DAY 121 - SPLIT

19 August, 2011—The Story of Marko Antun De Domnis

Total:  1149.5 miles24,200 steps Total: 2,232,291 steps

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887

The history of Split is absolutely fascinating: we had an excellent tour, which in an hour only touched the surface of what was here. The Palace of Diocletian was built in the fourth century, under a strong Venetian influence and architecture.  I will perhaps write more about this emperor who was the last to allow the Olympic Games before making way after his death to Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity, or more precisely, his mother’s, led to the closure of the Olympic Games after twelve centuries of Games and of the truce, because they were deemed a pagan celebration.

This tradition of people claiming both spiritual and temporal (political) power, has been both a disaster and a break on human progress, wherever it has become manifest. Man has always craved power and the ultimate power is for man to claim that he or she speaks, and most crucially judges, for God. They of course all want God’s power, but aren’t so keen on his love or grace:

Enter, Case 1—Marko Antun De Dominis, Archbishop of Split in the early seventeenth century (appointed 1602). Dominis, a Croatian, was considered one of the most educated Europeans of his time, specialising in mathematics, physics, theology and philosophy (especially branches of rhetoric and logic). Many of his explorations in physics brought him into conflict with the church; such as his experiments that showed how a rainbow was created and explained the colour spectrum.  Of course the church taught that this was a sign from God from the time of Noah, so a bishop who produced a glass ball filled with water and created a rainbow in sunlight was asking for trouble.  The same was true of his explanation of tides being caused by the interaction between the earth and the moon. Both are common knowledge now, but heresy in eyes of the early church.

Dominis’s main research focussed on the great schism between the Catholic and Protestant churches following Martin Luther’s Reformation. He wrote a ten volume masterpiece on The Church and State, delivering a series of recommendations about how the church could be unified.  Now explaining rainbows and tides may be one thing, but any suggestion of the church relinquishing it’s hard won political power and wealth, was deemed absolute heresy.  Dominis was summoned to Rome to stand trial before the Inquisition, all copies of his manuscript were ordered to be burned, and it was expected that after a bit of torture by the Inquisition, the troublesome priest would recant and his dangerous ideas would be suppressed.

Dominis being a smart fellow knew this, but thought his ideas were right, so he fled first to Venice – who at the time did not have an extradition treaty for heretics with the Vatican.  From Venice he was invited to England, under the protection of King James I, who then sponsored the entire ten volumes of Church and State – presumably because Dominis’s first demand that the Pope’s rule must be limited from that of Master of the Church to its servant, fitted nicely with the English king’s desire that he should be the Head of Church and State in England.  Instead, he proposed that the Church should be ruled by a synod. Now these views were bad enough, but the last straw was the claim that no one can stand between the Ruler and God: that the Church therefore had no right to instruct the Ruler in any way and that the Ruler had no right to instruct the Church.

Under Pope Urban VIII he was imprisoned and tried by the Inquisition and surprise, surprise was found guilty.   However, Dominis had died in prison some months earlier, so his corpse was exhumed and burnt along with copies of his book and he was condemned to enter perdition and oblivion. But his ideas lived on and almost four hundred years later, many of his ideas were adopted by the Vatican II Council – presumably he is now pleasantly on his way out of purgatory and marching towards beatification.

One of my favourite hymns is ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’ and especially the second verse—it was written three centuries too late for poor old Dominis, but it is just in time for us:

And there’s another country, I’ve heard of long ago—
Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know;
We may not count her armies, we may not see her King;
Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering;
And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase,
And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace.