Saint Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621)

The battle of ideas in the 16th century

Bellarmine was born a quarter of a century after Luther’s theses, into a Christendom torn apart by the Protestant Reformation. The battle was no longer fought only on the ground of discipline and morals — where Saint Charles Borromeo would shine — but on that of doctrine. The reformers had produced a formidable literature; the Catholic Church still lacked a theological synthesis capable of answering, point by point, every controversy raised. It was this colossal task that Providence would entrust to the young Jesuit from Montepulciano.^[7][8]

The Society of Jesus, army of doctrinal reform

The Society of Jesus, founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in 1540, had set itself the mission of defending and spreading the faith through teaching. Within a few decades, its colleges covered Catholic Europe. The Roman College (today’s Gregorian University), founded in 1551, became the intellectual hearth of the Catholic Reformation. It was there that Bellarmine would hold the chair of controversy, and from his courses would be born the theological arsenal of a whole century.^[9][10]

Birth at Montepulciano (1542)

Robert Bellarmine was born on 4 October 1542 at Montepulciano, a small city in Tuscany, into a noble but impoverished family.^[11][12] His father, Vincenzo Bellarmino, was a lord of little fortune; his mother, Cinzia Cervini, was the sister of Cardinal Marcello Cervini, who would reign for a few weeks in 1555 under the name Marcellus II. The child was pious, gifted, and passionate about letters. It is said that he already composed Latin verse and knew poems of Virgil by heart.^[13]

The young Jesuit (1560)

Despite his father’s plans, who dreamed of a brilliant career for him, Robert asked to enter the Society of Jesus. He was received into the Roman novitiate on 20 September 1560 and pronounced his first vows the next day.^[14] He was seventeen. His fragile health and frequent illnesses would accompany him all his life, without ever slowing his labour.

Studies: Padua and Louvain

After three years of philosophy at the Roman College, Bellarmine taught humanities at Florence then at Mondovì.^[15] He began theology at Padua in 1567, then was sent in 1569 to complete it at the University of Louvain, in the Low Countries, then one of the great battlegrounds between Catholics and Protestants.^[16][17] There he was ordained priest in 1570.^[18][19]

Louvain: a preacher heard as far as England

At Louvain, Bellarmine revealed himself an exceptional preacher. His reputation crossed borders: Protestants came, it is said, from England and Holland to hear him.^[20] He also fought his first great intellectual battles there, notably against Baianism. Seven years in the Low Countries made him intimately acquainted with Reformed thought — knowledge that would feed his masterwork.

The chair of controversy at the Roman College

Recalled to Italy in 1576, Bellarmine received the chair of controversy of the Roman College, created to train priests to answer Protestant objections.^[21] For eleven years, he methodically expounded there, with an honesty and erudition acknowledged even by his adversaries, the whole range of disputed questions between Rome and the Reformation.

The Disputationes de Controversiis (1586, 1588, 1593)

From these lessons was born the great monument of his life: the Disputationes de Controversiis christianae fidei adversus hujus temporis haereticos — “Disputations on the controversies of the Christian faith against the heretics of this time” — published in three volumes at Ingolstadt in 1586, 1588 and 1593.^[22][23] The work examines, with unequalled breadth, every debated question: Scripture and Tradition, Christ, the pope, councils, the Church, the sacraments, grace, purgatory, the saints. Its strength lay in a new method: first setting out the opposing objection in all its rigour, faithfully quoting Protestant authors, then answering. The fairness of the exposition was such that some reformers believed the work written by a team of authors; it was even imagined, in Protestant lands, that a single man could not have such mastery of both camps.^[24]

Rector of the Roman College and the revision of the Vulgate

Having become rector of the Roman College in 1592, Bellarmine was entrusted with a delicate mission: sitting on the final commission charged with revising the Latin Bible. Pope Sixtus V had had printed in 1590 an edition of the Vulgate riddled with errors. After his death, the work had to be corrected without dishonouring the memory of the pontiff. Bellarmine found the solution: republishing the amended text while attributing the first errors to the haste of the printers. It was he who wrote the preface to the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate (1592), which remained in use for centuries.^[25]

The indirect power of the pope (potestas indirecta)

The most famous — and most disputed — of Bellarmine’s theses concerns relations between pope and princes. Against the regalists, who wanted to subject the Church to civil power, and against certain ultramontanes, who attributed to the pope a direct temporal domination over the whole world, Bellarmine defended a balanced position: the pope has no direct jurisdiction over temporal affairs, but an indirect power (potestas indirecta); he may intervene in the civil domain only when the salvation of souls requires it.^[26][27]

Between two fires: Sixtus V and the Index

This moderate thesis earned Bellarmine attacks from both sides. Pope Sixtus V, judging that it gave too little power to the Holy See, wanted to place the Disputationes on the Index in 1590; only the pontiff’s death halted the proceedings.^[28] In 1610, his Tractatus de potestate Summi Pontificis in rebus temporalibus, a reply to William Barclay, was on the contrary judged too favourable to the pope by the Parlement of Paris, which had it burned.^[29] To be condemned in turn as too Roman and not Roman enough is, for a theologian, the mark of a rare soundness of judgment.

