“Nam oportet et hæreses esse.” (1 Cor 11:19). “It is fitting that there be heresies, so that those who
are true, may be manifested among you.”
How
appropriate is this sentiment of St. Paul’s
when we apply it to the Ecumenical Council of Trent.
In
the annals of difficult ecclesiastical births, none was so trying as the effort
to marshal a council following the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. Even
when it met it was plagued by intermittent attendance, sickness, military
threats, and political machinations. Yet 450 years ago, on 4 December 1563,
after sporadic meetings lasting over eighteen years, the Council of Trent closed
its deliberations and forwarded its decisions to Rome for Papal approval. What
it accomplished during those eighteen is staggering. If all the other 20
ecumenical synods were put together, they would not equal the dogmatic output of
the Tridentine Council. In terms of Church doctrine, no Council has had a wider
effect.
The
implications of this go much further however. Trent did not even begin to meet
until twenty-five years had elapsed since Martin Luther’s excommunication. For
reasons that included politics, geography, fear of conciliarism, and lack of
papal leadership, the Council was severely delayed. During that time large
sections of the Church were ripped away: Germany, Poland, the Low Countries,
Switzerland, Britain, and Scandinavia. By the time the Fathers of Trent
assembled, those areas were gone, though a few would later be patiently
recovered for the Church.
With
that said however, this generational delay allowed the Church time to collect
her thoughts. The great theologians of the Mendicant orders (and the young
Jesuits) began to focus their efforts to create a comprehensive answer to the
Protestant challenge. The Council would be no knee jerk reaction, nor a mere
repeat of the ineffectual Lateran V. The theologians and bishops came to Trent
with a thorough understanding of the theological issues at stake, a firm grasp
of Protestant claims, and a sober realization of the seriousness of the task
which lay before them. In a certain sense, the delay of Trent was a
providential blessing.
While the postponement of the Council was keenly felt throughout
Christendom, and though the sessions were at times tense, the outcome was
astonishing. There exists no area of Catholic life that the Council did not
address, refine, or reform. Dogmatically, things which were assumed for over a
millennium were defined for the first time (or reaffirmed definitively and
solemnly). The canon of scripture—including the Deuterocanonicals—was
proclaimed, along with the septenary number of the sacraments. Apostolic
Traditions were held to be received with equal reverence to the scriptures. Of
course all of these had been accepted immemorially, but Trent re-established
them as cornerstones of the Catholic faith.
Of
course the Council was eager to address the particular claims of the Lutheran
and Reformed movements, but in reality it went much deeper than that. Instead
of merely anathematizing heretical tenets, the Fathers of Trent took the
occasion to root their answers in a wholesale reaffirmation of lived,
hierarchical, traditional, liturgical, and mystical Christianity. Nor was the
Council needlessly divisive; in clarifying the faith they had no desire further
to alienate those outside the fold. For example, the first decrees it issued
were condemnations of Pelagianism, the same heresy Luther himself attacked as
latent in late medieval scholasticism. The Council reasserted the Augustinian
position that first grace is absolutely unmeritable by us. Following that
however the Fathers took up a wholesale defense of the intrinsic nature of
Justification, that we are really made new creations in Christ, grafted into him
and regenerated and, with our graced wills now freely able to do good, merit a
real claim to eternal life. The Tridentine documents on Original Sin and
Justification are some of the most theologically sophisticated works ever to be
produced by an Ecumenical Council.
Following upon these pivotal decrees the Council turned its
attention to the ordinary means of justification and sanctification: the
sacraments. Their grace-conferring characters were confirmed.
Transubstantiation received a substantial defense while the sacrificial nature
of the Mass was firmly established. The Council confirmed the value of celibacy
and tightened Church law regarding Marriage.
