The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  It was part of Inquisition procedure to let a prisoner brood in jail for long periods before, between, and after examinations. Almost a year passed before Bruno was brought before the Roman tribunal in December 1593. He was examined again—or tortured by questioning—in April, May, September, and December 1594. In January 1595 the Inquisitors met twice to study the record; in March 1595 and April 1596 Bruno, says the trial record, “was brought before the Lord Cardinals and was visited” in his cell “and was interrogated by them and heard concerning his necessities.”35 In December 1596 his complaints were heard “concerning food.” In March 1597 he was brought before the examiners, who again “heard him concerning his necessities”; we are not told what these were, but the repeated pleas suggest nameless hardships, not including the long suspense aimed presumably to break down an ardent spirit into an edifying humility. Another year passed. In December 1597, another questioning; then another year in the cell. In December 1598 he was allowed paper and pen. On January 14, 1599, he was again summoned. Eight heretical propositions taken from his books were read to him, and he was asked to recant them. He defended his views, but agreed to accept the decision of the Pope as to the quoted passages. On February 4 Clement VIII and the Congregation of the Holy Office decided that the excerpts were plainly heretical. No mention of Bruno’s Copernican views occurs in the record of the trial; the heresies related to the Incarnation and the Trinity. He was allowed forty days more to acknowledge his errors.

  He was heard again on February 18 and in April, September, and November. On December 21 he declared that he would not retract. On January 20, 1600, he addressed a memorial to the Pope, claiming that the condemned propositions had been wrongly taken from their context, offering to defend them against any theologians, and again expressing willingness to accept the decision of the Pope. Thereupon, reads the record, “the most holy lord, Pope Clement VIII, decreed and commanded that the cause be carried to final measures, … sentence be pronounced, and the said Brother Jordanus be committed to the secular court.” On February 8 the Inquisitors summoned Bruno, repeated the accusations, and told him that he had been allowed eight years in which to repent; that he had agreed to accept the decision of the Pope as to whether his propositions were heretical; that the Pope had so decided, and that the prisoner still persisted in his heresies, continuing “impenitent, obstinate, and pertinacious”; wherefore sentence was now passed upon him that he should be “delivered to the secular court, … to the Governor of Rome here present, that thou mayest be punished with the punishment deserved, though we earnestly pray that he will mitigate the rigor of the laws concerning the pains of thy person, that thou mayest not be in danger of death or of mutilation of thy members.” The sentence was signed by nine cardinals, including Bellarmine. According to Caspar Scioppius, a German scholar recently converted to Catholicism and then residing in Rome, when the verdict was read to Bruno he said to his judges, “Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.”36

  He was at once transferred to a secular prison. On February 19, still impenitent, his body nude, his tongue tied, he was bound to an iron stake on a pyre in the Piazza Campo de’ Fiori and was burned alive, in the presence of an edified multitude. He was fifty-two years old. On that same spot in 1889, a statue was erected to him by subscription from all quarters of the world.

  III. VANINI AND CAMPANELLA

  Nineteen years later a kindred spirit moved quickly to a like fate. Giulio Cesare Lucilio Vanini was born in southern Italy of an Italian father and a Spanish mother—powder mating with fire. After wandering over Europe like Bruno, sampling climates and theologies, and writing books whose occasional insights (as that man had once been a quadruped) hardly balanced the occult nonsense, he settled down in Toulouse (1617) and, again like Bruno, enjoyed there two years of peace. But an attendant at his lectures reported him as laughing at the Incarnation and questioning the existence of a personal God.37 Another hearer, Sieur de Francon, gained Vanini’s confidence, drew him out as Mocenigo had done with Bruno, and reported him to the municipal parlement. On August 2, 1618, he was arrested not by the Church but by order of the Procurator-General of the King. On the basis of his lectures he was accused of atheism and blasphemy, both of them crimes punishable by the state. Vanini affirmed his belief in God, but Francon alleged that the prisoner had more than once professed atheism, saying that Nature was the only God. The judges accepted the evidence, and despite Vanini’s passionate protests and the piety that he showed in his cell, they condemned him—thirty-four years old—

