Justified True Belief

(●) The Jesuit who set out the Catholic case against the Reformers in full, and whom Protestant Europe spent the next century answering by name. + After Bellarmine was dead, Rome opened the slow enquiry into whether he ought to be called blessed, which is the first formal step toward naming a man a saint, and one of the witnesses it called was a man who had been an undergraduate at Cambridge in his own student days. What he remembered was a joke among the students there. When they wanted to know how a sermon had gone, they asked one question: had the preacher gone after Bellarmine? If the answer was yes, nobody needed to ask anything else. The sermon had been a disaster, because taking on the Jesuit in Rome was the fastest way for a clever man to make a fool of himself in public. Robert Bellarmine was the most formidable controversialist the Counter-Reformation produced. A controversialist, in the sixteenth-century sense, is not a man who likes a fight; he is a professional arguer, appointed to state and defend a disputed position. The Roman College had just founded a chair of controversies when he was given it in 1576, and the lectures he delivered from it grew into three folio volumes, books of the largest size the presses made, the kind you read at a table because you cannot hold one comfortably in your lap. Between them they gathered every point in dispute between Rome and the Reformation, stated the Protestant case in its own words, and answered it piece by piece. Nothing on that scale had been attempted. Cambridge and Oxford set their best men to answer it, and the phrase imprimis Robertum Bellarminum, "and Robert Bellarmine first of all," went on appearing on the title pages of Protestant books the way a challenge appears on a poster. He belongs on a Christian apologetics site for a reason that has nothing to do with which side a reader takes. Bellarmine argued in an age that had almost forgotten how. His contemporaries called each other unclean beasts and foul-mouthed hogs in print, and the abuse ran in both directions. He quoted his opponents accurately, gave their arguments their full weight before answering, and on at least one occasion spent four columns defending John Calvin against a charge of heresy that fellow Catholics had brought and that Bellarmine judged to be false. A story told sixteen years after his death has him keeping a portrait of the Cambridge Protestant William Whitaker, his sharpest English critic, hanging where he worked.

(●) 1542 AD: Born in a Tuscan hill town to a family with a pope in it and no money left. + Robert Bellarmine was born at Montepulciano on 4 October 1542, in the hill country south of Siena where the vineyards run down from the town walls. His father, Vincenzo Bellarmino, came of good local family and had spent most of what the family had. His mother, Cinzia Cervini, was the sister of Cardinal Marcello Cervini, who in 1555 was elected pope as Marcellus II and died twenty-two days later, before he had done anything at all except impress everyone who met him. A boy with an uncle in the Sacred College, the body of cardinals who elect the pope and run the church’s central business between elections, was a boy with prospects, and Vincenzo had plans for him. What actually shaped Robert was smaller and nearer to hand. The Jesuits had just opened a school in Montepulciano, one of the new colleges the young Society of Jesus was planting across Italy, and he went to it. He was slight, undersized, and never strong. A joke about his height survives from his student years: a fellow traveller who wanted to press on ahead and be sure of a place for the night told him he was going far too slowly, and got the answer that there was sure to be room for a little fellow like him.

(●) 1560 AD: He entered the Society of Jesus at eighteen, and was sent north to be trained where the argument was hottest. + He joined the Jesuits in Rome on 20 September 1560 and took his first vows the next day, the promises of poverty, chastity and obedience with which a man’s training in the order begins. The Society of Jesus was twenty years old, founded by Ignatius of Loyola as an order of priests under a fourth vow of obedience to the pope, and it was already the sharpest instrument the Catholic reform possessed. Three years of philosophy at the Roman College followed, then teaching stints in the humanities at Florence and at Mondovì in the hills of Piedmont, then theology at Padua from 1567. In 1569 his superiors moved him to Louvain in the Low Countries, and the reason mattered. Padua was a great university in a Catholic country, where a student met the Protestant position mostly on paper. Louvain sat in a region where Calvinist preaching, iconoclasm, which is the smashing of statues and painted images in the churches, and armed revolt were the news of the week. A young theologian there could learn the Protestant arguments from people who actually held them rather than from somebody’s summary of them. He read Calvin’s Institutes and the Lutheran and Reformed divines directly, and he lectured on the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas rather than on the medieval textbook then standard, which was itself a small revolution in how theology was taught. He was professed of three solemn vows in the Jesuit college chapel on 6 January 1570, meaning that the promises he had made as a beginner were now made finally and for life, and eleven weeks later, on Holy Saturday, Cornelius Jansens, the Bishop of Ghent, ordained him priest. His preaching drew crowds, and the crowds included Protestants who came to hear what the other side had to say. Seven years of that, and he never again had to guess what an opponent believed.