This
is only a sampling of the dozens and dozens of dogmatic decisions reached by the
Council, but it is well to draw attention to the manner in which these decisions
were framed. In the first place the Council truly wished to cast these ideas in
such a way that Protestants—suspicious of scholastic subtleties—would be able to
appreciate. One of the striking achievements of Trent was that the Council
managed to communicate the substance of the medieval Christian tradition without
the cumbrous scaffolding of scholastic terminology. Rather the documents of the
Council are filled with the language of the Bible and of the Fathers. This is
an underappreciated aspect of the Council which anticipates the genuine desire
for mutual ecumenical understanding, while at the same time taking seriously the
Church’s duty to safeguard the deposit of faith.
Trent should also not be seen as an authoritarian Council,
intended to reduce Catholic intellectual life to mere rote obedience. There
were many theological traditions represented at Trent: Thomists, Scotists,
Augustinians, devotees of the via moderna of Ockham, and even some
inclined to the more extrinsic, imputational theories of the Protestants. The
Fathers in their decisions retained Catholic dogma, while permitting a wide
latitude of interpretation about that dogma within the various theological
schools of Christendom. Far from silencing theology, Trent merely set the
boundaries of the “garden,” within which the thinkers of the Church were free to
meet and explore the depths of revelation.
Equally significant were the decrees of Reform that the Council
accomplished. What the Tridentine Fathers brought about was no mere
“Counter-Reformation” as it has sometimes been derisively called. Trent was no
reflexive reactionary gathering attempting to circle the wagons. Rather Trent
was the culmination of a period of “Catholic Reform” which had its roots long
before Luther, and could be seen in the rise of observant Religious orders, in
the purified Church in Spain, and in the great humanistic and artistic
achievements of the Renaissance. Trent set its seal of approval on all of these
movements, consolidated them, and gave them an impetus which was to last for
hundreds of years.
Indeed it was only after the conclusion of the Council in 1563
that we begin to discern its epoch-making effects. A congregation was set up
for the implementation of Conciliar decrees (today the Congregation for the
Clergy). Under its supervision seminaries were created for the first time,
leading to the professionalization of the clergy, instructing them in theology,
philosophy, Latin, and canon law, and equipping them to keep their congregations
Catholic and to begin to win back those fallen away. Great reforming bishops
like Charles Borromeo and Francis de Sales, fired by the Council’s mandate,
reformed their dioceses from top to bottom, providing models of episcopal
leadership that would endure well into the modern world. The incomparable
Roman Catechism was written for parish priests, to help them instruct the
laity and catechize them in a systematic way for the first time in history, with
the aim of beginning the theological education of the lay members of the
Church. The artistic, musical, and mystical traditions of the Church were
reaffirmed and given new life and new forms. The insights of humanism aided in
the revision of Jerome’s Vulgate bible, and St. Pius V undertook the great
streamlining of the Latin liturgy and Divine Office. While partisans of
medieval liturgical pluralism might blanch a bit at the homogenization of the
Roman liturgy, one cannot deny the tremendous success of the Missal of Pius V,
particularly in the mission territories.
The
Council of Trent did indeed stanch the bleeding. Northern Europe was gone,
however the spirit which the assembly breathed into the Church stopped the
spread of Protestantism, and indeed helped whole territories to be won back to
the Church, such as Poland and southwest Germany. More importantly it equipped
the Church for worldwide expansion. For every Protestant lost, 10 souls were
gained—in Asia, in Africa, in the Americas. Trent was a missionary revolution,
producing a streamlined, purified Church, free of the corrupting accretions of
the late medieval period. It was also that rarest of things in Church history:
a Council of Concord. We are used to the fruits of a Council being disorder and
chaos, and Church history supports our present experience—one need only look to
the confusion following Nicea and Ephesus, or the conciliarist councils of the
fifteenth century.
Trent was different. Its spirit inspired a whole age of the
Church, lasting hundreds of years. Nominalist historians have derisively called
it the “invention of the Roman Catholicism,” as if Trent fundamentally altered
the faith. In spite of their inaccuracy they identify a central point. Trent
stamped its ineffaceable image upon Catholicism, but it was successful not
because it innovated, but rather was able to present that faith “once for all
delivered to the saints” in ways that were perfectly suited to its place in
history. Even though responding to new challenges and situations, Catholicism
will indeed be “Tridentine” forever.
