Los Dominicos y el Concilio de Trento by Venancio D. Carro, O. P.

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS Los Dominicos y el Concilio de Trento. By VENANCIO D. CARRO, 0. P. Salamanca: 1948. Pp. ~~7. L a work that is of equal interest to. theologians and historians, Father Carro, who is a competent writer in both fields, presents for the first time an account of the part taken by the Order of Preachers in the remarkable work of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of Church Councils. Father Carro is well at home in the field, for he is a widely recognized authority on medieval theology and especially on the great Spanish theologians of the 16th century. His work in two volumes, El Maestro Fr. Pedro de Soto, 0. P., Y las Oontroversias Politico-Theologicas en el Siglo XVI (Salamanca, 1981), although not widely known among American scholars who, for some unknown reason are prone to discredit Spanish scholarship, is a classic of its kind. His briefer work on the other de Soto, Domingo de Soto y el Derecho de Gentes (Madrid, 1980), is an important contribution to the history of international law. The present work started out as an article in the Spanish Dominican review, La Ciencia Tomista, but research on the subject uncovered so much important material that it was decided to expand the original article to the proportions of a book. It is the author's expressed intention to give as complete and objective a piciure as possible of the part taken by the Order of Preachers in the work of the Council of Trent, both inside and outside the Council. He admits in the prologue that this is not a definitive history, because much more research remains to be done. As for complete objectivity, Father Carro is too much the Spaniard and too fervent the Dominican to bear even a remote resemblance to that queer specimen of homo sapiens, the objective historian. (Does he really exist?) Faced with the evidence of the great work done at Trent by both Spaniards and Dominicans, he often breaks into eulogy. Even though he goes out of his way to give credit to the other Orders and the non-Dominican hierarchy of the Church, one is inevitably drawn to the conclusion that without the Dominican and Spanish contributions the Council of Trent, saving, of course, the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Ghost (as Father Carro explicitly points out), would not have been a success. Yet, in spite of his enthusiastic and frank admiration of the greatness of his nation and his Order, an attitude condemned by the canons of objective historiography, Father Carro succeeds in presentin.g an objective picture; for the facts are there whether or no the reader shares Father Carro's enthusiasm for them. The work might be divided into three parts. In the first part, the writer attempts to give a brief history of theology before Trent, with special 400 BOOK REVIEWS 401 attention to theological error; the second part consists of biographies of many of the Dominicans who participated in the Council, the third part is a summary of the debates on the basic doctrines. In the first part great emphasis. is laid upon the theological errors that led to heresy. The errors of Luther did not spring suddenly into existence hi the 16th century, and they were not invented by Luther and the other heretic theologians (if it is permissible to style Luther a theologian) . The seeds of these errors as well as the other errors which caused controversies within the Church in the 16th century were inherited from preceding ages. The seeds that were. planted by Lombard in the 12th century, seeds of error regarding original sin, free will, concupiscence, etc., blossomed into the noxious flower of heresy in the 16th. The errors on grace taught by Ariminense and the pseudoAugustinian school of the 14th century became a basic doctrine of faith for the religious revolutionist of the 16th. Luther's doctrine of justification and his teaching on the remission of sin was a logical development of nominalist error of earlier times. The Protestant creed did not spring Minerva-like from the brain of Luther, Melancthon or any of the other heretics. It had been in...