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to have the work withdrawn.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)