A Life, for the seventeenth day of September — the day of his death; his feast in the traditional Roman calendar is kept on the thirteenth of May, III classis
In medio Ecclesiae aperuit os eius: et implevit eum Dominus spiritu sapientiae et intellectus: stola gloriae induit eum. “In the midst of the Church he opened his mouth: and the Lord filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding: He clothed him with a robe of glory.” — Introit of the Mass of a Doctor, from Ecclesiasticus 15:5
I. Montepulciano
He was born on the fourth day of October, 1542, at Montepulciano in Tuscany, the third of the children of Vincenzo Bellarmino and Cinzia Cervini. The house was noble and poor, which is the most dangerous combination for a young man’s soul, since it supplies the ambition without the means. His father had the ambition for him. His mother supplied something else: Cinzia was a woman of hard prayer, long fasts, and steady almsgiving, and her brother was Cardinal Marcello Cervini, who in 1555 was raised to the Chair of Peter as Marcellus II and held it for twenty-two days before dying. A papal uncle in the family is a fact that shapes a boy’s prospects. In Robert’s case it shaped his father’s plans and not his own.
He was put into the Jesuit college newly opened in his own town, and there the thing was decided. He wanted the Society of Jesus. His father wanted a career, and the father’s opposition was strenuous enough that the case had to be handled delicately; but on the twentieth of September, 1560, at Rome, Robert Bellarmine entered the Society, and made his first vows the following day. He was not yet eighteen. His health, which was frail from childhood and remained so for seventy-eight years, was already an argument against him, and was overruled.
II. Louvain
Three years of philosophy at the Roman College; then the humanities to teach, at Florence and at Mondovì in Piedmont; then theology at Padua in 1567; and in 1569 he was sent north to Louvain — sent there, his superiors judged, because at Louvain a man could learn the errors of the age at first hand rather than from a summary.
He was ordained priest on Palm Sunday, the nineteenth of March, 1570, at Ghent, by Cornelius Jansenius, the Bishop of Ghent and a considerable commentator on the Scriptures. (He is not to be confused with the later Jansenius of Ypres, whose name became a heresy. The two are frequently confounded, and the confusion is worth clearing away, since the earlier man was entirely orthodox.)
At Louvain he became the first Jesuit to hold a chair of theology in that university, and he did there two things of consequence. The first was that he lectured not upon the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which was the custom, but upon the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas — a choice that helped to fix the Angelic Doctor as the text of the Catholic schools for the next four centuries. The second was that he read the heretics. He read Luther and Calvin and Chemnitz in their own books, closely and completely, together with the Fathers and the councils and the whole history of the Church, and he did it in an age when the study of patristics and ecclesiastical history had fallen into a genuine neglect.
He also preached. He was a very small man, and the accounts agree that when he first stood in a pulpit the congregation was inclined to smile; and that the smiling stopped as soon as he began, and that Protestants came from a distance to hear him. In these years he composed a Hebrew grammar, the Institutiones linguae Hebraicae, because he thought a theologian should be able to read the Old Testament in the language God gave it.
III. The Controversies
In 1576 Gregory XIII called him back to Rome to occupy a chair newly created at the Roman College: the chair of Controversies, that is, of polemical theology against the Protestants. He held it for eleven years, and out of the lectures came the work by which the world knew him — the Disputationes de Controversiis Christianae Fidei adversus huius temporis haereticos, published in three great volumes between 1586 and 1593.
It is necessary to say what this book was, because “polemical theology” suggests something it was not. It was the first comprehensive, ordered, documented exposition of the entire Catholic position on every point then disputed: the Word of God and its interpretation, Christ, the Church and her visible constitution, the Roman Pontiff, purgatory, the saints, the sacraments, grace and free will, justification and good works. And Bellarmine’s method was this: to state the adversary’s position in the adversary’s own words, from the adversary’s own printed books, fully and without caricature, before answering it.
That method was so unusual that it produced a reputation of its own. Protestants accused him of setting out their arguments better than they had set them out themselves; certain Catholics muttered that a man who could state heresy that well was suspiciously fluent in it. Chairs of divinity were endowed in England and in Germany for the single purpose of answering him, which is a compliment no author can buy. A controversialist who is remembered for fairness is a rare creature. Charity in argument is not a softening of the argument; it is the condition of the argument being worth anything at all.
IV. What exactness cost him
It cost him at once, and from the highest quarter.
