How far Paul II was justified in calling his
Abbreviators and their friends to account for their paganism, is
certainly a matter of great doubt, as his biographer and chief victim,
Platina, has shown a masterly skill in explaining his vindictiveness on
other grounds, and especially in making him play a ludicrous figure.
The charges of infidelity, paganism, denial of immortality, and so
forth, were not made against the accused till the charge of high
treason had broken down. Paul, indeed, if we are correctly informed
about him, was by no means the man to judge of intellectual things. It
was he who exhorted the Romans to teach their children nothing beyond
reading and writing. His priestly narrowness of views reminds us of
Savonarola, with the difference that Paul might fairly have been told
that he and his like were in great part to blame if culture made men
hostile to religion. It cannot, nevertheless, be doubted that he felt a
real anxiety about the pagan tendencies which surrounded him. And what,
in truth, may not the humanists have allowed themselves at the court of
the profligate pagan, Sigismondo Malatesta, How far these men,
destitute for the most part of fixed principle, ventured to go,
depended assuredly on the sort of influences they were exposed to. Nor
could they treat of Christianity without paganizing it.
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