A scribe busy at his craft, sculpted in the thirteenth century on the Western Portal of Chartres Cathedral. (photo credit 13.5)
The categories that a reader brings to a reading, and the categories in which that reading itself is placed — the learned social and political categories, and the physical categories into which a library is divided — constantly modify one another in ways that appear, over the years, more or less arbitrary or more or less imaginative. Every library is a library of preferences, and every chosen category implies an exclusion. After the Jesuit order was dissolved in 1773, the books stored in its Brussels house were sent to the Belgian Royal Library, which, however, had no room to accommodate them. The books were therefore kept in a vacant Jesuit church. As the church was infested with mice, the librarians had to devise a plan to protect the books. The secretary of the Belgian Literary Society was commissioned to select the best and most useful books; these were placed on shelves in the centre of the nave, while all the others were left on the floor. It was thought that the mice would gnaw their way around the edges, leaving the central core intact.27
There are even libraries whose categories do not accord with reality. The French writer Paul Masson, who had worked as a magistrate in the French colonies, noticed that the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris was deficient in Latin and Italian books of the fifteenth century, and decided to remedy this by compiling a list of appropriate books under a new category that “would save the prestige of the catalogue” — a category that included only books whose titles he had made up. When Colette, a long-time friend, asked what was the use of books that did not exist, Masson’s answer was an indignant “Well, I can’t be expected to think of everything!”28
A room determined by artificial categories, such as a library, suggests a logical universe, a nursery universe in which everything has its place and is defined by it. In a celebrated story, Borges took Bacon’s reasoning to its uttermost reach, imagining a library as vast as the universe itself. In this library (which in actual fact multiplies to infinity the architecture of the old Buenos Aires National Library on Calle Méjico, where Borges was the blind director) no two books are identical. Since the shelves contain all possible combinations of the alphabet, and thus rows and rows of indecipherable gibberish, every real or imaginable book is represented: “the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the falsity of these catalogues, the demonstration of the falsity of the real catalogue, the gnostic Gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true account of your death, a version of every book in every language, the interpolation of every book in all the other books, the treatise the Venerable Bede might have written (and never wrote) on Saxon mythology, the lost books of Tacitus.” In the end, Borges’s narrator (who is also a librarian), wandering through the exhausting corridors, imagines that the Library itself is part of another overwhelming category of libraries, and that the almost infinite collection of books is periodically repeated throughout a bookish eternity. “My loneliness,” he concludes, “is cheered by this elegant hope.”29
Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children’s Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not — or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader — the curious reader, the alert reader — to rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned.
Colossal head of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great. (photo credit 13.6)
READING THE FUTURE
n the year 1256, the immensely well-read scholar Vincent de Beauvais gathered the opinions of such classical authors as Lactantius and Saint Augustine and, based on their writings, listed in his vast thirteenth-century encyclopedia of the world, the Speculum majus, the birthplaces of the ten ancient sibyls — Cumae, Cyme, Delphi, Erythrea, the Hellespont, Libya, Persia, Phrygia, Samos and Tibur.1 The sibyls, de Beauvais explained, were oracular women who spoke in riddles — divinely inspired words that human beings were supposed to decipher. In tenth-century Iceland, in a poetic monologue known as the Voluspa,2 a sibyl is made to utter these blunt words as a refrain addressed to the inquisitive reader: “Well, do you understand? Or what?”
The sibyls were immortal and almost eternal: one declared that she had begun speaking the voice of her god in the sixth generation after the Flood; another maintained that she preceded the Flood itself. But they grew old. The Sibyl of Cumae, who, “dishevelled, bosom heaving, heart swollen with wild frenzy”,3 had directed Aeneas to the underworld, lived throughout the centuries in a bottle dangling in mid air, and when children asked her what she wanted she would answer, “I want to die.”4 The sibylline prophecies — many of which were accurately composed by inspired mortal poets after the events foretold — were held to be true in Greece, Rome, Palestine and Christian Europe. Collected in nine books, they were offered by the Cumaean sibyl herself to Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh and last king of Rome.5 He refused to pay, and the sibyl set fire to three of the volumes. Again he refused; she burned three more. Finally the king bought the remaining three books at the price of the original nine, and they were kept in a chest in a stone vault under the Temple of Jupiter until they were consumed in a fire in 83 BC. Centuries later, in Byzantium, twelve texts attributed to the sibyls were found and collected in a single manuscript; an incomplete version was published in 1545.
