In fact, Italy was at this time professor-ridden. Of all odious dogmatisms surely that of pedagogues is the most intolerable form of social tyranny, and under this the Transalpine world was then groaning. Armed with their pens and their tinsel eloquence the men of letters wrote down and talked down all opposition, and made so much noise in the world that they seemed for a time to occupy a much larger and more influential position than was really the case. They dictated their laws to the literary world, and every one who would not be pasquinaded as a barbarian was content to follow the fashion. So in the pulpit preachers called on their audience to contemplate the examples of Epaminondas or Socrates; parallels were drawn between the sacred events of the Passion, and the self-devotion of a Curtius or a Decius: our Divine Lord was commonly spoken of as a hero who had deserved well of his country, and not unfrequently allusions would be introduced to the thunders of Jupiter and the stories of heathen mythology.
The grand object of Italian scholars at this time was to attain a pure Ciceronian style, and in this none were more successful than the two papal secretaries, Sadolet and Bembo. The pains taken by the latter on his compositions at least deserved success. He is said to have kept forty portfolios, into each of which his sheets were successively entered, and only passed on to the one next in order after undergoing careful revision. The rejection of every phrase not absolutely Ciceronian led to very strange affectation when speaking of events of ordinary life, as well as to the more offensive fault of adopting heathen phraseology on matters relating to the Christian faith. Thus the accession of Leo was announced to foreign Courts as having taken place “through the favour of the Immortal Gods;” Divine grace was the magnificentia divinitatis; Our Lady was the Dea Lauretana, or the Alma Parens; and the Christian mysteries were described in terms taken from the sacrificial terminology of the Greeks. Erasmus had good sense enough to despise these extravagances, and he did his utmost to render them ridiculous.[330] He describes the Ciceronian spending a whole winter’s night on the composition of a single sentence, compiling lexicons of Ciceronian words, tropes, locutions, and pleasantries, more bulky than the great orator’s entire works, and struggling with the insuperable difficulties of rendering the wants and habits of a modern age into the colloquial phraseology of the ancients.
The poets and artists followed the example set them by the professors. They still occasionally condescended to choose Christian subjects, but in most cases it was to debase them by a pagan method of treatment. When Sannazar thought fit to employ his muse on so old-fashioned a theme as the birth of Our Lord, he converted it into a pagan fable, placed the prophecies of the Sibyls in the hands of the Blessed Virgin, and the words of Isaias in the mouth of Proteus, omitted the name of Jesus Christ throughout his entire poem, and surrounded the holy crib with nymphs, satyrs, and hamadryads. The very liturgy of the Church had a narrow escape of undergoing a classical reform, and a new Hymnarium appeared, drawn up by Zachario Ferreri, “according to the true rules of Latinity and metre,” in which, says Dom Guéranger, “occur every image and allusion to pagan belief and customs which are to be met with in Horace.” This work was undertaken by command of Leo X., but its use, though permitted by Clement VII., was happily never enjoined on the clergy.
Hand in hand with the paganism of literature advanced the paganism of morals. We are not here engaged in studying the history of the Church, and may therefore be spared the pain of contemplating her scandals—those scandals the existence of which, far from weakening our faith, may rather confirm it, when we remember that they were distinctly prophesied by her Divine Head as evils which “must needs be” accomplished. Our business is with schools and scholars, and, sooth to say, after wandering amid the dim religious light of the mediæval cloisters, the blaze of the Roman literary circles, after first dazzling our eyes, reveals such bewildering spectacles, that we look about for some retreat into which the Christian scholar may creep and hide himself.
