Chapter III: The Inquisition and the Index (2)

How little the subjects of S. Mark at this epoch trusted the good faith of laws securing liberty of thought in Venice, may be gathered from what happened immediately after the publication of the Index Expurgatorius in 1596. From an official report upon the decline of the printing trade in Venice, it appears that within the space of a few months the number of presses fell from 125 to 40.[108] Printers were afraid to undertake either old or new works, and the trade languished for lack of books to publish. Yet an edict had been issued announcing that by the terms of the Concordat with Clement VIII., the Venetian press would only be subject to State control and not to the Roman tribunals.[109] The truth is that, in regard both to the Holy Office and to the Index, Venice was never strong enough to maintain the independence which she boasted. By cunning use of the confessional, and by unscrupulous control of opinion, the Church succeeded in doing there much the same as in any other Italian city. Successive Popes made, indeed, a show of respecting the liberties of the Republic. On material points, touching revenue and State-administration, they felt it wise to concede even more than complimentary privileges; and when Paul V. encroached upon these privileges, the Venetians were ready to resist him. Yet the quarrels between the Vatican and San Marco were, after all, but family disputes. The Venetians at the close of the sixteenth century proved themselves no better friends to spiritual freedom than were the Grand Dukes of Tuscany. Their political jealousies, commercial anxieties, and feints of maintaining a power that was rapidly decaying, denoted no partiality for the opponents of Rome--unless, like Sarpi, these wore the livery of the State, and defended with the pen its secular prerogatives. Therefore, when the Signory published Clement VIII.'s Index, when copies of that Index were sown broadcast, while only an edition of sixty was granted to the Concordat, authors and publishers felt, and felt rightly, that their day had passed. The art of printing sank at once to less than a third of its productivity. The city where it had flourished so long, and where it had effected so much of enduring value for European culture, was gagged in scarcely a less degree than Rome. We have full right to insist upon these facts, and to draw from them a stringent corollary. If Venice allowed the trade in books, which had brought her so much profit and such honor in the past, to be paralyzed by Clement's Index, what must have happened in other Italian towns? The blow which maimed Venetian literature, was mortal elsewhere; and the finest works of genius in the first half of the seventeenth century had to find their publishers in Paris.[110] But these reflections have led me to anticipate the proper development of the subject of this chapter.

[Footnote 108: The document in question, prepared for the use of the Signoria, exists in MS. in the Marcian Library, Misc. Eccl. et Civ. Class. VII. Cod. MDCCLXI.]

[Footnote 109: This edict is dated August 24, 1596.]

[Footnote 110: This will be apparent when I come to treat of Marino and Tassoni.]

In Italy at large, the forces of the Inquisition were directed, not as in Spain against heretics in masses, but against the leaders of heretical opinion; and less against personalities than against ideas. Italy during the Renaissance had been the workshop of ideas for Europe. It was the business of the Counter-Reformation to check the industry of that _officina scientiarum_, to numb the nervous centers which had previously emitted thought of pregnant import for the modern world, and to prevent the reflux of ideas, elaborated by the northern races in fresh forms, upon the intelligence which had evolved them. To do so now was comparatively easy. It only needed to put the engine of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum into working order in concert with the Inquisition.

Throughout the Middle Ages it had been customary to burn heretical writings. The bishops, the universities, and the Dominican Inquisitors exercised this privilege; and by their means, in the age of manuscripts, the life of a book was soon extinguished. Whole libraries were sometimes sacrificed at one fell swoop, as in the case of the 6000 volumes destroyed at Salamanca in 1490 by Torquemada, on a charge of sorcery.[111] After the invention of printing it became more difficult to carry on this warfare against literature, while the rapid diffusion of Protestant opinions through the press rendered the need for their extermination urgent. Sixtus IV. laid a basis for the Index by prohibiting the publication of any books which had not previously been licensed by ecclesiastical authority. Alexander VI. by a brief of 15O1 confirmed this measure, and placed books under the censorship of the episcopacy and the Inquisition. Finally, the Lateran Council, in its tenth session, held under the auspices of Leo X., gave solemn ecumenical sanction to these regulations.

The censorship having been thus established, the next step was to form a list of books prohibited by the Inquisitors appointed for that purpose. The Sorbonne in Paris drew one up for their own use, and even presented a petition to Francis I. that publication through the press should be forbidden altogether.[112] A royal edict to this effect was actually promulgated in 1535. Charles V. commissioned the University of Louvain in 1539 to furnish a similar catalogue, proclaiming at the same time the penalty of death for all who read or owned the works of Luther in his realms.[113] The University printed their catalogue with Papal approval in 1549.

[Footnote 111: Llorente, vol. i. p. 281.]

[Footnote 112: Christie's _Etienne Dolet_, pp. 220-24.]

[Footnote 113: Llorente, vol. i. p. 463.]

These lists of the Sorbonne and Louvain formed the nucleus of the Apostolic Index, which, after the close of the Council of Trent, became binding upon Catholics. When the Inquisition had been established in Rome, Caraffa, who was then at its head, obtained the sanction of Paul III. for submitting all books, old or new, printed or in manuscript, to the supervision of the Holy Office. He also contrived to place booksellers, public and private libraries, colporteurs and officers of customs, under the same authority; so that from 1543 forward it was a penal offence to print, sell, own, convey or import any literature, of which the Inquisition had not first been informed, and for the diffusion or possession of which it had not given its permission. Giovanni della Casa, who was sent in 1546 to Venice with commission to prosecute P. Paolo Vergerio for heresy, drew up a list of about seventy prohibited volumes, which was printed in that city.[114] Other lists appeared, at Florence in 1552, and at Milan in 1554. Philip II. at last, in 1558, issued a royal edict commanding the publication of one catalogue which should form the standard for such Indices throughout his States.[115] These lists, revised, collated, and confirmed by Papal authority, were reprinted, in the form which ever afterwards obtained, at Rome, by command of Paul IV. in 1559.

