Flaminio Fabrizi

Sentence

Court

Congregation of the Holy Office

Local judge

Sentence date

21 December 1590

Sentence place

Rome, Papal States

Crime category

Formal heresy

List of crimes

Declared a heretic, an infidel, and a destroyer of the foundations of the Holy Faith due to the multitude, gravity, and enormity of his heresies:

• Reading numerous prohibited books, particularly De Occulta Philosophia and De Vanitate Scientiarum by Cornelius Agrippa.

• Asserting the existence of two deities—one of good, the other of evil.

• Expressing heterodox views concerning the Old Testament.

• Believing in and affirming the horoscope of Christ as drawn by Cardano, claiming that the stars governed His destiny and death, and that the heavens alone shaped men of greatness and would give rise to others like Him—thus implying Christ was not the Son of God.

• Boasting of the power to raise the dead, thereby diminishing the nature of miracles and attributing them to magical art.

• Conceiving the plan, upon seizing the fortress of the Tremiti Islands, to become the head of a new sect, offering refuge to every malefactor.

• Mocking the concept of paradise, claiming that only the unfortunate, the poor, the wretched, the deformed, and young children enter it, and that it is an undesirable place—preferring instead Hell, where kings, emperors, and princes reside.

• Asserting that prophecy is a gift of the stars.

• Holding unorthodox views concerning the nature and existence of devils.

• Showing contempt for papal laws, particularly the Papal Bull against astrology.

• Denying the validity of fasts, precepts, and the doctrine of purgatory.

• Believing that the world is eternal and that the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was due to the mineral and sulphurous nature of the earth.

• Claiming that Moses was an astrologer and a magician who feigned to be a man of God, and that the law was of his own invention.

• Doubting the virginity of Mary and expressing heretical views on the nature of Christ’s body in accordance with the doctrines of the Manichaeans.

• Maintaining that before the Nativity there was only one God, without the Trinity of persons.

Reason for conviction

Antitrinitarian

Accessory penalties

Seizur