F. Sixtus of Siena, of the Order of Preachers — On the Catholic Expositors of the Divine Volumes. The Holy Library, Book Four.
Preface
The Third book of our Library set forth the art of expounding the sacred letters, and all the modes of explaining the sacred volumes familiar to the divine expositors. The Fourth book, which we now arrange according to the alphabetical order of the letters, comprehends — of all the Catholic expositors, both extant and not extant, who from the three-hundredth year before Christ down to this day have expounded the divine volumes — their names, surnames, family, dignities [offices], dates, the number and variety of their commentaries, their language, style, kind of exposition, and method of expounding, together with the judgments of illustrious men upon the writings of most of the noble expositors. To these, as by way of appendix, there will follow at the end of the volume a Catalogue of the Hebrew expositors, who explained in Hebrew the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament; and likewise a brief admonition concerning the causes of false ascriptions [of titles], and by what conjectures their falsity may be detected.
All which things we have gathered both from the most approved authors of Ecclesiastical History — Eusebius, Theodoret, Socrates, Sozomen, Evagrius, Zonaras, and Nicephorus — and from those who published Catalogues of the illustrious writers of the church, among whom we have chiefly followed Jerome, Gennadius, Isidore, Honorius, Sigebert, Notger, and Trithemius. 1 The rest we have supplied as best we could from the various Libraries [catalogs] of Italy, Gaul, Spain, and Greece, which — partly through friends, partly through ourselves, having undertaken many journeys through Italy and Gaul — we have surveyed, not without great labor. 2
But lest anyone wonder, or impute it to me as a fault, that in this volume I have omitted very many works of various kinds written by Catholic expositors, let him know that this alone was my care: that I should gather only the exegetical writings which the Orthodox explainers had expressly destined for the explanation of the holy volumes chiefly — but should omit the rest, which had flowed from them on other occasions and toward other ends, as it were “exoteric.” Not indeed that I would defraud those most excellent men of any part of their labors (from whom, being brighter than the light of the Sun, my silence can take nothing away, nor can my speech add anything), but because the plan of the present work admitted only those things which pertain to the interpretative kind of writing. Moreover, we have deferred the censures and corrections which the noble fathers of the church [made] upon the various commentaries of the more illustrious expositors to the next following book, lest the size of the present volume should grow more than is fair — [the present volume] which we now begin from the first letter of the Alphabet.