The Author of the Book.
Richard de Bury (1281-1345), so called from being born near Bury St. Edmunds,
was the son of Sir Richard Aungerville. He studied at Oxford; and was
subsequently chosen to be tutor to Prince Edward of Windsor, afterwards Edward
III. His loyalty to the cause of Queen Isabella and the Prince involved him in
danger. On the accession of his pupil he was made successively Cofferer,
Treasurer of the Wardrobe, Archdeacon of Northampton, Prebendary of Lincoln,
Sarum, and Lichfield, Keeper of the Privy Purse, Ambassador on two occasions to
Pope John XXII, who appointed him a chaplain of the papal chapel, Dean of
Wells, and ultimately, at the end of the year 1333, Bishop of Durham; the King
and Queen, the King of Scots, and all the magnates north of the Trent, together
with a multitude of nobles and many others, were present at his enthronization.
It is noteworthy that during his stay at Avignon, probably in 1330, he made the
acquaintance of Petrarch, who has left us a brief account of their intercourse.
In 1332 Richard visited Cambridge, as one of the King's commissioners, to
inquire into the state of the King's Scholars there, and perhaps then became a
member of the Gild of St. Mary--one of the two gilds which founded Corpus
Christi College.
In 1334 he became High
Chancellor of England, and Treasurer in 1336, resigning the former office in
1335, so that he might help the King in dealing with affairs abroad and in
Scotland, and took a most distinguished part in diplomatic negociations between
England and France. In 1339 he was again in his bishopric. Thereafter his name
occurs often among those appointed to treat of peace with Philip of France, and
with Bruce of Scotland. It appears that he was not in Parliament in 1344.
Wasted by long sickness--longa infirmitate decoctus--on the 14th of April,
1345, Richard de Bury died at Auckland, and was buried in Durham Cathedral.
Dominus Ricardus de
Bury migravit ad Dominum.
The Bishop as
Booklover. According to the concluding note, the Philobiblon was completed on
the bishop's fifty-eighth birthday, the 24th of January, 1345, so that even
though weakened by illness, Richard must have been actively engaged in his
literary efforts to the very end of his generous and noble life. His
enthusiastic devoted biographer Chambre[1] gives a vivid account of the
bishop's bookloving propensities, supplementary to what can be gathered from
the Philobiblon itself. "Iste summe delectabatur in multitudine librorum;
he had more books, as was commonly reported, than all the other English bishops
put together. He had a separate library in each of his residences, and wherever
he was residing, so many books lay about his bed-chamber, that it was hardly
possible to stand or move without treading upon them. All the time he could
spare from business was devoted either to religious offices or to his books.
Every day while at table he would have a book read to him, unless some special
guest were present, and afterwards would engage in discussion on the subject of
the reading. The haughty Anthony Bec delighted in the appendages of royalty--to
be addressed by nobles kneeling, and to be waited on in his presence-chamber
and at his table by Knights bare-headed and standing; but De Bury loved to
surround himself with learned scholars. Among these were such men as Thomas
Bradwardine, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, and author of the De Causa
Dei; Richard Fitzralph, afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, and famous for his
hostility to the mendicant orders; Walter Burley, who dedicated to him a
translation of the Politics of Aristototle made at his suggestion; John
Mauduit, the astronomer; Robert Holkot, author of many books; Richard de
Kilvington; Richard Benworth, afterwards Bishop of London; and Walter Seagrave,
who became Dean of Chichester."[2]
The Bishop's Books. In
the Philobiblon, Richard de Bury frankly and clearly describes his means and
method of collecting books. Anyhow his object was clearly not selfish. The
treatise contains his rules for the library of the new College at Oxford
--Durham College (where Trinity College now stands)--which he practically
founded, though his successor, Bishop Hatfield, carried the scheme into effect.
It is traditionally reported that Richard's books were sent, in his lifetime or
after his death, to the house of the Durham Benedictines at Oxford, and there
remained until the dissolution of the College by Henry VIII., when they were
dispersed, some going into Duke Humphrey's (the University) library, others to
Balliol College, and the remainder passing into the hands of Dr. George Owen,
who purchased the site of the dissolved College.[3]
Unfortunately, the
"special catalogue" of his books prepared by Richard has not come
down to us; but "from his own book and from the books cited in the works
of his friends and housemates, who may reasonably be supposed to have drawn
largely from the bishop's collection, it would be possible to restore a
hypothetical but not improbable Bibliotheca Ricardi de Bury. The difficulty
would be with that contemporary literature, which they would think below the
dignity of quotation, but which we know the Bishop collected."
Early Editions of the
Philobiblon. The book was first printed at Cologne in 1473, at Spires in 1483,
and at Paris in 1500. The first English edition appeared in 1598-9, edited by
Thomas James, Bodley's first librarian. Other editions appeared in Germany in
1610, 1614, 1674 and 1703; at Paris in 1856; at Albany in 1861. The texts were,
with the exception of those issued in 1483 and 1599, based on the 1473 edition;
though the French edition and translation of 1856, prepared by M. Cocheris,
claimed to be a critical version, it left the text untouched, and merely gave
the various readings of the three Paris manuscripts at the foot of the pages;
these readings are moreover badly chosen, and the faults of the version are
further to be referred to the use of the ill-printed 1703 edition as copy.
In 1832 there appeared
an anonymous English translation, now known to have been by J. B. Inglis; it
followed the edition of 1473, with all its errors and inaccuracies.
Mr. E. C. Thomas'
Text.--The first true text of the Philobiblon, the result of a careful
examination of twenty-eight MSS., and of the various printed editions, appeared
in the year 1888:--
"The Philobiblon
of Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, Treasurer and Chancellor of Edward III,
edited and translated by Ernest C. Thomas, Barrister-at-law, late Scholar of
Trinity College, Oxford, and Librarian of the Oxford Union. London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, & Co."
For fifteen years the
enthusiastic editor--an ideal Bibliophile--had toiled at his labour of love,
and his work was on all sides received with the recognition due to his monumental
achievement. To the great loss of English learning, he did not long survive the
conclusion of his labours. The very limited edition of the work was soon
exhausted, and it is by the most generous permission of his father, Mr. John
Thomas, of Lower Broughton, Manchester, that the translation--the only
trustworthy rendering of Richard de Bury's precious treatise--is now, for the
first time, made accessible to the larger book-loving public, and fittingly
inaugurates the present series of English classics. The general Editor desires
to express his best thanks to Mr. John Thomas, as also to Messrs. Kegan Paul,
for their kindness in allowing him to avail himself of the materials included
in the 1888 edition of the work. He has attempted, in the brief Preface and
Notes, to condense Mr. Thomas' labours in such a way as would have been
acceptable to the lamented scholar, and though he has made bold to explain some
few textual difficulties, and to add some few references, he would fain hope
that these additions have been made with modest caution--with the reverence due
to the unstinted toil of a Bibliophile after Richard de Bury's own pattern. Yet
once again Richard de Bury's Philobiblon, edited and translated into English by
E. C. Thomas, is presented to new generations of book-lovers:--
"LIBRORUM DILECTORIBUS."
[1] Cp. Surtees Society's edition of Scriptores Tres; also Wharton's
Anglia Sacra. [2] An unsuccessful attempt has been made to transfer the
authorship of the book to Robert Holkot. Various theories have been advanced
against Richard's claims. It is noteworthy that his contemporary Adam Murimuth
disparages him as "mediocriter literatus, volens tamen magnus clericus
reputari," but such disparagement must be taken with the utmost caution.
The really difficult fact to be accounted for is the omission on the part of
Chambre to mention the book. [3] Mr. J. W. Clark puts the matter as
follows:--"Durham College, maintained by the Benedictines of Durham, was
supplied with books from the mother-house, lists of which have been preserved;
and subsequently a library was built there to contain the collection bequeathed
in 1345 by Richard de Bury" (The Care of Books, p. 142). Mr. Thomas points
out that De Bury's executors sold at least some portion of his books; and,
moreover, his biographer says nothing of a library at Oxford. Possibly the
scheme was never carried out. In the British Museum (Roy. 13 D. iv. 3) is a
large folio MS. of the works of John of Salisbury, which was one of the books
bought back from the Bishop's executors. PROLOGUE.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
I THAT THE TREASURE OF
WISDOM IS CHIEFLY CONTAINED IN BOOKS . . . . . . . . . . . 7
II THE DEGREE OF
AFFECTION THAT IS PROPERLY DUE TO BOOKS. . . . . . . . . . . . .14
III WHAT WE ARE TO
THINK OF THE PRICE IN THE BUYING OF BOOKS. . . . . . . . . . .19
IV THE COMPLAINT OF
BOOKS AGAINST THE CLERGY ALREADY PROMOTED . . . . . . . . . .22
V THE COMPLAINT OF
BOOKS AGAINST THE POSSESSIONERS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34
VI THE COMPLAINT OF
BOOKS AGAINST THE MENDICANTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38
VII THE COMPLAINT OF
BOOKS AGAINST WARS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46
VIII OF THE NUMEROUS
OPPORTUNITIES WE HAVE HAD OF COLLECTING A STORE OF BOOKS . .53
IX HOW, ALTHOUGH WE
PREFERRED THE WORKS OF THE ANCIENTS,
WE HAVE NOT CONDEMNED THE STUDIES OF THE MODERNS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.65
X OF THE GRADUAL
PERFECTING OF BOOKS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72
XI WHY WE HAVE PREFERRED
BOOKS OF LIBERAL LEARNING TO BOOKS OF LAW. . . . . . . .77
XII WHY WE HAVE CAUSED
BOOKS OF GRAMMAR TO BE SO DILIGENTLY PREPARED. . . . . . .81
XIII WHY WE HAVE NOT
WHOLLY NEGLECTED THE FABLES OF THE POETS . . . . . . . . . .83
XIV WHO OUGHT TO BE SPECIAL
LOVERS OF BOOKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .88
XV OF THE ADVANTAGES OF
THE LOVE OF BOOKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .91
XVI THAT IT IS
MERITORIOUS TO WRITE NEW BOOKS AND TO RENEW THE OLD . . . . . . .98
XVII OF SHOWING DUE
PROPRIETY IN THE CUSTODY OF BOOKS. . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
XVIII SHOWETH THAT WE
HAVE COLLECTED SO GREAT STORE OF BOOKS
FOR THE COMMON BENEFIT OF SCHOLARS AND NOT ONLY FOR OUR OWN PLEASURE . . . . .
110
XIX OF THE MANNER OF
LENDING ALL OUR BOOKS TO STUDENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
XX AN EXHORTATION TO
SCHOLARS TO REQUITE US BY PIOUS PRAYERS . . . . . . . . . 118
TO all the faithful of
Christ to whom the tenor of these presents may come, Richard de Bury, by the
divine mercy Bishop of Durham, wisheth everlasting salvation in the Lord and to
present continually a pious memorial of himself before God, alike in his
lifetime and after his death.
What shall I render
unto the Lord for all His benefits towards me? asks the most devout Psalmist,
an invincible King and first among the prophets; in which most grateful
question he approves himself a willing thank-offerer, a multifarious debtor,
and one who wishes for a holier counsellor than himself: agreeing with
Aristotle, the chief of philosophers, who shows (in the 3rd and 6th books of
his Ethics) that all action depends upon counsel.
And indeed if so
wonderful a prophet, having a fore-knowledge of divine secrets, wished so
anxiously to consider how he might gratefully repay the blessings graciously
bestowed, what can we fitly do, who are but rude thanksgivers and most greedy
receivers, laden with infinite divine benefits? Assuredly we ought with anxious
deliberation and abundant consideration, having first invoked the Sevenfold
Spirit, that it may burn in our musings as an illuminating fire, fervently to
prepare a way without hinderance, that the bestower of all things may be
cheerfully worshipped in return for the gifts that He has bestowed, that our
neighbour may be relieved of his burden, and that the guilt contracted by
sinners every day may be redeemed by the atonement of almsgiving.
Forewarned therefore
through the admonition of the Psalmist's devotion by Him who alone prevents and
perfects the goodwill of man, without Whom we have no power even so much as to
think, and Whose gift we doubt not it is, if we have done anything good, we
have diligently inquired and considered in our own heart as well as with
others, what among the good offices of various works of piety would most please
the Almighty, and would be more beneficial to the Church Militant. And lo!
there soon occurred to our contemplation a host of unhappy, nay, rather of
elect scholars, in whom God the Creator and Nature His handmaid planted the
roots of excellent morals and of famous sciences, but whom the poverty of their
circumstances so oppressed that before the frown of adverse fortune the seeds
of excellence, so fruitful in the cultivated field of youth, not being watered
by the rain that they require, are forced to wither away. Thus it happens that
"bright virtue lurks buried in obscurity," to use the words of
Boethius, and burning lights are not put under a bushel, but for want of oil
are utterly extinguished. Thus the field, so full of flower in Spring, has
withered up before harvest time; thus wheat degenerates to tares, and vines
into the wild vines, and thus olives run into the wild olive; the tender stems
rot away altogether, and those who might have grown up into strong pillars of
the Church, being endowed with the capacity of a subtle intellect, abandon the
schools of learning. With poverty only as their stepmother, they are repelled
violently from the nectared cup of philosophy as soon as they have tasted of it
and have become more fiercely thirsty by the very taste. Though fit for the
liberal arts and disposed to study the sacred writings alone, being deprived of
the aid of their friends, by a kind of apostasy they return to the mechanical
arts solely to gain a livelihood, to the loss of the Church and the degradation
of the whole clergy. Thus Mother Church conceiving sons is compelled to
miscarry, nay, some misshapen monster is born untimely from her womb, and for
lack of that little with which Nature is contented, she loses excellent pupils,
who might afterwards become champions and athletes of the faith. Alas, how
suddenly the woof is cut, while the hand of the weaver is beginning his work!
Alas, how the sun is eclipsed in the brightness of the dawn, and the planet in
its course is hurled backwards, and, while it bears the nature and likeness of
a star suddenly drops and becomes a meteor! What more piteous sight can the
pious man behold? What can more sharply stir the bowels of his pity? What can
more easily melt a heart hard as an anvil into hot tears? On the other hand,
let us recall from past experience how much it has profited the whole Christian
commonwealth, not indeed to enervate students with the delights of a
Sardanapalus or the riches of a Croesus, but rather to support them in their poverty
with the frugal means that become the scholar. How many have we seen with our
eyes, how many have we read of in books, who, distinguished by no pride of
birth, and rejoicing in no rich inheritance, but supported only by the piety of
the good, have made their way to apostolic chairs, have most worthily presided
over faithful subjects, have bent the necks of the proud and lofty to the
ecclesiastical yoke and have extended further the liberties of the Church!
