ABSTRACT
Scholasticism and experimental science were never two mutually exclusive and opposed intellectual forces in Counter-Reformation Europe, any more than were Augustinianism and scholasticism. The argument that Catholic Europe, in and after the Counter-Reformation, suffered economic stagnation and relative decline is based, however, on more than an antithesis between scientific discovery and the neo-scholasticism of Suarez and certain other Jesuits. A failure to apply technological advances to manufacture, and the perpetuation of a large, and celibate, clerical estate in Catholic society, are taken to be two aspects of the deleterious effects of Catholic reassertion. The promotion of charity in Catholic Europe, in the Counter-Reformation, was, furthermore, not merely indiscriminate. Protestant teaching, against which the Tridentine decrees were reacting, was not in all senses innovatory. Luther condemned the Copernican theory, because it conflicted with biblical literalism. The Council of Trent asserted the contested canonical authenticity of the apocryphal books of the Old Testament, which Protestant critics rejected.
