HoP 459 - Cardinal Rule - Robert Bellarmine
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Cardinal Rule, Robert Bellarney. In the first book of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle enters into a discussion of the adage that we should call no one happy so long as he still lives.

What he has in mind is that even a flourishing, successful person could toward the end of his life experience a shattering calamity, as happened to Priam in the Iliad, already an old man when his son Hector was killed by Achilles and his city defeated by the Greeks. Aristotle observes that even after death we are still not safe. Some disaster might befall a man's descendants, retroactively making him seem cursed rather than blessed. Something along these lines happened to Robert Bellarmine.

He rose to the rank of cardinal in the Catholic Church and devoted his entire life to the defense of his faith, becoming one of the leading intellectuals of the Counter-Reformation. As his death approached in 1621, Bellarmine might well have indulged in the thought that he had led a good and successful life, even without knowing that he would eventually be canonized as a saint. He would surely have been horrified and flabbergasted to learn that he would go down in history for a very different reason.

Because, if you know just one thing about Bellarmine, it's almost certainly that he was involved in the persecution of Galileo. From his point of view, this would have been quite a minor episode in his own biography, one that paled in significance alongside the other tasks he carried out for the church, his indefatigable career of polemical writing against Protestantism, and his development of a nuanced view of the relationship between church and state.

Bellarmine, or his modern-day defenders, might also hasten to point out that his role in the affair had been a relatively moderate one. In fact, when he was put on trial in 1633, Galileo produced a memorandum Bellarmine had written back in 1616 and made it fundamental to his own defense. So it is somewhat unfair that Bellarmine's name has become so closely linked to the church's misguided efforts at thought control. But not entirely unfair.

He served for many years as censor and inquisitor, argued explicitly in favor of burning both heretical books and the men who wrote them, and drew up an index of forbidden works in 1592 that called for the banning of books by Calvin, Luther, Machiavelli, Marsilius of Padua, Jan Hus, Abelard, and Wycliffe. He once said, with a jocularity that hasn't aged very well, I hardly ever read a book without feeling in the mood to give it a good censoring.

So, there's no getting away from seeing Bellarmine as part of one of the stories we've been following, the inquisitorial procedures of the Counter-Reformation Church and their effect on science and philosophy. But he belongs to a couple of other stories we've been following too, including that of the Jesuits. Born in 1542, he joined the Society in 1560 and studied at the Roman College under, among others, Francisco de Toledo.

After a spell at Louvain, he returned to Rome in 1576, where he assumed the tellingly named Chair of Controversies. Despite that title, he resisted the tendency of some Jesuits to reduce Catholic intellectual activity to casuistry and controversial argumentation. Those who elected to specialize in casuistical exercises were to his mind showing a most vile wit.

He wrote, "It is not enough to hear controversies and cases of conscience, because controversies presuppose philosophy and scholastic theology, and to form mere controversialists is to put them in a great confusion. As from experience we see that the mere controversialists whom we have now understand almost nothing. Instead, dialectical encounters with opponents, both inside and outside the church, needed to be built on a firm foundation.

This meant looking back by the canonical medieval thinkers to the church fathers and scripture itself, with the latter understood in the light of traditional interpretations. His lectures at Rome were nonetheless published under the title Controversies, appearing in three installments in 1585, 88, and 93, and a final complete edition in 1596.

The result was a veritable monument of anti-Reformation theology, which cites Protestants no fewer than 7,135 times, referring to 83 different authors, in order to refute them. Perhaps surprisingly, Luther is not the leading target. That would be Calvin, followed even more surprisingly by the now relatively obscure Martin Chemnitz.

The more technical and doctrinal theological writings of these authors made them a useful foil, and Bellarmine would in due course play the same role for his own opponents. Within a century of its publication, the Controversies provoked almost 200 refutations from Protestant authors. Bellarmine wound up being pretty controversial within the confines of Catholicism too. In an ironic twist, his book, the Controversies, was denounced to the Pope and submitted for consideration by the Congregation of the Index.

The sitting Pope, Sixtus V, was no friend of the Jesuits and moved to put Bellarmine on the list of censored authors. But fortunately, at least from Bellarmine's point of view, Sixtus died shortly thereafter. The irony twisted back the other way, as Bellarmine censored the censoring, critiquing this most recent index as containing measures that were superfluous, useful, harmful, and too rigid.

Pope Sixtus was motivated by more than just animosity to Bellarmine's religious order. He was also perturbed by Bellarmine's views on political order. The provocative teaching concerned another story we have been following about the relationship between church and state. It's a tribute to Bellarmine's subtlety that he managed to devise a new position within this long-running debate, which goes by the name of indirect papal authority. He sums up his signature idea as follows:

The pontiff as pontiff does not have any temporal authority directly and immediately, but only a spiritual authority. However, in virtue of this spiritual authority, he does have a certain indirect authority, and that a supreme one in temporal matters. This doesn't exactly speak for itself, so let's figure out what he means. We can start with his understanding of temporal or secular political authority, which is conveniently set out in a treatise he wrote called "On Secular People."

