When a certain wise man [Bernard of Chartres] was asked what is the method and form of learning, he replied, “A humble mind, zeal for inquiry, a quiet life, silent investigation, poverty, and a foreign land: these are wont to reveal to many what is obscure in their reading.” I think that he had heard the saying, “Manners adorn knowledge,” and so he joined together precepts for study and precepts for living, so that the reader may perceive both the manner of his own life and the meaning of study. Knowledge is unworthy of praise when it is stained by a shameless life. Therefore, he who seeks knowledge should take the greatest care not to neglect discipline.
Humility is the beginning of discipline, and although there are many examples of this, these three especially are important to the reader: first, that he should hold no knowledge and no writing cheap; second, that he should not be ashamed to learn from anyone; third, that when he himself will have attained knowledge, he should not scorn others. This has deceived many, who wished to seem wise prematurely. Hence they swell up with self-importance, so that now they begin to pretend to be what they are not, and to be ashamed of what they are, and thus they withdraw further from wisdom, because they wish, not to be wise, but to be considered wise. I have known many of this sort, who, while they are still lacking in the first elements, deign to interest themselves only in the most advanced, and on this account they think that they themselves have become great, if only they have read the writings, or heard the words of the great and wise. “We,” they say, “have seen them; we have read their works; they often speak to us; those distinguished, those famous men know us.” But would that no one recognized me, if I might know everything! You glory in having seen Plato, not in having understood him; I think then that it is not worthy of you to listen to me. I am not Plato, nor do I deserve to see Plato. It is enough for you that you have drunk at the fount of philosophy, but would that you were still thirsty! A king drinks from an earthen pot after he has drunk from a cup of gold. What are you ashamed of? You have heard Plato, you will also hear Chrysippus. As the proverb says: “What you do not know, perhaps Ofellus knows.” It is given to no one to know everything, and yet there is no one who has not received from nature something peculiar to himself. The prudent scholar, therefore, hears everyone freely, reads everything, and rejects no book, no person, no doctrine. He seeks from all indifferently what he sees is lacking in himself; he considers not how much he may know, but how much he may not know. Hence the Platonic saying: “I prefer to learn modestly from another, rather than shamelessly to thrust forward my own knowledge.” Why are you ashamed to learn and not ashamed to be ignorant? This is more shameful than that. Or why do you strive for the heights, when you are lying in the depths? Consider rather what your powers are strong enough to bear. He advances most suitably who proceeds in an orderly way. When some desire to make a great leap, they fall into the abyss. Do not, therefore, hasten too fast, and thus you will more quickly achieve wisdom. Learn gladly from everyone what you do not know, since humility can make that yours which nature made the possession of someone else. You will be wiser than everyone, if you will learn from everyone. Those who receive from everyone are richer than anyone. Finally, hold no knowledge cheap, since all knowledge is good. If there is time, scorn no writing, or at least read it, since if you gain nothing, you will lose nothing, especially as in my estimation there is no book which does not set forth something to be desired. If it is treated in an appropriate place and order, there is none which does not have something special, which the diligent reader has found nowhere else. The rarer it is, the more gratefully it should be enjoyed. Yet there is nothing good which is not made better.
If you cannot read everything, read that which is more useful. Even if you can read everything, the same amount of labor should not be expended on all. But some things are to be read so that they may not be unknown, and some so that they may not be unheard of, since sometimes we believe that of which we have not heard to be of greater importance, and a thing is more easily judged when its results are known. You can see now how necessary for you this humility is, that you may hold no knowledge cheap, and may learn freely from all. Likewise it behooves you not to despise others when you begin to know something. This vice of arrogance takes possession of some so that they contemplate their own knowledge too lovingly, and since they seem to themselves to be something, they think that others whom they do not know can neither be nor become such as they. Hence also these peddlers of trifles, boasting I do not know of what, accuse their ancestors of simplicity, and believe that wisdom was born with them, and will die with them. They say that in sermons the manner of speaking is so simple that it is not necessary to listen to teachers in these matters, that each of them can penetrate the secrets of truth well enough by his own intelligence. They turn up their noses and make wry mouths at the lecturers in divinity, and they do not understand that they do God an injury, whose words are simple indeed in the beauty of their expression, but they proclaim stupidities with deformed sense. I do not advise imitating such as these. For the good student should be humble and gentle, a stranger to senseless cares and the enticements of pleasure; he should be diligent and zealous, so that he may learn freely from all. He is never presumptuous about his own knowledge, he shuns the authors of perverse teaching like poison, he learns to consider a matter for a long time before he makes a judgment, he knows or seeks not how to seem learned, but to be truly learned, he loves the words of the wise when they have been understood, and he strives to keep them always before his eyes, as a mirror in front of his face. And if perchance his understanding does not have access to the more obscure things, he does not immediately burst out into vituperation, believing that nothing is good unless he himself can understand it. This is the humility of the students’ discipline.
