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The Venetian Interdict and the Problem of Order

This essay explored the broader cultural significance of the confrontation between the papacy and the Venetian Republic during the interdict of 1606–1607. Viewing the transition from the medieval to the modern world as involving, among other things, a shift from a metaphysical to a practical conception of order, it brought into sharper focus one of the themes of my book Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty, published by the University of California Press in 1968. During the years when I was working on that book, I was corresponding about scholarly matters with Lech Szczucki of the Polish Academy of Sciences; and he solicited from me an article for a volume of essays , Histoire—Philosophie—Religion, published by the academy's Institute of Philosophy and Sociology as volume 12 of the Archiwum Historii Filozofii i Mysli Spolecznej (Warsaw, 1966), pp. 127–140. It is reprinted here by permission of the publisher .

Central to the great upheavals marking the transition between the medieval and the modern world were profound disagreements about the nature of order, whether in the social and political realm, in the church, in the cosmos, or in the exalted spheres of metaphysics. High medieval culture, broadly speaking, had tended toward a unified and hierarchical conception of order which assigned to all men, experiences, places, things, and ideas their appropriate positions in a vast, graded system of values. Conversely the attack on medieval civilization at its deepest level, operating simultaneously in both the material and ideal realms, was directed at this system and the general principles it incorporated. Their common participation in this attack is perhaps the primary link among the essential tendencies of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation,

and the scientific revolution. By the same token the Counter- Reformation was, at its center, an effort to reassert and reinvigorate a conception of political and cultural as well as ecclesiastical order that had been under long attack from many directions. This crucial impulse in Rome establishes the coherence of the various efforts on the part of ecclesiastical authority to obstruct the growing political particularism of the modern age, to control literary and artistic expression, to fight heresy, to centralize the loose administration of the church, and to restrain the new science. Each of these apparently disparate phenomena had expressed in a different area of human concern some parallel repudiation of the traditional vision of order.

Complex relationships of this sort among great historical movements, unless they are altogether obvious, can generally be established clearly only by elaborate demonstration and evidence drawn from numerous sources. But occasionally a concrete historical crisis forces a whole range of underlying issues to the surface and brings suddenly into clear focus the inner meaning of major historical developments. The Venetian interdict of 1606–1607 was a crisis of this useful kind. Ostensibly intended to force the defiant Venetian Republic to cease the punishment of criminal clergy in civil courts and to withdraw laws restricting clerical wealth and the building of churches, the interdict quickly became the occasion for fundamental discussion not only about the nature of Christendom and the church but also about the underlying principles of all order.^[1]

Even at the Curia preliminary interviews between Pope Paul V and the Venetian ambassador, Agostino Nani, quickly touched on fundamentals. Nani boldly defended Venetian policy by a direct appeal to "reason of state," and the pope denounced the Republic on precisely the same ground. For both sides the propriety of an autonomous and secular politics was clearly at stake.^[2] But the most penetrating discussion of basic issues was carried on by means of a massive exchange of writings which were, for both sides, directed to a European audience. The presses of Rome, Bologna, and other Italian cities poured out a flood of pamphlets and books, often of considerable length, against the stubborn Republic; and the best minds in the Catholic world (as well as some of the dullest) were pressed into this cause. Among the champions of the pope were Baronius, Bellarmine, Possevino, and even Campanella. Often tedious, repetitious, quite without intellectual distinction, and frequently merely hortatory or vituperative, the various compositions of the papal writers nevertheless provide an impressive collective statement of the deepest attitudes and convictions of the Counter-Reformation. Venice also found effective champions. Some, like the Servite monk Fra Paolo Sarpi, the

Franciscan Marc'Antonio Capello, and the lay patrician Antonio Quirino, were native Venetians. Others, like the Neapolitan Giovanni Marsilio, a former Jesuit, were outsiders resident in the city and enlisted in its defense. In Paris the Venetian ambassador, Pietro Priuli, managed to persuade the Gallican jurists Louis Servin and Jacques Leschassier to write in behalf of Venice. Like the writings composed in the Roman interest, those defending Venice also dealt with the most fundamental issues.

