The Roman Inquisition. Thomas F. Mayer
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aimed at them. Jacovazzi told him to do no more and also told the priors of Santa Maria Novella and San Marco not to deal with the matter on the following Sunday.51
Then the Inquisition took a hand. On 21 August 1602, after hearing complaints from both sides, the Jesuit one about Lorini (for what not said), it ordered Jacovacci and the vicar to investigate.52 In the following day’s meeting with the pope (a coram), the Congregation read the letters again, and the pope issued the proposed order to investigate Lorini and his new Jesuit antagonist.53 The nuncio’s report was delayed until 15 September, but when it was read in another coram on 26 September, the pope ordered the Dominican general “to have removed from the city and diocese of Florence Fra Niccolò Lorini and order (praecipiat) him not to speak or treat of this matter (“ut removere faciat a civitate ac diocesi Florentiae fratrem Nicolaum Lorinum, eique praecipiat ne loquatur, ne tractet de hac materia”).54 The nuncio had to defend himself for allegedly having begun judicial process in the case, although Lorini was not specifically mentioned. In fact, he disappears from the record, suggesting that he had indeed finally accepted the Inquisition’s precept and gone into exile.
Lorini’s “exile” did not prevent him from serving as prior of S. Domenico, Pistoia, from at least 9 February 1604; he was replaced by 22 January 1606.55 In the fall of 1605 (and possibly the following year as well), Lorini preached at least one more set of Advent sermons in Rome. The sermons were published in 1615 with a dedication to the Florentine Cardinal Luigi Capponi, new legate of Bologna, another home of Galileo’s enemies, suspiciously dated the day after Caccini’s reading.56 In the preface Lorini claimed that he would bring out the “moral sense, and the points addressed to the soul will all be taken from the proper bowels of the letter” (“il senso morale, e gl’avvertimenti nell’anima saranno tolti tutti di peso dalle proprie viscere della lettera”); in other words, he rooted his preaching in the literal sense of scripture. Interestingly enough, the first sermon has a lot to say about the sun and the heavens in both a natural and metaphorical sense. Preaching on one of the prescribed texts for 1 Advent “There will be signs in the sun and moon and stars” (Luke 21.25), he told his hearers that they well knew “that really in these bodies and globes and celestial planets will be caused many unusual things, which will multiply so much, the noises and crashes, that it will appear that the same bodies and celestial globes, that is, the stars, fall down and disappear or do not appear because of the thick fogs or darkest clouds, it will be exactly as if they had fallen, losing especially their usual influence” (“che realmente in questi corpi, e globi, e Pianeti celesti faranno cagionate molte cose disusate, a talche tanto si multiplicaranno, i rumori, e fracassi, che egli parrà, che gli stessi corpi, e globi celesti, cioe le stelle caschino, e sparendo, o non si appalesando per rispetto alle nebbie folte, o oscurissime nugole sarà proprio, come se fossero cadute, mancando massimo da loro consueti influssi”).
The regular motions of “the celestial orders” would be altered such that the end would come. But not because the heaven’s intrinsic motion given it by God had failed, which by its nature it never could, but because of that same God’s extrinsic action to stop that motion.57 Although the apocalyptic and astrological overtones and content are clear, Lorini’s point was that Christian philosophers and theologians offered the same explanation of these phenomena, as did astrologers and physicians, no matter how their language might differ.58 The absence of astronomers, whom Lorini would have called mathematicians, might have struck his audience.