Zeal for inquiry pertains to exercise, in which the student needs encouragement more than instruction. For he who will diligently examine what the ancients achieved because of their love of wisdom, and what monuments of their power they left to be remembered by posterity, will see how inferior is his own diligence. Some spurned honours, others threw away riches, some rejoiced when they received injuries, others scorned punishments, others, abandoning the society of men and penetrating the inmost recesses and secret places of the desert, dedicated themselves solely to philosophy, in order that they might have leisure for contemplating it more freely, because they did not subject their minds to any of those desires which are wont to obstruct the path of virtue. The philosopher Parmenides is said to have sat for fifteen years on a rock in Egypt, and Prometheus is remembered because of his excessive attention to meditation while he was exposed to the vultures on Mount Caucasus. For they knew that the true good is not concealed in the opinion of men, but in a pure conscience, and that those are not really men who, clinging to transitory things, do not recognize their own good. The ancients knew also how much they differed from the others in mind and in intelligence; the very remoteness of their dwellings shows that one habitation may not hold those who are not associated in the same purpose. A certain man once said to a philosopher, “Don’t you see how men mock you?” And the philosopher answered, “They mock me and the asses deride them.” Think, if you can, how much he valued being praised by those whose scorn he did not fear. Again, we read of another that, after the study of all disciplines and after reaching the heights of the arts, he descended to the potter’s trade. And of still another that his disciples loaded their master with praises, and did not fail to boast of his skill as a shoemaker. I would desire such diligence, then, to be in our students, that in them wisdom should never grow old.
Abishag the Shunammite alone kept the old David warm, since the love of wisdom does not desert its lover even when the body grows feeble. Almost all virtues of the body change in the old, and while wisdom alone increases, the others decline. For in the old age of those who furnish their youth with honourable arts, they become more learned, more practised, wiser in the course of time, and reap the sweetest fruits of earli
er studies. Whence also it is said that after that wise man of Greece, Themistocles, had lived one hundred and seven years, he saw that he was about to die, and said that he grieved because he had to abandon life just when he had begun to be wise. Plato died after eighty-one years, and Socrates filled ninety-nine years with teaching and writing and painful labour. I say nothing of the other philosophers, Pythagoras, Democritus, Xenocrates, Zeno, and Eleatus, who flourished for a long time in the studies of wisdom.
I come now to the poets, Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, Tersilochus, who, when they were very old, sang their swan songs, I know not what, but sweeter than ever at the approach of death. When Sophocles, at a very great age and because of his neglect of family affairs was accused by his own family of madness, he recited to the judge that tale of Oedipus which he had written earlier, and gave so great an example of wisdom in his broken old age, that he converted the severity of his judges into acclamation of his performance. Nor is it to be wondered at that when Cato the Censor, the most eloquent of the Romans, took up the study of Creek as an old man, he was not ashamed, nor did he despair. Certainly Homer tells us that sweeter discourse flowed from the tongue of Nestor when he was an old and decrepit man. Behold, then, how much those men loved wisdom whom not even infirm old age could keep from its pursuit....
The four remaining precepts which follow are so arranged, that, in alternation, one has regard to discipline and the other to practice.
Quietness of life is either interior, that the mind is not distracted by unlawful desires, or exterior, that leisure and opportunity suffice for honourable and useful studies. Both of these pertain to discipline.
But investigation, that is, meditation, pertains to practice. It seems, however, that investigation is included under the zeal for inquiry. If this is true, it is superfluous to repeat what has been said above. But it should be known that there is this difference between the two, that the zeal for inquiry means urgency of effort, but investigation, diligence in meditation. Labour and love complete a work, but care and vigilance bring forth counsel. You act in labour, you perfect in love, you prepare with care, and you are attentive in vigilance. These are the four footmen who bear the litter of Philology, since they exercise the mind in which wisdom rules. The chair of philology is the seat of wisdom, which is said to be carried by these bearers, since it advances by exercising itself in them. Therefore, the handsome youths, Philos and Kophos, that is, Labour and Love, because of their strength are said [Martianus Capella, De nuptiis philologiae, bk. n] to bear the litter in front, since they complete a work externally; and behind, the two maidens, Philemia and Agrimina, that is, Care and Vigilance, since they bring forth counsel within and in secret. There are some who think that by the chair of philology is meant the human body, which is governed by the rational mind, that four servants carry the body, that is, that it is composed of four elements. Of these, two are superior, that is, fire and air, masculine in name and in fact, but two are inferior and feminine, earth and water.
