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THE SPIRITUAL CHANGES IN THE ROMAN CHURCH AS SEEN THROUGH THE PRISM OF THE MEDIEVAL TRANSLATORS’ ACHIEVEMENTS
Relja SEFEROVIĆ
Sažetak
Spreading of the Word has been the major concern of the Roman Church since its very beginnings. In that direction St Jerome, the most infl uential among Catholic translators, made the most as far as the written word is concerned. The great translator of the Bible
had enough courage and openmindedness to use also the knowledge of the classical Roman pagan authors. The pattern for translations which St Jerome has left us was not always followed by younger translators. They would more often neglect his rule that the only
correct translations were those which correctly translate the original thoughts, and not every single word. However, translators with a sound humanistic education, like Herman of Dalmatia and his colleague Robert of Ketton, justifi ed the Church Father’s opinion. St
Jerome’s spirit lived in them, at least partly. So we should forgive them for being seduced by the 12th century humanistic spirit in such measure that, when translating texts from Arabic into Latin, they used to omit up to one third of the original, or to redistribute the
original chapters. We claim to have proved the continuity according to the principles of translationing and according to the inner content of these texts. The ideas of pagan poets and philosophers have got a new meaning in the Christian spirit. This double tradition is symbolized by another great thinker and translator, Boethius, who practised literal translations. After the age of St Jerome and Boethius there followed a new period: the use of translations in religious polemics, in order to suppress other religious communities, especially
Islamic. As they wished to teach their opponents and thus to win them over for the Christianity, translators also taught other Christians about the opponent, about his errors, but about his virtues too, or how his teaching, no matter how perverse, also confi rms the
Christianity. In this mutual didactic approach lies the essence of all the efforts by Peter the Venerable, a 12 th century Benedictine abbot of Cluny who organised the fi rst complete translation of Kuran into Latin, and, having it connected with a few Islamic legends, issued
a compilation known as the Collectio Toletana. However, there was a parallel development of the translations of texts with natural sciences, especially medicine and astronomy. This development had slowly outgrown the intellectual frontiers made by the Church. The
first consequence was the appearance of the resistance towards philosophical authorities. This is why Herman of Dalmatia, one of translators engaged by Peter the Venerable and famous after his scientifi c work, confronted with his former teacher Thierry of Chartres. The Neoplatonism began to fade in front of the newly discovered Aristotelian philosophy. Bishops were helping translations of these new texts too, because they realised they were yet another and a welcome way to confi rm the Word. The apprehension that had existed towards the written works of Arabic and Greek thinkers in this field removed St Thomas Aquinas in the 13 th century by his deep theological work, managing to incorporate these new philosophical ideas into the body of the Church. Perhaps his greatness mostly lies in the fact that he spread until then existing intellectual frontiers, although he did not remove them entirely. When by the end of the 14 th and 15 th centuries the amount of knowledge at the already numerous universities all over the Europe reached the critical peak where they began to suspect in the valour and purpose of the then existing intellectual frontiers and when it
became necessary to make the new ones, at that moment did not appear a new Thomas Aquinas, but John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. The movements they were leading, especially the pragmatist Hus, had theological, social and national characteristics. Instead of following
their predecessors from St Jerome across Peter the Venerable to St Thomas Aquinas and to continue to spread the rigid frontiers of the Word, they rejected them and spoke in favour of an entirely different approach. They opposed to the Church itself, until then the
undoubted authority. This attitude put in danger the very fundaments of the Roman Church and threatened its existence. The answer came from Ivan Stojkovic, a Dominican born in Dubrovnik, who played the most active role at various Church councils in the first half of the 15 th century, especially at Basle, and who had religious polemics against the Hussites as well as against the Byzantine
clergy. He was a zealous follower of the Roman Church and defender of tradition, but a bold reformer too. Because of his fundamental thought that everybody are equal members of the Church and that there exists only one Church of all the good ones and the bad ones, he saw the pope himself as yet an ordinary member of that ecclesiastical community, not even as the fi rst among the equals. These attitudes could not have brought
him the approval from Rome, and, on the other hand, he did not manage to remove the differences towards the Hussites and the Byzantines. He remained isolated, deprived of the support from Rome, which he admired so much, and also from his Slavic brethren, whom he loved so much. Stojkovic’s importance does not lie in his zealous preaching, or in the political role he played, but in the ‘Treaty on the Church’ he wrote and especially in the
idea of the ecclesia militans, by which he encircled the efforts of all the translators in the Christian Latin world most properly: by continuous fi ght against the outer opponents to build the own attitudes from within, and thus to spread the intellectual frontiers not only outwards, but inwards too.
Ključne riječi
St Jerome; Herman Dalmatin; Ivan Stojkovic; medieval translators
Hrčak ID:
11443
URI
Datum izdavanja:
16.6.2004.
Posjeta: 2.566 *