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SOME NOTES ABOUT FURTHER READING
There are two indispensable tools for the serious student of the history of
the General Councils, one of them a source book and the other a history.
The first, referred to always as Mansi, is a collection of all the known
documentation of councils of every kind, made by John Dominic Mansi,
archbishop of Lucca, and published in 31 folio volumes in the eighteenth
century, 1759-98, Sacrorum Concilium Nova et Amplissima Collectio. A new,
revised edition was prepared and published 1899-1927. This includes the
nineteenth-century councils and runs to 60 volumes. The second
indispensable work is the History of the Councils by Carl Joseph Hefele,
who later, as has been related, played a part in the Vatican Council. This
work goes as far as the Lateran Council of 1517. It was, many years later,
translated into French and brought up to date, in the matter of research,
by the Farnborough Benedictine Henri Leclercq, in eight[430] volumes (1907-
21). This is the work cited as Hefele-Leclercq.
The reader will see that to make use of these "indispensables" our serious
student needs at least a reading knowledge of Latin and French. And there
is the same need of foreign languages for all of us whose curiosity about
this history takes us any appreciable distance beyond such a book as mine.
The exiguity of Catholic scholarly work, in the English language, in the
field of Church History is notorious and, considering the fact that
English-speaking Catholics must number a good 60 or 70 million, is very
little to our credit. For far too long now we have left it all to the
"heretics." Indeed, I can think of only one figure who can be ranked with
the great French and German scholars, from Dollinger to Duchesne and
Batiffol, and that is Newman. This, in explanation of the character of the
books I am now going to suggest "for further reading."
As to the general history of the Church there are now available in
translation, published by Herder (St. Louis) several volumes of Mourret's
Histoire de l'Eglise, very thoroughly done, and scholarly indeed, but a
little out of date after nearly sixty years. A more succinct account, not
yet (I trust) to be labelled, "somewhat out of date," is my own History of
the Church, in three volumes, which goes down to the end of the Fifth
Lateran Council, 1517. Volume I tells the story of the councils as far as
the sixth (680). In Volume II are the last two eastern councils (787 and
869) and the medieval councils from First Lateran to First Lyons
inclusively. In Volume III, Lyons II to Lateran V are dealt with. I mention
these two, somewhat detailed, general works[431] because it is not possible
to understand the councils without some knowledge of the general history,
and because unless history is read in considerable detail it not only
raises more questions than it answers, and risks all the time being a
distortion or a caricature of the truth, but is horribly dull and dreary
work. Who is there who ever got any satisfaction, for example, out of these
terrible survey courses of the history of our civilisation, one massive
(splendidly produced) volume that begins with the Egyptians (and earlier)
and tells us all about it, down to the conventions of 1960? What a dreadful
prostitution of a great branch of learning! What a fraud on the young
people! There are no short cuts in history; from the nature of the matter
there cannot be.
As to the special works on particular councils, they are not so numerous as
might be expected. I should like to begin with Newman's Arians of the
Fourth Century, for the first two councils--a book greatly admired by the
nineteenth century for its classic purity of style, and which (after 130
years) has not ceased to be very useful indeed. The fifteenth centenary of
Chalcedon (1951) produced Das Konzil von Chalkedon, Geschichte und
Gegenwart, edited by A. Grillmaier, S.J., and H. Bacht, S.J., in three
volumes. The next council for which I can suggest a special ad hoc work is
the "Photius" council of 869-70, for which see Fr. Francis Dvornik's book
in the list that follows. No one has written a specialist general work on
any of the next six councils. But for the Council of Vienne (1311-12) we
possess Das Konzil von Vienne by E. Muller, O.F.M. (1934). About the so-
called Conciliar Theory which underlay the activities whence came the
troubles of the next two General Councils, we have two very remarkable
books, Foundations of Conciliar Theory by Brian Tierney (1955) and Studies
in the Conciliar Epoch, by E. F. Jacob (1943) . Although no one has yet
attempted to sum up, for their own sake, the history of the councils of
Constance and Basel, mention must be made of two great pieces of
scholarship, re--the proceedings on both these occasions, viz., Acta
Concilii Constantiensis, 4 vols. (1896-1928), due primarily to Fr. H.
Finke, and Concilium Basiliense, 8 vols. (1896-1936), the work of J. Haller
and others. From the Papal Oriental Institute in Rome there has now come a
similar work on the Council of Florence, Concilium Florentinum, 6 vols.
(1940-55); one of the scholars engaged on it, Fr. Joseph Gill, S.J., is the
author of the work noted in the list that follows.
As to Trent, the greatest council of all, the history of its history has
indeed been one of conflict. The first account, the basis of the antipapal
view that has coloured almost every account since given, published (in
Italian) in London in 1619 was the work of a Servite friar, Fra Paolo
Sarpi, who certainly had access to many of the closely guarded documents
and the diplomatic correspondence. He was a Venetian, and a kind of
literary bravo in the service of the Serenissima during its conflict with
Pope Paul V (1605-21) who had laid Venice under an interdict. This partisan
and highly damaging work went unanswered for forty years, when Cardinal
Pallavicini S.J., specially commissioned by the pope, and with access to
all the papers, produced his Istoria del Concilio di Trento, in three
volumes. Ranke's critical comparison of these two works is one of the
classic feats of his well-known History of the Popes. But in our own time
the real history of the council has at last appeared, Monsignor Hubert
Jedin, modestly announcing himself with a finished history of the History
of the Council of Trent, Das Konzil von Trient. Ein Uberblick uber die
Erforschung seiner Geschichte (1948). There have now been published also
the first two volumes of his History of the Council of Trent, the first of
which has also appeared in an excellent English translation by Dom Ernest
Graf (1957). Msgr. Jedin comes to his task after a hard apprenticeship in
the service of the great German enterprise which, for sixty years and more,
has been classifying and critically editing the documents of the council.
Of this work, Concilium Tridentinum, twelve volumes have so far been
published. Meanwhile, for the reader who needs today to know this history,
there remains the much neglected account of the Council of Trent to be
found in Pastor's History of the Popes, the details of which I transcribe:
vol. 10, 106-69, 221-29; vol. 12, 124-408; vol. 13, 76-128; vol. 15, 216-
65.
The Vatican Council was scarcely more fortunate than Trent in the way the
forces hostile to it in the intellectual world were allowed a good fifty
years start in their commentaries. Given the notorious fact of the bitter
feeling, it is somewhat surprising that twenty years went by before, in
vol. VII of the Jesuit work on councils, Collectio Lacensis, the essential
documentation began to appear (1892). This was, again, a German enterprise,
and it was a German Jesuit also, Granderath, who in 1903-6 published the
first history, Geschichte des Vatikanischen Konzils, 3 volumes. For this
work the author was given all the papers he desired to see. In 1923-27 the
whole of the papers were published as volumes 49-53 of the new edition of
Mansi. Then, in 1930, appeared Butler's book, noted below, which Canon
Aubert generously calls "the best account," to be himself rewarded (so to
say) for his own account, noted below, by a like word from Msgr. Jedin. As
an introduction to the socio-religious history of the years 1789-1870, I
cannot too highly recommend two books by E. E. Y. Hales, The Catholic
Church in the Modern World; A survey from the French Revolution to the
present (1958) and Pio Nono; Creator of the Modern Papacy (1954);
Revolution and Papacy; The Papacy and the Revolutionary Movement in Europe,
1769-1846 (1960).
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