialogue of Scriptures and Traditions and how to know them,” 10. 49. Ibid., 11. 50. Ibid.: “The Scriptures therefore are profitable to all and are sufficient in themselves, though not always in order to everyone, for our safe conduct to heaven, for as much as they are liable to divers senses.” 51. Ibid., 12. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 12–13. 56. Ibid., 12: “Every one of our particular Tenets was always by the universalitie of Christians in all places (so far as Christian monuments are extant to attest them) acknowledged either in formall terms, or virtually included in such which were in terms written or delivered.”

616 Notes to Pages 419 – 425 57. Ibid., 13. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. See Sancta Clara, De definibilitate controversiae Immaculatae Conceptionis (Douay, 1651), 2 and 5. 61. Sir Lucius Cary his discourse of infallibility (1651), 65– 66. 62. De definibilitate, 6 and 8. 63. Ibid., 8: “Ecclesia potest minori numero adhaerere, et illam sententiam infallibiliter declarare.” 64. Ibid., 25: “Ecclesia enim non condit, sed fideliter educit veritates necessarias ex necessariis revelatis, ut communiter et rectè docetur, hoc est, quod nunc explicatius crederetur quod ante obscurius, ut rectè Vincentius Lerinensis.” 65. Enchyridion of Faith (1655), dialogue 2, 13: “And to this purpose [sc. establishing constant Tradition] the common Records of Christianitie, which are Scriptures, Councels, and Solemn liturgies, are most authenticall; next, the Fathers writings, especially if the former are deficient, which speak the whole Churches sense.” 66. Ibid.: “On the contrary, none of these [sc. Scriptures, Councils, solemn liturgies, writings of the Church fathers], universally taken, will witness the contradictorie or denial of our tenets in any particular. So that here is the difference betwixt catholiques and others, that we challenge universality; they particularity; Or, to speak a great truth more plainly, they cannot be said to challenge any one particular Father for any one Tenet, wherein they differ from us, but they snatch at any word spoken, as I said, by chance, or by flip of the pen, and not attending to his deliberate judgement in reading the whole man, they flatter themselves into a mistake.” 67. Ibid., dialogue 2, 17. 68. Ibid., 15–16. 69. Ibid., dialogue 4, 22– 23. 70. Ibid., 23. 71. Ibid., dialogue 5, 24. 72. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 44, 344: “The greatest and main abuse of scripture, and to which almost all the rest are either consequent, or subservient, is the wresting of it, to prove that the Kingdom of God, mentioned so often in the Scripture, is the present Church.” See also chapter 47, 381, where Hobbes speaks of the error “that the present Church now Militant on earth is the Kingdome of God, (that is, the Kingdom of Glory, or the Land of promise; not the Kingdom of Grace, which is but a Promise of the Land).” 73. Enchyridion of Faith (1655), dialogue 5, 24. 74. Citing the title page, which implies that what is being discussed is Christian faith tout court. 75. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), pt. 3, chap. 43, 322. 76. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 7, 29– 30.

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77. For the incorporation of Explanation of Catholic Belief into dialogue 7, see page 29: “First, we humbly believe the sacred Mistery of the B. Trinity eternall almightie and incomprehensible God whom only we adore and worship . . . abhorring from our hearts as a most detestable sacriledge to give our creatour’s honour to any Creature whatsoever”; and page 31: “We pray therefore to them both, not that we hope anything from them as originall Authors thereof, but from God the fountain of all goodness, through Jesus Christ our Mediatour and Redeemer.” Similar whole citations of Explanation of Catholic Belief are found in the subsequent twenty dialogues. 78. For Hobbes’s condemnation of “the Worship of Images” as a “relique of Gentilisme,” see Leviathan (1651), chap. 45, 356, and 362– 63: “Now for the worship of saints, and Images, and reliques, and other things at this day practiced in the Church of Rome, I say they are not allowed by the Word of God, nor brought into the Church of Rome, from the Doctrine there taught; but partly left in it at the first conversion of the Gentiles; and afterwards countenanced and confirmed and augmented by the Bishops of Rome.” See also page 366, last paragraph of chapter 45: “I doubt not but he might find more of these old empty Bottles of gentilisme, which the Doctors of the Romane Church, either by Negligence, or Ambition, have filled up again with the new Wine of Christianity, that will not faile in time to break them.” 79. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 7, 34. 80. Ibid., 35. 81. Ibid., dialogue 9, 38. 82. For Thomas White’s Jansenism, see, e.g., Ruth Clark, Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 149– 52. 83. E.g., Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 45, 361, speaking of privately made statues and images: “This was idolatry, because they made them so to themselves, having no authority from God, neither in his eternall Law of Reason, nor in his positive or revealed Will.” 84. Ibid., chap. 46, 375, “Will the cause of Willing”: “For cause of the Will, to do any particular action, which is called Volitio, they assign the faculty, that is to say, the Capacity in general, that men have, to will sometimes one thing, sometimes another, which is called Voluntas; making the Power the cause of the Act: As if one should assign for cause of the good or evil Acts of men, their Ability to do them.” 85. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 9, 39. The Master does not give an example, but see page 47: “We can do no good except by our blessed Saviour”; and page 48: “Infidels well living avails not to their eternall living.” 86. See, e.g., Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 43, 326: “Again, (John 11.26) Whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall not die eternally, therefore to believe in Christ is faith sufficient to eternall life.” 87. Enchyridion of Faith, 39. 88. Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 44, 337; God “promised to send his Son into the world, to expiate the sins of them all by his death, and to prepare them

618 Notes to Pages 427– 430 by his Doctrine, to receive him at his second coming; Which second coming not yet being, the Kingdom of God is not yet come, and we are not under any other Kings by Pact but our Civil Sovereigns; saving only, that Christian men are already in the Kingdom of Grace, in as much as they have already the Promise of being received at his coming again.” 89. Cf. ibid., chap. 42, 330. 90. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 9, 40. 91. Ibid. Valentine Randour, as we recall, approved Sancta Clara’s Systema fidei in June 1647, at Douay, where he was Regius and ordinary professor. See, further, Valentini Randour S. Theol. Doctoris ac Professoris Regii in alma universitate Duacena Oratio contra Synopsim de gratia et annexis Samuelis Maresii Calvinistae: habita in scholis publicis ad solemnem inaugurationem . . . Ioannis lennin Presbyteri etc. 14 maij 1652 (1652). 92. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 9, 41: “Yet I cannot omit to acquaint you with my opinion, that I do not conceive how Gods grace should not be more powerfull then to leave the will in the same indifferency, in which it found it. Surely it doth more biases it to the Godhead.” 93. Ibid., 41– 42. 94. Ibid., 46. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., dialogue 10, 49. Cf. Explanation of Catholic Belief, 4th ed. (1670), para. 9, 9–10. 97. Ibid. Implicitly, the Master reminds the Disciple that the Church does not define every single truth that is assumed or known, but only those that needed to be defined because of a crisis. 98. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 15, 74. Jeffrey Collins, “Thomas Hobbes, Heresy, and the Theological Project of Leviathan,” Hobbes Studies 26 (2013), points out (11) that “this appears to be the first explicit mention of heresy in Hobbes’s major works. It targets the counter-Reformation casuistry that used heresy to police the boundaries of political legitimacy.” 99. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 43, 322, where Hobbes considers, “What Obedience is Necessary” and “to what Laws,” for the sake of being received “into the Kingdom of God at the Judgment,” especially: “The Laws of God therefore are none but the Laws of Nature, whereof the principall is, that we should not violate our faith, that is, a commandment to obey our Civill Soveraigns, which we constituted over us, by mutual pact one with another. And this Law of God, that commandeth Obedience to the Law Civill, commandeth by consequence Obedience to all the Precepts of the Bible.” 100. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 8, 36: “Thus we believe the merit or rewardableness of holy living (both which signify the same thing with us) arises not from the self value even of our best actions as they are ours, but from the Grace and bounty of God. And for ourselves we sincerely profess when we have done all those

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things which are commanded of us, we are unprofitable Servants, having done nothing but that which was our duty, so that our boasting is not in ourselves, but all our glorying is in Christ.” Cf. the same passage, verbatim, in Explanation of Catholic Belief, 4th ed. (1670), sec. 3, 4. 101. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 46, 376: “men judge the Goodness, or Wickedness of their own, and of other mens actions, and of the actions of the Commonwealth itself, by their own Passions; and no man calleth Good or Evil, but that which is so in his own eyes, without any regard at all to the Publick Law; except onely Monks and Friers, that are bound by Vow to that simple obedience to their Superiour, to which every Subject ought to think himself bound by the Law of Nature to the Civil Sovereign.” 102. Ibid., chap. 44, 337: “A second general abuse of Scripture, is the turning of Consecration into Conjuration, or Enchantment. To Consecrate is in Scripture, to offer, Give, or Dedicate, in pious and decent language and gesture, a man, or any other thing to God, by separating it from common use.” 103. Enchyridion of Faith (1655), dialogue 11, 51– 53; see especially, 52: “There is not a more universal Tradition or consent of all Churches and Times for any Article of our faith, then of this holy Sacrifice according to holy Scriptures. So that this unquestionably is a point of faith.” 104. Ibid., 52: “Even in the Command of Christ to his Apostles in his last supper Luc. 22 imported by the word Facite, or do you this; which imports in the stile of the Scripture Sacrificing as in the book of Kings, l. 3, c. 18 Faciam, I will make another Oxe, etc. And again after in the same chapter it is used again in the same sense of Sacrificing, where it is to be noted that both in the Gospel and in the book of kings according to the Septuagints, the Greek word is poien which is facere.” Cf. King James Bible, 1 Kings 18:23: “And I will dress the other bullock.” 105. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 11, 54. 106. Ibid., 55. 107. Ibid., dialogue 12, 55. 108. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 46, 379. 109. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 12, 57. 110. For Hobbes’s condemnation, see Leviathan (1651), chap. 46, 379. 111. Hobbes cites “Gregory the Pope, S. Bernard and our Beda” (Leviathan [1651], chap. 46, 379) while the Master cites “Saint Gregory, Bede and Dennis the Carthusian (Enchyridion of Faith [1655], 58). 112. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 12, 58: “Sir, I confesse a Purgatory in some sense to have been acknowledged from the beginning as your discourse shews, and in our common prayer book we pray for the faithfull departed their last resurrection, which necessarily shews them to be in a condition of wanting prayers, else we pray to no purpose.” 113. Cited by Hobbes, Of Liberty and Necessity, 61. 114. Ibid., 60.

620 Notes to Pages 433– 435 115. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 13, 61. 116. Ibid., 62: “And truly Beza, De cena Domini, p. 216, who is the most subtil of his sect, acknowledgeth Transubstantiation to follow upon the real presence.” 117. Ibid., 63– 64. 118. Ibid., 63. 119. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 43, 328: “In summe, he that holdeth this Foundation, Jesus is the Christ, holdeth Expressly all that he seeth rightly deduced from it, and Implicitely all that is consequent thereunto, though he have not skill enough to discern the consequence.” 120. For Hobbes’s nonmiraculous interpretation, see Leviathan (1651), chap. 44, 336: “The words, This is my Body, are aequivalent to these, This signifies, or represents my Body; and it is an ordinary figure of speech; but to take it literally, is an abuse.” 121. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 13, 65. Cf. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 44, 335– 36: “What should we have thought of them [sc. Egyptian Conjurers], if there had appeared in their Rods nothing like a Serpent, and in the Water enchanted, nothing like Blood, nor any else but Water, but that they had faced down the King, that they were serpents that looked like Rods, and that it was Blood that seemed Water? That had been both enchantment, and Lying. And yet in this daily act of the priest, they do the very same, by turning the holy words into the manner of a Charm, which produceth nothing new to the Sense; but they face us down, that it hath turned the Bread into Man; nay more, into God; and require men to worship it, as if it were our Saviour himself, present God and Man, and thereby to commit most gross idolatry.” 122. Enchyridion of Faith, 65. 123. Ibid., 70– 71. 124. Ibid., 71. 125. Ibid., 72: “But to all such who only say and do not prove, I remember when Delphidius the Oratour had cryed out, who can ever be guilty if it is sufficient to deny? Julian ex tempore with great applause replyed, who can be innocent if it be sufficient to accuse; In the like legal and most easy manner all such are confuted even in the rigour of Logick.” 126. Ibid., dialogue 14, 76. 127. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 47, 383. 128. Perhaps Nicholas Day felt special “delectation” at this passage? At the very least, it allows the possibility that a “confession” was in some sense involved in Safeguard from Shipwreck. 129. Enchyridion of Faith (1655), dialogue 15, 76– 77. 130. Ibid., 78. 131. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 44, 338– 39. 132. Enchyridion of Faith (1655), dialogue 16, 78. 133. Ibid., 79– 80.

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134. Ibid., 81: “So that in these three there can be no difficulty, but the rest methinks may admit some shew of cloudiness as to the Gospel” (i.e., as to whether they were really instituted by Christ). 135. Ibid.: “So that we must acknowledge some of them to be of a more noble nature, or rather more nobly to participate of the nature of a Sacrament then [sic] others, wherein also may be understood, that some of them are more universally necessary than others.” 136. For the disruption caused by Anabaptism in New England, see, e.g., Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 339– 40. The Master cites Trent, session 7, canon 29, and Ephesians 5, which mentions baptism in only the most allegorical terms and seems, if anything, to argue against infant baptism, since God’s Word is invoked as the baptismal water, which presumably an infant would not fully grasp: “Christ loveth his Church, and hath given himself to death for his Churches sake to sacrifice her and make her holy, in cleansing by the fountain of water in his word.” 137. Enchyridion of Faith (1655), dialogue 17, 82. 138. Ibid. The Master cites Augustine, “Sermo 10 de verbis Apostoli,” and refers the disciple to “the Systeme.” 139. Ibid., 83. For John Davenport’s very strict views on baptism and on Church membership, see Bremer, John Davenport, 121– 29. 140. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 17, 83: “Though I do not conclude hence that the acceptance or non-acceptance of any particular ceremonies is matter of faith.” 141. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 18, 83– 84. 142. Ibid.: “Whence it followeth even according to faith, that if a wicked priest should not have the right intention, the administration would be fruitless even in those Sacraments which raise the dead, and therefore are called in the Schools, Sacramenta mortuorum as giving life: which as you know our men boggle at as being left in great uncertainty in no lesse matter then our Salvation.” 143. Ibid.: “They say the Church in this Councel declares that certain words and actions be performed in the legal and valid administration of the sacraments according to our blessed Lords institution; which if the priest in doing intendeth to do, he hath an intention of doing what the Church doth.” 144. Ibid., 85: “Whence according to the grounds which I laid in our second Dialogue, it remains clear, that as to point of Faith, it is not evidently defined that nay other intention is required then what is specified, though in matter of opinion the schools with strong probability require more.” 145. Ibid.: “You may at leisure reade of this in the fourteenth Chapter in saint Clement his Systeme.” 146. Ibid., 86: “One difficulty begetteth another.” The Disciple cites Mason, Laud, Bramhall, Jeremy Taylor, Ferne, and Hammond as arguing that Church of England orders comply with apostolic succession.

622 Notes to Pages 438 – 440 147. Citing Michael Questier, verbatim, in Newsletters, 226, fn. 1061. Questier refers the reader, further, to W. Stubbs, ed., Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1897), 115–16. 148. Dodd’s Church History of England, 2:305; and Thompson Cooper, “Goffe [Cough], Stephen (1605–1681), Roman Catholic priest and royalist agent,” ODNB. 149. Bremer, John Davenport, 115–18. 150. Stephen Goffe to Gilbert Sheldon, April 16/26, 1635, in Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, 8:28– 29. After describing Hugh Peter’s calling and consecration by the New Covenanters, Goffe concludes: “We in England have reason to be greatly displeased with [this ridiculous and strange business] inasmuch as Peters was ordained before” (29). 151. See Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 44, 333, and chap. 47, 381, and 386 – 87. 152. Legenda lignea, chap. 34, 144. 153. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 19, 86– 87. 154. Ibid., 87: “Conclusion: According to the clear sense of the ancient and present universall Church, their Ordinations are ipso jure invalide, which I shall with modesty and truth endeavour to declare.” 155. Ibid., 90. The Master explicitly denies the relevance of innermost private thoughts: “I touch not inferior intentions, nor ways by outward acts expressed, of which holy Church taketh no cognizance.” 156. Ibid., 91. 157. Ibid. We note that Oxford is depicted as a true alma mater—a fortress, thanks to the Bodleian, of true records against distortions and biases of the moment! 158. Ibid., 93. The Master concludes with a syllogism, the premise of which is as follows: “All Ordination celebrated in a forme different from the Church with an intention sufficiently expressed of opposition to her sense, are invalid according to the definitions of General councils cited.” 159. Ibid., 94. Presumably, Anglican baptism is valid (1) because the sincerity condition is not violated and (2) because a layman, in an emergency, is qualified to perform a valid baptism. 160. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 47, 382. Hobbes reports, incorrectly, that it is “a Doctrine of the Catholic church that Bishops have their Right, not form God, but from the Pope.” Trent actually leaves the question undefined. 161. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 47, 383: “Sixthly, the Deniall of Marriage to Priests, serveth to assure Power of the Pope over Kings. For if a King be a Priest, he cannot Marry and transmit his Kingdom to his Posterity; If he be not a Priest, then the Pope pretendeth this Authority Ecclesiasticall over him, and over his people.” 162. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 20, 97: “Where you must note that catholiques, as is shewed in S. Cl. his Systeme distinguishing divine from Apostolicall precepts or customes, hold it lawfull for the Pope to dispence in them as in other ecclesiastical laws where there is just occasion.”

