It would be good for religion if many
books that seem useful were destroyed. When there were not so many
books and not so many arguments ("ragioni naturali") and disputes,
religion grew more quickly than it has done since.' He wished to limit
the classical instruction of the schools to Homer, Virgil and Cicero,
and to supply the rest from Jerome and Augustine. Not only Ovid and
Catullus, but Terence and Tibullus, were to be banished. This may be no
more than the expressions of a nervous morality, but elsewhere in a
special work he admits that science as a whole is harmful. He holds
that only a few people should have to do with it, in order that the
tradition of human knowledge may not perish, and particularly that
there may be no want of intellectual athletes to confute the sophisms
of the heretics. For all others, grammar, morals, and religious
teaching ('litterae sacrae') suffice. Culture and education would thus
return wholly into the charge of the monks, and as, in his opinion, the
'most learned and the most pious' are to rule over the States and
empires, these rulers would also be monks. Whether he really foresaw
this conclusion, we need not inquire.
A more childish method of reasoning cannot be imagined. The simple
reflection that the newborn antiquity and the boundless enlargement of
human thought and knowledge which was due to it, might give splendid
confirmation to a religion able to adapt itself thereto, seems never
even to have occurred to the good man.
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