The Roman Inquisition. Thomas F. Mayer
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the hiding place of this brain will be opened. And as St. Peter Damian said “Everyone’s every secret will be revealed.”23 That ingenious Florentine mathematician of ours [Galileo] laughs at the ancients who made the sun the most clear and clean of even the smallest spot, whence they formed the proverb “To seek a spot on the sun.”24 But he, with the instrument called by him telescope makes visible that it has its regular spots, as by observations of days and months he had demonstrated. But this more truly God does, because “The heavens are not of the world in His sight.”25 If spots are found in the suns of the just, do you think that they will be found in the moons of the unjust?26
The indirect assault came in a more sensitive context, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, probably on 8 December 1615, just as the first phase of Galileo’s trial approached its denoument and from a much more prominent pulpit, that of the cathedral of Florence, the first time Delle Colombe preached there.
It27 was Seneca’s thought that the mirror was invented to allow contemplating the sun. It did not seem a fitting thing that man could not consider the beauty of the greatest light that appears in the theatre of the world. But because the mortal eye, for the weaknesses of its vision, cannot fix its gaze on it for its too great light, at least it can be stared at in a clear crystal behind which the sun presents to us its beautiful image. Therefore an ingenious Academic took for his device a mirror in the face of the sun with the motto “It shows what is received.” [“Receptum exhibet.”]28 That means that he had carved in his spirit I do not know what kind of beloved sun. But what would be better for Mary? Who could fixedly look at the infinite light of the Divine Sun, were it not for this virginal mirror, that in itself conceives it [the light] and renders it to the world? “Born to us, given to us from an intact virgin?”29 This is “let what is received be shown.” For one who seeks defects where there are none, is it not to be said to him “he seeks a spot in the sun?” The sun is without spot, and the mother of the sun without spot. “From whom Jesus was born.”30
Yet like Domenico Gori, Delle Colombe was not entirely an old unreconstruct. While he often referred to traditional cosmology, he also cited the work of the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Clavius.31
Dominican Science and Theology
That Delle Colombe knew Clavius’s work should not surprise us. Florentine Dominicans enjoyed a deep theological and scientific culture, as Guerrini has shown in two books devoted to broadening our understanding of that culture and its role in the opposition to Galileo, especially in the preaching campaign of Delle Colombe, Caccini, and Niccolò Lorini (the last not much more than mentioned). Following Eugenio Garin, Guerrini emphasizes the quality of science available at both San Marco and Santa Maria Novella right through the early seventeenth century.32 The key figure in the construction of the Dominicans’ distinctive anti-Copernicanism is Giovanni Maria Tolosani who in his “De veritate sacrae scripturae” (1546) had provided all the ammunition his confreres needed to attack Copernicus.33 Guerrini stresses, almost certainly too much, that Tolosani’s work provided “the theoretical basis on which the discourse of the censors (for the most part Dominicans) was developed in the proceeding [against Galileo] of 1616.”34 As Tolosani’s work’s title suggests, the problem lay in the contradiction between De revolutionibus and scripture.35
Niccolò Lorini, Turbulent Priest
As damaging as Delle Colombe’s sermons might have been and however important his role in the conspiracy against Galileo, he never took as active a role as two other Florentine Dominicans. The most egregious of them was Tommaso Caccini (see the next two chapters). Lorini had greater stature (ca. 1544–?after 1617).36 He was much older than Caccini, but age never made him diplomatic. Born to a Florentine noble family probably from Mugello, after entering the Dominican order at San Marco (not Santa Maria Novella as is universally said) in 1561, he next appears in Genoa in 1577, probably preaching against the plague.37 If so, this was the first of a number of sermons he delivered in his youth, including one for the first Sunday of Advent 1585 in the Sistine Chapel before the pope himself that earned him an appointment as apostolic preacher; he was already a reader and general preacher in the Dominicans’ Roman province.38 The text was published at least twice, originally by the papal printer.39 This was Lorini’s second printed sermon, the first coming the previous year after being preached on All Souls (given the delays of printing possibly 1583) in Santa Maria del Fiore.40
Shortly before that Lorini had begun to manifest another facet of his career, stirring up controversy, at first through preaching. In January 1583, the chronicler Giuliano de’ Ricci noted that, in the midst of a campaign by the Dominicans to canonize a former prior of Santa Maria Novella, Lorini attacked the Conventual Franciscans, who opposed the canonization, for setting a bad example and not following their rule.41 He seems to have suffered no consequences, but he did three years later. This time in another fiery sermon de’ Ricci heard (describing it as exaggerated “according to his usual”), Lorini had attacked “the many thefts and homicides that had been done in this state [the grand duchy of Tuscany] and the few that were punished,” and went on to name names, saying that “Annibale’s brother did more damage at present in Tuscany by freeing prisoners than the same Hannibal had done in all of Italy.” “[A]ll the people” understood Annibale to mean Annibale da Pescia, and his brother—or at least relative—Lorenzo, secretary of the Florentine criminal magistracy, the Otto di Balìa.42 This charge, which turned out to be true, led to Lorini being prohibited first from preaching in the cathedral of Florence and then its entire diocese.43 Lorini took an MA in 1592, but there is no evidence he ever taught.44
Now things become really interesting. In 1602, at age fifty-seven, Lorini was banned by the Roman Inquisition from the diocese of Florence for objecting to the Council of Trent’s prohibition of public confession.45 The trouble blew up before 18 May 1602 when the Jesuit general Claudio Acquaviva wrote from Rome that there was to be no response to Lorini’s provocation that Acquaviva was addressing “by another road.”46 He sent a more detailed version of this order to the Jesuit rector four days later. The Jesuits were to ignore Lorini’s preaching, leaving it to Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici, archbishop of Florence, to take action once his vicar had informed him of the problem.47 The nuncio seems to have superseded Acquaviva’s plan, in the process providing more detail about what happened. Lorini had tried to attack Antonio Santarelli, reader in the Jesuit house, over a sermon considering whether it was possible to confess via letter or messenger. An “ordine” from the archiepiscopal vicar had been put in place preventing him from doing so, which he circumvented by proposing to “read” in his own convent, San Marco, where the vicar had no jurisdiction. He planned to invite people to attend. The nuncio, Ascanio Jacovacci or Giacovazzi, seeing a scandal brewing and the prospect of worse, had issued a precept to both Lorini and Santarelli and to their superiors. The precept’s prohibition was remarkably similar to Galileo’s (see Chapter 3). It read that “in the future either of them [Lorini and Santarelli] not dare, nor in any way whatsover presume both in preaching and in readings or otherwise to discuss or in another manner treat the article, often brought into controversy by them in recent days by preaching, that is, whether sacramental confession can be done through writing or a messenger.” The penalty was excommunication latae sententiae.48 Lorini reacted by complaining publicly about the “prohibitione” and “precetto” and threatening to go to preach in Lucca outside the nuncio’s jurisdiction. He also alleged that Galileo’s enemy Giovanni de’ Medici put the nuncio up to his action.49 Jacovacci closed by reminding the cardinal’s nephew, Pietro Aldobrandini, and Pope Clement VIII that they knew Lorini well and “how freely and imprudently he speaks,” suggesting a history of trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities in Rome.50
Jacovacci’s precept had little effect. On 11 August, he complained that a Jesuit had preached in their house of S. Giovanni about a papal decree on confessors. One of two Dominicans in the audience (Lorini?) had “struck his hands together with a great shout” and walked out, which understandably caused surprise, including to the nuncio who thought matters