(●) 1576 AD: Rome gave him a new chair of controversies, and his lectures became the most answered book of the age. + Recalled to Italy in 1576, he was given a chair that had only just been invented: controversies, meaning the whole body of disputed questions between Rome and the Reformation, taught as one subject rather than scattered through a dozen others. Picture the room. Students sit copying the lectures down by hand, because there is no printed text and there will not be one for another ten years, and when a man goes home he carries his notebook with him. The copies travelled. Before the first volume was printed a manuscript of the lectures had reached Cambridge, which is how an English professor came to be teaching against a Roman course he had never heard delivered. The lectures became Disputationes de Controversiis Christianae Fidei adversus huius temporis haereticos, "Disputations on the controversies of the Christian faith against the heretics of this time." The first folio came off David Sartorius’s press at Ingolstadt in 1586 with seven treatises in it, a treatise being a sustained argument on one subject run to its end: on Scripture and tradition, on Christ, on the pope, on councils and the church, on the members of the church on earth, on purgatory, and on the saints in heaven. The second volume, on the sacraments, followed in 1588 and quoted 259 church writers and 59 historians and philosophers, almost all of them checked at first hand rather than lifted from other people’s collections. The third, on grace and justification, appeared in 1593. The method is what made it dangerous to answer. Bellarmine would set out a Protestant position with its supporting texts and its best arguments, in the words of the men who held it, before he said a word against it. Readers on both sides noticed that his summaries of the opposition were better than most of the opposition’s own. An opponent who wanted to reply had first to get past a version of himself that was harder to beat than he was.

(●) 1590 AD: The pope who had accepted the book’s dedication moved to put it on the Index, and then left him a broken Bible to mend. + Bellarmine had dedicated the first volume to Sixtus V, and Sixtus had sent him four hundred gold pieces in thanks. Then the pope read it properly. What he found was the treatise on the papacy. There Bellarmine denied that the pope holds any direct power over kings and kingdoms; he holds only an indirect power, and only where the souls of Christians are at stake. To Sixtus, who thought of the papal office in far larger terms, that was a betrayal from inside the household, and he moved to put the volume on the Index of forbidden books, the printed list of titles no Catholic might read without special leave. The most effective defender Rome had was about to be banned in Rome, for not claiming enough on Rome’s behalf. Bellarmine was away in France at the time, attached to a papal embassy sent into the wars of religion, and the news reached him there. The new Index was ready for the press on 19 August 1590, and eight days later Sixtus was dead. His successor Urban VII, who reigned a dozen days, had the name struck off it at once. The dead pope left a worse problem behind him. The Council of Trent had called for a corrected edition of the Latin Vulgate, the Bible the Western church had used for a thousand years, and the scholars appointed to it had very nearly finished when Sixtus took the job over himself, made his own alterations to the text, and had the result printed. The alterations were bad. Copies had already gone out. If Protestant scholars got hold of them, they would be able to show that a pope had published a corrupted Bible over his own authority, and say so for the next hundred years. Bellarmine sat on the commission that put the text right, less than three weeks of hard work in Cardinal Colonna’s country house at Zagarolo, and then came the question of how to publish it. His advice was to bring the corrected Bible out quickly, under the names of Sixtus and the pope then reigning, with a preface explaining that errors had crept into the first printing and that Sixtus had himself decided the work should be done again. The Clementine Vulgate of 1592 carries that preface, unsigned, and it is his. It saved the papacy’s reputation, and it has cost him his own with a good many readers ever since.

