Christian Schools and Scholars / or, Sketches of Education from the Christian Era to the Council of Trent

by Augusta Theodosia Drane

It was precisely at this time that St. Ignatius and his companions first appeared in Rome, and submitted to the Holy See the plan for the foundation of their society. The education of youth[358] is set forth in the Formula of Approval granted by Paul III. in 1540 as the first duty embraced by the new Institute, and it is to be observed that the two patrons who most powerfully interested themselves in obtaining this approval were both of them members of the above-named commission, namely, Cardinal Gaspar Contarini, and the Dominican, Father Thomas Badia. Although the new religious were not at once able to begin the establishment of colleges, yet the plan of those afterwards founded was gradually ripening in the sagacious mind of St. Ignatius, who looked to these institutions as calculated to oppose the surest bulwarks against the progress of heresy. The first regular college of the Society was that established at Gandia in 1546, through the zeal of St. Francis Borgia, third General of the Society; and the regulations by which it was governed, and which were embodied in the constitutions, were extended to all the Jesuit colleges afterwards founded. The studies were to include theology, both positive and scholastic, as well as grammar, poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy. The course of philosophy was to last three years, that of theology four; and the Professors of Philosophy were enjoined to treat their subject in such a way as to dispose the mind for the study of theology, instead of setting up faith and reason in opposition to one another. The theology of St. Thomas, and the philosophy of Aristotle, were to be followed, except on those points where the teaching of the latter was opposed to the Catholic faith. Those points of metaphysics which involved questions depending for their demonstration on revealed truth, such as free-will, or the origin of evil, were not to be treated in the course of philosophy, but to be reserved for that of theology. No classical authors, whether Greek or Latin, wherein was to be found anything contrary to good morals, were to be read in the classes until first corrected, and the students were subjected to rules of discipline which aimed at forming in them habits of solid piety. It is clear that colleges thus constituted were exactly fitted to carry out those reforms which Pole and his colleagues had suggested as being so urgently called for, and that the system of education thus proposed effectually excluded the “impious philosophy” which had been nurtured in the academies of Italy.

Meanwhile the political horizon was gradually growing clearer, and on the 13th of December 1545, the first session of the long-expected Council was opened by the three legates nominated by the Pope. They were the Cardinals del Monte, Cervini, and Pole. The two first successively filled the chair of St. Peter after Paul III., under the titles of Julius III. and Marcellus II. Pole held his office only until the October of the following year, when the state of his health obliged him to retire from the legation. He nevertheless continued to be employed in affairs connected with the Council, and assisted in drawing up the Bull of Reform published by Julius III. in 1550. The exhortation addressed to the Fathers of the Council at the opening of the second session was composed by him, and the doctrinal decree on Justification, which defined the faith of the Church on the point most warmly controverted by the Lutherans, is believed to have been first sketched out by his pen,[359] and was certainly submitted by his colleagues to his approval in its complete shape before publication, he being then detained by sickness at Padua. In 1554 the accession of Queen Mary recalled him to England, where, for the four remaining years of his life, he was engaged in reconstructing the shattered constitution of the English Church, and was, of course, unable to take any active part in the affairs of the Council. But some of his Synodal Acts anticipated in so remarkable a manner the Tridentine decrees of discipline that they have been even supposed to have furnished the model on which the decrees were drawn up. At any rate, they evince how thoroughly Pole was himself imbued with the views and principles which guided the Fathers of the Council, and bear too closely on our subject to be omitted here.

The first act of his primacy, after the formal reconciliation of the nation to the Holy See, was to summon a Provincial Synod, which met in Henry VII.’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey, and continued to sit from the November of 1554 to the same month in the ensuing year. After regulations passed for the remedy of sundry abuses, such as pluralities and non-residence, and others which aimed at providing for the instruction of the people, by means of preaching, we come to the important decrees on the subject of Church seminaries. A return was made to the ancient ecclesiastical system, and the cathedral schools were put on a footing which should enable them to train the future clergy of the diocese. Every cathedral was to maintain, in its own school, a certain number of boys, in proportion to its revenues. Those only were to be chosen in whom there seemed to be tokens of a vocation to the priesthood; they were to be received about the age of eleven or twelve, rather from the ranks of the poor than the rich, and were required before admission to know at least how to read and write. All were to wear the tonsure and the ecclesiastical habit, to live in common, and to assist daily at the public office in the cathedral. They were gradually to be admitted to Holy Orders, at proper intervals. The school was to be placed under the superintendence of the Dean and Chapter. Other students might be admitted, who were required to follow the rules of the seminary in all things. Moreover, all the schools and schoolmasters of the diocese were placed under the jurisdiction of the Ordinary, and the books used in these schools were first to be approved by him.[360] The acts of this synod were sent to Rome, and formally approved by Pope Paul IV., and there is little doubt that they must have been in the hands of many of the prelates who assisted at the later sessions of the Council of Trent.

