Preface upon the Eight Books of the Holy Library

PREFACE of Friar Sixtus of Siena, of the Order of Preachers, upon the eight books of the Holy Library

With such clouds of ignorance indeed are all mortals encompassed, and overwhelmed with such darkness of errors, that by their own strength they cannot lift the bedimmed eyes of the mind to that most refulgent splendor of the divine light, in the beholding of which consists the highest and true felicity of man. God, the creator of all things, taking pity on this so profound gloom of the human mind, has bestowed very many remedies upon our blindness: among which that most excellent light of Christian wisdom stands foremost, revealed in the holy books of the divine oracles, whose most brilliant rays show, amid the devious and dark by-paths of this life, the unencumbered way to eternal beatitude.

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And lest any difficulty either of foreign speech and unknown tongue, or any obscurity of abstruse meaning, should in any part becloud for readers the flashing brightness of the divine volumes, He summoned into His Church, out of all the nations of the whole world, various interpreters, expositors, and doctors, nobly imbued with the secular disciplines and divinely inspired with skill in sacred things, who should pour over the blessed scriptures of both Testaments into the principal languages of the nations, and should unlock the mysteries hidden in them not only with living words and the animated sound of the voice, but should also, with pen and ink, piously and perspicuously unfold them in pages and codices destined to endure the longer — leaving to us, upon all the parts of both the old and the new instrument [Testament], divers works of sacred explanation: that is, Translations, Introductions, Partitions, Annotations, Paraphrases, Enarrations, Homilies, Sermons, Meditations, Disputations, Collations, Coacervations [accumulations], Commentaries, Collectanea, Compendia, and other innumerable writings of the interpretative kind like to these, digested according to the diversity of talents and the variety of the times.

And lest either the carelessness of men, or the injury of time — which obliterates all things — should bring destruction upon such distinguished monuments of letters, God first raised up not a few prelates and pastors of the Church, kindled with ardor for the evangelical doctrine and for ecclesiastical discipline, who gathered up the toils and vigils of the sacred authors, sought out through the whole world not without great labor and enormous expense, and with great fidelity — or rather religious scruple — copied them out in most correct codices; and thereafter out of these erected libraries in the chief churches, in the colleges of priests, and in the monasteries of monks, stocked full with the most precious lucubrations of the holy doctors of the Church: so that the custody of so divine a thing might rest with those whose chief concern it is to pass their whole mortal life in the studies of eternal life, and not only to meditate on the laws of God day and night, according to the sentence of David ², but also to instruct others delivered over to their care, and to school them both in the evangelical precepts and in the [evangelical] counsels.

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For nothing is more useful for the training and teaching of the people of the Church than the divine furniture of books, and the writings of the noble chieftains of the Church, containing nothing that does not belong to the celestial and immortal goods. For from these, as from the most fertile and ever-verdant fields bedewed with the dew of Mount Hermon, the Christian people is fed with wholesome nourishment; the thirst of the hearers is quenched as from the purest fountains of living water and from the eternal rivers of paradise; and against spiritual diseases, as from medicinal gardens, are gathered the most efficacious remedies of herbs and flowers that perish by no old age. From these, just as from a most opulent treasury of riches, the poverty of needy souls is enriched; nor otherwise than from the best-furnished armories are weapons taken up, whereby the madnesses of infidels and the furies of heretics are laid low. From these, no otherwise than from a school and training-ground of all the virtues, the whole life, manners, and duties of the Christian man are formed: the unlearned are taught, the learned are exercised, the fallen are helped, that they may rise; the standing [are admonished], lest they fall; the naked are armed with spiritual arms; the armed are led forth into battle; those in the fight are heartened, lest they be conquered; the conquering are admonished, lest they lose their victory. In sum, there is nothing anywhere either honorable, or useful, or delightful — nothing great or rare — which could be desired in these [books] for [attaining] Christian erudition, for piety of life, and for the gaining of true felicity.

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But, our sins so deserving it, it has come to pass that upon this sacred treasure of the ecclesiastical Library — which God, by such great solicitude of our forefathers, willed to be preserved for the use of the Church, there have now — O grief! — been brought loss and disaster, to be bewailed with many tears, by the ignorance together with the avarice, the rashness, the ambition, and the impiety of many utterly abandoned men of this wicked age.