The confrontation between the two sides was not entirely direct. Much of their difference originated in attitudes and assumptions too deep and intimate for conscious recognition. Proceeding from different premises, the papal and Venetian writers often give the impression of writing in different languages that perversely insist on using the same vocabulary. The result was that each side triumphantly scored points against the other, chalked up favorable marks on its private boards, and felt a righteous indignation when the opposition refused to admit defeat. Charges of dishonesty accumulated, bad feeling mounted, and each side was increasingly inclined angrily to dismiss the arguments of the other. For Rome Venice was moved only by impious greed later compounded by rebellion. For Venice the lofty pretensions of Rome masked a lust for power.

The basic obstacle to their communication was a major difference in intellectual constitution. Roman discourse was rational and systematic in a style inherited from the high Middle Ages, while Venice represented the concrete and flexible political mentality of Renaissance republicanism. Thus Bellarmine and his colleagues attacked the Venetians as bad logicians,^[3] inundated the discussion with masses of authorities,^[4] and accumulated classifications and subtle distinctions. Bellarmine, for example, did not care to discuss liberty without distinguishing half a dozen senses of the term.^[5] The mental world of these men was fixed and certain, and they conceived of intellectual discourse as the task of revealing its firm, clear outlines.

But the works of Sarpi and his associates (though they frequently found it necessary to reply in kind) often display quite a different spirit. Sarpi ridiculed Bellarmine's distinctions as pedantic,^[6] and his own compositions are permeated with a sense of the relativity of human practice "to what the variety of the times may bring."^[7] As he remarked to his government at an early point in the struggle, he was convinced that "examples move more than reasons."^[8] He constantly preferred concrete data to speculative conclusions;^[9] he remarked in his first consulto that "it is not suitable to proceed in these cases by conjectures, deductions, or

syllogisms, but by explicit laws."^[10] By the same token the Venetian theologians were critical of their opponents' habit of pressing Scripture into a rigid dogmatic framework. "One ought not take refuge in allegory but stick to the proper and literal sense," Marsilio loftily informed Bellarmine;^[11] and Sarpi constantly insisted that a proper interpretation of Scripture always required a sense of context. "Sacred Scripture should be read as a whole, not in passages," he advised the most distinguished of the Roman theologians.^[12] Such minds were also little impressed by the familiar medieval arguments from analogy, to which the papal theologians still constantly referred. "Propositions that are to be estabished as dogmas should not be based on similitudes of similitudes," Sarpi observed stiffly in connection with the association of Peter and the rock;^[13] and Capello was not at all persuaded that the relationship between body and soul had any real bearing on the relations between Venice and the pope.^[14] Roman theologians appealed to historical precedent, and Venetians cited canons or exploited syllogisms where they were useful. But neither side was entirely comfortable with the weapons of the other.

But although issues could not always be joined directly, the basic character of the conflict is clear; and the clash was nowhere more fundamental than in the utterly different meanings the two sides assigned to the idea of order; on its deepest level the Venetian interdict was nothing less than a struggle over the nature of order. For the Roman theologians order implied a great system comprehending the entire natural and supernatural universe, organizing all its elements into a single all-inclusive scheme, imposing harmony and meaning on the whole and each of its parts. For the Venetians order had a limited and practical significance. Order was simply the necessary condition of social existence, and any attempt to fill it with a more sublime content could only subvert the true order relevant to the human situation.

Lelio Medici, Inquisitor General in Florence, offered an unusually comprehensive exposition of the papalist vision of order. "Now it is very clear and a conclusion approved by all the theologians," he declared in a typical piece of exegesis, "that all the works of God have order in themselves." Thus in the story of the Creation the fact that "God saw all the things that he had made and they were very good" (Gen. 1:31) meant that they were ordered . It could not be otherwise, Medici declared, "because if they were not ordered, there would necessarily be confusion among them, which would mean imperfection in all things and especially in God." It was equally clear to this writer that order had a specific character. Its essential principle was hierarchy, the distinction between

higher things and lower, above all the due subordination of inferior to superior. "Order," Medici continued, "carries with it this condition, that lower things, being less perfect and noble, should be subordinated to higher, to the more perfect and noble, a point on which there is no difficulty."^[15] Possevino was both more specific and more complex: "In the world there are the elements and the higher spheres; but because the whole remains in order, they are conserved together. In man there are a soul and body of diverse natures, and God found a way to join them together. Nor, because the heart, the brain, the liver administer motion, heat, and life to the body, do they suffice to keep man alive, because the intellectual soul is necessary, without which, as without its proper form, the whole would remain a cadaver. . . . In heaven there are, equally, various hierarchies, nor does one prejudice another because, each power being subordinated to higher powers, they preserve that admirable union from which all stability and joy derive."^[16]