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163. Ibid.: “As I told you, holy Church hath not declared it as point of faith or as clearly contained in holy Scriptures or decreed by the Apostles in Scriptures yet the example of the Apostles continued in holy Church even unto our days, except in some cases of dispensation, ought to have uncontrollable authority among all Christians, as S. Augustine constantly teaches.” 164. For the importance of this point for Hobbes, see Leviathan (1651), chap. 41, 262 and 263– 64: “Hitherto therefore there is nothing done, or taught by Christ, that tendeth to the diminution of the Civill Right of the jewes or of Cesar. . . . Seeing therefore he did nothing, but by preaching, and Miracles go about to prove himself to be that Messiah, hee did therein nothing against their laws. The Kingdome hee claimed was to bee in another world.” 165. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 21, 98: “As to the signification of words, though at the first it was arbitrary, yet the constant and continued usance and acceptance of them in a determinate sense, renders it morally so necessary, that a man would be esteemed not fit for humane conversation, who would presume to use them in any other sense, as for example to use panis for a stone, and the like.” 166. Ibid.: “So in due proportion, Actions which of their own nature as taken in a speculative sense, might be thought indifferent in order to morall consideration, are by usance and acceptance taken out of that indifferency and restrained to a conformity or difformity to reason.” 167. Ibid.: “Insomuch that a man would justly be esteemed not fit for humane conversation who would presumtuously praevaricate the commonly or vulgarly admitted estimation of such actions.” 168. Ibid. 169. Ibid., 98– 99. 170. Ibid., 100. 171. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 42. 172. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 22, 101– 2. With this dialogue, the text of the 1654 edition resumes. Pius V is meant. 173. Ibid., 105. 174. Ibid.: “There is also an excellent though formidable Decree against duels, which the Councel Session 25 of Reformation, cap. 10, calls Monomachia, that is, single murther, where without any contradiction of the Princes or Legats, all Emperours, Kings, princes, Dukes, etc., are excommunicated and deprived of those territories which they hold of the Church, and if they are onely feudatories, they return to the chief Lords; namely if they permit any places in their Dominions for duels.” 175. Ibid.: “Which decree belongs in a supreme degree to the Pope as chief Pastour to declare when it is violated and to take legal cognizance of the violation, he is designed as a true Telemachus to abolish duels. Yet because the Decree is not matter of Faith, as being not doctrinal in this particular, nor doth so much as mention the Pope; I do not put it into the list.” 176. Ibid., 105– 6: “Where they must observe also that this was made with consent of Emperors, Kings, princes, etc., in Order to the quiet of the Church, and

624 Notes to Pages 444 – 446 therefore not obtruded, violente enim non sit injuria. So that no man can object this against the Pope.” The Fourth Lateran Council is meant. 177. Ibid., dialogue 23, 108– 9. 178. Ibid., 109. 179. Ibid., dialogue 24, 110–11. 180. Ibid., 111: “Reason also will demonstrate necessity of it upon supposition of the supremacy as necessarily included in it; namely the Law of nature dictates, That to whom any power is given, to him inevitably is given whatsoever is necessary for the conservation and execution of it, as in this Case is clear.” 181. Ibid., 112. 182. Ibid.: “(Pope) Gelasius in his Epistle . . . styles himself Executorem canonum Ecclesiae.” See also, same sentence: “It belongs to that Sea [i.e., to the see of Peter] to cause the canons of Generall Councels to be executed.” 183. Ibid., dialogue 25, 112–13: “Your last Lateran Councel which began under Julius the Second and ended under Leo the tenth, is thought to define his Superiority over them, to which the Councels of Constance and basil defined the contrary.” 184. Ibid., 113: “it remains therefore in the list of those tenets which S. Thomas calls non perfecte declarata, not sufficiently determined by the Church, and therefore our doctors are tolerated to examine it further even up to the grounds of Christianity in Scriptures and Traditions, to see how far they can warrant a Conciliary definition for either side.” 185. Ibid., 114. 186. Ibid., 115: “Some proceed in all occurrences with much gayety, others with very unpleasing and almost cynical severity.” 187. Ibid., dialogue 26, 115: “You are not ignorant how much this hath been opposed by many or ours.” 188. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 47, 382: “To this head, I referre all those Doctrines that serve them to keep the possession of this spiritual Soveraignty after it is gotten. As first, that the Pope in his public capacity cannot erre. For who is there, that believing this to be true, will not readily obey him in whatsoever he commands?” 189. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 26, 115–16. The Master concludes: “So that to deny or doubt either the infallibility of Councells, or the existence of God, is to take away the respective foundations of all belief, though neither of them were properly a distinct article of faith.” 190. Ibid., 117–18, namely: (1) ex parte objecti (necessary in itself, objectively); (2) ex parte Ecclesiae (necessary for the Church); (3) ex parte utriusque (necessary in itself and for the Church); (4) ex parte modi (necessary because of the connotation of terms). 191. Ibid., 118–19; see especially 118: “Of the third sort, namely ex parte ut riusque are all such Divine truths, which the Church in her Councels compelled by importunities of Heretiques, or whatsoever necessitie defineth as matters of Faith;

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that is, Conciliarily declareth and obligeth the faithfull to receive them as such, which properly we understand by the Church definitions.” 192. Ibid.: “Holy Church proceeding conciliarily in her universall Synods, hath always had and assuredly will have a proportioned assistance of the Holy Ghost in order to those degrees; which I therefore say, because there is not required an equall in-errance in each of these.” 193. Ibid., 119– 20. The Master cites “our learned Countrey-man Waldensis,” i.e., Thomas Netter, as his precedent. 194. Ibid., 120: “If the Sciences are subalternate, they borrow of the subalternnant, and onely dictate, do not prove the principles, but suppose them to be truths, and so it must be here sometimes” (emphasis added). 195. Ibid., 120: “In so much that I see the whole body of controversies is now reduced to this only head.” (At this point, the 1655 edition meets up with the 1654 edition, pages 296– 97.) 196. Ibid.: “Which I see is the Basis or Systeme of Faith in the sense of the Church.” 197. Ibid.: “I have only one scruple: Why should you call the Roman Church the Catholique Church? This is offensive, and methinks justly, for it seems to import that the others are not Churches, nor part of the Church universall.” 198. Ibid.: “As S. Gregory concluded against John of Constantinople, who would have arrogated to himself the same title.” The Disciple means John the Faster, patriarch of Constantinople, who took the title “Ecumenical Patriarch.” Pope Gregory I (599– 604) argued against the title, writing that “if one patriarch is called universal the title is thereby taken from others” (Letters of Pope Gregory the Great, bk. 5, epistle 18). The Disciple does not mention Hobbes, but his challenge overlaps considerably with Hobbes’s argument in Leviathan (1651), chap. 47, 386. 199. See Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 47, 386; and De cive (1642), chap. 17, sec. 22. 200. Enchyridion of Faith, dialogue 27, 122– 23. 201. Ibid., 123: “It behooves you to think seriously of this, for if your Church is Schismaticall (as doubtless it is) your condition is very sad, especially if nothing can excuse it, as great Dennis with all other Fathers asserts.” 202. Ibid.: “The object of our faith considered in the motives specified in our first Dialogue, is not onely more certain but no lesse evident then [sic] any natural truth by physical demonstration, which onely requires that the cause necessarily produceth the same effect. But the joined motives (of ) our faith necessarily infer that God hath said each of those divine truths which are comprehended in it.” 203. Ibid.: “And therefore when any object that demonstration is opposite to faith, it is to be understood that obscurity of faith which is opposite to demonstrative evidence, consists in this, that the object of faith doth not appear in itself as the object of demonstration; but this hindereth not that it clearly appears in the motives, as I said.” (This paragraph is added to the discussion of the 1654 edition.)

626 Notes to Pages 449 – 452 204. Ibid., 124. 205. Cf. Richard Mocket, God and the king, or, A dialogue shewing that our soveraigne lord King Iames being immediate under God within his dominions, doth rightfully claime whatsoever is required by the Oath of allegiance (Cambridge, 1616). 206. Enchyridion of Faith, last dialogue [sic], 124– 25: “Conciliation is the terme of art in this particular, and used by Saint Clemence in his Problemes, where he gives this account of his endeavours herein, 419: Insudavi, pie lector (ut vides) conciliare Articulos confessionis Anglicae determinationibus Ecclesiae Catholicae, non Ecclesiam ipsis ex qua collapsi sunt, sed ipsos Ecclesiae in qua Dei opitulante gratia salvandi sunt, reducendos censui; His aim was professedly to reduce them to the Church, not the Church to them of which they are fallen.” 207. Ibid., 124: “The word accommodation is not Ecclesiastical language, and seems to import the making of an Olla podrida of all Religions, which surely no Christian man can expect.” Olla Podrida is a Spanish cassoulet or stew. 208. Ibid.: “Therefore I much dislike the author of God and the King in this, that he saith, In the opinions of learned men, our controversies have been so discussed and by mutual yielding brought to that passé, that peace might be easily compounded. I understand not mutual yielding nor compounding in matters of Religion. To compound is much in use in some Courts, but not brought into the Church yet.” 209. Ibid., dialogue 25, 113. 210. Ibid., 126. 211. Ibid., 125– 26. 212. Ibid., 125. 213. Ibid.: “We should not for Opinions, judge, that is in our case leave our brethren.” 214. Ibid.: “The way therefore for a Conciliation, is for them, as saint Augustine instructed the Donatists, to send everywhere their Encycicles [sic] or Circular and communicatory Epistles to catholique Bishops agreeing with our Faith.” 215. Ibid. Presumably, by specifying “the definitions,” the Master means to leave some flexibility with regard to canons, etc., which in any event, are not fides simpliciter and thus allow for lesser degrees of adherence and for debate. 216. Ibid., 126: Pope Leo “himself in his Epistle 51 to Empress Pulcheria saith, Ad unitatem vero pacemque redeuntibus, remedium venia praestaretur. He will have all meekness used to such who return.” 217. Ibid.: “Saint Gregory Nazianzus in his fourth Oration, perswadeth the Christian Governours who succeeded after Julian not to persecute the Heathens, and giveth this reason, Ostendamus quod illos Daemones doceant, quod rursum Christus nos erudiat: Persecution was from the Devil, according to S. Greg. Nazianzus.” 218. Ibid., 127. 219. Ibid.: “S. Augustines method, who assaulted indeed the heart but not with knives but made tender incisions by soft pens, which is all my aym, as I have learned out of S. Cl.”

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. Religio philosophi 1. Sancta Clara, Religio philosophi peripati discutienda, in Operum Omnium (Douay, 1667), “Preface to the Reader.” See also, Franciscus Coventriensis, Para lipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico (Douay, 1652), chap. 4, 67. 2. Sancta Clara, Religio philosophi. Ronald Hutton reports that Ralph Hopton moved in March 1647 “to join his uncle Sir Arthur Hopton at Rouen”; see Hutton, “Hopton, Ralph, Baron Hopton (bap. 1596, d. 1652), royalist, army officer,” ODNB. 3. For a preliminary analysis of the contents of Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico, see Anne Davenport, “Scotus as Father of Modernity: The Natural Philosophy of the English Franciscan Christopher Davenport in 1652,” Early Science and Medicine 12 (2007): 55– 99; Davenport, “Baroque Fire (A Note on Early-Modern Angelology),” Early Science and Medicine 14 (2009): 369– 97; and Davenport, “Atoms and Providence in the Natural Philosophy of Francis Coventriensis, 1652,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 1 (2015): 29– 45. 4. Paralipomena de mundo peripatetico, authore P. Francisco Coventriensi Anglo ordinis Seraphici, FF. Minorum, olim Aulae magdaliensis Oxonii alumno (Douay, 1652), 49. 5. For the general importance of this question during this period in England, see Barbara Shapiro, A Culture of Fact (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), especially 86–138. 6. Walter Charleton, The darkness of atheism dispelled (1652). See also Robert Kargon, “Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle and the Acceptance of Epicurean Atomism in England,” Isis 55, no. 2 (1964): 184– 92; and Nina R. Glebart, “The Intellectual Development of Walter Charleton,” Ambix 18, no. 3 (1971): 149– 67. 7. Charleton, The darkness of atheism dispelled, chap. 4, 136. 8. Ibid., 137. 9. Robert Boyle, Atomicall Philosophy, in Hunter and Davis, eds., The Works of Robert Boyle (Charlottesville: Intelex Corporation, 2003) (electronic resource), 13:227– 34 (citations on 228 and 230). See, further, William R. Newman, “The Alchemical Sources of Robert Boyle’s Corpuscular Philosophy,” Annals of Science 53 (1996): 567– 85; and J. J. MacIntosh, “Boyle on Epicurean Atheism and Atomism,” in Atoms, Pneuma and Tranquility, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 200– 201. 10. Robert Boyle, “Essay of the Holy Scriptures,” in Works, 13:188. 11. Ibid., 13:187. 12. Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico (Antwerp, 1652), Prosecutio Capitis IV, “De miraculis,” § Secundus, “Libertas hominis peripatetica,” 84 (Pomponatius) and 15, 116, 133, 147, 151, and 157 (Epicurus). 13. Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico, caput 4, “De miraculis,” 68– 69. 14. Enchyridion of Faith (1655), 127.

628 Notes to Pages 455 – 457 15. Francisco Ansón, Tres Milagros para el siglo XXI (Madrid: Palabra, 2003), 22– 23. 16. Douglas B. Price and Neil Twombly, The Phantom Limb Phenomenon: A Medical, Folkloric and Historical Study (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1978), 428. 17. Leandro Aína Naval, El milagro de calanda a nivel histórico: Studio crítico de los documentos que lo atestiguan (Saragossa: Tipo-Línea, 1972). See also Vittorio Messori, Il Miracolo: Spagna, 1640; indagine sul più sconvolgente prodigio mariano (Milan: Rizzoli, 1998). 18. William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants (1638), preface, sec. 43. 19. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), chap. 32, 198. 20. Boyle to Stubbe, March 9, 1666, in Works, 1:lxvi. 21. Daniel Beck, Miracle and the Mechanical Philosophy: The Theology of Robert Boyle in Its Historical Context (PhD diss., Notre Dame University, 1986), 96– 99; Rosalie Colie, “Spinoza and the Early English Deists,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959): 23– 46; and Boyle Papers Online (The Royal Society: The Boyle Project, 2004), vol. 3, fols. 109–10, and vol. 7, fols. 120– 23. 22. News from the Dead. Or a True and Exact Narration of the miraculous deliverance of Anne Greene, Who being Executed at Oxford December 14, 1650, afterwards revived; and by the care of certain physicians there, is now perfectly recovered. Together with the manner of her Suffering, and the particular meanes used for her Recovery. Written by a Scholler in Oxford for the satisfaction of a friend, who desired to be informed concerning the truth of the businesse. Whereunto are added certain poems, casually written upon that subject (Oxford, 1651). 23. News from the Dead, 6: “A ceux de la Messe. Ça, Catholique, que dis-tu maintenant? Les miracles se font-ils pas?” It is signed “Jo Williamson, from Queen’s College.” See Alan Marshall, “Williamson, Sir Joseph (1633–1701), government official,” ODNB; and John Pollock, The Popish Plot (London, 1903), 109. 24. For the medical aspects of Anne Green’s case, see J. Trevor Hughes, “Miracu lous Deliverance of Anne Green: An Oxford Case of Resuscitation in the Seventeenth Century,” British Medical Journal 285 (December 1982): 1792– 93. 25. W. Burdet, A wonder of wonders (London, 1651). The short narrative is signed “Oxford, January 13, 1651.” 26. For William Petty and Hobbes, see, e.g., James H. Ullmer, “The Scientific Method of Sir William Petty,” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 4, no. 2 (2011): 1–19; for Ralph Bathurst, see, e.g., Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 192– 94. 27. Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 325. See also Bathurst’s poem in praise of Hobbes, “In Libellum Praestantissimi Tho. Hobbes, Viri verè Philosophi, de naturâ Hominis” (1650), reprinted in Thomae Hobbes Angli Malmesburiensis philosophi vita (1681), 9–11. For Hobbes’s rejection of miracles, see Leviathan (1651), chap. 46, 379.

