Marco Antonio de Dominis

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Marco Antonio de Dominis (Croatian Markantun de Dominis) Dalmatian ecclesiastic, apostate, and man of science, was born on the island of Arbe, off the coast of Dalmatia, in 1566; d. in the Castle of Sant' Angelo, Rome, September, 1624. Educated at the Illyrian College at Loreto and at the University of Padua, he entered the Society of Jesus and taught mathematics, logic, and rhetoric at Padua and Brescia.

Contents 1 Religious politics 2 Scientific work 3 See also 4 References

[edit] Religious politics

He was educated by the Jesuits in their colleges at Loreto and Padua, and is supposed by some to have joined their order; the more usual opinion, however, is that he was dissuaded from doing so by Cardinal Aldobrandini. For some time he was employed as a teacher at Verona, as professor of mathematics at Padua, and professor of rhetoric and philosophy at Brescia.

In 1596 he was, through imperial influence, appointed Bishop of Senj (Segna, Seng) and Modrus in Dalmatia (Aug., 1600), and transferred (November, 1602) to the archiepiscopal See of Split. His endeavours to reform the Church soon brought him into conflict with, his suifragans; and the interference of the papal court with his rights as metropolitan, an attitude intensified by the quarrel between the papacy and Venice, made his position intolerable. This, at any rate, is the account given in his own apologythe Consili-um profectionis in which he also states that it was these troubles that led him to those researches into ecclesiastical law, church history and dogmatic theology, which, while confirming him in his love for the ideal of the true Catholic Church, revealed to him how far the papal system was from approximating to it.

He sided with Venice, in whose territory his see was situated, during the quarrel between Pope Paul V and the Republic (1606-7). That fact, combined with a correspondence with Fra Paolo Sarpi and conflicts with his clergy and fellow-bishops which culminated in the loss of an important financial case in the Roman Curia, led to the resignation of his office in favour of a relative and his retirement to Venice. Threatened by the Inquisition, he prepared to apostatize, entered into communication with the English ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, and having been assured of a welcome, left for England in 1616.

On his way there, he published at Heidelberg a violent attack on Rome: Scogli del Cristiano naufragio, afterwards reprinted in England. He was received with open arms by James I, who quartered him upon Archbishop Abbot of Canterbury, called on the other bishops to pay him a pension, and granted him precedence after the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. De Dominis wrote a number of anti-Roman sermons, published his often reprinted chief work, De Republicâ Ecclesiasticâ contra Primatum Papæ (Vol. 1, 1617; vol. II, 1620, London; Vol. III, 1622, Hanover), and took part, as assistant, in the consecration of George Montaigne as Bishop of Lincoln, 14 December, 1617. In that same year, James I made him Dean of Windsor and granted him the Mastership of the Savoy.

Contemporary writers give no pleasant account of him, describing him as fat, irascible, pretentious and very avaricious; but his ability was undoubted, and in the theological controversies of the time he soon took a foremost place. His published attacks on the papacy succeeded each other in rapid succession: the Papatus Romanus, issued anonymously (London, 1617; Frankfort, 1618), the Scogli del naufragio Christiano, written in Switzerland (London, (?) 1618), of which English, French and German translations also appeared, and a Sermon preached in Italian before the king.

But his principal work was the De republica ecciesiastica, of which the first partafter revision by Anglican theologians was published under royal patronage in London (1617), in which he set forth with a great display of erudition his theory of the church. In the main it is an elaborate treatise on the historic organization of the church, its principal note being its insistence on the divine prerogatives of the Catholic episcopate as against the encroachments of the papal monarchy. In 1619 Dominis published in London, with a dedication to James I., Paolo Sarpis Historia del Concilio Tridentino, the manuscript of which he had brought with him from Venice. It is characteristic of the man that he refused to hand over to Sarpi a penny of the money present given to him by the king as a reward for this work.

In 1619 De Dominis published in London the first edition of Fra Paolo Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent; the work appeared in Italian, with an anti-Roman title page and letter dedicatory to James I. His vanity, avarice, and irascibility, however, soon lost him his English friends; the projected Spanish marriage of Prince Charles made him anxious about the security of his position in England, and the election of Pope Gregory XV (Feb. 9, 1621) furnished him with an occasion of intimating, through Catholic diplomatists in England, his wish to return to Rome.

The king's anger was aroused when De Dominis announced his intention (Jan. 16, 1622), and Star-Chamber proceedings for illegal correspondence with Rome were threatened. Eventually he was allowed to depart, but his chests of hoarded money were seized by the king's men, and only restored in response to a piteous personal appeal to the king.

Once out of England his attacks upon the English Church were as violent as had been those on the See of Rome, and in Sui Reditus ex Anglii Consilium (Paris, 1623) he recanted all he had written in his Consilium Profectionis (London, 1616), declaring that he had deliberately lied in all that he had said against Rome. After a stay of six months in Brussels he proceeded to Rome, where he lived on a pension assigned him by the pope. On the death of Gregory XV (8 July, 1623) the pension ceased, and irritation loosened his tongue.

Coming into conflict with the Inquisition he was declared a relapsed heretic, was confined to the Castle of Sant Angelo, and there died a natural death. Even this did not end his trial, and on the 20th of December judgment was pronounced over his corpse in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. By order of the Inquisition his body was taken from the coffin, dragged through the streets of Rome, and publicly burnt in the Campo di Fiore. His case was continued after his death, his heresy declared manifest, and his body burned together with his works on December 21, 1624.

By a strange irony, the publication of his Reditus consilium was subsequently forbidden in Venice because of its uncompromising advocacy of the supremacy of the pope over the temporal powers. As a theologian and an ecclesiastic Dominis was thoroughly discredited; as a man of science he was more happy.

[edit] Scientific work

In 1611 he published, at Venice, a scientific work entitled: Tractatus de radiis visus et lucis in vitris, perspectivis et iride, in which, according to Isaac Newton, he was the first to develop the theory of the rainbow, by drawing attention to the fact that in each raindrop the light undergoes two refractions and an intermediate reflection. His claim to that distinction is, however, disputed in favour of Descartes.

In 1625 he published in Rome, "Euripus, seu de fluxus at refluxus maris sententiae". It is an important source for the strange story of the theory of tides. It contains an exact but qualitative, luni-solar explanation of the phaenomena. This explanation is directly connected with the later developments.^[1]

[edit] See also

See the article by Canon G. G. Perry in the Dictionary of National Biography, and that by Benrath in Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopdie (ed. 1898), iv. p. 781, where a full bibliography is given. Also H. Newland, Life and Contemporaneous Church History of Antonio de Dominis (Oxford, 1859).

[edit] References

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

This article incorporates text from the public-domain Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913.