⁵ Among whom, first, the printers and certain booksellers, seeking nothing by their craft except gain, daily send forth new broods of books — adulterine, supposititious, pseudepigraphous, and bastard — having set upon the frontispieces of the works, without any judgment or shame, the false inscriptions of illustrious authors, that thereby they may sell them both dearer and faster. By this artifice, to be sure, they have foisted upon us, among many spurious births, the Questions on Genesis of Philo the Jew; the Questions to the Gentiles of Justin, philosopher and martyr; the Questions to Antiochus of St. Athanasius; the Paraphrase on Job of Origen, and Commentaries of the same on the same book; likewise the Commentaries on the Psalms of Arnobius the Rhetor; the Homilies on the Gospels of Eusebius of Emesa; the Explanations on the Apocalypse of Ambrose; the three books of Jerome On Proverbs, and three books On the Lamentations of Jeremiah; the eight books of Eucherius On the histories of Genesis and of Kings; and along with these very many other works falsely fathered, especially under the names of the ancient Fathers — whose doctrines, style, and times stand farther from their own titles and inscriptions than heaven from earth.

⁶ And with a not dissimilar, but more impudent trickery, these same men — as the adage has it, getting themselves two sons-in-law from a single daughter — have oftentimes printed what was the work of but one author separately, and even in the same printing-house, under the diverse titles of two or three authors: exhibiting to us (that I may meanwhile adduce a few little instances out of so many for example) the Homilies on Leviticus printed in separate volumes, once under the name of Origen and again the very same under the name of Cyril; bringing forward likewise the same commentaries on the epistles of Paul, inscribed in some codices to Athanasius, but in others to Theophylact; similarly publishing the same Paraphrase on Ecclesiastes, first fore-titled with the inscription of Gregory of Neocaesarea, and then, the following year, with that of Gregory Nazianzen; selling the same commentaries on Proverbs, at first claimed for Bede, and soon after for Jerome; divulging also the same commentations on Job, in many volumes, under the name of Philip the Priest, but in most fore-titled with the style of Bede the Priest — under which [name] they have also issued the Collectanea of the same Bede On the Hexameron, struck off at the same time under the appellation of Junilius the African; and the same explanations of the Psalms, bearing in the earlier edition the inscription of Hugh of [St.] Cher (Hugonis Carensis), but in the later, that of Alexander of Hales.

⁷ A detriment far greater and graver than these have the impious heretics of our times brought upon the divine Library: who, that they might win credit for their heresies from the authority of distinguished authors, have set upon the books of nefarious doctrine published by themselves the well-graced names and surnames of the Catholic Fathers — by this kind of imposture, forsooth, enticing to themselves greedy and incautious readers, to whom they might vend dregs and excrements for ambrosia and nectar, and death-dealing poisons smeared over with honey for remedies and antidotes. Thus in recent years they published abroad the pernicious volume of Oecolampadius against the Sacrament of the body of Christ under the title of Bertram the Priest, On the body and blood of the Lord, to Charlemagne; and, conversely, the work of Carlstadt against the venerators of images, with the inscription of Charlemagne, On the cult of images, to the sixth synod gathered in the East. And again they sent forth another work — of Calvin — under the name of Alcuin, the preceptor of Charlemagne, to the same Emperor Charles. In this fashion they transformed the book of Henry Bullinger against the visible church into a book of St. Athanasius, On the true and pure church. So too they changed the little work of Bucer against the merits of good works into another little work, with the lying inscription of John, bishop of Rochester (episcopi Roffensis), On the mercy of God. And with a like fraud they turned the Italian sermons of Bernardino Ochino, apostate and heretic, into the sermons of Thomas [Stella], of the Order of Preachers, bishop of Justinopolis [Capodistria].

⁸ And as though this detestable metamorphosis of writings might seem, to these Proteuses and masked play-actors, of no moment or of very little: they have again, with a boldness far more pestilent, rushed upon the labors of the orthodox Fathers, usurping to themselves — above all in the writings of the ancients — a certain tyrannical power of judging, of censuring, of calling into doubt, of repudiating, of mutilating, of rescinding, and, at the lust of their fancy, of removing and utterly abolishing whatever did not please their own insane taste. Of these — that I may not review them one by one — let Oecolampadius, Luther, and Erasmus suffice for example. The first of whom removed the books of Ambrose On the sacraments out of the Ambrosian works, as if unworthy of Ambrose their parent, for no other cause than that they overthrew his heresy concerning the sacrament. The second cast utterly away all the works celebrated under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite — brought forward now for so many ages, under his authority, by great authors in testimony of the weightiest matters — offended, as he himself says, by their Platonic dreams, and by their unskilled and frigid allegories, in which that author would be forever playing. But the third [Erasmus] — whom the heretics, by way of honor, do not blush to call the Censor of the ecclesiastical library — snatched up the censor’s rod against sacred authors of great name with such authority (not to say temerity), that out of their distinguished lucubrations he either removed a great part altogether, or reduced it into the lowest classes of worthless writers: taking away from Cyprian well-nigh half of his labors; from Jerome, a fourth; from Ambrose, one tome out of four; from Chrysostom, the half of one tome; from Augustine, more than sixty books or opuscula — of which, though I grant that some were not undeservedly expunged, yet very many were unworthily and rashly hissed off.