Accordingly, having
taken a survey of human necessities in every direction, with a view to bestow
our charity upon them, our compassionate inclinations have chosen to bear pious
aid to this calamitous class of men, in whom there is nevertheless such hope of
advantage to the Church, and to provide for them, not only in respect of things
necessary to their support, but much more in respect of the books so useful to
their studies. To this end, most acceptable in the sight of God, our attention
has long been unweariedly devoted. This ecstatic love has carried us away so
powerfully, that we have resigned all thoughts of other earthly things, and
have given ourselves up to a passion for acquiring books. That our intent and
purpose, therefore, may be known to posterity as well as to our contemporaries,
and that we may for ever stop the perverse tongues of gossipers as far as we
are concerned, we have published a little treatise written in the lightest
style of the moderns; for it is ridiculous to find a slight matter treated of
in a pompous style. And this treatise (divided into twenty chapters) will clear
the love we have had for books from the charge of excess, will expound the
purpose of our intense devotion, and will narrate more clearly than light all
the circumstances of our undertaking. And because it principally treats of the
love of books, we have chosen, after the fashion of the ancient Romans, fondly
to name it by a Greek word, Philobiblon.
THE desirable treasure
of wisdom and science, which all men desire by an instinct of nature,
infinitely surpasses all the riches of the world; in respect of which precious
stones are worthless; in comparison with which silver is as clay and pure gold
is as a little sand; at whose splendour the sun and moon are dark to look upon;
compared with whose marvellous sweetness honey and manna are bitter to the
taste. O value of wisdom that fadeth not away with time, virtue ever
flourishing, that cleanseth its possessor from all venom! O heavenly gift of the
divine bounty, descending from the Father of lights, that thou mayest exalt the
rational soul to the very heavens! Thou art the celestial nourishment of the
intellect, which those who eat shall still hunger and those who drink shall
still thirst, and the gladdening harmony of the languishing soul which he that
hears shall never be confounded. Thou art the moderator and rule of morals,
which he who follows shall not sin. By thee kings reign and princes decree
justice. By thee, rid of their native rudeness, their minds and tongues being
polished, the thorns of vice being torn up by the roots, those men attain high
places of honour, and become fathers of their country, and companions of
princes, who without thee would have melted their spears into pruning-hooks and
ploughshares, or would perhaps be feeding swine with the prodigal.
Where dost thou chiefly
lie hidden, O most elect treasure! and where shall thirsting souls discover
thee?
Certes, thou hast
placed thy tabernacle in books, where the Most High, the Light of lights, the
Book of Life, has established thee. There everyone who asks receiveth thee, and
everyone who seeks finds thee, and to everyone that knocketh boldly it is
speedily opened. Therein the cherubim spread out their wings, that the intellect
of the students may ascend and look from pole to pole, from the east and west,
from the north and from the south. Therein the mighty and incomprehensible God
Himself is apprehensibly contained and worshipped; therein is revealed the
nature of things celestial, terrestrial, and infernal; therein are discerned
the laws by which every state is administered, the offices of the celestial
hierarchy are distinguished, and the tyrannies of demons described, such as
neither the ideas of Plato transcend, nor the chair of Crato contained.
In books I find the
dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike
affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are
corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he
generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God
had provided mortals with the remedy of books.
Alexander, the
conqueror of the earth, Julius, the invader of Rome and of the world, who, the
first in war and arts, assumed universal empire under his single rule, faithful
Fabricius and stern Cato, would now have been unknown to fame, if the aid of
books had been wanting. Towers have been razed to the ground; cities have been
overthrown; triumphal arches have perished from decay; nor can either pope or
king find any means of more easily conferring the privilege of perpetuity than
by books. The book that he has made renders its author this service in return,
that so long as the book survives its author remains immortal and cannot die,
as Ptolemy declares in the Prologue to his Almagest: He is not dead, he says,
who has given life to science
Who therefore will
limit by anything of another kind the price of the infinite treasure of books,
from which the scribe who is instructed bringeth forth things new and old?
Truth that triumphs over all things, which overcomes the king, wine, and women,
which it is reckoned holy to honour before friendship, which is the way without
turning and the life without end, which holy Boethius considers to be threefold
in thought, speech, and writing, seems to remain more usefully and to fructify
to greater profit in books. For the meaning of the voice perishes with the
sound; truth latent in the mind is wisdom that is hid and treasure that is not
seen; but truth which shines forth in books desires to manifest itself to every
impressionable sense. It commends itself to the sight when it is read, to the
hearing when it is heard, and moreover in a manner to the touch, when it suffers
itself to be transcribed, bound, corrected, and preserved. The undisclosed
truth of the mind, although it is the possession of the noble soul, yet because
it lacks a companion, is not certainly known to be delightful, while neither
sight nor hearing takes account of it. Further the truth of the voice is patent
only to the ear and eludes the sight, which reveals to us more of the qualities
of things, and linked with the subtlest of motions begins and perishes as it
were in a breath. But the written truth of books, not transient but permanent,
plainly offers itself to be observed, and by means of the pervious spherules of
the eyes, passing through the vestibule of perception and the courts of
imagination, enters the chamber of intellect, taking its place in the couch of
memory, where it engenders the eternal truth of the mind.
Finally we must
consider what pleasantness of teaching there is in books, how easy, how secret!
How safely we lay bare the poverty of human ignorance to books without feeling
any shame! They are masters who instruct us without rod or ferule, without
angry words, without clothes or money. If you come to them they are not asleep;
if you ask and inquire of them they do not withdraw themselves; they do not
chide if you make mistakes; they do not laugh at you if you are ignorant. O
books, who alone are liberal and free, who give to all who ask of you and
enfranchise all who serve you faithfully! by how many thousand types are ye
commended to learned men in the Scriptures given us by inspiration of God! For
ye are the minds of profoundest wisdom, to which the wise man sends his son
that he may dig out treasures: Prov. ii. Ye are the wells of living waters,
which father Abraham first digged, Isaac digged again, and which the
Philistines strive to fill up: Gen. xxvi. Ye are indeed the most delightful
ears of corn, full of grain, to be rubbed only by apostolic hands, that the
sweetest food may be produced for hungry souls: Matt. xii. Ye are the golden
pots in which manna is stored, and rocks flowing with honey, nay, combs of
honey, most plenteous udders of the milk of life, garners ever full; ye are the
tree of life and the fourfold river of Paradise, by which the human mind is
nourished, and the thirsty intellect is watered and refreshed. Ye are the ark
of Noah and the ladder of Jacob, and the troughs by which the young of those
who look therein are coloured; ye are the stones of testimony and the pitchers
holding the lamps of Gideon, the scrip of David, from which the smoothest
stones are taken for the slaying of Goliath. Ye are the golden vessels of the
temple, the arms of the soldiers of the Church with which to quench all the
fiery darts of the wicked, fruitful olives, vines of Engadi, fig-trees that are
never barren, burning lamps always to be held in readiness--and all the noblest
comparisons of Scripture may be applied to books, if we choose to speak in
figures.
SINCE the degree of
affection a thing deserves depends upon the degree of its value, and the
previous chapter shows that the value of books is unspeakable, it is quite
clear to the reader what is the probable conclusion from this. I say probable,
for in moral science we do not insist upon demonstration, remembering that the
educated man seeks such degree of certainty as he perceives the subject-matter
will bear, as Aristotle testifies in the first book of his Ethics. For Tully
does not appeal to Euclid, nor does Euclid rely upon Tully. This at all events
we endeavour to prove, whether by logic or rhetoric, that all riches and all
delights whatsoever yield place to books in the spiritual mind, wherein the
Spirit which is charity ordereth charity. Now in the first place, because
wisdom is contained in books more than all mortals understand, and wisdom
thinks lightly of riches, as the foregoing chapter declares. Furthermore,
Aristotle, in his Problems, determines the question, why the ancients proposed
prizes to the stronger in gymnastic and corporeal contests, but never awarded
any prize for wisdom. This question he solves as follows: In gymnastic
exercises the prize is better and more desirable than that for which it is
bestowed; but it is certain that nothing is better than wisdom: wherefore no
prize could be assigned for wisdom. And therefore neither riches nor delights
are more excellent than wisdom. Again, only the fool will deny that friendship
is to be preferred to riches, since the wisest of men testifies this; but the
chief of philosophers honours truth before friendship, and the truthful
Zorobabel prefers it to all things. Riches, then, are less than truth. Now
truth is chiefly maintained and contained in holy books--nay, they are written
truth itself, since by books we do not now mean the materials of which they are
made. Wherefore riches are less than books, especially as the most precious of
all riches are friends, as Boethius testifies in the second book of his
Consolation; to whom the truth of books according to Aristotle is to be
preferred. Moreover, since we know that riches first and chiefly appertain to
the support of the body only, while the virtue of books is the perfection of
reason, which is properly speaking the happiness of man, it appears that books
to the man who uses his reason are dearer than riches. Furthermore, that by
which the faith is more easily defended, more widely spread, more clearly
preached, ought to be more desirable to the faithful. But this is the truth
written in books, which our Saviour plainly showed, when he was about to
contend stoutly against the Tempter, girding himself with the shield of truth
and indeed of written truth, declaring "it is written" of what he was
about to utter with his voice.
And, again, no one
doubts that happiness is to be preferred to riches. But happiness consists in
the operation of the noblest and diviner of the faculties that we possess--when
the whole mind is occupied in contemplating the truth of wisdom, which is the
most delectable of all our virtuous activities, as the prince of philosophers
declares in the tenth book of the Ethics, on which account it is that
philosophy is held to have wondrous pleasures in respect of purity and
solidity, as he goes on to say. But the contemplation of truth is never more
perfect than in books, where the act of imagination perpetuated by books does
not suffer the operation of the intellect upon the truths that it has seen to
suffer interruption. Wherefore books appear to be the most immediate
instruments of speculative delight, and therefore Aristotle, the sun of philosophic
truth, in considering the principles of choice, teaches that in itself to
philosophize is more desirable than to be rich, although in certain cases, as
where for instance one is in need of necessaries, it may be more desirable to
be rich than to philosophize.
Moreover, since books
are the aptest teachers, as the previous chapter assumes, it is fitting to
bestow on them the honour and the affection that we owe to our teachers. In
fine, since all men naturally desire to know, and since by means of books we
can attain the knowledge of the ancients, which is to be desired beyond all
riches, what man living according to nature would not feel the desire of books?
And although we know that swine trample pearls under foot, the wise man will
not therefore be deterred from gathering the pearls that lie before him. A
library of wisdom, then, is more precious than all wealth, and all things that
are desirable cannot be compared to it. Whoever therefore claims to be zealous
of truth, of happiness, of wisdom or knowledge, aye, even of the faith, must
needs become a lover of books.
FROM what has been said
we draw this corollary welcome to us, but (as we believe) acceptable to few:
namely, that no dearness of price ought to hinder a man from the buying of
books, if he has the money that is demanded for them, unless it be to withstand
the malice of the seller or to await a more favourable opportunity of buying.
For if it is wisdom only that makes the price of books, which is an infinite
treasure to mankind, and if the value of books is unspeakable, as the premises
show, how shall the bargain be shown to be dear where an infinite good is being
bought? Wherefore, that books are to be gladly bought and unwillingly sold,
Solomon, the sun of men, exhorts us in the Proverbs: Buy the truth, he says,
and sell not wisdom. But what we are trying to show by rhetoric or logic, let
us prove by examples from history. The arch-philosopher Aristotle, whom
Averroes regards as the law of Nature, bought a few books of Speusippus
straightway after his death for 72,000 sesterces. Plato, before him in time, but
after him in learning, bought the book of Philolaus the Pythagorean, from which
he is said to have taken the Timæus, for 10,000 denaries, as Aulus Gellius
relates in the Noctes Atticæ. Now Aulus Gellius relates this that the foolish
may consider how wise men despise money in comparison with books. And on the
other hand, that we may know that folly and pride go together, let us here
relate the folly of Tarquin the Proud in despising books, as also related by
Aulus Gellius. An old woman, utterly unknown, is said to have come to Tarquin
the Proud, the seventh king of Rome, offering to sell nine books, in which (as
she declared) sacred oracles were contained, but she asked an immense sum for
them, insomuch that the king said she was mad. In anger she flung three books
into the fire, and still asked the same sum for the rest. When the king refused
it, again she flung three others into the fire and still asked the same price
for the three that were left. At last, astonied beyond measure, Tarquin was
glad to pay for three books the same price for which he might have bought nine.
The old woman straightway disappeared, and was never seen before or after.
These were the Sibylline books, which the Romans consulted as a divine oracle
by some one of the Quindecemvirs, and this is believed to have been the origin
of the Quindecemvirate. What did this Sibyl teach the proud king by this bold
deed, except that the vessels of wisdom, holy books, exceed all human
estimation; and, as Gregory says of the kingdom of Heaven: They are worth all
that thou hast?
A GENERATION of vipers
destroying their own parent and base offspring of the ungrateful cuckoo, who
when he has grown strong slays his nurse, the giver of his strength, are
degenerate clerks with regard to books. Bring it again to mind and consider
faithfully what ye receive through books, and ye will find that books are as it
were the creators of your distinction, without which other favourers would have
been wanting.