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28. Nicholas Tyacke, The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4, 22. See also Blair Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 183– 84. 29. Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico, caput 4, “De miraculis,” 64 and 65. 30. Ibid. Sancta Clara cites a case reported to him by “Blessed martyr Franciscus Bell” of a nun in Segovia who was believed to be dead but was not. 31. Ibid., 58, 59, and 69. An English translation of Sancta Clara’s account of John Trelille is given in Nicholas Orme, The Saints of Cornwall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 170– 71. 32. Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico, 70. 33. M. H. A. D. Stapleton, A History of the Post-Reformation Catholic Missions in Oxfordshire, with an account of the families connected with them (London, 1906), 116–19. Stapleton cites documents of February 1651 (O. S.) and March 1652 (O. S.) that connect the recusants Edward and Ralph Sheldon to “Gilbert Sheldon, D. D.,” perhaps the future archbishop of Canterbury. Anne Hope, in turn, reports that the Franciscan martyr Martin Woodcocke had been chaplain “to mr. Sheldon in Artois” in 1640 (Hope, Franciscan Martyrs in England, 223). 34. A Spanish version was published in 1654 in Brussels by Antonio de Fuentes Biota in Historia de Nuestra Señora del Pilar. The book, interestingly enough, is dedicated to Don Alonso de Cardenas, who was Spanish ambassador in London, and whom Sancta Clara will single out to Anthony Wood as an opponent of Charles I and of Sancta Clara’s Deus, natura, gratia (Letter to Wood, April 6, 1672, in Wood, MS. F.50, Bodleian, Oxford). 35. Manuale missionariorum regularium praecipue anglorum S. Francisci, in quo fragmenta seu historia minor provinciae angliae ff. minorum exaratur. Adijcitur commentatio super singulas regulae S. Francisci nobiliores quaestiones, speciatim Missionibus Angliae, et quibusvis aliis adaptatas. Authore R. Adm. P. Francisco a S. Clara (Douay, 1658). 36. Manuale missionariorum, 3rd ed. (1665), in Sancta Clara’s Operum Omnium, 1:112–13. 37. Manuale missionariorum regularium praecipue anglorum S. Francisci (1658), caput 22, 128– 34. 38. John Bramhall, A Just Vindication of the Church of England (London, 1654), chap. 3, 40. In the same chapter, Bramhall cites Sancta Clara’s defense of the English monarch’s jurisdiction over the Church of England (47). 39. John Fendley, “William Rogers and His Correspondence,” Recusant History 23 (1996): appendix 2, 314. 40. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 104. 41. A Clear Vindication of Roman Catholics cites Prynne, Good Old Cause (1659), and Baxter, Key to Catholics (1659). See also Prynne, A new discovery of some Romish emissaries, Quakers (1656). In Key to Catholics, Baxter explicitly recounts

630 Notes to Pages 459 – 461 the opposition that Sancta Clara and Leander Jones encountered from Jesuits in the 1630s before accusing Jesuits of posing as sectaries (see chapter 37, 327– 29, which is clearly Sancta Clara’s target). 42. A Clear Vindication, 6: “It will be instanced that upon account of this dispensation, one in New-castle became a Jew, was circumcised, another in London upon the same score preach’t among the Quakers in a millers habit.” 43. A vindication of the Roman catholicks of the English nation. From some aspersions lately cast upon them. In a letter from a protestant gentleman in the countrey, to a citizen of London (London, 1660). 44. Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, chap. 28, June 13, 1659. 45. Francesco Guistinian, Venetian Ambassador to France, November 29, 1659, to the Doge and Senate; in State Papers, Venetian. 46. Letter of Montagu to Cardinal Mazarin, November 25, 1659; reprinted in English translation by Andrew Scoble in François Guizot, Monck: or, The fall of the Republic (London: Bell and Dadly, 1866), 128. 47. Thomas White, A letter to a person of honour (1659). 48. Thomas White, Notes on Mr. F.D.’s Result of a dialogue concerning the middle state of souls (Paris, 1660), 3– 4. 49. E.g., Anthony Wood, diary entries from May to June, 1660: “The world of England was perfectly mad.” 50. “The case of a Toleration in Matters of Religion,” in Several miscellaneous and weighty cases of conscience learnedly and judiciously resolved by the Right Reverend in God, Dr. Thomas Barlow (London, 1692), 29. 51. The Result of a dialogue concerning the middle-state of souls (signed simply “F. D.”), chap. 9, 99–110. 52. Nicholas Tyacke, “Religious Controversy,” in Tyacke, ed., The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4, 604. 53. White, Notes on Mr. F.D.’s Result of a dialogue, 37– 39. 54. The Holy Life of Philip Nerius founder of the Congregation of the Oratory. To which is annexed a relation written by S. Augustine of the miracles in his days, wrought many of them in or near the city wherein he resided and well-known to him. And a relation of sundry miracles wrought at the monastery of Port-Royall in Paris, A.D. 1656, publickly attested by many witnesses. Translated out of a French copie published at Paris, 1656. Although it claims to be published “at Paris, 1659,” the typography suggests an English publication. Annotation on Thomason copy: “Aprill.” 55. The Holy Life of Philip Nerius, 423: “Ex R. P. Francisci Coventr. Paralipom. Philosoph. Cap. 4. P. 68.” The whole story is translated into English from Sancta Clara’s Latin text. 56. Ibid.: “Out of a Treatise of Bishop Halls of the Invisible World, I. lib. 8. Sect. concerning the same miracle.” 57. Ibid., 404.

Notes to Pages 462 – 465

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58. Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico (1652), caput 4, 61. 59. Yorkshire Archaeological Society, MS 51, February 21, 1652; cited by Jerome Bertram in “Woodhead, Abraham (1609–1678), Roman Catholic controversialist,” ODNB. 60. Fendley, “William Rogers and His Correspondence,” appendix 1, 302, and 310n65. Fendley interprets “Nerius” to be our compilation, The Holy Life of Philip Nerius, but mentions Edward Sheldon “as a possible alternative author.” 61. Paralipomena philosophica (1652), 79. 62. Cited by Tetsuya Shiokawa, Pascal et les miracles (Paris: Nizet, 1977), 99. 63. The Holy Life of Philip Nerius, 412–13. 64. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 1:lxv; cited by Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 134. On William Rogers, see Fendley, “William Rogers and His Correspondence,” 285– 317. 65. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 122, for the record of the two appointments. See also Thaddeus, The Franciscans in England, 160– 61 and 199. 66. Joseph Hall, The invisible world (London, 1659), bk. 1, sec. 8, 64– 65. 67. Ibid., sec. 9, 72. 68. Ibid., 74– 77. 69. Ibid., bk. 2, sec. 7, 124. 70. Ibid., bk. 3, sec. 6, 170– 72. 71. Ibid., 171. 72. Ibid., bk. 3, sec. 8, 185– 88. 73. See the approvals of Liber Dialogorum, seu summa veteris theologiae Dialogismis tradita, in Sancta Clara’s Operum Omnium, vol. 2 (Douay, 1667). For the 1661 edition, see Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 105– 6. 74. Sancta Clara himself records this in the late edition of Fragmenta seu Historia Minor published in his Operum Omnium, vol. 1 (1665), 47– 48. 75. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 128. 76. Ibid., 129. 77. Thomas Browne, Religio Medici. The fifth Edition, Corrected and amended, with Annotations Never before published, upon all the obscure passages therein. Also, Observations By Sir Kenelm Digby, now newly added (London, 1659). See further Daniela Havenstein, Democratizing Sir Thomas Browne (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999). Havenstein cites Sancta Clara’s Religio philosophi in the bibliography (209) but does not discuss it alongside other more prominent examples of Thomas Browne tributes/imitators/rivals/critics. 78. Kenelm Digby, “Observations upon Religio Medici,” in Thomas Browne, Religio Medici. The fifth Edition, Corrected and amended, with Annotations Never before published, upon all the obscure passages therein. Also, Observations By Sir Kenelm Digby, now newly added (London, 1659), 43. 79. Ibid., 22– 23. 80. Ibid., 23– 24.

632 Notes to Pages 465 – 471 81. Religio philosophi peripati discutienda . . . Authore Reverendo Adm. P.F. Francisco Davenporto, vulg A S. Clara; sacrae Theol. Doctore, Alma Provinciae Angliae Fratrum Minorum iterate Ministro Provinciali, ac Serenissimae magnae Britanniae Reginae Catherinae Theologo (Douay, 1662). 82. Ibid., 87. 83. The full title of Religio philosophi peripati discutienda includes “in quo offertur epitome Processus Historiae celeberrimi Miraculi, à Christo nuperrimè patrati, in restitutione Tibiae abscissae et sepultae, ab Aristoteles in suis principiis examinati.” 84. Ibid. 85. Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae, or, A rational account of the grounds of Christian faith, as to the truth and divine authority of the Scriptures and the matters therein contained (London, 1662), bk. 3, chap. 3, 147. 86. See, recently, Vittorio Messori, Il miracolo: Spagna 1640. Indagine sul più sconvolgente prodigio mariano (Milan: Rizzoli, 1998); and Naval, El milagro de calanda. 87. For Sancta Clara’s rejection of credulity as a moral failing, see Paralipomena philosophica. 88. Edward Stillingfleet, A rational account of the grounds of Protestant Religion (London, 1665), chap. 5. See also Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae, bk. 2, chap. 9. 89. Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae (London, 1662), chap. 10, sec. 4, 343– 52; see especially 348: “It cannot then be with any reason supposed, that when a Divine testimony is already confirmed by miracles undoubtedly divine, that new miracles should be wrought in the Church to assure us of the truth of it”; and 350: “To what purpose then the huge outcry of miracles in the Roman Church is, is hard to conceive, unless it be to make is appear how ambitious that church is of being called by the name of him whose coming is after the working of Satan, with all power and signs of lying wonders.” 90. Religio philosophi peripati discutienda, “Letter of Dedication.” 91. Ibid., 4. 92. Ibid., 118. 93. Ibid., disputatio 1, 5. 94. Ibid., 6. 95. Browne, Religio medici (1659), sec. 28, 60: “I hold that God can do all things, how he should work contradictions I do not understand, yet dare not therefore deny.” Browne’s annotator points out (250) the similarity of Browne’s statement to Montaigne, citing Essais, 2, chap. 12. 96. Ibid. 97. Ralph Austen, A treatise of fruit-trees; sheweing the manner of grafting, planting, pruning (Oxford, 1657), and Austen, Observations upon some part of Sr. Francis Bacon’s Naturall history as it concerns fruit-trees, fruits and flowers (Oxford, 1658). 98. Sancta Clara, Religio philosophi, 6–15. 99. Ibid., 16–17.

Notes to Pages 471– 479

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100. Ibid., 17–18. 101. Ibid., 18. 102. Cf. Walter Charleton, Natural history of nutrition, life, and voluntary motion containing all the new discoveries of anatomist’s and most probable opinions of physicians (London, 1659), “Exercitation the First,” 1– 3. 103. Religio philosophi, 22– 23. 104. Ibid., 23. 105. Ibid., 24. 106. Ibid., 25. 107. Ibid., 25– 26. Cf. Charleton, Natural history of nutrition, “Exercitation the Fourth,” 34– 36 and 40– 46. 108. Religio philosophi, 30. 109. Cf. Paracelsus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541: Essential Theoretical Writings, ed. A. Weeks (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 13– 22 and 228, fn. a. 110. Religio philosophi, 36. 111. Ibid., 45. 112. Ibid., 49. 113. Ibid., 52. 114. Ibid., 62. 115. A Chronicle of the Kings of England, 298. 116. Religio philosophi, disputatio 1, 72. 117. Ibid., 77. 118. See the official ruling in Naval, El milagro de calanda, 524. 119. Religio philosophi, disputatio 1, 87. 120. Ibid., 100–101. 121. For the Jansenist context and Ludovic Stuart d’Aubigny’s use of the Holy Thorn in 1663 to treat Catherine of Braganza’s illness, see, e.g., Quentin Manning Hope, Saint-Evremond and His Friends (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 235– 36. 122. Religio philosophi, 103. 123. Ibid., 30– 34. Cf. Paralipomena philosophica, 47. 124. Ibid., 110. 125. Ibid., 117. 126. Ibid., disputatio 2, 118. Cf. Paralipomena philosophica, “Quaestio necessario resolvenda” (76– 79, but misnumbered). 127. Ibid., 120. 128. Ibid., 121. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid. Sancta Clara specifies that he has already taught this “elsewhere,” meaning in Enchyridion of Faith. 131. Ibid., 121– 22. 132. Ibid., 122. 133. Ibid., 123.

634 Notes to Pages 479 – 484 134. Ibid., 124. 135. Ibid., 126– 30. This section concludes: “Miraculum proprie accipitur, Daemones non possunt, sed solus Deus.” 136. Ibid., 130– 32. 137. Ibid., 135– 37. 138. R. M. Burns, The Great Debate on Miracles from Joseph Glanvill to David Hume (London: Bucknell University Press, 1981), 129–130. 139. Cf. Paolo Parigi, The Rationalization of Miracles (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 126– 59 and 161– 66. 140. Antonio de Fuertes y Biota, Historia de Nuestra Señora del Pilar (Brussels, 1656), 44. 141. Joseph Felix de Amada, Conpendio de los Milagros de nuestra Señora del Pilar de Zaragoza (Saragossa, 1680), 280: “en prueba de la resurreccion de la carne, que niegan muchos hereges de nuestro tiempo en Ingalaterra, Olanda, Francia y Alemania.” 142. “Official Sentence,” in Naval, El milagro de calanda, 520. Article 29, 461, affirms that the Miguel Pellicero “whose leg was amputated by the surgeon Juan de Estanga is the same person as the Miguel Pellicero who is present at the trial with two legs and that it is the common belief of all who know him and knew him that he is the same person.” 143. Cited by Fuertes y Biota, Historia de Nuestra Señora del Pilar, 50. 144. Vincente Allanegui y Lusarreta, Apuntes hist ricos sobre la historia de Calanda (Calanda: Estudios Turolenses, 1998), 273. . Self-Censorship without Self-Suppression 1. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, appendix G, 157– 58, letter in Codices Barberini Latini, dated February 1662. 2. Ranke, A History of England principally in the seventeenth century, 400; and Clark, Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal, 88–100. 3. Clark, Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal, 92– 94. 4. Ibid. Action ascribed it to Billings on the grounds of the anti-Jansenist clause, but Clark agrees with Dumas that d’Aubigny is the probable author. 5. George Morley, Epistola apologetica et paraenetica ad theologum quendam Belgam scripta (London, 1663), 4. 6. Richard Baxter, Against the revolt to a foreign jurisdiction (London, 1691), 32– 37. 7. Ibid., 90– 91 and 310. 8. On Thorndike, Sheldon, and Morley, see Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 245– 62. 9. J. C. Hayward reports that George Morley “had eight books by Arnauld, six of them in editions of 1656”; Hayward, “New Directions in Studies of the Falkland Circle,” The Seventeenth Century 2, no. 1 (1987): 40.

