Mystical Theology, Ecumenism and Church-State Relations: Francesco Bellisomi (1663

Mystical theology, ecumenism and church-state relations: Francesco Bellisomi (1663- 1741) at the limits of confessionalism in early eighteenth-century Europe Abstract: This article reconstructs the biography of a little-known Italian priest, Francesco Bellisomi (1663-1741), in order to trace the intellectual and political dimensions of religious reformism in early eighteenth-century Europe. Its primary objective is to demonstrate the causal relationships between three trends: firstly, pietistic spiritual reform influenced by mystical theology; secondly, ecumenical dialogue among Protestants and between Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox Christians; and thirdly, the political articulation of the non- confessional state. By following a persecuted Bellisomi from Pavia to Rome, and then on to Venice, Vienna, Halle, Berlin and London, it depicts the strands connecting the political, intellectual and religious environment on the Italian Peninsula, within the Holy Roman Empire and in the British Isles. From the latter seventeenth century, the equation of confessionalism – the alliance of a confessionalising church and a centralising state - was being undermined across Europe. One factor in this process was enthusiasm for a supra- confessional ecclesia universalis, the nature of which was highly contested. Bellisomi’s life offers a unique window onto this networked and inter-confessional intellectual culture. I By the middle of the seventeenth century, the ‘golden age’ of confessionalisation – the alliance of a confessionalising Church and a centralizing state which had emerged from the religious reformations of the sixteenth century – was coming to an end.1 The schisms within European Christendom had become, in large part, territorially established, and the stage was 1 On the Confessionalisation thesis, see Heinz Schilling, ‘Das Konfessionelle Europa. Die Konfessionalisierung der europaischen lander seit Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts und ihre Folgen für Kirche, Staat, Gesellschaft und Kultur‘, in Ausgewahlte Abhandlungen zur europaischen Reformations-und Konfessionsgeschichte, ed. Heinz Schilling (Duncker & Humblot, 2002), pp. 646-700; Heinz Schilling, Early Modern European Civilization and its Political and Cultural Dynamism – the Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures (Brandeis University Press, 2008). Reviewing the thesis, see Timothy A Brady Jr., ‘“We have lost the Reformation” – Heinz Schilling and the rise of the confessionalisation thesis’, and other essays in Wege der Neuzeit. Festschrift für Heinz Schilling zum 65 Geburtstag, ed. Stefan Ehrenpreis, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Olaf Mörke, Luise Schorne-Schutte, eds. (Duncker & Homblot, 2007), pp. 33-56; Hartmut Lehman, ‘Grenzen der Erklarungskraft der Konfessionalisierungsthese‘, in Interkonfessionalitat – transkonfessionalitat – binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Manfred Jakubowski-Tiessen, Thomas Kaufmann and Hartmut Lehmann (Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2003), pp 242-49. 1 set for the emergence of the modern secular state. In this reading, from the eighteenth century religion was increasingly ejected from a secularising political realm. In the face of its expulsion from ‘the political’, where the making of modern history took place, ‘the religious’ was turned back upon itself to become a private, spiritual or natural affair. This narrative of the conceptual decoupling of ‘the political’ and ‘the religious’ is integral to well-established academic understandings of the modern world. Since the latter part of the twentieth century, however, it has increasingly come under assault. A key factor here has been the practical recognition of the inadequacy of a narrowly secular frame to understand contemporary political realities: the bulk of modern Western political thought was constructed upon a teleological premise – that of secularisation – which has proven demonstrably false.2 This ‘return of religion’ to the academic consciousness has also prompted a wealth of scholarship reassessing the long historical arc of secularisation as process.3 One emergent perspective has proposed a sustained ‘dialectical relationship’ between political and religious realms into the eighteenth century and beyond.4 From this point of view, learning to forget the inevitable divergence of ‘the religious’ and ‘the political’ offers alternative frameworks through which to understand the emergence of the modern world. 