The Charge of Reading Secular Books

But now my defense has steered its way out of these rough and broken places, and I have refuted the charge of heresy brought against me by looking my accuser freely in the face. So I will pass on to the other charges with which he tries to attack me. The first is that I am an abusive person, a slanderer of everyone, always snarling and biting at those who went before me. I ask him to name a single person whose reputation I have run down, or whom I have stung with pretended praise, an art my opponent practices. But suppose I do speak against ill-natured people, and wound with the point of my pen some Luscius Lanuvinus, or some Asinius Pollio of the race of the Cornelii. Suppose I fight off the attacks of a boastful and prying man, and aim all my arrows at a single target. Why does he share out among others the wounds meant for him alone? And why is he so unwise as to show, by the irritation of his answer to my attack, that he knows the description fits him and him alone? [a]

He brings against me the charges of perjury and sacrilege together. In a book written to instruct one of Christ’s virgins, I described the promise I once made when I dreamed that I stood before the judgment seat of the Judge: that I would never again give my attention to secular literature. And yet, he says, I have sometimes mentioned the learning I then condemned. I think I have here come upon the man who, under the name of Sallustianus Calpurnius, raised a question, not a very great one, through the letter the orator Magnus wrote to me. My answer on the general subject is in the short treatise I wrote to him at the time. But at present I must answer the charge of sacrilege and perjury over my dream. I said that from then on I would read no secular books. It was a promise for the future, not the abolition of my memory of the past. You may ask me, “How can you keep what you have gone so long without reading?” I must give my answer by turning back to one of those old books: [d]

But by denying it this way I incriminate myself, for in 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 every man knows from his own experience. Which of us does not remember his childhood? You are a man of such great seriousness, yet I will make you laugh, and in the end you will have to do as Crassus did, who, Lucilius tells us, laughed only once in his life, if I recount the memories of my childhood: how I ran about among the rooms 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 furious Orbilius. You may be still more astonished if I tell you that even now, when my head is gray and bald, I often seem in my dreams to be standing, a curly-haired youth dressed in my toga, about to declaim a disputed case before the teacher of rhetoric. And when I wake, I congratulate myself on escaping the danger of making a speech. [h]

Believe me, our childhood brings many things back to us with great exactness. If you had had a literary education, your mind would hold on to what it was first steeped in, as a wine jar keeps its smell. Purple dye cannot be washed out of wool with water. Even donkeys and other animals know the inns where they have stopped before, however long the journey may have been. Are you astonished that I have not forgotten my Latin books, when you learned Greek without a teacher? I learned the seven forms of the syllogism in the elements of logic. I learned what an axiom is, 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 pile up the steps of the sorites; how to detect the clever turns of the Pseudomenos and the tricks of the stock sophisms. I can swear that I never read any of these things after I left school. I suppose that, to keep what I learned from being made into a crime, I must go, as the poets’ fables have it, and drink from the river Lethe.

I call on you, who accuse me over my scanty knowledge and who think yourself a man of letters and a rabbi. Tell me how you dared to write some of the things you have written, and to translate Gregory, that most eloquent man, with a splendor of eloquence like his own. Where did you get that flow of words, that clearness of statement, that variety in translating, you who in your youth had hardly more than a first taste of rhetoric? I am very much mistaken if you do not study Cicero in secret. I suspect that, being so cultivated a person yourself, you forbid me under penalty to read 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. Your style is akin to the thorny sentences of Cleanthes and the contortions of Chrysippus, not by any art, since you say you know none, but from a natural kinship of mind. The Stoics claim logic as their own, a science you despise as foolishness. On this side, then, you are an Epicurean, and the rule of your eloquence is matter, not style. For indeed, what does it matter that no one else understands what you mean, when you write for your own friends alone and not for everyone? I must confess that I myself do not always understand what you write, and I think I am reading Heraclitus. Still, I do not complain or lament my own slowness of mind, for the trouble of reading what you write is no greater than the trouble you must have in writing it.