(●) 1599 AD: Made a cardinal against his will, he gave away his furniture in Capua and came back to a desk at the centre of every quarrel in Rome. + Clement VIII made him a cardinal on 3 March 1599, saying that the church of God had not his equal in learning. He had spent years trying to prevent it, and he wept. The red hat brought an income, and he spent it: he cut his household to the minimum, and when the money ran out he sold what was left. From 1602 to 1605 he was Archbishop of Capua, north of Naples, and those three years are the part of his life his biographers like best. Think what a visitor of those years would expect on being shown into the private room of an archbishop, and then look at what a visitor to this one found: bare walls, four leather chairs, a narrow bed under a shabby cloth canopy, and a prie-dieu, the low kneeling desk a man says his prayers at, with a crucifix on it. Even the two portraits on the wall were borrowed. He visited the hospital of the Annunciation, in one witness’s phrase, an infinite number of times. A parish priest once came to him in distress because a dying man could not be got to think about God, so consumed was he with fear for three grown daughters who would be left with nobody. Bellarmine went to the bedside and told the man that he had been the girls’ father until now and would be their father afterwards, heard his confession, and after the funeral found the daughters a home. Paul V called him back to Rome in 1605 and kept him there. From then until his death he was the chief theological adviser of the Holy See, which is the name for the pope’s own government, and the effect of that was simple: when Rome had a quarrel on its hands, the papers came to his desk. Three of those quarrels are worth naming. The first was with the Republic of Venice, which claimed in 1606 the right to judge clergy in its own courts and to control church property inside its territory. Bellarmine argued the papal side, against the Venetian friar Paolo Sarpi. The second was with a king. England imposed an oath of allegiance on its Catholic subjects in 1606, and the oath was drafted so that there was no comfortable way to deal with it. Refuse it, and a man looked like a traitor to his own country. Swear it, and he had called impious a claim about papal authority that most theologians in Europe still defended. Bellarmine answered King James I of England on the point in 1608, under the name of his chaplain Matteo Torti, and again in 1609 under his own. The third quarrel was inside the Catholic house. He sat on the commission called De Auxiliis, "on the helps of grace," convened to settle whether the Jesuit Luis de Molina or the Dominicans had the right account of how grace and free will fit together. Bellarmine’s advice from the first was that the question should not be decided by authority at all, but left to the schools, meaning the universities and the teaching orders where such things are argued out, with each side forbidden to call the other a heretic. Clement VIII wanted a definition and found his presence awkward, which is part of why Capua fell vacant for him. In 1607 the commission ended exactly as Bellarmine had first advised.

(●) 1616 AD: He summoned Galileo to tell him to give up the moving earth, and then wrote out a certificate to protect him. + Bellarmine wanted to know. He had followed Galileo’s telescope work with interest, and in 1611 he wrote to the Jesuit mathematicians of the Roman College to ask whether the new observations held up. They told him that they did. The two men were on friendly terms, which is the part that usually gets left out of the story. In 1615 a Carmelite named Paolo Antonio Foscarini published a little book arguing that the Copernican system, with the sun at the centre and the earth in motion, could be squared with Scripture, and sent Bellarmine a copy. The cardinal’s reply of 12 April 1615 is the most quoted thing he ever wrote (T4). Speak of it as a mathematical hypothesis and you are safe, he said, and sensible. Assert it as fact and you collide with the plain sense of texts that every commentator, ancient and modern, has read the other way. And then the sentence that has kept the letter alive: if there were a real proof, we should have to change our reading of Scripture rather than deny what had been proved. He added that he did not believe such a proof existed and would not until it was shown him, and there he was in step with most astronomers of 1615, since the observations then available fitted more than one arrangement of the heavens. On 25 February 1616 the Holy Office, the Roman tribunal that tried questions of doctrine and the men who held them, instructed Bellarmine to summon Galileo and tell him to abandon the opinion. The interview took place the next day at the cardinal’s residence. The minute of it is one of the most argued-over documents in the history of science, and the reason is that it records two different things happening in one room. There is the gentle admonition Bellarmine was told to give. There is also a far harsher injunction from the Commissary of the Holy Office, delivered immediately afterwards, forbidding Galileo to hold, teach or defend the opinion in any way whatever. Galileo said he would obey. Rome then filled up with a rumour: Galileo had been made to abjure, to stand up and swear publicly that he renounced the opinion, and had been given a penance on top of it. A rumour like that follows a man for life, so Galileo asked Bellarmine for a written denial, and got one on 26 May 1616, in the cardinal’s own hand. Signor Galileo had abjured nothing, in his hand or anyone’s, and no penance of any kind had been laid on him. Seventeen years later, at the trial that ended with his condemnation, Galileo produced that certificate in his own defence. Bellarmine had been dead for twelve years.