In the Controversies Bellarmine denied that the Roman Pontiff possesses a direct temporal power over the kingdoms of the earth. He holds, rather, a power over temporal things that is indirect: real, and exercised in order to the spiritual end for which the Church exists, but not the ordinary jurisdiction of a temporal sovereign over sovereigns. This was the sober and traditional position, and it satisfied nobody. Sixtus V, a pope of vast energy and short patience, took it as a diminution of the papal dignity and ordered the first volume placed upon the Index. Sixtus died before the Index containing it was promulgated, and Gregory XIV had the name struck out.
The second episode was graver and more delicate. Sixtus V had also undertaken, largely with his own hand, a corrected edition of the Latin Vulgate, and the result was defective — so defective that it could not be allowed to stand as the authentic text of the Latin Church. Bellarmine was of the commission that produced the revision published under Clement VIII in 1592, the Clementine Vulgate that served the Church thereafter; and he wrote its preface. In that preface he explained the withdrawal of the earlier edition by laying the errors at the door of the printers. It was a charitable fiction, written to shield the memory of a dead pope and the authority of the Holy See from the use that would certainly have been made of the truth. It has been criticized ever since, and the criticism is not frivolous. It is the sort of act by which a man discovers what he will and will not do for the good of the Church, and it belongs in any honest account of him.
V. The direction of souls
Not everything in these Roman years was controversy. He was spiritual father of the Roman College, and among the young men who came to him for confession and direction was a Gonzaga of Mantua, a marquis’s heir who had given away a principality — Aloysius, who would die at twenty-three nursing the plague-stricken, in 1591.
Bellarmine, who had by then read every heretic in Europe and answered most of them, formed the judgment that this boy had gone further into God than he ever would, and he asked afterwards for one thing only: to be buried at Aloysius’s feet. He was. The two lie now in the church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome, the Doctor at the feet of the novice, which is a better summary of his theology of humility than anything he wrote.
VI. The scarlet, and the poverty in it
On the third of March, 1599, Clement VIII created him cardinal, and stated the reason publicly: that the Church of God had not his equal in learning. Bellarmine had spent years trying to avoid it, and thought that a Jesuit ought not to hold such a dignity, his own Constitutions being explicit on the point.
Having accepted it under obedience, he proceeded to be a cardinal in a way Rome was not accustomed to. He kept the diet of the poor. He reduced his household to what was barely necessary and gave the remainder away. He is said to have ransomed a soldier who had deserted, and to have taken down the hangings from the walls of his apartments to clothe beggars, observing that the walls would not catch cold. In the great age of nepotism, when a red hat was a family’s fortune, he enriched no relative of his and permitted none to come to Rome on his account. Two conclaves — of 1605, which elected Leo XI, and of 1605 again, which elected Paul V — saw votes cast for Bellarmine himself, and he worked against them.
In 1602 he was named Archbishop of Capua and consecrated bishop by Clement VIII with his own hands on the twenty-first of April. The appointment was understood at the time to be partly an honourable removal: the controversy De Auxiliis, on the manner in which grace and free will concur, was raging between Dominicans and Jesuits, Bellarmine had spoken frankly to the Pope about it, and it was convenient to have him elsewhere. He went, and for three years he was the model that Trent had described on paper: resident, preaching in his cathedral, visiting a parish every week, holding three diocesan synods and a provincial council, examining the clergy, and teaching the catechism to children himself. A cardinal of the first rank in Europe, spending Sunday afternoons with the children of Capua.
VII. The catechisms
Of everything he wrote — and he wrote enormously — the two smallest books did the most work. In 1597 and 1598, at Clement VIII’s command, he composed a short catechism for children and a fuller one for those who had to teach them: the Dottrina cristiana breve and the Dichiarazione più copiosa. They were carried by missionaries into every quarter of the world, translated into scores of languages, and remained in ordinary use for three hundred years.
The man who had answered the whole Protestant north in three folio volumes spent his pen just as willingly on Who made you? God made me. The Church noticed. When she came at last to canonize him, she gave him as patron to catechists and catechumens, and not to controversialists.
VIII. Kings
His later years were spent defending the Church’s liberty against Catholic princes as much as against Protestant ones.