This general conception of order was central to the papalist view of all social organization. "The order which shines through in all the works of God," leaders of his own monastic group wrote against Sarpi, "is also found in every human congregation. For because order cannot exist without chief and head, since the principle of order consists in this, it happens that in every multitude gathered together, insofar as order exists, there is a chief and head on which the ordered multitude depends. This appears in families, in armies, and in all other regulated assemblies." Inherent in nature, the same principle of order also applies inevitably to the church: "In the same way the most beauteous order appears in this Holy Congregation of the faithful, which is the Christian Church, as in the family, or an army, or even, as Saint Paul suggests, a human body." Thus it was clearly necessary "that there should be one head and chief, and in consequence levels of authority and subjection. Because in every ordered assembly it is necessary that some should rule and others should be subject; some should command and others obey; some should give laws and others observe them, and with their observance direct and conduct themselves to the destined end."^[17]

Ventura Venturi, Olivetan abbot of Siena, made the system as a political conception particularly neat, at the same time suggesting how participation in the hierarchy meant the dignity and fulfillment of even its humblest members. "Nor are temporal princes and senators disunited from this hierarchy," he wrote, "but a part and principal member of it. For just as the celestial hierarchy consists of angels and archangels, thrones, principates, powers, dominions, so in the human hierarchy there correspond the thrones of the empires, of kingdoms, of princes; of

governments, of republics, and of all the other powers which, therefore, with just and harmonious proportion, are successively ordered by, disposed by, and finally depend on the supreme hierarch, the pope."^[18] But the principle of subordination above all required the obedience of the whole temporal order to spiritual direction and the discipline of all things to man's ultimate end. This meant that politics could never be self-contained and that secular government could never be a law unto itself. Giovanni Antonio Bovio made this point with particular clarity:^[19]

Politics and religion cannot rule in distinct countries separated by mountains, rivers, or other boundaries; because every community of men, like every man in himself, being made by God and subject to him, must have within itself religion, with which it renders to God due tribute of worship and adoration. Since, therefore, politics and religion must exist together in the same republic, it is necessary that they should not co-exist as equals, lest differences and discords be interminable; and hence one has to be subordinated to the other, since where there is no order there is confusion, and where all powers are not subordinated to one supreme power there cannnot be good government. . . . Now we see which of the two must be subordinated and subject to the other. Politics undertakes to procure the felicity of this earthly life, religion that of celestial life. Politics ordains the whole body of the republic under an earthly prince, religion orders both the entire republic and its head under the supreme Head and Lord God. Politics rules and governs earthly things, religion directs them to the eternal. Politics is occupied for the most part with what pertains to the body and to corporal things, religion with that which concerns the salvation of souls. Who does not see clearly, therefore, that just as man is subject to God and the body to the soul, and just as this life is ordained as the way to the heavenly fatherland and these earthly things as a stairway to celestial, so politics is subject and subordinate to religion, and the prince and temporal government to the head of religion and of the church?

Bovio thus presents us systematically with the case of the Counter-Reformation against Machiavelli and against Renaissance politics in general. His argument was of course by no means novel; novelty was precisely what Rome wished to avoid. But the emphatic articulation of the position here should make it quite apparent that general considerations of the most far-reaching significance were at stake in the papal indictment of Venice. The offense of the Republic did not consist simply of particular acts of disobedience to papal authority but set off a series

of wide reverberations. The real guilt of Venice lay in her rebellion against the principle of order implicit in the very nature of reality. Bellarmine equated Venetian defiance of the pope with the original sin of Eve.^[20]

The Venetian theologians made little effort to refute the papal conception of order directly. Indeed their indifference to this abstract challenge on its own sublime level is one of the clearest indications of the distance between the two antagonists. For Venice order posed a practical, not a speculative, problem; true order was precisely what her own admirable constitution had so effectively created, and the Venetian constitution required no sanction beyond its own perfection and success. Thus the real Venetian reply to the Roman conception of order was not a direct refutation but insistence on the familiar Renaissance conception of the liberty of states. The order of Venice depended not on her participation, as a subordinate member, in a monolithic and hierarchical system but on her detachment and independence from all systems. It was because Venice was free, because no alien power had the right to interfere with her genial political processes, that her government had become a model of stability for the rest of Europe.