(●) 1621 AD: "To die, sir," he told a cardinal who asked where he was going, and he went to the Jesuit novice house and did exactly that; the canonisation took three centuries more. + In the summer of 1621, at seventy-eight and failing, he was at last given leave to leave the world of business and go to Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale, the house where the Jesuit novices lived. On the morning of 25 August his plain carriage met the very grand coach of Cardinal d’Este in the Roman streets, and d’Este leaned out to ask where my lord Bellarmine might be going today. To die, sir, came the answer, cheerfully. He is going away to die. D’Este protested that he had never seen him look better. Nevertheless, my lord, said the old man, I am going away to die, and high time too. He had written a book about how to do it. De arte bene moriendi, "The art of dying well," had come out the year before, and the first thing it says is that the art of dying well is the art of living well, practised long enough to become a habit. He had one piece of unfinished business, a session of the Congregation of the Index on 28 August, and he went to it, took his leave of the cardinals, and did not look back. He died at Sant’ Andrea on 17 September 1621. His body was moved a year later into the vault that had held the remains of Ignatius of Loyola, and in 1923 to the feet of Aloysius Gonzaga, the young Jesuit he had guided through his last years and whose canonisation he had worked to bring about. His own cause took three centuries, and what held it up was not anything laid to his charge. It was French court politics, which could not forgive his account of papal authority (T3). Pius XI canonised him in 1930 and named him a Doctor of the Church in 1931, a title Rome gives to a handful of writers whose teaching it commends to the whole church rather than to scholars only.

What He Taught

(T1) The church is a visible society, as plain to the eye as the republic of Venice. + Stand in the doorway of a parish church on a Sunday morning in 1580 and count the heads inside. Have you just counted the church? Put that question to a Roman theologian and to a Reformed one and you get two very different answers. The Reformers distinguished the visible church, meaning the congregations you can walk into on a Sunday, from the invisible church, meaning the whole company of those God has actually saved, whose names are known to him and to nobody else. The distinction did real work for them. It explained how the true church could have survived through centuries when the visible institution had gone wrong, and it kept salvation a matter between God and the soul rather than a matter of membership. Bellarmine went at that distinction with a hammer. One church, he said, not two. He was willing to grant that faith, hope and love are found in the church and are what make a member a living one. What he denied was that any inward quality is what puts you in it. What puts you in it is public and countable: you profess the faith, you receive the sacraments, you are under lawful pastors and under the bishop of Rome. Anyone can see who satisfies that description, the way anyone can see who is a citizen of Venice. The gain is obvious and it is why the definition stuck. A church defined this way can be found, joined, disciplined and reformed. Nobody has to guess whether he belongs. The Reformers’ answer was that Scripture itself speaks of a church God knows in a way men cannot (2 Timothy 2:19), that a visible body can be shot through with hypocrites without ceasing to be the visible body, and that making visible membership the whole story turns a living relation to Christ into a question of paperwork. That exchange has never closed. It is the one Bellarmine forced into the open, and both sides have argued on his ground ever since.

(Q) "For the Church is a body of men as visible and palpable as the assembly of the Roman people, or the kingdom of France, or the republic of Venice." + Source: Bellarmine, De Controversiis, On Councils and the Church, book 3 (On the Church Militant), chapter 2, in James Bannerman’s translation (The Church of Christ, 1868, vol. 1, p. 69). The sentence closes a paragraph in which Bellarmine has just reviewed the Reformers’ definitions one by one and named the difference: they all require an inward virtue for membership and so make the true church invisible, while he requires only "an external profession of faith, and the communion in the sacraments, which is received by sense itself." Bannerman, a Scottish Presbyterian who disagreed with every word of it, thought the definition important enough to translate in full and then argue with at length.