Notes to Pages 485 – 486

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10. A journal of all proceedings between the Jansenists and the Jesuits [. . .]. Publish’d by a well-wisher, to the distressed Church of England (London, 1659), “To the Reader.” 11. See Henry Hammond, A view of some exceptions which have been made by a Romanist to the Ld. Viscount falkland’s discourse of the Infallibility of the Church of Rome (London, 1650), “Preface.” For a discussion of the attribution, see Hayward, “New Directions in Studies of the Falkland Circle,” 40. Hayward concedes that the 1659 preface that is signed “H. H.” is “much closer” to Hammond’s style than the earlier prefaces involved, but he cites important reasons why the attribution to Hammond should be doubted. Nonetheless, Hayward stresses that “the surviving members of Falkland’s circle” were interested in Pascal’s writings, starting with Clarendon, and he argues that the task of refuting Hobbes played a role. See also Paule Jansen, De Blaise Pascal à Henry Hammond (Paris: Vrin, 1954), 77– 80. 12. Henry Hammond, Letter of Resolution to Six Quaeres of Present Use in the Church of England (1652), 313– 409. 13. George Morley, The Bishop of Worcester’s letter to a friend for vindication of himself from mr. Baxters calumny (London, 1662), 8– 9. 14. John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 102; and Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 223. 15. Clark, Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal, 95. 16. Baxter, Against the revolt to a foreign jurisdiction, 107; where Baxter cites Peter Heylyn’s characterization in Cyprianus Anglicus of Sancta Clara as a “Reconciler.” See further Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (London, 1668), 414. 17. Jon Parkin speaks of “an anti-toleration campaign orchestrated by Sheldon,” in Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England: Richard Cumberland’s De legibus Naturae (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999), 37. 18. Baxter, Against the revolt to a foreign jurisdiction, 32– 33. 19. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 130; citing Franciscan archives, Forest Gate Friary, London, Acta Capitulorum, I, A, 1625–1680, 96. 20. Thaddeus, The Franciscans in England, 1600–1850, 91. 21. Ibid., 92– 93. 22. See James II’s Life, written by himself, in James Macpherson, Original papers (London, 1775) 1:56– 57: “The King bade him [James] to keep it [Anne Hyde’s resolve to be reconciled] private; as it was from all but father Hunt, a Franciscan, lady Cranmer, woman of her bedchambers, and Mr. Dupuy, the duke’s servant. So it was not known till she died.” 23. Wood, Ms. F. 50, Bodleian Library. 24. Anthony Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, 2:432: “In the beginning of this month, Mr. William Joyner told me that Mr. Francis Hunt (S. Clara) was dead half a year since. False: I heard in September 1679 that he was living in Somerset House” (entry of January 1680, N. S.).

636 Notes to Pages 486 – 489 25. Fragmenta seu Historia Minor Provinciae Angliae FF. Minorum. Reverendissimo P. F. Michaeli de Sambuca Ord. Minorum Ministro Generali, porrecta. Editio secunda, auctior et correctior. Authore R. Adm. P.F. Francisco à Sancta Clara, S. Theologiae lectore emerito, ac Provinciae FF. Minorum in Angliâ, iteratò Ex-ministro, ac Serenissimae Reginae Magnae Britanniae à Sacris &c (Douay, 1661), 7– 9. 26. Reported by Anthony Parkinson in Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica (London, 1727), ix. 27. In Operum Omnium Scholasticorum et Historicum, vol. 1 (1665). 28. Parkinson, Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica (London, 1726), 264– 65. 29. Ibid. The second decree is signed by Frater Christophorus Rokas. 30. For attempts ca. 1663 by a foreign Franciscan to disrupt the negotiations between Peter Walsh and Clarendon regarding a reframed oath of allegiance, see Clark, Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal, 205 (based on Godfroi Hermant, Mémoires, 6:300). 31. Samuel Pepys, Diary, January 23, 1667, in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. G. Gregory Smith (London: Macmillan and Co., 1905), 456– 57. 32. Fragmenta seu Historia Minor Provinciae Angliae Fratrum Minorum (1665 ed.), 7. 33. Ibid., 7 and 39. 34. Ibid., 33– 35. 35. Manuale missionariorum (1665 ed.), chap. 26, 163. 36. Clark, Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal, 98, cites d’Aubigny’s efforts in 1661 to save “les bons pères jésuites” from the rigors of the English Parliament. 37. Jon Parkin, “Hobbism in the Later 1660s: Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker,” The Historical Journal 42, no. 1 (1999): 85–108; and Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 358– 61. See also Jeffrey Collins, “Thomas Hobbes, Heresy, and the Theological Project of Leviathan,” Hobbes Studies 26 (2013): 6– 33. 38. Clark, Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal, 88. 39. Ibid., 95. 40. Jeremy Taylor, Ductor dubitantium, or the Rule of Conscience (London, 1660), bk. 3, chap. 3, sec. 1, 130 (“The supreme power in every Republic is universal, absolute and unlimited”), and chap. 4, sec. 1, 211 (“The whole power which Christ hath left in ordinary to his Church is merely spiritual”). 41. Jeremy Taylor, Unum Necessarium. Or The doctrine and practice of repentance (London, 1655), chap. 1, sec. 3, “How Repentance and the Precept of Perfection Evangelicall can stand together.” 42. Summa veteris theologiae discipulis meis missionariis propinata, in Operum Omnium, vol. 2, 1667. 43. John Vincent Canes, Diaphanta (London, 1665), 15: “It is thought by Fiat Lux to be more reasonable and Christian-like, to leav [sic] these endless, groundless, and ruinous contentions, and resign our selvs [sic] to humility and peace. This is the design and whole summe of my book.” 44. Sancta Clara, Fragmenta seu Historia Minor (1658 ed.), 3.

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45. For the quasi-exclusive focus on uniformity, see, e.g., Bishop Morley’s “Articles of Visitation” of 1665 in Church of England, Diocese of Winchester, Articles of visitation and enquiry concerning matters ecclesiastical (London, 1665), 10 pages, throughout. 46. Anthony J. Storey, Mount Grace Lady Chapel (Beverley: Highgate, 2001), 24– 29. 47. Ibid., 24. 48. E.g., Evelyn to Boyle, November 23, 1664, on his upcoming Mystery of Jesuitism, published January 2, 1665; cited in Clark, Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal, 107. 49. Clark, Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal, 116– 20. 50. Given his closeness to English Benedictines, Sancta Clara was likely aware that the English Benedictine nuns in Paris were carefully correcting the Jansenist errors of their pupils by reminding them that human beings cooperate actively with grace rather than suffer passively for grace to operate within them; reported by Clark, Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal, 65. 51. Jeffrey Collins, “Restoration Anti-Catholicism: A Prejudice in Motion,” in England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited, ed. Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), especially 293– 98; and Jon Parkin, “Baiting the Bear: The Anglican Attack upon Hobbes in the Later 1660s,” History of Political Thought 34, no. 3 (2013): 421– 58. 52. Christopher Hill, The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 2:96. 53. Richard Hawkins, A brief narrative of the life and death of that antient servant of the Lord and his people, Gilbert Latey (London, 1701), 50– 53. 54. Ibid., 53– 54. 55. Ibid., 56– 58. 56. Greg Peters, Reforming the Monastery: Protestant Theologies of the Religious Life (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014), 56– 57. 57. Citing Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, ed. Andrew Clark and Llewelyn Powys (Oxford: Clarendon, 1891), 2:133– 34 (May 16, 1668). 58. Operum Omnium, vol. 2 (1667). 59. Wood, The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, 2:168 (August 29, 1669). 60. Ibid., 191– 92 (May 6, 1670). 61. William M. Brady, The Episcopal Succession in England, Scotland and Ireland (Rome: Tipografia Della Pace, 1876), 3:123. 62. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 128; citing Agretti’s report conserved at the Archives of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, England [Anglia], December 14, 1669. For Agretti’s concern about Parliament, see Piero Mocenigo, Venetian Ambassador in England, to the Inquisitors of state, November 1, 1669, State Papers, Venetian, 139. For Agretti’s failed incognito, see Piero Mocenigo, dispatch (in cipher) to the Inquisitors of state, September 20, 1669, in State Papers, Venetian, 114.

638 Notes to Pages 492 – 495 63. On recurrent Anglican opposition to Blackloists, see Jeffrey Collins, “Restoration Anti-Catholicism,” 281– 308. 64. On Anthony Wood’s report of Hobbes and White arguing when they were “eighty years of age,” see Tutino, Thomas White and the Blackloists, 136. 65. Anne Hyde’s statement is reprinted in Baxter, Against the revolt to a foreign jurisdiction (1691), 81– 86. See also Dodd, The Church History of England from the year 1500, to the year 1688 (Brussels, 1742), 3:397– 98. 66. James Macpherson, Original Papers: Containing the Secret History of Great Britain (London, 1775), 1:56– 57. 67. Two letters written by the Right Honourable Edward, earl of Clarendon, late Lord High Chancellour of England one to his Royal Highness the Duke of York, the other to the Dutchess, occasioned by her embracing the Roman catholick religion (London, 1680). 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. For Jeremy Taylor, see Ductor dubitantium (London, 1660), bk. 3, chap. 4, sec. 16 (“The Decrees and canons of the Bishop of Rome oblige the conscience of none but his own subjects”). 70. On Caesar Cranmer’s family connections, notably to Sir Henry Wood, see R. E. Chester-Waters, Genealogical memoirs of the kindred families of Thomas Cranmer (London, 1877), 91–101. Clarendon’s reference to Caesar Cranmer is found in Clarendon’s Life (Oxford, 1827), 3:53. 71. The life of James the Second, king of England, ed. J. S. Clarke (London, 1816), 1:452– 53. 72. See George Morley’s letter to Anne Hyde, dated January 24, 1670 (O. S.), and published in 1683 as A letter to her Highness the Duchess of York some few months before her death by the Bishop of Winchester (London, 1683), 20. 73. William Penn, A seasonable caveat against popery, or, A pamphlet entituled, An Explanation of the Roman-Catholick belief, briefly examined (London, 1670), 36. See also William Penn, The great case of liberty of conscience once more debated and defended with some brief observations on the late Act, presented to the Kings consideration (London, 1670). 74. R. Hawkins, A brief narrative of the life and death of Gilbert Latey (London, 1701), 50– 56. 75. C. John Sommerville, “Anglican, Puritan, and Sectarian in Empirical Perspective,” Social Science History 13 (1989): 109– 35, especially 119– 20. 76. Edward Stillingfleet, A discourse concerning the idolatry practiced in the Church of Rome and the danger of salvation in the communion of it, in an answer to some papers of a revolted Protestant; wherein a particular account is given of the fanaticism and divisions of that church (London, 1671), “Preface.” 77. Ibid., chap. 5, sec. 15, 457– 68. 78. Ibid., 465. 79. On Stillingfleet’s Erastianism and defensive relationship to Hobbes, see Parkin, Science, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England, 22– 32.

Notes to Pages 495 – 499

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80. Jeffrey Collins, “Thomas Hobbes, ‘Father of Atheists,’” in Atheism and Deism Revalued: Heterodox Religious Identities in Britain, 1650–1800, ed. Wayne Hudson, Diego Lucci, and Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 25– 44. I thank Collins for allowing me to see this text prior to publication. 81. Taylor, Ductor dubitantium (1660 ed.), bk. 3, question 4, 188, and question 5, 191: “The Emperour is to be obeyed against the will of the Bishop.” 82. Ibid., 301. 83. Taylor, Ductor dubitantium (1660 ed.), bk. 3, chap. 3, 161. See also 163: “It is necessary that the supreme power of Kings or States should be governors in Religion, or else they are but half Kings at the best.” 84. Anthony Wood describes the octogenarian Hobbes and White arguing over philosophy; see citation and discussion in Tutino, Thomas White and the Blackloists, 136. 85. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A brief view and survey of the dangerous and pernicious errors to church and state in Mr. Hobbes’s Book entitled Leviathan (Oxford, 1676). Further discussion is found in Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 313– 22. 86. See, e.g., Antoine Le Grand, De carentia sensu et cognitionis in brutis (London, 1676), 63– 65, where Le Grand repeats Descartes’s argument in Discours de la Méthode, pt. 6, that human speech and reason suffice to distinguish a true human being from an automaton. See also the written debate between Descartes and Hobbes, published as the “Third Objections,” appended to Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia. 87. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 322– 34, especially 328. 88. The Sincere popish convert, or, A brief Account of the reasons which induced a person who was some years since seduced to the Romish Church to relinquish her communion (London, 1681), 2. 89. Ibid., 4. 90. See John Pollock, The Popish plot; a study in the history of the reign of Charles II (London: Duckworth, 1903), “Table of Events,” xv. 91. The case of interest or usury, as to the common practice, stated and examined; in a private letter to a person of quality, who desired satisfaction in that point, By T.S. (London, 1673). 92. Les Provinciales or the Mysterie of Jesuitisme (London, 1657), letter 8, 164– 67. See also two 1670 London publications—The Moral Practice of the Jesuits, 20: “Receivers of ill gotten goods”; and The Jesuits’ Morals, 37: “The usurer will also find no lesse favour with the Jesuit.” 93. Dockery, Christopher Davenport, 127n7; citing Goodings, Annals, 27. 94. On October 26, 1678, both houses of Parliament petitioned the king to issue a new decree barring popish recusants from “your royal palaces of Whitehall, Somerset-House, St. James’s, the cities of London and Westminster, and from all other places within ten miles of the same”; see Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England, 4:1022. 95. Hobbes, Leviathan, pt. 4, chap. 44.

640 Notes to Pages 499 – 506 96. Thaddeus, The Franciscans in England, 90: “At the request of Father Francis a S. Clara, a benefactor assigned one thousand pounds, which, in his own name and for the purposes to be determined by him, he desired the Mother Abbess of Nieuport (afterwards Bruges) to invest with a merchant or corporation. Half the interest was yearly to be paid her, the other half to be handed over by way of alms to the Guardian of our College at Douai”; see also 92. 97. Jon Parkin, “Thomas Hobbes and the Problem of Self-Censorship,” in The Art of Veiled Speech: Self-Censorship from Aristophanes to Hobbes, ed. Hans Balthussen and Peter Davis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 293– 317. 98. Ibid., 296. 99. Parkin, Taming the Leviathan, 249– 50. 100. Samantha Frost, “‘Faking It’: Hobbes’s Thinking-Bodies and the Ethics of Dissimulation,” Political Theory 29, no. 1 (2001): 30– 57. 101. Additionals to the Mystery of Jesuitisme (1658), 81– 82. 102. Taylor, Ductor dubitantium, bk. 3, chap. 2, question 1, 84. 103. On this aspect of “what beseems an honest man,” see Stefania Tutino, Shadows of Doubt: Language and Truth in Post-Reformation Catholic Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 21– 24. 104. December 19, 1671: Wilkinson, Henry, 1616–1690 (Gosfield, Essex, England) to Wood, Anthony, 1632 –1695, in Early Modern Letters Online, http:// tinyurl.com/797q7pb. 105. René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode, pt. 6: “J’appris que des personnes à qui je défère, et dont l’autorité ne peut guère moins sur mes actions que ma propre raison sur mes pensées”; C. Adam and P. Tannery, eds., Œuvres de Descartes (Paris: Vrin, 1971), 6:60. 106. The informations of John Sergeant and David Maurice, gentlemen; relating to the popish-plot, (deliver’d by them upon their respective oaths) reported to the House of Commons, upon the 26th day of march, 1681. Then ordered by the Commons in Parliament, to be forthwith printed (London, 1681). 107. D. A. Bellengar, “Pickering, Thomas (1621?–1679), Benedictine monk and victim of the Popish Plot,” ODNB. 108. Thaddeus, The Franciscans in England, 1600–1850, 109; and Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, 4:107. 109. See The Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste (New York: Woodward, 1864), 19:319.

Epilogue 1. Letter of September 20, 1670, Wood, MS F.50, Bodleian Library, Oxford. 2. See John Vincent Canes, Infallibility (1662), 7: “But our Protestant Divines, when they come to opugne this Infallibility of the Catholick Church, speak

Notes to Pages 506 – 507

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so altogether besides the purpose, as they do almost in all other things, that a man . . . would wonder what they mean or what they would have. And it may be, some of those who defend Catholick faith in England or other countries, may by their own inconsideration give the occasion.” 3. Thaddeus, The Franciscans in England, 1600–1850, 81– 82. 4. Thomas Hughes, History of the Society of Jesus in North America: Colonial and Federal (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1917), 2:81. 5. James Corker, Roman Catholick principles in reference to God and the King explained in a letter to a friend and now made publick to shew the connexion between the said principles and the late Popish Plot, by a well-wisher of his country (London, 1680), 3: “Let those in God’s name, if any there be of what Religion soever, who hold such Tenents suffer for them. Why should the Innocent be involved with the Guilty? There is neither Reason nor Justice in it” (italics in the original). 6. Ibid., 5. 7. Thomas H. Clancy, S.J., “Ecumenism and Irenics in 17th-Century English Catholic Apologetics,” Theological Studies 58 (1997): 87. 8. John Bramhall, The works of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Bramhall (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1842– 45), 1:30, 80, 125, 165, 170– 75, 188; 2:209–10, 221– 22, 582; 3:115, 524. Richard Baxter, The practical works of Richard Baxter (London: J. Duncan, 1830), 5:280, 255, 524, 596; 14:558. Edward Stillingfleet, The works of that eminent and most learned prelate, Dr. Edw. Stillingfleet (London: Henry and George Mortlock, 1709–10), 5:133 ff. 9. Pierre Bayle, Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jesus Christ, contrain-les d’entrer (Cantorbery, 1686), pt. 2, chap. 10, 524: “Un Cordelier de notre Nation nommé François de Sainte Claire rapport sur cela le sentiment de plusieurs habiles Théologiens, on peut le consulter (Dans son Deus, Natura & Gratia, p. 86 &seq.).” I thank Jean-Luc Solère of Boston College for this citation. 10. Pierre Bayle, A philosophical commentary on these words of the Gospel, Luke XIV.23, compel them to come in (London, 1708), 331. Compare the French “On peut le consulter” to the English “he’s worth consulting.” 11. Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, ed. Prosper Marchand, 11th ed. (Rotterdam, 1720), 13:61. Bayle gives the full title of the 1635 edition of Deus, natura, gratia, with the apologetic epistolary preface.

