§1
The restraint of slanderers is a thing altogether necessary and worthy of the cares of princes. For those poisons of tongues not only oppose the restoration of peace, but even break off a negotiation for peace after it has begun, and not rarely ruin peace itself after it has been well composed and confirmed. Deservedly, therefore, in the year 1613, at the Diet of Regensburg, the orthodox princes and estates proposed to the Imperial Majesty, among their other grievances, the insane license of reviling and slandering by which the race of preachers protects its desperate cause. For after they had demonstrated that the Augsburg Confession was gradually being annihilated and would at last be entirely destroyed amid so great a diversity of religions, and that all men appeared to have conspired for the destruction of the Catholic religion, they finally add:
“The very license of slandering and accusing has now prevailed to such a degree in the pulpits of the other party that they do not hesitate to rend with insults even the Roman Pontiff, who deserved far better of them and of the whole Empire, particularly at the time of the recent Hungarian war. What is done concerning Catholic princes, and how not only they themselves but also other estates professing the Augsburg Confession who desire to live peacefully with Catholics are everywhere traduced and dishonored by defamatory pamphlets, it is not worth the labor to demonstrate at length. Nevertheless they hope that Caesar will at length consider lawful means both of restraining this license and of preserving concord in the Empire,” etc.
These are the words of our princes. Nor are the artificers of calumnies themselves ignorant of them, since they dare to insert them into their histories in the same words. Would that princes of the other religion possessed power great enough to confine and tame θηριώδη [beastlike] and savage breasts by fear of the laws. But those men break all the rights and bonds of the laws; inflamed with envy, hatred, and anger, they fly about and nevertheless accomplish nothing else than to reveal to the world the malevolence planted in their spirits and to become the destruction of their own state. For Holy Scripture teaches us that license to slander is the sign of a city about to perish:
Jeremiah 6:6: “This is the city of visitation; calumny is in its midst.” Ezekiel 18:22: “He who has slandered and done violence to his brother—behold, he is dead in his iniquity.” But Amos 3: “Make it heard in the houses of Ashdod and in the houses of the land of Egypt, and say: Assemble upon the mountains of Samaria, and see the many insanities in its midst and those suffering calumny in its inner rooms. And they did not know to do what is right, says the Lord, storing up iniquity and plunder in their houses. Therefore thus says the Lord God: The land will be afflicted and surrounded, and your strength will be drawn away from it, and your houses will be plundered.” For the safety of that state is laid aside and lamented not only when vices reign freely, but when they also vex innocence with impunity and oppress virtue, in which men have degenerated so far from what is right that evil is called good and good evil.
But this is the single pursuit of the new-evangelical ministry: since they cannot prevail by truth, they hold the unskilled by slandering the adverse party. They know that the bite of calumny is incurable and, though it does not deserve belief, nevertheless generates an opinion by which the greatest part of mankind is led. Although that which is boasted in an old saying is false:
Νικᾷ γὰρ αἰεὶ διαβολὴ τὰ κρείττονα.
Calumny always conquers the better things.
For truth often conquers. Yet the other saying is true:
Οὐδὲν διαβολῆς ἐστὶν ἐπιπονώτερον.
Nothing is more intolerable than calumny.
The sword indeed cuts, according to Democritus, but calumny separates friends. Yet I appeal to those men in vain: like an asp, they possess poison in their tongue, and their single hope of victory; and, if they can hear the truth, they owe every success of novelty and every increase of heresy to their lies. Therefore they will not permit these arms to be wrested from their hands unless their princes and magistrates, lovers of true and sincere peace, reduce them to the orbit of modesty by force and fear. Unless they attend especially to this, not only will pear tree grow old upon pear tree and fig tree upon fig tree in their dominions, but they will also lose every assurance and hope of peace. For he who slanders renders the man whose reputation he detracts hateful, and himself too hateful to all. What a basilisk touches, it kills and poisons; the man whom a slanderer destroys he renders execrable even to others.
We seek peace, a synod, treaties, and friendship; but amid so great a license and impunity of fabrication, amid so great an atrocity of calumnies, we cannot negotiate with the preachers. Nothing of fidelity, nothing of humanity, much less of religion, can exist in professed informers and sycophants. For behold, we have disputed together for so many years, and in each year they fabricate new, horrible, and unheard-of crimes concerning us; with these they fill sheets, pictures, books, and the ears of the peoples. What kind of conscience so laboriously traduces another’s innocence? What kind of religion is it which needs to be supported by such unspeakable lies? Catholics deservedly detest them when they observe that they slander not only beyond belief but also beyond measure.
