Bernardino Tommasini

Bernardino Tommasini (detto Ochino) was born in Siena in 1487, the son of the barber Domenico Ochino. At the age of 7 or 8, in around 1504, he was placed in the care of the Franciscan Friars. From 1510 he studied medicine at Perugia.

In 1534, Ochino obtained permission to transfer to the newly founded Order of Friars Minor Capuchin. He was already a close friend of 'oratorio' spirituali such as Juan de Valdés, Pietro Bembo, Vittoria Colonna, Vermigli, and Carnesecchi. In 1538 he was elected vicar-general of his order. The next year, urged by Bembo, he visited Venice and delivered a course of sermons showing a sympathy with the doctrine of 'justification by faith', something explained even more clearly in his Dialogues (1539). Prior to Ochino’s exile he published his Lucchese sermons (delivered 1538/published 1541), his Venetian sermons (delivered 1539/published 1541) and his Dialogi Sette (1540, 1542), all in Italian. A satirical writing by Ochino entitled Imagine di Antechristo, first printed at Geneva by Jean Gerard in 1542, later translated into French and German (1545), Spanish (1557), and Latin (1558), enjoyed special success. (Caponetto 1999, p. 31) He was denounced, but evaded Church action until the establishment of the Roman Inquisition in June 1542. Ochino received a citation to deliver himself to Rome, which he started to obey until he was deterred by the warnings of Cardinal Contarini, whom he found at Bologna, dying of poison administered by the reactionary party. Some authors also connect the flight of Vermigli to the subsequent flight of Ochino.

Instead of continuing on to Rome, Ochino turned aside to Florence, and then went across the Alps to Geneva where he was welcomed by John Calvin. Over the next two years he published a series of five books of Prediche, apologetic tracts defending his change of religion and addressing his Italian sympathizers such as Vittoria Colonna, Claudio Tolomei, among others. These totalled some 295 sermons. There were quite a number of Italian Protestant exiles in places such as Strasbourg, Zurich, and Augsburg, and so in 1545 Ochino became minister of the Italian Protestant congregation in the latter. When in January 1547 the city was occupied by the imperial forces for the Diet of Augsburg, he was forced to flee once again.

This time he found asylum in England, where his fame went before him. He was made a prebendary of Canterbury Cathedral, received a pension from Edward VI's privy purse, and composed his major work (in Latin) the Tragoedie or Dialoge of the unjuste usurped primacie of the Bishop of Rome (of which only a 1549 translation remains). The Tragoedie is a series of dialogues depicting the papacy as the work of Lucifer and his demons which seems set to conquer all before it, when Heaven raises up Henry VIII of England and his son for their overthrow. Several of Ochino's Prediche were translated into English by Anna Cooke; and he published numerous controversial treatises on the Continent. Ochino’s Che Cosa è Christo was translated into Latin and English by Elizabeth I herself (1547).

In 1553 the accession of Mary to the throne drove Ochino, Vermigli and others from England. He went to Basel, and then Zurich, having been invited by Lelio Sozzini and Martino Muralto to pastor an Italian church there composed mainly of refugees from Locarno. Ochino's flow of publications demonstrated that he was not well-aligned with the Calvinist mainstream of Swiss reformed thought. His was an adventurous faith seeking individual experience of the love of God, and his theology was thus exploratory ('anti-dogmatic'), synthetic and idiosyncratic. The Labyrinth, a discussion of the freedom of the will, critiqued the doctrine of predestination. In 1563 Ochino published his Thirty Dialogues, the arguments in which relating to polygamy, divorce and the Trinity were considered by many to be heretical. Ochino was summarily banished from Zürich, and took refuge in the relatively liberal state of Poland. This safe haven was then denied him when an edict appeared (8 August 1564) banishing all foreign dissidents. Fleeing the country, he encountered the plague at Pińczów; three of his four children died and he himself, worn out by misfortune, died in solitude and obscurity at Slavkov in Moravia, about the end of 1564.

Magisterial Protestant memory wasn't kind to Ochino's reputation, and unlike Vermigli, he ceased to have an extensive influence in the Protestant world. Wenz, however, considers that his publications probably did more than any other to help form the diasporic Italian Protestant imagination. His exile, Wenz suggests, provided him with the opportunities of the free printing press, which in turn allowed him to become 'the primary teacher of Italian Protestantism to his followers throughout Europe'. Cantimori notes that he was 'perhaps the most important of the Italian reformers'.

Works

Prediche (1542)

Epistola alli Signori di Balia della città di Siena (1543)

Responsio ad Marcum Brixiensem Abbatem Ordinis S. Benedicti (Geneva, 1543)

Responsio ad Mutium Justinopolitanum to Girolamo Muzio (1496-1576)

Tragoedie or Dialoge of the unjuste usurped primacie of the Bishop of Rome. 1549 translation of Bishop John Ponet.

Disputa intorno alla presenza del corpo di Cristo nel Sacramento della Cena

Labyrinth - Laberinti del libero arbitrio (1563) dedicated to Elisabeth I

Dialogi XXX (1563)

Prediche

Sources

Benrath, Karl, Bernardino Ochino, of Siena: A Contribution Towards the History of the Reformation. London: J. Nisbet & Company, 1876.

Caponetto, Salvatore, The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy, Translated by Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi. Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999.

Fragnito, Gigliola, “Gli ‘spirituali’ e la fuga di Bernardino Ochino,” Rivista storica italiana 84.3 (1972), pp. 777-811

Wenz, Andrea Beth, Bernardino Ochino of Siena: The Composition of the Italian Reformation at Home and Abroad, Boston College, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2017