Paolo Sarpi

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On 17 April 1606 the Republic of Venice woke to find itself excommunicate. Pope Paul V — Camillo Borghese, a canonist by training — had laid the city under interdict: no Mass, no sacraments, no absolution within its territory until it yielded. The quarrel was jurisdictional. Venice had arrested two clerics on ordinary criminal charges and tried them in its own secular courts, and it had passed laws restraining the building of new churches and the steady passage of land into the Church’s untaxable hands. Rome held that a cleric answered only to a Church tribunal and that no civil power could check the Church’s hold on property. The Senate refused to surrender the principle. Most of the Venetian clergy, ordered by the state to keep saying Mass, did so; the interdict fell on the city and broke against it. To make the Republic’s case in canon law, the Senate appointed an obscure friar as its theological consultor. Within a year he was known across Europe.

Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623) was a Venetian friar of the Servite order — the Servants of Mary — the official theologian and canonist of the Republic, and the author of the most famous early history of the Council of Trent. Born Pietro and given the name Paolo on entering the order as a boy, he took a degree at Padua in 1579 and rose through the order’s offices, serving as provincial in Venice and as its procurator-general in Rome. He sat at the meeting point of several worlds that the seventeenth century usually kept apart: a cleric who spent his life arguing against the reach of the Church, a man of prayer with a reputation for unbelief, and a natural philosopher in close touch with the new science. Much of what is claimed about his inner convictions is contested, then and now, and the difficulty of pinning him down is part of what made him a legend.

The interdict and the case for the temporal sword

Sarpi’s public role in 1606 and 1607 was political and ecclesiastical at once. In a stream of tracts and consulti written to the Senate’s order, he set out a doctrine of the two jurisdictions sharper than anything Venice had yet put in print. The pope’s authority, he argued, was spiritual; his power to bind and loose touched the conscience and the sacraments, not the sword and the land. A prince held his temporal authority from God directly and answered to God alone for the government of his people. An interdict laid not for any sin but to bend a sovereign’s policy was, on this reading, an abuse of the keys — a spiritual weapon turned to a worldly end, and therefore void. The friar was careful to keep the case canonical rather than Protestant; he cited the Church’s own law against the Church’s own claims, which was exactly what made it dangerous. This was the Venetian quarrel with Rome at its most pointed: not the doctrines fixed at Trent, whose substance belongs to the Tridentine Mass and the liturgy of the Counter-Reformation, but the prior question of whether the papacy’s writ ran to the temporal order of a free state.

The interdict held for a year and accomplished nothing. France, Venice’s counterweight to Spain, sent Cardinal François de Joyeuse as mediator, and on 21 April 1607 a settlement was reached that let both sides save face: the two imprisoned clerics were handed to the cardinal legate rather than to Rome, the censures were lifted, and Venice conceded none of the principle Sarpi had defended. Rome did not forget the man who had armed the Republic with arguments. On 5 October 1607, near the Servite convent, assassins fell on him with stilettos and left him for dead; one blade entered by the right ear and lodged in the cheekbone, bent. He survived. The surviving anecdote has him, examining the weapon left behind, remarking with grim wordplay — Agnosco stylum Curiae Romanae, that he recognized the style of the Roman Curia, where stylum carries both the writing-hand and the stiletto. His attackers fled to papal territory, were sheltered, and were eventually pensioned.

The Istoria del Concilio Tridentino

The work that secured his name appeared in London in 1619, in Italian, under the anagrammatic pseudonym Pietro Soave Polano — a rearrangement of Paolo Sarpi Veneto. The Istoria del Concilio Tridentino told the story of the council that, in stages between 1545 and 1563, had defined Catholic doctrine against the Reformation, and it told that story as the record of a body managed by papal interest rather than guided by the Spirit — a council, in Sarpi’s telling, steered to prevent reform of the papacy itself. The manner of its publication was nearly as charged as the matter. Sarpi wrote it in Venice and kept it close; Marcantonio de Dominis, the apostate Archbishop of Spalato who had crossed to England, obtained a copy of the manuscript, carried it abroad, and had it printed in London. De Dominis chose the transparent pseudonym and a polemical title that displeased its author, advertising the council as a record of all the artifices of the Court of Rome to keep the truth of doctrine hidden and reform untouched. An English version by Nathaniel Brent — sent to Venice for that purpose by the Archbishop of Canterbury — followed in 1620, with Latin and further editions soon after.

