The Philobiblon
by Richard de Bury
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 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 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 godlike 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
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.
- The Philobiblon
by Richard de Bury
Chapter XIV
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