⁹ I pass over the innumerable and almost infinite volumes of pontifical law and of scholastic theology, which the impious fury of the heretics has shamefully cast out of the sacred Libraries as tyrannical, barbarous, and sophistical, and has even burned up in public conflagrations of flames.

¹⁰ I omit, for brevity’s sake, certain profane defilers who, as cockle with wheat and lees with wine, mix into the writings of the Fathers their own trifles, old-wives’ songs, and errors, with such a mingling and such a joining that they cannot be torn away from the authors’ true works without loss of the whole work, and can only with difficulty even be distinguished: of which kind are Prefaces, Arguments, Coronides [tail-pieces], Appendices, Corollaries, Summaries, Glossemata, Annotations, Scholia, Castigations, Observations, Censures, Antidotes, and a thousand other by-works (parerga) of most impudent temerity, conferred [inflicted] by Oecolampadius and Lucianus upon Chrysostom, by Beatus Rhenanus upon Tertullian, and by Erasmus upon Hilary, Jerome, and Augustine — and lately condemned by decree of the holy Roman Church.

¹¹ And, lest I delay the reader longer in a matter so manifest, I say nothing of the translations and printings of the sacred authors, in so many places deliberately altered, depraved, falsified by the heretics, and violently wrested to their own heresies. I come rather to the blessed writers of both Testaments: whom, though above all — on account of the majesty of the divine word and the undoubted authority of our faith — they ought to have kept untouched and left inviolate, yet against none have these boars, more than sylvan [wild], raged more savagely.

¹² Of whom some, raising the beginning of contention from the very translations of the divine scripture, proclaim with sacrilegious voice that all the editions which the church of the faithful has down to this day venerated as true and certain are for the greater part badly translated, wrongly copied, contaminated, altered, in many places falsified, scraped away, added to, and in every way most vilely handled; and that therefore, for the sincere reading of the holy volumes, there is need of new, true, and emended versions: such as in recent years have been sent forth by Pellican, Zwingli, Luther, Münster, Erasmus, Castellio, and several other authors of profane novelties — who out of the Greek and Hebrew fount have translated the holy Bible into the various tongues of divers nations according to the good pleasure of their own dogmas, with scholia, glossemata, arguments, summaries, titles, and most pestilent indices adjoined: whereby they compel the divine scriptures to speak whatever they themselves have willed, and whatever of impiety they have devised.

¹³ Others, having assailed the very authority of the divine letters more criminally and more impiously, diminish for us the number of the volumes of both Testaments and reduce it to a smaller sum: among whom Luther and Zwingli first eliminate from the old Testament the books of Wisdom, of Ecclesiasticus, of Tobias, of Esther, of Judith, of Baruch, of the Maccabees, and a part of Daniel, as apocrypha and writings of uncertain authority and credit. And from the new instrument [Testament] the same men take away from us the epistle of Paul to the Hebrews, the Epistles of James and of Jude, the second of Peter, and the second and third epistles of John, as being too little evangelical and unworthy of the apostolic name. Calvin cuts out of the Gospel of John the history of the adulterous woman. Musculus lops off the last chapter from the Gospel of Mark, of whose author and inscription Erasmus had some time before entertained doubts. Erasmus tears away from the new testament the Apocalypse of John, previously condemned by Luther, and pronounces that they are deceived who believe it to be [the work] of John the Evangelist — from whose earlier [first] epistle he also cut away that most celebrated testimony Of the Unity of the Trinity [1 John 5:7], as adventitious and thrust in from elsewhere by the Homousians [defenders of the homoousion].

¹⁴ And the raving Fanatics and the Anabaptists proudly boast that the whole body of divine scripture has been corrupted on every side, but especially in the evangelical and apostolic letters: inasmuch as in them many testimonies out of the Mosaic and prophetic books were rashly and falsely inserted by half-Jewish Christians.

¹⁵ Others, on the contrary, wishing to augment the number of the holy books, bring forward under the name of divine authors certain apocryphal writings: such as are the Protoevangelium of James, the Gospel of the Nazarenes, the Gospel of Nicodemus, the epistle of Paul to the Laodiceans, the Visions of Esaias, and other things of this kind, lately struck off by the presses of the heretics and illustrated with scholia. Such also are the Hebrew [Gospel] of Matthew’s Gospel; the Hebrew epistle of Paul to the Hebrews; and the Hebrew volumes of Tobias, Judith, and the Maccabees, far different from our vulgate edition — which Münster, having partly translated them himself out of the Latin into the Hebrew speech, and partly fabricated them, has put under the press and published, as though faithfully taken from the ancient archives of the Jews and from the very archetypes of their authors.