Like Suarez and other Jesuits, Bellarmine inclines to the view that governmental structures are put in place by the consent of the community that will be governed by them. The power to create a political order is created in us by God and belongs to the natural law. Indeed, by nature, humanity as a whole must be a perfect commonwealth.

It is, however, advantageous to create smaller polities, in which the God-given power of humans to rule over their own affairs is transferred to a recognized authority, like a king. But it doesn't have to be a king. Again, like Suarez, he recognizes that different kinds of government can be legitimate. For Bellarmine, it is typical of the reformist tradition, going all the way back to Wycliffe and Hus in the medieval period, to think that divine grace is needed to establish rightful political rule.

He rejects this, arguing that humans are entirely competent within the natural law to arrange their political affairs. Otherwise, pagans and non-Christians could never have legitimate governments, which seems obviously absurd. Besides, as the Protestants themselves never tired of saying, the workings of divine grace remain a mystery to humankind, so we could never know whether rulers are legitimate if that legitimacy depended on divine favor.

It's worth noting that in offering these and other arguments, he distinguishes between scriptural, or theological points, and those drawn from reason. Typically, he provides several considerations of a religious nature, and then a final, rational argument to clinch his case. This has several effects. First, it shows that the teaching of the church is in harmony with reason.

Second, it gives support to Bellarmine's way of interpreting scripture. And third, in a context like this, it helps him to lay down a political theory that can work entirely within a secular setting. Because political life is natural, we do not need God to tell us how it should work any more than we need him to designate some specific person as our king. This doesn't mean, however, that the worldly political sphere is entirely separate from spiritual concerns. Indeed, that's going to be the whole point of his theory of indirect authority.

For starters, as we've seen other scholastics arguing, it is a sin to defy rightful authority. So even if a law has been established in a purely secular fashion, your immortal soul is still on the line when it comes to obeying it. Conversely, secular rulers have a duty to defend true religion.

So, just as thinkers like Wycliffe and Hus erred by making secular rule dependent on divine grace, so other thinkers have erred in the other direction by claiming that secular rulers operate in complete independence of religious concerns. To take a not-at-all-hypothetical case, the church would be entirely within its rights to step in if a king should start requiring his subjects to adhere to heretical teachings.

Thus, all theologians, by which Bellarmine of course means all right-thinking Catholic theologians, agree that the supreme pontiff has the right to depose heretical princes and to free their subjects from their obedience. The reason a pope can do this is that his authority is higher, in keeping with the superiority of spiritual concerns over worldly ones. Bellarmine here appeals to a traditional analogy, the church is like the soul, the secular state like the body, and the soul rules over the body.

So far, none of this is especially novel. Already Molina had argued that the Pope has power over princes precisely to the degree demanded by the supernatural end for which the spiritual power is ordained. If this supernatural end demands it, the supreme pontiff can depose kings and deprive them of their kingdoms.

Where Bellarmine innovates is in his stress on the fact that the Pope does not, at least by virtue of his papal office, have any secular power whatsoever. The Pope is not a prince because he is representative of the power of Christ on earth, and when Christ was himself on earth, he never assumed any secular power. This is why the Pope exercises no direct authority over worldly affairs.

Whereas other counter-reformation theorists like Vittorio Molina and Suarez ascribe temporal power to the papacy in some fashion, Bellarmine controversially denied that the pope wields any such authority. That might sound like a significant concession coming from a Catholic, and you can see why Pope Sixtus was not best pleased. But in fact, Bellarmine removes papal authority from the secular sphere precisely in order to safeguard its absolute superiority and transcendence.

To ascribe worldly authority to the Pope would be the equivalent of damning him with faint praise. His authority is purely spiritual, but by that very fact, it outranks any merely secular authority. The upshot is that the Pope should generally stay out of the business of kings who rule over men insofar as they are men, but the Pope rules over those same men insofar as they are Christians.

So the moment that policy questions arise that bear on salvation or other spiritual concerns, the pope can literally overrule a king. This is why he does have authority over the secular realm, though this authority is indirect. He can intervene in temporal affairs, but only for spiritual reasons. Here's an analogy. A referee has absolute authority over those playing a football game, just insofar as the players are playing football.

If he penalizes a player, there's no higher authority to whom the player can appeal. For instance, if the police are watching, they cannot come in and overturn the referee's decision. But suppose that a fight breaks out between some players during the game and one of them is killed. Now the higher concerns of criminal law come into play. The referee has no standing to get in the way of the police when they show up and start arresting people.

So, a king is like the referee, supreme within his limited sphere, but subject to outside interference by a superior power on those rare occasions that more profound concerns arise. Bellarmine called foul when the monarchs of his own day failed to understand their limited role. He blamed Henry VIII for having confused the secular and spiritual spheres by declaring himself the head of the church in England. That had happened decades ago, but the problem was ongoing in Bellarmine's day.

