Consensus Iesuitarum et Christianorum in doctrina religionis. Ubi examinantur Propositiones Confeßionis Augustinianae: quibus ceu Catholicis pronunciatis, D. Hieronymus Torrensis Iesuita, summam totius Iesuiticae Theologiae complecti voluit.
8vo (15.5 x 9.4 cm), [24], 167 pp. Occasional underlining in light brown ink in an early hand. Bound in modern quarter vellum. Inner margin of title and several leaves reinforced, otherwise a very good copy, pages clean and fresh. Very rare second edition (first, 1568) of this early attack on the Jesuits, written as part of a wider tug-of-war between the Protestants and the Catholics over the right to the teachings of St. Augustine. It provides an early Protestant reaction to the Jesuits’ use of print in polemical disputes, which would come to be a particular trademark in the Society’s vigorous defence of the Church against heretics. “There is general consensus among historians that Augustine was an important intellectual force behind the Reformation. Indeed, as the Oxford church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch recently argued, the dramatic development was the result of the ‘explosive power of an idea,’ an idea that he identified as ‘a new statement of Augustine’s ideas on salvation.’ In emphasizing that salvation depended on faith exclusively, Martin Luther and his Protestant supporters claimed that Augustine was ‘completely on their side” (Visser, Reading Augustine in the Reformation, p. 4). Wilhelm Bidembach (1538-72), a Lutheran preacher, here attacks the Jesuit Jerónimo Torres’ synopsis of Augustine’s Confessions, itself intended to reclaim the saint from Erasmus’ questionable edition of Augustine’s works (Basel, 1528-9). Bidembach’s treatise is just as inflammatory as Torres’ own polemic, presenting a thorough catalogue of “Jesuit” beliefs versus those of “Christians”. Each Jesuit “proposition” is followed by a lengthy “Christian” response drawing on the works of Augustine to prove the point: these propositions range from obvious doctrinal matters (“to be Christian is to follow the Pope”), to points of liturgy (“Water is to be mixed with wine in the holy chalice”), to matters of church governance (“monks who leave their monastery are damned” and “the Church Fathers are infallible judges upon modern matters”). The very founding of the Jesuits in 1540 was necessitated by the urgent need to defend the faith against Protestant heretics, and the Jesuits soon became known as the “watch dogs” of the Church. One peculiarly Jesuit trademark of this “militant” approach to the Church’s enemies was to attack them vociferously in print, sparking numerous polemical battles and “pamphlet wars”, of which the present work is a remarkably early example. OCLC shows just two U.S. copies of any edition of Bidembach’s work (Emory and Gonzaga, both holding the first edition of 1568). According to De Backer-Sommervogel, the work also appeared in a collection entitled Doctrinae Iesuitarum praecipua capita (1584), held by Mercer (GA), the Library of Congress, SMU, and NYPL.
* VD 16 B 5363; De Backer-Sommervogel VIII: 128; cf. Arnoud Visser, Reading Augustine in the Reformation (2011)
Price: $1,450.00