And, lest by enumerating each thing singly I weary the reader with too long a preface, let it suffice to have pointed out these things only, by way of example: which indeed, together with the other impostures of this kind — to be plainly detected by us in the course of the present work — have so tossed the precious treasures of the divine Library topsy-turvy, and, rolling them up together with the filthy off-scourings of the heretics, have confounded them into one chaos of undivided commixture, that nothing is now more difficult than, in so great a confusion of writings, to discern the true from the false, the pious from the impious, the pure from the impure; to distinguish the legitimate and truly genuine from the spurious; and to separate the depravations of impostors from the entire and uncontaminated writings of the authors.

Considering — I myself — this so great calamity of the orthodox Library, not without immense sadness of heart and the constant brooding of a grieving mind, I judged that I should be doing a thing neither wholly superfluous, nor at all unserviceable for the repairing of this loss, if out of the most approved writers I should weave together the present work, divided into eight books: whose arguments — that from these you may comprehend at a single glance the matter, the usefulness, and the order of the whole undertaking from its very beginning — I shall briefly set forth in this place.

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The first book, then, treating of the divine volumes of both Testaments, will expound most diligently the several arguments of them, their authors, their authority, and the times of the matters described by their authors.

The second will review all the writings — extant and not extant, the true and undoubted as well as the apocryphal and pseudepigraphous — of all the writers of whom mention is made in the sacred volumes; and will lucidly explicate their arguments, and many obscure things in them.

The third, embracing the art of expounding the holy volumes, will show, by most apt rules and examples, almost sixty modes of explaining the holy writings, employed by the Catholic expositors.

The fourth, containing a catalog of those who have illustrated the divine volumes with Catholic interpretations, will comprehend, of all the expositors who from the three-hundredth year before the birth of Christ down to these times have expounded the holy books rightly and piously: their names, their race [nation], their dignity, their century, the number and variety of their commentaries, their language, their style, their kind of exposition, their method of expounding — and especially the various judgments of illustrious men concerning the principal expositors. To this will be added, in the place of an appendix, an Index (Elenchus) of the Hebrew expositors of the divine volumes; and likewise a brief admonition On the causes of false inscriptions, and by what conjectures their falsity may be detected.

The fifth, claiming to itself the censor’s right over the expositors of the divine volumes of the old Testament, will contain annotations, censures, castigations, observations, and elucidations of the most erudite doctors of the church upon various passages in the explanations of the nobler expositors — partly to be read with caution, partly to be avoided altogether, partly to be piously interpreted, or at least modestly excused.

The sixth will contain, with the same annotating zeal and order, censures and annotations upon the explainers of the books of the new Testament.

The seventh, contending against those who have attempted to obscure the books of the New testament with their heresies, will most sharply confute — both out of the divine letters themselves and out of the writings of the ancient fathers — all the heresies which from the ascension of Christ down to this day have arisen against the several scriptures of the new Testament.

The eighth, with the same weapons, will overthrow all the heresies stirred up by the heretics against the several volumes of the old Testament.

These things, therefore, digested into eight books according to the order proposed, we have gathered together for no other cause than by a pious zeal of helping to serve the public convenience of all lovers of the sacred letters: that — the ambushes being detected, and the perils and well-nigh all the obstacles being removed, which the fraud of the heretics has set in opposition to those greedy of celestial wisdom — it may be permitted to the students of the holy scriptures to range at large through the ample and pleasant fields of the sacrosanct Library, with the greatest delight of mind, more freely, more boldly, and without stumbling. Wherefore I exhort the pious readers — for whose sake we have undertaken this labor, such as it is, with many vigils, sweats, and the expense of good hours — that, if they find any things in my writings which they judge to pertain to the profit of readers, they give thanks to the excellent authors of the church, from whose immortal monuments we have borrowed whatever of good we have contributed hither. But if they detect anything said less than rightly, or strayed into through imprudence (for we too are men, and in many things, as the Apostle says, we all offend), again I beseech and implore them not to attribute it either to arrogance, or to malice, or to any other private affections of mine, but rather to ascribe it to my weakness and slenderness [of powers], modestly correcting and sincerely emending whatever things shall seem to them worthy of castigation. For I myself — a cast-down manikin, and not ignorant of my own lowest condition — not only, as is fitting, do I as a suppliant offer myself and all my writings to the apostolic judgment of the Holy Roman Church, but I also willingly and gladly subject the same to the reckoning [vote] of every candid reader for castigation and emendation: admonishing those who are about to read these things not to exact from me ornaments of words and elegance of elocution — which I neither profess, nor, if I did profess it, could I preserve it in so various and unequal a collection of divers writings — but to receive kindly from me the truth of the matters, set forth in such speech and order as was possible; and to embrace with their whole heart the ready willingness of my mind, my burning desire of helping, and my labor expended for the common profit of all good men: praying our Lord Jesus Christ, that out of His most bountiful goodness He may breathe favorably upon the beginning of our work, and after the beginning may grant prosperous successes even to the end. But now, to the labor of the sacrosanct Library already marked out, let us begin to set our hands.

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