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.