The Venetian political ideal was not altogether secular; the theologians of the Republic derived its separate existence (and the existence of all other states) from God. But the relation of any particular state to the deity (like that of the Protestant believer) was direct; it was not mediated through a hierarchy of authorities. And God himself, as Sarpi insisted, required that the independence of states should be staunchly maintained: "Because the civil being of every republic or kingdom comes from God and is directed to his glory, therefore it is not permissible, without sin and offense to God, that its proper liberty, which is the civil being of every principate, should be taken away and usurped. Nor ought there to be any doubt that negligence in its defense is a grave offense against God, and most grave when it is voluntarily allowed to be usurped."^[21] It could hardly have been reassuring to Rome that Sarpi put the matter in such general terms. He not only clearly denied that Venice belonged to a system directed by the pope to supernatural and supranational ends; he also argued that such a system was directly contrary to the will of God.

But God's purposes in willing the existence of a political world of discrete states were not inscrutable and arbitrary; particular states were required because of their superior efficiency in maintaining the kind of order that the Venetians considered relevant to the human condition. This point emerges clearly in the theories of sovereignty that the Vene-

tian writers developed from their ideal of political liberty. Sovereignty, as the authority to govern effectively and without external interference, presented itself as the only guarantee of true order in human affairs. For Sarpi sovereignty meant first of all the comprehensive authority of rulers to take any action required by the common interest. "Nature," he wrote, "when it gives an end, also provides all those powers necessary to attain it." Would God, he inquired rhetorically, do less?^[22] He had already supplied his answer: "God, on whom the prince who is responsible for the public tranquility immediately depends, has also given him power to impede and to remedy all the things that disturb it."^[23] Therefore, he declared, "In a well-ordered republic this kind of sovereignty requires that the prince can dispose of any thing and person according to the necessity and utility of the public good."^[24] But the adequacy of sovereignty also implied its indivisibility and, once again, its independence. "I cannot refrain from saying," Sarpi advised his government at an early point in the struggle with Rome, "that no injury penetrates more deeply into a principate than when its majesty, that is to say sovereignty, is limited and subjected to the laws of another. A prince who possesses a small part of the world is equal in this respect to one who possesses much, nor was Romulus less a prince than Trajan, nor is your Serenity now greater than your forebears when their empire had not extended beyond the lagoons. He who takes away a part of his state from a prince makes him a lesser prince but leaves him a prince. He who imposes laws and obligations on him deprives him of the essence of a prince, even if he possessed the whole of Asia."^[25]

Sarpi's reference here to laws points to the fact that for the Venetians, as for Bodin, full legislative authority, the key to maintaining social order, was the heart of sovereignty. The right to do "anything needful" meant above all the right to make and enforce laws. By claiming comprehensive authority to interfere with the laws of Venice the pope had thus touched on the most sensitive nerve of the body politic. Princes, the Senate had reminded the French ambassador, "are necessarily deprived of sovereignty when they are subjected to the censures of popes, who can compel them with excommunications to adjust the laws in their way."^[26] The Venetian government had seen this issue clearly. At an early point it had insisted to the pope on its right to make laws, a right which "God gave to the first men who established the Republic and through them transmitted to the present and continuously exercised with moderation, never exceeding legitimate limits."^[27] Each of the particular Roman complaints against Venice was an attack on some aspect of the

legislative authority of the secular state, and therefore on its ability to maintain true order.

