The Philobiblon
by Richard de Bury
Chapter IV
The complaint of books against the clergy already
promoted
A generation of vipers destroying their own parent and
base offspring of the ungrateful cuckoo, who when he has
grown strong slays his nurse, the giver of his strength, are
degenerate clerks with regard to books. Bring it again to
mind and consider faithfully what ye receive through books,
and ye will find that books are as it were the creators of
your distinction, without which other favourers would have
been wanting.
In sooth, while still untrained and helpless ye crept up
to us, ye spake as children, ye thought as children, ye
cried as children and begged to be made partakers of our
milk. But we being straightway moved by your tears gave you
the breast of grammar to suck, which ye plied continually
with teeth and tongue, until ye lost your native
barbarousness and learned to speak with our tongues the
mighty things of God. And next we clad you with the goodly
garments of philosophy, rhetoric and dialectic, of which we
had and have a store, while ye were naked as a tablet to be
painted on. For all the household of philosophy are clothed
with garments, that the nakedness and rawness of the
intellect may be covered. After this, providing you with the
fourfold wings of the quadrivials that ye might be winged
like the seraphs and so mount above the cherubim, we sent
you to a friend at whose door, if only ye importunately
knocked, ye might borrow the three loaves of the Knowledge
of the Trinity, in which consists the final felicity of
every sojourner below. Nay, if ye deny that ye had these
privileges, we boldly declare that ye either lost them by
your carelessness, or that through your sloth ye spurned
them when offered to you. If these things seem but a light
matter to you, we will add yet greater things. Ye are a
chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy race, ye are a
peculiar people chosen into the lot of God, ye are priests
and ministers of God, nay, ye are called the very Church of
God, as though the laity were not to be called churchmen.
Ye, being preferred to the laity, sing psalms and hymns in
the chancel, and, serving the altar and living by the altar,
make the true body of Christ, wherein God Himself has
honoured you not only above the laity, but even a little
higher than the angels. For to whom of His angels has He
said at any time: Thou art a priest for ever after the order
of Melchisedech? Ye dispense the patrimony of the crucified
one to the poor, wherein it is required of stewards that a
man be found faithful. Ye are shepherds of the Lord's flock,
as well in example of life as in the word of doctrine, which
is bound to repay you with milk and wool.
Who are the givers of all these things, O clerks? Is it
not books? Do ye remember therefore, we pray, how many and
how great liberties and privileges are bestowed upon the
clergy through us? In truth, taught by us who are the
vessels of wisdom and intellect, ye ascend the teacher's
chair and are called of men Rabbi. By us ye become
marvellous in the eyes of the laity, like great lights in
the world, and possess the dignities of the Church according
to your various stations. By us, while ye still lack the
first down upon your cheeks, ye are established in your
early years and bear the tonsure on your heads, while the
dread sentence of the Church is heard: Touch not mine
anointed and do my prophets no harm, and he who has
rashly touched them let him forthwith by his own blow be
smitten violently with the wound of an anathema. At length
yielding your lives to wickedness, reaching the two paths of
Pythagoras, ye choose the left branch, and going backward ye
let go the lot of God which ye had first assumed, becoming
companions of thieves. And thus ever going from bad to
worse, dyed with theft and murder and manifold impurities,
your fame and conscience stained by sins, at the bidding of
justice ye are confined in manacles and fetters, and are
kept to be punished by a most shameful death. Then your
friend is put far away, nor is there any to mourn your lot.
Peter swears that he knows not the man: the people cry to
the judge: Crucify, crucify Him! If thou let this man go,
thou act not Caesar's friend. Now all refuge has
perished, for ye must stand before the judgment-seat, and
there is no appeal, but only hanging is in store for you.