I shall make the matter clear by examples. In Poland they fabricated unspeakable and foul things concerning certain priests of our Society and published in writing that, examined before the eyes of the city of Kraków, they had been subjected to the supreme punishment. They lied that the same crimes had been expiated publicly at Antwerp by others. The most serene King of Poland, the bishop and governor of Kraków, and the senate and bishop of Antwerp refuted the manifest lies by their testimony. They lie about other things at Vienna, Styria, and Bavaria; princes and states defend innocence among foreigners by public attestations. For in those places where the crimes are said to have been committed and punished by the gallows, wheel, and fires in the sight of all, there is no need of a defense, since so many thousands of men recognize the heretical lust for lying and detest it equally with heresy. I pass over lesser and daily things; from these greater ones I draw my argument.
Nothing can be negotiated with men who do not fear to scatter so many and such false things, either in the polity or in religion, since all familiarity and every conversation possess no less danger than if you were associating with a scorpion, viper, or basilisk. I am not ignorant of their excuse: that they fabricate those things for the sake of defending religion and conquering their adversaries. But if religion is true, it ought to rest upon its own integrity, not upon detraction from another’s piety. I know that otherwise they cannot maintain their cause; but it is better to lose it than conquer through so many crimes.
In the year 1613 a disputation was instituted at Durlach between Catholics and adversaries. The ministers, with the μεγαληγορία [boastful grandiloquence] customary to them and confident speech, boasted that they would prove certain pronouncements of their opinion from the sole, clear Scripture. When they came to the matter, they brought glosses and petty arguments in place of the sole, clear Scripture. The history was published in Latin and French. But what did the evangelical historian do? Contrary to the conscience and testimonies of two most illustrious men, contrary to the preachers’ own programs and theses, he lies about the event in these words, Mercurius Gallobelgicus, volume 9, book 4:
“At the beginning of July, a colloquy between the Protestants and Pontificians was instituted at Durlach, to which the brother of the Duke of Lorraine also had gone with two Jesuits so that he might attend the colloquy. But since the Jesuits, obtaining the ancient position, chanted their old song again and contended that the Pope must be chosen as judge and that the dispute must be conducted from the Fathers and indeed in the French language; whereas the Protestants, appealing to Holy Scripture, said that the disputation must be conducted from it alone and indeed in the Latin language, in the customary manner; the Jesuits, unwilling to accept that condition, returned by the road on which they had arrived and departed to their own party with the matter unaccomplished.”
These are the words of Gothard Artus, a man of such prostituted shamelessness that, after princes testified and the preachers themselves moreover disclosed in writings that the matter stood otherwise—not only the Jesuits but even the most serene Vaudémont himself demanded the proof of dogmas from Scripture alone, as had been promised, and the preachers confessed that they could not do this—he nevertheless has not yet deleted the lies detected by the writings of so many Lutherans and Calvinists and even by Pareus’s oration. There can be no negotiation for peace with such men, who, as soon as they have been conquered, possess at hand some scoundrel sold to lies, by whose pen they overthrow the truth of history, who dares to swear that it is not light at midday.
But I now cease to marvel at these things, since I have read the foulest calumnies since the birth of mankind against the most reverend and illustrious Cardinal Bellarmine. Impiety never formerly dared anything similar; innocence suffered nothing of this kind. The arch-sycophants of the Evangelicals have reached the summit; they have conquered all the ancient informers, slanderers, revilers, abusive speakers, and detractors; now in the Bellarminian calumny they have conquered themselves. Therefore, unless such men are excluded from conferences or constrained by the laws
and punishments of princes, peace cannot exist. For let us suppose a colloquy appointed in some city on the Rhine: what disposition can Catholics possess when they know that the Gdańsk slanderer is prepared to attack any celebrated truth by a public lie? When they must fear lest, meanwhile, while they themselves devote themselves to prayer, reading, doctrine, and disputation, sheets fly throughout all Germany in which they are said to have died, to be carried through the air encircled by flames by the devil, to fill cities with enormous wailing, and to render their hearers lifeless? For since they have fabricated these things against Bellarmine, without precedent, from the fullness of diabolism, they will not easily be milder toward us: that example has made them more instructed, impunity more audacious, and practice more prompt.
