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Acceptance and carrying out of the decrees [1564–88

preach; and the whole discipline of the Church was improved. The practical reform, however, that was most far-reaching in its results was probably the establishment of seminaries for the education of the clergy in each diocese. This measure provided the Church with an adequate supply of trained men for its service, and removed the reproach which had formerly rested on the clerical state. At the same time it made the clergy a body more distinct from the laity than they had ever been before. It narrowed the interests of the clergy, and made them to a considerable extent the blind instruments of their superiors. Together with the system of celibacy, it separated the clergy from the ordinary social life of the people, and accentuated the division between the Church and the modern world.

The Council left to the Papacy the right of interpreting its decrees ; and Pius IV hastened to enunciate this principle in the Bull Benedictus Deus (January 26, 1564), which confirmed its proceedings. No prelate was to publish any gloss upon the decrees of the Council or venture to interpret them without papal authorisation. In 1588 Sixtus V set up a special Congregation of the Council of Trent, to supervise the carrying out of its decisions. Meanwhile the Papacy anxiously endeavoured to persuade the Catholic Powers to accept in their entirety the decrees of the Council; but with the decrees on doctrine governments did not concern themselves. They were accepted throughout the Catholic Church, but with the decrees on discipline it was different. Even in the modified form which they received after the protests of the ambassadors, they infringed many ancient rights of the secular power in various countries, rights which it was not likely would be easily abandoned. In the end the decrees on discipline were only accepted in their entirety by the Emperor Ferdinand for his hereditary dominions, by Portugal, and by the King of Poland. France and the Empire never accepted them, while Spain and Venice received them with a reservation of their own rights which had practically the same effect. There were limits beyond which no modern State could allow the papal claims to go.

The tasks which the Council had left to the Pope were actively taken. in hand. The Breviary and the Missal were revised, and a new edition of the Corpus Juris Canonici was published. A purification of Church music was begun. A commission of eight Cardinals was appointed on August 2, 1564; and in Palestrina a genius arose who became the founder of modern Church music. His famous Missa di Papa Marcello, performed before the commission on April 28, 1565, subordinated the music to the words, and substituted a dignified and masterly simplicity for the florid and decadent style which had hitherto characterised ecclesiastical music in Rome. The most important task left to the Papacy was however the preparation of an Index of Prohibited Books. So early as 1479 Sixtus IV had empowered the University of Cologne to inflict penalties on printers, purchasers, and readers of heretical books.

1515-96]

The Index of Prohibited Books

687

This was confirmed and extended by the Bull Inter multiplices of Alexander VI in 1501. At the fifth Lateran Leo X in 1515 authorised the Master of the Sacred Palace to act as censor in Rome and the papal States; and the Inquisition in 1543 began to regard the censorship as one of its functions. The first lists of prohibited books were however drawn up in 1546 and 1550 at Louvain, in 1549 at Cologne, and by the Sorbonne between 1544 and 1551. The first papal Index was that of Paul IV, which was published in 1559. It was arranged alphabetically, but under each letter came three categories. The first class consisted of the heresiarchs, all of whose writings were prohibited. This was a mere list of names. The second class consisted of writers, some of whose productions, which were enumerated, tended to heresy, impiety, magic, or immorality. The third class consisted of writings, chiefly anonymous, which were unwholesome in doctrine. The Index of Paul IV met with much opposition; and Naples, Milan, Florence, and Venice refused to print or enforce it. Pius IV modified it in 1561 by allowing the use of non-Catholic editions of the Fathers and other inoffensive writings to licensed readers, provided comments by heretics of the first class had been previously erased. No Index Expurgatorius, however, as distinguished from an Index Librorum Prohibitorum, was ever published officially at Rome. The harder work of pointing out particular passages which must be deleted was only undertaken in Spain. The Papacy contented itself with prohibiting books altogether or with a "donec corrigatur," of which nothing came.

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum of Paul IV was however condemned at Trent as a bad piece of work; and a commission was appointed to revise it. Ten rules to be observed were drawn up, but the work itself was left to the Papacy. The new Index was published by the Papacy in March, 1564, and is known as the Tridentine Index. The Index of Paul IV was improved, and some of its worst blunders removed. It was accepted by Portugal, Belgium, Bavaria, and parts of Italy. In 1571 Pius V set up a special Congregation of the Index distinct from the Inquisition; and in 1588 this body was empowered by Sixtus V to undertake further revision of the Index. Twenty-two new rules took the place of the ten laid down at Trent; and this new Index was published in 1590. Shortly after its publication, however, Sixtus V died; and Clement VIII restored the Tridentine rules and issued another Index in 1596. The materials collected for the Index of 1590 were used, though the Spanish Index of Quiroga published in 1584 was one of the chief sources. The Index of 1596 remained the standard, though additions were made to it, until the middle of the eighteenth century.

