ECCLESIASTICAL TAXES. – Alongside voluntary contributions – donations, last wills, oblations (v.) – they are one of the sources of income for the Church, which has the right to demand from the faithful, independently of civil authority, the means necessary for divine worship and the support of the clergy (cf. can. 1496 CIC).
Even within the Church’s tax system, a distinction exists between taxes, coercive levies of wealth carried out to meet collective needs, and ecclesiastical dues, owed as consideration for services rendered by ecclesiastical offices. Among the former are to be counted tithes (v.) and episcopal taxes in general: among these, some are ordinary, such as the cattedraticum (v.) and the seminarium (v.); others – extraordinary – may be imposed, in moderate measure (can. 1505), upon all ecclesiastical beneficiaries or religious to meet some particular need of the diocese.
Bishops may, moreover, impose a tax on churches, benefices, and ecclesiastical institutes at the time of their foundation or consecration (can. 1506), as well as temporary pensions burdening the holder of a benefice (can. 1429).
Among ecclesiastical dues are to be recalled those for the conferral of benefices, for the granting of the pallium, and those of chancery and judicial nature owed to the Holy See (v. TASSE DI CURIA); those of chancery, for dispensations and judicial
He devoted himself to the study of Aristotle and to reading the Discorsi dell’arte poetica and presenting the fifty Conclusioni d’amore, developing those two fundamental themes of his life that revolve around the Court and the Academy, understood as complex meeting places of culture and civilization. In the retinue of the cardinal, in 1570–71 he set out for Paris, from where he sent Ercole de’ Contrari a letter-treatise, steeped in a piquant geographical flavor, on matters concerning France. In ’72 he was back in Ferrara, now in the service of Duke Alfonso II. This was a happy season of poetry for Tasso; he continued his lyrical output, with sonnets, canzoni, and madrigals, of love (for Laura Peperara and for Eleonora Sanvitale) and of praise (for Lucrezia and Eleonora, the duke’s sisters); in the spring of 1573 he composed the Aminta, a pastoral play in five acts; then he began Galealto re di Norvegia, his first attempt at a tragedy, which, under the changed title of Re Torrismondo, he completed in 1586–87; and finally, in April 1575, “the poem of Goffredo,” to which he had been devoting himself for several years with imaginative enthusiasm and assiduous labor, was finished. But already by the end of that year the first symptoms of imbalance began to disturb the integrity of his body, worn out by fatigue, and of his mind, subjected to excessive strain. After the long creative labor came the exhausting work of revising the poem, a task poisoned both by the frenzy that gripped the poet, anxious for success, and by the disappointment at the criticisms of the poem that reached him from all sides—from Scipione Gonzaga, Sperone Speroni, Silvio Antoniano, Flaminio de’ Nobili, and Pier Angelo Bargeo, to whose judgment he himself had entrusted his work. Artistic doubts, compounded by religious scruples and vague fears that were taking the form of a persecution mania, made his dialogue with these reviewers increasingly tormented. A suggestive and sorrowful testimony to this remains in a thick bundle of letters and in the very Allegoria della Liberata (1576), in which the poet strives to devise a moral interpretation of the poem. The examination, which he voluntarily underwent, by the inquisitor (in Bologna in 1575 and two years later in Ferrara), with the resulting acquittal, did not succeed in freeing him from his morbid unease. But the most dramatic manifestation of his illness occurred one evening in June 1577, when, believing himself to have been insulted during a conversation with Princess Lucrezia, he hurled a knife at a servant. Segregated because of his dangerous frenzy, he escaped under romantic circumstances and began that painful wandering that injects such a restless, tormented, and hallucinated note into his biography: from Ferrara to Sorrento, to Rome, and again to Ferrara for a few months, with a new departure for Mantua, Padua, Venice, Pesaro, Urbino; and then again to Ferrara, Mantua, Vercelli, Turin. In February 1579 he returned to Ferrara, while at court everyone was occupied with preparations for the duke’s third marriage to Margherita Gonzaga; neglected and disappointed, in a paroxysm of his illness, on the evening of March 11 he broke out in violent invective against his former patron. Locked up and chained as a madman in the hospital of S. Anna, he would spend seven years there, treated, according to the medical customs of the time, more like a prisoner than a patient, although later the original rigor was much relaxed. In S. Anna the poet, in his long intervals of lucidity, resumed his literary pursuits and conversations with friends, and meanwhile sought to defend himself against the charge of insanity and to regain his freedom: the sorrowful and anxious, fervent and feverish existence of this period is documented in his letters, some of them most humane, certainly among the