[Footnote 114: In the year 1548. The MS. cited above (p. 192) mentions another Index of the Venetian Holy Office published in 1554.]

[Footnote 115: Sarpi, _Ist. del Conc. Tial_, vol. ii..p. 90.]

The Tridentine Council ratified the regulations of the Inquisition and the Index concerning prohibited books, and referred the execution of them in detail to the Papacy. A congregation was appointed at Rome, which, though technically independent of the Holy Office, worked in concert with it. This Congregation of the Index brought the Tridentine decrees into harmony with the practice that had been developed by Caraffa as Inquisitor and Pope. Their list was published in 1564 with the authority of Pius IV. Finally, in 1595 the decrees embodying the statutes of the Church upon this topic were issued in print, together with a largely augmented catalogue of interdicted books. This document will form the basis of what I have to say with regard to the Catholic crusade against literature.

Not without reason did Aonio Paleario call this engine of the Index 'a dagger drawn from the scabbard to assassinate letters'--_sica districta in omnes scriptores_.[116] Not without reason did Sarpi describe it as 'the finest secret which has ever been discovered for applying religion to the purpose of making men idiotic.'[117]

[Footnote 116: In his _Oratio pro se ipso ad Senenses_. Printed by Gryphius at Lyons in 1552.]

[Footnote 117: _1st. del Conc. Trid_. vol. ii. p. 91. The passage deserves to be Paul IV. designated in his transcribed. 'Sotto colore di fede e religione sono vietati con la medesima severita e dannati gli autori de'libri da'quali l'autorita del principe e magistrati temporali e difesa dalle usurpazioni ecclesiastiche; dove l'autorita de' Concilj e de'Vescovi e difesa dalle usurpazioni della Corte Romana; dove le ipocrisie o tirannidi con le quali sotto pretesto di religione il popolo e ingannato o violentato sono manifestate. In somma non fu mai trovato piu bell'arcano per adoperare la religione a far gli uomini insensati.']

Index Expurgatorius sixty-one printing firms by name, all of whose publications were without exception prohibited, adding a similar prohibition for the books edited by any printer who had published the writings of any heretic; so that in fine, as Sarpi says, 'there was not a book left to read.' Truly he might well exclaim in another passage that the Church was doing its best to extinguish sound learning altogether.[118]

In order to gain a clear conception of the warfare carried on by Rome against free literature, it will be well to consider first the rules for the Index of Prohibited Books, sketched out by the fathers delegated by the Tridentine Council, published by Pius IV., augmented by Sixtus V., and reduced to their final form by Clement VIII. in 1595.[119] Afterwards I shall proceed to explain the operation of the system, and to illustrate by details the injury inflicted upon learning and enlightenment.

[Footnote 118: _Discorso Sopra l'Inq._ vol. iv. p. 54.]

[Footnote 119: These rules form the Preface to modern editions of the Index. The one I use is dated Naples, 1862. They are also printed in vol. iv. of Sarpi's works.]

The preambles to this document recite the circumstances under which the necessity for digesting an Index or Catalogue of Prohibited Books arose. These were the diffusion of heretical opinions at the epoch of the Lutheran schism, and their propagation through the press. The Council of Trent decreed that a list of writings 'heretical, or suspected of heretical pravity, or injurious to manners and piety,' should be drawn up. This charge they committed to prelates chosen from all nations, who, when the catalogue had been completed, referred it for sanction and approval to the Pope. He nominated a congregation of eminent ecclesiastics, by whose care the catalogue was perfected, and rules were framed, defining the use that should be made of it in future. It issued officially, as I have already stated, in 1564, the fifth year of the pontificate of Pius IV., with warning to all universities and civil and ecclesiastical authorities that any person of what grade or condition soever, whether clerk or layman, who should read or possess one or more of the proscribed volumes, would be accounted _ipso jure_ excommunicate, and liable to prosecution by the Inquisition on a charge of heresy.[120] Booksellers, printers, merchants, and custom-house officials received admonition that the threat of excommunication and prosecution concerned them specially.

[Footnote 120: Paulus Manutius Aldus printed this Index at Venice in 1564.]

The first rules deal with the acknowledged writings of Protestant heresiarchs. Those of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, whether in their original languages or translated, are condemned absolutely and without exception. Next follow regulations for securing the monopoly of the Vulgate, considered as the sole authorized version of the Holy Scriptures. Translations of portions of the Bible made by learned men in Latin may be used by scholars with permission of a bishop, provided it be understood that they are never appealed to as the inspired text. Translations into any vernacular idiom are strictly excluded from public use and circulation, but may, under exceptional circumstances, be allowed to students who have received license from a bishop or Inquisitor at the recommendation of their parish priest or confessor. Compilations made by heretics, in the form of dictionaries, concordances, etc., are to be prohibited until they have been purged and revised by censors of the press. The same regulation extends to polemical and controversial works touching on matters of doctrine in dispute between Catholics and Protestants. Next follow regulations concerning books containing lascivious or obscene matter, which are to be rigidly suppressed. Exception is made in favor of the classics, on account of their style; with the proviso that they are on no account to be given to boys to read. Treatises dealing professedly with occult arts, magic, sorcery, predictions of future events, incantation of spirits, and so forth, are to be proscribed; due reservation being made in favor of scientific observations touching navigation, agriculture, and the healing art, in which prognostics may be useful to mankind. Having thus broadly defined the literature which has to be suppressed or subjected to supervision, rules are laid down for the exercise of censure. Books, whereof the general tendency is good, but which contain passages savoring of heresy, superstition or divination, shall be reserved for the consideration of Catholic theologians appointed by the Inquisition; and this shall hold good also of prefaces, summaries, or annotations. All writings printed in Rome must be submitted to the judgment of the Vicar of the Pope, the Master of the Sacred Palace, or a person nominated by the Pontiff. In other cities the bishop, or his delegate, and the Inquisitor of the district, shall be responsible for examining printed or manuscript works previous to publication; and without their license it shall be illegal to circulate them. Inquisitorial visits shall from time to time be made, under the authority of the bishop and the Holy Office, in bookshops or printing houses, for the removal and destruction of prohibited works. Colporteurs of books across the frontiers, heirs and executors who have become depositaries of books, collectors of private libraries, as well as editors and booksellers, shall be liable to the same jurisdiction, bound to declare their property by catalogue, and to show license for the use, transmission, sale, or possession of the same.

