Whatever we may think of the good taste of Bruno"s sarcasms upon the faith in which he had been bred--and it is certain that he never rightly apprehended Christianity in its essence--there is no doubt he died a valiant martyr to the truth as he conceived it. "His death like that of Paleario, Carnesecchi, and so many more, no less than countless exiles suffered for religious causes, are a proof that in Italy men had begun to recognize their obligation to a faith, the duty of obedience to a thought: an immense progress, not sufficiently appreciated even by modern historians."[120] Bruno was a hero in the battle for the freedom of the conscience, for the right of man to think and speak in liberty.[121]
[Footnote 120: These pregnant words are in Berti"s _Vita di G.B._ p.
299.]
[Footnote 121: He well deserves this name, in spite of his recantation at Venice; for it seems incredible that he could not by concessions have purchased his life. As Breugger wrote with brutal crudity to Kepler: "What profit did he gain by enduring such torments? If there were no G.o.d to punish crimes, as he believed, could he not have pretended any thing to save his life?" We may add that the alternative to death for a relapsed apostate was perpetual incarceration; and seven years of prison may well have made Bruno prefer death with honor.]
Just five years before this memorable 17th of February, Ta.s.so had pa.s.sed quietly away in S. Onofrio. "How dissimilar in genius and fortune,"
exclaims Berti, "were these men, though born under the same skies, though in childhood they breathed the same air! Ta.s.so a Christian and poet of the cross; Bruno hostile to all religious symbols. The one, tired and disillusioned of the world, ends his days in the repose of the convent; the other sets out from the convent to expire upon the scaffold, turning his eyes away from the crucifix."[122] And yet how much alike in some important circ.u.mstances of their lives were these two men! Both wanderers, possessed by that spirit of vagrancy which is the outward expression of an inner restlessness. The unfrocked friar, the courtier out of service, had no home in Italy. Both were pursued by an oestrum corresponding to the intellectual perturbations which closed the sixteenth century, so different from the idyllic calm that rested upon Ariosto and the artists of its opening years. Sufficient justice has not yet been done in history to the Italian wanderers and exiles of this period, men who carried the spirit of the Renaissance abroad, after the Renaissance had ended in Italy, to the extremest verges of the civilized world. An enumeration of their names, an examination of their services to modern thought, would show how puissant was the intellectual influence of Italy in that period of her political decadence.[123]
[Footnote 122: _op. cit._ p. 70.]
[Footnote 123: Both Berti and Quinet have made similar remarks, which, indeed, force themselves upon a student of the sixteenth century.]
Bruno has to be treated from two distinct but interdependent points of view--in his relation to contemporary thought and the Renaissance; and in his relation to the evolution of modern philosophy--as the critic of mediaeval speculation and the champion of sixteenth-century enthusiasm; and also as the precursor of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Sch.e.l.ling, Hegel, Darwin.
From the former of these two points of view Bruno appears before us as the man who most vitally and comprehensively grasped the leading tendencies of his age in their intellectual essence. He left behind him the mediaeval conception of an extra-mundane G.o.d, creating a finite world, of which this globe is the center, and the princ.i.p.al episode in the history of which is the series of events from the Fall, through the Incarnation and Crucifixion, to the Last Judgment.[124] He subst.i.tuted the conception of an ever-living, ever-acting, ever-self-effectuating G.o.d, immanent in an infinite universe, to the contemplation of whose attributes the mind of man ascends by study of Nature and interrogation of his conscience. The rehabilitation of the physical world and of humanity as part of its order, which the Renaissance had already indirectly effected through the medium of arts and literature and modes of life, found in Bruno an impa.s.sioned metaphysical supporter. He divinized Nature, not by degrading the Deity to matter, but by lifting matter to partic.i.p.ation in the divine existence. The Renaissance had proclaimed the dignity of man considered as a mundane creature, and not in his relation to a hypothetical other-world. It abundantly manifested the beauty and the joy afforded by existence on this planet, and laughingly discarded past theological determinations to the contrary of its new Gospel. Bruno undertook the systematization of Renaissance intuitions; declared the divine reality of Nature and of man; demonstrated that we cannot speculate G.o.d, cannot think ourselves, cannot envisage the universe, except under the form of one living, infinite, eternal, divinely-sustained and soul-penetrated complex. He repudiated authority of every sort, refusing to acknowledge the decrees of the Church, freely criticising past philosophers, availing himself of all that seemed to him substantial in their speculations, but appealing in the last resort to that inner witness, that light of reason, which corresponds in the mental order to conscience in the moral. As he deified Nature, so he emanc.i.p.ated man as forming with Nature an integral part of the supreme Being. He was led upon this path to combat Aristotle and to satirize Christian beliefs, with a subtlety of scholastic argumentation and an acerbity of rhetoric that now pa.s.s for antiquated.
