Friday, November 20, 2020

F.J. Crehan, S.J. on Sixtus' Edition of the Vulgate

 

 

The success of the Septuagint may have led Sixtus to think that the Vulgate could be dealt with as easily. There had been work going on since 1561, under Sirleto’s direction, which was a remote preparation for a new edition. Various scholars had been copying into the margins of a chosen printed Vulgate (that of Henten of Louvain) the variants they noted in ancient codices which they inspected. In 1586, as work on the Septuagint was coming to a close, Sixtus named Carafa the head of a Vulgate commission, and it was possible in two years to put together an edition that drew upon all these collations. The work was presented to Sixtus late in 1588 or early in 1589, but he sowed much displeasure at it and decided to see the matter through himself. As he said in the Constitution Aeternus ille prefixed to his edition, he felt it was the work of others to advise, but his to choose from among the alternatives submitted that which was best. Some changes were for the good; works not in the canon of Trent were omitted (such as III and IV Esdras and III Maccabees), and the New Testament was remarkably free from misprints, but the Old Testament left more to be desired. Num. xxx. 11-13 was entirely omitted, perhaps by mistake, but as the passage was used by moral theologians that husbands could annul the vows of chastity which their wives might make without their consent, and as in this disputed question St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas were on opposite sides, it does not seem entirely impossible that some interested party was responsible for making so clean a cut of three verses, especially as there is no warrant for the omission in any manuscript. One of the great faults of the new version was that it changed the system of reference, having indeed a division into verses as well as chapters, but not following the same system as had been made popular by the edition of Stephanus. This cause alone might have moved the Cardinals to attempt to have the work withdrawn. Nestle’s suggestion (in 1892) that this opposition was due to some odium theologicum between Bellarmine and the pope reads like an aftermath of the Kulturkampf.

 

Sixtus was impatient for the release of the printed work and the accompanying Constitution was dated for 1 March 1590, although the printing of the Bible did not finish until 10 April of that year. The first few copies were sent off to Catholic princes on 31 May. Before the time of grace allowed (four months in Italy and eight months outside) had elapsed and before the Constitution could come into force, Sixtus was dead (27 August 1590), and on 5 September the cardinals forbade the sale of the new Bible. Thus it was never the case that Sixtus’s desire for the imposition of a uniform edition reached fulfilment, and his legislation that henceforth this book must be regarded as the Vulgate—a question which Trent had left open when it made its generic decree about the authenticity of the Vulgate—was never in fact operative. An over-zealous Inquisitor at Venice had already gone to work to have the Latin Bibles in bookshops there withdrawn from sale in favour of the new work, but the pope had (7 July 1590) assured the Venetian government that this act was premature.

 

On 7 February 1591 the new pope, Gregory XIV, set up a new commission of cardinals and theologians (including William Allen and Bellarmine) to revise the Bible of Sixtus and to advise him on what could be done to restore the situation, which Sixtus had left in confusion. Even after the publication of his Vulgate Sixtus was sending out tiny correction slips which were toe be pasted over the misprints (Plate 35). Sometimes he sent a special messenger to see to the job being done. He also thought, according to Bellarmine, of more extensive revision of his work, to which he had devoted himself, body and soul, for many months before his death. The new commission returned (as they had been told) to the work of Carafa’s men and made their revised text depend more on the ancient manuscripts where Sixtus had rather followed the printed editions of Henten and Stephanus. No doubt some of the trouble was due to a natural conservatism, Sixtus not wanting to disturb a reading which was familiar to Catholics from long use, even thought it might have little support in the manuscripts. In modern times, the controversies over the new Latin Psalter introduced by Pius XII in 1944 might show the same forces at work. Thus, at Wisdom viii. 17 the Carafa commission had decided in immortalitas est in cognition sapientiae; Sixtus went back to the earlier printed text, giving immortalis est in cogitatione sapientie, but then he wavered and accepted the words immortalitas as a correction. Hesitation of this kind was, in spite of his vehemence of character, not uncommon in Sixtus, and it may be true, as Angelo Rocca, one of his counsellors in this business, asserted, at the very end he wished to make his first edition serve as an experimental text on which comments might be made by Catholic scholars everywhere, so that a more definitive edition could then be made. Pastor (History of the Popes, XXI, 215-18) inclines to accept this, and also gives a full account of the uncertainties about the bull. One indication of the incomplete state of the text can be seen at John i. 3-4, where the words quod factum est are ‘left in the air’, having a comma before and after them, so that the reader can take them with what precedes or with what follows as he may please. Toletus, whose commentary on John appeared in 1588, and who was advising Sixtus in his work, says that he cannot make up his mind which reading is correct here, and it would seem Sixtus could not do so either. (F.J. Crehan, “The Bible in the Roman Catholic Church from Trent to the Present Day,” in S.L. Greenslade, ed., The Cambridge History of the Bible, Volume 3: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963], 199-237, here, pp. 208-10, emphasis in bold added)