Such, perhaps, was the feeling of many a student who, coming fresh from the schools of Louvain, or the cloisters of Winchester or Oxford, found himself suddenly dropped down upon a world which seemed to have broken loose from all time-honoured traditions of scholastic life. Perhaps he had been used to set before him the musty maxim of Philip the Almoner,[331] that “that is no true science which is not the companion of justice;” or he had learned from Hugh of St. Victor to regard humility as the foundation of wisdom; or he was familiar with the saying of the Angel of the schools, that the best way to make progress in philosophy was to keep the commandments of God. But if he had the gift of prudence, he would think twice before citing such authorities in the polite circles of the Roman literati. He would have been hooted at as a barbarian. The monks and schoolmen were never spoken of by the professors of the new learning save in terms of execration and contempt. They were, to use the language of Erasmus, wretched creatures, whose language was as uncouth as their apprehension was dull. In those days there was no greater reproach than to call a man a Scotist—it meant precisely a dunce[332]—and those who held communion with the Muses and the Graces would have judged it an affront to be required to treat with respect the memory of St. Thomas or St. Bonaventure. And truly their venerable names, and the maxims they had laid down for the guidance of Christian scholars, would have been sadly out of place in the sumptuous orgies of the Chigi palace, or those luxurious soirées where prelates, ambassadors, and men of letters did not refuse to appear as the guests of the most questionable characters. The Roman academy which had been suppressed by Paul II., and had revived under Julius II., was now at the height of its renown. Its members generally met in some delicious suburban garden, and there, under the shade of the thick foliage, in an atmosphere heavy with the perfume of the orange-flower, they recited poems, proposed philosophic questions, and whiled away with song and merriment long hours of the day and night. Amid scenes of such Epicurean enjoyment the stranger might have been forgiven had he imagined himself taking part in the revelries of pagan rather than of Christian Rome. On the walls of the luxurious banqueting-rooms, in which he assisted at those suppers of world-wide celebrity, he might see representations from the comedies of Plautus, reminding him how close a parallel was to be drawn between the manners described by the Latin poet and those of the sixteenth century. From the elegant revellers around him he might hear the authority of Pliny quoted to prove that the human soul differed in nothing from that of beasts; or, exchanging the philosophic for a lighter mood, he might perhaps be called on to assist at some macaronic exhibition, such as the crowning of Querno, the drunken buffoon, arch-poet of Rome; or be required to listen to the facetious improvisation of Folengo or Mariano Fetti,—the former a monk, the latter a friar,—both of whom had quitted their cloisters to ply the trade of professional jesters. Thankful enough he would be to escape from these polished circles and return to his own barbarous land and the society of those rude English, who, as Politian contemptuously remarked, “knew nothing of letters, and busied themselves with their sheep,” and who perhaps might, in their turn, have thought with the Psalmist, that it was well with those who knew no literature, and were only mindful of justice.[333]
We are not left merely to conjecture the abuses which throve in such a soil. We have the grave avowal of the commission of Cardinals already referred to, that “in no city was there to be witnessed such corruption of manners as in this city, which should be an example to all.” Vice, in fact, had ceased to wear a veil; it stalked abroad under the noonday sun, and too often found illustrious support. Yet, strange to say, the existing abuses, monstrous as they were, were more superficial than they seemed. The evil scum that rises to the surface of society must not always be taken as a test of what lies beneath; the gaudy charlock may toss its wanton head and blazon itself to the eye, but the good seed is quietly germinating below, and in the day of harvest its sheaves will not be wanting. The Church is happily not governed by professors and scholastics, and at the very time when the literary world of Rome was exhibiting the spectacles described above, the Fifth Council of Lateran was holding its sessions in that very city, and promulgating its decrees for the reform of the Universities, the College of Cardinals, and the Roman Court.[334] The Church, by the mouth of her episcopate, was solemnly exposing and condemning those very evils which thoughtless observers were perhaps laying to her charge. In the decree of the Council on the study of the Scriptures and the liberal arts, the Fathers, after setting forth the vital importance of the education of youth, go on to declare that schoolmasters and professors are bound not merely to teach their scholars grammar and rhetoric, but yet more to instruct them in their religion, and to make them study sacred hymns and psalms, and the lives of the saints; and forbid anything to be taught on Sundays and festival days save what refers in some way to religion or holy living. Decrees of this sort, if they plainly indicate the deplorable practical paganism which at that time prevailed in most public academies, show us also that the rulers of the Church were sensible of the evil, and earnestly desirous to apply a suitable remedy. And, as we shall see hereafter, this very city of Rome that seemed so corrupt, cherished in her bosom a principle of life and power, which eventually cast out the infection which had hung over her so long, and so accomplished her own purification. Long before Luther had uttered the word “Reform,” it had rung through the halls of the Lateran. The Fathers of the Council spared nothing and dissimulated nothing; and at the opening of the ninth session, a remarkable oration was delivered by Antonio Pucci, clerk to the Apostolic Chamber, in which he called on the Pope to set about the work in earnest. “Holy Father!” he exclaimed, “you desire to restore peace to Christendom, and you do well in so desiring. But see first that you extinguish the intestine wars of our vices, and exterior peace will soon reappear. Behold the world! Behold the cloister! Behold the sanctuary! Everywhere there are abuses to reform, and it is with the house of God that we must begin.”
