Papacy failed to support them, and the Bishops of the Council could not even understand them. For a few sentences below the foregoing quotation, we read: ‘Though many complained here-of [i.e., of the Decree], yet it prevailed but little, because generally the Fathers [i.e., the Bishops] desired to hear men speak with intelligible terms, not abstrusely, as in the matter of Justification, and others already handled.’
Poor belated medievalists! When they used reason they were not even intelligible to the ruling powers of their epoch. It will take centuries before stubborn facts are reducible by reason, and meanwhile the pendulum swings slowly and heavily to the extreme of the historical method.
Forty-three years after the Italian divines had written this memorial, Richard Hooker in his famous Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity makes exactly the same complaint of his Puritan adversaries.[1] Hooker’s balanced thought — from which the appellation ‘The Judicious Hooker’ is derived — , and his diffuse style, which is the vehicle of such thought, make his writings singularly unfit for the process of summarising by a short, pointed quotation. But, in the section referred to, he reproaches his opponents with Their Disparagement of Reason; and in support of his own position definitely refers to ‘The greatest amongst the school-divines,’ by which designation I presume that he refers to St. Thomas Aquinas.
Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity was published just before Sarpi’s Council of Trent. Accordingly there was complete independence between the two works. But both the Italian divines of 1551, and Hooker at
- ↑ Cf. Book III, Section VIII.
