The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury
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Richard de Bury >> The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury
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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.
CHAPTER VI
THE COMPLAINT OF BOOKS AGAINST THE MENDICANTS
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.
CHAPTER VII
THE COMPLAINT OF BOOKS AGAINST WARS
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 Phoebus 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 Chaldaeans; 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.
CHAPTER VIII
OF THE NUMEROUS OPPORTUNITIES WE HAVE HAD OF COLLECTING A STORE
OF BOOKS
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 Phoenician 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.
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