Much that is obsolete in his writings must be referred to the polemical necessities of an age enthralled by peripatetic conceptions, and saturated with the ecclesiastical divinity of the schoolmen.
[Footnote 124: This theological conception of history inspired the sacred drama of the Middle Ages, known to us as Cyclical Miracle Plays.]
These forces of the philosophy he sought to supersede, had to be attacked with their own weapons and by methods adapted to the spirit of his age. Similar judgment may be pa.s.sed upon his championship of the Copernican system. That system was the pivot of his metaphysic, the revelation to which he owed his own conception of the universe. His strenuous and ingenious endeavors to prove its veracity, his elaborate and often-repeated refutations of the Ptolemaic theory, appear to modern minds superfluous. But we must remember what a deeply-penetrating, widely-working revolution Copernicus effected in cosmology, how he dislocated the whole fabric upon which Catholic theology rested, how new and unintelligible his doctrine then seemed, and what vast horizons he opened for speculation on the destinies of man. Bruno was the first fully to grasp the importance of the Copernican hypothesis, to perceive its issues and to adapt it to the formation of a new ontology.
Copernicus, though he proclaimed the central position of the sun in our system, had not ventured to maintain the infinity of the universe. For him, as for the elder physicists, there remained a sphere of fixed stars inclosing the world perceived by our senses within walls of crystal.
Bruno broke those walls, and boldly a.s.serted the now recognized existence of numberless worlds in s.p.a.ce illimitable. His originality lies in the clear and comprehensive notion he formed of the Copernican discovery, and in his application of its corollaries to the Renaissance apocalypse of deified nature and emanc.i.p.ated man. The deductions he drew were so manifold and so acute that they enabled him to forecast the course which human thought has followed in all provinces of speculation.
This leads us to consider how Bruno is related to modern science and philosophy. The main point seems to be that he obtained a vivid mental picture (_Vorstellung_) of the physical universe, differing but little in essentials from that which has now come to be generally accepted. In reasoning from this concept as a starting-point, he formed opinions upon problems of theology, ontology, biology and psychology, which placed him out of harmony with medaeival thought, and in agreement with the thought of our own time. Why this was so, can easily be explained. Bruno, first of all philosophers, adapted science, in the modern sense of that term, to metaphysic. He was the first to perceive that a revolution in our conception of the material universe, so momentous as that effected by Copernicus, necessitated a new theology and a new philosophical method.
Man had ceased to be the center of all things; this globe was no longer "the hub of the universe," but a small speck floating on infinity. The Christian scheme of the Fall and the Redemption, if not absolutely incompatible with the new cosmology was rendered by it less conceivable in any literal sense. Some of the main points on which the early Christians based their faith, and which had hardened into dogmas through the course of centuries--such, for instance, as the Ascension and the Second Advent--ceased to have their old significance. In a world where there was neither up nor down, the translation of a corporeal Deity to some place above the clouds, whence he would descend to judge men at the last day, had only a grotesque or a symbolic meaning; whereas to the first disciples, imbued with theories of a fixed celestial sphere, it presented a solemn and apparently well-founded expectation.
The fundamental doctrine of the Incarnation, in like manner, lost intelligibility and value, when G.o.d had to be thought no longer as the Creator of a finite cosmos, but as a Being commensurate with infinity.
It was clear to a mind so acute as Bruno"s that the dogmas of the Church were correlated to a view of the world which had been superseded; and he drew the logical inference that they were at bottom but poetical and popular adumbrations of the Deity in terms concordant with erroneous physical notions. Aristotle and Ptolemy, the masters of philosophy and cosmography based upon a theory of the universe as finite and circ.u.mscribed within fixed limits, lent admirable aid to the theological constructions of the Middle Ages. The Church, adopting their science, gave metaphysical and logical consistency to those earlier poetical and popular conceptions of the religious sense. The _naf_ hopes and romantic mythologies of the first Christians stiffened into syllogisms and ossified in the huge fabric of the _Summa_. But Aristotle and Ptolemy were now dethroned. Bruno, in a far truer sense than Democritus before him,
extra Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi.
Bolder even than Copernicus, and nearer in his intuition to the truth, he denied that the universe had "flaming walls" or any walls at all.
