The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury
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Richard de Bury >> The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury
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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.
CHAPTER IX
HOW, ALTHOUGH WE PREFERRED THE WORKS OF THE ANCIENTS, WE HAVE NOT
CONDEMNED THE STUDIES OF THE MODERNS
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 Atticae.
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.
CHAPTER X
OF THE GRADUAL PERFECTING OF BOOKS
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,
continually 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
Chaldaeans, 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.
CHAPTER XI
WHY WE HAVE PREFERRED BOOKS OF LIBERAL LEARNING TO BOOKS OF LAW
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 Phoebus 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.
CHAPTER XII
WHY WE HAVE CAUSED BOOKS OF GRAMMAR TO BE SO DILIGENTLY PREPARED
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.
CHAPTER XIII
WHY WE HAVE NOT WHOLLY NEGLECTED THE FABLES OF THE POETS
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.
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