When Paul V laid Venice under interdict in 1606, Bellarmine answered the Republic’s theologian, Fra Paolo Sarpi. When James I of England imposed his Oath of Allegiance upon English Catholics after the Gunpowder Plot — an oath which bound the conscience not merely to civil obedience, which the Church permitted, but to a denial of doctrine — Bellarmine answered the King of England in print, and the King answered him back, which is not a thing that happens often. Against the Scot William Barclay he published in 1610 De Potestate Summi Pontificis in Rebus Temporalibus; the Parlement of Paris, jealous of Gallican liberties, condemned it.
The doctrine that earned him these enemies was double-edged, and both edges cut at absolutism. Against the Protestant princes he defended the Pope’s indirect power. But he also taught that civil authority, though it comes from God, does not descend upon a particular man by divine appointment: it resides first in the community, which designates the ruler. The divine right of kings, in the sense the Stuarts and the Bourbons wanted, therefore had no foundation. It is a historical curiosity worth knowing that when Sir Robert Filmer wrote his Patriarcha to defend that divine right, he named Bellarmine as the chief adversary to be refuted — and that the whole Anglophone argument about the origin of political power began, in part, as an argument with a Jesuit cardinal.
IX. Galileo, and the honest account
He was a consultor of the Holy Office, and two of its cases are attached to his name. A hagiography that avoided them would be worthless.
The first is Giordano Bruno. Bellarmine was among the theologians who in 1599 drew up the censured propositions put to Bruno, and he signed the sentence of 1600. It should be said plainly what Bruno was condemned for, because the nineteenth century manufactured a legend about it: the propositions concerned the Trinity, the divinity and Incarnation of Christ, the virginity of Our Lady, transubstantiation, the transmigration of souls, and the eternity of a plurality of worlds understood in a pantheist sense. They were not astronomical propositions. The Holy Office judged doctrine; the penalty of death was inflicted by the secular arm under the law of Christendom as it then stood, a law which the Church of that age accepted and which no Catholic today is obliged to defend as prudent. Bellarmine acted within it, and the fact belongs to his life.
The second is Galileo, who was his friend. In April of 1615 Bellarmine wrote to the Carmelite Foscarini a letter which is one of the more impressive documents of the whole affair. Its substance is threefold: that Copernicus may lawfully be treated as a hypothesis which saves the appearances, and that this is prudent; that if a true demonstration of the earth’s motion should ever be produced, then one would have to proceed with great care in expounding the Scriptures which seem contrary, and to say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false; and that, in his judgment, no such demonstration had been produced, and until it was, the plain sense of Scripture and the consent of the Fathers held the field.
The first and second of those points are exactly right, and Leo XIII would restate the principle in Providentissimus Deus three centuries later. The third was a judgment of fact, and it was mistaken — though it is fair to add that Galileo’s own proof, drawn from the tides, was indeed no proof at all. In February of 1616 Bellarmine conveyed to Galileo the admonition of the Holy Office; and afterwards, when rumours spread that the astronomer had been made to abjure and do penance, Bellarmine gave him a signed certificate stating that he had done nothing of the kind and had merely been notified of the decree. Galileo kept that paper for the rest of his life, and it was his best defence at his later trial.
This shows, as much as anything in his life, the difference between a saint and an oracle. Sanctity is not omniscience. Bellarmine was wrong about the motion of the earth and right about how a Christian ought to reason when revelation and demonstration seem to collide; and he was kind to the man he had to admonish.
X. De arte bene moriendi
In his last years, the controversialist fell silent and the contemplative spoke. Out of the annual retreats of an old man came a series of small spiritual books which are still read when the folios are not: De ascensione mentis in Deum per scalas rerum creatarum, the mind’s ascent to God by the ladder of created things (1615); De aeterna felicitate sanctorum; De gemitu columbae, the mourning of the dove, on the gift of tears; De septem verbis Domini; and in 1620, at seventy-eight, De arte bene moriendi — the art of dying well.
He then practised it. Feeling his end, he asked to leave his palace and was carried to the Jesuit novitiate of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, to die among religious in a plain room rather than among his household. Gregory XV came to see him, and the cardinals came, and the city understood what it was losing. He died on the seventeenth of September, 1621, in his seventy-ninth year, on the octave day of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
XI. Three centuries in the antechamber
He was venerated as a saint before he was cold, and the processes were opened at once at Montepulciano and at Capua. Urban VIII approved the opening in 1626 — and then promulgated the general rule that a confessor’s cause might not proceed until fifty years after his death. So the matter waited.
