The century of Columbus

by James J. Walsh

"Utopia was but the author's home writ large. His beautiful house, on the river side at Chelsea, was, through his delight in social life and music, and through the wit and merriment of his nature, a dwelling of joy and mirth as well as of study and thought. It often rang with song, and was cheery with the laughter of children and grandchildren, he himself, in his own words, 'being merry, jocund and pleasant among them.' Erasmus, who was often his guest, has given us many delightful glimpses of his family life, of his children and their tasks, and the monkey and rabbits which amused their leisure. To the solitary and ever-wandering Erasmus, More's house was a haven of refuge from the discomforts and vexations of his bachelor existence. In one of his epistles he writes, 'More has built near London, upon the Thames, a modest yet commodious mansion. There he lives, surrounded by his numerous family, including his wife, his son and his son's wife, his three daughters and their husbands, with eleven grandchildren. There is not any man living so affectionate to his children as he, and he loveth his old wife as if she were a girl of fifteen. Such is the excellence of his disposition that whatever happeneth that could not be helped, he is as cheerful and as well pleased as though the best thing possible had been done. In More's house you would say that Plato's academy was revived again, only, whereas in the academy the discussion turned upon geometry and the power of numbers, the house at Chelsea is a veritable school of Christian religion. In it is none, man or woman, but readeth or studieth the liberal arts, yet is their chief care of piety. There is never any seen idle; the head of the house governs it: not only by a lofty carriage and oft rebukes, but by gentleness and amiable manners. Every member is busy in his place, performing his duty with alacrity; nor is sober mirth wanting."

APPENDIX II
AFTER THE REFORMATION

It is such a commonplace of history as written in English, at least, that the beginnings of our modern progress are to be traced to the time when the movement called the Reformation freed men's minds from the domination of the Church, which had used every effort to keep men in darkness in order to secure their readier submission to Church teaching, that the tracing of all our modern developments to the century before the movement began may surprise many readers. Not only is it true, however, that for nearly a hundred years before the Reformation was there a climax of intellectual and artistic achievement in every department in every [{554}] country in Europe, but what is much more striking is that immediately after the "reform" movement set in, decadence made itself felt everywhere. Art in all its phases, painting, sculpture, architecture, education and scholarship, literature, and, above all, humanitarianism, reached magnificent expression during the first three quarters of Columbus' Century. In the fourth quarter, coincident with the spread of the reforming doctrines, decadence begins in nearly every phase of human activity and continues until the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries gave a new stimulus to independent thinking. It has seemed necessary, owing to the position taken in the preceding pages, to illustrate these facts by quotations from well-known non-Catholic writers.

No fallacy is cheaper than that of arguing because one set of events happens after another, therefore it is due to that other. It would take a much deeper and broader study of history than any that we have made here, or could make in our limited space, to trace the philosophy of the history of Columbus' Century and the succeeding centuries and to indicate the causes at work and their effects. All that can be pointed out here is that the facts of intellectual history represent an exact contradiction to the usually accepted impression that whatever is best in the modern time can be traced to the Reformation. On the contrary, immediately after the reform movement, human achievement declined for many generations, and the revival of the past hundred years represents a reversion to ideas and modes of thought current before the religious revolt and the evolution of which was interrupted by that movement.

EDUCATION, BOOKS, INSTITUTIONS

An historical opinion which is considered by a great many people who are sure that they are well informed to be quite above all question, is that the Reformation had a wonderfully beneficial effect on education. As a matter of fact, education, which had been at a very high degree of cultivation during the Renaissance period, began to decline immediately after the Reformation nearly everywhere in Europe, and only for the schools of the Jesuits, would have reached a serious depth of degradation. As it was, there is a steep descent in the Protestant countries, until in the eighteenth century Cardinal Newman thought that education at Oxford was at its lowest possible ebb, and when Winckelmann wanted to teach Greek in Germany he had to have his pupils write out copies of Plato, because no edition of the author had been issued in that country for two centuries. Authorities in the history of education have emphasized this, and no one more so than Professor Paulsen, who, after a wide academic experience throughout Germany, held at the end of his life the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin. His book on the history of German education was [{555}] translated into English and published with an introduction by President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University. One does not have to go very far in it before finding the great German authority's opinion with regard to the influence of the Reformation on education. He says:

"After 1520, Humanism, an aristocratic and secular impulse, was overtaken and succeeded by a movement of vastly greater power and depth, the religious and popular movement of the Reformation. For a brief space the Reformation may well have seemed a reinforcement of Humanism, united as both these were in their hatred of scholastic philosophy and of Rome. Hutton and Luther are represented in pamphlets of the year 1520 as the two great champions of freedom. Inwardly, however, they were very different men, and very different were the goals to which they sought to lead the German people. Luther was a man of inward anti-rationalistic and anti-ecclesiastical religious feeling, and Hutton a man of rationalistic and libertinistic humanism. Hutton did not live to see the manifestation of this great contrast; but after 1522 or 1523, the eyes of the Humanists were open to the fact, and almost without exception they turned away from the Reformation as from something yet more hostile to learning than the old Church herself. In very truth, it appeared for the time as if the Reformation would be in its effects essentially hostile to culture. In the fearful tumults between 1520 and 1530 the universities and schools came to an almost complete standstill, and with the Church fell the institutions of learning which she had brought forth, so that Erasmus might well say, 'Where Lutheranism reigns, there is an end of letters.'"

Those who hold a brief for the Reformation and its much vaunted beneficent influence on education may be tempted to retort that at least the German religious movement gave liberty of teaching to the German University. It is a constantly emphasized Protestant tradition that the incubus of the Church on teaching institutions before this time had been most serious in its consequences, and that developments in education had been prevented because of this. Those who assume that the reformers, so-called, introduced academic liberty into Germany will find very little support for any such claim in Professor Paulsen. Paulsen insists that exactly the opposite is true, and that far from bringing freedom of thought, the new religious movement still further shackled university and teaching freedom and the liberty of speech and writing, so that a sadly stilted period of educational development comes on the scene in Germany. He talks from the standpoint of his own department of philosophy, and evidently resents the shackles that were placed on freedom of speculation at this period.

"During this period also a more determined effort was made to control instruction than at any period before or since. The fear of heresy, the extra anxiety to keep instruction well within orthodox lines, was not less intense at the Lutheran than at the Catholic institutions--perhaps it was even more so, because here doctrine [{556}] was not so well established, apostasy was possible in either of two directions, Catholicity or Calvinism. Even the philosophic faculty felt the pressure of this demand for correctness of doctrines. Thus came about these restrictions within the petty States and their narrow-minded established churches, which well-nigh stifled the intellectual life of the German people."

A good deal of the misunderstanding of the effect of the reform movement on education is due to the fact that the novelty of the reformers' doctrines in religion and theology led to the use sometimes of the term, the New Learning, for their teaching. The same term, however, had come to be used for the study of the Latin and Greek classics, and the supposed opposition of the Church to the humanistic teachings is founded on the confusion of these two terms. Of course the ecclesiastics of the old Church opposed the New Learning in as far as it related to the reformers' doctrines with regard to free will, the lack of merit in good works and denials of other religious doctrines. They were, however, the most ardent patrons of the New Learning in as far as that term may be applied to the study of the classics. As a matter of fact, the Jesuits, founded at this time, based all their teaching on the classics and their schools spread all over Europe.