§2
But lest we be moved excessively by reputation—although whoever neglects it is cruel—what of the fact that we cannot even live among them without the greatest peril? Certainly with no less peril than men formerly lived among informers at Rome in the time of Tiberius, Claudius, and Domitian. For at the slanderous lie of one or two men, if strength should belong to the adverse party, we must perish without a defense. The history which the same purveyor of lies relates teaches this, volume 10, book 3:
“Meanwhile, when a report had become widespread that the Jesuits at Münster had performed a comedy concerning the ruined Maurice—namely, representing his person on the stage as suddenly vanishing, as it were, while fighting with Spinola, while he concealed himself under a table and thus escaped the impending danger, his soldiers being altogether routed and at last put to flight by Spinola’s soldiers—the Nassauers, moved by this occasion, converted the comedy into a tragedy a little afterward. For immediately seven troops of the confederates’ cavalry, together with no small body of infantry, flying into the neighborhood to seek him, crawled through various places; and when they did not find Maurice, after all chests and boxes had been shaken out, they carried away with them whatever goods they could seize, while the peasants lamented their lost possessions in vain.”
These are the words of that same Artus. That comedy was never written, never performed, never seen; nor did any scoundrel so shameless arise who dared to say that he had seen it. But a report became widespread: that report was false. But report is a swift evil and one which acquires strength by going. The report arose from the preachers or their satellites, certainly from those who both hate Catholics and loved the resources of Catholics excessively; they will also render account to God for the plundering of the wretched. But this is not the time to complain of these things; it was done recently at the Diet of Regensburg by the Catholic estates.
Now I assert this: that with the unpunished license of the ministers, we cannot hope for peace. An inequitable condition of peace indeed! If you delay an irritable and bilious minister for a little while, he will immediately lie that you made a comedy about Maurice; he himself, the artificer, in order to convert it into a tragedy, will bring seven troops of cavalry with infantry, plunder the neighboring regions and harmless inhabitants. Behold how much evil comes to you from one tongue! What viper, what basilisk, by prolonged ravaging, brought so much devastation as one tongue of a slanderer, by a few and false words and while absent? It was rightly said long ago:
Οὐδὲν θηρίον κακουργότερον τῆς διαβολῆς.
No beast is more harmful than calumny.
Good God, what will happen to the entire Catholic name if armed princes believe their ministers when they lie for our blood? If those princes are able to do what the ministers wish? If the fortunes and life of the orthodox depend upon the worst of all things—the tongue of a preacher?
§3
Calumnies do not touch private persons alone; they rise with the same audacity against kings and princes, and not only Catholics but even those who desire to live peacefully with Catholics. Above I cited calumnies, insults, and defamatory pamphlets. In them an eagle is fabricated without feathers and Caesar sleeping; the Pontiff is Antichrist, and all ecclesiastical and Catholic princes are Antichristian; the King of Spain is compared to a griffin; Spinola rides upon the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse; no Catholic and none of the friends of Catholics is immune. I am not ignorant that the States of Holland prohibited these things, but the rage of the ministers strives toward what is forbidden. They have spurned God’s command prohibiting calumny; it is not astonishing if they contemn the magistrate. For what authority would not be cheap to those who mock eternal Majesty as though it did not impute crimes?
Therefore, every law being set aside, not only do they defile the fairs with abusive speech, defamatory pamphlets, and pictures, but they twist the news which they print each week to the insult of Catholic princes, as in issue 52 of the journal of the year 1615, where the King of Spain and his ambassador are rendered suspect as though they were privy to the Somerset conspiracy; and in the journal of the year 1616, on the twenty-second day, it is reported that a persecution of religion has begun in Austria, whereby Caesar is traduced as a persecutor. In the other reports such is the course and malignity of the narration that the cause of Catholics is burdened with suspicions and contempt. Therefore, if they seek peace, let them remove from the midst the perpetual material of wars and nursery of discords—namely, the abusive speech of the preachers—or at least so bridle it that it does not ravage with the liberty which it has possessed until now.