It was resumed in 1675 and came near to the declaration of heroic virtue, when the Promoter of the Faith unearthed a short account of his own life which Bellarmine had written for the internal use of the Society, had it printed, and distributed it among the cardinals. It could be read — and was read — as self-praise, as criticism of certain popes, and as an indiscretion about the business of the Sistine Vulgate. The cause stopped.
It was resumed in 1752. Benedict XIV, a great canonist who wanted the beatification, found himself facing the opposition of French cardinals of Jansenizing and Gallican sympathies, for whom Bellarmine’s doctrine of the papal power was the offence it had always been; he judged it prudent to wait, and then he died.
So the Church left the greatest controversialist of the Counter-Reformation standing in her antechamber for three hundred years, precisely because he had been too useful to the Holy See and too candid about kings. The cause was taken up again in 1919. Pius XI beatified him on the thirteenth of May, 1923; canonized him on the twenty-ninth of June, 1930; and on the seventeenth of September, 1931 — the tenth anniversary of his death — declared him a Doctor of the Universal Church. His feast was assigned to the thirteenth of May, the day of his beatification, and is so kept in the traditional Roman calendar, III classis. The reformed calendar moved it to the seventeenth of September, his dies natalis.
XII. What the life teaches
That charity is a condition of truth-telling, not a dilution of it. Bellarmine conceded nothing whatever to Luther or Calvin, and he refused to misrepresent them by a syllable. The temptation in every controversy is to fight the weakest form of the opposing case, because it is easier and it feels like victory. It is not victory; it is a way of never meeting the argument at all. He is a Doctor of the Church partly because he would not do it.
That the smallest instrument may be the one that lasts. Three folio volumes of Controversies are consulted now by specialists. The little catechism taught the faith to the children of four continents for three hundred years, and the Church made him patron of catechists. A man’s greatest work is not always the one he would have named.
That a saint may be mistaken, and that this is not a scandal. He was wrong about the earth’s motion. He wrote a preface that shaded the truth to protect an office. He signed a sentence that a later age reads with horror. The Church does not canonize impeccability or infallibility of judgment; she canonizes heroic virtue, which is a matter of what a man does with his will over a lifetime. And she is not embarrassed by the record, because the record is what makes him imitable. An unerring man teaches us nothing we can use.
Practice
Examine. Take the last disagreement you had — in the parish, at work, in your own house, on some question of religion. Could you state the other man’s case, in his own words, so accurately that he would accept your statement of it as fair? If not, you have not yet been arguing with him; you have been arguing with a figure you constructed. Begin there.
Do. Teach the catechism to someone this week: a child, a godchild, a convert, a man who asks you why Catholics do a thing and expects you not to know. Bellarmine is the patron of exactly this. Answer briefly, accurately, and without heat.
Pray. The Collect of his Mass:
Deus, qui ad errores impugnandos et Apostolicae Sedis iura propugnanda, beatum Robertum Pontificem tuum atque Doctorem mira eruditione et virtute decorasti: eius meritis et intercessione concede; ut nos in veritatis amore crescamus, et errantium corda ad Ecclesiae tuae redeant unitatem.
“O God, who didst adorn blessed Robert, Thy Bishop and Doctor, with wondrous learning and virtue for the confounding of errors and the defence of the rights of the Apostolic See: grant, by his merits and intercession, that we may grow in the love of truth, and that the hearts of them that err may return to the unity of Thy Church.”
Devote. The Glorious Mysteries, with attention to the Descent of the Holy Ghost, who is the Spirit of understanding by whom the Church is taught. Or, for those who are ill or old or attending the dying, read a chapter of his Art of Dying Well; it was written for exactly that purpose and has not aged.
If you wish to go deeper: the Theology and Doctrine path takes up the matter Bellarmine spent his life on — the marks and constitution of the visible Church, the authority of the Roman Pontiff, and the rule of faith — in the Thomistic order. The Church History path treats the Catholic Reform and the confessional conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which his whole career stands. The Lives of the Saints path continues with the other great Jesuits of his generation: Ignatius, Francis Xavier, Peter Canisius, Aloysius Gonzaga, at whose feet he lies.
Sancte Roberte Bellarmine, Doctor Ecclesiae, patrone catechistarum, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “St. Robert Francis Romulus Bellarmine”; the New Catholic Encyclopedia; the Encyclopædia Britannica; Bellarmine’s own letter to Foscarini of 12 April 1615 and his certificate to Galileo of 26 May 1616; and modern Jesuit scholarship on the history of his cause. Where the older Roman accounts and the archival record differ on minor dates, the archival record is followed.