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| To the charge of reading secular books I reply that I remember what I learned in youth. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
30. But now, since my pleading
has steered its course out of these rough and broken places, and I have
refuted the charge of heresy which had been urged against me by looking
my accuser freely in the face, I will pass on to the other articles of
charge with which he tries to assail me. The first is that I am a
scurrilous person, a detractor of every one; that I am always snarling
and biting at my predecessors. I ask him to name a single person whose
reputation I have disparaged, or whom, according to an art practised by
my opponent, I have galled by pretended praise. But, if I speak against
ill-disposed persons, and wound with the point of my pen some Luscius
Lanuvinus3057
3057 A
rival of Terence, to whom Jerome often compares Rufinus. | or an Asinius Pollio of the race of
the Cornelii,3058
3058 Asinius Pollio was a rival of Cicero. It seems that some detractor
of Jerome boasted that he was of the race of the Cornelii. See Comm. on
Jonah iv. 6. “A certain Cantherius, of the most ancient race of
the Cornelii, or, as he boasts, of the stock of Asinius Pollio, is said
to have accused me at Rome long ago for having translated
‘ivy’ instead of ‘gourd.’” | if I repel the
attacks of a man of boastful and curious spirit, and aim all my shafts
at a single butt, why does he divide with others the wounds meant for
him alone? And why is he so unwise as to shew, by the irritation of his
answer to my attack, his consciousness that it is he alone whom the cap
fits?
He brings against me the charge
of perjury and sacrilege together, because, in a book written for the
instruction of one of Christ’s virgins, I describe the promise
which I once made when I dreamed that I was before the tribunal of the
Judge, that I would never again pay attention to secular literature,
and that nevertheless I have sometimes made mention of the learning
which I then condemned. I think that I have here lighted on the man
who, under the name of Sallustianus Calpurnius, and through the letter
written to me by the orator Magnus, raised a not very3059
3059 Per
oratorem Magnum non magnam moverat
quæstionem. | great question. My answer on the general
subject is contained in the short treatise which I then wrote to him.3060
3060 Jerome, Letter LXX, c. 6. “Perhaps the question (as to
Christians reading heathen books) is suggested by one who, for his love
of Sallust, might go by the name of Calpurnius
Lanarius.” | But at the present moment I must make
answer as to the sacrilege and perjury of my dream. I said that I would
thenceforward read no secular books: it was a promise for the future,
not the abolition of my memory of the past. How, you may ask me, can
you retain what you have been so long without reading? I must give my
answer by recurring to one of these old books:3061
3061 Virg. Geor. ii, 272. |
’Tis much to be inured in
tender youth.
But by this mode of denial I
criminate myself; for bringing Virgil as my witness I am accused by my
own defender. I suppose I must weave a long web of words to prove what
each man is conscious of. Which of us does not remember his infancy? I
shall make you laugh though you are a man of such extreme gravity; and
you will have at last to do as Crassus did, who, Lucilius tells us,
laughed but once in his life, if I recount the memories of my
childhood: how I ran about among the offices where the slaves worked;
how I spent the holidays in play; or how I had to be dragged like a
captive from my grandmother’s lap to the lessons of my enraged
Orbilius.3062
3062 The name of a pedagogue recorded by Horace (Ep. ii, 1, 71), which
passed into a general name for boys’ tutors. | You may still more be astonished if
I say that, even now that my head is gray and bald, I often seem in my
dreams to be standing, a curly youth, dressed in my toga, to declaim a
controversial thesis before the master of rhetoric; and, when I wake, I
congratulate myself on escaping the peril of making a speech. Believe
me, our infancy brings back to us many things most accurately. If you
had had a literary education, your mind would retain what it was
originally imbued with as a wine cask retains its scent. The purple dye
on the wool cannot be washed out with water. Even asses and other
brutes know the inns they have stopped at before, however long the
journey may have been. Are you astonished that I have not forgotten my
Latin books when you learnt Greek without a master? I learned the seven
forms of Syllogisms in the Elements of logic; I learned the meaning of
an Axiom, or as it might be called in Latin a Determination; I learned
how every sentence must have in it a verb and a noun; how to heap up
the steps of the Sorites,3063
3063 The “Heap-argument,” in which a number of separate
arguments converge on the same point. | how to detect
the clever turns of the Pseudomenos3064
3064 “The Liar,” another logical puzzle. | and the
frauds of the stock sophisms. I can swear that I never read any of
these things after I left school. I suppose that, to escape from having
what I learned made into a crime, I must, according to the fables of
the poets, go and drink of the river Lethe. I summon you, who
accuse me for my scanty knowledge, and who think yourself a
litérateur and a Rabbi, tell me how was it that you dared to write
some of the things you have written, and to translate Gregory,3065
3065 Nazianzen. See Prolegomena. | that most eloquent man, with a splendour
of eloquence like his own? Whence have you obtained that flow of words,
that lucidity of statement, that variety of translations,—you who
in youth had hardly more than a first taste of rhetoric? I must be very
much mistaken if you do not study Cicero in secret. I suspect that,
being yourself so cultivated a person, you forbid me under penalties
the reading of Cicero, so that you may be left alone among our church
writers to boast of your flow of eloquence. I must say, however, that
you seem rather to follow the philosophers, for your style is akin to
that of the thorny sentences of Cleanthes3066
and the contortions of Chrysippus,3067
3067 Of Cilicia; disciple of Cleanthes, b.c.
280–208. | not from
any art, for of that you say you are ignorant, but from the sympathy of
genius. The Stoics claim Logic as their own, a science which you
despise as a piece of fatuity; on this side, therefore, you are an
Epicurean, and the principle of your eloquence is, not style but
matter. For, indeed, what does it matter that no one else understands
what you wish to say, when you write for your own friends alone, not
for all? I must confess that I myself do not always understand what you
write, and think that I am reading3068
3068 Born at Ephesus b.c. 503. His philosophy
was tinged with melancholy, and his style obscure. |
Heraclitus; however I do not complain, nor lament for my sluggishness;
for the trouble of reading what you write is not more than the trouble
you must have in writing it.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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