  to be delivered into the hands of the executioner of justice, who shall draw him on a hurdle, in his shirt, with a halter about his neck, and bearing upon his shoulders a placard with the words ATHEIST AND BLASPHEMER OF THE NAME OF GOD; he shall thus conduct him before the principal entrance to the church of St. Stephen, and being there placed on his knees … he shall ask pardon from God, from the King, and from Justice for his said blasphemies. Afterward he shall bring him into the Place of Salin, bind him to a stake there erected, cut off his tongue and strangle him, and afterward his body shall be burned … and the ashes thrown to the wind.38

  Tradition tells that as Vanini came from his cell to bear his agony (February 9, 1619), he exclaimed, “Andiamo, andiamo allegramente a morire da filosofo” (Let us go, let us go cheerfully to die like a philosopher).39

  Tommaso Campanella too was born with Calabrian lava in his blood. He cooled it for a while in a Dominican monastery, studied Telesio and Empedocles, rejected Aristotle, ridiculed a papal excommunication, and was imprisoned for some months by the Inquisition at Naples (1591–92). Released, he took courses at Padua, and was indicted for unchastity. There he wrote his first significant work, Prodromos philosophiae instaurendae (1594), in which, like Francis Bacon eleven years later, he advised thinkers to study Nature rather than Aristotle, and outlined a program for the restoration of science and philosophy. Returning to Naples, he joined a conspiracy to free it from Spain; the plot was frustrated, and Campanella languished in state jails for twenty-seven years (1599–1626). Twelve times he was tortured, once for forty hours.40 He allayed his suffering with philosophy, poetry, and visions of perfect states. His sonnet “The People” voices his resentment at the failure of the populace to support his revolt:

  The people is a beast of muddy brain

  That knows not its own force and therefore stands

  Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands

  Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein.

  One kick would be enough to break the chain;

  But the beast fears, and what the child demands

  It does, nor its own terror understands,

  Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain.

  Most wonderful, with its own hand it ties

  And gags itself—gives itself death and war

  For pence doled out by kings from its own store.

  Its own are all things between earth and heaven,

  But this it knows not; and if one arise

  To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven.41

  The most famous product of those weary years was his Civitas solis. Campanella imagined his City of the Sun as standing on a mountain in Ceylon. Its officials are chosen—and are removable—by a national assembly of all inhabitants over twenty years old. The magistrates so chosen choose the head of the government, a priest called Hoh. He and his aides rule in all matters, temporal or spiritual. They preside also over the union of the sexes, seeing to it “that men and women are so joined together that they bring forth the best offspring. Indeed, they laugh at us who exhibit a studious care for our breed of horses and dogs, but neglect the breeding of human beings.”42 Hence deformity is unknown. Women are communistically shared and sternly disciplined. They are required to take active exercise, which “gives them a clear complexion. … If any woman dyes her face or uses high-heeled boots … she is condemned to capital punishment.”43 Both the sexes are trained to
war. Those who flee from battle are, when caught, put to death by being placed in a den of lions and bears.44 Everyone is assigned to work, but only for four hours a day. Children are brought up in common and are psychologically prepared for a communistic sharing of goods. The religion of these people is a worship of the sun as the “face and living image of God.” “They assert that the whole earth will come to live in accordance with their customs.”45

  This communist manifesto, echoing Plato, was written in jail about 1602 and was published in Frankfurt am Main in 1622. Perhaps it expressed the aspirations of the Neapolitan conspirators and may have contributed to Campanella’s long incarceration. In time he made his peace with the Church and was released. He delighted Urban VIII by asserting the right of the popes to rule kings. In 1634 Urban sent him to Paris to save him from implication in another Neapolitan revolt. Richelieu protected him, and the tired rebel, recapturing his youth, died in a Dominican cell (1639). “I am the bell [campanella],” he said, “that announces the new dawn.”46