While the wretched man's heart is thus filled with woe and
only the sorrowing Muses bedew their cheeks with tears, in
his strait is heard on every side the wailing appeal to us,
and to avoid the danger of impending death he shows the
slight sign of the ancient tonsure which we bestowed upon
him, begging that we may be called to his aid and bear
witness to the privilege bestowed upon him. Then straightway
touched with pity we run to meet the prodigal son and snatch
the fugitive slave from the gates of death. The book he has
not forgotten is handed to him to be read, and while with
lips stammering with fear he reads a few words, the power of
the judge is loosed, the accuser is withdrawn, and death is
put to flight. O marvellous virtue of an empiric verse! O
saving antidote of dreadful ruin! O precious reading of the
psalter, which for this alone deserves to be called the book
of life! Let the laity undergo the judgment of the secular
arm, that either sewn up in sacks they may be carried out to
Neptune, or planted in the earth may fructify for Pluto, or
may be offered amid the flames as a fattened holocaust to
Vulcan, or at least may be hung up as a victim to Juno:
while our nursling at a single reading of the book of life
is handed over to the custody of the Bishop, and rigour is
changed to favour, and the forum being transferred from the
laity, death is routed by the clerk who is the nursling of
books.
But now let us speak of the clerks who are vessels of
virtue. Which of you about to preach ascends the pulpit or
the rostrum without in some way consulting us? Which of you
enters the schools to teach or to dispute without relying
upon our support? First of all, it behoves you to eat the
book with Ezechiel, that the belly of your memory may be
sweetened within, and thus as with the panther refreshed, to
whose breath all beasts and cattle long to approach, the
sweet savour of the spices it has eaten may shed a perfume
without. Thus our nature secretly working in our own,
listeners hasten up gladly, as the load-stone draws the iron
nothing loth. What an infinite host of books lie at Paris or
Athens, and at the same time resound in Britain and in Rome!
In truth, while resting they yet move, and while retaining
their own places they are carried about every way to the
minds of listeners. Finally, by the knowledge of literature,
we establish Priests, Bishops, Cardinals, and the Pope, that
all things in the ecclesiastical hierarchy may be fitly
disposed. For it is from books that everything of good that
befalls the clerical condition takes its origin. But let
this suffice: for it pains us to recall what we have
bestowed upon the degenerate clergy, because whatever gifts
are distributed to the ungrateful seem to be lost rather
than bestowed.
Let us next dwell a little on the recital of the wrongs
with which they requite us, the contempts and cruelties of
which we cannot recite an example in each kind, nay,
scarcely the main classes of the several wrongs. In the
first place, we are expelled by force and arms from the
homes of the clergy, which are ours by hereditary right, who
were used to have cells of quietness in the inner chamber,
but, alas! in these unhappy times we are altogether exiled,
suffering poverty without the gates. For our places are
seized now by dogs, now by hawks, now by that biped beast
whose cohabitation with the clergy was forbidden of old,
from which we have always taught our nurslings to flee more
than from the asp and the cockatrice; wherefore she, always
jealous of the love of us, and never to be appeased, at
length seeing us in some corner protected only by the web of
some dead spider, with a frown abuses and reviles us with
bitter words, declaring us alone of all the furniture in the
house to be unnecessary, and complaining that we are useless
for any household purpose, and advises that we should
speedily be converted into rich caps, sendal and silk and
twice-dyed purple, robes and furs, wool and linen: and,
indeed, not without reason, if she could see our inmost
hearts, if she had listened to our secret counsels, if she
had read the book of Theophrastus or Valerius, or only heard
the twenty-fifth chapter of Ecclesiasticus with
understanding ears.
And hence it is that we have to mourn for the homes of
which we have been unjustly robbed; and as to our coverings,
not that they have not been given to us, but that the
coverings anciently given to us have been torn by violent
hands, insomuch that our soul is bowed down to the dust, our
belly cleaveth unto the earth. We suffer from various
diseases, enduring pains in our backs and sides; we lie with
our limbs unstrung by palsy, and there is no man who layeth
it to heart, and no man who provides a mollifying plaster.