Protestant Europe received the book as vindication, and Rome could not let it stand. The official answer came decades later: the Jesuit Sforza Pallavicino’s own Istoria del Concilio di Trento, written at the pope’s direction and printed in Rome in 1656–57, a deliberate refutation that earned its author a cardinal’s hat. The two histories have remained paired ever since, the partisan against the apologist. Modern scholarship treats Sarpi’s account as polemic as much as chronicle — partisan and brilliantly documented at once, drawing on diplomatic correspondence and conciliar papers — a foundational text less for any verdict it settles than for how it reads ecclesiastical power as power. The fate of the man who smuggled it out underlines the stakes: de Dominis returned to Rome in 1622, recanted everything, fell foul of the Inquisition after his protector died, was declared a relapsed heretic, and after his death in 1624 had his corpse and his books burned in the Campo de’ Fiori — the same square where Giordano Bruno had burned in 1600. Concealment of one’s real convictions, and the cost of having them found out, was not an abstraction in Sarpi’s world.

The new philosophy and the friendship with Galileo

Long before the interdict, Sarpi was a working natural philosopher of the first rank. He had met Galileo around 1592 and shared in his investigations for the better part of two decades; Galileo is reported to have thought no one in Europe could surpass the friar in mathematics. Sarpi worked on the anatomy and physiology of the eye and the heart, was credited — his biographer Fulgenzio Micanzio pressed the claim against Fabricius of Aquapendente — with attention to the valves of the veins, noted the dilation of the pupil under light, and admired William Gilbert’s De Magnete of 1600 enough to make magnetism his own study. When in the summer of 1609 a Dutch spyglass was offered to the Venetian Senate, it was Sarpi who advised the Senate to hold off, knowing Galileo would soon present a better instrument; he was the channel through which Galileo dealt with the Republic. His verdict on Galileo’s later condemnation was mordant: a future age, he expected, would deplore the injustice done to so great a man. The friar belonged, in short, to the same Venetian and Paduan world of medicine, jurisprudence, and the new science that drew curious minds from across Europe — the milieu in which a courtier-virtuoso like Kenelm Digby would later move, and in which the mathematical and the heterodox kept easy company.

The Pensieri and the contested interior

Sarpi’s hold on later imagination came from the suspicion that he believed far less than he professed. He moved in a Venetian circle of physicians, jurists, and men of letters known for skeptical talk, corresponded across Protestant and Catholic Europe alike, and kept private notebooks, the Pensieri — several hundred terse numbered entries, composed mostly between the late 1570s and the 1590s, on natural philosophy, metaphysics, mathematics, and religion. The originals burned in a fire in 1769 and survive in copies; the complete corpus was not printed until a critical edition in 1996. The entries on religion are written from a strikingly detached and strictly philosophical standpoint. Some hold that knowledge rests not on revelation but on what the senses deliver. To certain readers they amount to covert materialism — a worked-out account of mind and world with no need of a soul that outlasts the body, and a cool anatomy of how belief governs men.

Whether the Pensieri record genuine irreligion or the caution of a churchman who valued religion as an instrument of civic order is exactly the question scholars dispute, and the dispute has hardened into two portraits. In the reading associated with William Bouwsma’s study of 1968, Sarpi stands as the last great voice of Renaissance republican liberty, a Christian patriot defending Venice and its civic faith against the medieval universalism of papal Rome — the historian as exponent of a sincere, if anticlerical, Christianity. In the reading argued by David Wootton in 1983, the friar is something else entirely: a systematic unbeliever who built, out of the Pensieri, one of the earliest coherent philosophies of atheism in modern Europe, his whole public life a sustained act of dissimulation under a regime that punished candor with the stake. The two accounts cannot easily be merged. Each fits a part of the evidence and strains against the rest; the man left no confession that decides between them, and the silence is plausibly deliberate. Sarpi practiced the art of saying as much as could safely be said and reserving the rest — the same exoteric-outward, esoteric-inward discipline that John Toland would later make an explicit thesis, and that the case of Andreas Osiander — who slipped an unsigned preface onto Copernicus to soften its claims — illustrates as a recurring early-modern predicament rather than a single scandal. With such a writer, the interior is not recoverable in principle; concealment was the method, not a gap in the record.