most suggestive in his epistolary. From these years of imprisonment date, along with many letters, a good number of lyrics, the Dialoghi and the Apologia della Liberata. And it was during these years of imprisonment that the editorial vicissitudes of Tasso’s masterpiece began. Published without the author’s knowledge and to his detriment by Celio Malespini in 1580 in Venice under the title of Goffredo in a most incorrect and incomplete edition, it was republished complete, to repair the disastrous first edition, the following year by Angelo Ingegneri in Padua and Casalmaggiore under the title destined to remain, Gerusalemme Liberata; it finally appeared in the same year, 1581, in Ferrara, through the care of Febo Bonnà, with the author’s consent, later renounced. Meanwhile, in July 1586 the duke granted Vincenzo Gonzaga permission to take Tasso with him to Mantua, where the poet completed the Torrismondo and planned a revision of the Gerusalemme. But in October 1587 he suddenly left Mantua, driven by a restless urge for continuous travel: Bergamo, Genoa, Loreto, Rome. From Rome he went to Naples, with the intention of recovering his mother’s property, where, to please his hosts, the Olivetan monks, he began the Monte Oliveto, a short poem left unfinished at the 102nd stanza of the first canto. By the end of 1588 he was again in Rome, at the home of Cardinal Scipione Gonzaga; in 1590 in Florence; in 1592 in Mantua, where he wrote in honor of Duke Vincenzo the Genealogia di casa Gonzaga (119 ottave); in 1592 in Naples, first at the home of the Prince of Conca and then at the home of Marquis G. B. Manso, who would be one of his first biographers (and here he began Le sette giornate del mondo creato, in blank hendecasyllables, completed in Rome in 1594). In 1593 he published the revised poem, the Gerusalemme Conquistata, dedicated to Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII, who in Rome in his final years showed him great hospitality, and he composed Le lagrime di Maria Vergine and Le lagrime di Gesù Cristo (respectively in 25 and 20 ottave). In 1594, for the last time in Naples, he began La vita di S. Benedetto (a fragment of 8 stanzas). Having been granted a pension by the Pope, while plans were already afoot to honor him with the laurel crown of poet at the Capitol, at the beginning of April 1595, having left the Vatican, he was received, in grave conditions of health, into the monastery of S. Onofrio on the Gianicolo. From there, with a calm premonition of the end, he wrote to Antonio Costantini the celebrated letter with which the epistolary closes: “I have had myself brought to this place of retreat [...] almost to begin from this eminent place, and with the companionship of these devout fathers, my companionship in heaven.” And here he died on April 25, 1595. The poet’s crown was placed on his coffin. The tomb, a plain stone that was not replaced by a modest monument until 1857, is in S. Onofrio.
Fairly dense traces of his outward life and a vivid image of his inner self are left by T. in his Letters (about seventeen hundred), which, however, must be interpreted with great discretion, without confusing their ideal truth with that particular truth in the strict archival-historical sense. In them, under a dignified literary seal that is always highly controlled and responsible, the poet has entrusted, through a whole series of direct or indirect psychological data, the suggestive voices of his soul stirred by internal and external events. And it is the voice that resounds and takes shape in the court, in that court which is a physical and moral, aesthetic and cultural reality, which regulates and adorns his writing, and justifies his conceit, and sustains and directs his insistent and painful supplication. But precisely this supplication, which alludes to the poet’s suffering condition of perpetual need and the search for iniquity, is among the most frequent and painful notes. Often the feelings of pain, melancholy, and death brush these pages, while sighs and anxious gusts of enjoyment and well-being sometimes mingle and alternate with them. Frequently it is the very physical presence of the poet, who appears in some more spontaneous attitude; and it is that of the most singular hours of his day; or again, quite exceptionally, that of a brand-new experience, which rises in zones of hallucination and mystery. Alongside the motif of pain and death is the motif of religious experience, which T. confesses in terms of undoubted sincerity, but, it must be acknowledged, rather poor in contemplative genius and devoid of ascetic anxiety. More vivid and original are the themes that engage the intelligence with secular matters, as occurs in some letters that have the character of objective disquisition, notably in that on the affairs of France and in the other to Ercole on marriage. But above all, the notes that touch the poet’s and scholar’s critical conscience are most intense, exercised with vigilance and quibbling, compelling him to constant scrutiny of the poem, traces of which remain in the dense group of letters that accompany the vast elaborative process of the transition from the *Gerusalemme Liberata* to the *Conquistata*.