  IV. PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS

  1. Juan de Mariana: 1536–1624

  The central feature of medieval politics was the unifying supremacy of the papacy over the kings; the outstanding aspect of modern political history is the conflict of national states freed from papal power; hence the first question that agitated political philosophy in the century after the Reformation was the demand of Catholic thinkers that papal supremacy be restored, and the demand of Protestant thinkers that papal authority be wholly destroyed. Papal polemists argued that absolute kings, claiming divine right and repudiating all restraints by religion, morals, and law, would tear Europe to pieces; the defenders of the Reformation replied that no supranational authority could be trusted to seek the good of mankind rather than its own power and profit; moreover, a supreme Church would stifle all freedom of life and thought.

  The Scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages, echoing Roman jurists, had derived all royal authority from the consent of the people rather than from God; consequently there was no divine right of kings, and a bad ruler might be justly dethroned. Calvinist thinkers, like Bèze, Buchanan, and the author of Vindiciae contra tyrannos, warmly seconded this view; but Lutheran and Anglican theologians supported the divine right of kings as a necessary offset to public violence and papal claims, and upheld the duty of obedience even to unjust kings.47

  The defenders of popular sovereignty included many Jesuits, who saw in this view a means of weakening royal as against papal authority. If, argued Cardinal Bellarmine, the authority of kings is derived from, and therefore subject to, the people, it is obviously subordinate to the authority of the popes, which is derived from the establishment of the Church by Christ, and is therefore subject only to God. Luis Molina, a Spanish Jesuit, concluded that the people, as the source of secular authority, may justly—but by orderly procedure—depose an unjust king.48 Francisco Suárez, “the finest theologian the Society of Jesus has produced,”49 restated this view, with careful modifications, in countering the absolutist claims of James I, and upheld the right of popes to unseat kings. The Jesuit Juan de Mariana’s defense of tyrannicide roused an international furor because it was alleged to have encouraged the assassination of Henry IV.

  Mariana (whom we have already noted as the greatest historian of his generation) was in all ways a remarkable individual, renowned for learning, eloquence, and intellectual audacity. In 1599 he dedicated to Philip III, and published with the permission of the local Jesuit censor, the treatise De rege et regis institutione (On the King and His Education). Anticipating Hobbes by half a century, he described a “state of nature” before the origin of society; men then lived like animals in the wild, free from all restraints but their physical limitations, recognizing no law and no private property, and following instinct in seeking food and mates. But there were inconveniences in this Rousseauian freedom; e.g., dangerous animals abounded. To protect themselves men formed social organization, the greatest of all tools yet invented and a necessary counter to the physiological organs of defense and offense given by nature to animals. By an explicit or implicit compact, the members of a group agreed to delegate their collective authority to a chief or king; but sovereignty remained in the people, and in almost all cases (as in the Cortes of Spain) a national assembly checked this delegated power, retained control of the purse, and formed a body of laws whose authority was superior to the king’s.

  Democracy, in Mariana’s view, is made impossible by the unequal distribution of ability and intelligence among men. It would be ruinous to let policy be determined by plebiscites.50 A limited, or constitutional, monarchy is the best form of government compatible with the nature of man and the survival of the state. It should be hereditary, for an elective monarchy is a periodic invitation to anarchy.

  The king should be limited by laws, by religious and moral restraints, and by the right of the people to depose him if he becomes a tyrant. He must not change the laws or levy taxes without the people’s consent. He “should determine nothing about religion,”51 for the Church is superior to the state and must rule herself; nevertheless he must protect the national religion, for “if religion is neglected a state cannot stand firm.”52 The state should support religion in maintaining morality; it should condemn bullfights as encouraging brutality, and the stage as stimulating sexual license.53 It should finance the care of the sick and the poor through a wide distribution of hospitals and charity; and the rich should give to the needy what they now spend on their luxuries and their dogs. Taxes should be high on superfluities, low on necessaries. The goods of the earth would suffice for all if they were rightly distributed.54 A good prince will guard against the concentration of wealth. Private property replaced primitive communism because “greedy and furious avarice laid its hand upon the divine gifts and claimed everything for itself”;55 it is now a necessary institution, but in heaven communism will be restored.56

  A tyrant may be deposed, he may rightly be killed, even, in some circumstances, by an individual.

