4.
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 Cæsar'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.