Our native whiteness that was clear with light has turned to
dun and yellow, so that no leech who should see us would
doubt that we are diseased with jaundice. Some of us are
suffering from gout, as our twisted extremities plainly
show. The smoke and dust by which we are continuously
plagued have dulled the keenness of our visual rays, and are
now infecting our bleared eyes with ophthalmia. Within we
are devoured by the fierce gripings of our entrails, which
hungry worms cease not to gnaw, and we undergo the
corruption of the two Lazaruses, nor is there anyone to
anoint us with balm of cedar, nor to cry to us who have been
four days dead and already stink, Lazarus come forth! No
healing drug is bound around our cruel wounds, which are so
atrociously inflicted upon the innocent, and there is none
to put a plaster upon our ulcers; but ragged and shivering
we are flung away into dark corners, or in tears take our
place with holy Job upon his dunghill, or--too horrible to
relate--are buried in the depths of the common sewers. The
cushion is withdrawn that should support our evangelical
sides, which ought to have the first claim upon the incomes
of the clergy, and the common necessaries of life thus be
for ever provided for us, who are entrusted to their
charge.
Again, we complain of another sort of injury which is too
often unjustly inflicted upon our persons. We are sold for
bondmen and bondwomen, and lie as hostages in taverns with
no one to redeem us. We fall a prey to the cruel shambles,
where we see sheep and cattle slaughtered not without pious
tears, and where we die a thousand times from such terrors
as might frighten even the brave. We are handed over to
Jews, Saracens, heretics and infidels, whose poison we
always dread above everything, and by whom it is well known
that some of our parents have been infected with pestiferous
venom. In sooth, we who should be treated as masters in the
sciences, and bear rule over the mechanics who should be
subject to us, are instead handed over to the government of
subordinates, as though some supremely noble monarch should
be trodden under foot by rustic heels. Any seamster or
cobbler or tailor or artificer of any trade keeps us shut up
in prison for the luxurious and wanton pleasures of the
clergy.
Now we would pursue a new kind of injury by which we
suffer alike in person and in fame, the dearest thing we
have. Our purity of race is diminished every day, while new
authors' names are imposed upon us by worthless compilers,
translators, and transformers, and losing our ancient
nobility, while we are reborn in successive generations, we
become wholly degenerate; and thus against our will the name
of some wretched stepfather is affixed to us, and the sons
are robbed of the names of their true fathers. The verses of
Virgil, while he was yet living, were claimed by an
impostor; and a certain Fidentinus mendaciously usurped the
works of Martial, whom Martial thus deservedly rebuked:
"The book you read is, Fidentinus! mine,
Though read so badly, 't well may pass for thine!"
What marvel, then, if when our authors are dead clerical
apes use us to make broad their phylacteries, since even
while they are alive they try to seize us as soon as we are
published? Ah! how often ye pretend that we who are ancient
are but lately born, and try to pass us off as sons who are
really fathers, calling us who have made you clerks the
production of your studies. Indeed, we derived our origin
from Athens, though we are now supposed to be from Rome; for
Carmentis was always the pilferer of Cadmus, and we who were
but lately born in England, will to-morrow be born again in
Paris; and thence being carried to Bologna, will obtain an
Italian origin, based upon no affinity of blood. Alas! how
ye commit us to treacherous copyists to be written, how
corruptly ye read us and kill us by medication, while ye
supposed ye were correcting us with pious zeal. Oftentimes
we have to endure barbarous interpreters, and those who are
ignorant of foreign idioms presume to translate us from one
language into another; and thus all propriety of speech is
lost and our sense is shamefully mutilated contrary to the
meaning of the author! Truly noble would have been the
condition of books if it had not been for the presumption of
the tower of Babel, if but one kind of speech had been
transmitted by the whole human race.
We will add the last clause of our long lament, though
far too short for the materials that we have. For in us the
natural use is changed to that which is against nature,
while we who are the light of faithful souls everywhere fall
a prey to painters knowing nought of letters, and are
entrusted to goldsmiths to become, as though we were not
sacred vessels of wisdom, repositories of gold-leaf. We fall
undeservedly into the power of laymen, which is more bitter
to us than any death, since they have sold our people for
nought, and our enemies themselves are our judges.
It is clear from what we have said what infinite
invectives we could hurl against the clergy, if we did not
think of our own reputation. For the soldier whose campaigns
are over venerates his shield and arms, and grateful Corydon
shows regard for his decaying team, harrow, flail and
mattock, and every manual artificer for the instruments of
his craft; it is only the ungrateful cleric who despises and
neglects those things which have ever been the foundation of
his honours.
-
- The Philobiblon
by Richard de Bury
Chapter III
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