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?