S E L E C T

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Sancta Clara’s Published Works (with locations of the volumes that were consulted) Epistolium continens confutationem duarum propositionum astrologicarum cum principiis adversus iudicariam astrologiam. Douay, 1626. Dedicated to Joseph Bergaigne, Franciscan Commissary General for Belgian Province. (Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris) Deus, natura, gratia. Sive tractatus de predestinatione, de meritis et peccatorum remissione, seu de Iustificatione, et denique de Sanctorum Invocatione. Ubi ad trutinam Fidei Catholicae examinatur Confessio Anglicana et ad singular puncta, quid teneat, qualiter differat, excutitur. Doctrina etiam Doctoris Subtilis, D. Augustini sequacis acutissimi, olim Oxoniae et Cantabrigiae, et solemniter approbata, et honorificè praelecta, exponitur et propugnatur. Accessit paraphrastica Expositio reliquorum Articulorum Confessionis Anglicae. Lyon, 1634. Dedicated to Charles I (Brown University Library; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Bodleian Library, Oxford). Second edition, Lyon, 1634 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris). Third edition, Lyon, 1635, augmented with “Epistolium Apologeticum lectore Catholico et pacis Christianae studioso.” (Bodleian Library, Oxford) Apologia episcoporum, seu sacri magistratus propugnatio. Praemittuntur Anarcharum politicismi. Cologne, 1640. (Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève, Paris; and Bodleian Library, Oxford) Fragmenta, seu Historia minor provinciae Angliae FF. Minorum. Editio secunda, auctior et corrector. First edition, 1644. Second edition augmented with material from Sancta Clara’s confrère Angel Mason, Douay, 1661. (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) Systema fidei seu Tractatus de concilio universali, ubi tam ex principiis Scholasticis quam Monumentis veterum: praesertim Magni Orbis Magistri Augustini, Quidditas et Potestas Concilii, cum singulis vel apicibus de hac re desideratis enucleantur: Divina Authoritas Scripturarum et Traditionum declaratur. Fidei structura delineatur. Ubi innumera antiqua examinantur. Distinctio fundamentalium et non fundamentalium in rebus ad fidem spectantibus discutitur. Abstrusiora quaedam ex naturae penetralibus exponuntur quibus anima humana immor-

642

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talis asseritur. Sacrum Tridentianum vindicatur. Appendix De origine Papatus Romani, et an Petrus et Paulus fuerint simul Papae. Liège, 1648. John Dockery lists three further editions in 1666, 1667, and 1679. (Bibliothèque Ste. Gene viève, Paris; and Bodleian Library, Oxford) Scot, Philip. Treatise of the Schism of England. London, 1650. (Houghton Library, Harvard; and Early English Books Online) De definibilitate controversiae Immaculatae Conceptionis Dei Genitricis opusculum sive disputatio. Douay, 1651. Dedicated to Count Rosetti. (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico. Antwerp, 1652. (The copies at St. Bonaventure’s College, NY, and at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, are dedicated to Francis Englefield. The copy at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, is dedicated to Jean de Lières, Abbot of Anchin.) An Enchyridion of Faith: presented in a dialogue, declaring the truth of Christian religion in generall: distinguishing also points of faith from other doctrines. Douay, 1654. Second edition “much augmented with most grave matters,” 1655. (Early English Books Online) An Explanation of the Roman Catholicks Belief: concerning their church, worship, iustification, and civil government and their other tenets: as it was presented to some persons of quality, for their particular satisfaction. 1656. Reprinted in 1670 and 1673. (Bodleian Library, Oxford; and Early English Books Online) Manuale missionariorum regularium, praecipue anglorum, S. Francisci, in quo fragmenta seu historia minor provinciae angliae FF minorum exaratur. Adijcitas Commentatio, super singulas regulae S. Francisci nobliores Quaestiones, speciatim Missionibus Angliae, et quibusvis aliis adaptatas. Cum spicilegiis necessariis. Opus omnibus Regularibus perquam utile. Douay, 1658. Dedicated to Pedro Manero, Franciscan Minister General. Second edition, 1661. (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; and Bodleian Library, Oxford) A Cleare Vindication of Roman Catholicks from a Fowle Aspersion: To Wit, That they have and do promote a bloody and wicked Designe of the Pope and Cardinals. 1659. Inscribed by Anthony Wood: “By my good friend FFran: a Sancta Clara or of ffather [sic] Davenport.” (Bodleian Library, Oxford) The Result of a dialogue concerning the Middle-State of Souls. Wherein is asserted the Ancient Doctrine of their Relief, obtained by Prayers, Alms, etc. before the Day of Judgment. Paris, undated. Dedicated to Henry, Lord Arundel of Wardour; donated to Thomas Barlow, December 12, 1660. (Bodleian Library, Oxford) A Further reflexion touching St. Austin’s Mind for the releasement of Souls in Purgatory. London, 1660. (Bodleian Library, Oxford) Summa veteris theologiae discipulis meis missionariis propionata. In qua variis intercurrentibus dialogismis Christianae in universum Religionis veritas demonstrator. Ac decernuntur ea quae sunt de Fide à reliquis cujusvis generis Doctrinis et Dogmatibus ubi multa Veterum examinantur. Douay, 1661. Dedicated to the Theology Faculty of Douay University. (Bodleian Library, Oxford)

644 Select Bibliography Religio philosophi peripati discutienda in qua offertur epitome processus historiae celeberrimi miraculi, a Christo nuperrimé patrati, in restitutione Tibiae abscissae et sepultae, ab Aristotele in suis principiis examinati. Authore R. Adm. P. F. Francisco Davenporto, vulgò A S Clara. Douay: Belleri, 1662. Dedicated to Henry Howard, Duke of Norfolk. (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) Operum Omnium Scholasticorum et Historicum. Editio Novissima, Correctior et Auctior. Tomus primus. Douai: Belleri, 1665. Contains: 1. Systema fidei cui annectitur Opusculum de Definibilitate Controversiae Immaculatae Conceptionis; 2. Tractatus de Schismate, speciatim Anglicano; 3. Fragmenta seu Historia Minor; 4. Manuale Missionariorum (Bodleian Library, Oxford). Systema fidei is dedicated to François de Calonne and the treatise on the Immaculate Conception is dedicated separately to Pedro de Alva y Astorga and to Wat Montagu. The treatise on the English schism is dedicated to Englebert du Bois, Canon of Namur. The Manuale missionariorum is dedicated to Michele Buongiorno de Sambuca, Minister General, who accepted the dedication and approved it at Rome in June 1664. Operum Omnium Scholasticorum et Historicum. Tomus secundus. Douai, 1667. Contains: 1. Apologia episcoporum; 2. Liber Dialogorum, seu Summa Veteris Theologiae Dialogismis tradita; 3. Problemata Scolastica et Controversalia Speculativa; 4. Opusculum de Medio Statu Animarum; 5. Paralipomena Philosophica de Mundo Peripatetico; 6. Religio Philosophi, seu Peripatetica discussio Celeberrimi Miraculi restauratae Tibiae; 7. Epistolium adversus Iudiciariam Astrologiam (Bodleian Library, Oxford). The whole second volume is dedicated to Franciscan Minister General Ildephonso Salizanes and to the “holy fathers and my sons, students of the English Province.” Praecedentia Angliae humiliter exponitur et fortissimo demonstratur. Douay, 1670. (Bodleian Library, Oxford) Supplementum Historiae provinciae angliae, in quo est Chronosticon, continens catalogum, et praecipua gesta provincialium Fratrum Minorum Provinciae Angliae. Annectitur, Disputatio de Antiqua Provinciae Praecedentia. Front page: “Anthony à Wood, ex dono authoris, sc. Franc. A S. C, vulgo Davenport, an. 1672.”

Select Published Primary Works Augustine, Saint. Digitus Dei or God appearing in his wonderfull Works. London, 1676. Bayle, Pierre. Commentaire philosophique sur ces paroles de Jesus-Chrit [sic]: Contrainles d’entrer. Cantorbery, 1686. ———. A philosophical commentary on these words of the Gospel, Luke XIV 23: Compel them to come in. London, 1708. Baxter, Richard. The practical works of Richard Baxter. London, 1838. In four volumes.

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645

Birchley, William. The Christian moderator, or Persecution for religion condemned. London, 1651. ———. The Christian moderator, in two parts. With an explanation of the Roman Catholick belief, concerning these four points: their church, worship, iustification, and civill government. The fourth edition. London, 1652. ———. The Christian moderator, Third part. Or, The oath of abjuration arraign’d by the common law and common sense. London, 1653. Boyle, Robert. The Works of Robert Boyle. 14 vols. Edited by Michael Hunter and Edward Davis. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000. Browne, Thomas. Miracles, work’s above and contrary to nature. London, 1683. Burton, Edwin, and Thomas Williams, eds. The Douai College Diaries, 1598–1654. London, 1911. Canes, John Vincent. The reclaimed papist. London, 1655. ———. Fiat Lux. The third edition, reviewed and enlarged by the author. London, 1665. Carpenter, Richard. Experience, historie and divinitie. London, 1641. Chillingworth, William. The works of W. Chillingworth. Eleventh edition with life, by Dr. Birch. London, 1820. Colman, Walter. La dance macabre or Death’s duell. London, 1632. Cressy, Serenus. Exomologesis. Paris, 1647. Cross, John. Philotea’s Pilgrimage to perfection. Bruges, 1668. Cudworth, Ralph. The true intellectual system of the universe. London, 1678. Digby, Kenelm. Observations upon Religio medici. London, 1643. ———. Two treatises. London, 1644. ———. A treatise of adhering to God. Also a conference with a lady about choice of religion. London, 1653. Donne, John. Pseudo-martyr. London, 1610. Evelyn, John. Diary and correspondence of John Evelyn. Edited by William Bray. London, 1906. Falkland, Lucius Cary, Viscount. Sir Lucius Cary, late Lord Viscount of Falkland, his discourse of infallibility, with an answer to it, and his Lordships reply. London, 1651. Featley, Daniel. Virtumnus Romanus, or, A discourse penned by a romish priest. London, 1642. Gamaches, Cyprien de. Exercices d’une âme royale ou les Devoirs les plus importants du chrétien. Paris, 1655. ———. La Vraye félicité du chrétien. Paris, 1660. ———. Mémoires de la Mission des capuchins de la province de Paris près la Reine d’Angleterre, depuis 1630 jusqu’à 1669. Paris, 1881. Gennings, John. The life and death of Mr. Edmund Geninges priest, crowned with martyrdome at London. St. Omers, 1614. Goodman, Godfrey. The creatures praysing God; or, The religion of dumbe creatures. London, 1624.

646 Select Bibliography ———. Bishop Goodman his proposition: in discharge of his own dutie and conscience both to God and man. London, ca. 1650. Gother, John. A papist mis-represented and represented. London, 1685. ———. Papists protesting against Protestant-popery. London, 1686. Green, Mary A. E., ed. Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria. London, 1857. Hall, Joseph. The works of the Right Reverend Joseph Hall. 10 vols. Oxford, 1863. Heath, Henry. Soliloquia, seu Documenta Christianae Perfectionis. Antwerp, 1652. Heylyn, Peter. Cyprianus Anglicus. London, 1668. Highfield, J. R. L., ed. Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis, 1603–1660. Oxford, 2006. Hobbes, Thomas. Elementa philosophica de cive. Amsterdam, 1647. ———. Leviathan. London, 1651. ———. Leviathan. Edited by Noel Malcolm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Holden, Henry. The analysis of divine faith, or, Two treatises of the resolution of Christian belief. Paris, 1658. ———. A letter by Dr. Holden to Mr. Grant, concerning Mr. White’s treatises De medio animarum statu. Paris, 1661. ———. Check, or, Inquiry into the late act of the Roman Inquisition. London, 1662. Hyde, Edward. A brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors to Church and State, in Mr. Hobbes’s Book entitled Leviathan. Oxford, 1676. ———. History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England. 3 vols. Oxford, 1807. Jackson, Bonaventure. Manuduction to the Palace of Truth. Mechlin, 1616. Kellison, Matthew. A Survey of the new religion. Douay, 1603. ———. A treatise of the hierarchie and divers orders of the church. Douay, 1629. Laud, William. The history of the troubles and tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God and blessed martyr William Laud. London, 1695. Le Grand, Antoine. Philosophia veterum, e mente Renati Descartes more scholastico breviter degesta. London, 1671. ———. Institutio philosophiae secundum principia D. Renati Descartes. London, 1672. ———. Historia naturae, variis experimentis et ratiociniis elucidate. London, 1673 (dedicated to Robert Boyle). ———. Man without passion, or The wise stoick. London, 1675. ———. The divine Epicurus. London, 1676. L’Estrange, Roger. Toleration Discussed. London, 1663. MacCaghwell, Hugh. Suplementum ad Quaestiones Scoti in libros de Anima. Lyon, 1639. Marchant, Pierre. Tribunal sacramentale et visibile animarum. Ghent, 1642– 43. Mason, Richard. Certamen Seraphicum Provinciae Angliae. Douay, 1649. ———. Manual of the Confraternity of the Cord. Douay, 1654. Meester, Bernard de, ed. Correspondance du nonce Giovanni-Francesco Guidi di Bagno (1621–1627). Brussels, 1938.

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Milton, John. Of reformation in England. London, 1641. Montagu, Richard. A gag for the new Gospell? No: a new gag for an old goose. London, 1624. ———. Appello Caesarem: a just appeale from two unjust informers. London, 1625. Naval, Leandro Aína. El Milagro de Calanda a Nivel Histórico: Estudio critico de los documentos. Saragossa, 1972. Panzani, Gregorio. The memoirs of Gregorio Panzani: giving an account of his agency in England in the years 1634, 1635, 1636. Translated from the Italian original. By the Revd. Joseph Berington. Birmingham, 1793. Parkinson, Anthony. Collectanea Anglo-Minoritica. London, 1726. Penn, William. The great case of liberty of conscience once more briefly debated and defended. London, 1670. ———. A seasonable caveat against popery. London, 1670. Pepys, Samuel. The diary of Samuel Pepys. New York: Modern Library, 2001. ———. The letters of Samuel Pepys, 1656–1703. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006. Perkins, William. The whole treatise of the cases of conscience. Cambridge, 1606. Plowdon, Charles. Remarks on a book entitled Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani. Liège, 1794. Poole, Matthew. The Nullity of the Romish Faith; or, a Blow at the Root of the Romish Church. With an Appendix wherein the reader will find all the materiall objections of S. Clara in his Systema Fidei answered. London, 1667; 2nd ed. 1679. Preston, Roland [Roger Widdrington]. A theologicall disputation concerning the oath of allegiance. London, 1613. Pugh, Robert. Blacklo’s Cabal discovered in severall of their letters. 2nd edition, 1680. Questier, Michael, ed. Newsletters from the Caroline Court, 1631–1638. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Rudyerd, Benjamin. The speeches of Sr. Benjamin Rudyer [sic] in the High Court of Parliament. London(?), 1641. Sergeant, John. Reflexions upon the oaths of supremacy and allegiance by a catholick gentleman, and obedient son of the church and loyal subject of His Majesty. London, 1661. ———. Sure-footing in Christinaity, or Rational discourses on the rule of faith. London, 1665. ———. Faith vindicated from possibility of falsehood. Louvain, 1667. ———. The Jesuit loyalty: manifested in three several treatises lately written by them against the oath of allegiance. London, 1677. Sorbière, Samuel. Relation d’un voyage en Angleterre. Paris, 1664. Stillingfleet, Edward. The works of that most eminent prelate, Dr. Edward Stillingfleet. 6 vols. Edited by R. Bentley. London, 1710. Taylor, Jeremy. The whole works of the Right Rev. Jeremy Taylor. 3 vols. London, 1867.