The more limited and practical Venetian conception of order also found expression in a conception of law far different from that of the Curia. For the Roman theologians law too was embedded in the general structure of reality; law was first of all an eternal principle of universal application. Particular laws, notably including the legislation of particular societies, were thus legitimate only when they reflected and conformed to the general principle of law, which also had its hierarchies. Certain authorities, certain kinds of law, were inevitably closer to the general source of law than others, reflected its substance more accurately, and therefore should take precedence over other authorities and other kinds of law. This meant that princes were never free to legislate arbitrarily, or simply on the basis of local need and conditions. Responsible only for an inferior level of the Christian Republic, itself a vast commonwealth in which local interests had always to be subordinated to universal, princes not only were required to adapt their enactments to divine and natural law; their laws were also subject to review by ecclesiastical authority. By the same token canon law in every state had always to take precedence over civil law.^[28] According to these criteria local custom was the poorest possible form of legal authority.^[29]

The Venetians did not deny the existence or even the priority of divine and natural law. Sarpi, indeed, was prepared on occasion to defend the "natural" rights of princes, and he acknowledged that certain acts, for example murder, were intrinsically contrary to the law of nature.^[30] But most human actions and situations could not, in his view, be treated in this categorical way. The majority of acts, he argued, are by nature neither just nor unjust but merely raise issues of convenience; and such matters were, he believed, precisely the concern of the civil law, which must therefore respond not to ultimate principles but to immediate conditions.^[31] But although it need not be referred to larger patterns of universal order, Sarpi did not mean that civil law was merely arbitrary; its true criterion, however, should be the interest of the immediate community it is designed to serve.

But, as the Venetians were well aware, communities differ and times change. Thus in connection with the regulation of clerical wealth Sarpi pointed out that "every prince can in such matters establish in his own state whatever the conditions of the times and places require, and also change things once constituted if changing conditions demand it."^[32] Capello made the point even more generally: "Laws are to behavior like

medicine to illnesses. Therefore, just as a different illness requires a different medicine, so different times, different customs, different conditions, require various, diverse, and sometimes contrary laws."^[33] On this basis the Venetians attached a high value to local custom.

The Venetian definition of order had particular consequences for the status of the clergy in the community. Rome had taken the position that the absolute priority of spiritual to temporal required for the clergy a special position, privileged and apart, within every secular state; the clergy were not properly citizens of any earthly community but only of the City of God. Possevino thought it monstrous "that the head should be subject to the feet, the greater to the less, those who are consecrated to the divine cult to profane men."^[34] Bellarmine argued that priests cannot be judged by laymen because in relation to the laity a priest is divine, and also that it is much worse for a layman to disobey a prelate than for a prelate to injure a layman.^[35] The Servite theologians agreed with him that although the clergy may normally live in conformity with the civil law, they do so only voluntarily rather than through any legal obligation.^[36] The hierarchical distinctions among men were thus as absolute as those in the heavens.

But for Venice just as sovereignty could not be shared, the needs of order required that the law be applied equally to all persons within the geographical limits of the state. Quirino was emphatic: "The Republic, as free and independent prince, has, by the nature of its principate, authority over all its subjects indifferently."^[37] For Sarpi the very survival of the state depended on the maintenance of this principle. "A natural body could not endure within itself one part not destined to belong to the whole," he wrote; "even less can a civil body endure that has in its midst a man who recognized others than the prince [as his superior] in human and temporal things."^[38] The authority of the Venetian state (or any other) to punish criminals of every description was, for the Venetians, an inevitable consequence of the purpose for which the state had been instituted. That the clergy should be exempted from an obligation not only common to all men but also finally a religious duty appeared to them particularly unseemly.^[39]

Behind the Venetian position on this matter was the conviction that a priest, whatever else he might be in addition, was in the first place a civil being, that he shared the common needs of men as citizens, and that he ought therefore to have some share in the common obligations of citizenship. Quirino was also clear on this point: "It suffices to say that a city is composed of citizens, and that citizens are those who enjoy the benefit of civil life through being preserved in peace among them-