So far as the southern nations were concerned the Index achieved its work. The peoples who continued to adhere to the Catholic Church were cut off from the culture and science of the North, and a serious blow was dealt to human progress. It was impossible for such measures

L

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The new Catholicism

to succeed ultimately; but for a time at any rate they were a serious hindrance to the advance of knowledge. The learned Jesuit Canisius, in a striking letter written to the Duke of Bavaria in 1581, printed in Reusch's great history of the Index, pointed out the futility of such measures. Repression by Edicts and Indexes could never succeed; construction was needed as well as destruction, and good authors must be provided to take the place of bad. A revival of Catholic scholarship, such as Canisius advocated, marked the close of the sixteenth century, a revival in which his own Order played a prominent part. Rome became again a centre of Christian learning; and the Annals of Baronius were worthy to stand by the Centuries of Magdeburg. New editions of the Fathers were prepared. In 1587 appeared the Roman edition of the Septuagint, and both Sixtus V and Clement VIII endeavoured to improve the text of the Vulgate. Historical scholarship ceased to be the monopoly of one party. The Jesuits were the equals in learning of their adver saries and their educational system was immeasurably superior. Protestantism in Germany was torn asunder by petty feuds; and by sheer force of superior ability and unremitting labour Catholicism was restored, first in the Rhine lands and then on the Danube. The story of this work, the success of which drove Protestantism to desperation and assisted to provoke the Thirty Years' War, is beyond our scope. sufficient to notice here that it was the fruit of that new Catholicism which emerged triumphant from the Council of Trent. Saintliness of life and the beauty of holiness were again exhibited to the world in a Carlo Borromeo and a Filippo Neri; while Protestantism was too often sinking into a time-serving Erastianism or developing an arid scholasticism of its own which quenched the springs of religious life.

Increased centralisation in government and strict definition of dogma made Catholicism after Trent a far more powerful fighting force than it had ever been before, but it was only at the price of drawing in its borders and limiting its sympathies. There is a curious likeness in essence, though in forms of expression they are poles asunder, between Puritanism in England and the movement of which Caraffa and Ignatius are the typical representatives in the Roman Church. Both alike subordinate the wider interests of humanity to the supposed requirements of religious faith. The sacred was rigidly marked off from the profane; and the culture of the world and its wisdom were banned and avoided as evil in themselves. The world was given up as hopeless, and the attempt to separate its evil from its good was abandoned. The work which Clement of Alexandria and Origen had begun for the ancient Church, and Thomas Aquinas and the great Schoolmen had achieved for the Church of the Middle Ages, was not done anew for the modern world. The true Renaissance was not absorbed into the circle of ecclesiastical ideas; and the medieval conception of Catholicity was limited rather than widened. The modern world, if not actually hostile to the Church,

End of the Catholic reform movement

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grew up apart from it and by its side rather than under its influence. The kingdom of intellectual unity- which Raffaelle had depicted for Julius II on the walls of the Vatican was not realised. The leaders of the Christian Renaissance had not the moral enthusiasm or the force of character necessary for the task. As the gentle Andrewes and the gracious Falkland had to give way before the sterner enthusiasm and the narrow pedantry of Laud, which in its turn fell before a more singleminded but still narrower creed, so Contarini and his associates abdicated the leadership to Ignatius and Caraffa. Neither Pole nor Morone had the spirit of martyrdom; and freedom could not triumph without its roll of martyrs. It was left to the sects in the future to vindicate the rights of conscience, and to extort by force from without what liberal churchmen had failed to achieve within the Church. There was a touch of the dilettante spirit in the aristocratic circles of the Catholic reformers in Italy at the opening of the sixteenth century which paralysed their efforts and enervated their moral fibre. The movement was too academic to influence the world effectively. Some of its members fell into the sins which they themselves had denounced, and like Cortese ended their lives in joining in the hunt for benefices. The rest contented themselves with a lower ideal as best they could, and stood helplessly aside. The Church was reformed and underwent a moral regeneration; but religious and intellectual freedom were left further off than ever. The issues at stake were, however, made clear, and the parties in the great struggle were definitely marked out. A modus vivendi between authority and liberty could not be found. Neither would tolerate the other, and Europe was doomed to be the battlefield of the contending principles. The sword alone could be the arbiter.

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C. M. H. II.

CHAPTER XIX

TENDENCIES OF EUROPEAN THOUGHT IN THE AGE OF THE REFORMATION

WHEN the sixteenth century opens, the West, with the exception of Italy, is still medieval, distinguished by a superficial uniformity of mind, thinking ideas which it has ceased to believe and using a learned tongue which it can hardly be said to understand. When the century closes, the West, with the possible exception of Italy, now fallen as far to the rear as she once stood in the van, has become modern; its States have developed what we may term a personal consciousness and an individual character, have created a vernacular literature and a native art, and have faced new problems which they seek by the help of their new tongues to state and to solve. In Spain, the land of ancestral and undying pride, the humours of a decayed chivalry have been embodied in a tale which moves to laughter without ever provoking to contempt. In Portugal the navigators have created afresh the epic feeling; a new Iliad has been begotten, where swifter ships plough a vaster sea than was known to the ancient Greeks, where braver heroes than Agamemnon do battle against a mightier Troy, while travellers fare to remoter and stranger lands than those visited by Odysseus. In France, where the passion for unity is beginning to work like madness in the brain, Rabelais speaks in his mother tongue the praises of the new learning; Montaigne makes it the vehicle of the new temper and its cultured doubt; Clement Marot uses it to sing the Psalms of the ancient Hebrew race; John Calvin to defend and commend his strenuous faith; while Descartes, born in this century though writing in the next, states his method, defines his problem, and determines the evolution of modern philosophy, in the language of the people as well as in that of the learned. In England the century began in literary poverty, but it ended in the unapproached wealth of the Elizabethan age. In Germany, where the main intellectual interest was theological and confessional, Martin Luther gave the people hymns that often sound like echoes of the Hebrew Psalter; Kepler, listening to the music which nature reserves for the devout ear, discovered the unity which moves through her apparent disorder; and Jakob Boehme, though but a cobbler, had visions of higher mysteries than the proud can see. The Netherlands proved