That "immaginata circonferenza," "quella margine immaginata del cielo,"
on which antique science and Christian theology alike reposed, was the object of his ceaseless satire, his oft-repeated polemic. What, then, rendered Bruno the precursor of modern thought in its various manifestations, was that he grasped the fundamental truth upon which modern science rests, and foresaw the conclusions which must be drawn from it. He speculated boldly, incoherently, vehemently; but he speculated with a clear conception of the universe, as we still apprehend it. Through the course of three centuries we have been engaged in verifying the guesses, deepening, broadening and solidifying the hypotheses, which Bruno"s extension of the Copernican theory, and his application of it to pure thought, suggested to his penetrating and audacious intellect, Bruno was convinced that religion in its higher essence would not suffer from the new philosophy. Larger horizons extended before the human intellect. The soul expanded in more exhilarating regions than the old theologies had offered. The sense of the Divine in Nature, instead of dwindling down to atheism, received fresh stimulus from the immeasurable prospect of an infinite and living universe. Bruno, even more than Spinoza, was a G.o.d-intoxicated man. The inebriation of the Renaissance, inspired by golden visions of truth and knowledge close within man"s grasp, inflamed with joy at escaping from out-worn wearying formula into what appeared to be the simple intuition of an everlasting verity, pulses through all his utterances. He has the same cherubic confidence in the renascent age, that charms us in the work of Rabelais. The slow, painful, often thwarted, ever more dubious elaboration of modern metaphysic in _rapport_ with modern science--that process which, after completing the cycle of all knowledge and sounding the fathomless depth of all ignorance, has left us in grave disillusionment and st.u.r.dy patience--swam before Bruno in a rapturous vision. The Inquisition and the stake put an end abruptly to his dream.
But the dream was so golden, so divine, that it was worth the pangs of martyrdom. Can we say the same for Hegel"s system, or for Schopenhauers or for the encyclopaedic ingenuity of Herbert Spencer?
Bruno imagined the universe as infinite s.p.a.ce, filled with ether, in which an infinite number of worlds, or solar systems resembling our own, composed of similar materials and inhabited by countless living creatures, move with freedom. The whole of this infinite and complex cosmos he conceived to be animated by a single principle of thought and life. This indwelling force, or G.o.d, he described in Platonic phraseology sometimes as the Anima Mundi, sometimes as the Artificer, who by working from within molds infinite substance into an infinity of finite modes. Though we are compelled to think of the world under the two categories of spirit and matter, these apparently contradictory const.i.tuents are forever reconciled and harmonized in the divine existence, whereof illimitable activity, illimitable volition, and illimitable potentiality are correlated and reciprocally necessary terms. In Aristotelian language, Bruno a.s.sumed infinite form and infinite matter as movements of an eternal process, by which the infinite unity manifests itself in concrete reality. This being the case, it follows that nothing exists which has not life, and is not part of G.o.d. The universe itself is one immeasurable animal, or animated Being. The solar systems are huge animals; the globes are lesser animals; and so forth down to the monad of molecular cohesion. As the universe is infinite and eternal, motion, place and time do not qualify it; these are terms applicable only to the finite parts of which it is composed. For the same reason nothing in the universe can perish. What we call birth and death, generation and dissolution, is only the pa.s.sage of the infinite, and h.o.m.ogeneous ent.i.ty through successive phases of finite and differentiated existence; this continuous process of exchange and transformation being stimulated and sustained by attraction and repulsion, properties of the indwelling divine soul aiming at self-realization.
Having formed this conception, Bruno supported it by metaphysical demonstration, and deduced conclusions bearing on psychology, religion, ethics. Much of his polemic was directed against the deeply-rooted notion of a finite world derived from Aristotle. Much was devoted to the proof of the Copernican discovery. Orthodox theology was indirectly combated or plausibly caressed. There are consequently many pages in his dialogues which do not interest a modern reader, seeing that we have outlived the conditions of thought that rendered them important. In the process of his argument, he established the theory of a philosophical belief, a religion of religions, or "religione della mente," as he phrased it, prior to and comprehensive of all historical creeds. He speculated, as probabilities, the transmigration of souls, and the interchangeability of types in living creatures. He further postulated a concordance between the order of thought and the order of existence in the universe, and inclined to the doctrine of necessity in morals. Bruno thus obtained _per saltum_ a prospect over the whole domain of knowledge subsequently traversed by rationalism in metaphysics, theology and ethics. In the course of these demonstrations and deductions he antic.i.p.ated Descartes" position of the ident.i.ty of mind and being. He supplied Spinoza with the substance of his reasoned pantheism; Leibnitz with his theory of monadism and pre-established harmony. He laid down Hegel"s doctrine of contraries, and perceived that thought was a dialectic process. The modern theory of evolution was enunciated by him in pretty plain terms. He had grasped the physical law of the conservation of energy. He solved the problem of evil by defining it to be a relative condition of imperfect development. He denied that Paradise or a Golden Age is possible for man, or that, if possible, it can be considered higher in the moral scale than organic struggle toward completion by reconciliation of opposites through pain and labor. He sketched in outline the comparative study of religions, which is now beginning to be recognized as the proper basis for theology. Finally, he had a firm and vital hold upon that supreme speculation of the universe, considered no longer as the battle-ground of dual principles, or as the finite fabric of an almighty designer, but as the self-effectuation of an infinite unity, appearing to our intelligence as spirit and matter--that speculation which in one shape or another controls the course of modern thought.[125]
[Footnote 125: It was my intention to support the statements in this paragraph by translating the pa.s.sages which seem to me to justify them; and I had gone so far as to make English versions of some twenty pages in length, when I found that this material would overweight my book. A study of Bruno as the great precursor of modern thought in its more poetical and widely synthetic speculation must be left for a separate essay. Here I may remark that the most faithful and pithily condensed abstract of Bruno"s philosophy is contained in Goethe"s poem _Proemium zu Gott und Welt_. Yet this poem expresses Goethe"s thought, and it is doubtful whether Goethe had studied Bruno except in the work of his disciple Spinoza.]