The most ancient, most venerated of the sibyls was Herophile, who had prophesied the Trojan War. Apollo offered her any gift she chose; she asked him to grant her as many years as the grains of sand she held in her hand. Regrettably, like Tithonus, she forgot to ask the god for immortal youth as well. Herophile was known as the Erythrean sibyl,6 and two towns at least claimed to be her birthplace: Marpessos, in what is today the Turkish province of Canakkale (erythrea means “red dirt”, and the earth of Marpessos is red), and Erythrea, farther south, in Ionia,7 in what is today roughly the province of Izmir. In the year 162, at the beginning of the Parthian Wars, Lucius Aurelius Verus, who for eight years shared the imperial Roman throne with Marcus Aurelius, seemingly settled the question. Ignoring the claims of the citizens of Marpessos, he entered the so-called Sibyl’s Cave in Ionian Erythrea and set up two statues, one of the sibyl and another of her mother, declaring on her behalf, in verses engraved in stone, “No other is my country, only Erythrea.”8 The authority of the Sibyl of Erythrea was thereby established.
In the year 330, Flavius Valerius Constantinus, whom history would remember as Constantine the Great, having defeated the army of the rival emperor Licinius six years earlier, affirmed his position as head of the world’s vastest empire by moving his capital from the edge of the Tiber to the edge of the Bosphorus, to Byzantium. To underline the significance of this change of waterfront he renamed the city New Rome; the emperor’s vanity and his courtiers’ sycophancy changed it once again, to Constantinople — the City of Constantine.
To make the city fit for an emperor, Constantine enlarged the old Byzantium both physically and spiritually. Its language was Greek; its political organization was Roman; its religion — largely through the influence of Constantine’s mother, Saint Helena — was Christian. Brought up in Nicomedia, in the Eastern Roman Empire, at the court of Diocletian, Constantine had become familiar with much of the rich Latin literature of classical Rome. In Greek
he felt less comfortable; when later in life he was obliged to deliver speeches in the Greek tongue of his subjects, he would first compose them in Latin and then read out translations prepared by educated slaves. Constantine’s family, originally from Asia Minor, had worshipped the sun as Apollo, the Unconquered God, whom the Emperor Aurelian had introduced as the supreme deity of Rome in 274.9 It was from the sun that Constantine received a vision of the Cross bearing the motto In hoc vinces (“By this you shall be victorious”) before his battle with Licinius;10 the symbol of Constantine’s new city became the sun’s rayed crown made, so it was believed, from the nails of the True Cross which his mother had disinterred close to the hill of Calvary.11 So powerful was the radiance of the sun god that barely seventeen years after Constantine’s death, the date of the birth of Christ — Christmas — was transferred to the winter solstice — the birthday of the sun.12
In 313 Constantine and Licinius (with whom Constantine then shared the government of the empire and whom he would later betray) met in Milan to discuss “the welfare and security of the realm” and declared, in a famous edict, that “of the things that are of profit to all mankind, the worship of God ought rightly to be our first and chiefest care, and it is right that Christians and all others should have freedom to follow the kind of religion they favour.”13 With this Edict of Milan, Constantine officially ended the persecution of Christians in the Roman empire, who until then had been regarded as outlaws and traitors, and punished accordingly. But the persecuted turned persecutors: to assert the authority of the new state religion, several Christian leaders adopted the methods of their old enemies. In Alexandria, for example, where the legendary Catherine was supposed to have been martyred on a spiked and wooden wheel by the Emperor Maxentius, in 361 the bishop himself led the assault on the Temple of Mithras, the Persian god who was a favourite among soldiers and became the one really serious competitor to the religion of Christ; in 391 the patriarch Theophilus pillaged the Temple of Dionysus — the god of fertility, whose cult was celebrated in mysteries of great secrecy — and urged the Christian crowd to destroy the great statue of the Egyptian god Serapis; in 415 the patriarch Cyrillus ordered a crowd of young Christians to enter the house of Hypatia, the pagan philosopher and mathematician, drag her out into the streets, hack her to pieces and burn her remains in the public square.14 It must be said that Cyrillus himself was not much loved. After his death in 444, one of the bishops of Alexandria pronounced the following funeral eulogy: “At last this odious man is dead. His departure causes his survivors to rejoice, but is bound to distress the dead. They will not be long in becoming fed up with him and sending him back to us. Therefore, place a very heavy stone on his tomb so that we will not run the risk of seeing him again, even as a ghost.”15
Christianity became, like the religion of the powerful Egyptian goddess Isis or of the Persians’ Mithras, a fashionable religion, and in the Christian church of Constantinople, second only to St. Peter’s in Rome, the faithful rich came and went among the faithful poor, parading such an array of silks and jewellery (on which enamelled and embroidered Christian stories had replaced the myths of the pagan gods) that Saint John Chrysostom, patriarch of the church, would stand on the steps and follow them with a reproving glare. The rich complained to no avail; from transfixing them with his eyes, Saint Chrysostom began lashing them with his tongue, denouncing from the pulpit their excesses. It was unseemly, he thundered eloquently (the name “Chrysostom” means “golden-tongued”), that a single nobleman might own ten or twenty houses and up to two thousand slaves, and possess doors carved out of ivory, floors of glittering mosaics and furniture inlaid with precious stones.16
But Christianity was still far from being a secure political force. There was the danger of Sassanian Persia, which from a nation of weak Parthians had become a fiercely expanding state that three centuries later was to conquer almost the entire Roman East.17 There was the danger of heresies: the Manicheans, for instance, who believed that the universe was controlled not by one omnipotent god but by two antagonistic powers, and who, like the Christians, had missionaries and holy texts and were gaining adepts as far as Turkestan and China. There was the danger of political dissension: Constantine’s father, Constantius, had controlled only the eastern part of the Roman empire, and in the farthest corners of the realm administrators were shifting their loyalties from Rome to their own domains. There was the problem of high inflation, which Constantine made more serious by flooding the market with gold expropriated from the pagan temples. There were the Jews, with their books and religious arguments. And there were still the pagans. What Constantine needed was not the tolerance preached in his own Milan edict, but a strict, no-nonsense, far-reaching, authoritarian Christianity, with deep roots in the past and a stern promise for the future, established through earthly powers and laws and customs for the greater glory of both emperor and God.