Frugality also should be recommended to students, that is, not to strive after superfluities; this is especially related to discipline. For, as it is said, a fat belly does not beget a keen mind. But what can the scholars of our time reply to this, who not only scorn frugality, but also strive to seem richer than they are? Now no one boasts of what he has learned, but of what he has spent. But perhaps they do not want to imitate their own masters, concerning whom I have not discovered what I can say worthy of them.
Finally, a foreign land has been mentioned, which in itself exercises a man. The whole world is a place of exile to those who pursue philosophy. But yet, as someone says [Ovid, Epistulae ex Pont., I, iii, 35], “I do not know what sweetness of the native land alone draws us all, and does not let us be unmindful of it.” It is a great beginning of virtue that the trained mind should little by little first learn to change these visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it will be able to give them up entirely. He is still weak for whom his native land is sweet, but he is strong for whom every country is a fatherland, and he is perfect for whom the whole world is a place of exile. The first confirms his love for the world, the second disperses it, and the last extinguishes it. From boyhood, I have lived in exile, and I know with what grief the spirit sometimes deserts the narrow limits of the poor man’s hut, and with what a sense of freedom it afterwards despises marble halls and panelled ceilings.
From Didascalicon, C. H. Buttimer, ed. (Washington: Catholic University Press, 1939); trans. M.M.M.
The Battle of the Arts
HENRI D’ANDELI
Thirteenth century
Civil Law rode gorgeously
And Canon Law rode haughtily
Ahead of all the other arts.
There was many a Lombard knight,
Marshalled by Rhetoric.
Darts they have of feathered tongues
To pierce the hearts of foolish people
Who come to attack their strongholds;
For they snatch up many a heritage
With the lances of their eloquence.
Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory,
Jerome, Bede, and Isidore,
They quoted to Divinity as authorities
That she might avoid their vanity.
Madam Exalted Science,
Who did not care a fig about their dispute,
Left the arts to fight it out together.
Methinks she went to Paris
To drink the wines of her cellar.
Villainous Chirurgy
Was seated near a bloody cemetery;
She loved discord much better
Than bringing about nice concord.
She carried boxes and ointments
And a great plenty of instruments
To draw arrows from paunches.
It did not take her long to patch up
The bellies she saw pierced:
However, she is a science.
But she has such bold hands
That she spares no one
From whom she may be able to get money.
I would have had much respect for them
If they had cured my eyes;
But they dupe many people,
While with the copper and silver
Which they receive for their poisons
They build them fine houses in Paris.
Madam Music, she of the little bells,
And her clerks full of songs,
Carried fiddles and viols,
Psalteries and small flutes;
From the sound of the first fa
They ascended to cc sol fa.
The sweet tones diatessaron
Diapente, diapason,
Are struck in various combinations.
In groups of four and three,
Through the army they went singing,
They go enchanting them with their song.
These do not engage in battle.
One of the pupils of Dame Logic
Was sent to Grammar;
He bore letters to make peace.
Now I simply cannot refrain from telling this,
That when he arrived at his destination
He did not know the sense
Of the presents nor the preterits;
And that there where he had been brought up,
He had dwelt on them but little.
He had not learned thoroughly
Irregular conjugations,
Which are most difficult to inflect,
Adverbs and parts of speech,
Articles and declensions,
Genders and nominatives,
Supines and imperatives,
Cases, figures, formations,
Singulars, plurals, a thousand terms;
For in the court of Grammar are more corners
Than in all of Logic’s prattlings.
The boy did not know how to come to the point;
And came back in shame.
But Logic comforted him,
Carried h
im to her high tower,
And tried to make him fly
Before he was able to walk.
Grammar withdrew
Into Egypt, where she was born.
But Logic is now in vogue,
Every boy runs her course
Ere he has passed his fifteenth year;
Logic is now for children!
Logic is in a very bad situation
In the tower on Montlhéry;
There she practises her art;
But Grammar opposes her
With her authors and authorlings
Sententious and frivolous.
Echo answered in the tower
To the great blows given all around,
For there they all hurl their rhymes.
Sirs, the times are given to emptiness;
Soon they will go entirely to naught,
For thirty years this will continue,
Until a new generation will arise,
Who will go back to Grammar,
Just as it was the fashion
When Henri d’Andeli was born,
Who gives it us as his opinion
That one should destroy the glib student
Who cannot construe his lesson;
For in every science that master is an apprentice
Who has not mastered his parts of speech.
Here ends The Battle of the Seven Arts.
From The Battle of the Seven Arts, trans. L. J. Paetow (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1914).
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