2 The key recognition of this is Peter Berger’s revision of his own classic ‘Secularisation thesis’, first articulated in his 1967, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1967), revised most bluntly in his 1999 The Desecularisation of the World: The Resurgence of Religion in World Politics (William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999). Jeffrey Cox, ‘Towards Eliminating the Concept of Secularisation: A Progress Report’, in Secularisation in the Christian World, ed. Callum Brown and Michael Snape (London: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 13-26. 3 Perhaps most significantly, this scholarship has nuanced readings of confessional toleration, indifference and co-habitation between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries: Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating Religious Difference in Central Europe, 1500-1800, ed. Howard Louthan, Gary Cohen and Franz Szabo (Bergahn Books, 2011). 4 Hartmut Lehmann, ‘Competing concepts for the study of religious reform movements, including Pietism, in early modern and in North-America’, in Confessionalism and Pietism: Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe, ed. Fred Van Lieburg (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), pp. 313-322, p. 320; see also, for instance, the work of Paolo Prodi, summarised in ‘Europe in the Age of Reformations: the Modern State and Confessionalization’, The Catholic Historical Review, vol. 103, 2017, no. 1, pp. 1-19. 2 This article makes a modest contribution to this project. Concretely, it aims to demonstrate a causal relationship between three historical developments at play in Europe in the years around 1700: firstly, the proliferation of spiritual, non-conformist, pietistic strands of Christian renewal, buoyed by the circulation of mystical theology; secondly, the strengthening of trans-confessional religious networks predicated upon an overcoming of religious conflict and division within Christianity; and thirdly, the political articulation of the state as a non-confessional but fundamentally Christian entity. These historical developments are all well-established within their respective fields, and the relationship between a turn to mysticism and pietism and the undermining of confessional and ecclesiastical hierarchy in particular is increasingly recognised.5 The political context to these religious dynamics, however, is less well understood, and this blunts their potential to revise historical narratives at large.6 A key objective here is to demonstrate the significance of spiritual-religious reformism for political reformism in Europe – and especially Catholic Europe – in the first decades of the eighteenth century. At a slightly deeper level, this article aims to demonstrate how within this nexus the forces which had fuelled confessional division in Europe from the sixteenth century – political theology, spiritual renewal and doctrinal primitivism – were, by 1700, increasingly being redeployed by scholars, theologians and jurists for an anti-confessional agenda, to heal the fissures within Christendom. Given that different individuals and groups tended to envisage 5 An important point of reference remains Leszek Kolakowski, Chrétiens sans église: la conscience religieuse et le lien confessionnelle au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1967). More recently, see Hartmut Lehmann, Hans-Jürgen Schrader and Heinz Schilling, eds., Jansenismus, Quietismus, Pietismus (Arbeiten zur Geschichte des Pietismus, 2002); Ted Campbell, The Religion of the Heart (University of South Carolina Press, 1991); Geoffrey Rowell, ‘Scotland and the ‘mystical matrix’ of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: an exploration of religious cross-currents’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 2014, Vol. 14, No. 2, 128- 144. Recent work by Lionel Laborie has been significant here: ‘Spreading the Seed: Toward a French Millenarian Network in pietist Germany’, in Kriminelle – Freidenker – Alchemister. Raume des Untergrunds in der Fruehen Neuzeit, ed. Martin Mulsow (Koln/Weimer/Wien: Böhlau-Verlag, 2014), pp. 99-117. 6 A recent article which does explicit tie together the political and religious currents of anti-confessionalism is Henri Adrien Krop, ‘Fides et Ration: An Early Enlightenment Defence of Non-Confessional Religion by Poiret and his Circle’, Church History and Religious Culture, vol. 90, no. 1, 2010, pp. 47-67. 3 an ecclesia universalis in their own (often confessionalised) image, attempts at unity within the Church tended to fail. Nonetheless, it was religious reform, renewal and an ecumenical enthusiasm, rather than advocacy for the secular state or the proliferation of anti-religious sentiment, which featured most prominently in attempts to unravel the confessional agenda circa 1700. The vessel for these arguments is a biographical case study: the little-known life of the itinerant priest Francesco Bellisomi (1663-1741).7 Born in Pavia, Bellisomi spent his early years on the Italian peninsula before travelling, under duress, extensively

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