CHAPTER XXIV.
THE COUNCIL OF TRENT.
When the conclave of October 13, 1534, announced the election of Cardinal Alexander Farnese as successor to Clement VII., few men probably anticipated what would be the character of the new pontificate. The antecedents of Paul III. appeared to link him with what may be called the Conservative party of the day. He had been a pupil of Pomponius Lætus, had been raised to the purple by Alexander VI., had grown up in the luxurious atmosphere of Leo’s Court, and in his early youth, before he embraced the ecclesiastical state, had not escaped the worldly infection which clung to the literary circles among which he mixed. Men of letters indeed might naturally look for encouragement from the friend of Sadolet, the correspondent of Erasmus, and the elegant commentator on Cicero, but few expected to find in him the uncompromising champion of ecclesiastical reform. Yet such he soon proved himself. One fault alone was charged to his administration, the promotion of relatives whose subsequent misconduct brought scandal on the Church, and anguish to his own heart. But in other respects his favour was bestowed on precisely those who were best qualified to forward the interests of religion. He filled the sacred college with men worthy of the purple; Pole, Fisher, Caraffa, Contarini, Sadolet, Aleander, and Cortese, were all cardinals of his nomination. In his love of art and poetry he was hardly inferior to Leo X., but the thoughts that occupied his soul as Supreme Head of the Church had a higher and nobler aim than even the encouragement of letters. To restore peace between France and the Empire, to keep back the onward progress of the Turks, and to call a General Council for the purpose of healing the wounds of the Church, these were the objects he set before him as the work of his pontificate, and he never rested till he had accomplished them. Until Charles and Francis had laid down their arms, however, the Council so loudly demanded by men of all opinions was a simple impossibility, and ten weary years had to pass before these Christian princes could be brought to terms. If for a moment they suspended hostilities, it was only to renew them with greater animosity than before, and to give the French king an opportunity of covering himself with infamy by calling to his help the Turkish hordes, and inviting them to overrun Italy. Whilst Europe was involved in these broils, it was plain there could be no Council; but at least there could be the initiatives of reform, and in 1537 Paul III. proved his earnest desire to begin the work by naming a Commission of cardinals and other ecclesiastics, whom he charged with the delicate task of drawing up a statement of those abuses which, in their judgment, most loudly called for redress.
This Commission was composed of nine men, whose names were equally illustrious for integrity and learning. They were the cardinals Contarini, Caraffa, Sadolet, and Pole, together with five other prelates afterwards raised to the same dignity; namely, Fregoso, Archbishop of Salerno; Aleander, Archbishop of Brindisi; Ghiberti, Bishop of Verona; Gregory Cortese, Abbot of Lerins; and Father Thomas Badia, Master of the Sacred Palace.
Some of these have already been spoken of. Contarini and Aleander had distinguished themselves by their missions in Germany and their fruitless efforts to conciliate and win back the misguided Lutherans. Ghiberti had been associated with Pole in his legations, and was bound to him by close ties of friendship. He was regarded by St. Charles Borromeo as the ideal of a Christian bishop, and his portrait always hung in the saint’s chamber, to urge him, as he said, to imitate his pastoral career. He was also profoundly learned, and had set up a printing-press in his episcopal palace, whence issued forth magnificent editions of the Greek Fathers. Cortese, a Benedictine abbot, had revived the fame of the old monastery of Lerins, and restored regular observance in a great number of other houses of his order. Tiraboschi calls him one of the most elegant writers of his age, and says that his theological works are free from the least tincture of scholastic barbarism. Frederic Fregoso was a Hebrew scholar, and Aleander a learned Orientalist. Not one, in short, of all the nine could be taunted as a disciple of the retrograde school, and all had in one way or other taken part in the revival of polite letters.
Out of the twenty-seven heads to which they reduced their statement of existing abuses, one only concerns our present subject. The whole report was indeed of great importance, and furnished the basis on which were framed many of the decrees of discipline subsequently promulgated by the Fathers of Trent. But it is the sixteenth article alone which touches on the subject of university education, which we will here reproduce as containing both a brief summary and a sufficient justification of much that has been put forward in the foregoing pages. After noticing the reforms urgently called for in the collation to ecclesiastical benefices, the Congregation of prelates proceed as follows:—
“It is a great and pernicious abuse that in the public schools, especially of Italy, many philosophers teach impiety. Even in the churches most impious disputations are held, and if some are of a pious nature, yet in them sacred things are treated before the people in a most irreverent manner. We think, therefore, that it should be pointed out to the bishops, in those places where public schools exist, that they admonish those who deliver lectures not to teach impiety to the young, but to manifest to them the weakness of natural reason in questions appertaining to God, to the recent origin or eternity of the world, and the like, and that they rather lead them to piety. Also, that they permit not public disputations to be held on questions of this nature, nor even on theological subjects, which certainly in this way lose much in vulgar esteem; but let disputations be held in private on these matters, and let the public disputations be on other questions of physics. And the same thing ought to be enjoined on all other bishops, specially of great cities where disputations of this sort are wont to be held. And the same care should be employed about the printing of books, and all princes should be written to, warning them not to allow books of all sorts to be printed everywhere in their dominions. And the care of the matter should be committed to the ordinaries. And whereas it is now customary to read to boys in the schools the ‘Colloquies’ of Erasmus,[356] in which there are many things which instil impiety into inexperienced minds, the reading of this book, and of others of a similar character, ought to be prohibited.”[357]
This certainly is a most remarkable document. It proceeded not from a body of “Scotists” and “barbarians,” but from elegant Humanists, all of them university scholars, whilst some, like Aleander, had themselves occupied Professors’ chairs. It will be observed that the evils which they point out in the existing system of education, and which they indicate as lying at the root of so many prevailing corruptions, are precisely those the growth of which we have been watching from the time when the universities replaced the episcopal and monastic schools. The whole weakness of the Professorial system is here laid bare; its incitements to vanity, its tendency to substitute novelties that tickle the ears of a mixed audience for the teaching of solid truth; the system which had Berengarius and Abelard for its fittest representatives; which had already produced a goodly crop of heretics and false teachers, and which, while it extinguished the old ecclesiastical seminaries, supplied in place of them, nothing better for the training of the Christian priesthood, than universities which, in Italy, at least, had grown to be little else than academies of heathen philosophy. Such a grave and deliberate declaration, and from such authority, requires no commentary; it was a candid avowal from the choicest intellects of Christendom, that three centuries before, a false step had been taken; and a plain and solemn warning that if the evil results of that step were now to be remedied, it could only be by returning to the ancient paths.