In sooth, while still
untrained and helpless ye crept up to us, ye spake as children, ye thought as
children, ye cried as children and begged to be made partakers of our milk. But
we being straightway moved by your tears gave you the breast of grammar to
suck, which ye plied continually with teeth and tongue, until ye lost your
native barbarousness and learned to speak with our tongues the mighty things of
God. And next we clad you with the goodly garments of philosophy, rhetoric and
dialectic, of which we had and have a store, while ye were naked as a tablet to
be painted on. For all the household of philosophy are clothed with garments,
that the nakedness and rawness of the intellect may be covered. After this,
providing you with the fourfold wings of the quadrivials that ye might be
winged like the seraphs and so mount above the cherubim, we sent you to a
friend at whose door, if only ye importunately knocked, ye might borrow the
three loaves of the Knowledge of the Trinity, in which consists the final
felicity of every sojourner below. Nay, if ye deny that ye had these
privileges, we boldly declare that ye either lost them by your carelessness, or
that through your sloth ye spurned them when offered to you. If these things
seem but a light matter to you, we will add yet greater things. Ye are a chosen
people, a royal priesthood, a holy race, ye are a peculiar people chosen into
the lot of God, ye are priests and ministers of God, nay, ye are called the
very Church of God, as though the laity were not to be called churchmen. Ye,
being preferred to the laity, sing psalms and hymns in the chancel, and,
serving the altar and living by the altar, make the true body of Christ,
wherein God Himself has honoured you not only above the laity, but even a
little higher than the angels. For to whom of His angels has He said at any
time: Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchisedech? Ye dispense
the patrimony of the crucified one to the poor, wherein it is required of
stewards that a man be found faithful. Ye are shepherds of the Lord's flock, as
well in example of life as in the word of doctrine, which is bound to repay you
with milk and wool.
Who are the givers of
all these things, O clerks? Is it not books? Do ye remember therefore, we pray,
how many and how great liberties and privileges are bestowed upon the clergy
through us? In truth, taught by us who are the vessels of wisdom and intellect,
ye ascend the teacher's chair and are called of men Rabbi. By us ye become
marvellous in the eyes of the laity, like great lights in the world, and
possess the dignities of the Church according to your various stations. By us,
while ye still lack the first down upon your cheeks, ye are established in your
early years and bear the tonsure on your heads, while the dread sentence of the
Church is heard: Touch not mine anointed and do my prophets no harm, and he who
has rashly touched them let him forthwith by his own blow be smitten violently
with the wound of an anathema. At length yielding your lives to wickedness,
reaching the two paths of Pythagoras, ye choose the left branch, and going
backward ye let go the lot of God which ye had first assumed, becoming
companions of thieves. And thus ever going from bad to worse, dyed with theft
and murder and manifold impurities, your fame and conscience stained by sins,
at the bidding of justice ye are confined in manacles and fetters, and are kept
to be punished by a most shameful death. Then your friend is put far away, nor
is there any to mourn your lot. Peter swears that he knows not the man: the
people cry to the judge: Crucify, crucify Him! If thou let this man go, thou
act not Cæsar's friend. Now all refuge has perished, for ye must stand before
the judgment-seat, and there is no appeal, but only hanging is in store for
you. While the wretched man's heart is thus filled with woe and only the
sorrowing Muses bedew their cheeks with tears, in his strait is heard on every
side the wailing appeal to us, and to avoid the danger of impending death he
shows the slight sign of the ancient tonsure which we bestowed upon him,
begging that we may be called to his aid and bear witness to the privilege
bestowed upon him. Then straightway touched with pity we run to meet the
prodigal son and snatch the fugitive slave from the gates of death. The book he
has not forgotten is handed to him to be read, and while with lips stammering
with fear he reads a few words, the power of the judge is loosed, the accuser
is withdrawn, and death is put to flight. O marvellous virtue of an empiric
verse! O saving antidote of dreadful ruin! O precious reading of the psalter,
which for this alone deserves to be called the book of life! Let the laity
undergo the judgment of the secular arm, that either sewn up in sacks they may
be carried out to Neptune, or planted in the earth may fructify for Pluto, or
may be offered amid the flames as a fattened holocaust to Vulcan, or at least
may be hung up as a victim to Juno: while our nursling at a single reading of
the book of life is handed over to the custody of the Bishop, and rigour is
changed to favour, and the forum being transferred from the laity, death is
routed by the clerk who is the nursling of books.
But now let us speak of
the clerks who are vessels of virtue. Which of you about to preach ascends the
pulpit or the rostrum without in some way consulting us? Which of you enters
the schools to teach or to dispute without relying upon our support? First of
all, it behoves you to eat the book with Ezechiel, that the belly of your
memory may be sweetened within, and thus as with the panther refreshed, to
whose breath all beasts and cattle long to approach, the sweet savour of the
spices it has eaten may shed a perfume without. Thus our nature secretly
working in our own, listeners hasten up gladly, as the load-stone draws the
iron nothing loth. What an infinite host of books lie at Paris or Athens, and
at the same time resound in Britain and in Rome! In truth, while resting they
yet move, and while retaining their own places they are carried about every way
to the minds of listeners. Finally, by the knowledge of literature, we
establish Priests, Bishops, Cardinals, and the Pope, that all things in the
ecclesiastical hierarchy may be fitly disposed. For it is from books that
everything of good that befalls the clerical condition takes its origin. But
let this suffice: for it pains us to recall what we have bestowed upon the
degenerate clergy, because whatever gifts are distributed to the ungrateful
seem to be lost rather than bestowed.
Let us next dwell a
little on the recital of the wrongs with which they requite us, the contempts
and cruelties of which we cannot recite an example in each kind, nay, scarcely
the main classes of the several wrongs. In the first place, we are expelled by
force and arms from the homes of the clergy, which are ours by hereditary
right, who were used to have cells of quietness in the inner chamber, but,
alas! in these unhappy times we are altogether exiled, suffering poverty
without the gates. For our places are seized now by dogs, now by hawks, now by
that biped beast whose cohabitation with the clergy was forbidden of old, from
which we have always taught our nurslings to flee more than from the asp and
the cockatrice; wherefore she, always jealous of the love of us, and never to
be appeased, at length seeing us in some corner protected only by the web of
some dead spider, with a frown abuses and reviles us with bitter words,
declaring us alone of all the furniture in the house to be unnecessary, and
complaining that we are useless for any household purpose, and advises that we
should speedily be converted into rich caps, sendal and silk and twice-dyed
purple, robes and furs, wool and linen: and, indeed, not without reason, if she
could see our inmost hearts, if she had listened to our secret counsels, if she
had read the book of Theophrastus or Valerius, or only heard the twenty-fifth
chapter of Ecclesiasticus with understanding ears.
And hence it is that we
have to mourn for the homes of which we have been unjustly robbed; and as to
our coverings, not that they have not been given to us, but that the coverings
anciently given to us have been torn by violent hands, insomuch that our soul
is bowed down to the dust, our belly cleaveth unto the earth. We suffer from
various diseases, enduring pains in our backs and sides; we lie with our limbs
unstrung by palsy, and there is no man who layeth it to heart, and no man who
provides a mollifying plaster. Our native whiteness that was clear with light
has turned to dun and yellow, so that no leech who should see us would doubt
that we are diseased with jaundice. Some of us are suffering from gout, as our
twisted extremities plainly show. The smoke and dust by which we are
continuously plagued have dulled the keenness of our visual rays, and are now
infecting our bleared eyes with ophthalmia. Within we are devoured by the
fierce gripings of our entrails, which hungry worms cease not to gnaw, and we
undergo the corruption of the two Lazaruses, nor is there anyone to anoint us
with balm of cedar, nor to cry to us who have been four days dead and already
stink, Lazarus come forth! No healing drug is bound around our cruel wounds,
which are so atrociously inflicted upon the innocent, and there is none to put
a plaster upon our ulcers; but ragged and shivering we are flung away into dark
corners, or in tears take our place with holy Job upon his dunghill, or--too
horrible to relate --are buried in the depths of the common sewers. The cushion
is withdrawn that should support our evangelical sides, which ought to have the
first claim upon the incomes of the clergy, and the common necessaries of life
thus be for ever provided for us, who are entrusted to their charge.
Again, we complain of
another sort of injury which is too often unjustly inflicted upon our persons.
We are sold for bondmen and bondwomen, and lie as hostages in taverns with no
one to redeem us. We fall a prey to the cruel shambles, where we see sheep and
cattle slaughtered not without pious tears, and where we die a thousand times
from such terrors as might frighten even the brave. We are handed over to Jews,
Saracens, heretics and infidels, whose poison we always dread above everything,
and by whom it is well known that some of our parents have been infected with
pestiferous venom. In sooth, we who should be treated as masters in the
sciences, and bear rule over the mechanics who should be subject to us, are
instead handed over to the government of subordinates, as though some supremely
noble monarch should be trodden under foot by rustic heels. Any seamster or
cobbler or tailor or artificer of any trade keeps us shut up in prison for the
luxurious and wanton pleasures of the clergy.
Now we would pursue a
new kind of injury by which we suffer alike in person and in fame, the dearest
thing we have. Our purity of race is diminished every day, while new authors'
names are imposed upon us by worthless compilers, translators, and
transformers, and losing our ancient nobility, while we are reborn in
successive generations, we become wholly degenerate; and thus against our will
the name of some wretched stepfather is affixed to us, and the sons are robbed
of the names of their true fathers. The verses of Virgil, while he was yet
living, were claimed by an impostor; and a certain Fidentinus mendaciously
usurped the works of Martial, whom Martial thus deservedly rebuked:
"The book you read
is, Fidentinus! mine,
Though read so badly,
't well may pass for thine!"
What marvel, then, if
when our authors are dead clerical apes use us to make broad their
phylacteries, since even while they are alive they try to seize us as soon as
we are published? Ah! how often ye pretend that we who are ancient are but
lately born, and try to pass us off as sons who are really fathers, calling us
who have made you clerks the production of your studies. Indeed, we derived our
origin from Athens, though we are now supposed to be from Rome; for Carmentis
was always the pilferer of Cadmus, and we who were but lately born in England,
will to-morrow be born again in Paris; and thence being carried to Bologna,
will obtain an Italian origin, based upon no affinity of blood. Alas! how ye
commit us to treacherous copyists to be written, how corruptly ye read us and
kill us by medication, while ye supposed ye were correcting us with pious zeal.
Oftentimes we have to endure barbarous interpreters, and those who are ignorant
of foreign idioms presume to translate us from one language into another; and
thus all propriety of speech is lost and our sense is shamefully mutilated
contrary to the meaning of the author! Truly noble would have been the
condition of books if it had not been for the presumption of the tower of
Babel, if but one kind of speech had been transmitted by the whole human race.
We will add the last
clause of our long lament, though far too short for the materials that we have.
For in us the natural use is changed to that which is against nature, while we
who are the light of faithful souls everywhere fall a prey to painters knowing
nought of letters, and are entrusted to goldsmiths to become, as though we were
not sacred vessels of wisdom, repositories of gold-leaf. We fall undeservedly
into the power of laymen, which is more bitter to us than any death, since they
have sold our people for nought, and our enemies themselves are our judges.
It is clear from what
we have said what infinite invectives we could hurl against the clergy, if we
did not think of our own reputation. For the soldier whose campaigns are over
venerates his shield and arms, and grateful Corydon shows regard for his
decaying team, harrow, flail and mattock, and every manual artificer for the
instruments of his craft; it is only the ungrateful cleric who despises and
neglects those things which have ever been the foundation of his honours.
THE venerable devotion
of the religious orders is wont to be solicitous in the care of books and to
delight in their society, as if they were the only riches. For some used to
write them with their own hands between the hours of prayer, and gave to the
making of books such intervals as they could secure and the times appointed for
the recreation of the body. By whose labours there are resplendent to-day in
most monasteries these sacred treasuries full of cherubic letters, for giving
the knowledge of salvation to the student and a delectable light to the paths
of the laity. O manual toil, happier than any agricultural task! O devout
solicitude, where neither Martha nor Mary deserves to be rebuked! O joyful
house, in which the fruitful Leah does not envy the beauteous Rachel, but
action and contemplation share each other's joys! O happy charge, destined to
benefit endless generations of posterity, with which no planting of trees, no
sowing of seeds, no pastoral delight in herds, no building of fortified camps
can be compared! Wherefore the memory of those fathers should be immortal, who
delighted only in the treasures of wisdom, who most laboriously provided
shining lamps against future darkness, and against hunger of hearing the Word
of God, most carefully prepared, not bread baked in the ashes, nor of barley,
nor musty, but unleavened loaves made of the finest wheat of divine wisdom,
with which hungry souls might be joyfully fed These men were the stoutest
champions of the Christian army, who defended our weakness by their most
valiant arms; they were in their time the most cunning takers of foxes, who
have left us their nets, that we might catch the young foxes, who cease not to
devour the growing vines. Of a truth, noble fathers, worthy of perpetual
benediction, ye would have been deservedly happy, if ye had been allowed to
beget offspring like yourselves, and to leave no degenerate or doubtful progeny
for the benefit of future times.
But, painful to relate,
now slothful Thersites handles the arms of Achilles and the choice trappings of
war-horses are spread upon lazy asses, winking owls lord it in the eagle's
nest, and the cowardly kite sits upon the perch of the hawk.
Liber Bacchus is ever
loved,
And is into their
bellies shoved,
By day and by night;
Liber Codex is
neglected,
And with scornful hand
rejected
Far out of their sight.
And as if the simple
monastic folk of modern times were deceived by a confusion of names, while
Liber Pater is preferred to Liber Patrum, the study of the monks nowadays is in
the emptying of cups and not the emending of books; to which they do not
hesitate to add the wanton music of Timotheus, jealous of chastity, and thus
the song of the merry-maker and not the chant of the mourner is become the
office of the monks. Flocks and fleeces, crops and granaries, leeks and
potherbs, drink and goblets, are nowadays the reading and study of the monks,
except a few elect ones, in whom lingers not the image but some slight vestige
of the fathers that preceded them. And again, no materials at all are furnished
us to commend the canons regular for their care or study of us, who though they
bear their name of honour from their twofold rule, yet have neglected the
notable clause of Augustine's rule, in which we are commended to his clergy in
these words: Let books be asked for each day at a given hour; he who asks for
them after the hour is not to receive them. Scarcely anyone observes this
devout rule of study after saying the prayers of the Church, but to care for
the things of this world and to look at the plough that has been left is
reckoned the highest wisdom. They take up bow and quiver, embrace arms and
shield, devote the tribute of alms to dogs and not to the poor, become the
slaves of dice and draughts, and of all such things as we are wont to forbid
even to the secular clergy, so that we need not marvel if they disdain to look
upon us, whom they see so much opposed to their mode of life.
Come then, reverend
fathers, deign to recall your fathers and devote yourselves more faithfully to
the study of holy books, without which all religion will stagger, without which
the virtue of devotion will dry up like a sherd, and without which ye can afford
no light to the world.