The next task which presented itself was the restoration of the universities, which, as we have seen, had sunk during the reign of Edward VI., into a state of utter decay. Here the Cardinal’s efforts were nobly seconded by Queen Mary, who re-endowed the Colleges with such portions of their revenues as had been seized by the Crown, and at her own charges commenced the rebuilding of the schools. To restore the ancient theological studies, and place the universities on their former footing, Nicholas Ormanetti, formerly Vicar-General to the good prelate Matthew Ghiberti, and now first Datary to the English Legation, was appointed visitor. The heretical professors were replaced with learned Catholics, both native and foreign, and among the latter number were the two Spanish Dominicans, Peter Soto and Bartholomew Carranza, both of whom had been present as theologians at some of the sittings of the Council of Trent. By their influence the scholastic theology was restored at Oxford—a circumstance which occasioned the charge of obscurantism to be very unsuitably brought against the Catholic professors, by those who had been engaged before them in crying down humane learning and burning Duke Humphrey’s library. Pole certainly was not one to neglect the cultivation of humane literature, but the restoration of the Divinity schools of Oxford was just then of more urgent necessity than anything else, and we could not have blamed the Catholic prelates if, in their solicitude on this point, they had even allowed the polite letters to remain for a time uncared for. They did, however, the very reverse of this, and put such renewed life into the English schools as inspired Sir Thomas Pope with courage to propose a new Oxford foundation, for the express purpose of promoting classical studies. The statutes of Trinity College, Oxford, were submitted to the approval of Pole, who pleaded strongly for more Greek. Sir Thomas Pope is represented by some to have resisted this, but his own letters explain the true state of the case. “I like the purpose well,” he says, “but I fear the times will not bear it now. I remember when I was a young scholar at Eton the Greek tongue was growing apace, but the study of it of late is much decayed.” That is to say, that the real “obscurantism” had been occasioned, not by the Spanish Dominicans, but by the Genevese Reformers, who left it to Pole and his colleagues to undo their mischievous work. In consequence of the Cardinal’s representations, a Greek lecturer was appointed at Trinity, and the buildings of old Durham College were given up to the new foundation, the present library being the very same originally built to receive the books deposited there by Richard of Bury.

The death of the queen in 1558, followed sixteen hours later by that of the Cardinal Primate, put an end to the work of restoration, and the curtain dropped heavily over the hopes of the English Catholics. And in what way, it may be asked, did the triumph of Protestantism affect the schools? “Duns, and his rabble of barbarous questionists” (to use the language of Ascham) were, of course, put to the rout; but what was substituted in their place during the golden reign of Queen Elizabeth? Five years after her accession, we learn from Wood, that there were only three divines in Oxford judged capable of preaching the university sermon. The established clergy were recruited from an illiterate class, who preached on Sundays, and worked at their trades on week days, some of them being hardly able to sign their names. Four years later, when Archbishop Parker founded three scholarships in Cambridge, for the best and ablest scholars to be elected from the chief schools of Kent and Norfolk, it was found prudent to require no higher attainments from the candidates than a knowledge of grammar, “and, if it may be, that they should be able to make a verse.” And three years later again, we find Horne, bishop of Winchester, requiring his minor canons every week to get by heart a chapter of St. Paul’s Epistles in Latin, which task they had to repeat aloud at the public episcopal visitation. The universities revived in some degree towards the close of Elizabeth’s reign, and yet more under the early Stuart princes, though it is remarkable how large a number of the best English scholars of this period, such as Campion and Crashaw, embraced the Catholic faith. But the free intercommunion with the mind of Europe, which had been the great intellectual advantage of these institutions in Catholic times, was now at an end. Whatever scholarship they fostered was henceforth stamped with a certain character of narrow nationality; their very Latinity became Anglicised in its pronunciation, and thus the Latin language ceased to be to English scholars what it was, and still is, to those of Catholic academies—a medium of intercourse between educated men. Among those Englishmen who have distinguished themselves in the ranks of science and literature since the Reformation, a very large proportion have not been university scholars, and our two philosophers of greatest note, Bacon and Locke, so far from acknowledging any obligations to their university training, avowedly despised, and set themselves to make others despise, the academic system of education.

It remains for us to speak of the decrees affecting the question of ecclesiastical education passed in the later sessions of the Council of Trent. The wars and political intrigues of that troublous time caused so many interruptions in the sittings of the Council that they were not finally closed until eighteen years from the date of their first opening.

