HoP 459 - Cardinal Rule - Robert Bellarmine

History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

Peter Adamson

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Society & Culture:philosophy

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2024

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

Though most famous for his role in persecuting Galileo, Robert Bellarmine was a central figure of the Counter-Reformation, especially in his political thought.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm
0:02.0	Hello, and
0:13.0	so.
0:37.9	Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at historyof philosophy.net. Today's episode, Cardinal Rule, Robert Bellarine.
0:44.9	In the first book of his Nicomachean ethics, Aristotle enters into a discussion of the adage that we should call no one happy so long as he still lives.
0:49.4	What he has in mind is that even a flourishing successful person could toward the end of his
0:53.6	life experience
0:54.3	a shattering calamity, as happened to Priam in the Iliad, already an old man when his son Hector
0:59.9	was killed by Achilles and his city defeated by the Greeks. Arasota observes that even after death
1:05.8	we are still not safe. Some disaster might befall a man's descendants, retroactively making him seem cursed rather
1:12.5	than blessed. Something along these lines happened to Robert Bellarmine. He rose to the rank
1:18.4	of Cardinal and the Catholic Church and devoted his entire life to the defense of his faith,
1:22.8	becoming one of the leading intellectuals of the Counter-Reformation. As his death approached in 1621,
1:28.8	Bellarmine might well have indulged in the thought that he had led a good and successful life,
1:33.4	even without knowing that he would eventually be canonized as a saint. He would surely have been
1:38.1	horrified and flabbergasted to learn that he would go down in history for a very different reason.
1:43.8	Because if you know just one thing about Bellarmine, it's almost certainly that he would go down in history for a very different reason. Because if you know just one
1:45.4	thing about Bellarmine, it's almost certainly that he was involved in the persecution of Galileo.
1:50.9	From his point of view, this would have been quite a minor episode in his own biography, one that paled
1:56.1	in significance alongside the other tasks he carried out for the church, his indefatigable career of
2:01.2	polemical writing against Protestantism, and his development of a nuanced view of the relationship
2:06.2	between church and state. Belarine, or his modern-day defenders, might also hasten to point out
	...

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