POOR in spirit, but
most rich in faith, off-scourings of the world and salt of the earth, despisers
of the world and fishers of men, how happy are ye, if suffering penury for
Christ ye know how to possess your souls in patience! For it is not want the
avenger of iniquity, nor the adverse fortune of your parents, nor violent
necessity that has thus oppressed you with beggary, but a devout will and
Christ-like election, by which ye have chosen that life as the best, which God
Almighty made man as well by word as by example declared to be the best. In
truth, ye are the latest offspring of the ever-fruitful Church, of late
divinely substituted for the Fathers and the Prophets, that your sound may go
forth into all the earth, and that instructed by our healthful doctrines ye may
preach before all kings and nations the invincible faith of Christ. Moreover,
that the faith of the Fathers is chiefly enshrined in books the second chapter
has sufficiently shown, from which it is clearer than light that ye ought to be
zealous lovers of books above all other Christians. Ye are commanded to sow
upon all waters, because the Most High is no respecter of persons, nor does the
Most Holy desire the death of sinners, who offered Himself to die for them, but
desires to heal the contrite in heart, to raise the fallen, and to correct the
perverse in the spirit of lenity. For which most salutary purpose our kindly
Mother Church has planted you freely, and having planted has watered you with
favours, and having watered you has established you with privileges, that ye
may be co-workers with pastors and curates in procuring the salvation of
faithful souls. Wherefore, that the order of Preachers was principally
instituted for the study of the Holy Scriptures and the salvation of their
neighbours, is declared by their constitutions, so that not only from the rule
of Bishop Augustine, which directs books to be asked for every day, but as soon
as they have read the prologue of the said constitutions they may know from the
very title of the same that they are pledged to the love of books.
But alas! a threefold
care of superfluities, viz., of the stomach, of dress, and of houses, has
seduced these men and others following their example from the paternal care of
books, and from their study. For, forgetting the providence of the Saviour (who
is declared by the Psalmist to think upon the poor and needy), they are
occupied with the wants of the perishing body, that their feasts may be
splendid and their garments luxurious, against the rule, and the fabrics of
their buildings, like the battlements of castles, carried to a height
incompatible with poverty. Because of these three things, we books, who have
ever procured their advancement and have granted them to sit among the powerful
and noble, are put far from their heart's affection and are reckoned as
superfluities; except that they rely upon some treatises of small value, from
which they derive strange heresies and apocryphal imbecilities, not for the
refreshment of souls, but rather for tickling the ears of the listeners. The
Holy Scripture is not expounded, but is neglected and treated as though it were
commonplace and known to all, though very few have touched its hem, and though
its depth is such, as Holy Augustine declares, that it cannot be understood by
the human intellect, however long it may toil with the utmost intensity of
study. From this he who devotes himself to it assiduously, if only He will
vouchsafe to open the door who has established the spirit of piety, may unfold
a thousand lessons of moral teaching, which will flourish with the freshest
novelty and will cherish the intelligence of the listeners with the most
delightful savours. Wherefore the first professors of evangelical poverty,
after some slight homage paid to secular science, collecting all their force of
intellect, devoted themselves to labours upon the sacred scripture, meditating
day and night on the law of the Lord. And whatever they could steal from their
famishing belly, or intercept from their half-covered body, they thought it the
highest gain to spend in buying or correcting books. Whose worldly
contemporaries observing their devotion and study bestowed upon them for the
edification of the whole Church the books which they had collected at great
expense in the various parts of the world.
In truth, in these days
as ye are engaged with all diligence in pursuit of gain, it may be reasonably
believed, if we speak according to human notions, that God thinks less upon
those whom He perceives to distrust His promises, putting their hope in human
providence, not considering the raven, nor the lilies, whom the Most High feeds
and arrays. Ye do not think upon Daniel and the bearer of the mess of boiled
pottage, nor recollect Elijah who was delivered from hunger once in the desert
by angels, again in the torrent by ravens, and again in Sarepta by the widow,
through the divine bounty, which gives to all flesh their meat in due season.
Ye descend (as we fear) by a wretched anticlimax, distrust of the divine
goodness producing reliance upon your own prudence, and reliance upon your own
prudence begetting anxiety about worldly things, and excessive anxiety about
worldly things taking away the love as well as the study of books; and thus
poverty in these days is abused to the injury of the Word of God, which ye have
chosen only for profit's sake.
With summer fruit, as
the people gossip, ye attract boys to religion, whom when they have taken the
vows ye do not instruct by fear and force, as their age requires, but allow
them to devote themselves to begging expeditions, and suffer them to spend the
time, in which they might be learning, in procuring the favour of friends, to
the annoyance of their parents, the danger of the boys, and the detriment of
the order. And thus no doubt it happens that those who were not compelled to
learn as unwilling boys, when they grow up presume to teach though utterly
unworthy and unlearned, and a small error in the beginning becomes a very great
one in the end. For there grows up among your promiscuous flock of laity a
pestilent multitude of creatures, who nevertheless the more shamelessly force
themselves into the office of preaching, the less they understand what they are
saying, to the contempt of the Divine Word and the injury of souls. In truth,
against the law ye plough with an ox and an ass together, in committing the
cultivation of the Lord's field to learned and unlearned. Side by side, it is
written, the oxen were ploughing and the asses feeding beside them: since it is
the duty of the discreet to preach, but of the simple to feed themselves in
silence by the hearing of sacred eloquence. How many stones ye fling upon the
heap of Mercury nowadays! How many marriages ye procure for the eunuchs of
wisdom! How many blind watchmen ye bid go round about the walls of the Church!
O idle fishermen, using
only the nets of others, which when torn it is all ye can do to clumsily
repair, but can net no new ones of your own! ye enter on the labours of others,
ye repeat the lessons of others, ye mouth with theatric effort the
superficially repeated wisdom of others. As the silly parrot imitates the words
that he has heard, so such men are mere reciters of all, but authors of nothing,
imitating Balaam's ass, which, though senseless of itself, yet became eloquent
of speech and the teacher of its master though a prophet. Recover yourselves, O
poor in Christ, and studiously regard us books, without which ye can never be
properly shod in the preparation of the Gospel of Peace.
Paul the Apostle,
preacher of the truth and excellent teacher of the nations, for all his gear
bade three things to be brought to him by Timothy, his cloak, books and
parchments, affording an example to ecclesiastics that they should wear dress
in moderation, and should have books for aid in study, and parchments, which
the Apostle especially esteems, for writing: and especially, he says, the
parchments. And truly that clerk is crippled and maimed to his disablement in
many ways, who is entirely ignorant of the art of writing. He beats the air
with words and edifies only those who are present, but does nothing for the
absent and for posterity. The man bore a writer's ink-horn upon his loins, who
set a mark Tau upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and cry, Ezechiel ix.;
teaching in a figure that if any lack skill in writing, he shall not undertake
the task of preaching repentance.
Finally, in conclusion
of the present chapter, books implore of you: make your young men who though
ignorant are apt of intellect apply themselves to study, furnishing them with
necessaries, that ye may teach them not only goodness but discipline and
science, may terrify them by blows, charm them by blandishments, mollify them
by gifts, and urge them on by painful rigour, so that they may become at once
Socratics in morals and Peripatetics in learning. Yesterday, as it were at the
eleventh hour, the prudent householder introduced you into his vineyard. Repent
of idleness before it is too late: would that with the cunning steward ye might
be ashamed of begging so shamelessly; for then no doubt ye would devote
yourselves more assiduously to us books and to study.
ALMIGHTY Author and
Lover of peace, scatter the nations that delight in war, which is above all
plagues injurious to books. For wars being without the control of reason make a
wild assault on everything they come across, and, lacking the check of reason
they push on without discretion or distinction to destroy the vessels of
reason. Then the wise Apollo becomes the Python's prey, and Phronesis, the
pious mother, becomes subject to the power of Phrenzy. Then winged Pegasus is
shut up in the stall of Corydon, and eloquent Mercury is strangled. Then wise
Pallas is struck down by the dagger of error, and the charming Pierides are
smitten by the truculent tyranny of madness. O cruel spectacle! where you may
see the Phbus of philosophers, the all-wise Aristotle, whom God Himself made
master of the master of the world, enchained by wicked hands and borne in
shameful irons on the shoulders of gladiators from his sacred home. There you
may see him who was worthy to be lawgiver to the lawgiver of the world and to
hold empire over its emperor, made the slave of vile buffoons by the most
unrighteous laws of war. O most wicked power of darkness, which does not fear
to undo the approved divinity of Plato, who alone was worthy to submit to the
view of the Creator, before he assuaged the strife of warring chaos, and before
form had put on its garb of matter, the ideal types, in order to demonstrate
the archetypal universe to its author, so that the world of sense might be
modelled after the supernal pattern. O tearful sight! where the moral Socrates,
whose acts were virtue and whose discourse was science, who deduced political
justice from the principles of nature, is seen enslaved to some rascal robber.
We bemoan Pythagoras, the parent of harmony, as, brutally scourged by the
harrying furies of war, he utters not a song but the wailings of a dove. We
mourn, too, for Zeno, who lest he should betray his secret bit off his tongue
and fearlessly spat it out at the tyrant, and now, alas! is brayed and crushed
to death in a mortar by Diomedon.
In sooth we cannot
mourn with the grief that they deserve all the various books that have perished
by the fate of war in various parts of the world. Yet we must tearfully recount
the dreadful ruin which was caused in Egypt by the auxiliaries in the
Alexandrian war, when seven hundred thousand volumes were consumed by fire.
These volumes had been collected by the royal Ptolemies through long periods of
time, as Aulus Gellius relates. What an Atlantean progeny must be supposed to
have then perished: including the motions of the spheres, all the conjunctions
of the planets, the nature of the galaxy, and the prognostic generations of
comets, and all that exists in the heavens or in the ether! Who would not
shudder at such a hapless holocaust, where ink is offered up instead of blood,
where the glowing ashes of crackling parchment were encarnadined with blood,
where the devouring flames consumed so many thousands of innocents in whose
mouth was no guile, where the unsparing fire turned into stinking ashes so many
shrines of eternal truth! A lesser crime than this is the sacrifice of Jephthah
or Agamemnon, where a pious daughter is slain by a father's sword. How many
labours of the famous Hercules shall we suppose then perished, who because of
his knowledge of astronomy is said to have sustained the heaven on his
unyielding neck, when Hercules was now for the second time cast into the
flames. The secrets of the heavens, which Jonithus learnt not from man or
through man but received by divine inspiration; what his brother Zoroaster, the
servant of unclean spirits, taught the Bactrians; what holy Enoch, the prefect
of Paradise, prophesied before he was taken from the world, and finally, what
the first Adam taught his children of the things to come, which he had seen
when caught up in an ecstasy in the book of eternity, are believed to have
perished in those horrid flames. The religion of the Egyptians, which the book
of the Perfect Word so commends; the excellent polity of the older Athens,
which preceded by nine thousand years the Athens of Greece; the charms of the
Chaldæans; the observations of the Arabs and Indians; the ceremonies of the
Jews; the architecture of the Babylonians; the agriculture of Noah the magic
arts of Moses; the geometry of Joshua; the enigmas of Samson; the problems of
Solomon from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop; the antidotes of Aesculapius;
the grammar of Cadmus; the poems of Parnassus; the oracles of Apollo; the
argonautics of Jason; the stratagems of Palamedes, and infinite other secrets
of science are believed to have perished at the time of this conflagration.
Nay, Aristotle would
not have missed the quadrature of the circle, if only baleful conflicts had
spared the books of the ancients, who knew all the methods of nature. He would
not have left the problem of the eternity of the world an open question, nor,
as is credibly conceived, would he have had any doubts of the plurality of
human intellects and of their eternity, if the perfect sciences of the ancients
had not been exposed to the calamities of hateful wars. For by wars we are
scattered into foreign lands, are mutilated, wounded, and shamefully
disfigured, are buried under the earth and overwhelmed in the sea, are devoured
by the flames and destroyed by every kind of death. How much of our blood was
shed by warlike Scipio, when he was eagerly compassing the overthrow of
Carthage, the opponent and rival of the Roman empire! How many thousands of
thousands of us did the ten years' war of Troy dismiss from the light of day!
How many were driven by Anthony, after the murder of Tully, to seek hiding
places in foreign provinces! How many of us were scattered by Theodoric, while
Boethius was in exile, into the different quarters of the world, like sheep
whose shepherd has been struck down! How many, when Seneca fell a victim to the
cruelty of Nero, and willing yet unwilling passed the gates of death, took
leave of him and retired in tears, not even knowing in what quarter to seek for
shelter!
Happy was that
translation of books which Xerxes is said to have made to Persia from Athens,
and which Seleucus brought back again from Persia to Athens. O glad and joyful
return! O wondrous joy, which you might then see in Athens, when the mother
went in triumph to meet her progeny, and again showed the chambers in which
they had been nursed to her now aging children! Their old homes were restored
to their former inmates, and forthwith boards of cedar with shelves and beams
of gopher wood are most skilfully planed; inscriptions of gold and ivory are
designed for the several compartments, to which the volumes themselves are
reverently brought and pleasantly arranged, so that no one hinders the entrance
of another or injures its brother by excessive crowding.
But in truth infinite
are the losses which have been inflicted upon the race of books by wars and
tumults. And as it is by no means possible to enumerate and survey infinity, we
will here finally set up the Gades of our complaint, and turn again to the
prayers with which we began, humbly imploring that the Ruler of Olympus and the
Most High Governor of all the world will establish peace and dispel wars and
make our days tranquil under His protection.
SINCE to everything there
is a season and an opportunity, as the wise Ecclesiastes witnesseth, let us now
proceed to relate the manifold opportunities through which we have been
assisted by the divine goodness in the acquisition of books.