648 Select Bibliography Thorndike, Herbert. The theological works. 6 vols. Edited by J. H. Parker. Oxford, 1844– 56. Travers, Walter. Autobiography of Father Bede of St. Simon Stock; reprinted in Benedict Zimmerman, Carmel in England, 171– 277. London, 1899. Vane, Henry. The retired mans meditations. London, 1655. Warmington, William. A moderate defense of the Oath of Allegiance. London, 1612. White, Thomas. De mundo dialogi tres. Paris, 1642. ———. Institutionum sacrarum peripateticis inaedificatarum. London, 1652. ———. Notes on Mr F. D’s Result of a Dialogue concerning the Middle state of Souls. Paris, 1660. ———. Religion and reason mutually corresponding and assisting each other. Paris, 1660. Williams, Roger. The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody. London, 1652. Wood, Anthony. Athenae Oxonienses. London, 1691. ———. The life of Anthony à Wood from the year 1632 to 1672; written by himself. Oxford, 1772.

Select Published Secondary Sources Albion, Gordon. Charles I and the Court of Rome: A Study in 17th Century Diplomacy. London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1935. Allison, Antony Francis. A Catalogue of Catholic Books in English Printed Abroad or Secretly in England, 1558–1640. Bognor Regis: Arundel, 1956. ———. “An English Gallican: Henry Holden (1596/7–1662).” Recusant History 22, no. 3 (1995): 319– 49. ———. Franciscan Books in English, 1559–1640. Bognor Regis: Arundel, 1955. ———. “Richard Smith’s Gallican Backers and Jesuit Opponents.” Recusant History 19, no. 3 (1989): 234– 85. Asch, Ronald. The Thirty Years War: The Holy Roman Empire and Europe, 1618–1648. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. Askew, Pamela. “The Angelic Consolation of St. Francis of Assisi in Post-Tridentine Italian Painting.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 280– 306. Atherton, Ian, and Julie Sanders, eds. The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Bossy, John. The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975. Braun, Harald E., and Edward Vallance, eds. Contexts of Conscience in Early Modern Europe. Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Bremer, Francis. Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

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Brotton, Jerry. The Sale of the Late King’s Goods: Charles I and His Art Collection. London: Macmillan, 2006. Cambers, Andrew. Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Clancy, Thomas. “Ecumenism and Irenics in 17th-Century English Catholic Apologetics.” Theological Studies 58 (1997): 85– 89. ———. English Catholic Books, 1641–1700. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1974. Clark, Ruth. Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932. Collins, Jeffrey. The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ———. “Christian Ecclesiology and the Composition of Leviathan: A Newly Discovered Letter to Thomas Hobbes.” The Historical Journal 43 (2000): 217– 31. ———. “Restoration Anti-Catholicism: A Prejudice in Motion.” In England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited, edited by Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess, 281– 306. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. ———. “Thomas Hobbes: ‘Father of Atheists.’” In Atheism and Deism Revalued: Heterodox Religious Identities in Britain, 1650–1800, edited by Wayne Hudson, Diego Lucci, and Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, 25– 44. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. ———. “Thomas Hobbes, Heresy and the Theological Project of Leviathan.” Hobbes Studies 26, no. 1 (2013): 6– 33. Como, David. “Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London.” The Historical Journal 46, no. 2 (2003): 263– 94. Courtines, Léo Pierre. Bayle’s Relations with England and the English. New York: Columbia University Press, 1938. Cross, Frank Leslie. The Oxford Movement and the Seventeenth Century. London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1933. Cust, Richard, and Ann Hughes, eds. Conflict in Early Stuart England. London: Longman, 1989. Davenport, Anne. “Baroque Fire (A Note on Early-Modern Angelology).” Early Science and Medicine 14 (2009): 369– 97. ———. Descartes’s Theory of Action. Leiden: Brill, 1999. ———. “English Recusant Networks and the Early Defense of Cartesian Philosophy.” Journal of Early Modern Studies 1 (Fall 2012): 65– 85. ———. “Reading Hobbes before Leviathan.” Hobbes Studies 27, no. 2 (2014): 105– 25. ———. “Scotus as Father of Modernity: The Natural Philosophy of the English Franciscan Christopher Davenport in 1652.” Early Science and Medicine 12 (2007): 55– 99. Demain, Thomas. “Probabilisme.” In Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, edited by A. Vacant and E. Mangenot, vol. 13, pt. 1, cols. 417–19. Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1936.

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Seaton, Alexander A. The Theory of Toleration under the Later Stuarts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911. Shapiro, Barbara. A Culture of Fact. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. ———. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Sharpe, Kevin. Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. ———. The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. ———. Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994. Sharpe, K., and Peter Lake, eds. Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England. London: Macmillan, 1994. Siedentop, Larry. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Sitwell, Gerard. “Leander Jones’s Mission to England, 1634– 5.” Recusant History 5 (1959– 60). Skinner, Quentin. “Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy.” In The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660, edited by G. E. Alymer. London: Macmillian, 1974. Slusser, Michael. “Abraham Woodhead (1608–1678).” Recusant History 15 (1979): 406– 22. Smuts, Malcolm. Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. ———. Culture and Power in England, 1585–1685. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999. ———. “The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria in the 1630s.” English Historical Review 93 (1978). Soden, Geoffrey. Godfrey Goodman, Bishop of Gloucester, 1583–1656. London: The Church Historical Society, 1953. Souleyreau, Marie-Catherine Vignal. La correspondence du cardinal de Richelieu. Au faîte du pouvoir: l’année 1632. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012. Southgate, Beverly. Covetous of Truth: The Life and Work of Thomas White, 1593–1676. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993. Springborg, Patricia. The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Spurr, John. The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Sutto, Antoinette. “Lord Baltimore, the Society of Jesus, and Caroline Absolutism in Maryland, 1630–1645.” Journal of British Studies 48 (July 2009): 631– 52. Tavard, George. The Church, Community of Salvation: An Ecumenical Ecclesiology. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. ———. L’oecuménisme. Paris: PUF, 1994. ———. The Quest for Catholicity: A Study in Anglicanism. New York: Herder and Herder, 1963.

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I N D E X

Abravanel, 298, 303, 325, 328 absolution, 25, 55– 56, 161, 251, 254– 55, 355, 402, 435 Act for the relief of religious and peaceable people, 383 Agreement of the People, 384– 85, 387 Agretti, Claudio (abbot), 492 Albo, Joseph, 297 Alexander, William, 64 Alexander of Hales, 478 Alexander VII (pope), 485 Alix, Alessandro d’Alès, 179– 82, 184, 202 Allen, Thomas, 44– 47 Allen, William (cardinal), 20– 22 Allix, Pierre, 507 Almagest, 44 Almain, Jacques, 316–17, 332 Ambrose, Saint, 111, 141, 144, 145, 170, 316, 354 Amyraut, Moses, 176 Analysis fidei, 316 Andrewes, Lancelot (bishop), 155, 157 Angles, Joseph, 134 Anglican ordination, 437– 40 Antiquities of Warwickshire, 32 Apologetic Letter (Epistolium apologeticum), 79, 80, 112, 187 Apologia (Preston), 26– 27, 29 Apologia Cardinalis Bellarmini pro jure principum, 24 Apologia episcoporum, 214– 46, 247– 50, 249, 256– 57, 411 Apology (Daillé), 394

apostolic flexibility, 322– 24 Appeale to Protestants. See Catholic Appeale to Protestants, A Appello Caesarem, 69– 70, 81, 90– 91, 137, 140 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 25, 133, 160– 61, 163– 64, 190, 234, 235, 431– 32 Aracoeli, Franciscan monastery of, 66– 67 Arbor virtutum, 381 Arcudius, Petrus, 160– 62 Arderne, Alicia, 37 Argyll, Earl of (Archibald Campbell), 64 Aristotle, 301, 312, 322– 23, 413, 431, 458, 469, 471– 73, 477, 480 Arminianism, 46, 64, 69– 71, 80, 83– 84, 93, 100, 112, 129– 30 Arminius, Jacob, 87, 129 Arnauld, Antoine, 253, 292, 484 Arriba, Francisco de, 127– 28 Articuli confessionis Anglicanae paraphrastice exponuntur, 118 Arundel Castle, 260, 264 astrology, 72– 79 astronomy, 41, 67, 75– 76 Athenae Oxonienses, 32, 36, 39 atomism, 454 Augsburg Confession, 238 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 142– 44, 157– 58, 171, 223, 226, 230, 234– 35, 298, 305, 312, 461, 462, 479 Aurelius, Petrus (Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbot of Saint-Cyran), 118, 179

655

656 Index Aureoli, Peter, 231, 234 Austin, John (William Birchley), 388– 95, 398– 400, 403– 4, 408– 9 Austin, Ralph, 470 Ayre (convent), 100, 101, 198 Badin, Father Étienne, 506 Bacon (alias Southwell), Thomas, 316 Bacon, Roger, 325, 473, 474 Bagno, Giovanni Francesco Guidi di (cardinal), 63– 67, 175, 181– 82, 184, 196 Bagshawe, Christopher, 33 Baker, Augustine, 101, 411 Baker, Richard, 475 Baker, Samuel, 259 Baltimore, 2nd Lord (Cecilius Calvert), 381 Bancroft, Richard (bishop), 4, 219 Barberini, Antonio (cardinal), 64– 67, 175– 76, 181 Barberini, Francesco (cardinal), 64– 65, 175– 78, 184, 195, 197– 99, 203, 206, 251, 483, 492 Barberini, Matteo. See Urban VIII Barclay, John, 13 Barclay, William, 12–13, 16 Barcos, Martin de, 292 Barlow, Dom Rudesind, 59, 65, 71, 113 Barlow, Thomas, 352, 400, 417, 426, 429, 430, 444, 456, 460 Barnes, Dom John, 113–14, 115, 181 Bartholomew of Medina, 24– 25 Basilikon doron, 8 Bathurst, Ralph, 457 Batten, Adam, 462– 63 Baxter, Richard, 459, 484– 85, 506 Bayle, Pierre, 507 Beacon Set on Fire, A, 403 Beacons Quenched, The, 404 Bede, Venerable (saint), 323 Bell, Arthur (Francis), 103– 6, 276 Bellarmine, Roberto Francesco (cardinal), 18–19, 24, 27, 155, 158, 160– 61, 163, 220, 229, 238, 283, 295, 442

Benedictine nuns, 101, 113–14 Bennett, Elizabeth, 37, 38– 39 Bentivoglio, Guido (cardinal), 176, 181 Berington, Joseph, 506– 7 Bernardino, Antonius à Sancto, 489 Bertrand, Charles, 458 Bérulle, Pierre de (cardinal), 65 Bichi, Alessandro, (cardinal), 120– 21, 175, 176, 177– 79, 184– 85, 196, 197 Biddle, John, 501 Biddulph, Peter, 119, 120– 23, 173, 175, 195, 205 Billings, Richard, 483 Billingsley, Henry, 44 Bilson, Thomas, 22 Birchley, William (John Austin), 388– 95, 398– 400, 403– 4, 408– 9 bishops. See episcopacy Blackloe (Blacklo). See White, Thomas Blackloism, 380– 82, 389, 400, 416, 417, 484, 485, 488, 492 Blackwell, George, 4, 18– 20, 22, 23 Blandford, Walter (bishop), 492– 94 Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody, The, 402 Blount, Emma, 37 Blount, Richard, 48 Bodley, Thomas, 33 Bolognetti, Giorgio, 185 Book of Martyrs, 41 Boonen, Jacques (bishop), 210 Borel, Camillus, 167 Borromeo, Cardinal, 20 Bosquetus (François Bosquet), 244 Boverio, Fra Zaccaria, 178 Boyle, Robert, 455, 456, 460 Bracamonte, Gaspar de, 482 Brachet de la Milletière, Théophile, 185, 411 Bradshaw, Dom Augustine, 181 Bradwardine, Thomas, 33, 188, 190 Bramhall, John, 343– 45, 347, 348, 351, 353, 414–15, 426, 459, 484, 506 Brent, Nathaniel, 35, 43 Brett, Sir Arthur, 195– 96 Bridges, John (bishop), 219

Index

Bristol, Earl of (George Digby), 485 Britannorum, Gildas, 323 Britannia, 33, 47 Broughton, Richard, 152 Browne, Anthony, 51 Browne, Thomas, 463, 465, 469, 480 Buchanan, George, 218 Bullaker, John Baptist (Thomas), 210, 266– 67, 276 Burgo, Hugo de, 413 Burton, Henry, 186, 205, 229 Butler, William, 93 Bzowski, Abraham, 190 Cajetan (Thomas de Vio, cardinal), 153, 168, 226, 227 Calderwood, David (Didoclavius), 221, 223, 225, 229, 248 Calvert, Giles, 384, 385 Calvin, John, 140, 238 Calvinism, 46, 64, 126, 177, 352 Cambridge, 121, 169, 378, 416, 491, 496 Camden, William, 33, 38, 47 Campion, Edmund, 2 Canes, John Vincent, 489, 506 Cano (Canus), Melchior, 153, 163, 169, 226, 303 Capreolus, Jean, 231, 234 Caramuel, Juan, 381, 459, 487, 500 Carey (Cary), Elizabeth, 130 Carier, Benjamin, 50, 190 Carleton, George (bishop), 84 Caron, Redmond, 459 Carpenter, Richard, 259– 64 Carterwood, David, 242 Cary (Carey), Lucius (Lord Falkland), 280, 281, 282, 286– 90, 320, 421 Cary, Patrick, 382, 409 case of interest or usury as to the common practice, The, 497– 98 Cassander, George, 345, 382 Castellio, Sebastian, 305 Catherine of Braganza (queen), 465, 487, 503 Catholic Appeale to Protestants, A, 85– 86, 90

657 Catholics’ Supplication unto the King’s Majesty, The, 5 Cavellus, Hugo. See MacCaghwell, Hugh Cecil, Robert (earl of Salisbury), 4, 7, 10–12 Celestine I (pope), 428 Celotius, 316 Certain quaeries concerning liberty of conscience, 384– 86 Chaissy, Gilles (Giles), 118, 174, 208, 251, 257 Challoner, Richard, 507 Chamber, John, 44 Charles I (king), 65– 66, 125– 26, 148– 49, 171, 174, 180, 182– 83, 193– 96, 202, 210, 219– 20, 248, 256, 264, 291, 348 Charles II (king), 348, 381, 460, 471, 483, 484, 485 Charleton, Walter, 454, 471, 472, 491 Cheverus, Jean-Louis Lefèbvre de (bishop), 507 Cheynell, Francis, 404 Chillingworth, William, 18, 115, 187, 209, 246, 249, 275, 276, 280– 82, 284, 290, 307, 309, 314, 352, 362– 63, 382 Chowne, Thomas, 186– 87, 191– 92 Christian Moderation, 257– 58 Christian Moderator, The, 388, 390, 398– 99, 402– 3, 404, 416 Christian Moderator II, 408– 9 Chronicle (Marcos de Lisboa), 101– 2, 105 Chrysostom, Saint John, 90 Clare, Saint, 102– 3 Clarendon, Earl of. See Hyde, Edward Clarendon State Papers, 185, 192, 206 Clarke, Samuel, 49 Clear Vindication of Roman Catholics from a foul aspersion, A, 459– 60 Clement of Alexandria, 235, 298 Clements, Hans, 458 Clerke, Henry, 457 Clink, the, 18– 31, 117 Cobb, Richard, 265

658 Index Codner, Dom David, 116, 122, 184, 194, 202, 208 Coke, Edward, 17 Coleman, Edward, 497 Coleman, Walter, 53, 100, 116, 264 Collectiones theologicarum, 187, 191– 92, 206 Colleton, John, 9–10 comets, 39, 41, 75– 76, 412, 455 Commentaire philosophique, 507 Con, George, 182, 196, 203– 4, 206, 208–10, 246, 250, 256 confederacy of Deceivers, A, 499 Conference with Fisher, 283 confession, 255, 324, 434– 35 Coninck, Giles de, 228, 231 Contarini di Tommaso, Alvise, 173– 76, 179 Conway, Roger, 238 Cooper, Thomas, 41 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 33, 44, 67– 68, 479 Cordoba, Antonius, 134, 238, 296 Corker, James, 502, 506 Cosin, John, 81, 200, 227, 415 Cotton, John, 383 councils of the Church, 163, 315, 316–18, 319– 20 Ancyranum, 480 Antioch, 231 Arles, 222 Cabilonense, 236 Carthage, 241 Chalcedon, 448 Florence, 189, 308, 331 Nicaea, 200 Nice, 241 role of, 422– 23 Trent, 48, 49, 70, 134, 137, 149, 150, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 164, 224, 227, 232, 248, 316, 318, 320, 323, 327, 344, 398, 409, 432, 435– 37, 442, 451, 483 Courtenay (Edward Leeds), 193, 194, 248 Coventriensis, Franciscus (Francis of Coventry; Sancta Clara, Franciscus à), 410, 412, 413–14, 415