(T2) The unwritten tradition of the apostles stands level with the written Scriptures. + A carpenter teaches an apprentice partly by handing him a written plan and partly by showing him how the work is done. Years later the apprentice knows things that are nowhere on the plan, and he did not invent them; they came from the same master. Bellarmine’s argument about tradition runs along that line. The apostles taught by speech before they taught by letter, and what they handed on by speech was as much from them as what they wrote. The word itself needs care, because it had two meanings in the sixteenth century and still does. Tradition can mean a custom that has simply grown up over time, which is what Protestants meant when they complained of the traditions of men. It can also mean what the Latin traditio means, a handing over: something passed from one hand to the next. Bellarmine meant the second, and his proof text was Paul telling the Thessalonians to "stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter" (2 Thessalonians 2:15). If the spoken word and the letter are named together, he argued, the church is not free to keep one and drop the other. And a good deal of what Christians actually do rests on exactly that footing, including infant baptism and the canon of Scripture itself, the canon being the settled list of which books belong in the Bible and which do not. The Reformers did not deny that the apostles spoke as well as wrote. Their reply was that we have no way of telling genuine apostolic speech from later growth except by the writings, and that Scripture is sufficient to equip the man of God for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Bellarmine’s counter was that the writings themselves have to be identified, gathered and read, and that no book can perform those offices for itself. The dispute is about who holds the pen when the rule is applied, and it remains the deepest single division between Rome and the Reformation.

(Q) "But, leaving out the abuse, because it is not our business to return evil for evil, I answer Brentz that tradition is quite rightly put on a level with the Scriptures." + Source: Bellarmine, De Controversiis, on the unwritten word of God, in James Brodrick’s translation (The Life and Work of Blessed Robert Francis Cardinal Bellarmine, 1928, vol. 1, p. 178). Johannes Brenz was a leading Lutheran theologian of Württemberg. Bellarmine had produced a passage from Basil of Caesarea in favour of unwritten tradition; Brenz answered that Basil had slipped and that decent men would pass over the lapse in silence, and called those who quoted it swine who uncover their father’s shame. Bellarmine sets the insult aside in half a sentence and then argues the point as carefully as if Brenz were a friend, which is the manner the whole three volumes are written in.

(T3) Civil power comes from God, but it comes to the ruler through the people. + Here is the question a sixteenth-century king wanted answered, and he wanted it answered the way a man wants the deeds to his house looked at: does my crown come to me straight from heaven, or does it come up to me through the men I rule? Everything turned on it. If straight from heaven, then to resist the king is to resist God, and no earthly body has any standing to judge him. If through the people, then the crown is held on terms, and terms can be broken. Bellarmine’s answer has three steps, and they are worth keeping apart. First, that there should be government at all is from God, by the law of nature: human beings cannot live otherwise, and Paul says that the authorities that exist have been instituted by God (Romans 13:1). Second, God gives that power to no particular man. Divine law does not name a king, so the power rests in the first place in the whole body of the people. Third, since a whole people cannot govern itself directly, it hands the power over to one man or to several, and which form it chooses, monarchy or aristocracy or republic, belongs to human law and can with good cause be changed. He notes drily that Rome did exactly that. From this he drew his account of the pope and kings: no direct power over temporal rulers at all, since their power is genuinely their own and comes up through their people, but an indirect power where the eternal good of Christians is at stake. He meant it as a moderate position, and like most moderate positions in that century it made enemies at both ends. Sixtus V moved to put the volume containing it on the Index for conceding too little to Rome. In 1610 the Parlement of Paris, which despite the name was a court of law rather than an assembly of the sort the English were building at Westminster, condemned his book against the Scottish jurist William Barclay for conceding too much. He was censured in 1590 for being too much the king’s man and in 1610 for being too much the pope’s.

(Q) "Note, secondly, that this power resides, as in its subject, immediately in the whole state, for this power is by Divine law, but Divine law gives this power to no particular man, therefore Divine law gives this power to the collected body." + Source: Bellarmine, De Laicis (On the Laity), chapter 6, in Kathleen E. Murphy’s translation (Fordham University Press, 1928). De Laicis is the section of the Controversies that deals with the lay members of the church, and chapter 6 argues the point from what Bellarmine calls the efficient cause, meaning the thing that actually produces the authority. The chapter goes on: "in the absence of positive law, there is no good reason why, in a multitude of equals, one rather than another should dominate."