Although from our youth
upwards we had always delighted in holding social commune with learned men and
lovers of books, yet when we prospered in the world and made acquaintance with
the King's majesty and were received into his household, we obtained ampler
facilities for visiting everywhere as we would, and of hunting as it were
certain most choice preserves, libraries private as well as public, and of the
regular as well as of the secular clergy. And indeed while we filled various
offices to the victorious Prince and splendidly triumphant King of England,
Edward the Third from the Conquest--whose reign may the Almighty long and
peacefully continue--first those about his court, but then those concerning the
public affairs of his kingdom, namely the offices of Chancellor and Treasurer,
there was afforded to us, in consideration of the royal favour, easy access for
the purpose of freely searching the retreats of books. In fact, the fame of our
love of them had been soon winged abroad everywhere, and we were reported to
burn with such desire for books, and especially old ones, that it was more easy
for any man to gain our favour by means of books than of money. Wherefore,
since supported by the goodness of the aforesaid prince of worthy memory, we
were able to requite a man well or ill, to benefit or injure mightily great as
well as small, there flowed in, instead of presents and guerdons, and instead
of gifts and jewels, soiled tracts and battered codices, gladsome alike to our
eye and heart. Then the aumbries. of the most famous monasteries were thrown
open, cases were unlocked and caskets were undone, and volumes that had
slumbered through long ages in their tombs wake up and are astonished, and
those that had lain hidden in dark places are bathed in the ray of unwonted
light. These long lifeless books, once most dainty, but now become corrupt and
loathsome, covered with litters of mice and pierced with the gnawings of the
worms, and who were once clothed in purple and fine linen, now lying in
sackcloth and ashes, given up to oblivion, seemed to have become habitations of
the moth. Natheless among these, seizing the opportunity, we would sit down
with more delight than a fastidious physician among his stores of gums and
spices, and there we found the object and the stimulus of our affections. Thus the
sacred vessels of learning came into our control and stewardship; some by gift,
others by purchase, and some lent to us for a season.
No wonder that when
people saw that we were contented with gifts of this kind, they were anxious of
their own accord to minister to our needs with those things that they were more
willing to dispense with than the things they secured by ministering to our
service. And in good will we strove so to forward their affairs that gain
accrued to them, while justice suffered no disparagement. Indeed, if we had
loved gold and silver goblets, high-bred horses, or no small sums of money, we
might in those days have furnished forth a rich treasury. But in truth we
wanted manuscripts not moneyscripts; we loved codices more than florins, and
preferred slender pamphlets to pampered palfreys.
Besides all this, we
were frequently made ambassador of this most illustrious Prince of everlasting
memory, and were sent on the most various affairs of state, now to the Holy
See, now to the Court of France, and again to various powers of the world, on
tedious embassies and in times of danger, always carrying with us, however,
that love of books which many waters could not quench. For this like a
delicious draught sweetened the bitterness of our journeyings and after the
perplexing intricacies and troublesome difficulties of causes, and the all but
inextricable labyrinths of public affairs afforded us a little breathing space
to enjoy a balmier atmosphere.
O Holy God of gods in
Sion, what a mighty stream of pleasure made glad our hearts whenever we had
leisure to visit Paris, the Paradise of the world, and to linger there; where
the days seemed ever few for the greatness of our love! There are delightful
libraries, more aromatic than stores of spicery; there are luxuriant parks of
all manner of volumes; there are Academic meads shaken by the tramp of
scholars; there are lounges of Athens; walks of the Peripatetics; peaks of
Parnassus; and porches of the Stoics. There is seen the surveyor of all arts and
sciences Aristotle, to whom belongs all that is most excellent in doctrine, so
far as relates to this passing sublunary world; there Ptolemy measures
epicycles and eccentric apogees and the nodes of the planets by figures and
numbers; there Paul reveals the mysteries; there his neighbour Dionysius
arranges and distinguishes the hierarchies; there the virgin Carmentis
reproduces in Latin characters all that Cadmus collected in Phnician letters;
there indeed opening our treasuries and unfastening our purse-strings we
scattered money with joyous heart and purchased inestimable books with mud and
sand. It is naught, it is naught, saith every buyer. But in vain; for behold
how good and how pleasant it is to gather together the arms of the clerical
warfare, that we may have the means to crush the attacks of heretics, if they
arise.
Further, we are aware
that we obtained most excellent opportunities of collecting in the following
way. From our early years we attached to our society with the most exquisite
solicitude and discarding all partiality all such masters and scholars and
professors in the several faculties as had become most distinguished by their
subtlety of mind and the fame of their learning. Deriving consolation from
their sympathetic conversation, we were delightfully entertained, now by
demonstrative chains of reasoning, now by the recital of physical processes and
the treatises of the doctors of the Church, now by stimulating discourses on
the allegorical meanings of things, as by a rich and well-varied intellectual
feast. Such men we chose as comrades in our years of learning, as companions in
our chamber, as associates on our journeys, as guests at our table, and, in
short, as helpmates in all the vicissitudes of life. But as no happiness is permitted
to endure for long, we were sometimes deprived of the bodily companionship of
some of these shining lights, when justice looking down from heaven, the
ecclesiastical preferments and dignities that they deserved fell to their
portion. And thus it happened, as was only right, that in attending to their
own cures they were obliged to absent themselves from attendance upon us.
We will add yet another
very convenient way by which a great multitude of books old as well as new came
into our hands. For we never regarded with disdain or disgust the poverty of
the mendicant orders, adopted for the sake of Christ; but in all parts of the
world took them into the kindly arms of our compassion, allured them by the
most friendly familiarity into devotion to ourselves, and having so allured
them cherished them with munificent liberality of beneficence for the sake of
God, becoming benefactors of all of them in general in such wise that we seemed
none the less to have adopted certain individuals with a special fatherly
affection. To these men we were as a refuge in every case of need, and never
refused to them the shelter of our favour, wherefore we deserved to find them
most special furtherers of our wishes and promoters thereof in act and deed,
who compassing land and sea, traversing the circuit of the world, and
ransacking the universities and high schools of various provinces, were zealous
in combatting for our desires, in the sure and certain hope of reward. What
leveret could escape amidst so many keen-sighted hunters? What little fish
could evade in turn their hooks and nets and snares? From the body of the
Sacred Law down to the booklet containing the fallacies of yesterday, nothing
could escape these searchers. Was some devout discourse uttered at the fountain-head
of Christian faith, the holy Roman Curia, or was some strange question
ventilated with novel arguments; did the solidity of Paris, which is now more
zealous in the study of antiquity than in the subtle investigation of truth,
did English subtlety, which illumined by the lights of former times is always
sending forth fresh rays of truth, produce anything to the advancement of
science or the declaration of the faith, this was instantly poured still fresh
into our ears, ungarbled by any babbler, unmutilated by any trifler, but
passing straight from the purest of wine-presses into the vats of our memory to
be clarified.
But whenever it
happened that we turned aside to the cities and places where the mendicants we
have mentioned had their convents, we did not disdain to visit their libraries
and any other repositories of books; nay, there we found heaped up amid the
utmost poverty the utmost riches of wisdom. We discovered in their fardels and
baskets not only crumbs falling from the masters' table for the dogs, but the
shewbread without leaven and the bread of angels having in it all that is
delicious; and indeed the garners of Joseph full of corn, and all the spoil of
the Egyptians, and the very precious gifts which Queen Sheba brought to
Solomon.
These men are as ants
ever preparing their meat in the summer, and ingenious bees continually
fabricating cells of honey. They are successors of Bezaleel in devising all
manner of workmanship in silver and gold and precious stones for decorating the
temple of the Church. They are cunning embroiderers, who fashion the
breastplate and ephod of the high priest and all the various vestments of the
priests. They fashion the curtains of linen and hair and coverings of ram's
skins dyed red with which to adorn the tabernacle of the Church militant. They
are husbandmen that sow, oxen treading out corn, sounding trumpets, shining
Pleiades and stars remaining in their courses, which cease not to fight against
Sisera. And to pay due regard to truth, without prejudice to the judgment of
any, although they lately at the eleventh hour have entered the lord's
vineyard, as the books that are so fond of us eagerly declared in our sixth
chapter, they have added more in this brief hour to the stock of the sacred
books than all the other vine-dressers; following in the footsteps of Paul, the
last to be called but the first in preaching, who spread the gospel of Christ
more widely than all others. Of these men, when we were raised to the
episcopate we had several of both orders, viz., the Preachers and Minors, as
personal attendants and companions at our board, men distinguished no less in
letters than in morals, who devoted themselves with unwearied zeal to the
correction, exposition, tabulation, and compilation of various volumes. But although
we have acquired a very numerous store of ancient as well as modern works by
the manifold intermediation of the religious, yet we must laud the Preachers
with special praise, in that we have found them above all the religious most
freely communicative of their stores without jealousy, and proved them to be
imbued with an almost Divine liberality, not greedy but fitting possessors of
luminous wisdom.
Besides all the
opportunities mentioned above, we secured the acquaintance of stationers and
booksellers, not only within our own country, but of those spread over the
realms of France, Germany, and Italy, money flying forth in abundance to
anticipate their demands; nor were they hindered by any distance or by the fury
of the seas, or by the lack of means for their expenses, from sending or
bringing to us the books that we required. For they well knew that their
expectations of our bounty would not be defrauded, but that ample repayment
with usury was to be found with us.
Nor, finally, did our
good fellowship, which aimed to captivate the affection of all, overlook the
rectors of schools and the instructors of rude boys. But rather, when we had an
opportunity, we entered their little plots and gardens and gathered
sweet-smelling flowers from the surface and dug up their roots, obsolete
indeed, but still useful to the student, which might, when their rank barbarism
was digested heal the pectoral arteries with the gift of eloquence. Amongst the
mass of these things we found some greatly meriting to be restored, which when
skilfully cleansed and freed from the disfiguring rust of age, deserved to be
renovated into comeliness of aspect. And applying in full measure the necessary
means, as a type of the resurrection to come, we resuscitated them and restored
them again to new life and health.
Moreover, we had always
in our different manors no small multitude of copyists and scribes, of binders,
correctors, illuminators, and generally of all who could usefully labour in the
service of books. Finally, all of both sexes and of every rank or position who
had any kind of association with books, could most easily open by their
knocking the door of our heart, and find a fit resting-place in our affection
and favour. In so much did we receive those who brought books, that the
multitude of those who had preceded them did not lessen the welcome of the
after-comers, nor were the favours we had awarded yesterday prejudicial to
those of to-day. Wherefore, ever using all the persons we have named as a kind
of magnets to attract books, we had the desired accession of the vessels of
science and a multitudinous flight of the finest volumes.
And this is what we
undertook to narrate in the present chapter.
ALTHOUGH the novelties
of the moderns were never disagreeable to our desires, who have always
cherished with grateful affection those who devote themselves to study and who
add anything either ingenious or useful to the opinions of our forefathers, yet
we have always desired with more undoubting avidity to investigate the
well-tested labours of the ancients. For whether they had by nature a greater
vigour of mental sagacity, or whether they perhaps indulged in closer
application to study, or whether they were assisted in their progress by both
these things, one thing we are perfectly clear about, that their successors are
barely capable of discussing the discoveries of their forerunners, and of
acquiring those things as pupils which the ancients dug out by difficult
efforts of discovery. For as we read that the men of old were of a more
excellent degree of bodily development than modern times are found to produce,
it is by no means absurd to suppose that most of the ancients were
distinguished by brighter faculties, seeing that in the labours they
accomplished of both kinds they are inimitable by posterity. And so Phocas
writes in the prologue to his Grammar:
Since all things have
been said by men of sense
The only novelty is--to
condense.
But in truth, if we
speak of fervour of learning and diligence in study, they gave up all their
lives to philosophy; while nowadays our contemporaries carelessly spend a few
years of hot youth, alternating with the excesses of vice, and when the
passions have been calmed, and they have attained the capacity of discerning
truth so difficult to discover, they soon become involved in worldly affairs
and retire, bidding farewell to the schools of philosophy. They offer the
fuming must of their youthful intellect to the difficulties of philosophy, and
bestow the clearer wine upon the money-making business of life. Further, as
Ovid in the first book of the De Vetula justly complains:
The hearts of all men
after gold aspire;
Few study to be wise,
more to acquire:
Thus, Science! all thy
virgin charms are sold,
Whose chaste embraces
should disdain their gold,
Who seek not thee
thyself, but pelf through thee,
Longing for riches, not
philosophy.
And further on:
Thus Philosophy is seen
Exiled, and Philopecuny
is queen,
which is known to be
the most violent poison of learning.
How the ancients indeed
regarded life as the only limit of study, is shown by Valerius, in his book
addressed to Tiberius, by many examples. Carneades, he says, was a laborious
and lifelong soldier of wisdom: after he had lived ninety years, the same day
put an end to his life and his philosophizing. Isocrates in his ninety-fourth
year wrote a most noble work. Sophocles did the same when nearly a hundred
years old. Simonides wrote poems in his eightieth year. Aulus Gellius did not
desire to live longer than he should be able to write, as he says himself in
the prologue to the Noctes Atticæ.
The fervour of study
which possessed Euclid the Socratic, Taurus the philosopher used to relate to
incite young men to study, as Gellius tells in the book we have mentioned. For
the Athenians, hating the people of Megara, decreed that if any of the
Megarensians entered Athens, he should be put to death. Then Euclid, who was a
Megarensian, and had attended the lectures of Socrates before this decree,
disguising himself in a woman's dress, used to go from Megara to Athens by
night to hear Socrates, a distance of twenty miles and back. Imprudent and
excessive was the fervour of Archimedes, a lover of geometry, who would not
declare his name, nor lift his head from the diagram he had drawn, by which he
might have prolonged his life, but thinking more of study than of life dyed
with his life-blood the figure he was studying.
There are very many
such examples of our proposition, but the brevity we aim at does not allow us
to recall them. But, painful to relate, the clerks who are famous in these days
pursue a very different course. Afflicted with ambition in their tender years,
and slightly fastening to their untried arms the Icarian wings of presumption,
they prematurely snatch the master's cap; and mere boys become unworthy
professors of the several faculties, through which they do not make their way
step by step, but like goats ascend by leaps and bounds; and, having slightly
tasted of the mighty stream, they think that they have drunk it dry, though
their throats are hardly moistened. And because they are not grounded in the
first rudiments at the fitting time, they build a tottering edifice on an
unstable foundation, and now that they have grown up, they are ashamed to learn
what they ought to have learned while young, and thus they are compelled to
suffer for ever for too hastily jumping at dignities they have not deserved.