With regard to the correction of books, it is provided that this duty shall fall conjointly on bishops and Inquisitors, who must appoint three men distinguished for learning and piety to examine the text and make the necessary changes in it. Upon the report of these censors, the bishops and Inquisitors shall give license of publication, provided they are satisfied that the work of emendation has been duly performed. The censor must submit not only the body of a book, to scrupulous analysis; but he must also investigate the notes, summaries, marginal remarks, indexes, prefaces, and dedicatory epistles, lest haply pestilent opinions lurk there in ambush. He must keep a sharp lookout for heretical propositions, and arguments savoring of heresy; insinuations against the established order of the sacraments, ceremonies, usages and ritual of the Roman Church; new turns of phrase insidiously employed by heretics, with dubious and ambiguous expressions that may mislead the unwary; plausible citations of Scripture, or passages of holy writ extracted from heretical translations; quotations from the authorized text, which have been adduced in an unorthodox sense; epithets in honor of heretics, and anything that may redound to the praise of such persons; opinions savoring of sorcery and superstition; theories that involve the subjection of the human will to fate, fortune, and fallacious portents, or that imply paganism; aspersions upon ecclesiastics and princes; impugnments of the liberties, immunities, and jurisdiction of the Church; political doctrines in favor of antique virtues, despotic government, and the so-called Reason of State, which are in opposition to the evangelical and Christian law; satires on ecclesiastical rites, religious orders, and the state, dignity, and persons of the clergy; ribaldries or stories offensive and prejudicial to the fame and estimation of one's neighbors, together with lubricities, lascivious remarks, lewd pictures, and capital letters adorned with obscene images. All such peccant passages are to be expunged, obliterated, removed or radically altered, before the license for publication be accorded by the ordinary.

No book shall be printed without the author's name in full, together with his nationality, upon the title-page. If there be sufficient reason for giving an anonymous work to the world, the censor's name shall stand for that of the author. Compilations of words, sentences, excerpts, etc., shall pass under the name of the compiler. Publishers and booksellers are to take care that the printed work agrees with the MS. copy as licensed, and to see that all rules with regard to the author's name and his authority to publish have been observed. They are, moreover, to take an oath before the Master of the Sacred Palace in Rome, or before the bishop and Inquisitor in other places, that they will scrupulously follow the regulations of the Index. The bishops and Inquisitors are held responsible for selecting as censors, men of approved piety and learning, whose good faith and integrity they shall guarantee, and who shall be such as will obey no promptings of private hatred or of favor, but will do all for the glory of God and the advantage of the faithful. The approbation of such censors, together with the license of the bishop and Inquisitor, shall be printed at the opening of every published book. Finally, if any work composed by a condemned author shall be licensed after due purgation and castration, it shall bear his name upon the title-page, together with the note of condemnation, to the end that, though the book itself be accepted, the author be understood to be rejected. Thus, for example, the title shall run as follows: 'The Library, by Conrad Gesner, a writer condemned for his opinions, which work was formerly published and proscribed, but is now expurgated and licensed by superior authority.'

The Holy Office was made virtually responsible for the censorship of books. But, as I have already stated, there existed a Congregation of prelates in Rome to whom the final verdict upon this matter Was reserved. If an author in some provincial town composed a volume, he was bound in the first instance to submit the MS. to the censor appointed by the bishop and Inquisitor of his district. This man took time to weigh the general matter of the work before him, to scrutinize its propositions, verify quotations, and deliberate upon its tendency. When the license of the ordinary had been obtained, it was referred to the Roman Congregation of the Index, who might withhold or grant their sanction. So complicated was the machinery, and so vast the pressure upon the officials who were held responsible for the expurgation of every book imprinted or reprinted in all the Catholic presses, that even writers of conspicuous orthodoxy had to suffer grievous delays. An archbishop writes to Cardinal Sirleto about a book which had been examined thrice, at Rome, at Venice and again at Rome, and had obtained the Pope's approval, and yet the license for reprinting it is never issued.[121] The censors were not paid; and in addition to being overworked and over-burdened with responsibility, they were rarely men of adequate learning. In a letter from Bartolommeo de Valverde, chaplain to Philip II., under date 1584, we read plain-spoken complaints against these subordinates.[122] 'Unacquainted with literature, they discharge the function of condemning books they cannot understand. Without knowledge of Greek or Hebrew, and animated by a prejudiced hostility against authors, they take the easy course of proscribing what they feel incapable of judging. In this way the works of many sainted writers and the useful commentaries made by Jews have been suppressed.' A memorial to Sirleto, presented by Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, points out the negligence of the Index-makers and their superficial discharge of onerous duties, praying that in future men of learning and honesty should be employed, and that they should receive payment for their labors.[123] These are the expostulations addressed by faithful Catholics, engaged in literary work demanded by the Vatican, to a Cardinal who was the soul and mover of the Congregation. They do not question the salutary nature of the Index, but only call attention to the incapacity and ignorance of its unpaid officials.