(T4) If something in nature is truly proved, the reading of Scripture must give way, not the proof. + Bellarmine is remembered as the man who warned Galileo, and the warning was real. Less often noticed is the rule he laid down in the same breath, which is stronger than anything the Protestant universities of his day were saying on the subject. He distinguished two things that are easy to confuse, and a railway platform is a good place to see the difference between them. The carriage you are sitting in begins to slide backwards, or else the train on the next track is sliding forwards. What you see through the glass is the same either way. You have a picture that fits what you see, and you do not yet have a proof of which of the two is moving. A theory that saves the appearances is like that: an arrangement that predicts what we see. A demonstration is the other thing: a proof that the thing is so. Putting the sun at the centre predicted the planets better than the old system of circles upon circles, and Bellarmine granted that freely. But predicting well is not the same as proving true, since more than one arrangement can predict the same appearances, and in 1615 that was not a dodge but the plain state of the evidence. The stellar parallax that would have settled it, the tiny annual shift in the apparent position of a star as the earth swings from one side of its orbit to the other, is far too small to see without instruments nobody would have for two hundred years. Then comes the concession. Suppose the demonstration did arrive. In that case, Bellarmine says, we should have to go carefully back over the passages of Scripture that seem to say otherwise, and conclude that we had not understood them, rather than say that what has been proved is false. That is the principle Augustine had urged twelve centuries earlier and that Galileo was urging in the same years: Scripture teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. Bellarmine held it in theory and, in February 1616, acted against it in practice, because he was convinced that no demonstration existed.

(Q) "If there were a real proof that the sun is in the centre of the universe, that the earth is in the third heaven, and that the sun does not go round the earth but the earth round the sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and rather admit that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true." + Source: Bellarmine, letter to Paolo Antonio Foscarini, 12 April 1615, in James Brodrick’s translation (1928, vol. 2, p. 359). The sentence immediately following is the one that decided the case: "But as for myself, I shall not believe that there are such proofs until they are shown to me." "The third heaven" means the third sphere counting outward from the centre, which is where the earth sits in the Copernican ordering.

(T5) What a rich man has beyond his needs already belongs to the poor. + The great controversialist spent his last years writing small devotional books, one out of each annual retreat, and those little books sold better than the folios ever did. The last of them, The Art of Dying Well, ends with a question he says a man must settle before he dies: whether he may keep superfluous wealth without sin. Superfluous is the word doing the work there. It means whatever is over and above what a man needs for his own state of life, and Bellarmine is careful with it, because what is superfluous for one household may be barely enough for the one next door. He refuses to set a number. What he will not allow is the escape route. He lines up Scripture first, Luke 3:11 on the man with two tunics and Luke 12:20 on the rich fool whose soul is required of him that night, and then a column of the fathers: Basil asking whether a man who keeps what he was given to distribute is not simply a thief, Ambrose calling it no smaller crime to deny alms when you can give them than to steal, Jerome saying that whatever exceeds food and clothing is a debt you owe, Augustine that what is superfluous to the rich is necessary to the poor. Then he closes off the last exit. Suppose you say these goods are not owed to the poor in strict justice, only in charity. Very well, says the cardinal; and what difference will that make to where you end up? He was made to answer for it. Every book printed at Rome had to be licensed first, and the licensing was the business of the Master of the Sacred Palace, the pope’s own household theologian. He read the manuscript, called the teaching on almsgiving new and strange, and reported it to the pope. Friends urged Bellarmine to defend himself. He would not, on the ground that defending himself meant putting a fellow religious in the wrong, and if people thought less of him, so much the better. He had by then given away almost everything he owned; a will he drew up in 1611 disposing of debts owed to him and goods in his cellars was out of date by 1621, because there were no debts left and the cellars were empty.

(Q) "Here if any will contend that these superfluous goods are not to be given unto the poore out of the rigour of the law, yet truly he cannot deny that they are to be given them out of charity, and it importeth little, God wot, whether a man go to hel for want of justice or for want of charity." + Source: Bellarmine, The Art of Dying Well (1620), in Edward Coffin’s English translation (St Omers, 1621), pp. 91-97, as quoted by James Brodrick (1928, vol. 2, p. 406). The spelling is Coffin’s, printed within a year of Bellarmine’s death for English Catholic readers abroad. "God wot" is the old form of "God knows."

