§ 1. Under the name of learning I embrace knowledge of all the liberal arts and sciences, and even skill in sacred laws and theology. I shall now treat these generally, and then individually.
Someone has said incorrectly: “Many embrace evil things; no one accuses what is good.” For many accuse knowledge, and philosophy certainly had its detractors of old. Licinius was so unlearned that he could not even sign his own name upon official documents. He burned with such hatred of letters that he called letters a pest and public calamity. He hated rhetoricians and philosophers most bitterly and said that they were the virus and poison of the state. But he, brought up by a rustic father among the barbarous Dacians, was equitable only toward them. Yet this vice is rare. For the splendor of letters and their dignity are so great that most princes even hunt after the reputation of learning and flee the reputation of ignorance. Nero was the first among those who gained supreme power to need another man’s eloquence. Tacitus, Book 13: for he recited Seneca’s speeches in order to commend himself to the Senate and people by the praise of eloquence.
How much the learning of many men, especially nobles and magnates, contributes to the state is easily understood in any private person. For learning brings it about, as that man used to say, that stone does not sit upon stone. As much as Socrates surpasses Batto, and Atticus Bambalio, so much does a state polished by letters surpass an unlearned one.
§ 2. For the pursuit of wisdom is contained chiefly in letters. But a state cannot subsist unless he who commands possesses and cultivates the pursuit of wisdom. The counsels of wise men must certainly be heard; otherwise all decrees of princes which are supported neither by law nor wisdom cannot be protected by the mere force of the ruler. Through either the reproach of subjects or the praise of a successor, responses given without counsel are abolished.
First, therefore, I require a learned prince, such as Solomon was. “God,” he says in Wisdom 7:17, “gave me true knowledge of the things that are: that I might know the disposition of the globe of the earth and the powers of the elements, the beginning and ending and midst of times, the alterations of their courses and the changes of seasons, the mutations of customs and divisions of times, the courses of the year and arrangements of the stars, the natures of animals and the rages of beasts, the force of winds and the thoughts of men, the diversities of plants and the powers of roots; and all things that are hidden and unforeseen I learned, for wisdom, the artificer of all things, taught me.”
How greatly it harms the state when most princes are governed and follow whatever anyone, induced by money, hatred, or favor, has whispered into their ear, all kingdoms have taught. Yet this is the second happiness and wisdom: to follow the wise. For the first part of wisdom is not to believe oneself wise; and he who wishes to be good will accomplish this in no easier way than by believing himself evil, so that through repentance he may become good.
Προνοίας οὐδὲν ἀνθρώποις ἔφυ κέρδος λαβεῖν ἄμεινον, οὐδὲ νοῦ σοφοῦ.
For human beings there is no advantage greater or better than prudence and a wise mind.
Nor would I wish the Roman laws to be believed more on my authority than on that of the prince himself. “The imperial Majesty,” he says, “ought not only to be adorned with arms but also armed with laws, so that either time, both of wars and of peace, may be rightly governed; and so that the Roman Prince may not only stand forth victorious in battles against enemies, but may also expel the iniquities of calumniators through lawful paths, and become both a most religious observer of law and a magnificent triumphator over vanquished enemies.”
He will never be able to do this unless he himself knows the laws by which he commands, just as he will not wage war properly unless practiced in camps. Deservedly, therefore, the Authentic Concerning Judges ordains that they not be unlearned: “We, therefore, seeing the arrangement of judges altogether confused, have thought it necessary to determine by this law the things which may impose a becoming order upon a case. For we have not thought it necessary to have the names of certain judges, especially men unlearned in the laws and, moreover, lacking experience of cases. For our administrators are in every way accompanied by assessors, who explain matters of law and fulfill their duties; since many, detained by the cares which they have with us, deservedly discharge their part in judgments through the presence of their assessors. But those men, having neither a belt of office nor an administration entrusted by us, if they cannot by themselves know what is just but must beg from elsewhere for the honor of judging—
how will it not be the greatest defect of the state to entrust lawsuits not to those who know from themselves what must be done, but to permit them to seek others from whom they may learn what it befits them to pronounce in judging?”
§ 3. This too is a remarkable advantage of a learned prince: he alone possesses counselors of whom some are altogether incorrupt and others timidly wicked. Those who speak a most upright opinion without hope and fear are dead men; for princes read in them things which no one ventures to tell them. They would not endure being told by a friend the things which they delight to read in unknown men; they delight in reproaches being made against their errors when those authors threaten with a public voice. Since, therefore, even those who apply themselves to the disciplines with great zeal and devote themselves to governing the state frequently err, what must be thought of those whom ignorance and torpor, like golden rams, have given as prey to cunning men?
