The Love of Books Part 4

We read that Philip thanked the G.o.ds 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 Phoebus, 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, G.o.d Himself, who hath made and who fas.h.i.+oneth 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 cla.s.ses of men who are conspicuous by the tonsure or the sign of clerks.h.i.+p, against whom books lifted up their voices in the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters, are bound to serve books with perpetual veneration.

CHAPTER XV

OF THE ADVANTAGES OF THE LOVE OF BOOKS

It transcends the power of human intellect, however deeply it may have drunk of the Pegasean fount, to develop fully the t.i.tle 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 Phaedo: 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 G.o.dlike Xenocrates showed this by the firmness of his reason, who was declared by the famous hetaera 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 uns.e.xed 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 pa.s.sion, but to slay with the dagger of reason the pa.s.sions 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 mult.i.tudinous 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 circ.u.mvent the innocent by his wiles. The reverence of G.o.d is revealed to us by books, the virtues by which He is wors.h.i.+pped 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 beat.i.tude 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 beat.i.tude, 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 amba.s.sadors 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 chast.i.ty, 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.

CHAPTER XVI

THAT IT IS MERITORIOUS TO WRITE NEW BOOKS AND TO RENEW THE OLD

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 a.s.saults of pagans and heretics with a mult.i.tude 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 Ca.s.siodorus 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 Ca.s.siodorus.

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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d is applied, performing the office of a pen! We do not read of the Son of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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.

G.o.d himself inscribes the just in the book of the living; Moses received the tables of stone written with the finger of G.o.d. 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 G.o.d destroyed the original world by the Deluge, is to be ascribed to a miracle and not to nature; as though G.o.d 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 G.o.d endowed with gift of science, let him, according to the counsel of the Holy Spirit, write wisdom in his time of leisure (Eccles. x.x.xviii.), 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 Caesar, 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 a.n.a.logia, 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 t.i.tus 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.

Caesars.

CHAPTER XVII

OF SHOWING DUE PROPRIETY IN THE CUSTODY OF BOOKS

We are not only rendering service to G.o.d 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 ap.r.o.n! His nails are stuffed with fetid filth as black as jet, with which he marks any pa.s.sage that pleases him. He distributes a mult.i.tude 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 cla.s.s 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, was.h.i.+ng 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 s.m.u.tty 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 G.o.d. O fitting place and appropriate for a library, which was made of imperishable s.h.i.+ttim-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.

CHAPTER XVIII

SHOWETH THAT WE HAVE COLLECTED SO GREAT STORE OF BOOKS FOR THE COMMON BENEFIT OF SCHOLARS AND NOT ONLY FOR OUR OWN PLEASURE

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 rect.i.tude.

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 G.o.d 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 rect.i.tude 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.