Coventry, 32– 42 Cranmer, Lady, 493 Cressy, Hugh (Serenus), 290, 345– 46, 377– 78, 381– 83, 411, 491 Cromwell, Oliver, 348, 383, 389, 397, 399, 412, 415 Cross, Father John, 491 Cudworth, Ralph, 496 Cusanus, Nicholas, 190, 220, 303 Cyprian, 240 Daillé, Jean, 394 d’Alès, Alessandro, 179, 181, 184, 202 d’Alvin, Etienne, 165 Damport (Davenport), ix, 213, 258, 261, 268 Danvers, Henry, 384– 85 darkness of atheism dispelled by the light of nature, The, 454 d’Aubigny, Ludovic Stuart (lord Obaney), 462, 464, 483, 485, 488, 490– 91, 495 Davenant, William, 381 Davenport, Barnabas (Barnaby), 36 Davenport, Christopher (Sancta Clara, Franciscus à), 32– 53 Davenport, Christopher (half brother), 37 Davenport, Christopher (uncle), 35, 39– 40 Davenport, Edward (grandfather), 35, 38, 42 Davenport, George (kinsman), 416 Davenport, Henry (father), 35, 36– 38, 40 Davenport, John (half brother), ix, 32, 36, 38, 69, 117, 195, 438 Davenport, Richard, 38 Davenport, Thomas, 37, 38 Davenport, William(s), 37 Davenport, Winifred, 36, 38 Davenportus, Pater Frater Franciscus, vulgò A S. Clara (Sancta Clara, Franciscus à), 465 Davies, Sir John, 4, 7 Day, Nicholas, 51, 268, 413 Daza, Antonio, 103– 4 De anima, 60

Index

De animalibus, 471 De basilico doro, 218 De causa dei, 186 De cive, 346, 348, 350, 352, 356, 359, 361, 362, 366, 368, 371, 372 De civitate Dei, 461, 462, 476, 478, 479, 480 De corpore, 413 De declaratione veritatum, 226 De definibilitate controversiae Immaculatae Conceptionis, 411, 420– 21 de Dominis, Marc Antonio (archbishop), 194, 438 de fide tradition, 303, 315, 322– 24, 433 De generatione animalium, 471 De jure regni, 218 De medio animarum statu, 415 De mundo, 278, 432, 454, 455, 457– 58, 461, 462, 464, 468, 477– 78 De obedientia, 218 De praecedentia Angliae, 486 De sancta virgine, 90 de Soto, Andrés, 52– 53, 54, 164, 234 De summo pontifice, 168 De unitate Ecclesiae Catholicae, 240 De universi orbis christiani pace et concordia, 185 de Vega, Andreas, 130, 133, 164 Defensio censurae, 43 Delphinus, Joannes Antonius, 221, 224, 234 Delrio, Martin, 74, 75 Denys, Martin, 411, 458 Dering, Richard, 64 Descartes, René, 302, 336, 502 Deus, natura, gratia, 112– 47, 173, 175, 178, 183, 185, 186, 194, 196, 203, 206, 207, 248, 250, 261, 268, 269, 289, 344, 411. See also Thirty-nine Articles second edition, 186, 192, 197– 98, 274, 290 Diaphanta, 489 Diaz de Luco, Juan Bernardo, 166 Dictionaire historique et critique, 507

659 Digby, Sir Kenelm, 248– 49, 258, 276, 278– 79, 284, 291, 292, 326– 27, 329, 343, 348, 382, 389, 415, 464– 65, 470 Direction to be Observed, A, 209 Discours de la Méthode, 502 Discourse against the Oath, 194 Disputatio theologica de iuramento fidelitatis, 27– 29 Douay, 46, 48, 50, 51– 52, 58, 59, 63, 68– 69, 115, 344, 345, 465, 486 Douglas, Sir Robert, 181– 82, 201 Dow, Christopher, 249 Dreux, Jacques, 121– 22 du Trieu, Philippe, 71, 115 Ductor dubitantium, 416 Dugdale, William, 32 Duncon, Eleazer, 121 Duppa, Brian (bishop), 204 Durandus of St. Pourçain, 77, 82, 225, 230, 231, 232 Duval, André, 166 Duvergier de Hauranne, Jean. See Aurelius, Petrus Eadmer of Canterbury, 220 Eaton, Richard, 35 Eccles, Henry, 43 Edict of Nantes, 176 Eliot, John, 69 Elizabeth, Lady, 40 Elizabeth, Queen, 3– 4, 169 Elizabeth of Portugal, Saint, 106– 7 Ellis, Humphrey, 492 Enchiridion o Manual de los tiempos, 166, 456 Enchyridion of Faith, 400, 410– 52, 425, 439, 455, 458, 464, 483– 84, 488 English Romayne Lyfe, The, 1– 2 Epicure Spirituel, 491 episcopacy, 222– 46 electing bishops by divine right, 242– 46 jure divino, 225– 35, 247– 49, 257– 58, 276, 332

660 Index episcopacy (cont.) ordaining priests by divine right, 229– 33 order in its own right, 233– 37 power by divine right, 222– 29, 237– 42 Epistolium apologeticum (Apologetic Letter), 79, 80, 112, 187 Erasmus, 305 Espencaeus (Claude d’Espence), 236 Essex, Earl of (Robert Devereux), 4 Eugene IV (pope), 189, 297 exhortation to the Imitation of the Life of Christ, An, 348 Exomologesis, 345– 46, 377– 78, 382 Experience, Historie and Divinitie, 259, 260, 262 Experiments of the Spiritual Life, 406 Explanation of the Roman Catholicks Belief, 398– 402, 404– 5, 407– 8, 411, 425, 429, 494, 506 faith, rule of, 418– 29 Falkland, Lord (Lucius Cary), 280, 281, 282, 286– 90, 320, 421 fallibility, human, 294– 309 Featley, Daniel, 83, 91, 266, 269– 70, 271– 74 Felisius, Matthias, 480 Ferdinand III (emperor), 381 Ferrar, John, 95 Ferrar, Nicholas, 92– 95, 97, 99–100 Fiat lux, 489 Field, Richard, 49– 50 Fienus, Thomas, 471 First English Euclid, The, 44 Fitzherbert, Thomas, 30 Floating Island, The, 204 Fludd, Robert, 466, 473 Fontenay-Mareuil, Marquis de (François Du Val), 124, 180 Foxe, John, 41 Foxly, William, 475 Fragmenta vel Historia Minor Provinciae Angliae Fratrum Minorum, 486– 87, 489. See also Historia Minor

Francis of Coventry (Francis Coventriensis; Sancta Clara, Franciscus à), 410, 412, 413–14, 415 Francis of Mayronis, 82, 221 Frost, John, 66, 68 Fuertes y Biota, Antonio de, 481 fundamenta, 298– 99, 304, 306– 7, 309, 311, 314, 338 fundamentalia, 298– 302, 304, 306– 7, 309, 311, 313, 314, 338 Gage, Edward, 51 Galilei, Galileo, 67, 176, 301, 302, 479 Gassendi, Pierre, 346 Gennings, John, 51, 52– 53, 58, 66, 71, 100, 104, 112, 120, 186, 349 Georgius, Francis, 220 Gerard, Sir William, 37 Gerson, Jean, 96, 163, 170, 172, 226, 242, 295– 96, 316 Gertman, Matthias, 465 Gifford, Dom Gabriel, 181 Glanvill, Joseph, 480 Gloucester Hall, 47 God and the King, 449 Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry, 502 Goffe, Stephen, 438– 39 Goodman, Godfrey (bishop), 198, 203, 245– 46, 416, 496 Goodman, Christopher, 218 Goring, George, 115, 266, 274– 75 Gother, John, 507 Great Tew, 115, 130, 187, 280, 289, 290, 294, 306, 307, 314, 323, 336, 344, 345, 377, 381, 382, 383 Green (Greene), Anne, 456– 59, 476 Greenbury, Catharine (Sister Catharine Francis), 105– 6 Gregory XIII (pope), 2, 447 Gresham College, 84, 94, 95, 471 Grotius, Hugo, 64, 484 Grounds of Obedience and Government, 415 Gulston, Master, 43

Index

Gunpowder Plot, 10–12, 20, 205 sermon, 206, 253– 55, 267 Gussoni, Vincenzo, 175 Hales, John, 350, 364– 65, 381 Hall, Joseph (bishop), 83, 87, 257– 58, 333– 35, 343, 461, 463– 64 Hamilton, Sir William, 201, 203, 204 Hammond, Henry, 382, 417, 485 Handbook of Faith. See Enchyridion of Faith Harpsfield, Nicholas, 166– 67 Hartlib, Samuel, 470 Harvey, William, 471, 472 Hauzeur, Matthias, 292 Haywood, William, 192 Heath, Henry (Paul), 114, 276– 77 Heigham, John, 69 Henbury-Venables root, 38 Henriette-Marie, Queen, 65, 106, 115, 116, 179, 183, 197, 256, 264– 65, 278– 79, 292, 389, 415, 438, 460, 462, 464 Henry, Prince, 41– 42 Henry VIII (king), 218, 351 Henry of Ghent, 240 Hepburn, John, 183 Heylyn, Peter, 186, 484, 492 Highmore, Nathaniel, 471, 475 Historia, Vida y Milagros de Santa Juana de la Cruz, 103, 105 Historia Minor, 490. See also Fragmenta vel Historia Minor Provinciae Angliae Fratrum Minorum History of Animals, 472 History of generation, 471 History of the Reformation, 492 Hobbes, Thomas, 290, 343– 79, 381, 383, 392– 93, 404, 413, 414–15, 417, 425, 426, 429, 430, 438, 440, 442, 485, 490, 492, 495– 96 Holden, Henry, 113, 278, 295, 345, 348, 382, 485 Holland, Philemon, 33, 42, 47 Holy Life of Philip Nerius, 461

661 “Holy Sobriety,” 98 Holy Wisdom, 411 Holywell Manor, 46– 47 Hooker, Richard, 130– 31, 140, 352 Hopkins, Agnes, 38 Hopton, Sir Arthur, 453, 455, 466 Hosius of Cordoba, 354 Howard, Henry, 465 Howard, Philip Thomas (cardinal), 260, 464, 465 Howard, William, 193– 94, 250– 51 Hugh of St. Victor, 328 human free will, 130 Hunt, Father (Sancta Clara, Franciscus à), 55, 486, 493, 494 Hunt, Francis (Franciscus Venantius; Sancta Clara, Franciscus à), 260, 486 Hunt, Mr. (Sancta Clara, Franciscus à), 264– 66, 275, 486 Hyde, Anne (duchess of York), 486, 492– 94 Hyde, Edward (earl of Clarendon), 265, 275, 290, 370, 382, 389, 409, 415, 460, 484 Hygiasticon, 98 infallibility, 278– 90, 308, 320, 322, 446– 47 Ingoli, Monsignor Francesco, 67 Innocent IV (pope), 161, 163, 166 Innocent X (pope), 291, 380– 81, 428 Institutionum sacrarum, 389– 90 invisible world discovered to spirituall eyes, The, 461, 463 Isabella, Clara Eugenia (infanta of Spain), 52, 54, 106, 114 Isbergue, madame saincte, 54– 55 Jackson, Bonaventure, 58 Jacobean oath, 10, 13–17, 18– 21, 22, 24, 25– 26, 113, 180, 194, 195, 208, 270, 271, 499 James VI and I Stuart (king), 4– 8, 13, 16, 19, 39– 40, 41, 45, 58– 59, 64– 65, 113, 190, 218, 352

662 Index Jansenism, 55, 292, 424– 28, 484, 498 Jansenius, Cornelius, 210 Jennings, Theodore, 388 Jermyn, Henry, 344, 460 Jerome, Saint, 221, 223, 225 Joan, Sister (Joan of the Cross), 103– 5 John, King, 169 John Inglesant, 507– 8 John the Puritan (John Davenport), 36, 38 Jones, Inigo, 487 Jones, John (Leander Jones; Dom Leander à Sancto Martino), 59, 100, 101, 113, 114, 116, 181, 193, 194– 95, 196– 97, 208 Journall of all Proceedings between the Jansenists and the Jesuits, A, 484– 85 jure divino episcopacy. See episcopacy, jure divino Kellison, Matthew, 7– 8, 13, 52, 63, 69, 108–11, 112–13, 160– 61, 210–11 Kepler, Johannes, 67– 68 king of Scotland’s negotiations at Rome, The, 382 Knott, Edward (Wilson, Matthew), 173, 186, 204, 209–10, 218, 221, 229, 256, 281 La Milletière (Théophile Brachet de la Milletière), 185, 411 Lane, Master Samuel, 33– 36, 43– 45, 46, 47, 48 Latey, Gilbert, 491, 495 Lathroppe (Christopher Davenport), 52 Laud, William (archbishop of Canterbury), ix, 45, 46, 92, 117, 120– 22, 183, 184, 185, 186, 192, 204, 206, 208, 227, 245, 247– 52, 256– 60, 264– 66, 271, 275– 76, 283– 84, 347, 352, 438 Laurens, Louis du, 177 Laymann, Paul (Laymanus), 165 Le Courayer, Pierre, 507 Le Grand, Antoine (Anthony), 462– 63, 491, 496, 502

Leander. See Jones, John Lecey, John, 10 Lee, Canon, 148 Lee, E., 408– 9 Leeds, Edward (Courtenay), 193, 194, 248 Legenda Lignea with an answer to Mr. Birchleys moderator, 408– 9, 439 leniency, 189 Leo I (pope), 448 Leoni, Ottavio, 67 Lérins’s Golden Rule, 418, 420– 21 Lessius, Leonard, 96, 98– 99, 145 Letter refuting two astrological propositions, 70– 71 Leviathan, 346, 390, 392– 93, 400, 404, 415, 425, 430, 438, 442, 454, 457, 498 Lewgar, John, 282, 349, 381, 485 Leyburn, George, 120, 123– 24, 178, 194, 203– 5, 204, 206– 7 Liber dialogorum seu summa veteris theologiae, 464 Liberty of Conscience asserted, 385– 86, 388– 89, 390, 392, 395, 396 Liberty of prophesying (Theologia eklektike), 337– 39, 345 Life and Martyrdom of M. Edmund Gennings, The, 51 Life of the Holie Father S. Francis, 51 Lindsell, Augustine, 81, 92– 93, 117, 187 Lindsey, William, 349 Lisboa, Marcos de, 101– 2 Little Gidding, 93, 95– 96, 97, 99–100, 117, 120, 249, 347 Lloyd, William, 497 Lombard, Peter, 231, 239 Ludovicus, Fray, 196 Lupus, Hugh, 280 Lynwood, 244 MacCaghwell, Hugh (Cavellus, Hugo), 52, 59– 63, 67, 133, 190, 232 Magdalen Hall, 36, 48– 49, 50, 454 Maimonides, Rabbi Moses, 215, 297– 98, 304

Index

Major, John, 230, 244 Maldero, Raymond, 74, 75 Manuale missionariorum, 458– 59, 487, 488 Marchant, Jacques, 55 Marchant, Pierre, 55– 58, 71, 250, 256, 291– 93, 348– 49, 380, 411, 464 Marianus, Victorius, 222 Martel, Louis, 279, 292 Martin, Edward, 121 Martin, Peter, 122 Maryland, 381, 394, 494, 506 Mason, Angel (Francis), 44, 464, 465, 489 Mason, John, 43– 45, 44, 45 Mass, Catholic, 430– 34 Matthew, Tobie, 64, 180 Mazarin (Mazarino), Giulio, 184– 85, 460 Medina, Bartholomew of, 225, 238 Melchysedech, 229 Menasseh ben Israel, 330, 367, 417 Mercay, Margaret Carré de, 462 Merton College, 32– 36, 43– 48, 438 Milton, John, 257 miracles Anne Green(e), 456– 59, 476 Calanda (Miguel Pellicero’s leg), 453– 56, 458, 460, 464, 466– 77, 481, 482 Trelille, 463 Miranda (Bartolomé Carranza, archbishop), 164– 65 Mirandula, Francis de la, 153, 316 Mirror of Penance, 59 Mocket, Richard, 449 moderate defence of the Oath of Allegiance, A, 20, 23 Molina, Luis de, 132, 164, 295 Monck, George, 460 Monitum ad Anglos, 199– 203, 201, 202 Montagu, Richard (bishop), 69– 70, 80– 92, 129, 133, 137, 150, 157, 169, 191, 195, 199, 201, 227, 246 Montagu, Wat, 258, 382, 460, 462, 464 Montague, 2nd Viscount (AnthonyMaria Browne), 51