The quarrel with James I of England

After the Gunpowder Plot (1605), King James I of England imposed on Catholics an oath of allegiance denying any power of the pope to depose a sovereign. Bellarmine answered the king — who himself wrote pamphlets — with a long series of polemical works, defending the liberty of the Church and the rights of Catholic consciences.^[30][31] He likewise crossed swords with the Scotsman William Barclay, a partisan of the absolute divine right of kings.^[32]

Venice and Paolo Sarpi

In 1606, when the Republic of Venice entered into open conflict with Rome and was placed under interdict, Bellarmine engaged in a new battle of the pen against the Servite theologian Paolo Sarpi, defender of Venetian claims.^[33] The table below summarises the great controversies in which he was engaged.

Made cardinal by Clement VIII (1599)

On 3 March 1599, Pope Clement VIII made Bellarmine a cardinal, declaring, according to his biographers, that “the Church of God had not his equal in learning”.^[34] The Jesuit, who had always fled honours, accepted out of obedience. Having become a prince of the Church, he changed nothing in his life: he continued to live poorly, giving to the poor what a cardinal ordinarily spent on splendour.

“It is reported that he never furnished the walls of his house with anything but plain hangings; that he lived almost solely on bread and garlic, like the poor; and that he employed the revenues of his bishopric in relieving the indigent.” — Hagiographical tradition on Cardinal Bellarmine’s poverty^[35]

The archbishop pastor of Capua (1602–1605)

In 1602, Clement VIII named him Archbishop of Capua and consecrated him himself.^[36][37] Bellarmine, the great theoretician of reform, then became an exemplary pastor in the field, applying to the letter the decrees of the Council of Trent: visitations, preaching, catechism, care of the poor. The scholar who had written on the ideal bishop strove to be one.

The servant of the Roman Curia

On the death of Clement VIII (1605), Bellarmine took part in two successive conclaves in the same year. His own name was mentioned for the sovereign pontificate, but he shrank from it. The new pope, Paul V, wished to keep him in Rome. Bellarmine then gave up his archbishopric of Capua to devote himself entirely to the Roman congregations — the Holy Office, the Index, Rites — where he deployed his learning and prudence to the end.^[38][39]

The trial of Giordano Bruno (1600)

As a cardinal inquisitor, Bellarmine was involved in the trial of the philosopher Giordano Bruno, condemned and burned in 1600 for theses judged heretical.^[40] The episode belongs to an age when civil power punished obstinate heresy with death, and when the Roman Church was no exception to the judicial customs of its time. Historical honesty requires saying so without anachronism: one cannot judge a man of the 16th century by the criteria of the 21st, nor make of Bellarmine a fanatic — he who was, in all his writings, a mind of moderation and rigour.

The letter to Foscarini and the admonition of Galileo (1615–1616)

The best-known affair is that of Galileo. In 1615, the Carmelite Paolo Antonio Foscarini published a book maintaining that the heliocentrism of Copernicus was compatible with Scripture. Bellarmine answered him on 12 April 1615 with a letter of remarkable lucidity. In it he laid down a golden rule, still cited today by historians of science: if heliocentrism were ever truly demonstrated, it would be the interpretation of Scripture that must adjust, not the reverse.

“I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary; and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false. But I will not believe that there is such a demonstration, until it is shown me.” — Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, Letter to Foscarini, 12 April 1615^[41]

Bellarmine’s position was that of the science of his time: so long as decisive proof was lacking — and it was then lacking — heliocentrism had to be held as a fruitful hypothesis, not as an established truth. It was in the name of the Holy Office that in February 1616, by order of the pope, the cardinal notified Galileo of the prudential decree asking him not to hold Copernicanism as a certain thesis.^[42][43][44] Bellarmine, who personally esteemed Galileo, later issued him a certificate stating that he had been neither condemned nor forced to abjure, but merely warned.^[45]

The director of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga

At the heart of this life of learning and statesmanship, Bellarmine was above all a spiritual master. He was the spiritual director of the young Jesuit Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, who died at twenty-three nursing the plague-stricken of Rome.^[46] The cardinal vowed to this saintly youth such veneration that he asked, years later, to be buried near him. His wish was granted: his body rests today behind glass, beneath a side altar of the Church of Saint Ignatius in Rome, beside that of his former penitent.^[47][48]