It must not be supposed that Bruno apprehended these points with distinctness, or that he expressed them precisely in the forms with which we are familiar. The hackneyed metaphor of a Pisgah view across the promised land applies to him with singular propriety. Moreover, as an acute critic has remarked, things old and new are so curiously blended in his writings that what at first sight appears modern, is often found upon reflection to be antique, and what is couched in obsolete scholastic terminology, turns out upon a.n.a.lysis to contain the germs of advanced theories.[126] The peculiar forms adapted for the exposition of his thoughts contribute to the difficulty of obtaining a methodical view of Bruno"s philosophy. It has, therefore, been disputed whether he was a pantheist or an atheist, a materialist or a spiritualist, a mystic or an agnostic. No one would have contended more earnestly than Bruno himself, that the sage can hold each and all of these apparent contradictions together, with the exception of atheism; which last is a simple impossibility. The fragmentary and impa.s.sioned exposition which Bruno gave to his opinions in a series of Italian dialogues and Latin poems will not discourage those of his admirers who estimate the conspicuous failure made by all elaborate system-builders from Aristotle to Hegel. To fathom the mystery of the world, and to express that mystery in terms of logic, is clearly beyond the faculty of man. Philosophies that aim at universe-embracing, G.o.d-explaining, nature-elucidating, man-illuminating, comprehensiveness, have justly, therefore, become objects of suspicion. The utmost that man can do, placed as he is at obvious disadvantages for obtaining a complete survey of the whole, is to whet his intelligence upon confessedly insoluble problems, to extend the sphere of his practical experience, to improve his dominion over matter, to study the elevation of his moral nature, and to encourage himself for positive achievements by the indulgence in those glorious dreams from which regenerative creeds and inspiring philosophies have sprung--
Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And ever moving as the restless spheres.
[Footnote 126: Spaventa in his _Saggi di Critica_.]
Faith and poetry are the highest regions in which his spirit can profitably move. The study of government, law, and social ethics, the a.n.a.lysis of physical conditions to which he is subject, and over which he has an undefined, though limited, control, form the practical sphere of his intelligence. Bruno traversed these regions; and, forasmuch as the outcome of his exploration was no system, but a congeries of poetic visions, shrewd guesses, profound intuitions, and pa.s.sionate enthusiasms, bound together and sustained by a burning sense of the Divine unity in nature and in man, we may be permitted to regard him as more fortunate than those cloud-castle-builders whose cla.s.sifications of absolute existences are successively proved by the advance of relative knowledge to be but catalogues of some few objects apprehended by the vision of each partially-instructed age. We have, indeed, reason to marvel how many of Bruno"s intuitions have formed the stuff of later, more elaborated systems, and still remain the best which these contain.
We have reason to wonder how many of his divinations have worked themselves into the common fund of modern beliefs, and have become philosophical truisms.
It is probable that if Bruno"s career had not been cut short by the dungeon and the stake at the early age of thirty-four, he might have produced some final work in which his theories would have a.s.sumed a formal shape. It is possible that the Vatican even now contains the first sketch for such a studied exposition in the treatise on the Seven Arts, which Giovanni Mocenigo handed over to the Inquisition, and which the philosopher intended to dedicate to Clement VIII. But the loss of this elaborated system is hardly to be regretted, except for the clearer light it must have thrown upon the workings of the most illuminated intellect in the sixteenth century. We know that it could not have revealed to us the secret of things.
