The history of the popes, from the close of the middle ages : drawn ...

368
HISTORY OF THE POPES.
of Sacred Scripture at Louvain since 1552 directed his studies,
as he wrote to Cardinal Simonetta in a letter of 1569, to the
attempt to reconcile the followers of the new beliefs with true
Catholic doctrine. Since the Protestants, so he wrote, attach
no value to anything outside the Sacred Scriptures and the
most ancient Fathers of the Church, I have tried to reduce
theology to the study of the sacred books and of those Fathers
who are still of weight among the Protestants, such as Cyprian,
Prosper, Leo, and the four western Doctors.^ But when
Baius tried to set aside the intellectual labours of the medieval
theologians his doing so was not inspired only by his wish to
conciliate the exponents of the new faith, but rather by his
opinion that in the Middle Ages theology had degenerated,
and had got on to the wrong lines b}^ mixing itself up with
Aristotelian philosophy, and that it ought to be brought back
to the earlier Fathers, among whom he looks to St. Augustine
as his master above all others.
This bi-each with medieval tradition was at once shown to
be fatal by his treatment of the fundamental question of the
whole of Baianism, the original state of man. If, according
to the teaching of the Holy Scriptures, Adam was from the
first not only the servant but the son of God, if the movements
of concupiscence were restrained in him and made subject
to reason, theologians had hitherto seen in these and other
gifts of the first man nothing but free and gratuitous gifts
of God. Since human nature could have no claim whatever
to these gifts as things necessary or due to it, such gifts of
grace were called supernatural ; if God had left the first man
in a state in which he lacked all these graces, nothing
would have been wanting to his nature of the things tha^
in Katholik, 1868, I., 281 seqq. M. Bail . . . Opera omnia, cum
bullis Pontificum et aliis ipsius causam spectantibus . . . studio
A. P., Colon., 1696 (due to the labours of the Jansenist Gerberon ;
the second part contains under the title Baiana the documents
relating to the controversy). The Library of the Anima, Rome,
contains in MS Preuckiana Collectanea ms. C 43, p. 5-36, several
documents on Baianism.
1 Le Bachelet, II., 38.