The texts and the scholarship

The documentary trail behind these disputes is unusually rich, and most of it is now in print. The Istoria del Concilio Tridentino survives in the Italian of 1619 and in Nathaniel Brent’s English of 1620, with a long line of later editions; the modern critical study of the text traces how de Dominis’s printing shaped what Europe read. The Pensieri, lost in their originals to the 1769 fire and reconstructed from copies, reached their complete form only in the critical edition of Luisa Cozzi and Libero Sosio, Pensieri naturali, metafisici e matematici (Milan–Naples: Ricciardi, 1996), which separates the strata of natural-philosophical, metaphysical, and religious notes and is the basis of every serious modern reading. The two governing portraits stand in print as books: William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), and David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) — the Christian republican against the systematic unbeliever. A current bibliographic map of the field, weighing the religious, political, and scientific Sarpis against one another, is set out in the Oxford Bibliographies survey of Fra Paolo Sarpi. His standing in the history of science — the friendship with Galileo, the work on the eye and the venous valves, the part in the telescope affair of 1609 — is documented in the Museo Galileo catalogue biography of Sarpi and in the Linda Hall Library’s account of his anatomical and optical work. Together these reconstruct a figure whom no single discipline can claim whole.

The afterlife

What is not in doubt is the afterlife of the figure. Through Brent’s English the Istoria became a quarry for Protestant polemic and then for something larger: Thomas Hobbes and, later, Edward Gibbon drew on Sarpi’s caustic anatomy of priestcraft in their own debunkings of clerical authority. Eighteenth-century freethinkers and early deists adopted him as a forerunner — a learned insider who had turned the Church’s own erudition against its claims — and on that reading his name recurs in the genealogies drawn for the radical Enlightenment, the lineage that runs through the materialism later read out of Spinoza and his system, through the pantheism that Toland would name, and into the German rediscovery of these questions in the generation of Lessing. The Reformation he chronicled from the Catholic side, in the council that answered Luther and the wider revolt, became in his hands an argument the reformers themselves had not made — that the machinery of doctrine is the machinery of power. He kept, too, a place in the memory of Venice itself, a city that prized its independence of Rome and its philosophical libertines; the same Italian world that produced the prophetic heterodoxy of Tommaso Campanella produced this cooler, archival kind.

The Sarpi who matters to that tradition is in large part a construction of his admirers — the freethinkers’ learned insider, the proto-philosophe, a portrait assembled from the Istoria and a selective reading of the Pensieri. The friar who lived inside the Servite habit until the end is harder to see, and he meant to be: a consultor who armed a republic with canon law against the canon lawyer on the throne of Peter, who dissected the council that defined his own communion, and who wrote his most exposing thoughts in a private hand and let no one decide what he finally held. The day before he died, in January 1623, he is reported to have dictated three replies on affairs of state and, of Venice, to have said Esto perpetua — may it endure. The line is genuine to the man’s lifelong loyalty, and it is also the kind of line his admirers would have wished for him. He kept the inside of his mind to himself, which is the one thing about Paolo Sarpi that every reading must concede, and the precise thing that has kept the readings multiplying.

→ Related: John Toland · Gotthold Ephraim Lessing · Andreas Osiander · Galileo Galilei · The Reformation · Tridentine Mass · Giordano Bruno · Tommaso Campanella · Benedictus De Spinoza · Spinozism · Martin Luther · Pantheism · Kenelm Digby