Paolo Sarpi
(14 August 1552 – 15 January 1623) was an Italian Servite friar and Catholic priest who was a notable historian, scientist, canon lawyer, polymath and statesman active on behalf of the Venetian Republic during the period of its successful defiance of the papal interdict (1605–1607) and its war (1615–1617) with Austria over the Uskok pirates.
His writings, frankly polemical and highly critical of the Catholic Church and its Scholastic tradition, "inspired both Hobbes and Edward Gibbon in their own historical debunkings of priestcraft.
"[5] Sarpi was also an experimental scientist, a proponent of the Copernican system, a friend and patron of Galileo Galilei,[6] and a keen follower of the latest research on anatomy, astronomy, and ballistics at the University of Padua.
He then went to Milan in 1575, where he was an adviser to Charles Borromeo, the saint and bishop[10] but was transferred by his superiors to Venice, to serve as a professor of philosophy at the Servite monastery there.
In 1601, he was recommended by the Venetian senate for the bishopric of Caorle, but the papal nuncio, who wished to obtain it for a protégé of his own, accused Sarpi of having denied the immortality of the soul and controverted the authority of Aristotle.
An attempt to obtain another bishopric in the following year also failed, Pope Clement VIII having taken offence at Sarpi's habit of corresponding with learned heretics.
[citation needed] Clement VIII died in March 1605, and the attitude of his successor Pope Paul V strained the limits of papal prerogative.
In an anonymous tract published shortly afterwards (Risposta di un Dottore in Teologia), he laid down principles which struck radically at papal authority in secular matters.
[14] Following Sarpi's advice, the Venetian clergy largely disregarded the interdict and discharged their functions as usual, the major exception being the Jesuits, who left and were simultaneously expelled officially.
[15] At length (April 1607), the mediation of King Henry IV of France arranged a compromise which salvaged the pope's dignity but conceded the points at issue.
[20] Sarpi's would-be assassins settled in Rome, and were eventually granted a pension by the viceroy of Naples, Pedro Téllez-Girón, 3rd Duke of Osuna.
[21] The remainder of Sarpi's life was spent peacefully in his cloister, though plots against him continued to be formed, and he occasionally spoke of taking refuge in England.
In 1619 his chief literary work, Istoria del Concilio Tridentino (History of the Council of Trent), was printed in London, published under the name of Pietro Soave Polano, an anagram of Paolo Sarpi Veneto (plus o).
di Giesù ove insieme rifiutasi con auterevoli testimonianze un Istoria falsa divolgata nello stesso argomento sotto nome di Petro Soave Polano ("The History of the Council of Trent written by P. Sforza Pallavicino, of the Company of Jesus, in which a false history upon the same argument put forth under the name of Petro Soave Polano is refuted by means of authoritative testimony", 1656–1657).
[33] The great nineteenth century historian Leopold von Ranke (History of the Popes), examined both Sarpi and Pallavicino's treatments of manuscript materials and judged them both as falling short of his own strict standards of objectivity.
The former is described as moved by deadly hatred – malignant in his purpose and reckless in his means – fabricating falsehoods and distorting or perverting truths; while the Jesuit, though scrupulously correct in the documents he exhibits, often suppresses those opposed to his views.
[38] A Machiavellian tract on the fundamental maxims of Venetian policy (Opinione come debba governarsi la repubblica di Venezia) has been attributed to Sarpi and used by some of his posthumous adversaries to blacken his memory, but it in fact dates from 1681.
[39] He did not complete a reply which he had been ordered to prepare to the Squitinio della libertà veneta (1612, attributed to Alfonso de la Cueva), which he perhaps found unanswerable.
[citation needed] In folio appeared his History of Ecclesiastical Benefices, in which, said Matteo Ricci, "he purged the church of the defilement introduced by spurious decretals."
[45] As a historian and thinker in the realist tradition of Tacitus, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini, he stressed that patriotism as national pride or honour could play a central role in social control.
[47] Sarpi hoped for toleration of Protestant worship in Venice and the establishment of a Venetian free church by which the decrees of the Council of Trent would have been rejected.
Sarpi discusses his intimate beliefs and motives in his correspondence with Christoph von Dohna, envoy to Venice for Christian I, Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg.
[citation needed] Sarpi at the end of his life wrote to Daniel Heinsius that he favoured the side of the Calvinist Contra-Remonstrants at the Synod of Dort.
[55] On the other hand, in 1983 David Wootton made a case for Sarpi as a scientific materialist and thus as likely a "veiled" atheist who was "hostile to Christianity itself" and whose politics looked forward to a secular society unrealizable in his own time,[56] a thesis that has won some acceptance.
His response was unequivocal: he was convinced that knowledge of divine matters was attained sola fide and he explicitly claimed that in religious matters one could not make judgments based on reason, but instead, they had to be based on affection or feeling[58]Sarpi wrote notes on François Viète which established his proficiency in mathematics, and a metaphysical treatise now lost, which is said to have anticipated the ideas of John Locke.
[citation needed] Sarpi wrote on projectile motion in the period 1578–84, in the tradition of Niccolò Fontana Tartaglia; and then again in reporting on Guidobaldo del Monte's ideas in 1592, possibly by then having met Galileo Galilei.
[60] In 1609, the Venetian Republic had a telescope on approval for military purposes, but Sarpi had them turn it down, anticipating the better model Galileo had made and brought later that year.
