chapter 5 Christian Mortalism

De religione, non ratione, sed affectu iudicare . . . captivandam mentem in obsequium fidei. Sarpi, a letter to Isaac Casaubon, 22 June 1610

(One judges religion not with reason, but with affection . . . one has to delude the mind to obey belief.)

Faith and Religion

Due to the enthusiastic work of Renaissance humanists many classical authors enjoyed a revival in the course of the sixteenth century. Whereas Plato was accepted as a philosopher who acknowledged the immortality of the soul, Aristotle was far more problematic with his notion of eternal world and his alleged theory of the soul’s mortality. Pagan philosophers and poets such as Epicurus, Lucretius, Leucippus and Democritus were automatically rejected as impious and dangerous sources of heresy and atheism. During the Counter- Reformation period it became increasingly common to accuse dissidents of atheism, no matter how ill-justified such accusations truly were. In 1639 the Dutch Calvinist theologian Gisbertus Voetius (1589–1676) declared to his stu- dents that there were ‘practical’ and ‘speculative’ atheists, the first consisting of people who—like Epicureans, deists and libertines—considered religion useless; or practiced a wrong religion; or did not observe the rites and the ceremonies; or, like the Machiavellians and the politiques, did so merely on political grounds. ‘Speculative’ atheists in turn denied divine providence, downplayed the significance of the Bible, doubted natural light and the divine attributes, and rejected the idea of the resurrection of the body.1 Later in the seventeenth century writers like Gottleib Spitzel, Anton Rieser and Gabriel Wedderkopf traced the origins of atheism to the infamous writings of figures such as Giromalo Cardano, Jacques Vallée, Pierre Charron, François Rabelais, Lucilio Vanini, Robert Fludd and Tommaso Campanella, in the notorious De Tribus Impostoribus, and in many clandestine manuscripts in circulation. Furthermore, Voetius and other such writers rallied against open-mindedness,

1 Allen 1964, pp. 7–9.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004266742_�06 christian mortalism 127 the subordination of the church to the state, the diversity of sects, natural philosophers, and, finally, the satanic spreading of atheism. Voetius, the fore- runner of these anti-secular writers, observed that atheism was especially popular in “democracies”, which permitted “liberty of conscience”.2 Many of the aforesaid premises apply to Sarpi (he advocated the subordination of the church to the state, he was a natural philosopher, and he lived in an open-minded republic). Indeed, he was frequently prey to accusations of atheism, but I believe these allegations were based on political interests, not on facts. Historians have offered a variety of interpretations of Sarpi’s religiosity. According to Benedetto Croce, Sarpi’s political writings contributed to the birth of a new religious conscience. Furthermore, Croce claimed that the way in which Sarpi stressed the limits of man was fundamentally religious. I fully agree that Sarpi’s idea of the nature of man was Augustinian and shaped by his religious interpretation of man’s weakness and dependence on divine grace. Gaetano Cozzi and Boris Ulianich have seen Sarpi as a sympathizer of Calvinism in their early studies. However, they have later diverged from this opinion: Cozzi came to view Sarpi as a complicated and tormented reformer, while Ulianich has recently rejected the Calvinian interpretation of Sarpi’s views. In fact, Ulianich eschews ascribing to Sarpi any other religious position but that of a person who based his theology on the Scripture and especially on St. Paul. William Bouwsma’s Sarpi was a philo-protestant whose religious ideas were nevertheless “consistent with Catholic orthodoxy”, while Eric Cochrane described him as a typical representative of the Counter-Reformation period, in the sense that he was a deeply religious person. According to Manlio Busnelli Sarpi was undoubtedly a heterodox and apostate who was convinced of the utter corruption of Rome and who found religious truth in the Protestant doctrine. To Corrado Vivanti in turn Sarpi was a religious reformer who did not use religion as a political tool, but, instead, aspired towards an ecu- menical church. Here Vivanti seems to have followed Luigi Salvatorelli’s interpretation of Sarpi. Both Cozzi and Federico Chabod rejected any tinge of mysticism in Sarpi and Chabod noted that his religiosity was moral, sin- cere and profound. David Wootton, however, has quite strikingly suggested that Sarpi was an atheist, an argument subsequently accepted for example by A.P. Martinich, Richard Tuck, Paul A. Rahe—who goes as far as to claim that Sarpi was a “militant atheist”—and Gianluca Mori. Vittorio Frajese in turn sees Sarpi as a religious sceptic and a forerunner to Vico, Hegel, Feuerbach,

2 Allen 1964, pp. 11–12. Allen uses the word “democracies” without a reference to the original term.