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.