Bruno cast his thoughts in two molds: the dialogue, and Latin hexameters. He was attracted to the latter by his early study of Parmenides and Lucretius. The former seems to have been natural to the man. We must not forget that he was a Neapolitan, accustomed from childhood to the farces of his native land, vividly alive to the comic aspects of existence, and joyously appreciative of reality. His first known composition was a comedy, _Il Candelajo_; and something of the drama can be traced in all those Italian compositions which distinguish the period of his activity as an author in London. Lucian rather than Plato or Cicero determined the form of his dialogue. An element of the burlesque distinguishes his method of approaching religious and moral problems in the _s.p.a.ccio della Bestia_, and the _Cavallo Pegaseo_. And though he exchanged the manner of his model for more serious exposition in the trio of metaphysical dialogues, named _La Cena delle Ceneri, Della Causa_, and _Dell" Infinito Universo_, yet the irresistible tendency to dramatic satire emerges even there in the description of England and in the characters of the indispensable pedant buffoon. His dialogue on the _Eroici Furori_ is sustained at a high pitch of aspiring fervor. Mystical in its attempt to adumbrate the soul"s thirst for truth and beauty, it adopts the method of a running commentary upon poems, in the manner of a discursive and fantastic _Vita Nuova_. In his Italian style, Bruno owed much to the fashion set by Aretino. The study of Aretino"s comedies is apparent in _Il Candelajo_. The stringing together of words and ideas in triplets, balanced by a second set of words and ideas in ant.i.thetical triplets--this trick of rhetoric, which wearies a modern reader of his prose, seems to have been copied straight from Aretino. The coinage of fantastic t.i.tles, of which _Lo s.p.a.ccio della Bestia Trionfante_ contributed in some appreciable degree to Bruno"s martyrdom, should be ascribed to the same influence. The source of these literary affectations was a bad one. Aretino, Doni, and such folk were no fit masters for Giordano Bruno even in so slight a matter as artistic form. Yet, in this respect, he shared a corrupt taste which was common to his generation, and proved how fully he represented the age in which he lived. It is not improbable that the few contemporary readers of his works, especially in euphuistic England, admired the gewgaws he so plentifully scattered and rendered so brilliant by the coruscations of his wit. When, however, the real divine oestrum descends upon him, he discards those follies. Then his language, like his thought, is all his own: sublime, impa.s.sioned, burning, turbid; instinct with a deep volcanic fire of genuine enthusiasm. The thought is simple; the diction direct; the att.i.tude of mind and the turn of expression are singularly living, surprisingly modern. We hear the man speak, as he spoke at Fulke Greville"s supper-party, as he spoke at Oxford, as he spoke before the Sorbonne, as he might be speaking now. There is no air of literary effort, no tincture of antiquated style, in these masculine utterances.
CHAPTER X.
FRA PAOLO SARPI.
Sarpi"s Position in the History of Venice--Parents and Boyhood--Entrance into the Order of the Servites--His Personal Qualities--Achievements as a Scholar and Man of Science--His Life among the Servites--In Bad Odor at Rome--Paul V. places Venice under Interdict--Sarpi elected Theologian and Counselor of the Republic--His Polemical Writings--Views on Church and State--The Interdict Removed--Roman Vengeance--Sarpi attacked by Bravi--His Wounds, Illness, Recovery--Subsequent History of the a.s.sa.s.sins--Further Attempts on Sarpi"s Life--Sarpi"s Political and Historical Works--History of the Council of Trent--Sarpi"s Att.i.tude toward Protestantism--His Judgment of the Jesuits--Sarpi"s Death--The Christian Stoic.
Fra Paolo was the son of Francesco Sarpi and Isabella Morelli, Venetians of the humbler middle cla.s.s. He was born in 1552, christened Pietro, and nicknamed Pierino because of his diminutive stature. On entering the Order of the Servites he adopted the religious name of Paolo, which he subsequently rendered famous throughout Europe. Since he died in 1623, Sarpi"s life coincided with a period of supreme interest and manifold vicissitudes in the decline of Venice. After the battle of Lepanto in 1571, he saw the n.o.bles of S. Mark welcome their victorious admiral Sebastiano Veniero and confer on him the honors of the Dogeship. In 1606, he aided the Republic to withstand the thunders of the Vatican and defy the excommunication of a Pope. Eight years later he attended at those councils of state which unmasked the conspiracy, known as Bedmar"s, to destroy Venice. In his early manhood Cyprus had been wrested from the hands of S. Mark; and inasmuch as the Venetians alone sustained the cause of Christian civilization against Turk and pirate in the Eastern seas, he was able before his death to antic.i.p.ate the ruin which the war of Candia subsequently brought upon his country. During the last eighteen years of his existence Sarpi was the intellect of the Republic; the man of will and mind who gave voice and vigor to her policy of independence; the statesman who most clearly penetrated the conditions of her strength and weakness. This friar incarnated the Venetian spirit at a moment when, upon the verge of decadence, it had attained self-consciousness; and so instinctively devoted are Venetians to their State that in his lifetime he was recognized by them as hero, and after his death venerated as saint.
No sooner had the dispute with Paul V. been compromised, than Sarpi noticed how the aristocracy of Venice yielded themselves to sloth and political indifference. The religious obsequiousness to Rome and the "peace or rather cowardice of slaves," which were gradually immersing Italy in mental torpor and luxurious idleness, invaded this last stronghold of freedom. Though Sarpi"s Christian Stoicism and practical sagacity saved him from playing the then futile part of public agitator, his private correspondence shows how low his hope had sunk for Italy.