  Who may justly be held a tyrant? … We do not leave this to the decision of any individual, or even to the judgment of many unless the voice of the people publicly takes part, and learned and serious men are associated in the deliberation…. [But] when a prince brings the country to ruin, abuses state property and the possessions of individuals, spurns public laws and holy religion, begins to assert himself arrogantly, insolently, and impiously, … [when] citizens have been deprived of the possibility of assembling for general deliberation, but are earnestly minded to put an end to the existing tyranny—and supposing this to be notorious and unendurable … if in such a case any individual comes forward who responds to the general desire and offers to put such a ruler to death, I for one shall not regard him as an evil-doer. … It is a salutary reflection that princes have been persuaded that if they oppress the state … they can be killed not only justly but with praise and glory.57

  Mariana reminded his readers of historic tyrannicides—of Harmodius and Aristogeiton who killed Hipparchus, tyrant of Athens, and of Brutus who drove the tyrant Tarquinius from Rome; and he pointed out that Athens and Rome, indeed all literate Europe, honored their memory. But Mariana showed his hand and bias by half approving the recent (1589) assassination of Henry III by Clément:

  Henry III, King of France, lies dead, stabbed by a monk in the intestines with a poisoned knife, a detestable spectacle…. Jacques Clément … studied theology in the Dominican college of his order. He was told by the theologians whom he had consulted that a tyrant may be killed legally…. Clément died an eternal honor to France, as it has seemed to very many…. Many people consider he died worthy of immortality, while others, pre-eminent in wisdom and learning, think it blamable.58

  Henry III, it will be recalled, had opposed the Catholic League and had ordered his aides to kill Henri, Duke of Guise, its leader. Philip II of Spain had supported and in part financed the League; he had agreed to the assassination of Elizabeth I and William
of Orange. And Philip III had no objection to a doctrine that justified the killing of an enemy of Spain.

  In 1599 Claudio Aquaviva, general of the Society of Jesus, ordered that Mariana’s De rege should be “corrected.” When Henry IV was murdered by Ravaillac (May 14, 1610), Aquaviva condemned Mariana’s teaching on tyrannicide (July 8), and forbade its propagation in Jesuit instruction. Meanwhile Mariana had been arrested, not for praising tyrannicide but for arguing against Philip Ill’s debasement of the coinage and warning him in a brilliant treatise, De monetae mutatione (1605), of the evils of inflation. Mariana suffered his confinement philosophically, survived it, and lived on till 1624, dying at the age of eighty-seven.

  2. Jean Bodin: 1530–96

  How different was Bodin! No theologian with his feet in the sky, no somber lover of the League, but a Politique after L’Hôpital’s heart, a defender of toleration, a counselor and admirer of Henry IV. Born at Angers, probably of a Spanish-Jewish mother, he came to Paris in 1560, practiced law unprofitably, and lost himself eagerly in philosophy and history. He studied voraciously Hebrew, Greek, German, Italian, Livy, Tacitus, the Old Testament, Cicero, and the constitutions of all the West European states. He believed that the study of history is the beginning of political wisdom. His first venture into print was a Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566)—Method for the Easy Understanding of History. The student will find it jejune, rhetorical, verbose—the philosophic mind does not mature early. Bodin, at thirty-six, thought that history inspires us to virtue by showing the defeat of the wicked and the triumph of the good.59 Nevertheless the book, after Machiavelli’s Discourses, is the first significant work on the philosophy of history.