[Footnote 121: Dejob, _De l'Influence_, etc. p. 60.]

[Footnote 122: Id. _op. cit._ p. 76.]

[Footnote 123: Id. _op. cit._ p. 78.]

Meanwhile, it was no easy matter to appoint responsible and learned scholars to the post. The inefficient censors proceeded with their work of destruction and suppression. A commentator on a Greek Father, or the Psalms, was corrected by an ignoramus who knew neither Greek nor Hebrew, anxious to discover petty collisions with the Vulgate, and eager to create annoyances for the author. Latino Latini, one of the students employed by the Vatican, refused his name to an edition of Cyprian which he had carefully prepared with far more than the average erudition, because it had been changed throughout by the substitution of bad readings for good, in defiance of MS. authority, with a view of preserving a literal agreement with the Vulgate.[124] Sigonius, another of the Vatican students, was instructed to prepare certain text-books by Cardinal Paleotti. These were an Ecclesiastical History, a treatise on the Hebrew Commonwealth, and an edition of Sulpicius Severus. The MSS. were returned to him, accused of unsound doctrine, and scrawled over with such remarks as 'false,' 'absurd.'[125]

[Footnote 124: Dejob, _op. cit._ p. 74.]

[Footnote 125: Id. _op. cit._ p. 54.]

In addition to the intolerable delays of the Censure, and the arrogant inadequacy of its officials, learned men suffered from the pettiest persecution at the hands of informers. The Inquisitors themselves were often spies and persons of base origin. 'The Roman Court,' says Sarpi, 'being anxious that the office of the Inquisition should not suffer through negligence in its ministers, has confided these affairs to individuals without occupation, and whose mean estate renders them proud of their official position.'[126] It was not to be expected that such people should discharge their duties with intelligence and scrupulous equity. Pius V., himself an incorruptible Inquisitor, had to condemn one of his lieutenants for corruption or extortion of money by menaces.[127] There was still another source of peril and annoyance to which scholars were exposed. Their comrades, engaged in similar pursuits, not unfrequently wreaked private spite by denouncing them to the Congregation.[128] Van Linden indicated heresies in Osorius, Giovius, Albertus Pighius. The Jesuit Francesco Torres accused Maes, and threatened Latini. Sigonius obtained a license for his _History of Bologna_, but could not print it, owing to the delation of secret enemies. Baronius, when he had finished his Martyrology, found that a cabal had raised insuperable obstacles in the way of its publication. I have been careful to select only examples of notoriously Catholic authors, men who were in the pay and under the special protection of the Vatican. How it fared with less favored scholars, may be left to the imagination. We are not astonished to find a man like Latini writing thus from Rome to Maes during the pontificate of Paul IV.[129]

[Footnote 126: Discorso dell'Origine, etc. dell'Inquisizione,' _Opp._ vol. iv. p. 34.]

[Footnote 127: Mutinelli, _Storia Arcana_, vol. i. p. 277.]

[Footnote 128: Dejob, _op. cit._ pp. 53-57.]

[Footnote 129: Id. _op. cit._ p. 75.]

'Have you not heard of the peril which threatens the very existence of books? What are you dreaming of, when now that almost every published book is interdicted, you still think of making new ones? Here, as I imagine, there is no one who for many years to come will dare to write except on business or to distant friends. An Index has been issued of the works which none may possess under pain of excommunication; and the number of them is so great that very few indeed are left to us, especially of those which have been published in Germany. This shipwreck, this holocaust of books will stop the production of them in your country also, if I do not err, and will teach editors to be upon their guard. As you love me and yourself, sit and look at your bookcases without opening their doors, and beware lest the very cracks let emanations come to you from those forbidden fruits of learning.' This letter was written in 1559, when Paul proscribed sixty-one presses, and prohibited the perusal of any work that issued from them. He afterwards withdrew this interdict. But the Index did not stop its work of extirpation.

Another embarrassment which afflicted men of learning, was the danger of possessing books by heretics and the difficulty of procuring them.[130] Yet they could not carry on their Biblical studies without reference to such authors as, for example, Erasmus or Reuchlin. The universities loudly demanded that books of sound erudition by heretics should at least be expurgated and republished. Yet the process of disfiguring their arguments, effacing the names of authors, expunging the praises of heretics, altering quotations and retouching them all over, involved so much labor that the demand was never satisfied. The strict search instituted at the frontiers stopped the importation of books,[131] and carriers refused to transmit them. In their dread of the Inquisition, these folk found it safer to abstain from book traffic altogether. Public libraries were exposed to intermittent raids, nor were private collections safe from such inspection. The not uncommon occurrence of old books in which precious and interesting passages have been erased with printer's ink, or pasted over with slips of opaque paper, testifies to the frequency of these inquisitorial visitations.[132] Any casual acquaintance, on leaving a man's house, might denounce him as the possessor of a proscribed volume; and everybody who owned a book-case was bound to furnish the Inquisitors with a copy of his catalogue. Book-stalls lay open to the malevolence of informers. We possess an insolent letter of Antonio Possevino to Cardinal Sirleto, telling him that he had noticed a forbidden book by Filiarchi on a binder's counter, and bidding him to do his duty by suppressing it.[133] When this Cardinal's library was exposed for sale after his death, the curious observed that it contained 1872 MSS. in Greek and Latin, 530 volumes of printed Greek books, and 3939 volumes of Latin, among which 39 were on the Index. But charity suggested that the Cardinal had retained these last for censure.