For these and the like reasons the tyros in the schools do not attain to the
solid learning of the ancients in a few short hours of study, although they may
enjoy distinctions, may be accorded titles, be authorized by official robes,
and solemnly installed in the chairs of the elders. Just snatched from the
cradle and hastily weaned, they mouth the rules of Priscian and Donatus; while
still beardless boys they gabble with childish stammering the Categorics and
Peri Hermeneias, in the writing of which the great Aristotle is said to have
dipped his pen in his heart's blood. Passing through these faculties with
baneful haste and a harmful diploma, they lay violent hands upon Moses, and
sprinkling about their faces dark waters and thick clouds of the skies, they
offer their heads, unhonoured by the snows of age, for the mitre of the
pontificate. This pest is greatly encouraged, and they are helped to attain
this fantastic clericate with such nimble steps, by Papal provisions obtained
by insidious prayers, and also by the prayers, which may not be rejected, of
cardinals and great men, by the cupidity of friends and relatives, who,
building up Sion in blood, secure ecclesiastical dignities for their nephews
and pupils, before they are seasoned by the course of nature or ripeness of
learning.
Alas! by the same
disease which we are deploring, we see that the Palladium of Paris has been
carried off in these sad times of ours, wherein the zeal of that noble
university, whose rays once shed light into every corner of the world, has
grown lukewarm, nay, is all but frozen. There the pen of every scribe is now at
rest, generations of books no longer succeed each other, and there is none who
begins to take place as a new author. They wrap up their doctrines in unskilled
discourse, and are losing all propriety of logic, except that our English
subtleties, which they denounce in public, are the subject of their furtive
vigils.
Admirable Minerva seems
to bend her course to all the nations of the earth, and reacheth from end to
end mightily, that she may reveal herself to all mankind. We see that she has
already visited the Indians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians and Greeks, the
Arabs and the Romans. Now she has passed by Paris, and now has happily come to
Britain, the most noble of islands, nay, rather a microcosm in itself, that she
may show herself a debtor both to the Greeks and to the Barbarians. At which
wondrous sight it is conceived by most men, that as philosophy is now lukewarm
in France, so her soldiery are unmanned and languishing.
WHILE assiduously
seeking out the wisdom of the men of old, according to the counsel of the Wise
Man (Eccles. xxxix.): The wise man, he says, will seek out the wisdom of all
the ancients, we have not thought fit to be misled into the opinion that the
first founders of the arts have purged away all crudeness, knowing that the
discoveries of each of the faithful, when weighed in a faithful balance, makes
a tiny portion of science, but that by the anxious investigations of a
multitude of scholars, each as it were contributing his share, the mighty
bodies of the sciences have grown by successive augmentations to the immense
bulk that we now behold. For the disciples, continally melting down the
doctrines of their masters, and passing them again through the furnace, drove
off the dross that had been previously overlooked, until there came out refined
gold tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times to perfection, and
stained by no admixture of error or doubt.
For not even Aristotle,
although a man of gigantic intellect, in whom it pleased Nature to try how much
of reason she could bestow upon mortality, and whom the Most High made only a
little lower than the angels, sucked from his own fingers those wonderful volumes
which the whole world can hardly contain. But, on the contrary, with lynx-eyed
penetration he had seen through the sacred books of the Hebrews, the
Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Chaldæans, the Persians and the Medes, all of
which learned Greece had transferred into her treasuries. Whose true sayings he
received, but smoothed away their crudities, pruned their superfluities,
supplied their deficiencies, and removed their errors. And he held that we
should give thanks not only to those who teach rightly, but even to those who
err, as affording the way of more easily investigating truth, as he plainly
declares in the second book of his Metaphysics. Thus many learned lawyers
contributed to the Pandects, many physicians to the Tegni, and it was by this means
that Avicenna edited his Canon, and Pliny his great work on Natural History,
and Ptolemy the Almagest.
For as in the writers
of annals it is not difficult to see that the later writer always presupposes
the earlier, without whom he could by no means relate the former times, so too
we are to think of the authors of the sciences. For no man by himself has
brought forth any science, since between the earliest students and those of the
latter time we find intermediaries, ancient if they be compared with our own
age, but modern if we think of the foundations of learning, and these men we
consider the most learned. What would Virgil, the chief poet among the Latins,
have achieved, if he had not despoiled Theocritus, Lucretius, and Homer, and
had not ploughed with their heifer? What, unless again and again he had read
somewhat of Parthenius and Pindar, whose eloquence he could by no means
imitate? What could Sallust, Tully, Boethius, Macrobius, Lactantius, Martianus,
and in short the whole troop of Latin writers have done, if they had not seen
the productions of Athens or the volumes of the Greeks? Certes, little would
Jerome, master of three languages, Ambrosius, Augustine, though he confesses
that he hated Greek, or even Gregory, who is said to have been wholly ignorant
of it, have contributed to the doctrine of the Church, if more learned Greece
had not furnished them from its stores. As Rome, watered by the streams of
Greece, had earlier brought forth philosophers in the image of the Greeks, in
like fashion afterwards it produced doctors of the orthodox faith. The creeds
we chant are the sweat of Grecian brows, promulgated by their Councils, and
established by the martyrdom of many.
Yet their natural
slowness, as it happens, turns to the glory of the Latins, since as they were
less learned in their studies, so they were less perverse in their errors. In
truth, the Arian heresy had all but eclipsed the whole Church; the Nestorian
wickedness presumed to rave with blasphemous rage against the Virgin, for it would
have robbed the Queen of Heaven, not in open fight but in disputation, of her
name and character as Mother of God, unless the invincible champion Cyril,
ready to do single battle, with the help of the Council of Ephesus, had in
vehemence of spirit utterly extinguished it. Innumerable are the forms as well
as the authors of Greek heresies; for as they were the original cultivators of
our holy faith, so too they were the first sowers of tares, as is shown by
veracious history. And thus they went on from bad to worse, because in
endeavouring to part the seamless vesture of the Lord, they totally destroyed
primitive simplicity of doctrine, and blinded by the darkness of novelty would
fall into the bottomless pit, unless He provide for them in His inscrutable
prerogative, whose wisdom is past reckoning.
Let this suffice; for
here we reach the limit of our power of judgment. One thing, however, we
conclude from the premises, that the ignorance of the Greek tongue is now a
great hindrance to the study of the Latin writers, since without it the
doctrines of the ancient authors, whether Christian or Gentile, cannot be
understood. And we must come to a like judgment as to Arabic in numerous
astronomical treatises, and as to Hebrew as regards the text of the Holy Bible,
which deficiencies, indeed, Clement V. provides for, if only the bishops would
faithfully observe what they so lightly decree. Wherefore we have taken care to
provide a Greek as well as a Hebrew grammar for our scholars, with certain
other aids, by the help of which studious readers may greatly inform themselves
in the writing, reading, and understanding of the said tongues, although only
the hearing of them can teach correctness of idiom.
THAT lucrative practice
of positive law, designed for the dispensation of earthly things, the more
useful it is found by the children of this world, so much the less does it aid
the children of light in comprehending the mysteries of holy writ and the
secret sacraments of the faith, seeing that it disposes us peculiarly to the
friendship of the world, by which man, as S. James testifies, is made the enemy
of God. Law indeed encourages rather than extinguishes the contentions of
mankind, which are the result of unbounded greed, by complicated laws, which
can be turned either way; though we know that it was created by jurisconsults
and pious princes for the purpose of assuaging these contentions. But in truth,
as the same science deals with contraries, and the power of reason can be used
to opposite ends, and at the same the human mind is more inclined to evil, it
happens with the practisers of this science that they usually devote themselves
to promoting contention rather than peace, and instead of quoting laws
according to the intent of the legislator, violently strain the language
thereof to effect their own purposes.
Wherefore, although the
over-mastering love of books has possessed our mind from boyhood, and to
rejoice in their delights has been our only pleasure, yet the appetite for the
books of the civil law took less hold of our affections, and we have spent but
little labour and expense in acquiring volumes of this kind. For they are
useful only as the scorpion in treacle, as Aristotle, the sun of science, has
said of logic in his book De Pomo. We have noticed a certain manifest
difference of nature between law and science, in that every science is
delighted and desires to open its inward parts and display the very heart of
its principles, and to show forth the roots from which it buds and flourishes,
and that the emanation of its springs may be seen of all men; for thus from the
cognate and harmonious light of the truth of conclusion to principles, the
whole body of science will be full of light, having no part dark. But laws, on
the contrary, since they are only human enactments for the regulation of social
life, or the yokes of princes thrown over the necks of their subjects, refuse
to be brought to the standard of synteresis, the origin of equity, because they
feel that they possess more of arbitrary will than rational judgment. Wherefore
the judgment of the wise for the most part is that the causes of laws are not a
fit subject of discussion. In truth, many laws acquire force by mere custom,
not by syllogistic necessity, like the arts: as Aristotle, the Phbus of the
Schools, urges in the second book of the Politics, where he confutes the policy
of Hippodamus, which holds out rewards to the inventors of new laws, because to
abrogate old laws and establish new ones is to weaken the force of those which
exist. For whatever receives its stability from use alone must necessarily be
brought to nought by disuse.
From which it is seen
clearly enough, that as laws are neither arts nor sciences, so books of law
cannot properly be called books of art or science. Nor is this faculty which we
may call by a special term geologia, or the earthly science, to be properly
numbered among the sciences. Now the books of the liberal arts are so useful to
the divine writings, that without their aid the intellect would vainly aspire
to understand them.
WHILE we were
constantly delighting ourselves with the reading of books, which it was our
custom to read or have read to us every day, we noticed plainly how much the
defective knowledge even of a single word hinders the understanding, as the
meaning of no sentence can be apprehended, if any part of it be not understood.
Wherefore we ordered the meanings of foreign words to be noted with particular
care, and studied the orthography, prosody, etymology, and syntax in ancient
grammarians with unrelaxing carefulness, and took pains to elucidate terms that
had grown too obscure by age with suitable explanations, in order to make a
smooth path for our students.
This is the whole
reason why we took care to replace the antiquated volumes of the grammarians by
improved codices, that we might make royal roads, by which our scholars in time
to come might attain without stumbling to any science.
ALL the varieties of
attack directed against the poets by the lovers of naked truth may be repelled
by a two-fold defence: either that even in an unseemly subject-matter we may
learn a charming fashion of speech, or that where a fictitious but becoming
subject is handled, natural or historical truth is pursued under the guise of
allegorical fiction.
Although it is true
that all men naturally desire knowledge, yet they do not all take the same
pleasure in learning. On the contrary, when they have experienced the labour of
study and find their senses wearied, most men inconsiderately fling away the
nut, before they have broken the shell and reached the kernel. For man is
naturally fond of two things, namely, freedom from control and some pleasure in
his activity; for which reason no one without reason submits himself to the
control of others, or willingly engages in any tedious task. For pleasure
crowns activity, as beauty is a crown to youth, as Aristotle truly asserts in
the tenth book of the Ethics. Accordingly the wisdom of the ancients devised a
remedy by which to entice the wanton minds of men by a kind of pious fraud, the
delicate Minerva secretly lurking beneath the mask of pleasure. We are wont to
allure children by rewards, that they may cheerfully learn what we force them
to study even though they are unwilling. For our fallen nature does not tend to
virtue with the same enthusiasm with which it rushes into vice. Horace has
expressed this for us in a brief verse of the Ars Poetica, where he says:
All poets sing to
profit or delight.
And he has plainly
intimated the same thing in another verse of the same book, where he says:
He hits the mark, who
mingles joy with use.
How many students of
Euclid have been repelled by the Pons Asinorum, as by a lofty and precipitous
rock, which no help of ladders could enable them to scale! This is a hard
saying, they exclaim, and who can receive it. The child of inconstancy, who
ended by wishing to be transformed into an ass, would perhaps never have given
up the study of philosophy, if he had met him in friendly guise veiled under
the cloak of pleasure; but anon, astonished by Crato's chair and struck dumb by
his endless questions, as by a sudden thunderbolt, he saw no refuge but in
flight.
So much we have alleged
in defence of the poets; and now we proceed to show that those who study them
with proper intent are not to be condemned in regard to them. For our ignorance
of one single word prevents the understanding of a whole long sentence, as was
assumed in the previous chapter. As now the sayings of the saints frequently
allude to the inventions of the poets, it must needs happen that through our
not knowing the poem referred to, the whole meaning of the author is completely
obscured, and assuredly, as Cassiodorus says in his book Of the Institutes of
Sacred Literature: Those things are not to be considered trifles without which
great things cannot come to pass. It follows therefore that through ignorance
of poetry we do not understand Jerome, Augustine, Boethius, Lactantius,
Sidonius, and very many others, a catalogue of whom would more than fill a long
chapter.
The Venerable Bede has
very clearly discussed and determined this doubtful point, as is related by
that great compiler Gratian, the repeater of numerous authors, who is as
confused in form as he was eager in collecting matter for his compilation. Now
he writes in his 37th section: Some read secular literature for pleasure,
taking delight in the inventions and elegant language of the poets; but others
study this literature for the sake of scholarship, that by their reading they
may learn to detest the errors of the Gentiles and may devoutly apply what they
find useful in them to the use of sacred learning. Such men study secular
literature in a laudable manner. So far Bede.
Taking this salutary
instruction to heart, let the detractors of those who study the poets
henceforth hold their peace, and let not those who are ignorant of these things
require that others should be as ignorant as themselves, for this is the
consolation of the wretched. And therefore let every man see that his own
intentions are upright, and he may thus make of any subject, observing the
limitations of virtue, a study acceptable to God. And if he have found profit
in poetry, as the great Virgil relates that he had done in Ennius, he will not
have done amiss.
TO him who recollects
what has been said before, it is plain and evident who ought to be the chief
lovers of books. For those who have most need of wisdom in order to perform
usefully the duties of their position, they are without doubt most especially bound
to show more abundantly to the sacred vessels of wisdom the anxious affection
of a grateful heart. Now it is the office of the wise man to order rightly both
himself and others, according to the Phbus of philosophers, Aristotle, who
deceives not nor is deceived in human things. Wherefore princes and prelates,
judges and doctors, and all other leaders of the commonwealth, as more than
others they have need of wisdom, so more than others ought they to show zeal
for the vessels of wisdom.
Boethius, indeed,
beheld Philosophy bearing a sceptre in her left hand and books in her right, by
which it is evidently shown to all men that no one can rightly rule a
commonwealth without books. Thou, says Boethius, speaking to Philosophy, hast
sanctioned this saying by the mouth of Plato, that states would be happy if
they were ruled by students of philosophy, or if their rulers would study
philosophy. And again, we are taught by the very gesture of the figure that in
so far as the right hand is better than the left, so far the contemplative life
is more worthy than the active life; and at the same time we are shown that the
business of the wise man is to devote himself by turns, now to the study of
truth, and now to the dispensation of temporal things.
