The Philobiblon
by Richard de Bury
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.
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- The Philobiblon
by Richard de Bury
Chapter IX
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