De Dominis, Marcantonio

DE DOMINIS, MARCANTONIO. - Archbishop of Split, then apostate and finally once again Catholic, b. probably in 1560 (or 1566) in the city of Arbe (Rab) on the island of the same name in the Dalmatian archipelago, and d. in Rome on 8 Sept. 1624. A pupil of the Jesuits, he then entered the Order. He first cultivated the physical and mathematical sciences, in which he was also a teacher at Padua. Of an irascible and impatient temperament, he left the Order in 1596. Appointed bishop of Zengg (Segna) in Aug. 1600, he acted energetically there against the Uskoks; he was then archbishop of Split (15 Nov. 1602) and also received the pallium. The fruit of his scientific studies is the work De radiis visus et lucis in vitris perspectivis et iride (Venice 1611) concerning the decomposition of light. In the question of the "Interdict" he took the side of Venice against Rome. He then came into conflict with the Chapter and the nobles of his diocese.

In 1615 he moved to Venice, where he had contacts with Sarpi and became friendly with the English ambassador to the Republic, Sir Henry Wotton, and with his embassy chaplain William Bedell. The reasons and circumstances for which, in 1616, De D. left Venice for Switzerland, whence, by way of Heidelberg and Rotterdam, he reached England on 16 Dec. 1616, are not, however, entirely clear. He then entered the Anglican church, and on the first Sunday of Advent in 1617 in London, in the chapel of the Mercedarians, he launched a violent public attack against the Church of Rome. Shortly afterwards there followed the writing Scogli del naufragio cristiano quali va scoprendo la S. Chiesa di Cristo allii suoi figliuoli perché da quelli possano allontanarsi (London [?] 1618), later translated into English, French and German. Rome was accused in it of aspiring to a purely temporal dominion, of sowing religious terror, of corrupting the evangelical ideals. De D. received honours and prebends, to the point of becoming dean of Windsor. Meanwhile, in 1617, the first part of his major work De republica ecclesiastica had appeared (Heidelberg and London; then Heidelberg 1618, bks. I-IV). The work continued to appear in the years 1620 (bks. V-VI) and 1622 (bks. VI and IX; bks. VIII and X never appeared). Welcome to Protestants for polemical reasons, it was widely translated and used: but its truest significance is, in substance, anti-curialist and Gallican, albeit with Protestant influences. To a "monarchical" concept of the Church, De D. intends to substitute that of a "spiritual aristocracy" represented by the episcopate: the primacy of St. Peter was personal in nature; the Church of Rome has no prerogatives and its authority is of "external" origin, according to De D., or purely "historical", as was said later. In the second part of the work the Protestant influence is more pronounced, especially as regards the doctrine on the sacraments. Purgatory is denied in it. Treating of the relations between temporal powers and the Church, De D. arrives at a clear jurisdictionalist conception; for D. ecclesiastics and the pope himself are bound to the laws of princes in temporal matters, even in the external ecclesiastical regime. De D. made use of the narrative and accentuated the guiding ideas of Sarpi's Historia del Concilio Tridentino, of which he, from a copy of the original and without Sarpi's own consent, had arranged the publication (London 1619), dedicating it to King James I.

But De D. was beginning to tire of his stay in England. His ideas were suspected of little Protestant orthodoxy. When Gregory XV, who had known De D., ascended the papal throne, the latter, through the Spanish ambassadors, manifested to Rome his intention of returning to the bosom of the Church, and on 16 Jan. 1622 wrote to the king saying that he wished to leave because of the climate. The king was indignant at this and, after some attempt to detain him, gave him twenty days' time to depart. From Rome he had had promises of a good reception. He arrived, after various vicissitudes, at Brussels, and here wrote the Sui reditus ex Anglia consilium (published in Rome in 1623), in which he completely retracted his past and declared to be mere calumny all that he had said or written against the Catholic Church. In Rome, where he had gone, an amends in Consistory was nevertheless demanded of him. But since D. had once again given grounds for suspicion, the Inquisition placed him under arrest and examined his case. In this period, however, De D. (1624) came to his death (cf. letter of G. Fabro to G. Galilei, in Opere of G. Galilei, XIII, Florence 1903, p. 207). The cardinalatial commission, at the conclusion of its examination, declared, especially on the basis of certain writings on the Most Holy Trinity found among D.'s papers, that he had died a heretic. His corpse was therefore disinterred and burned together with his books. All his works are on the Index (decrees of 1616, 1617, 1618, 1620, 1621).

Franco Bolgiani