§ 120.7. Humanism in England.—In England we meet with two men in the end of the 15th century, closely related to Erasmus, of supreme influence as humanists in urging the claims of reform within the Catholic church. John Colet in A.D. 1496 returned to England after a long sojourn in Italy, where he had obtained, not only humanistic culture, but also, through contact with Savonarola and Mirandola, a powerful religious impulse. He then began, at Oxford, his lectures on the Pauline epistles, in which he abandoned the scholastic method and returned to the study of Scripture and the Fathers. There, in A.D. 1498, he attached himself closely to Erasmus and to young Thomas More, who was studying in that place. In A.D. 1505 Colet was made doctor and Dean of St. Paul’s, in which position he expounded with great success whole biblical books and large portions of others in his sermons. After his father’s death in A.D. 1510, he applied his great wealth to the founding of a grammar school at St. Paul’s for the instruction of more than 150 boys in classical, biblical, and patristic literature. A convocation of English bishops in A.D. 1512, to devise means for rooting out heresy (§ [119, 1]), gave him the opportunity in his opening sermon to speak plainly to the assembled bishops. He told them that reform of their own order was the best way to protect the church against the incursion of heretics. This aroused the bitter wrath of the old, bigoted Bishop Fitzjames of London, who disliked him exceedingly on account of his reforming tendencies and his pastoral and educational activity. But the archbishop, Warham of Canterbury, repelled the bishop’s fanatical charge of heresy as well as King Henry’s suspicions in regard to the political sympathies of the simple, pious man. Colet died in A.D. 1519.—Thomas More, born in A.D. 1480, was recommended to the king by Cardinal Wolsey, and rose from step to step until in A.D. 1529 he succeeded his patron as Lord Chancellor of England. In bonds of closest intimacy with Colet and Erasmus, More also shared in their desires for reform, but applied himself, in accordance with his civil and official position, more to the social and political than to the ecclesiastical aspects of the question. His most comprehensive contribution is found in his famous satire, “Utopia,” of A.D. 1516, in which he sets forth his views as to the natural and rational organization of all social and political relations of life in contrast to the corrupt institutions of existing states. The religious side of this utopian paradise is pure deism, public worship being restricted to the use of what is common to all religions, and peculiarities of particular religions are relegated to special or private services. We cannot however from this draw any conclusion as to his own religious beliefs. More continued to the end a zealous Catholic and a strict ascetic, and was a man of a singularly noble and steadfast character. In the controversy between the king and Luther (§ [125, 3]) he supported the king, and as chancellor he wrote, in direct contradiction to the principles of religious toleration commended in his “Utopia,” with venomous bitterness against the adherents of the anti-Catholic reformation.But he decidedly refused to acquiesce in the king’s divorce; and when Henry quarrelled with the pope in A.D. 1532 and began to carry out reforms in a Cæsaro-papistic manner (§ [139, 4]), he resigned his offices, firmly refused to acknowledge the royal supremacy over the English church, and, after a long and severe imprisonment, was beheaded in A.D. 1535.[359]
§ 120.8. Humanism in France and Spain.—In France humanist studies were kept for a time in the background by the world-wide reputation of the University of Paris and its Sorbonne. But a change took place when the young king Francis I., A.D. 1515-1547, became the patron and promoter of humanism. One of its most famous representatives was Budæus [Buddæus], royal librarian, who aided in founding a college for the cultivation of science free from the shackles of scholasticism, and exposed the corruptions of the papacy and the clergy. But much as he sympathized with the spirit of the Reformation, he shrank from any open breach with the Catholic church. He died in A.D. 1540. His like-minded contemporary, Faber Stapulensis, as a teacher of classical literature at Paris gathered crowds of pupils around him, and from A.D. 1507 applied himself almost exclusively to biblical exegetical studies. He criticised and corrected the corrupt text of the Vulgate, commented on the Greek text of the gospels and apostolic epistles, and on account of this, as well as by reason of a critical dissertation on Mary Magdalene of A.D. 1521, was condemned by the Sorbonne. Francis I. and his sister Margaret of Orleans protected him from further persecution. Also his former pupil, William Briçonnet, Bishop of Meaux, who was eagerly endeavouring to restore morality and piety among his clergy, appointed him his vicar-general, and gave him an opportunity to bring out his French translation of the New Testament from the Vulgate in A.D. 1523, which was followed by a translation of the Old Testament and a French commentary on the pericopes of the Sundays and festivals. As Faber here represented the Scriptures as the only rule of faith for all Christians, and taught that man is justified not by his works, but only by faith in the grace of God in Christ, the Sorbonne charged him with the Lutheran heresy, and Parliament, during the king’s imprisonment in Spain (§ [126, 5]) in A.D. 1525, appointed a commission to search out and suppress heresy in the diocese of Meaux. Faber’s books were condemned to the flames, but he himself, threatened with the stake, escaped by flight to Strassburg. After his return the king provided for him a safe retreat at Blois, where he wrought at his translation of the Old Testament, which he completed in A.D. 1528. He spent his last years at Nérac, the residence of his patroness Margaret, now Queen of Navarre, where he died in A.D. 1536 in his 86th year. Though at heart estranged from the Catholic church, he never formally forsook it.—In Spain Cardinal Ximenes (§ [118, 7]) acted as the Mæcenas of humanist studies. The most distinguished Spanish humanist was Anton of Lebrija, professor at Salamanca, a fellow labourer with Ximenes on the Complutensian Polyglott, and protected by him from the Inquisition, which would have called him to account for his criticism of the Vulgate. He died in A.D. 1522.