[Footnote 130: Sarpi's Letters abound in useful information on this topic. Writing to French correspondents, he complains weekly of the impossibility even in Venice of obtaining books. See, for instance, _Lettere_, vol. i. pp. 286, 287, 360, vol. ii. p. 13. In one passage he says that the importation of books into Italy is impeded at Innsbruck, Trento, and throughout the Tyrolese frontiers (vol. i. p. 74). In another he warns his friends not to send them concealed in merchandise, since they will fall under so many eyes in the custom-houses and lazzaretti (vol. i. p. 303).]

[Footnote 131: It was usual at this epoch to send Protestant publications from beyond the Alps in bales of cotton or other goods. This appears from the Lucchese proclamations against heresy published in _Arch. Stor._ vol. x.]

[Footnote 132: I may mention that having occasion to consult Savonarola's works in the Public Library of Perugia, which has a fairly good collection of them, I found them useless for purposes of study by reason of these erasures and Burke-plasters.]

[Footnote 133: Dejob, _op. cit._ p. 43.]

During the period of the Counter-Reformation it was the cherished object of the Popes to restore ecclesiastical and theological learning. They gathered men of erudition round them in the Vatican, and established a press for the purpose of printing the Fathers and diffusing Catholic literature. But they were met in the pursuance of this project by very serious difficulties. Their own policy tended to stifle knowledge and suppress criticism. The scholars whom they chose as champions of the faith worked with tied hands. Baronio knew no Greek; Latini knew hardly any; Bellarmino is thought to have known but little. And yet these were the apostles of Catholic enlightenment, the defenders of the infallible Church against students of the caliber of Erasmus, Casaubon, Sarpi! An insuperable obstacle to sacred studies of a permanently useful kind was the Tridentine decree which had declared the Vulgate inviolable. No codex of age or authority which displayed a reading at variance with the inspired Latin version might be cited. Sirleto, custodian of the Vatican Library, refused lections from its MSS. to learned men, on the ground that they might seem to impugn the Vulgate.[134] For the same reason, the critical labors of all previous students, from Valla to Erasmus, on the text of the Bible were suppressed, and the best MSS. of the Fathers were ruthlessly garbled, in order to bring their quotations into accordance with Jerome's translation. Galesini takes credit to himself in a letter to Sirleto for having withheld a clearly right reading in his edition of the Psalms, because it explained a mistake in the Vulgate.[135] We have seen how Latini's Cyprian suffered from the censure; and there is a lamentable history of the Vatican edition of Ambrose, which was so mutilated that the Index had to protect it from confrontation with the original codices.[136] This dishonest dealing not only discouraged students and paralyzed the energy of critical investigation; but it also involved the closing of public libraries to scholars. The Vatican could not afford to let the light of science in upon its workshop of forgeries and sophistications.

[Footnote 134: Dejob, _op. cit._ p. 50. Also his _Muret_, pp. 223-227.]

[Footnote 135: Dejob, _De l'Influence_, p. 49.]

[Footnote 136: Id. _op. cit._ pp. 96-98.]

A voice of reasonable remonstrance was sometimes raised by even the most incorruptible children of the Church. Thus Bellarmino writes to Cardinal Sirleto, suggesting a doubt whether it is obligatory to adhere to the letter of the Tridentine decree upon the Vulgate.[137] Is it rational, he asks, to maintain that every sentence in the Latin text is impeccable? Must we reject those readings in the Hebrew and the Greek, which elucidate the meaning of the Scriptures, in cases where Jerome has followed a different and possibly a corrupt authority? Would it not be more sensible to regard the Vulgate as the sole authorized version for use in universities, pulpits, and divine service, while admitting that it is not an infallible rendering of the inspired original? He also touches, in a similar strain of scholar-like liberality, upon the Septuagint, pointing out that this version cannot have been the work of seventy men in unity, since the translator of Job seems to have been better acquainted with Greek than Hebrew, while the reverse is true of the translator of Solomon. Such remonstrances were not, however, destined to make themselves effectively heard. Instead of relaxing its severity after the pontificate of Pius IV., the Congregation of the Index grew, as we have seen, more rigid, until, in the rules digested by Clement VIII., it enforced the strictest letter of the law regarding the Vulgate, and ratified all the hypocrisies and subterfuges which that implied.

[Footnote 137: This very interesting and valuable letter is printed by Dejob in the work I have so often cited, p. 391.]

Under the conditions which I have attempted to describe, it was impossible that Italy should hold her place among the nations which encouraged liberal studies. Rome had one object in view--to gag the revolutionary free voice of the Renaissance, to protect conservative principles, to establish her own supremacy, and to secure the triumph of the Counter-Reformation. In pursuance of this policy, she had to react against the learning and the culture of the classical revival; and her views were seconded not only by the overwhelming political force of Spain in the Peninsula, but also by the petty princes who felt that their existence was imperiled.