(Q) "We know, too, that we were in a great hurry, that we often disagreed, and, above all, that we had to leave many things alone which needed amending." + Source: Bellarmine, memorandum to Gregory XIV on the publication of the revised Vulgate, 1591, in James Brodrick’s translation (1928, vol. 1, p. 286). He is arguing against issuing the new Bible with a decree suppressing all other editions. The sentences before it are franker still: the pope gave the commission its warrant but could not give it the assistance of the Holy Spirit, and being human, its members may easily have made mistakes. The man who wrote that was the man who wrote the unsigned preface to the Clementine Bible the following year.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Protestant Europe answered him by name for a century, and drank its beer out of jugs shaped like his head. + William Whitaker, Master of St John’s College and Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, got hold of a manuscript of the Roman lectures before they were printed and rebuilt his own course around them. He said why at the head of the course: others had written on the controversies, but beyond them all in the largeness of his treatment stood Bellarmine, whose lectures were passing from hand to hand and being copied out by very many. "Since Bellarmine hath handled these questions with accuracy and method, and his lectures are in every body’s hands, we will make him, so to speak, our principal aim, and follow, as it were, in his very footsteps" (A Disputation on Holy Scripture, 1588, in the Parker Society translation of 1849). Cambridge was not alone in it. At Oxford, John Rainolds, who would later propose the translation that became the King James Bible, held a temporary lectureship founded in 1586 by Sir Francis Walsingham for the confutation of Roman tenets, and spent it almost entirely on Bellarmine, leaving two hundred and fifty lectures behind him. Richard Field of Magdalen Hall argued against Bellarmine every Sunday for seven years, which is a long time to spend on a man you have never met. The Puritan William Ames published a whole book under the title Bellarminus enervatus, "Bellarmine unnerved." The story that Elizabeth I founded university chairs for the express purpose of refuting him is repeated in many books, and the Calendar of State Papers, Strype, Camden and Wood give it no confirmation; it looks like a later embroidery on the real lectureships, which were founded by private benefactors and aimed at Roman teaching in general. What is beyond doubt is the title-page formula. Bellarmine had written adversus huius temporis haereticos, against the heretics of this time; Whitaker turned the caption round to contra huius temporis papistas, and added imprimis Robertum Bellarminum, and Robert Bellarmine first of all. Protestant book after Protestant book flourished that codicil on its front page. The oddest monument of all is a jug. Potters at Frechen near Cologne had long made round-bellied stoneware bottles with a bearded face moulded on the neck, and somewhere in this period the Protestant north began calling them bellarmines. A non-Catholic admirer wrote to Notes and Queries to protest that the cardinal, so far from being signalized by a capacious belly, was particularly noted for sobriety. That was precisely the joke, and the protest missed it. The humour lay in the mismatch: put the name of a small, spare, notably abstemious cardinal on a fat bottle of ale, and you get to tip him up by the neck whenever you are thirsty. The jugs turn up in English museums by the crate, and pouring your drink out of the top of that head was a cheap answer to three folio volumes nobody local could refute.

(†) He argued without abuse in an age of abuse, and that, more than any single conclusion, is what both sides learned from him. + It is difficult now to convey how foul religious argument had become by the 1580s. A single English controversialist called his Catholic opponents witless sophisters, unclean beasts, foul-mouthed hogs and the seed of the devil, and was answered in kind by a man who described him as a mean tanner’s son fit only to sweep chambers. Bellarmine’s own ally Thomas Stapleton wrote of Whitaker that his head was thicker than any mallet ever made, and fitter for a fool’s cap than a doctor’s. This was normal. Against that background, two episodes stand out. The Benedictine scholar Gilbert Génebrard had accused Calvin and Beza, Theodore Beza being Calvin’s successor at Geneva, of a grave error about the Trinity, and Peter Canisius had repeated the charge. A man in Bellarmine’s position had every reason to repeat it too, and instead he went to the texts and read them. He reported that he had read Calvin carefully, that he found the language faulty and open to the reading Catholic writers had put on it, and that all the same he was not willing to say Calvin had believed or taught the heresy; then he spent four columns proving the Genevan’s orthodoxy on the point. He had no earthly motive for it except that it was true. The second is a story told sixteen years after his death by the Protestant writer Donald Lupton, and repeated with more detail by the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood, so it is testimony rather than documentation. Bellarmine, they say, obtained a portrait of Whitaker and kept it where he worked. Asked by fellow Jesuits why he would have a heretic’s picture in front of him, he answered that although the man was a heretic and his adversary, he was a learned adversary. Thomas Fuller, a Protestant historian with no reason to flatter him, gave the verdict from the other side: a great scholar who wanted nothing but a good cause to defend, generally writing ingenuously, sometimes slanting but seldom downright railing.