§ 120.9. Humanism and the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century.—Humanists, in common with the reformers, inveighed against the debased scholasticism as well as against the superstition of the age. They did so however on very different grounds, and conducted their warfare by very different methods. While the reformers employed the word of God, and strove after the salvation of the soul, the humanists employed wit and sarcasm, and sought after the temporal well-being of men. Hence the reaction of the despised scholasticism and the contemned monasticism against humanism was often in the right. A reformation of the church by humanism alone would have been a return to naked paganism. But, on the other hand, classical studies afforded men who desired a genuine reformation of the church a rich, linguistic, philosophical, and scientific culture, without which, as applied to researches in church history, the exposition of Scripture, and the revision of doctrine, the reforms of the sixteenth century could hardly have been carried out in a comprehensive and satisfactory manner. The most permanent advantage won for the church and theology by the revival of learning was the removal of Holy Scripture from under the bushel, and giving it again its rightful place as the lamp of the church. It pointed back from the Vulgate, of which since A.D. 1500, some ninety-eight printed editions had appeared, to the original text, condemned the allegorical method of exposition, awakened an appreciation of the grammatical and historical system of interpretation, afforded scientific apparatus by its philological studies, and by issuing printed Bibles secured the spread of the original text. From the time of the invention of printing the Jews were active in printing the Old Testament. From A.D. 1502 a number of Christian scholars, under the presidency of Ximenes, wrought at Alcala at the great Complutensian Polyglott, published in A.D. 1520. It contained the Hebrew and Greek texts, the Targums, the LXX., and the Vulgate, as well as a Latin translation of the LXX. and of the Targums, with a much-needed grammatical and lexical apparatus. Daniel Bomberg of Antwerp published at Venice various editions of the Old Testament, some with, some without, rabbinical commentaries. His assistants were Felix Pratensis, a learned Jew; and Jacob ben Chaijim, a rabbi of Tunis. As the costly Complutensian Polyglott was available only to a few, Erasmus did great service by his handy edition of the Greek New Testament, notwithstanding its serious critical deficiencies. Erasmus himself brought out five successive editions, but very soon more than thirty impressions were exhausted.
THIRD DIVISION.
History of the Development of the Church under Modern European Forms of Civilization.
§ 121. Character and Distribution of Modern Church History.
In the Reformation of the sixteenth century the intelligence of Germany, which had hitherto been under the training and tutelage of the Romish church, reached maturity by the application of the formal and material principles of Protestantism,—the sole normative authority of Scripture, and justification by faith alone without works of merit. It emancipated itself from its schoolmaster, who, for selfish ends, had made and still continued to make strenuous efforts to check every movement towards independence, every endeavour after ecclesiastical, theological, and scientific freedom, every struggle after evangelical reform. Yet this emancipation was not completely effected in all the purely German nationalities, much less among those Romanic and Slavonic peoples which had bowed their necks to the papal hierarchy. The Romish church of the Reformation not only adhered to the form and content of its former unevangelical constitution, but also still further developed and formally elaborated its creed in the same unevangelical direction, and the result was a split in the western church into an Evangelical Protestant and a Roman Catholic church. Then again the principles of the Reformation were set forth in different ways, and Protestantism branched off into two divisions, the Lutheran and the Reformed. Besides these three new western churches and the one old eastern church, which all rested upon the common œcumenical basis of the old Catholic church, a variety of sects sprang out of them. Through these greater and lesser divisions, modern church history, where, with some advantages and some disadvantages, one church is pitted against another, possesses a character entirely different from the church history of earlier times.
Modern church history naturally falls into four divisions. The distinguishing characteristic of each is found partly in the opposition of particular churches to one another, partly in the antagonism of faith and unbelief. The transition from one to another corresponds generally with the boundaries of the centuries. The sixteenth century forms the Reformation period, in which the new Protestantism, parted from the old Roman Catholicism, cast off the deformatory elements which had attached themselves to it, and developed for itself a system of doctrine, worship, and constitution; while the Roman Catholic church, from the middle of the century, set to work upon a counter-Reformation, by which it succeeded in large measure in reconquering the field that had been lost. The seventeenth century was characterized on the Protestant side as the age of orthodoxy, in which confessionalism obtained undivided supremacy, deteriorating however in doctrine and life into a frigid formalism, which called forth the movement of Pietism as a corrective; but, on the Roman Catholic side, it was characterized as a period of continued successful restoration. In the eighteenth century begins the struggle against the dominant church and the prevailing conceptions of Christianity in the forms of deism, naturalism, and rationalism within both the Protestant and Catholic churches. The fourth division embraces the nineteenth century. The newly awakened faith strives vigorously with rationalism, and then, on the Protestant side, splits into unionism and confessionalism; while, on the Roman Catholic side, it makes its fullest development in a zealous ultramontanism. But rationalism again renews its youth under the cloak of science, and alongside of it appears a more undisguised unbelief in the distinctly antichristian forms of pantheism, materialism, and communism, which seeks to annihilate everything Christian in church and state, in science and faith, in social and political life.