Marco Antonio de Dominis
Marco Antonio de Dominis, Dalmatian ecclesiastic, apostate, and man of science, b. 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. On leaving the Jesuits (1596), he was, through imperial influence, appointed Bishop of Zengg (Segna, Seng) and Modrus in Dalmatia (Aug., 1600), and transferred (Nov., 1602) to the archiepiscopal See of Spalato. He sided with Venice, in whose territory his see was situated, during the quarrel between 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 Dec., 1617. In that same year, James I made him Dean of Windsor and granted him the Mastership of the Savoy.
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 Gregory XV (9 Feb., 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 (16 Jan., 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. His case was continued after his death, his heresy declared manifest, and his body burned together with his works on 21 Dec., 1624.
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 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.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
MARCO ANTONIO DE DOMINIS (1560-1624), Italian theologian and natural philosopher, was born of a noble Venetian family in 1560 In the island of Arbe, off the coast of Dalmatia. 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 I 596 he was appointed to the bishopric of Segnia (Zengg) in Dalmatia, and two years later was raised to the archbishopric of Spalato and primacy of Dalmatia and Croatia. 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. After a visit to Rome, when he in vain attempted to gain the ear of Pope Paul V., he resigned his see in September 1616, wrote at Venice his Consilium profectionis, and then went by way of Switzerland, Heidelberg and Rotterdam to England, where he arrived in December. He was welcomed by the king and the Anglican clergy with great respect, was received into the Church of England in St Pauls cathedral, and was appointed master of the Savoy (1618) and dean of Windsor (1619); he subsequently presented himself to the living of ,West Ilsley, Berkshire. 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, &c., before the king. But his principal work was the De republica ecciesiastica, of which the first partafter revision by Anglican theologianswas 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 Tr-identino, the MS. 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.
Three years later the ex-archbishop was back again in Rome, doing penance for his heresies in St Peters with a cord round his neck. The reasons for this sudden revolution in his opinions, which caused grave scandal in England, have been much debated; it is probably no libel on his memory, however, to say that they were connected with the hopes raised by the elevation of his kinsman, Alessandro Ludovisi,to the papal throne as Gregory XV. (1621). It is said that he was enticed back to Rome by the promise of pardon and rich preferment. If so, he was doomed to bitter disappointment. He had barely time to publish at Rome (1623) his Sui red itus ex Angliae consilium, an abject repudiation of his anti-papal works as written non ex cordis sinceritate, non exbona conscientia, non ex fide, when Gregory died (July 1623). During the interregnum that followed, the proceedings of the Inquisition against the archbishop were revived, and they continued under Urban VIII. Before they were concluded, however, Dominis died in prison, on the 8th of September 1624. 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. By a strange irony of fate 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. He was the first to put forward a true theory of the rainbow, in his Dc radiis visus et lucis in vitris perspectivis et iride (Venice, 1611).
See the article by Canon G. G. Perry in the Dict. Nat. Biog., 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).
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
