«Che il Prencipato nella società umana è instituito da Dio». Paolo Sarpi, la sovranità dello Stato e il governo della religione nella Venezia del primo ́600

The Interdict crisis of 1606-1607 was not only a watershed for the Venetian Republic, but also a turning point in the life of Paolo Sarpi, who elaborated and refined his thinking on the State and relations with the Church in this context. The measure was imposed by Pope Paul V following three alleged violations of the libertas Ecclesiae, two represented by the issuing of laws and one by the performance of acts of a jurisdictional nature. But above this was the Venetian claim to assert the State’s power to punish guilty of serious crimes and to legislate also on ecclesiastical property, as essential profiles of sovereignty, to which the Servite friar returned in several of his writings. Although certain passages seem to endorse the idea of Sarpi as the herald of a conception of the reciprocal independence of temporal and spiritual power, in his unfinished and unpublished work Della Potestà de prencipi, he supports an absolutist vision far away from the Robert Bellarmine’s natural law theory and the so-called Second Scholasticism. Since the prince enjoys divine investiture, his laws and orders must be obeyed not only externally, but also in the internal forum, i.e. in conscience. At the same time, after excluding the right of resistance towards the prince, the Servite friar invokes it towards the pope, while not denying the divine origin of the authority of the Church. This strong conception of sovereignty, although far in appearance from the myth of Venice as a mixed system of government based on a balance of powers, fully espoused the claim to independence that the Serenissima had, since the Middle Ages, upheld in theory and actually practiced.