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of a proscribed volume; and everybody who owned a book-case was bound to furnish the Inquisitors with a copy of his catalogue. Book-stalls lay open to the malevolence of informers. We possess an insolent letter of Antonio Possevino to Cardinal Sirleto, telling him that he had noticed a forbidden book by Filiarchi on a binder's counter, and bidding him to do his duty by suppressing it. When this

Cardinal's library was exposed for sale after his death, the curious observed that it contained 1872 MSS. in Greek and Latin, 530 volumes of printed Greek books, and 3939 volumes of Latin, among which 39 were on the Index. But charity suggested that the Cardinal had retained these last for censure.

During the period of the Counter-Reformation it was the cherished object of the Popes to restore ecclesiastical and theological learning. They gathered men of erudition round them in the Vatican, and established a press for the purpose of printing the Fathers and diffusing Catholic literature. But they were met in the pursuance of this project by very serious difficulties. Their own policy tended to stifle knowledge and suppress criticism. The scholars whom they chose as champions of the faith worked with tied hands. Baronio knew no Greek; Latini knew hardly any; Bellarmino is thought to have known but little. And yet these were the apostles of Catholic enlightenment, the defenders of the infallible Church against students of the caliber

' Dejob, op. cit. p. 43.

VATICAN STUDENTS.

211

of Erasmus, Casaubon, Sarpi! An insuperable obstacle to sacred studies of a permanently useful kind was the Tridentine decree which had declared the Vulgate inviolable. No codex of age or authority which displayed a reading at variance with the inspired Latin version might be cited. Sirleto, custodian of the Vatican Library, refused lections from its MSS. to learned men, on the ground that they might seem to impugn the Vulgate. For the same reason, the critical labors of all previous students, from Valla to Erasmus, on the text of the Bible were suppressed, and the best MSS. of the Fathers were ruthlessly garbled, in order to bring their quotations into accordance with Jerome's translation. Galesini takes credit to himself in a letter to Sirleto for having withheld a clearly right reading in his edition of the Psalms, because it explained a mistake in the Vulgate. We have seen how Latini's Cyprian suffered from the censure; and there is a lamentable history of the Vatican edition of Ambrose, which was so mutilated that the Index had to protect it from confrontation with the original codices. This dishonest dealing not only discouraged students and paralyzed the energy of critical investigation; but it also involved the closing of public libraries to scholars. The Vatican could not afford to let the light of science in upon its workshop of forgeries and sophistications. A voice of reasonable

1 Dejob, op. cit. p. 50. Also his Muret, pp. 223–227. • Dejob, Del Influence, p. 49.

• Id. op. cit. pp. 96-98.

remonstrance was sometimes raised by even the most incorruptible children of the Church. Thus Bellarmino writes to Cardinal Sirleto, suggesting a doubt whether it is obligatory to adhere to the letter of the Tridentine decree upon the Vulgate. Is it rational, he asks, to maintain that every sentence in the Latin text is impeccable? Must we reject those readings in the Hebrew and the Greek, which elucidate the meaning of the Scriptures, in cases where Jerome has followed a different and possibly a corrupt authority? Would it not be more sensible to regard the Vulgate as the sole authorized version for use in universities, pulpits, and divine service, while admitting that it is not an infallible rendering of the inspired original? He also touches, in a similar strain of scholar-like liberality, upon the Septuagint, pointing out that this version cannot have been the work of seventy men in unity, since the translator of Job seems to have been better acquainted with Greek than Hebrew, while the reverse is true of the translator of Solomon. Such remonstrances were not, however, destined to make themselves effectively heard. Instead of relaxing its severity after the pontificate of Pius IV., the Congregation of the Index grew, as we have seen, more rigid, until, in the rules digested by Clement VIII., it enforced the strictest letter of the law regarding the Vulgate, and ratified all the hypocrisies and subterfuges which that implied.

This very interesting and valuable letter is printed by Dejob in the work I have so often cited, p. 391.

REACTION AGAINSt renaissance.

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Under the conditions which I have attempted to describe, it was impossible that Italy should hold her place among the nations which encouraged liberal studies. Rome had one object in view-to gag the revolutionary free voice of the Renaissance, to protect conservative principles, to establish her own supremacy, and to secure the triumph of the Counter-Reformation. In pursuance of this policy, she had to react against the learning and the culture of the classical revival; and her views were seconded not only by the overwhelming political force of Spain in the Peninsula, but also by the petty princes who felt that their existence was imperiled.

Independence of judgment was rigorously proscribed in all academies and seats of erudition. New methods of education and new text-books were forbidden. Professors found themselves hampered in their choice of antique authors. Only those classics which were sanctioned by the Congregation of the Index could be used in lecture-rooms. On the one hand, the great republican advocates of independence had incurred suspicion. On the other hand, the poets were prohibited as redolent of paganism. To mingle philosophy with rhetoric was counted a crime. Thomas Aquinas had set up Pillars of Hercules beyond which the reason might not seek to travel. Roman law had to be treated from the orthodox scholastic standpoint. Woe to the audacious jurist who made the Pandects serve for disquisitions on the rights of men and nations! Scholars

like Sigonius found themselves tied down in their class-rooms to a weariful routine of Cicero and Aristotle. Aonio Paleario complained that a professor was no better than a donkey working in a mill; nothing remained for him but to dole out commonplaces, avoiding every point of contact between the authors he interpreted and the burning questions of modern life. Muretus, who brought with him to Italy from France a ruined moral reputation with a fervid zeal for literature, who sold his soul to praise the Massacre of S. Bartholomew and purge by fulsome panegyrics of great public crimes the taint of heresy that clung around him, found his efforts to extend the course of studies in Rome thwarted. He was forbidden to lecture on Plato, forbidden to touch jurisprudence, forbidden to consult a copy of Eunapius in the Vatican Library. It cost him days and weeks of pleading to obtain permission to read Tacitus to his classes. Greek, the literature of high thoughts, noble enthusiasms, and virile sciences, was viewed with suspicion. As the monks of the middle ages had written on the margins of their MSS. Graeca sunt, ergo non legenda, so these new obscurantists exclaimed: Graeca sunt, periculosa sunt, ergo non legenda. I am forced,' he cries in this extremity, to occupy myself with Latin and to abstain entirely from Greek. And yet he knew that if the men of our age advance one step further in their neglect of Greek, doom and destruction are 1 See Dejob's Life of Muret, pp. 231, 238, 274, 320.

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