(†) His account of where a king’s power comes from travelled further than his account of the pope’s. + Bellarmine meant (T3) as a limit on royal pretension and a defence of the papacy’s indirect authority. What survived was the first half. Once you have said that God gives political power to no particular man, and that it rests in the first place in the whole body of the people, you have said something that will not stay inside the argument it was built for. An idea of that size goes where the logic takes it, and this one went to England. Sir Robert Filmer saw it coming and hated it. Patriarcha, the classic English defence of the divine right of kings, opens by quoting Bellarmine to the effect that secular authority is in the people unless they bestow it on a prince, and sets out to demolish it root and branch by deriving all royal power from Adam’s fatherhood. John Locke then wrote his First Treatise of Government to demolish Filmer. The doctrine that political authority arises from the governed, which English readers met as a Jesuit error worth refuting, was thus argued through three generations of English political writing and came out the other side as a commonplace. The next step in the story is usually overstated. There is a persistent claim that Bellarmine’s writings were a direct source for the Declaration of Independence, sometimes with Jefferson reading him at his desk. Historians who have gone looking for the evidence have not found it, and the resemblance is better explained by a long shared tradition of natural-law reasoning running through the Spanish scholastics and the English Whigs than by any book on Jefferson’s shelf. The real influence is traceable and is quite large enough without it.

(†) Where his own record is open to challenge: a preface, a list of propositions, and an admonition. + The disagreements between Bellarmine and the Reformers are live arguments between Christians, and each side has its own case to state. What can fairly be laid at his own door is narrower, and it is what the primary documents show him doing. There are three items, and they are not equal. - The preface to the Clementine Vulgate. The preface of 1592 puts the faults of the Sixtine Bible down to simple misprints, and says that Sixtus V, dissatisfied with them, had himself resolved to put the whole work on the anvil again. That is a kind story, and two documents in Bellarmine’s own hand tell it differently. In his memorandum to Gregory XIV and in his autobiography the errors have several causes, and no such resolve of Sixtus is mentioned anywhere. Then Paul Maria Baumgarten found the original of Aeternus Ille, the bull with which Sixtus had promulgated his text, a bull being the most formal kind of papal decree, issued under the pope’s leaden seal. He found it in 1907 and printed it among the documents of the case in 1911. It is endorsed on the back as promulgated on 10 April 1590, which makes the preface’s picture of a pope quietly reconsidering his own work very hard to sustain. Catholics have criticised it as sharply as Protestants; the gentler verdict has been a pious subterfuge, the harder one a deliberate lie. His defenders answer that the wording was a committee’s as much as his, that the alternative was to let a pope be publicly convicted of corrupting Scripture, and that the man who told Gregory XIV plainly how much the revisers had left unamended was not in the habit of deceiving. They add one point of substance: when Jesuits in Rome were asked in 1610 to establish what had actually happened, they reported that the bull was never entered in the papal chancery registers and so was never promulgated at all, and that Bellarmine, returning from France, had been told as much by cardinals who spoke with certainty. A reader may weigh that as he finds it. What cannot be said is that the preface tells the truth plainly. - The propositions against Giordano Bruno. On 14 January 1599 the Holy Office approved a list of eight heretical propositions drawn from Bruno’s works and trial record, assembled by Bellarmine together with the Dominican Alberto Tragagliolo. The list itself is lost. Bruno refused to recant, and on 17 February 1600 he was burned in the Campo de’ Fiori. Bellarmine did not light the fire and the surviving papers do not make him the driving force of the case, but he was a cardinal of the Holy Office that conducted it and he did the work of specifying what Bruno had to abjure. He held, with nearly every authority of his century on both sides of the Reformation, that obstinate heresy was a capital matter for the civil power. That the conviction was general does not make it right. - The admonition to Galileo. The letter to Foscarini lays down a rule that would have protected Galileo, and ten months later Bellarmine carried out the Holy Office’s instruction to tell him to abandon the opinion. There is no contradiction in his own mind, since the rule applies only when a demonstration is in hand and he judged that none was. The judgement was defensible in 1615 and it was still wrong, and the fault is not only his: he was enforcing a decision he had not made, in an institution that had taken to settling questions of fact by decree. The most that his own principle required of him was to say that the church should wait. He did not say it. Set beside these, the rest of the record is a man who gave away his income, went to the hospital an infinite number of times, refused to defend himself when censured, and asked to be buried at the feet of a boy he had taught to pray.