Another friendship, of perhaps a yet closer and more intimate kind, was that which sprung up between Olympia and the Princess Lavinia della Rovere. This daughter of the Ducal family of Urbino had recently married Paolo Orsini, when, at the court of Ferrara, she became acquainted with Olympia. Lavinia, says the historian of her husband's family,[69] "was a lady of most excellent and cultivated mind, inasmuch as, besides her other rare and excellent qualities, she was devoted to philosophy and the other branches of profane literature;" "alla filosofia, e all'altre belle lettere humane." This, too, was a friendship for life; and, despite the wide difference in the social standing and circumstances of the two friends, was one, in which the most perfect equality of affection placed these two natures—highly gifted both—in the relative position to each other, which their respective calibre of intellect made the fitting and natural one, of guide and guided, as is seen from the letters of Olympia in after life.
The remarkable limitation in Sansovino's above quoted eulogy to excellence in philosophy and profane literature, would seem to imply that Lavinia, at the time of which the writer is speaking, had paid no attention to the theological questions which were agitating the world. It may be, that the orthodox historian of the house of Orsini merely intended to indicate in a manner reflecting as little scandal as might be on the family of his patron, that in the province of religion there was little good to be said of the lady Lavinia. Either meaning on the part of a good Catholic would have done her little wrong at the time of her companionship with Olympia at the court of Ferrara.
The general movement of mind, and the ventilation of theological questions which was stirring society from the monk's cell to the lady's bower, had produced on both the friends a destructive, but as yet no constructive result. They had ceased to believe the incredibilities taught by the Church; and their emancipation had brought them to a state,—if not of entirely comfortable and contented indifferentism, yet to one of unanxious infidelity, in which their meditations were rather curious speculations, than struggles for vital truth.
This state of mind is clearly indicated by passages of Olympia's letters of an after period, joined to the traces yet left of her pre–occupations and studies at that time. Writing after her own mind had attained firm convictions, she exhorts her friend to "lay aside that old error, which formerly induced us to think that, before calling on God, it was necessary to know whether we had been from eternity elected by him. Rather let us, as he commands us, first implore his mercy, and then, when we have done so, we shall know of a certainty, that we are of the number of elect."
INDIFFERENTISM.
It is needless now–a–days to stop to point out how this method of defending the tenets of Calvinism consists in simply abandoning them. The use of the passage quoted is only to show, that when the two friends had talked of these things together at Ferrara, they had been prevented from adopting the reformer's faith by these perplexities.
And this difficulty of finding the way to any firm standing ground of conviction was not a cause of unhappiness or struggle to these pure young hearts. Witness Olympia's subsequent opinion of her then state of mind.
"Had I remained longer at court," she writes[70] to her earliest friend Celia Curione, "it would have been all over with me and my salvation. For never while I remained there, could I attain the knowledge of aught lofty or divine, or read the books of either Testament."
The two young women talked of these subjects, soon discovered that they sympathised in utter alienation from the faith of the Church, compared their difficulties as to the new doctrines in vogue, and turned to the more congenial subjects of pagan philosophy and Augustan literature;—Olympia, for example, to the amusement of translating into the language of Cicero a couple of the fables of Boccaccio.