What did this Sibyl teach the
proud king by this bold deed, except that the vessels of wisdom,
holy books, exceed all human estimation; and, as Gregory says of
the kingdom of Heaven: They are worth all that thou hast?
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.
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