For although a prince may possess a great intellect and a grave and prudent nature, he nevertheless cannot administer the state with certainty and without fear. For he possesses nothing except opinion, which is accustomed both to deceive and to be deceived. And even when he has conceived some most illustrious measure, he must hand it over to jurists for examination, from whom he afterwards receives it as though dictated, and by his own authority publishes among the people what was conceived by another mind.
They enumerate for us as learned princes Solon, Epaminondas, Philip of Macedon, Alexander, Philopoemen, Romulus, Remus, Caesar, Octavian, Tiberius, Claudius, the Antonines, Constantine, the Theodosii, Charlemagne and Charles V, Robert king of Jerusalem, Emperor Sigismund, and Alfonso of Aragon. From ancient peoples they also name Mithridates and Chosroes. Lipsius treats them in his Monita, as do many others. They do not even exclude women: Zenobia, Amalasuntha, Isabella, and others. I value more highly the fact that all those learned rulers surrounded their sides with the most learned men and thus most excellently established very many things.
§ 4. For this reason alone, learned kings and a learned state find approval with me: I readily observe that it is a singular privilege of the Christian religion to excel in the liberal arts and sciences. For if we weigh history, we shall easily understand that the whole world yields the palm to Christians. Although the ancients lacked neither talents nor time, and although diligence even abounded, they nevertheless could in no way reach the summit of the sciences to which Christians ascended. Pythagoras, Democritus, and Plato traveled through Egypt, Asia, and India to acquire learning for themselves; Crates the Theban cast away his wealth; Cleanthes supported his studies by drawing water. Yet it will be evident that they accomplished little by so great an exertion if they are compared with Christians, so that it is like a prodigy that the philosophers of the gentiles, though so studious, remained fixed in so many and such great errors.
The Chinese also in our time, although many expend their entire life upon studies and although the fruit of study is very great, can nevertheless scarcely compare their most learned men with our adolescents. They first learned from Father Matteo Ricci that the earth is not square, and other matters. Father Nicolaus Trigautius narrates the affair in Book 4, chapter 5, of the expedition among the Chinese. By nothing else did Father Matteo equally lead the entire multitude of Chinese philosophers into astonishment as by the novelty of European sciences confirmed by the firmest reasons. For now, for the first time after so many ages, it was heard that the earth was round. They held as though for a first principle a certain old axiom: “Heaven is round, but the earth square.” No one knew that a center lay in its middle, either summoning all heavy bodies to itself or receiving them when they fall by their own inclination; that the whole surface around it is inhabited; or that antipodal human beings stand opposite human beings without falling—matters to which, although the intellect assents, the imaginative faculty of many does not yet acquiesce.
Until then it was unheard of that an eclipse of the moon results from the earth being placed between the sun and moon. In explaining it they devised absurdities more defective than the moon itself. Among these interpreters, some said that the moon, placed opposite the sun, lost its light from astonishment. Others perforated the sun itself in the middle and asserted that the moon, when opposite this opening of the sun, could not receive light from the sun. It was novel that the sun exceeds the whole globe of the earth in magnitude, although some more readily allowed themselves to be led to believe this because it was established that it had also been written in the monuments of books by the ancient mathematicians of their kingdom, who, after measuring the sun, had found it to exceed a thousand miles in their mathematical instruments. But that the stars themselves, which our eyes measure by so small a space, exceed the entire surface of the earth—this at last seemed a paradox. It had not yet been understood, nor even said, that the heavens consist of solid matter, that the stars remain fixed in it and do not wander irregularly, that ten celestial spheres are numbered, that one is enclosed by another, and that they are borne by different motions. From these things it is established that every commonplace matter was unknown to them.
§ 5. But in the Christian state, even apart from sacred theology, there is such great knowledge of foreign matters that heathendom has nowhere beheld anything equal to it, or even second to it. For if we retrace ancient things, the very beginnings of the Christian religion will supply Christian philosophers far more excellent than the pagans were. Dionysius the Areopagite, a man illustrious in knowledge and reputation and a disciple of Paul, then at last discovered true philosophy. In the times of Dionysius there was also Aristides of Athens, a most eloquent philosopher, as St. Jerome calls him. Quadratus followed, then Justin, Pantaenus, and Ammonius, whom Porphyry prefers to all.
Ammonius had many illustrious hearers, both Christian and gentile. Among the Christians was Origen, to whose learning Porphyry, an enemy of our piety, bore witness: “I saw Origen when I was still a very young boy, occupying the citadel of all learning, as is also proved by those things which he handed down to the memory of posterity. This is that Origen whose immense glory is held among their teachers. He had attained all the secrets of Plato; he had been instructed in the books of Numenius, Cronius, Apollophanes, Longinus, Moderatus, and Nicomachus; and in Pythagorean matters the commentaries of the highest men had not escaped him. He also touched upon the volumes of Chaeremon the Stoic and Cornutus.”