Nothing but a general war could free her from the yoke of arrogant Rome and foreign despotism. Meanwhile the Papal Court, Spain and the House of Austria, having everything to lose by contest, preserved the peace of Italy at any cost. Princes whose petty thrones depended on Spanish and Papal good-will, dreaded to disturb the equilibrium of servitude; the population, dulled by superst.i.tion, emasculated by Jesuitical corruption and intimidated by Church tyranny, slumbered in the gross mud-honey of slavish pleasures. From his cell in the convent of the Servites Sarpi swept the whole political horizon, eagerly antic.i.p.ating some dawn-star of deliverance. At one time his eyes rested on the Duke of Savoy, but that unquiet spirit failed to steer his course clear between Spanish and French interests, Roman jealousies, and the ill-concealed hostilities of Italian potentates. At another time, like all lovers of freedom throughout Europe, he looked with confidence to Henri IV. But a fanatic"s dagger, sharpened by the Jesuits, cut short the monarch"s life and gave up France to the government of astute Florentine adventurers.
Germany was too distracted by internal dissensions, Holland too distant and preoccupied with her own struggle for existence, to offer immediate aid. It was in vain that Sarpi told his foreign correspondents that the war of liberty in Europe must be carried into the stronghold of absolutism. To secure a victory over the triple forces of Spain, the Papal Court and Jesuitry, Rome had to be attacked in Italy. His reasoning was correct. But peoples fighting for freedom on their native soil could not risk an adventure which only some central power of the first magnitude like France might have conducted with fair prospect of success. In the meantime what Sarpi called the Diacatholicon, that absolutist alliance of Rome, Spain and Austria, supported by the Inquisition and the Jesuits, accepted by the states of Italy and firmly rooted in some parts of Germany, invaded even those provinces where the traditions of independence still survived. After 1610 the Jesuits obtained possession of France; and though they did not effect their re-entrance into Venice, the ruling cla.s.ses of the Republic allowed themselves to be drugged by the prevalent narcotic. Venice, too, was fighting for her life in the Adriatic and the Levant, while her n.o.bles became daily more supine in aristocratic leisure, more papalizing in their private sympathies. Thus the last years of Sarpi"s life were overclouded by a deep discouragement, which did not, indeed, extinguish his trust in the divine Providence or his certain belief that the right would ultimately prevail, but which adds a tragic interest to the old age of this champion of political and moral liberty fallen on evil days.
I have thought it well to preface what I have to say about Sarpi with this forecast of his final att.i.tude. As the Italian who most clearly comprehended the full consequences of the Catholic Revival, and who practically resisted what was evil for his nation in that reactionary movement, he demands a prominent place in this book. On his claims to scientific discoveries and his special service rendered to the Venetian Republic it will suffice to touch but lightly.
Sarpi"s father was short of stature, brown-complexioned, choleric and restless. His mother was tall, pale, lymphatic, devoted to religious exercises and austerities. The son of their ill-a.s.sorted wedlock inherited something of both temperaments. In his face and eyes he resembled his mother; and he derived from her the piety which marked his course through life. His short, spare person, his vivid, ever-active intellect testified to the paternal impress. This blending of two diverse strains produced in him a singular tenacity of fiber. Man"s tenement of clay has rarely lodged a spirit so pa.s.sionless, so fine, so nearly disembodied. Of extreme physical tenuity, but gifted with inexhaustible mental energy, indefatigable in study, limitless in capacity for acquiring and retaining knowledge, he accentuated the type which nature gave him by the sustained habits of a lifetime. In diet he abstained from flesh and abhorred wine. His habitual weaknesses were those of one who subdues the body to mental government. As costive as Scaliger,[127] Sarpi suffered from hepatic hemorrhage, retention of urine, prolapsus recti, and hemorrhoids. Intermittent fevers reduced his strength, but rarely interfered with his activity. He refused to treat himself as an invalid, never altered his course of life for any illness, and went about his daily avocations when men of laxer tissue would have taken to their bed. His indifference to danger was that of the Stoic or the Mussulman. During a period of fifteen years he knew that restless foes were continually lying in wait to compa.s.s his death by poison or the dagger. Yet he could hardly be persuaded to use the most ordinary precautions. "I am resolved," he wrote, in 1609, "to give no thought whatever to these wretchednesses. He who thinks too much of living knows not how to live well. One is bound to die once; to be curious about the day or place or manner of dying is unprofitable. Whatsoever is G.o.d"s will is good."[128] As fear had no hold upon his nature, so was he wholly free from the dominion of the senses. A woman"s name, if we except that of the Queen of France, is, I think, not once mentioned in his correspondence. Even natural affections seem to have been obliterated; for he records nothing of his mother or his father or a sister who survived their deaths. One suit of clothes sufficed him; and his cell was furnished with three hour-gla.s.ses, a picture of Christ in the Garden, and a crucifix raised above a human skull.