663 Montaigne, George (bishop), 438 moral law, 429– 30 moral probabilism, 25 More, Sir Thomas, 21, 169, 218, 419 Morla (Pedro Agustin Morla), 168 Morley, George, 484, 485 Morton, Thomas, 85– 86, 352 Motives to Holy Living, 492 Moura, Emmanuel do Valle de, 104 Munday, Anthony, 1– 2 Musart, Charles, 71, 115 Napper, George, 46 Napper, Master William, 46– 47 Napper family of Holywell, 51 Navarro (Martinus ab Azpilcueta), 166, 168 Neile, Richard (archbishop), 81 Neri, Saint Philip, 461, 462 Netter, Thomas (Waldensis). See Waldensis New Gagg for an Old Goose, A, 69, 81, 88, 90 Newes from the dead, 456 Nicene Creed, 305, 338, 340 Novariensis (Peter Lombard), 239 Nys, Jan (Driedo), 153 oath of supremacy, 274 oaths, 14–17. See also Jacobean oath Obaney, Lord. See d’Aubigny, Ludovic Stuart Of the Church, Five Books, 49 On the Law of God, 87 Operum Omnium, 487, 488 opinion, 60– 62 ordo caritatis, 57– 58 Osbaldeston, Father Francis, 489, 490 Osburg of Coventry, Saint, 55 Osmotherley, 489– 90 Overton, William (bishop), 1, 12 Owen, John, 383 Owen, Morgan, 252 Oxford, 51, 159, 204, 251– 52, 347, 460, 462, 463. See also Magdalen Hall; Merton College

664 Index Pacian, Fulvius, 167 Palatinate, 195– 96 Panormitanus (Niccolò de’ Tudeschi), 224 Panzani, Gregorio, 184– 86, 195, 197, 198, 199, 201, 203– 4, 207, 268, 269 papacy, 291, 331– 33, 359, 442– 45 deposing power, 26, 30 role of, 318–19 term, 221– 22 papal breves, 21 Paracelsus, 473, 474 Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico, 411, 412, 413, 453, 491 Paraphrastica expositio articulorum confessionis Anglicae, 148– 72, 193, 507 Parkinson, Brother Anthony, 487 Parkinson, Thomas, 489– 90 Parsons, Robert, 19, 43, 323 Pascal, Blaise, 461, 490, 498 Pascal II (pope), 243 Pattern of Christian Loyalty, 193– 94 Paul (apostle), 312 Paul IV (pope), 169 Paul V (pope), 18–19 Paunet, Father Pierre, 53, 54 Pax licita, 381 Payne, Robert, 382 Peace-maker, 333, 335 Peiresc, Nicolas Fabri de, 178 Pelagiarminianism, 266 Pelagius, 83– 87, 135, 140 Pellicero, Miguel Juan, 413, 455, 467, 476, 480. See also miracles, Calanda Pemble, William, 49 penance, 55– 56 Penn, William, 494– 95 Penry, John “Penrius,” 218 Pepys, Samuel, 487 Percy, Henry (earl of Northumberland), 5 Perkins, William, 13–16 Perron, Jacques Davy du (cardinal), 297 Perrot, George, 268, 269, 281, 458 Persons, Robert, 2

Peter, Hugh, 438 Petition apologeticall, presented to the Kinges most excellent maiesty, 10 Petty, William, 457 Philip, Father Robert, 178– 79, 181, 185, 195, 197, 199, 202, 207, 438 Philip IV (king), 482 Philotea’s Pilgrimage to Perfection, 491 Photius (Photius I of Constantinople), 236 Pickering, Thomas, 502 Pickford, Jerome, 53, 63 Pius V (pope), 442 Poling, 259, 263, 264 Pollet, Jacobus, 71 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 455, 458 Poor Clares of Gravelines, 51, 59, 101– 2, 104 Port-Royal, 461– 62 postulate of transfer, 165 Potter, Christopher, 227, 249, 352 Powell (Powel), Gabriel, 6, 10 Powell, Daniel, 50 Powhatan, 94– 95 Preston, Roland (Dom Thomas; alias Roger Widdrington), 24– 31, 30, 82, 116, 117, 120, 152, 180, 193, 194, 202, 391 Preston– Sancta Clara probability axiom, 392 Price, Daniel, 46, 206 Price, Dom William, 195, 196, 206, 207, 250– 51, 256, 484 priest (term), 221 Prima secundae, 25 probable ignorance, 133 Problematibus, 330 Prosper of Aquitaine, 313 Protestation of Allegiance, 9 Provincial Constitutions of the Anglican Church (Ecclesiae Anglicanae), 244 Provincial Letters, 490 Prynne, William, 83– 84, 117, 220, 221, 229, 248, 459 Ptolemy, Claudius, 44 purgatory, 325– 27

Index

Quaestiones (Scotus), 60 Quakers, 490– 91, 494– 95 Radcliffe sisters, 100–101, 104 Randour, Valentine, 292, 428 “Ransom of Time, The,” 50 rational account of the grounds of Christian faith, A, 466– 67 rational account of the grounds of Protestant Religion, A, 468 Real Principles of Roman Catholicism in Reference to God and Country, The, 506 Recollect convent of Vernon, 279– 80 Réflexions critiques et théologiques, 507 Religio jurisconsulti, 466 Religio medici, 463, 466, 469 Religio philosophi peripati discutienda, 453– 82, 491, 505 Replie to Jesuit Fisher’s Answer, A, 86 Responsio apologetica, 27 Result of a Dialogue concerning the middle-state of souls, The, 460– 61 reunion, 114, 124, 158, 169, 172, 176– 79, 185– 86, 188, 190, 192– 96, 199– 207, 219, 241, 250– 51, 256– 58, 261, 271, 274– 75, 340, 345, 351, 403, 416, 420, 449– 52, 483– 84 Richard of St. Victor, 480 Richelieu, Cardinal, 175– 84 rights of dissenters from the established church, principally to English Catholics, The, 507 rigidity, 187– 89 Rinuccini, Giovanni, 292, 380 Rogers, Thomas, 152 Rogers, William, 459, 462, 491– 92 Roman Catholics, 4– 8 Roman-Catholick Principles in reference to God and the King, 506 Rossetti, Carlo, 257 Rous, Sir Francis, 258, 266 Rudyerd, Sir Benjamin, 258 Rushworth’s Dialogues, 280, 284

665 Sa, Emanuel, 21, 134 Sacrae theologiae doctores, 464 sacraments, 434– 37 Safeguard from Shipwreck, 266– 67, 270– 71, 273– 76, 278 Salgado de Somoza, Francisco, 166 Salzedo, Ignacio Lopez de, 166 Sancroft, William, 415, 416 Sancta Clara, Franciscus à burial, 502– 3 changed name from Christopher Davenport, 39 early life, 32– 53 See also Coventriensis, Franciscus; Davenport, Christopher; Davenportus, Pater Frater Franciscus, vulgò A S. Clara; Hunt, Father; Hunt, Francis; Hunt, Mr.; Scot, Philip; Venantius, Frater Franciscus Sancta Clara, Franciscus à, writings Apologia episcoporum, 214– 46, 247– 50, 249, 256– 57, 411 De definibilitate controversiae Immaculatae Conceptionis, 411, 420– 21 Deus, natura, gratia, 112– 47, 173, 175, 178, 183, 185, 186, 194, 196, 203, 206, 207, 248, 250, 261, 268, 269, 289, 344, 411. See also Thirty-nine Articles Enchyridion of Faith, 400, 410– 52, 425, 439, 455, 458, 464, 483– 84, 488 Epistolium apologeticum (Apologetic Letter), 79, 80, 112, 187 Explanation of the Roman Catholicks Belief, 398– 402, 404– 5, 407– 8, 411, 425, 429, 494, 506 Manuale missionariorum, 458– 59, 487, 488 Paralipomena philosophica de mundo peripatetico, 411, 412, 413, 453, 491 Religio philosophi peripati discutienda, 453– 82, 491, 505 Result of a Dialogue concerning the middle-state of souls, The, 460– 61

666 Index Sancta Clara, Franciscus à, writings (cont.) Summa veteris theologiae, 411, 488 Systema fidei, 278– 81, 291– 342, 344– 45, 346– 47, 351, 376, 380, 390, 420, 478, 501, 505 —“De papatu,” 291– 92 Sancto Edmundo, Lawrence à, 249, 413, 465 Sandys, Sir Edwin, 94– 95 Sandys– Ferrar faction, 94– 95 Sarpi, Paolo, 13, 442 Savage, Jane, 116 Savage, Matthew (Selvaggi, Matthew), 116, 122 Savage, Sir Christopher, 37 Saville, Sir Henry, 33– 36, 44– 45, 48 Sayer, Gregory, 24– 25 Scargill affair, 499 schism, 352– 53, 355, 356, 364– 66, 483 Scot, Philip (Sancta Clara, Franciscus à), x, 349, 377, 411 Scotus, John Duns, 55– 56, 59– 60, 70, 75, 76, 77, 125, 128– 29, 131, 132– 34, 156, 160– 61, 162, 163, 189, 222, 234, 237, 238, 295, 296, 311, 413, 472 Second Parallel, 91 Selby, Dom Wilfrid, 181, 193, 195, 196 Selden, John, 220– 21, 225, 228, 290, 383, 392, 486 Selvaggi, Matteo (Savage, Matthew), 116, 122 Senis, Bernardine de, 67 Sentences Commentary, 59, 480 Seraphyck Love, 459 Sergeant, John, 253– 54, 502 Seymour, Thomas, 497, 498, 501 Sheldon, Gilbert, 290, 382, 438, 484, 492 Sheldon, Ralph, 462 Shepheard, Father William, 490 Short relation of the life, virtues and miracles of S. Elizabeth, A, 106 Shorthouse, Joseph Henry, 507– 8 Sincere popish convert, The, 496 Smising, Theodor, 129

Smith, Richard (bishop), 108, 112–13, 124, 133, 178, 180, 182, 194, 203– 4 Smythe–Warwick faction, 95 Soame, Robert, 352 Some Protestant Misconceptions, 506 Somerset, Anne, 465, 476 Somerset House, 32, 115, 197, 205, 347, 486, 491, 498, 502– 3, 506 Souchey, Jean-Baptiste Du, 279, 292 souls, 328– 29 Southcot, John, 119, 120– 23, 173, 175, 180, 183, 195, 197, 204 Spada, Bernardino (cardinal), 185, 196 St. Bonaventure’s (convent and college), 58– 59, 63, 68– 70, 114, 344 St. Elizabeth’s (convent), 101, 103, 105, 106, 112, 249, 276 St. Maddern’s well, 463 St. Vedast (school), 59 Stanney, William, 51 Stapleton, Thomas, 296, 298, 323, 345– 46 stars, 75– 77 Stillingfleet, Edward, 466– 67, 468, 470, 478, 480– 82, 495, 496– 97, 498, 502, 506– 7 Stockis, Leonard, 349 Stow, John, 22 Strafford, Earl of (Thomas Wentworth), 258 Strode, William, 204 Stuart, Sir Walter, 453, 466 Stubbe, Henry, 456 Suarez, Francisco, 155, 157, 163, 167, 168, 239, 323, 327 Summa theologiae, 25 Summa veteris theologiae, 411, 488 supererogation, 80–111, 146– 47, 151, 274, 430 supererogatory obedience, 120 superstition, 327– 28 Supplementum ad Quaestiones Scoti in libros de Anima, 60 Supplication to the Kings most excellent Majestie, 9 survay of London, A, 22

Index

Survey of the New Religion, A, 7, 13 Sutcliffe, Matthew, 10, 219 Swineshead, Richard, 33 Systema fidei, 278– 81, 291– 342, 344– 45, 346– 47, 351, 376, 380, 390, 420, 478, 501, 505 “De papatu,” 291– 92 Talbot, Peter, 460 Taylor, Jeremy, 209, 252– 56, 276, 337– 42, 343, 345, 348, 352, 383, 416, 488, 495, 500. See also Gunpowder Plot, sermon Teresa of Avila, Saint, 463 Tertullian, 70– 71 Theologia eklektike (Liberty of prophesying), 337– 39, 345 theologicall disputation concerning the oath of allegiance, A, 28– 29 Thirty-nine Articles, 148– 72, 183, 187, 189, 202 Thomson, William, 117, 120, 207 Thorndike, Herbert, 484, 485, 488 Thorpe, George, 94 Three Seats of Power in One Harmony, 211–13 Tillotson, John, 497 Toletus, Cardinal (Francisco de Toledo), 21 Torre, Raphael De la, 328 transubstantiation, 156– 57, 323, 341, 432– 33 Treatise of Liberty and Necessity, 426 Treatise of the Definibility of the Controversy, 420 Treatise of the Hierarchie, A, 108, 110 Treatise of the Schism of England, 346, 349– 52, 364– 65, 380– 83, 389, 403, 411, 414, 448, 496 Treaty of Westphalia, 380, 421 Trelille, John, 455, 458, 461, 463 Trent, Council of. See councils of the Church, Trent Tribunal sacramentale et visibile animarum in hoc vita mortali, 55 Triplici nodo, 19

667 true intellectual system of the universe, The, 496 Turrecremata (Juan de Torquemada, cardinal), 164– 65 Two Treatises, 278 Unbishoping of Timothy and Titus, 248 Unum necessarium, 488 Urban VIII (pope), 64– 66, 79, 106, 126, 173, 176, 179, 182– 83, 184, 193, 195, 202, 256, 325 usury, 498 Valdés, Juan de (Valdesso), 96 Valentia, Gregorio de, 164 Van Dyck, Anthony, 183, 475 Vane, Henry, 402– 3, 406 Vargas, Tomás Tamayo de, 455 Vasquez, Gabriel, 24– 25, 26, 28, 160, 228, 231, 237, 238 Venables, Gilbert de, 38, 279– 80 Venant, Saint, 54– 55 Venantius, Franciscus (Francis Hunt; Sancta Clara, Franciscus à), 260, 486 Venantius, Frater Franciscus (Brother Francis Hunt; Sancta Clara, Franciscus à), 483 Venero, Alonso, 455– 56 Vernon, Richard de, 280 Vernon, William de, 280 Vincent of Lérins, Saint, 163, 296– 97, 316, 420 Vincentian Rule of Faith, 419, 422– 23 Vinot, Edmund, 279, 292 Virginia (colony), 93– 95 Vita minorica ad pristinum statum restituta, 489 Vitoria, Francisco de, 168 Wadding, Luke, 196, 268, 269 Wadsworth, James, 100 Waldensis (Thomas Netter), 108, 153, 225, 346 Wall, Father John, 502 Wallis, John, 413

668 Index Walmesley, Lady Juliana, 489– 90 Walsh, Peter, 55, 292, 380 Walsingham, Francis, 43, 243 Ward, Mary, 101, 490 Warmington, William, 19– 24 Warwickshire Visitation of 1619, 38– 39 Watkins, Richard, 456 Weston, Richard, 183 Whitaker, William, 132, 150 White, Francis, 86, 137 White, Thomas (Blacklo, Blackloe), 47, 53, 112, 118–19, 123, 197, 249, 278– 79, 280, 284– 90, 292, 298, 300, 302, 303, 316, 326– 27, 329, 343, 348, 389– 90, 412, 415, 426, 460– 61, 490 Whitgift, John (archbishop), 218 Widdrington, Roger, 24, 27 Wightman, Edward, 219 Wilkinson, Henry, 501 Wilkinson, John, 48 William of Heystbury, 33 William of Occam, 220, 226, 295 William II (king), 219

Williams, Roger, 402, 403, 406 Williamson, Joseph, 456 Willis, Thomas, 456, 457, 475, 491 Willoughby, Lady, 413 Wilson, Matthew. See Knott, Edward Windebank, Sir Francis, 181, 192, 193, 194– 95, 196, 203, 205, 206, 210, 250, 256, 257, 258, 279, 291, 331 Winter, John, 250, 272, 273 witches, 479– 80 women’s participation in ecclesiastic life, 236 Wood, Anthony, 32, 254, 456, 459, 462, 486, 491, 501 Woodhead, Abraham, 462, 492 Wotton, Anthony, 84, 91– 92 Wren, Christopher, 456 Wyatt, Francis, 94 Yate, Leonard, 43 Ypres (convent), 53, 54– 55, 58, 68 Zeal Examined, 402– 3, 406 Zelo domus Dei, 380– 81

A N N E A S H L E Y DAV E N P O RT is a lecturer in the Boston College Honors Program. She is the author of Descartes’s Theory of Action and Measure of a Different Greatness: The Intensive Infinite, 1250 –1650.