Independence of judgment was rigorously proscribed in all academies and seats of erudition. New methods of education and new text-books were forbidden. Professors found themselves hampered in their choice of antique authors. Only those classics which were sanctioned by the Congregation of the Index could be used in lecture-rooms. On the one hand, the great republican advocates of independence had incurred suspicion. On the other hand, the poets were prohibited as redolent of paganism. To mingle philosophy with rhetoric was counted a crime. Thomas Aquinas had set up Pillars of Hercules beyond which the reason might not seek to travel. Roman law had to be treated from the orthodox scholastic standpoint. Woe to the audacious jurist who made the Pandects serve for disquisitions on the rights of men and nations! Scholars like Sigonius found themselves tied down in their class-rooms to a weariful routine of Cicero and Aristotle. Aonio Paleario complained that a professor was no better than a donkey working in a mill; nothing remained for him but to dole out commonplaces, avoiding every point of contact between the authors he interpreted and the burning questions of modern life. Muretus, who brought with him to Italy from France a ruined moral reputation with a fervid zeal for literature, who sold his soul to praise the Massacre of S. Bartholomew and purge by fulsome panegyrics of great public crimes the taint of heresy that clung around him, found his efforts to extend the course of studies in Rome thwarted.[138] He was forbidden to lecture on Plato, forbidden to touch jurisprudence, forbidden to consult a copy of Eunapius in the Vatican Library. It cost him days and weeks of pleading to obtain permission to read Tacitus to his classes. Greek, the literature of high thoughts, noble enthusiasms, and virile sciences, was viewed with suspicion. As the monks of the middle ages had written on the margins of their MSS.: _Graeca sunt, ergo non legenda_, so these new obscurantists exclaimed: _Graeca sunt, periculosa sunt, ergo non legenda_. 'I am forced,' he cries in this extremity, 'to occupy myself with Latin and to abstain entirely from Greek.' And yet he knew that 'if the men of our age advance one step further in their neglect of Greek, doom and destruction are impending over all sound arts and sciences.' 'It is my misery,' he groans, 'to behold the gradual extinction and total decay of Greek letters, in whose train I see the whole body of refined learning on the point of vanishing away.[139]

A vigorous passage from one of Sarpi's letters directly bearing on these points may here be cited (vol. i. p. 170): 'The revival of polite learning undermined the foundations of Papal monarchy. Nor was this to be wondered at. This monarchy began and grew in barbarism; the cessation of barbarism naturally curtailed and threatened it with extinction. This we already see in Germany and France; but Spain and Italy are still subject to barbarism. Legal studies sink daily from bad to worse. The Roman Curia opposes every branch of learning which savors of polite literature, while it defends its barbarism with tooth and nail. How can it do otherwise? Abolish those books on Papal Supremacy, and where shall they find that the Pope is another God, that he is almighty, that all rights and laws are closed within the cabinet of his breast, that he can shut up folk in hell, in a word that he has power to square the circle? Destroy that false jurisprudence, and this tyranny will vanish; but the two are reciprocally supporting, and we shall not do away with the former until the latter falls, which will only happen at God's good pleasure.'

[Footnote 138: See Dejob's _Life of Muret_, pp. 231, 238, 274, 320.]

[Footnote 139: _Op. cit_. pp. 262, 481.]

The jealousy with which liberal studies were regarded by the Church bred a contempt for them in the minds of students. Benci, a professor of humane letters at Rome, says that his pupils walked about the class-room during his lectures. With grim humor he adds that he does not object to their sleeping, so long as they abstain from snoring.[140] But it is impossible, he goes on to complain, that I should any longer look upon the place in which I do my daily work as an academy of learning; I go to it rather as to a mill in which I must grind out my tale of worthless grain. Muretus, when he had labored twenty years in the chair of rhetoric at Rome, begged for dismissal. His memorial to the authorities presents a lamentable picture of the insubordination and indifference from which he had suffered.[141] 'I have borne immeasurable indignities from the continued insolence of these students, who interrupt me with cries, whistlings, hisses, insults, and such opprobrious remarks that I sometimes scarcely know whether I am standing on my head or heels.' 'They come to the lecture-room armed with poignards, and when I reprove them for their indecencies, they threaten over and over again to cut my face open if I do not hold my tongue.' The walls, he adds, are scrawled over with obscene emblems and disgusting epigrams, so that this haunt of learning presents the aspect of the lowest brothel; and the professor's chair has become a more intolerable seat than the pillory, owing to the missiles flung at him and the ribaldry with which he is assailed. The manners and conversation of the students must have been disgusting beyond measure, to judge by a letter of complaint from a father detailing the contamination to which his son was exposed in the Roman class-rooms, and the immunity with which the lewdest songs were publicly recited there.[142] But the total degradation of learning at this epoch in Rome is best described in one paragraph of Vittorio de'Rossi, setting forth the neglect endured by Aldo Manuzio, the younger. This scion of an illustrious family succeeded to the professorship of Muretus in 1588. 'Then,' says Rossi, 'might one marvel at or rather mourn over, the abject and down-trodden state of the liberal arts. Then might one perceive with tears how those treasures of humane letters, which our fathers exalted to the heavens, were degraded in the estimation of youth. In the good old days men crossed the seas, undertook long journeys, traversed the cities of Greece and Asia, in order to obtain the palm of eloquence and salute the masters of languages and learning, at whose feet they sat entranced by noble words. But now these fellows poured scorn upon an unrivaled teacher of both Greek and Latin eloquence, whose services were theirs for the asking, theirs without the fatigue of travel, without expense, without exertion. Though he freely offered them his abundance of erudition in both learned literatures, they shut their ears against him. At the hours when his lecture-room should have been thronged with multitudes of eager pupils you might see him, abandoned by the crowd, pacing the pavement before the door of the academy with one, or may be two, for his companions.'[143]

[Footnote 140: Dejob, _Marc Antoine Muret_, p. 349.]

[Footnote 141: The original is printed by Dejob, _Marc Antoine Muret_, pp. 487-489.]

[Footnote 142: The original letter, printed by Dejob, _op. cit._ p. 491, is signed by Giustiniano Finetti, who seems to have been a professor of medicine in the Roman University. His son, a youth of sixteen, complained that the students had demanded and obtained leave to recite a certain 'lettione che era carnavalesca d'ano et de priapo,' adding that they were in the habit of holding debates upon the thesis that (LATIN: 'res sodcae erant praeferendae veneri naturali, et reprobabant rem veneream cum feminis ac audabant masturbationem.') The dialogue which the students obtained leave publicly to recite was probably similar to one that might still be heard some years ago in spring upon the quays of Naples, and which appeared to have descended from immemorial antiquity.]