selves, through being defended from foreigners, through experiencing the good care of their resources and possessions, and finally through enjoying those blessings and felicities to which the collectivity of the citizens has been directed. This is not possible to obtain without community in the laws and good public ordinances, and with common judges."^[40] Sarpi agreed, drawing the appropriate practical conclusion: "Ecclesiastics are citizens and parts of the republic; but the republic is governed with the laws of the prince. Therefore they are subject to him so that, resisting, they sin before God no less than laymen."^[41] Fom the Venetian standpoint this conception of ecclesiastics as citizens certainly implied no reduction in dignity. On the contrary, it opened up to the clergy an area of virtuous activity from which they would otherwise have been excluded; as Capello noted, it recognized their capacity for "civil felicity."^[42] But the "liberty" from the normal obligations of political life demanded for the clergy in Rome would have denied them the benefits of the only species of order relevant to the human condition. What Rome called liberty was for Sarpi only license .^[43]

The Venetian concern with civil order and the jurisdiction of the state over its clerical subjects as over other men seems finally to have serious ecclesiological overtones. The Venetian argument tended, practically if not out of logical necessity, to break down all distinctions between priest and layman; and this tendency too found explicit expression in the Venetian case against Rome. The theologians of the Republic indignantly rejected the inclination at the Curia to identify the church with its clerical officers. Sarpi described this as usurpation.^[44] Quirino insisted that the clergy were merely that segment of the church chosen to serve the rest.^[45] Another Venetian writer argued that since every Catholic Christian is equally a member of the church, he is equally entitled to call himself an ecclesiastic .^[46] Any true definition of the church, these men insisted, had to take into account its huge lay majority; the church, Sarpi maintained more than once, "is the congregation of the faithful diffused throughout the whole world."^[47]

Venetian reluctance to acknowledge special status for the clergy even in the church seems to derive ultimately from an obscure but deeply rooted tendency among the urban republics of the Renaissance to regard the church as an essentially spiritual body. Venetian theologians were inclined to think of the work of salvation as wholly spiritual and invisible, and they minimized the contribution to it of any institutional agent. As Sarpi insisted against Bellarmine, salvation depends more on "the interior motions of the soul" than on any means at the disposal of the pope.^[48] Hence ecclesiastical censure might be ignored with impunity;

Sarpi assured his countrymen that only their private deficiencies could truly exclude them from the church. "The theologians give as a certain and infallible rule," he wrote, "that when a man is certain in his own conscience that he has not sinned mortally in the matter for which he is excommunicated, he may be sure in his conscience that he has suffered no hurt to his soul and is neither excommunicated with God nor deprived of the benefits of the church."^[49] God, in this view, could be glorified properly only by the invisible works of the spirit performed by the individual believer. For Sarpi the Gospel was on this point unequivocal: "We see from the divine Scriptures that the glory of God consists in the propagation of the Gospel and the good life of Christians and in sum, as Saint Paul says, in the mortification of the outer man and the life of the inner, and in the exercise of works of love. . . . And finally, as even the ordinary man knows, travail and suffering are the marks and proofs of the friends of God; and no one, the Gospel says, follows Christ without taking his own cross on his shoulders." Under these circumstances the clergy were not properly rulers, administrators, and disciplinarians; their duty consisted solely in appealing to individual believers, in "preaching the Gospel, holy admonitions and instructions about Christian customs, the ministry of the most holy sacraments, the care of the poor, the correction of crimes which exclude from the kingdom of God" through pious and charitable example. These sentiments were the more remarkable because they are contained in an official document in which Sarpi was concerned not to argue theology but only to appeal to the common religious assumptions of the Venetian patriciate.^[50]

Thus in the Venetian conception of things the irrelevance to Venice and to political existence in general of any comprehensive schemes of metaphysical or cosmic order found a religious parallel in deep convictions about the position of the individual soul. Every believer, like every state, was seen to be related to God directly and individually, not through a system of visible hierarchical relationships in which the individual derived his position from membership in a general class. The Venetian challenge to the pope that reached its climax with the interdict of 1606 was thus analogous, at once spiritually and politically, to the Protestant challenge of the previous century. But it is peculiarly apparent in this case that the relationship between the religious and political dimensions of the confrontation went deep. The religious issue and the political issue must finally be seen as parallel expressions of a profound disagreememt about the ultimate structure of order in every aspect of the universe. That both sides recognized the gravity of their differences accounts for the extraordinary bitterness of their confrontation.