Yet it can be no great matter of surprise that passing strangers did not always penetrate the distinction between the Church and the City of Rome, and that the undeniable corruption of the Roman literary circles brought ecclesiastical rulers into disrepute, and sapped in many minds the sentiment of loyalty to the Apostolic See. That both Erasmus and Luther carried with them from Rome fatal impressions, which, each in his own way, turned to the detriment of religion, is not to be doubted. Erasmus, indeed, had no cause to be scandalised by a state of society which was exactly to his taste. He was fêted and flattered by prelates and philosophers, and in his letters from Rome he wants words to express his raptures at those delicious hours which he spent among libraries and academies, in the reunions at the palace of the divine Cardinal San Giorgio, or the yet more charming assemblies in the Pope’s private chambers. Yet, while enjoying the cup of pleasure to the full, his keen sarcastic eye was taking the measure of all he saw, and it was on his journey back to the north, that he beguiled his travelling fatigues with composing his “Praise of Folly,” in which Cardinals, Popes, and Prelates are made the subject of his most caustic gibes and pleasantries. And this, after all, is the way of the world; it is a lynx-eyed critic, and has ever a rigorous standard for those who ought to be saints, and a ready condemnation for those who fall short of it. Erasmus, who was himself worldly to the heart’s core, had yet sense enough to feel that worldliness, however delightful, was out of place on the threshold of the apostles, and he made other men feel it too, with all that biting irony of which he was the master.
Luther, a man of different mould, visited Rome in a widely different spirit. He was in the first fervour of what he considered his religious conversion, when in 1510 he came thither full of enthusiasm, and fell on his knees as he entered the city, to kiss the soil watered by the blood of martyrs; though he afterwards mocked at his own devotion and at the simplicity with which he ran about from church to church prepared to believe and venerate everything that he saw. He too carried away impressions that were never effaced. His coarse, strong Saxon nature had little taste for the arts and the belles-lettres, and was only repelled by the magnificence around him. The Olympic deities that met his eye at every street corner, the heathenish adornments of the very churches, where pictures and images of Christian mysteries were presented in the garb of paganism, and the yet worse heathenism which met his ears from the elegant literary crowds among whom he passed in his coarse friar’s frock, all this sank into his soul to be reproduced on the day when he launched his imprecations against the seven-hilled city, and held her up to the scorn of his countrymen, as “the dwelling-place of dragons, the nest of bats and vultures, the resort of hobgoblins, weasels, gnomes, and demons.”[335] Nor did it matter anything to his audience that the enormities he exposed were far surpassed by those which he committed, and that the apostle of reform had himself let loose on the world the reign of frenzied license; the scandals he propagated did the work which he intended, and indelibly fixed in the Saxon mind the tradition which identified Rome with Babylon.
We need not here concern ourselves with the history of that great revolution which history miscalls the Reformation. Before the death of Leo X., that which had been deemed in its beginning to be but “a squabble of friars,” was ending in the apostasy of nations. The Roman academicians, however, were less moved at the tidings which reached them in 1520, that the Pope’s Bull, the Decretals, and the Summa of St. Thomas, had all been burnt together by Luther in the public square of Wittemberg, and that the Pope himself had been declared by the same authority to be Antichrist, than at another piece of intelligence, which was communicated to them on February 9, 1522, and which startled them like a clap of thunder. Leo was dead, and the choice of the Cardinals had fallen on the Cardinal Adrian of Utrecht. The burning of St. Thomas in person would have been a light matter to them, in comparison with the election to the Papal dignity of a plain austere Louvain professor; already known to fame as the advocate of ecclesiastical discipline, the friend and colleague of Ximenes, and it was more than whispered, the supporter of scholasticism. He was a Fleming, a “Scotist,” a Goth, and the enemy of letters. He had come into the city without pomp of any kind, and had ordered one of the half-finished triumphal arches, that was to have cost a thousand ducats, to be destroyed. He had discharged ninety out of the one hundred equerries kept by his predecessor. He had brought his old Louvain housekeeper with him to the Vatican, and was dismissing the improvisatori and whole troops of other Court idlers. They had taken him over the Museum attached to his palace, and he had been heard to mutter the words Idola antiquorum, when standing before the group of the Laocoon. Some of Sadolet’s most elegant Latin epistles had been placed in his hands, and he had briefly commented on them as “the letters of a poet.” “I verily believe,” writes Jerome Negri, in terrible alarm, “that he will do as Pope Gregory did before him, make a clean sweep of our libraries, and perhaps grind up our statues to furnish mortar for building St. Peter’s.” The artists cried out that now they should all be starved; the professors bewailed the certain return of Gothic barbarism: Bembo set out at once for Venice, and Sadolet retired to his bishopric of Carpentras, where he displayed those noble qualities which had as yet found no room to expand in the artificial atmosphere of the Court.
Never was there a more undeserved reproach than that which stigmatised Pope Adrian as the enemy of learning. Erasmus, who had been defended by him from the attacks of some over-zealous scholastics, judged far otherwise, but the Romans could not forgive his indifference to ancient art, and his condemnation of those paganising scholars, whom he termed “Terentians.” Still less could they forgive his plain speaking on the subject of reform. “Many abominations,” he said, “have existed near this Holy Chair, abuses in spiritual matters, and evil everywhere. We pledge ourselves, on our part, to use our utmost endeavour to reform that Court which has, perhaps, been the source of the evils we deplore.”