In 1606, King James of England in Scotland demanded that Catholic subjects swear allegiance to him and that they affirm that it would be heretical to say that he could be deposed by the Pope. Bellarmine declared this a heretical stratagem designed to transfer spiritual authority from its rightful holder, the Pope, to James, a mere worldly ruler.

There would be no grounds for objection if James had simply told his subjects to swear loyalty to him concerning non-spiritual matters, but he had no right to tell them what is or is not heretical. In part, this can be seen as a tactical move on Bellarmine's part. Back in the time of Elizabeth, it had proved counterproductive for the church to suggest that Catholics were all potential insurgents because they could not live under a Protestant ruler.

Far better to reassure such monarchs that they could expect nothing but obedience from Catholics so long as those monarchs stayed in their lane. Hence the concession that Catholics in Britain did owe properly political allegiance to James. Yet Bellarmine also insisted upon a more provocative point of principle, namely that James did indeed have to stay in his lane without straying into the spiritual territory overseen by the Pope and the Church.

Of course, the legitimate functions of the church were not, for Bellarmine, limited to preventing rulers from interfering with religious matters, and in extreme cases excommunicating them and stripping them of their authority. After all, this is only an exercise of indirect authority, so it can hardly be the definitive role of the pope or of the priestly hierarchy over which he presides. A far more central task would be the defending and expounding of scripture.

The Protestants kept insisting that the meaning of the sacred text is crystal clear, so that theological experts were not required to discover it. Against this, Bellarmine wryly noted that these same Protestants kept churning out commentaries on the Bible, suggesting that they thought it might stand in need of elaborate explanation after all.

Pointedly, he mentioned the example of Christ holding up bread at the Last Supper and saying "this is my body," a statement whose true significance was a matter of violent disagreements amongst the Protestants themselves. Remember the debates between Luther and Zwingli on this very point. In fact, human ingenuity is not sufficient to interpret scripture with full confidence, which is why we instead have the divinely guided tradition of exegesis and teachings going back to the fathers of the church.

Which brings us finally back to censorship and Bellarmine's role in the suppression of Galileo and his Copernican teaching that the earth goes around the sun instead of vice versa. You might think that the church could simply remain neutral on this point. Indeed, Galileo did think precisely that. It's not as if our salvation turns on the question, but Bellarmine explicitly rejected this easy way out. There were passages in the Bible that seemed to presuppose a geocentric rather than heliocentric arrangement of the cosmos.

For example, the book of Joshua recounts a miracle in which the sun stops moving, which would hardly be miraculous if the sun never moves in the first place. Similarly, we read in the Psalms that God "laid the foundations of the earth that it should not be removed forever," and in Ecclesiastes that the sun rises over the earth.

Given that no one had questioned the geocentrism of such passages throughout the whole history of biblical interpretation, it would take nothing short of a watertight proof to convince Bellarmine that the passages should be read differently. I cannot believe, he said, that there is such a demonstration until someone shows it to me. As I've said, this dispute looms much larger in our memory of Bellarmine than it did in Bellarmine's own career.

As a censor and inquisitor, he was involved in the revision, or worse, of many authors. For example, he said when censoring Jean Baudin's work on the method of history that Baudin was clearly either a heretic or an atheist. In 1587, he also censored the medical treatise of Juan Jarte, rejecting the naturalist tendencies that we've also seen in fellow Spanish medical author Oliva Sabuco.

In fairness, a book devoted to Bellarmine's activities as a censor concludes that he "inclined neither to severity nor to indulgence." I mentioned already how he complained about the exaggerations of Sixtus V's index, and that was not an isolated example. About another church censor, he complained, "If he goes on like this, no one will dare to write anything." But, as I also mentioned, Bellarmine explicitly endorsed the burning of books and execution of those deemed to be heretics.

Thus, in that political treatise on secular people, he says that the fathers of the church must already have destroyed heretical texts, which is why so few survive. He also argues that it does a favor to everyone to kill a heretic. Other people are thereby protected from insidious influence, while the heretics themselves are saved from stubbornly prolonging their error.

As a trained scholastic, Bellarmine is always ready to consider possible objections. So here, he confronts the counter-argument put by Castelio and other supporters of religious toleration, that it is impossible to compel sincere belief. Quite true, says Bellarmine, but we can't compel men to want to be faithful to their wives either, yet we still punish adultery.

Bellarmine saw heresy as a profound threat, corrosive to the harmony and authority of the church, something dramatically illustrated by the past decades of Protestant-led schism. In an ideal community, he said, people should all think the same thing. And like all censors, both then and now, Bellarmine assumed that this should be whatever he himself thought.

There's more to say about his role in the Galileo affair, but we'll say it next time, as we dig into that notorious episode and discover that it was a dispute about philosophical matters just as much as it was about astronomy. So, join me after the sun has gone around the earth another 14 times, or is it the other way around? When we'll finally be turning back to Galileo, here on the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Intro