We read that Philip
thanked the Gods devoutly for having granted that Alexander should be born in
the time of Aristotle, so that educated under his instruction he might be
worthy to rule his father's empire. While Phaeton unskilled in driving becomes
the charioteer of his father's car, he unhappily distributes to mankind the
heat of Phbus, now by excessive nearness, and now by withdrawing it too far,
and so, lest all beneath him should be imperilled by the closeness of his
driving, justly deserved to be struck by the thunderbolt.
The history of the
Greeks as well as Romans shows that there were no famous princes among them who
were devoid of literature. The sacred law of Moses in prescribing to the king a
rule of government, enjoins him to have a copy made of the book of Divine law
(Deut. xvii.) according to the copy shown by the priests, in which he was to
read all the days of his life. Certes, God Himself, who hath made and who
fashioneth every day the hearts of every one of us, knows the feebleness of human
memory and the instability of virtuous intentions in mankind. Wherefore He has
willed that books should be as it were an antidote to all evil, the reading and
use of which He has commanded to be the healthful daily nourishment of the
soul, so that by them the intellect being refreshed and neither weak nor
doubtful should never hesitate in action. This subject is elegantly handled by
John of Salisbury, in his Policraticon. In conclusion, all classes of men who
are conspicuous by the tonsure or the sign of clerkship, against whom books
lifted up their voices in the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters, are bound to
serve books with perpetual veneration.
IT transcends the power
of human intellect, however deeply it may have drunk of the Pegasean fount, to
develop fully the title of the present chapter. Though one should speak with
the tongue of men and angels, though he should become a Mercury or Tully,
though he should grow sweet with the milky eloquence of Livy, yet he will plead
the stammering of Moses, or with Jeremiah will confess that he is but a boy and
cannot speak, or will imitate Echo rebounding from the mountains. For we know
that the love of books is the same thing as the love of wisdom, as was proved
in the second chapter. Now this love is called by the Greek word philosophy,
the whole virtue of which no created intelligence can comprehend; for she is
believed to be the mother of all good things: Wisdom vii. She as a heavenly dew
extinguishes the heats of fleshly vices, the intense activity of the mental
forces relaxing the vigour of the animal forces, and slothfulness being wholly
put to flight, which being gone all the bows of Cupid are unstrung.
Hence Plato says in the
Phædo: The philosopher is manifest in this, that he dissevers the soul from
communion with the body. Love, says Jerome, the knowledge of the scriptures,
and thou wilt not love the vices of the flesh. The godlike Xenocrates showed
this by the firmness of his reason, who was declared by the famous hetæra
Phryne to be a statue and not a man, when all her blandishments could not shake
his resolve, as Valerius Maximus relates at length. Our own Origen showed this
also, who chose rather to be unsexed by the mutilation of himself, than to be
made effeminate by the omnipotence of woman--though it was a hasty remedy,
repugnant alike to nature and to virtue, whose place it is not to make men
insensible to passion, but to slay with the dagger of reason the passions that
spring from instinct.
Again, all who are
smitten with the love of books think cheaply of the world and wealth; as Jerome
says to Vigilantius: The same man cannot love both gold and books. And thus it
has been said in verse:
No iron-stained hand is
fit to handle books,
Nor he whose heart on
gold so gladly looks:
The same men love not
books and money both,
And books thy herd, O
Epicurus, loathe;
Misers and bookmen make
poor company,
Nor dwell in peace
beneath the same roof-tree.
No man, therefore, can
serve both books and Mammon.
The hideousness of vice
is greatly reprobated in books, so that he who loves to commune with books is
led to detest all manner of vice. The demon, who derives his name from
knowledge, is most effectually defeated by the knowledge of books, and through
books his multitudinous deceits and the endless labyrinths of his guile are
laid bare to those who read, lest he be transformed into an angel of light and
circumvent the innocent by his wiles. The reverence of God is revealed to us by
books, the virtues by which He is worshipped are more expressly manifested, and
the rewards are described that are promised by the truth, which deceives not,
neither is deceived. The truest likeness of the beatitude to come is the
contemplation of the sacred writings, in which we behold in turn the Creator
and the creature, and draw from streams of perpetual gladness. Faith is
established by the power of books; hope is strengthened by their solace,
insomuch that by patience and the consolation of scripture we are in good hope.
Charity is not puffed up, but is edified by the knowledge of true learning,
and, indeed, it is clearer than light that the Church is established upon the
sacred writings.
Books delight us, when
prosperity smiles upon us; they comfort us inseparably when stormy fortune
frowns on us. They lend validity to human compacts, and no serious judgments
are propounded without their help. Arts and sciences, all the advantages of
which no mind can enumerate, consist in books. How highly must we estimate the
wondrous power of books, since through them we survey the utmost bounds of the
world and time, and contemplate the things that are as well as those that are
not, as it were in the mirror of eternity. In books we climb mountains and scan
the deepest gulfs of the abyss; in books we behold the finny tribes that may
not exist outside their native waters, distinguish the properties of streams
and springs and of various lands; from books we dig out gems and metals and the
materials of every kind of mineral, and learn the virtues of herbs and trees
and plants, and survey at will the whole progeny of Neptune, Ceres, and Pluto.
But if we please to
visit the heavenly inhabitants, Taurus, Caucasus, and Olympus are at hand, from
which we pass beyond the realms of Juno and mark out the territories of the
seven planets by lines and circles. And finally we traverse the loftiest
firmament of all, adorned with signs, degrees, and figures in the utmost
variety. There we inspect the antarctic pole, which eye hath not seen, nor ear
heard; we admire the luminous Milky Way and the Zodiac, marvellously and
delightfully pictured with celestial animals. Thence by books we pass on to
separate substances, that the intellect may greet kindred intelligences, and
with the mind's eye may discern the First Cause of all things and the Unmoved
Mover of infinite virtue, and may immerse itself in love without end. See how
with the aid of books we attain the reward of our beatitude, while we are yet
sojourners below.
Why need we say more?
Certes, just as we have learnt on the authority of Seneca, leisure without
letters is death and the sepulture of the living, so contrariwise we conclude
that occupation with letters or books is the life of man.
Again, by means of
books we communicate to friends as well as foes what we cannot safely entrust
to messengers; since the book is generally allowed access to the chambers of
princes, from which the voice of its author would be rigidly excluded, as
Tertullian observes at the beginning of his Apologeticus. When shut up in
prison and in bonds, and utterly deprived of bodily liberty, we use books as
ambassadors to our friends, and entrust them with the conduct of our cause, and
send them where to go ourselves would incur the penalty of death. By the aid of
books we remember things that are past, and even prophesy as to the future; and
things present, which shift and flow, we perpetuate by committing them to
writing.
The felicitous
studiousness and the studious felicity of the all-powerful eunuch, of whom we are
told in the Acts, who had been so mightily kindled by the love of the prophetic
writings that he ceased not from his reading by reason of his journey, had
banished all thought of the populous palace of Queen Candace, and had forgotten
even the treasures of which he was the keeper, and had neglected alike his
journey and the chariot in which he rode. Love of his book alone had wholly
engrossed this domicile of chastity, under whose guidance he soon deserved to
enter the gate of faith. O gracious love of books, which by the grace of
baptism transformed the child of Gehenna and nursling of Tartarus into a Son of
the Kingdom!
Let the feeble pen now
cease from the tenor of an infinite task, lest it seem foolishly to undertake
what in the beginning it confessed to be impossible to any.
JUST as it is necessary
for the state to prepare arms and to provide abundant stores of victuals for
the soldiers who are to fight for it, so it is fitting for the Church Militant
to fortify itself against the assaults of pagans and heretics with a multitude
of sound writings.
But because all the
appliances of mortal men with the lapse of time suffer the decay of mortality,
it is needful to replace the volumes that are worn out with age by fresh
successors, that the perpetuity of which the individual is by its nature
incapable may be secured to the species; and hence it is that the Preacher
says: Of making many books there is no end. For as the bodies of books, seeing
that they are formed of a combination of contrary elements, undergo a continual
dissolution of their structure, so by the forethought of the clergy a remedy
should be found, by means of which the sacred book paying the debt of nature
may obtain a natural heir and may raise up like seed to its dead brother, and
thus may be verified that saying of Ecclesiasticus: His father is dead, and he
is as if he were not dead; for he hath left one behind him that is like
himself. And thus the transcription of ancient books is as it were the
begetting of fresh sons, on whom the office of the father may devolve, lest it
suffer detriment. Now such transcribers are called antiquarii, whose
occupations Cassiodorus confesses please him above all the tasks of bodily
labour, adding: "Happy effort," he says, "laudable industry, to
preach to men with the hand, to let loose tongues with the fingers, silently to
give salvation to mortals, and to fight with pen and ink against the illicit
wiles of the Evil One." So far Cassiodorus. Moreover, our Saviour
exercised the office of the scribe when He stooped down and with His finger
wrote on the ground (John viii.), that no one, however exalted, may think it
unworthy of him to do what he sees the wisdom of God the Father did.
O singular serenity of
writing, to practise which the Artificer of the world stoops down, at whose
dread name every knee doth bow! O venerable handicraft pre-eminent above all
other crafts that are practised by the hand of man, to which our Lord humbly
inclines His breast, to which the finger of God is applied, performing the
office of a pen! We do not read of the Son of God that He sowed or ploughed,
wove or digged; nor did any other of the mechanic arts befit the divine wisdom
incarnate except to trace letters in writing, that every gentleman and sciolist
may know that fingers are given by God to men for the task of writing rather
than for war. Wherefore we entirely approve the judgment of books, wherein they
declared in our sixth chapter the clerk who cannot write to be as it were
disabled.
God himself inscribes
the just in the book of the living; Moses received the tables of stone written
with the finger of God. Job desires that he himself that judgeth would write a
book. Belshazzar trembled when he saw the fingers of a man's hand writing upon
the wall, Mene tekel phares. I wrote, says Jeremiah, with ink in the book.
Christ bids his beloved disciple John, What thou seest write in a book. So the
office of the writer is enjoined on Isaiah and on Joshua, that the act and
skill of writing may be commended to future generations. Christ Himself has
written on His vesture and on His thigh King of Kings and Lord of Lords, so
that without writing the royal ornaments of the Omnipotent cannot be made
perfect. Being dead they cease not to teach, who write books of sacred
learning. Paul did more for building up the fabric of the Church by writing his
holy epistles, than by preaching by word of mouth to Jews and Gentiles. He who
has attained the prize continues daily by books, what he long ago began while a
sojourner upon the earth; and thus is fulfilled in the doctors writing books
the saying of the Prophet: They that turn many to righteousness shall be as the
stars for ever and ever.
Moreover, it has been
determined by the doctors of the Church that the longevity of the ancients,
before God destroyed the original world by the Deluge, is to be ascribed to a
miracle and not to nature; as though God granted to them such length of days as
was required for finding out the sciences and writing them in books; amongst
which the wonderful variety of astronomy required, according to Josephus, a
period of six hundred years, to submit it to ocular observation. Nor, indeed,
do they deny that the fruits of the earth in that primitive age afforded a more
nutritious aliment to men than in our modern times, and thus they had not only
a livelier energy of body, but also a more lengthened period of vigour; to
which it contributed not a little that they lived according to virtue and denied
themselves all luxurious delights. Whoever therefore is by the good gift of God
endowed with gift of science, let him, according to the counsel of the Holy
Spirit, write wisdom in his time of leisure (Ecclus. xxxviii.), that his reward
may be with the blessed and his days may be lengthened in this present world.
And further, if we turn
our discourse to the princes of the world, we find that famous emperors not
only attained excellent skill in the art of writing, but indulged greatly in
its practice. Julius Cæsar, the first and greatest of them all, has left us
Commentaries on the Gallic and the Civil Wars written by himself; he wrote also
two books De Analogia, and two books of Anticatones, and a poem called Iter;
and many other works. Julius and Augustus devised means of writing one letter
for another, and so concealing what they wrote. For Julius put the fourth
letter for the first, and so on through the alphabet; whilst Augustus used the
second for the first, the third for the second, and so throughout. He is said
in the greatest difficulties of affairs during the Mutinensian War to have read
and written and even declaimed every day. Tiberius wrote a lyric poem and some
Greek verses. Claudius likewise was skilled in both Greek and Latin, and wrote
several books. But Titus was skilled above all men in the art of writing, and
easily imitated any hand he chose; so that he used to say that if he had wished
it he might have become a most skilful forger. All these things are noted by
Suetonius in his Lives of the XII. Cæsars.
WE are not only
rendering service to God in preparing volumes of new books, but also exercising
an office of sacred piety when we treat books carefully, and again when we
restore them to their proper places and commend them to inviolable custody;
that they may rejoice in purity while we have them in our hands, and rest
securely when they are put back in their repositories. And surely next to the
vestments and vessels dedicated to the Lord's body, holy books deserve to be
rightly treated by the clergy, to which great injury is done so often as they
are touched by unclean hands. Wherefore we deem it expedient to warn our
students of various negligences, which might always be easily avoided and do
wonderful harm to books.
And in the first place
as to the opening and closing of books, let there be due moderation, that they
be not unclasped in precipitate haste, nor when we have finished our inspection
be put away without being duly closed. For it behoves us to guard a book much
more carefully than a boot.
But the race of
scholars is commonly badly brought up, and unless they are bridled in by the
rules of their elders they indulge in infinite puerilities. They behave with
petulance, and are puffed up with presumption, judging of everything as if they
were certain, though they are altogether inexperienced.