In May 325, in Nicaea, Constantine presented himself to his bishops as “the bishop of external things” and declared his recent military campaigns against Licinius to have been “a war against corrupt paganism”.18 For his efforts, Constantine would be seen from then on as a leader sanctioned by divine power, an emissary of the godhead itself. (When he died in 337, he was buried in Constantinople next to the cenotaphs of the twelve Apostles, the implication being that he had become a posthumous thirteenth. After his death, he was usually depicted in ecclesiastical iconography as receiving the imperial crown from the hand of God Himself.)
Constantine saw that it was necessary to establish the exclusivity of the religion he had chosen for his state. To do this, he decided to wield against the pagans the pagan heroes themselves. On Good Friday of that same year, 325, in Antioch, the emperor addressed a congregation of Christian followers, including bishops and theologians, and spoke to them about what he called “the eternal truth of Christianity”. “My desire,” he said to the assembly — which he called “the Assembly of Saints” — “is to derive even from foreign sources a testimony to the Divine nature of Christ. For on such testimony it is evident that even those who blaspheme His name must acknowledge that He is God, and the Son of God, if indeed they will accredit the words of those whose sentiments coincided with their own.”19 To prove this, Constantine invoked the Erythrean sibyl.
Constantine told his audience how the sibyl, in times long past, had been given over “by the folly of her parents” to the service of Apollo, and how “in the sanctuary of her vain superstition” she had answered the questions of Apollo’s followers. “On one occasion, however,” he explained, the sibyl “became really filled with inspiration from above, and declared in prophetic verses the future purposes of God, plainly indicating the advent of Jesus by the initial letters of a series of verses that formed an acrostic with these words: JESUS CHRIST, SON OF GOD, SAVIOUR, CROSS.” Then Constantine proceeded to declaim the sibyl’s poem.
Magically, the poem (which in English translation begins “Judgement! Earth’s oozing pores shall mark the day”) indeed contains the divine acrostic. To refute any possible skeptics, Constantine immediately acknowledged the obvious explanation: “that some one professing our faith, and not unacquainted with the poetic art, was the composer of these verses.” But this possibility he dismissed: “Truth, however, in this case is evident, since the diligence of our countrymen has made a careful computation of the times, so that there is no room to suspect that this poem was composed after the advent and condemnation of Christ.” Furthermore, “Cicero was acquainted with this poem, which he translated into the Latin tongue, and incorporated with his own works.” Unfortunately, the passage in which Cicero mentions the sibyl — the Cumaean, not the Erythrean — contains no reference to either these verses or the acrostic, and is in fact a refutation of prophetic predictions.20 Nevertheless, so convenient was this marvellous revelation that for many centuries afterwards the Christian world accepted the sibyl among its forebears. Saint Augustine gave her a home among the blessed in his City of God.21 At the e
nd of the twelfth century, the architects of the Cathedral of Laon sculpted on its façade the Erythrean sibyl (decapitated during the French Revolution) carrying her oracular tablets, shaped like those of Moses, and inscribed at her feet the second line of the apocryphal poem22 And four hundred years later Michelangelo placed her on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as one of the four sibyls complementing the four Old Testament prophets.
A woodcut of the Erythrean Sibyl in a 1473 edition of Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus. (photo credit 14.1)
The Sibyl was the pagan oracle, and Constantine had made her speak in the name of Jesus Christ. Constantine now turned his attention to pagan poetry and announced that the “prince of Latin poets” had also been inspired by a Saviour he could not have known. Virgil had written an eclogue to honour his patron, Gaius Asinius Pollio, founder of Rome’s first public library; the eclogue announced the arrival of a new golden age, born in the guise of a baby boy:
Begin, sweet boy! with smiles thy mother know,
Who ten long months did with thy burden go.
A History of Reading Page 21