In several sermons of another collection published two years later, Elogii delle più principali sante donne del sagro calendario [Praises of all the Principal Sainted Women of the Sacred Calendar], dedicated to the grand duke’s wife and proclaiming Lorini his preacher on the title page, the now seventy-three-year-old Dominican often came closer than he had in 1605 to leveling criticisms as Caccini had of “mathematicians” and on one occasion in a sermon perhaps given to his fellow Dominicans (the audience is addressed as “fratelli”) explicitly faulted Copernicus for saying the earth moved.59 The dedication helped explain why such ideas were so dangerous. Lorini told the grand duchess that he often thought about why Jesus likened the church to the heaven and concluded that it was because “just as the aforesaid heaven for His greater beauty and our greater utility has been by nature, not wanderingly (errante) so egregiously adorned with planets or masculine and feminine names and by so many other splendid lights, so His church by Him in resemblance to these lights of the heaven should have been adorned by His Divine Majesty with most select men and most prefect women, lights no less resplendent than those” (“si come il predetto Cielo per maggior bellezza di lui, e utilità di noi, è stato dalla Natura, non errante, tanto egregiamente adornato di Pianeti, di nome maschile, e femminile, e di tant’altri splendentissimi lumi, così la sua Chiesa di lui a somiglianza di essi lumi del Cielo, sia stata di S. D. M. adornata d’huomini sceltissimi, e di perfettisime donne, lumi non meno risplendenti di quelli”).60
Lorini spun out another long metaphor in a sermon for the feast of Sant’Agnese, 21 January. This time he raised the seemingly threatening possibility that the worthless, lowly earth might compete with “the heaven, the firmament and the pavement of God’s feet” and the heaven agree to comparison with the earth in certain respects. The stars in the heaven were like flames on earth, and both were full of flowers.61 The sun, “the queen of heaven,” was like a carbuncle (the gem, not a sore) on earth:62
Much proportion is found between virtues and jewels, since jewels are nothing other than vapor and a dry exhalation from the earth, frozen, or petrified by the cold by virtue of the heaven and operation of the sun and reduced by them to the highest digestion, from which the heaven and the sun receive the variety of colors and beauties and various properties and virtues; because finding [them] in the earth they are however generated by the goodness and virtue of heaven, as virtues are on earth in saintly souls, by God’s gift.”63
Lorini closed with what seems a veiled criticism of the Copernicans. The stars served to show human weakness “that could not rise to accomplish the tiniest thing in the starry heaven.”64
Lorini’s sermon on St. Ursula and her 11,000 virgins began with a metaphor promising more reflections on the relations between heaven and earth. Likening Ursula’s legendary battle with the Huns under the walls of Cologne to conflict or war between inanimate objects and “flowers of that great garden of the firmament,” he described the stars assembled into troops, then into battle array, and finally an army that naturally defeated the enemy. They did this without leaving their “order.” Lorini cited the examples of the combats between St. Michael and the dragon and the angels and Pharoah, as well as the Exodus, before observing “that the stars, standing firm, without leaving the firmament, should have battled, this is completely unheard of” (“che le stelle, stando ferme, senza partirsi del firmamento abbiano battagliato, questo è al tutto inaudito”).65 He amplified the point by comparing the stars to Ursula’s virgins, calling them “stars of the ecclesiastical firmament” (“stelle del firmamento ecclesiastico”).
Sometime after giving these sermons, Lorini returned from exile, reentering the convent of San Marco, where Caccini lived and the house the Medici particularly favored. He was also made preacher to Grand Duke Cosimo II (ruled 1609–1621) and allegedly reader in ecclesiastical history at the fledgling University of Florence.66 Lorini had good reason to regard sermons as his best weapon. Relying on it ten years after his banning, he tried exactly the same gambit as Caccini, attacking Galileo from the pulpit; his sermon has been lost.67 Later that same year Galileo called Lorini out and forced him to apologize for raising objections in conversation (or just possibly in another sermon) to “Ipernicus, or whatever his name is.”68 If Lorini really did not know Copernicus’s name, this suggests that he may not yet have been cooperating closely with Caccini, or that Caccini had not yet imbibed his anti-Copernican views, or some combination of the two. It is worth noting that, as of 1612, Galileo’s position was strong enough to force Lorini to crawl to him. Not that Lorini went quietly. The last sentence of his letter with its dark mutterings about “the Companies of Piano and Ghighnoni” suppressed long ago and its perhaps ironic assurance “that all our [Florentine] nobility is optimally catholic” made a barely implicit threat.69