The spiritual writer: The Ladder of Heaven

During the rare leisure left him by public affairs, Bellarmine composed a series of spiritual treatises of great depth. The most famous, De ascensione mentis in Deum — “The Ascent of the Mind to God”, or The Ladder of Heaven (L’Échelle du Ciel, 1615) — proposes rising to God through contemplation of creatures, in fifteen steps, in imitation of the Itinerary of Saint Bonaventure.^[49] In it the author explains his plan:

“During a little rest left me by public affairs, encouraged by the example of Saint Bonaventure who, in similar leisure, composed the Itinerary of the Soul to God, I tried to form, by means of creatures, a ladder for rising to God: I divided it into fifteen rungs.” — Saint Robert Bellarmine, The Ladder of Heaven, preface^[50]

The first step is self-knowledge, which brings the soul back to its nothingness and to God its creator:

“Do you sincerely desire to rise to God? Begin by learning to know yourself. […] If I seek to know my Creator, I find only God; if I wish to know the matter of which He formed me, I meet nothingness.” — Saint Robert Bellarmine, The Ladder of Heaven, first step^[51]

From this consideration is born the great lesson of the book, and of his whole life — humility:

“You will therefore be wise, O my soul, if you always place yourself in the last rank. Beware of ever stealing the glory of God; descend into your nothingness, which alone belongs to you, and henceforth the whole world cannot inspire you with pride.” — Saint Robert Bellarmine, The Ladder of Heaven, first step^[52]

Bellarmine also recalls there, as a pastor, that the churchman overwhelmed with business must never sacrifice prayer, for “the nourishment of the soul is prayer; its sleep is contemplation”.^[53]

The Art of Dying Well

The cardinal also wrote De arte bene moriendi — “The Art of Dying Well” (1620) —, De aeterna felicitate sanctorum on the felicity of Heaven (1616), and De gemitu columbae on the gift of tears (1617).^[54] All this spiritual work says the same thing: learning is of worth only if it leads to God. The greatest controversialist of his century wished to end as a monk at prayer.

The last days (1621)

In the summer of 1621, feeling his strength decline, Bellarmine obtained leave to retire to the Jesuit novitiate of Saint Andrew (Sant’Andrea al Quirinale) to prepare himself there for death.^[55][56] Pope Gregory XV came in person to visit the dying cardinal. Bellarmine greeted him with the words of the humble centurion of the Gospel, which sum up his whole physiognomy:

“Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter…” (Domine, non sum dignus ut intres…) — Saint Robert Bellarmine to Pope Gregory XV, on his deathbed^[57]

He died on 17 September 1621, aged seventy-eight, on the very day on which, three centuries later, he would be proclaimed Doctor of the Church.

Beatification, canonization, Doctor of the Church

Bellarmine’s reputation for holiness was immense, but his cause was long and thwarted. His twofold standing as a Jesuit and as the theorist of indirect power offended political interests; the canonization was several times postponed. It took the pontificate of Pius XI to bring it to completion: Bellarmine was beatified on 13 May 1923, canonized on 29 June 1930, and proclaimed a Doctor of the Church on 17 September 1931.^[58][59]

Patronage and legacy

Saint Robert Bellarmine remains the patron of catechists and canonists — that is, of those who teach the faith and of those who serve the law of the Church.^[60] His feast, long celebrated on 13 May, was fixed on 17 September, the day of his death, in the reformed calendar after 1969.^[61] His little catechisms (the Dottrina cristiana breve, 1597) were translated into dozens of languages and instructed generations of the faithful. But his most lasting legacy is to have proved that one can be at once the most learned of men and the humblest, and that true theology, far from withering the soul, leads it to God.

“The nourishment of the soul is prayer; its sleep is contemplation, by which it meditates in its heart the means of rising, in order to see the God of gods in heavenly Sion.” — Saint Robert Bellarmine, The Ladder of Heaven, preface^[62]

• Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) — the founder of the Society of Jesus, to which Bellarmine devoted his life.
• The foundation of the Society of Jesus (1521–1556) — the order that formed and carried his work.
• Saint Aloysius Gonzaga (1568–1591) — the young Jesuit whose spiritual director he was and near whom he rests.
• Saint Charles Borromeo (1538–1584) — the reforming bishop, another great figure of the Catholic Reformation.
• Saint Peter Canisius (1521–1597) — the Jesuit catechist, a Doctor of the Church like him.
• The Council of Trent (1545–1563) — the council whose decrees he defended and applied.
• The Catholic Reformation — the great movement of regeneration of which he was the theologian.