[Footnote 127: We may remind our readers of Henri IV."s parting words to Joseph Scaliger: "Est-il vrai que vous avez ete de Paris a Dijon sans aller a la selle?"]
[Footnote 128: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 239.]
His physical sensitiveness, developed by austerity of life, was of the highest acuteness. Sight, touch, and taste in him acquired the most exquisite delicacy. He was wont to say that he feared no poison in his food, since he could discriminate the least adulteration of natural flavors. His mental perspicacity was equally subtle. As a boy he could recite thirty lines of Virgil after hearing them read over once. Books were not so much perused by him as penetrated at a glance; and what he had but casually noticed, never afterwards escaped his memory. In the vast Venetian archives he could lay his hand on any doc.u.ment without referring to registers or catalogues. The minutest details of houses visited or places pa.s.sed through, remained indelibly engraved upon his memory. The characters of men lay open to his insight through their physiognomy and gestures. When new scientific instruments were submitted to his curiosity, he divined their uses and comprehended their mechanism without effort. Thus endowed with a rare combination of physical and intellectual faculties, it is no wonder that Sarpi became one of the most learned men of his age or of any age. He was an excellent Greek, Latin, and Hebrew scholar; an adequate master of the French and Spanish languages; profoundly versed in canon and civil law; accomplished in the erudition of cla.s.sical and scholastic philosophy; thoroughly acquainted with secular and ecclesiastical history. Every branch of mathematics and natural science had been explored by him with the enthusiasm of a pioneer. He made experiments in chemistry, mechanics, mineralogy, metallurgy, vegetable and animal physiology. His practical studies in anatomy were carried on by the aid of vivisection. Following independent paths, he worked out some of Gilbert"s discoveries in magnetism, and of Da Porta"s in optics, demonstrated the valves of the veins, and the function of the uvea in vision, divined the uses of the telescope and thermometer. When he turned his attention to astronomy, he at once declared the futility of judicial astrology; and while recognizing the validity of Galileo"s system, predicted that this truth would involve its promulgator in serious difficulties with the Roman Inquisition. In his treatises on psychology and metaphysics, he originated a theory of sensationalism akin to that of Locke. There was, in fact, no field of knowledge which he had not traversed with the energy of a discoverer.
Only to poetry and _belles lettres_ he paid but little heed, disdaining the puerilities of rhetoric then in vogue, and using language as the simplest vehicle of thought. In conversation he was reticent, speaking little, but always to the purpose, and rather choosing to stimulate his collocutors than to make display of eloquence or erudition. Yet his company was eagerly sought, and he delighted in the society, not only of learned men and students, but of travelers, politicians, merchants, and citizens of the world. His favorite places of resort were the saloons of Andrea Morosini, and the shop of the Secchini at the sign of the Nave d"Oro. Here, after days spent in religious exercises, sacerdotal duties, and prolonged studies, he relaxed his mind in converse with the miscellaneous crowd of eminent persons who visited Venice for business or pleasure. A certain subacid humor, combining irony without bitterness, and proverbial pungency without sententiousness, added piquancy to his discourse. We have, unfortunately, no record of the wit-encounters which may have taken place under Morosini"s or Secchini"s roof between this friar, so punctual in his religious observances, so scrupulously pure in conduct, so cold in temperament, so acute in intellect, so modest in self-esteem, so cautious, so impermeable, and his contemporary, Bruno, the unfrocked friar of genius more daring but less sure, who was mentally in all points, saving their common love of truth and freedom, the opposite to Sarpi.
Sarpi entered the Order of the Servi, or Servants of the Blessed Virgin, at the age of fourteen, renewed his vows at twenty, and was ordained priest at twenty-two.[129] His great worth brought him early into notice, and he filled posts of considerable importance in his Order.