[Footnote 143: The Latin text is printed in Renouard's _Imprimerie des Aldes_, p. 473.]

To accuse the Church solely and wholly for this decay of humanistic learning in Italy would be uncritical and unjust. We must remember that after a period of feverish energy there comes a time of languor in all epochs of great intellectual excitement. Nor was it to be expected that the enthusiasm of the fifteenth century for classical studies should have been prolonged into the second half of the sixteenth century. But we are justified in blaming the ecclesiastical and civil authorities of the Counter-Reformation for their determined opposition to the new direction which that old enthusiasm for the classics was now manifesting. They strove to force the stream of learning backward into scholastic and linguistic channels, when it was already plowing for itself a fresh course in the fields of philosophical and scientific discovery. They made study odious, because they attempted to restrain it to the out-worn husks of pedantry and rhetoric. These, they thought, were innocuous. But what the intellectual appetite then craved, the pabulum that it required to satisfy its yearning, was rigidly denied it. Speculations concerning the nature of man and of the world, metaphysical explorations into the regions of dimly apprehended mysteries, physics, political problems, religious questions touching the great matters in dispute through Europe, all the storm and stress of modern life, the ferment of the modern mind and will and conscience, were excluded from the schools, because they were antagonistic to the Counter-Reformation. Italy was starved and demoralized in order to avert a revolution; and learning was asphyxiated by confinement to a narrow chamber filled with vitiated and exhausted air.[144]

[Footnote 144: As Sarpi says: 'Of a truth the extraordinary rigor with which books are hunted out for extirpation, shows how vigorous is the light of that lantern which they have resolved to extinguish.' _Lettere_, vol. i. p. 328.]

Similar deductions may be drawn from the life of Paolo Manuzio in Rome. He left Venice in 1561 at the invitation of Pius IV., who proposed to establish a press 'for the publication of books printed with the finest type and the utmost accuracy, and more especially of works bearing upon sacred and ecclesiastical literature.'[145] Paolo's engagement was for twelve years; his appointments were fixed at 300 ducats for traveling expenses, 500 ducats of yearly salary, a press maintained at the Pontifical expense, and a pension secured upon his son's life. The scheme was a noble one. Paolo was to print all the Greek and Latin Fathers, and to furnish the Catholic world with an arsenal of orthodox learning. Yet, during his residence in Rome, no Greek book issued from his press.[146] Of the Latin Fathers he gave the Epistles of Jerome, Salvian, and Cyprian to the world. For the rest, he published the Decrees of the Tridentine Council ten times, the Tridentine Catechism eight times, the _Breviarium Romanum_ four times, and spent the greater part of his leisure in editing minor translations, commentaries, and polemical or educational treatises. The result was miserable, and the man was ruined.

[Footnote 145: See Renouard, _op. cit._ pp. 442-459, for Paulus Manutius's life at Rome.]

[Footnote 146: _op. cit._ pp. 184-216.]

It remains to notice the action of the Index with regard to secular books in the modern languages. I will first repeat a significant passage in its statutes touching upon political philosophy and the so-called _Ratio Status_: 'Item, let all propositions, drawn from the digests, manners, and examples of the Gentiles, which foster a tyrannical polity and encourage what they falsely call the reason of state, in opposition to the law of Christ and of the Gospel, be expunged.' This, says Sarpi in his Discourse on Printing, is aimed in general against any doctrine which impugns ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the civil sphere of princes and magistrates, and the economy of the family.[147] Theories drawn from whatever source to combat Papal and ecclesiastical encroachments, and to defend the rights of the sovereign in his monarchy or of the father in his, household, are denominated and denounced as _Ratio Status_. The impugner of Papal absolutism in civil, as well as ecclesiastical affairs, is accounted _ipso facto_ a heretic.[148] It would appear at first sight as though the clause in question had been specially framed to condemn Machiavelli and his school. The works of Machiavelli were placed upon the Index in 1559, and a certain Cesare of Pisa who had them in his library was put to the torture on this account in 1610. It was afterwards proposed to correct and edit them without his name; but his heirs very properly refused to sanction this proceeding, knowing that he would be made to utter the very reverse of what he meant in all that touched upon the Roman Church.

[Footnote 147: Sarpi's Works, vol. iv. p. 4.]

[Footnote 148: Sarpi, _Discorso_, vol. iv. p. 25, on Bellarmino's doctrine. Sarpi's _Letters_, vol. i. pp. 138, 243. Sarpi says that he and Gillot had both had their portraits painted in a picture of Hell and shown to the common folk as foredoomed to eternal fire, because they opposed doctrines of Papal omnipotence. _Ibid._ p. 151.]

This paragraph in the statutes of the Index had, however, a further and far more ambitious purpose than the suppression of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Sarpi. By assuming to condemn all political writings of which she disapproved, and by forbidding the secular authorities to proscribe any works which had received her sanction, the Church obtained a monopoly of popular instruction in theories of government. She interdicted every treatise that exposed her own ambitious interference in civil affairs or which maintained the rights of temporal rulers.[149] She protected and propagated the works of her servile ministers, who proclaimed that the ecclesiastical was superior in all points to the civil power; that nations owed their first allegiance to the Pope, who was divinely appointed to rule over them, and their second only to the Prince, who was a delegate from their own body; and that tyrannicide itself was justifiable when employed against a contumacious or heretical sovereign. Such were the theories of the Jesuits--of Allen and Parsons in England, Bellarmino in Italy, Suarez and Mariana in Spain, Boucher in France.

