United States or Colombia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Some have tried to free Vanini from the charge of Atheism, but there is abundant evidence of his guilt apart from his books. The tender mercies of the Inquisition were cruel, and could not allow so notable a victim to escape their vengeance. Whether to burn a man is the surest way to convert him, is a question open to argument.
And Vanini whom his contemporaries burned, finding that an easier task than to confute him puts the same thing in a very forcible way. Man, he says, is so full of every kind of misery that, were it not repugnant to the Christian religion, I should venture to affirm that if evil spirits exist at all, they have posed into human form and are now atoning for their crimes.
In this manner did we travel three long miles, making almost an intire circuit of the city-wall, without seeing the face of a human creature, and at length reached the gate, where we were examined by the guard, and allowed to pass, after they had told us it was a long mile from thence to the house of Vanini, where we proposed to lodge.
Vanini disguised his insidious teaching carefully, but it required a thick veil to deceive the eyes of Inquisitors, who were wonderfully clever in spying out heresy, and sometimes thought they had discovered it even when it was not there. Vanini and many other authors would have been wiser if they had not committed their ideas to writing, and contented themselves with words only.
Vanini, half a century later, that is at the commencement of the seventeenth, a restless, vain, and insolent man, after a life full of sudden changes of fortune, and yet distinguished, was burnt alive at Toulouse for certain passages in his De admirandis ... arcanis, and for having said that he would not express his opinion on the immortality of the soul until he was old, a Jew, and a German.
And if we add to this the contemporaneous reappearance of such writers as Bruno and Vanini, whose works have been reprinted by the active philosophical press of Paris, we may be well assured that it is not by overlooking or despising such speculations, but by boldly confronting and closely grappling with them, that we shall best protect the mind of the thinking community from their insidious and pestilent influence.
I have also left out all reference to Papal Rome, with its dungeons, its stakes, its massacres and its burnings. I have said nothing of Galileo, Vanini, Campanella or Bruno. I have passed over all this in silence.
Parve, nec invideo, sine me, liber, ibis in ignem. Lucilio Vanini, born in 1585, was an Italian philosopher, learned in medicine, astronomy, theology, and philosophy, who, after the fashion of the scholars of the age, roamed from country to country, like the knight- errants of the days of chivalry, seeking for glory and honours, not by the sword, but by learning.
Strong in the goodness of our cause, in our faith in the ultimate triumph of Truth, in our willingness to give up all save fidelity to the sacred cause of liberty of human thought and human speech, we await gravely and fearlessly the successors of the men who burned Bruno, who imprisoned Galileo, who tortured Vanini the men who have in their hands the blood-red cross of Jesus of Nazareth, and in their hearts the love of God and the hate of man."
Was there any distinction between this Protestant auto-da-fe and the Catholic one of Vanini, who was burnt at Toulouse, by the Inquisition, in 1629, for his "Dialogues concerning Nature?" The invention of printing, the dissemination of books, had introduced a class of dangers which the persecution of the Inquisition could not reach.
Word Of The Day