Several years of his manhood were spent in Rome, transacting the business and conducting the legal causes of the Fathers. At Mantua he gained the esteem of Guglielmo Gonzaga. At Milan he was admitted to familiar intimacy with the sainted Carlo Borromeo, who consulted him upon matters of reform in the diocese, and insisted on his hearing confessions. This duty was not agreeable to Sarpi; and though he habitually in after life said Ma.s.s and preached, he abstained from those functions of the priesthood which would have brought him into close relation with individuals. The bent of his mind rendered him averse to all forms of superst.i.tion and sacerdotal encroachments upon the freedom of the conscience. As he fought the battle of political independence against ecclesiastical aggression, so he maintained the prerogatives of personal liberty. The arts whereby Jesuits gained hold on families and individuals, inspired in him no less disgust than the illegal despotism of the Papacy. This blending of sincere piety and moral rect.i.tude with a pa.s.sion for secular freedom and a hatred of priestly craft, has something in it closely akin to the English temperament. Sarpi was a sound Catholic Christian in religion, and in politics what we should call a staunch Whig. So far as it is now possible to penetrate his somewhat baffling personality, we might compare him to a Macaulay of finer edge, to a Dean Stanley of more vigorous build. He was less commonplace than the one, more substantial than the other. But we must be cautious in offering any interpretation of his real opinions. It was not for nothing that he dedicated himself to the monastic life in boyhood, and persevered in it to the end of his long career. The discipline of the convent renders every friar inscrutable; and Sarpi himself a.s.sured his friends that he, like all Italians of his day, was bound to wear a mask.[130]
[Footnote 129: It was under the supervision of the Servites that Sarpi gained the first rudiments of education. Thirst for knowledge may explain his early entrance into their brotherhood. Like Virgil and like Milton, he received among the companions of his youthful studies the honorable nickname of "The Maiden." Gross conversation, such as lads use, even in convents, ceased at his approach. And yet he does not seem to have lost influence among his comrades by the purity which marked him out as exceptional.]
[Footnote 130: _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 237.]
Be this as it may, Sarpi was not the man to work his way by monkish intrigue or courtly service into high place either in his Order or the Church. Long before he unsheathed the sword in defense of Venetian liberties, he had become an object of suspicion to Rome and his superiors. Some frank words which escaped him in correspondence, regarding the corruption of the Papal Curia, closed every avenue to office. Men of less mark obtained the purple. The meanest and poorest bishoprics were refused to Sarpi. He was thrice denounced, on frivolous charges, to the Inquisition; but on each occasion the indictment was dismissed without a hearing. The General of the Servites accused him of wearing cap and slippers uncanonical in cut, and of not reciting the _Salve Regina_. After a solemn trial, Sarpi was acquitted; and it came to be proverbially whispered that "even the slippers of the incorruptible Fra Paolo had been canonized." Being a sincere Catholic at heart, as well as a man of profound learning and prudent speech, his papalistic enemies could get no grip upon him. Yet they instinctively hated and dreaded one whom they felt to be opposed, in his strength, fearlessness and freedom of soul, to their exorbitant pretensions and underhand aggressions upon public liberties. His commerce with heretics both in correspondence with learned Frenchmen and in conversation with distinguished foreigners at Venice, was made a ground of accusation, and Clement VIII. declared that this alone sufficed to exclude him from any dignity in the Church.
It does not appear that Sarpi troubled his head about these things. Had he cared for power, there was no distinction to which he might not have aspired by stooping to common arts and by compromising his liberty of conscience. But he was indifferent to rank and wealth. Public business he discharged upon occasion from a sense of duty to his Order. For the rest, so long as he was left to pursue his studies in tranquillity, Sarpi had happiness enough; and his modesty was so great that he did not even seek to publish the results of his discoveries in science. For this reason they have now been lost to the world; only the memory of them surviving in the notes of Foscarini and Grisellini, who inspected his MSS. before they were accidentally destroyed by fire in 1769.
Though renowned through Europe as the _orbis terrae ocellus_, the man sought out by every visitor to Venice as the rarest citizen of the Republic, Sarpi might have quitted this earthly scene with only the faint fame of a thinker whose eminent gifts blossomed in obscurity, had it not been for a public opportunity which forced him to forsake his studies and his cell for a place at the Council-board and for the functions of a polemical writer. That robust manliness of mind, which makes an Englishman hail English virtues in Sarpi, led him to affirm that "every man of excellence is bound to pay attention to politics."[131] Yet politics were not his special sphere. Up to the age of fifty-four he ripened in the a.s.siduous studies of which I have made mention, in the discharge of his official duties as a friar, and his religious duties as a priest. He had distinguished himself amid the practical affairs of life by judicial acuteness, unswerving justice, infallible perspicacity, and inexhaustible stores of erudition brought to bear with facility on every detail of any matter in dispute. But nature and inclination seemed to mark him out through early manhood for experimental and speculative science rather than for action. Now a demand was made on his deep fount of energy, which evolved the latent forces of a character unique in many-sided strength. He had dedicated himself to religion and to the pursuit of knowledge. But he was a Venetian of the Venetians, the very soul of Venice. After G.o.d, his Prince and the Republic claimed obedience; and when S. Mark called, Sarpi abandoned science for the service of his country. "Singularly composed of active and contemplative energies was the life of our Father; yielding to G.o.d that which he was able, to his Prince that which duty dictated, and to the domain of Venice more than any law but that of love demanded."[132]
[Footnote 131: _Lettere_, vol. ii, p. 80.]