[Footnote 149: On this point, again, Sarpi's _Letters_ furnish valuable details. He frequently remarks that a general order had been issued by the Congregation of the Index to suppress all books against the writings of Baronius, who was treated as a saint, vol. i. pp. 3, 147, ii. p. 35. He relates how the Jesuits had procured the destruction of a book written to uphold aristocracy in states, without touching upon ecclesiastical questions, as being unfavorable to their theories of absolutism (vol. i. p. 122). He tells the story of a confessor who refused the sacraments to a nobleman, because he owned a treatise written by Quirino in defense of the Venetian prerogatives (vol. i. p. 113). He refers to the suppression of James I.'s _Apologia_ and De Thou's _Histories_ (vol. i. pp. 286, 287, 383).]

In his critique of this monstrous unfairness Sarpi says: 'There are not wanting men in Italy, pious and of sound learning, who hold the truth upon such topics; but these can neither write nor send their writings to the press.'[150] The best years and the best energies of Sarpi's life were spent, as is well known, in combating the arrogance of Rome, and in founding the relations of State to Church upon a basis of sound common sense and equity. More than once he narrowly escaped martyrdom as the reward of his temerity; and when the poignard of an assassin struck him, his legend relates that he uttered the celebrated epigram: _Agnosco stilum Curiae Romanae_.

[Footnote 150: In the Treatise on the Inquisition, _Opere_, vol. iv. p. 53. Sarpi, in a passage of his _Letters_ (vol. ii. p. 163), points out why the secular authorities were ill fitted to retaliate in kind, upon these Papal proscriptions.]

Sarpi protested, not without good reason, that Rome was doing her best to extinguish sound learning in Italy. But how did she deal with that rank growth of licentious literature which had sprung up during the Renaissance period? This is the question which should next engage us. We have seen that the Council of Trent provided amply for the extirpation of lewd and obscene publications. Accordingly, as though to satisfy the sense of decency, some of the most flagrantly immoral books, including the _Decameron_, the _Priapeia_, the collected works of Aretino, and certain mediaeval romances, were placed upon the Index. Berni was proscribed in 1559; but the interdict lasted only a short time, probably because it was discovered that his poems, though licentious, were free from the heresies which Pier Paolo Vergerio had sought to fix upon him. Meanwhile no notice was taken of the _Orlando Furioso_, and a multitude of novelists, of Beccadelli's and Pontano's verses, of Molza and Firenzuola, of the whole mass of mundane writers in short, who had done so much to reveal the corruption of Italian manners. It seemed as though the Church cared less to ban obscenity than to burke those authors who had spoken freely of her vices. When we come to examine the expurgated editions of notorious authors, we shall see that this was literally the case. A castrated version of Bandello, revised by Ascanio Centorio degli Ortensi, was published in 1560.[151] It omitted the dedications and preambles, suppressed some disquisitions which palliated vicious conduct, expunged the novels that brought monks or priests into ridicule, but left the impurities of the rest untouched. A reformed version of Folengo's _Baldus_ appeared in 1561. The satires on religious orders had been erased. Zambellus was cuckolded by a layman instead of a priest. Otherwise the filth of the original received no cleansing treatment. When Cosimo de'Medici requested that a revised edition of the _Decameron_ might be licensed, Pius V. entrusted the affair to Thomas Manrique, Master of the Sacred Palace. It was published by the Giunti in 1573 under the auspices of Gregory XIII., with the approval of the Holy Office and the Florentine Inquisition, fortified by privileges from Spanish and French kings, dukes of Tuscany, Ferrara, and so forth. The changes which Boccaccio's masterpiece had undergone were these: passages savoring of doubtful dogma, sarcasms on monks and clergy, the names of saints, allusions to the devil and hell, had disappeared. Ecclesiastical sinners were transformed into students and professors, nuns and abbesses into citizens' wives. Immorality in short was secularized. But the book still offered the same allurements to a prurient mind. Sixtus V. expressed his disapproval of this recension, and new editions were licensed in 1582 and 1588 under the revision of Lionardo Salviati and Luigi Groto. Both preserved the obscenities of the _Decameron_, while they displayed more rigor with regard to satires on ecclesiastical corruption. It may be added, in justice to the Roman Church, that the _Decameron_ stands still upon the Index with the annotation _donec expurgetur_.[152] Therefore we must presume that the work of purification is not yet accomplished, though the Jesuits have used parts of it as a text-book in their schools, while Panigarola quoted it in his lectures on sacred eloquence.

[Footnote 151: See Dejob, _De l'Influence, etc._ Chapter III.]

[Footnote 152: _Index_, Naples, Pelella, 1862, p. 87.]

It would weary the reader to enlarge upon this process of stupid or hypocritical purgation, whereby the writings of men like Doni and Straparola were stripped of their reflections on the clergy, while their indecencies remained untouched; or to show how Ariosto's Comedies were sanctioned, when his Satires, owing to their free speech upon the Papal Court, received the stigma.[153] But I may refer to the grotesque attempts which were made in this age to cast the mantle of spirituality over profane literature. Thus Hieronimo Malipieri rewrote the _Canzoniere_ of Petrarch, giving it a pious turn throughout; and the _Orlando Furioso_ was converted by several hands into a religious allegory.[154]

[Footnote 153: This treatment of Ariosto is typical. Men of not over scrupulous nicety may question whether his Comedies are altogether wholesome reading. But not even a Puritan could find fault with his Satires on the score of their morality. Yet Rome sanctioned the Comedies and forbade the Satires.]

[Footnote 154: Curious details on this topic are supplied by Dejob, _op. cit._ pp. 179-181, and p. 184.]