Few, comparatively, of those who had taken part in the first sessions, assisted at the three last held in the year 1563, under the presidency of five cardinal legates.[361] Of the three who had presided at the opening of the Council, two had been successively raised to the Chair of St. Peter, and all had passed to a better life. Not one survived of those nine Cardinals who had sat in Paul III.’s Congregation of Reform. But the new generation which had arisen in their place were animated with the same spirit, or, if there were any difference to be noticed, it lay, perhaps, in the fact, that the deliberations of those eighteen years had supplied them with fuller light, and deepened their desire for the restoration of ecclesiastical discipline. The very troubles of the times had co-operated in the development of a strong Christian reaction against the Paganism of the last half century; and many prelates had not waited for the close of the Council before instituting a vigorous reform of abuses in their own dioceses. Thus the church of Verona under Matthew Ghiberti had become a model of discipline, and in Portugal the celebrated Bartholomew of the Martyrs, Archbishop of Braga, had set the example of exact observance of the canons, in the government of his large diocese. Among the other means he had adopted for the reform of his clergy, was the establishment of a sort of seminary in his own palace, which he endowed out of his episcopal revenues, appointing as scholasticus a religious of his order. The archbishop sat in the later sessions of the Council, and took a very prominent part in its deliberations. Again, the establishment of the Jesuit colleges, specially the German college in Rome, and the extraordinary success which had attended the labours of the Blessed Peter Canisius, in restoring Catholicism in Germany, had poured a flood of light on the whole subject of educational reform. Canisius assisted at the sittings of the Council in 1547 and again in 1562, and even when absent his opinion was continually consulted by Cardinal Hosius and the other legates. Reform was now not a theory, but a fact. In Aichstadt, the old diocese of St. Wilibald, where heresy and irreligion, had, as it seemed, firmly established themselves, the university was purged of the evil leaven, and the faith had revived in all its fervour. In Vienna, in spite of the protection of the Government, religion had so rapidly declined under the infection of the Lutheran doctrines, that for twenty years not a single candidate for holy orders had presented himself. Parishes were left without pastors, the sacraments were neglected, and through timidity and human respect the Catholic clergy opposed but a faint resistance to the encroachments of the heretics. But under the direction of Canisius the university was restored, a college was founded for the education of youth, and public catechisms were instituted, which effected a change little short of miraculous, and the same scenes were to be witnessed in the other cities of Germany.

The Fathers, therefore, who assembled at the twenty-seventh session of the Council of Trent had facts as well as principles before them, indicating a sound system of ecclesiastical education as the measure best calculated to remedy the evils which afflicted the Church. In earlier sessions the old canons had been confirmed requiring cathedrals to maintain a theologian and grammar-master for the instruction of the younger clergy, but this law fell very far short of what was needed, and its frequent renewal by former Councils does not appear to have been attended with much result. What the Church had possessed in former ages, and what she now desired to restore, were not mere theological classes, but rather nurseries, in which her clergy could be trained in ecclesiastical discipline as well as supplied with the learning proper to their state. Such seminaries had existed before the rise of the universities; they were now to reappear, and it was with unanimous consent, accompanied with an emotion of grateful joy not easy to express, that the Fathers passed that decree which has been called the practical résumé of the whole Council. It forms the eighteenth chapter of the twenty-seventh session, and its provisions are briefly as follows:—

Every cathedral or metropolitan church is bound, according to its means, to maintain a certain number of youths belonging to the city or diocese in some suitable college, who shall then be trained for the ecclesiastical state. They are to be at least twelve years old, and chosen from those who give hopes of their being eventually fit for the priesthood. The Holy Council desires that a “preference be given to the children of poor parents,” though the rich are not to be excluded. The college, which is to be “a perpetual seminary for the service of God,” is entirely under the direction of the bishop, who is to be assisted by two canons chosen by himself. The students, on their entrance, are to wear the tonsure and ecclesiastical habit; to learn grammar, church music, the ecclesiastical computation, and the other liberal arts; but they are specially to apply themselves to the study of the Scriptures, and all that appertains to the right administration of the Sacraments. The bishop, or the visitors whom he appoints, are to watch over the maintenance of good discipline among them, and to take all proper means for the encouragement of piety and virtue. The seminary is to be maintained by a tax on all the benefices in the diocese. If in any province the dioceses are too poor each to maintain its own seminary, the Provincial synod may establish one attached to the metropolitan church for the general use of all churches of the diocese; or, again, if a diocese be very large and populous, the bishop may, if necessary, establish in it more than one seminary. It belongs to the bishop to appoint or remove the scholasticus, and no person is to be appointed who is not a doctor or licentiate in theology or canon law. The bishop also has the right of prescribing what studies are to be pursued by the seminarists, according as he may think proper.[362]

So universal was the satisfaction caused by this decree, that many prelates hesitated not to declare, that if no other good were to result from the labours of the Council, this alone would compensate to them for all their fatigues and sacrifices. They regarded such a reform as was here provided, as the only efficacious means of restoring ecclesiastical discipline, well knowing that in every state and government, as are the heads, so are the members, and that the character of a people depends on that of their teachers.[363]