Works
Baronius is best known for his Annales Ecclesiastici, undertaken at the request of Philip Neri as an answer to the anti-Catholic history, the Magdeburg Centuries. He began writing this account of the Church after nearly thirty years of lecturing at Santa Maria in Vallicella. In the Annales he treats history in strict chronological order and keeps theology in the background. Lord Acton called it "the greatest history of the Church ever written". It was in the Annales that Baronius coined the term "Dark Age" in the Latin form saeculum obscurum, to refer to the period between the end of the Carolingian Empire in 888 and the first inklings of the Gregorian Reform under Clement II in 1046.
With its errors, especially in Greek history on which he had to depend upon secondhand information, the work of Baronius stands as an honest attempt to write history. Sarpi, in urging Casaubon to write a refutation of the Annales, warned him never to accuse or suspect Baronius of bad faith.
He also undertook a new edition of the Roman martyrology (1586), in which he removed some entries implausible for historical reasons. He is also known for saying, in the context of the controversies about the work of Copernicus and Galileo, "The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." This remark, which Baronius probably made in conversation with Galileo, was cited by the latter in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615).
At the time of the Venetian Interdict, Baronius published a pamphlet Paraenesis ad rempublicam Venetam (1606). It took a stringent papalist line on the crisis. It was answered by the Antiparaenesis ad Caesarem Baronium of Niccolò Crasso in the same year.
Read more about this topic: Caesar Baronius
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“Piety practised in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendour of beneficence.”
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“Through the din and desultoriness of noon, even in the most Oriental city, is seen the fresh and primitive and savage nature, in which Scythians and Ethiopians and Indians dwell. What is echo, what are light and shade, day and night, ocean and stars, earthquake and eclipse, there? The works of man are everywhere swallowed up in the immensity of nature. The AEgean Sea is but Lake Huron still to the Indian.”
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“The noble simplicity in the works of nature only too often originates in the noble shortsightedness of him who observes it.”
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