Marulić\u27s Conception of the Mystery of Church

At the transition from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, the Church was deep in crisis, a crisis that encompassed all its layers, the hierarchy, the orders, and the ordinary believer. It seems that in the whole history of the Church there was no sorrier a period than that in which our Marko Marulić lived (1450-1524). This is the period between Pope Nicholas V and Adrian VI, a period in which popes like Alexander VI (1492-1503) and Leo X (1503-1521) appeared. Scandals and abuses connected with the popes, not to mention other senior and junior clerics, were so numerous that it seemed that the end of the world had come. About 1500, indeed, the end of the world was actually expected, and immorality and the abuse of ecclesiastical position were a sign that the end was closer. The moral backsliding weakened the authority and influence of the Church in public life, and in consequence the feeling of faith and piety among many of the communicants. From many quarters came voices demanding renovatio, the reform of the Church in its head and its limbs. One of the many who not only longed for the renovation of the Church but also was active in carrying it out was Marko Marulić. In his life and his works he can be numbered among the not exactly abundant factors who preceded and prepared the way for the great reformation of the Church that took place after the Council of Trent (1545-1563). In spite of all the human abuses that he saw in it, for Marulić the Church was the work of God: it was divine and human, heavenly and earthly, eternal and temporal. The firmest rock that the Church was built on was Jesus Christ himself, the head of the Church and its founder. He, God and man, was a warrant that the Church would last until the end of the world and that no power, human or diabolic, could overturn it, however hard it tried. Marulić was not a member of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He was an ordinary believer, in today’s terms, a layman. However, in his writings Marulić did present himself as vir ecclesiasticus, a man of the church, who, at the time when even the popes were not up to their task, came out in the defence and dissemination of the faith and the defence of the mission of the Church and its supernatural origin. In everything that he wrote, proposed and championed, he shows that he wanted to remain faithful to the teachings of the Church, and did not wish to state anything not approved by the official doctrine of the Church. Not primarily from fear of censorship, but from the belief that the Church was a thing of God, that to which Jesus Christ, the one Truth, had confided the teaching of the truth and the spreading of the gospel. Marulić deliberately put himself at the service of the spreading of this truth. Reacting to the distorted Christianity eroded by immorality, many of the humanists of Marulić’s time went looking for some other wisdom. They took delight in the riches of the literature of antiquity, found teachers of wisdoms in other religions, endeavouring to reconcile them with Christianity. In short, abandoning the study of the Church, they no longer knew what to do with Christ, who became just one more in a line of teachers of wisdom and morality. Marulić, layman and Christian Humanist, never, on the other hand, abandoned the doctirne of the Church. He presented himself as an unshakeable believer who served the dissemination of the faith and the renovation of the Church. His works, accepted and happily read by generations of believers, particularly by the Religious, were part of the pre-Counter-Reformation renewal, and prepared the ground for the Council of Trent