We prefer to notice the rise of those great collections of the minor Christian writings which are generically known as the Bibliothecae Patrum. It was the chief merit of these that they brought together, and put into the hands of a large circle, a number of brief tracts of the most diverse ages, which ran the risk either of passing unnoticed or dropping out of existence altogether. That the texts of the works thus published were uniformly good we neither expect nor find; but of their extreme value to the men of their time there can be no doubt. Even now they are the best available authorities for a good many writings.
The series is headed by a publication of Sichard of Basel (1528), called Antidotum contra diversas...haereses. It contains treatises by twenty authors, the earliest of whom is Justin Martyr.
The Microprestyticon of 1550, also a Basel book, numbers thirty-two writers. Aristeas, the fabulous Chronicle of “Philo,” and the Letters of Ignatius and Polycarp, are among its contents. Five years later appeared the Orthodoxographa, edited by Herold, with seventy-six headings. The collection of Grynaeus, issued with the same title in 1569, includes eighty-five. The printer of these four was Henricus Petri. Basel, then, began the work with credit. Zurich produced somewhat similar publications, between 1546 and 1572, under the auspices of Conrad Gesner and Simler. But the productions of the two Swiss cities were surpassed, if not superseded, by the issue in 1575 of the first edition of the Paris Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum. Its editor was Marguerin de la Bigne, and the collection appeared in eight sections or classes arranged according to the character of the writings in each. In the first, for example, were Epistles, in the sixth Commentaries, and so forth. A supplementary volume was issued in 1579. Something over 220 writers of all ages, from the first to the sixteenth century, are represented altogether; and the whole work is in Latin. It was dedicated to Gregory XIII. In 1589 came a second edition, in nine volumes, increased by the addition of a good many treatises, but marked also by the omission of several which had called forth the censure of the authorities. Among these were the works of Nicholas de Clemanges, whose animadversions on ecclesiastical matters had seemed to surpass the bounds of fair criticism. So dangerous, indeed, did the collection appear to some minds that the Jesuit Possevin declares that it is impossible, salva conscientia, to keep either of the first two editions of the Bibliotheca on one’s shelves, and more than one detailed censure of the book was issued. In the editions of 1610 and later, efforts were made to remedy the faults that had been noted; and in 1624 appeared the first of a series of publications in which the Greek texts of some of the authors hitherto only published in Latin were given. This first auctarium was edited by the Jesuit Fronton le Due (Ducaeus). The final and largest form of de la Bigne’s Bibliotheca was issued in 1644, in seventeen volumes. It contained writings of about two hundred additional authors.
A rival to the Paris Bibliotheca soon appeared, in the shape of the Magna Bibliotheca of Cologne. The first fourteen tomes, with preface by Alard Wyel, were published in 1618: a fifteenth by Andreas Schott in 1622. Their appearance provoked the publication of an auctarium to the Paris collection by Gilles Morel at Paris in 1639. A noticeable point about the Cologne Bibliotheca is that its contents are digested in chronological order, each volume comprising the writers of a century. Similar arrangements were adopted in most of the subsequent Bibliothecae. Cologne did not continue the rivalry; and the last great work of the seventeenth century in this department was again the product of a French press. It was the Maxima Bibliotheca, issued at Lyons in 1677, in twenty-seven parts. The next century witnessed the appearance of a still more comprehensive corpus of patristic literature in the shape of Gallandi’s Bibliotheca (Venice, 1766); but the publication of Migne’s enormous Patrology-never likely to be surpassed in extent-in the middle of the nineteenth century has largely superseded the earlier collections which we have been reviewing. Let us attempt, in a few closing paragraphs, to sum up the results of an investigation which has covered, however incompletely, a wide range both in space and in time. We have seen reason to place the first symptoms of a revival of Christian learning as far back as the thirteenth century, and to connect the beginnings of the movement with England. In the fourteenth century the scene of activity is shifted to Italy, where the impulse given to classical studies reacts upon theology. Not until late in the fifteenth century are the effects of this awakening visible to much purpose in France or in Germany, in the Low Countries or in Switzerland; but throughout the succeeding centuries these countries continue to produce indefatigable workers and noble monuments of learning, while Italy, and more evidently Spain, gradually lose the predominance they had once held. The rapidity with which the light spread in Germany has been the subject of comment already: France’s achievements are not less noteworthy. Lefevre d’Etaples, Michel Vatable the Hebraist, Gentien Hervet the translator, the Estiennes, who cover the whole field of Greek and Latin literature, de la Bigne, Rigault, Dachery, Fronton le Due, Combefis-all strenuous workers in the patristic and medieval departments-these form an imposing list, and one that might be largely increased without difficulty. Nor does the succession of scholars cease with them: it continues throughout the seventeenth century, and culminates in the noble erudition of the Congregation of St Maur.
It is dangerous to attempt to characterise the work of whole centuries in single phrases; but there are cases, and this seems to be one of them, where the progress of a movement can be marked out with approximate accuracy, and its stages defined, in such a way. The three centuries, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth, with which we have been principally occupied, had each its special form of contribution to the movement which we have called the Christian Renaissance. The fifteenth century was the age of collection: the documents were brought together, and the great libraries formed. The sixteenth century was the age of publication. What had been recovered was given to the world by the great scholar-printers. And the seventeenth century was the age of criticism: with the documents now before them, men settled themselves down to the improvement of texts and the elucidation of subject-matter, to an extent which had been impossible for their predecessors.
The names of Niccoli and Poggio, of Erasmus and de la Bigne, of Ussher and Valois, give a fair indication of the several activities which seem to us to have characterised the periods we have passed under review.
CHAPTER XVIII. CATHOLIC EUROPE, by William Barry
SO far back as the Council of Vienne in 1311, William Durandus, nephew of the “Resolute Doctor,” when commissioned by Clement V to advise him on the method of holding that assembly, had answered in a volume which we may still consult that “the Church ought to be reformed in head and members.” The phrase was caught up, was echoed during the Great Schism at Pisa (1409), in the stormy sessions of Constance (1414-18), at Basel (1431-49), and to the very end of the fifteenth century. It became a watchword, not only in the manifestos of French or German princes at issue with the Apostolic See, but on the lips of Popes themselves and in official documents. But though searching and sweeping, the formula had its limits. Reformation was conceivable of persons, institutions and laws; it could not, on Catholic principles, be admitted within the sphere of dogma, or identified with Revelation; it must leave untouched the root-idea of medieval Christendom that the priesthood possessed a divine power in the Mass and in the Sacraments, conferred by the episcopal laying-on of hands. It affected nothing beyond discipline or practice; and only that portion of the Canon Law might be revised which was not implicitly contained in the Bible or in the unanimous teaching of the Fathers as expounded by the Church. Foxe of Winchester, writing to Wolsey in 1520, well defined the scope of amendment; he had found, he says, that everything belonging to the primitive integrity of the clergy, and especially to the monastic state, was perverted either by dispensations or corruptions, or else had become obsolete from age or depraved by the iniquity of the times. Thus even Alexander VI, startled into momentary penitence by the murder of his son, the Duke of Gandia, appointed a committee of Cardinals in 1497, to draw up a scheme for the reformation of morals which, he declared, must begin with the Roman Curia. The mere summary of abuses to be corrected, or of better dispositions to be taken, in the government of the Church, extends to one hundred and twenty-eight heads, as set forth in the papal Letters beginning, “In apostolicae sedis specula.” Julius II, addressing the Fifth Lateran Council (1512) reckons among its chief objects ecclesiastical reform; before its opening he had named a commission which was to set in order the officials of his Court. Leo X, in 1513, accepted the rules