You may happen to see
some headstrong youth lazily lounging over his studies, and when the winter's
frost is sharp, his nose running from the nipping cold drips down, nor does he
think of wiping it with his pocket-handkerchief until he has bedewed the book
before him with the ugly moisture. Would that he had before him no book, but a
cobbler's apron! His nails are stuffed with fetid filth as black as jet, with
which he marks any passage that pleases him. He distributes a multitude of
straws, which he inserts to stick out in different places, so that the halm may
remind him of what his memory cannot retain. These straws, because the book has
no stomach to digest them, and no one takes them out, first distend the book
from its wonted closing, and at length, being carelessly abandoned to oblivion,
go to decay. He does not fear to eat fruit or cheese over an open book, or
carelessly to carry a cup to and from his mouth; and because he has no wallet
at hand he drops into books the fragments that are left. Continually chattering,
he is never weary of disputing with his companions, and while he alleges a
crowd of senseless arguments, he wets the book lying half open in his lap with
sputtering showers. Aye, and then hastily folding his arms he leans forward on
the book, and by a brief spell of study invites a prolonged nap; and then, by
way of mending the wrinkles, he folds back the margin of the leaves, to the no
small injury of the book. Now the rain is over and gone, and the flowers have
appeared in our land. Then the scholar we are speaking of, a neglecter rather
than an inspecter of books, will stuff his volume with violets, and primroses,
with roses and quatrefoil. Then he will use his wet and perspiring hands to
turn over the volumes; then he will thump the white vellum with gloves covered
with all kinds of dust, and with his finger clad in long-used leather will hunt
line by line through the page; then at the sting of the biting flea the sacred
book is flung aside, and is hardly shut for another month, until it is so full
of the dust that has found its way within, that it resists the effort to close
it.
But the handling of
books is specially to be forbidden to those shameless youths, who as soon as
they have learned to form the shapes of letters, straightway, if they have the
opportunity, become unhappy commentators, and wherever they find an extra
margin about the text, furnish it with monstrous alphabets, or if any other
frivolity strikes their fancy, at once their pen begins to write it. There the
Latinist and sophister and every unlearned writer tries the fitness of his pen,
a practice that we have frequently seen injuring the usefulness and value of
the most beautiful books.
Again, there is a class
of thieves shamefully mutilating books, who cut away the margins from the sides
to use as material for letters, leaving only the text, or employ the leaves
from the ends, inserted for the protection of the book, for various uses and
abuses--a kind of sacrilege which should be prohibited by the threat of
anathema.
Again, it is part of
the decency of scholars that whenever they return from meals to their study,
washing should invariably precede reading, and that no grease-stained finger
should unfasten the clasps, or turn the leaves of a book. Nor let a crying
child admire the pictures in the capital letters, lest he soil the parchment
with wet fingers; for a child instantly touches whatever he sees. Moreover, the
laity, who look at a book turned upside down just as if it were open in the
right way, are utterly unworthy of any communion with books. Let the clerk take
care also that the smutty scullion reeking from his stewpots does not touch the
lily leaves of books, all unwashed, but he who walketh without blemish shall
minister to the precious volumes. And, again, the cleanliness of decent hands
would be of great benefit to books as well as scholars, if it were not that the
itch and pimples are characteristic of the clergy.
Whenever defects are
noticed in books, they should be promptly repaired, since nothing spreads more
quickly than a tear and a rent which is neglected at the time will have to be
repaired afterwards with usury.
Moses, the gentlest of
men, teaches us to make bookcases most neatly, wherein they may be protected
from any injury: Take, he says, this book of the law, and put it in the side of
the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God. O fitting place and appropriate
for a library, which was made of imperishable shittim-wood, and was all covered
within and without with gold! But the Saviour also has warned us by His example
against all unbecoming carelessness in the handling of books, as we read in S.
Luke. For when He had read the scriptural prophecy of Himself in the book that
was delivered to Him, He did not give it again to the minister, until He had
closed it with his own most sacred hands. By which students are most clearly
taught that in the care of books the merest trifles ought not to be neglected.
NOTHING in human
affairs is more unjust than that those things which are most righteously done,
should be perverted by the slanders of malicious men, and that one should bear
the reproach of sin where he has rather deserved the hope of honour. Many
things are done with singleness of eye, the right hand knoweth not what the
left hand doth, the lump is uncorrupted by leaven, nor is the garment woven of
wool and linen; and yet by the trickery of perverse men a pious work is
mendaciously transformed into some monstrous act. Certes, such is the unhappy
condition of sinful nature, that not merely in acts that are morally doubtful
it adopts the worse conclusion; but often it depraves by iniquitous subversion
those which have the appearance of rectitude.
For although the love
of books from the nature of its object bears the aspect of goodness, yet,
wonderful to say, it has rendered us obnoxious to the censures of many, by
whose astonishment we were disparaged and censured, now for excess of
curiosity, now for the exhibition of vanity, now for intemperance of delight in
literature; though indeed we were no more disturbed by their vituperation than
by the barking of so many dogs, satisfied with the testimony of Him to whom it appertaineth
to try the hearts and reins. For as the aim and purpose of our inmost will is
inscrutable to men and is seen of God alone, the searcher of hearts, they
deserve to be rebuked for their pernicious temerity, who so eagerly set a mark
of condemnation upon human acts, the ultimate springs of which they cannot see.
For the final end in matters of conduct holds the same position as first
principles in speculative science or axioms in mathematics, as the chief of
philosophers, Aristotle, points out in the seventh book of the Ethics. And
therefore, just as the truth of our conclusions depends upon the correctness of
our premises, so in matters of action the stamp of moral rectitude is given by
the honesty of aim and purpose, in cases where the act itself would otherwise
be held to be morally indifferent.
Now we have long
cherished in our heart of hearts the fixed resolve, when Providence should
grant a favourable opportunity, to found in perpetual charity a Hall in the
reverend university of Oxford, the chief nursing mother of all liberal arts,
and to endow it with the necessary revenues, for the maintenance of a number of
scholars; and moreover to enrich the Hall with the treasures of our books, that
all and every of them should be in common as regards their use and study, not
only to the scholars of the said Hall, but by their means to all the students
of the before-named university for ever, in the form and manner which the
following chapter shall declare. Wherefore the sincere love of study and zeal for
the strengthening of the orthodox faith to the edifying of the Church, have
begotten in us that solicitude so marvellous to the lovers of pelf, of
collecting books wherever they were to be purchased, regardless of expense, and
of having those that could not he bought fairly transcribed.
For as the favourite
occupations of men are variously distinguished according to the disposition of
the heavenly bodies, which frequently control our natural composition, so that
some men choose to devote themselves to architecture, others to agriculture,
others to hunting, others to navigation, others to war, others to games, we
have under the aspect of Mercury entertained a blameless pleasure in books,
which under the rule of right reason, over which no stars are dominant, we have
ordered to the glory of the Supreme Being, that where our minds found
tranquillity and peace, thence also might spring a most devout service of God.
And therefore let our detractors cease, who are as blind men judging of
colours; let not bats venture to speak of light; and let not those who carry
beams in their own eyes presume to pull the mote out of their brother's eye.
Let them cease to jeer with satirical taunts at things of which they are
ignorant, and to discuss hidden things that are not revealed to the eyes of
men; who perchance would have praised and commended us, if we had spent our
time in hunting, dice-playing, or courting the smiles of ladies.
IT has ever been
difficult so to restrain men by the laws of rectitude, that the astuteness of
successors might not strive to transgress the bounds of their predecessors, and
to infringe established rules in insolence of licence. Accordingly, with the
advice of prudent men, we have prescribed the manner in which we desire that
the communication and use of our books should be permitted for the benefit of
students.
Imprimis, we give and
grant all and singular the books, of which we have made a special catalogue, in
consideration of affection, to the community of scholars living in ---- Hall at
Oxford, as a perpetual gift, for our soul and the souls of our parents, and
also for the soul of the most illustrious King Edward the Third from the
Conquest, and of the most pious Queen Philippa, his consort: to the intent that
the same books may be lent from time to time to all and singular the scholars
and masters of the said place, as well regular as secular, for the advancement
and use of study, in the manner immediately following, that is to say:
Five of the scholars
sojourning in the Hall aforesaid shall be appointed by the Master thereof, who
shall have the charge of all the books, of which five persons three and not
fewer may lend any book or books for inspection and study; but for copying or
transcribing we direct that no book shall be allowed outside the walls of the
house. Therefore, when any scholar secular or religious, whom for this purpose
we regard with equal favour, shall seek to borrow any book, let the keepers
diligently consider if they have a duplicate of the said book, and if so, let
them lend him the book, taking such pledge as in their judgment exceeds the
value of the book delivered, and let a record be made forthwith of the pledge
and of the book lent, containing the names of the persons delivering the book
and of the person who receives it, together with the day and year when the loan
is made.
But if the keepers find
that the book asked for is not in duplicate, they shall not lend such book to
any one whomsoever, unless he shall belong to the community of scholars of the
said Hall, unless perhaps for inspection within the walls of the aforesaid
house or Hall, but not to be carried beyond it.
But to any of the
scholars of the said Hall, any book may be lent by three of the aforesaid
keepers, after first recording, however, his name, with the day on which he
receives the book. Nevertheless, the borrower may not lend the book entrusted
to him to another, except with the permission of three of the aforesaid
keepers, and then the name of the first borrower being erased, the name of the
second with the time of delivery is to be recorded.
Each keeper shall take
an oath to observe all these regulations when they enter upon the charge of the
books. And the recipients of any book or books shall thereupon swear that they
will not use the book or books for any other purpose but that of inspection or
study, and that they will not take or permit to be taken it or them beyond the
town and suburbs of Oxford.
Moreover, every year the
aforesaid keepers shall render an account to the Master of the House and two of
his scholars whom he shall associate with himself, or if he shall not be at
leisure, he shall appoint three inspectors, other than the keepers, who shall
peruse the catalogue of books, and see that they have them all, either in the
volumes themselves or at least as represented by deposits. And the more fitting
season for rendering this account we believe to be from the First of July until
the festival of the Translation of the Glorious Martyr S. Thomas next
following.
We add this further
provision, that anyone to whom a book has been lent, shall once a year exhibit
it to the keepers, and shall, if he wishes it, see his pledge. Moreover, if it
chances that a book is lost by death, theft, fraud, or carelessness, he who has
lost it or his representative or executor shall pay the value of the book and
receive back his deposit. But if in any wise any profit shall accrue to the
keepers, it shall not be applied to any purpose but the repair and maintenance
of the books.
TIME now clamours for
us to terminate this treatise which we have composed concerning the love of
books; in which we have endeavoured to give the astonishment of our
contemporaries the reason why we have loved books so greatly. But because it is
hardly granted to mortals to accomplish aught that is not rolled in the dust of
vanity, we do not venture entirely to justify the zealous love which we have so
long had for books, or to deny that it may perchance sometimes have been the
occasion of some venial negligence, albeit the object of our love is honourable
and our intention upright. For if when we have done everything, we are bound to
call ourselves unprofitable servants; if the most holy Job was afraid of all
his works; if according to Isaiah all our righteousness is as filthy rags, who
shall presume to boast himself of the perfection of any virtue, or deny that
from some circumstance a thing may deserve to be reprehended, which in itself
perhaps was not reprehensible. For good springs from one selfsame source, but
evil arises in many ways, as Dionysius informs us. Wherefore to make amends for
our iniquities, by which we acknowledge ourselves to have frequently offended
the Creator of all things, in asking the assistance of their prayers, we have
thought fit to exhort our future students to show their gratitude as well to us
as to their other benefactors in time to come by requiting our forethought for
their benefit by spiritual retribution. Let us live when dead in their
memories, who have lived in our benevolence before they were born, and live now
sustained by our beneficence. Let them implore the mercy of the Redeemer with
unwearied prayer, that the pious Judge may excuse our negligences, may pardon
the wickedness of our sins, may cover the lapses of our feebleness with the
cloak of piety, and remit by His divine goodness the offences of which we are
ashamed and penitent. That He may preserve to us for a due season of repentance
the gifts of His good grace, steadfastness of faith, loftiness of hope, and the
widest charity to all men. That He may turn our haughty will to lament its
faults, that it may deplore its past most vain elations, may retract its most
bitter indignations, and detest its most insane delectations. That His virtue
may abound in us, when our own is found wanting, and that He who freely
consecrated our beginning by the sacrament of baptism, and advanced our
progress to the seat of the Apostles without any desert of ours, may deign to
fortify our outgoing by the fitting sacraments. That we may be delivered from
the lust of the flesh, that the fear of death may utterly vanish and our spirit
may desire to be dissolved and be with Christ, and existing upon earth in body
only, in thought and longing our conversation may be in Heaven. That the Father
of mercies and the God of all consolation may graciously come to meet the
prodigal returning from the husks; that He may receive the piece of silver that
has been lately found and transmit it by His holy angels into His eternal
treasury. That He may rebuke with His terrible countenance, at the hour of our
departure, the spirits of darkness, lest Leviathan, that old serpent, lying hid
at the gate of death, should spread unforeseen snares for our feet. But when we
shall be summoned to the awful judgment-seat to give an account on the
testimony of conscience of all things we have done in the body, the God-Man may
consider the price of the holy blood that He has shed, and that the Incarnate
Deity may note the frame of our carnal nature, that our weakness may pass
unpunished where infinite loving-kindness is to be found, and that the soul of
the wretched sinner may breathe again where the peculiar office of the Judge is
to show mercy. And further, let our students be always diligent in invoking the
refuge of our hope after God, the Virgin Mother of God and Blessed Queen of
Heaven, that we who for our manifold sins and wickednesses have deserved the
anger of the Judge, by the aid of her ever-acceptable supplications may merit
His forgiveness; that her pious hand may depress the scale of the balance in
which our small and few good deeds shall be weighed, lest the heaviness of our
sins preponderate and cast us down to the bottomless pit of perdition.
Moreover, let them ever venerate with due observance the most deserving
Confessor Cuthbert, the care of whose flock we have unworthily undertaken, ever
devoutly praying that he may deign to excuse by his prayers his all-unworthy
vicar, and may procure him whom he hath admitted as his successor upon earth to
be made his assessor in Heaven. Finally, let them pray God with holy prayers as
well of body as of soul, that He will restore the spirit created in the image
of the Trinity, after its sojourn in this miserable world, to its primordial
prototype, and grant to it for ever to enjoy the sight of His countenance:
through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
THE END OF THE PHILOBIBLON OF MASTER RICHARD DE AUNGERVILLE, SURNAMED DE
BURY, LATE BISHOP OF DURHAM THIS TREATISE WAS FINISHED IN OUR MANORHOUSE OF
AUCKLAND ON THE 24TH DAY OF JANUARY, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD ONE THOUSAND THREE
HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR, THE FIFTY-EIGHTH YEAR OF OUR AGE BEING EXACTLY
COMPLETED, AND THE ELEVENTH YEAR OF OUR PONTIFICATE DRAWING TO AN END; TO THE
GLORY OF GOD. AMEN.