Jerome agrees: “I shall not leave unspoken this fact concerning his immortal intellect: that he also learned dialectic, geometry, arithmetic, music, grammar, rhetoric, and the sects of all the philosophers.” Origen’s pupils were many and weighty men, to whom most of the gentiles yielded. In the succeeding times there followed Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, Chrysostom, Augustine, Victorinus, Vegetius, and Albinus. And if we judge rightly, the Catholic world numbers so many thousands of bishops governing churches
that, although the learning of them all is unequal, all heathendom nevertheless has not equaled the learning of one century either in number or in excellence. But this, though more marvelous, is nevertheless true: if the learned men who flourished in Greece and in the Roman state before the beginning of the Christian religion, and those who excelled in knowledge of matters in Christian times, are collected, they will yield to one city. They will not be able to equal in learning the Roman Church’s pontiffs alone who were distinguished in philosophy and secular letters.
Clement I—whether he was Actius Clemens, to whom Pliny wrote, or another man—was most devoted to philosophy and committed excellent monuments to writing. See Baronius at the year 102 and in the Martyrology at July 2; Franciscus Turrianus against the Centuriators; and Delrio in his Vindiciae against Scaliger. Linus and Cletus too were noble Romans illustrious in letters. Hyginus was the most celebrated philosopher of his time when he was chosen for the pontificate.
And although the secular learning of Alexander, Sixtus, Pius, Telesphorus, and Soter is less known, from the letters which survive we readily gather that they were most learned men. His own writings teach that Cornelius was certainly not unequal in learning to Cyprian and others, as do those of Stephen and his successors.
Felix I and Eutychianus held famous disputations against Sabellius, Paul of Samosata, and the Manichaeans.
Liberius and Felix were men even of excessive and calamitous learning: for Liberius, from fear, subscribed to the condemnation of St. Athanasius, and Felix succeeded to his see by no good example.
Among these Damasus, the oracle of the world, was eminent in wisdom, eloquence, skill in governing, and love of learned men.
Innocent, famous also for his defense of St. Chrysostom even after Chrysostom’s death, was not greatly unequal to Damasus.
These learned centuries, agitated by heresies, possessed most learned pontiffs. Thus Innocent was succeeded by Zosimus, he by Boniface I, and Boniface by Celestine I, whom Augustine also consulted. At that time the hidden contagions of the Manichaeans and of other sects were creeping about, as were those of the Arians, Origenists, Pelagians, Nestorians, Acephali, Eutychians, Predestinarians, and Iconoclasts. They disturbed the Church not only by corrupting the Scriptures and ecclesiastical writers but also by vain philosophy. And so God, the supreme shepherd, gave the Church leaders who would meet the raging men on equal ground, armed in every part, and protect the Church by sacred and profane knowledge.
Leo the Great was then elected, who proved his teaching even to the succeeding world. Hilary, Simplicius, Felix III, Gelasius I, Symmachus I, Hormisdas, Vigilius, Gregory the Great, Leo II, John V, Gregory II, Stephen II, Paschal I, Eugenius II, Gregory IV, Nicholas the Great—who represented Gregory the Great in learning and virtues—John XVI, Eugenius III, Gregory XIII, Sixtus V, and Innocent IX also came into the number of the learned. Learning is therefore a peculiar dowry of the Church and is for that reason especially to be commended to the state. And if we also consider the present times and the lyceums of so many academies, no one can doubt that at this one time more learned men are living than all Greece possessed of old, from the age of Solon and the other sages down to the irruption of the Muslims, if you except the Christians.
§ 6. Not wise men, but a certain factious and unlearned class of courtiers, are accustomed to advance two objections against learning. The first is that tyrants have proceeded from philosophers. The second is that letters are an impediment to civil and military prudence. For Phalaris was a philosopher, as were Tiberius and Julian. Sicily endured Cyclopes at first and then tyrants, most of whom, however, were educated in Greece.
Indeed, Rhodiginus, Book 22, chapter 21, judges that philosophers commanded more cruelly: “For as many as proceeded from the schools of philosophers and seized tyrannies are found to have exercised them more cruelly, avariciously, and savagely than men altogether ignorant of letters. With what ferocity, I beseech you, did Ariston, nurtured in the schools of the Epicureans, oppress the liberty of his Athenian fatherland? Before him, did not Critias also do so, together with those who were initiated with Critias into the mysteries of philosophy? What shall I say of Pythagoras? What of those very Seven Sages and the others who attempted to undertake the weight of the greatest affairs? Are they not found to have used command most cruelly?
“The excessive cruelty of Athenion among the Athenians during the Mithridatic War became known from Athenaeus. Nor is the tyranny of Lysias of Tarsus, issuing from the schools of the philosophers, unknown. When his fatherland had chosen him stephanephoros, that is, priest of Hercules, once he had seized command he did not lay it down but openly played the tyrant. Moved by the bloody savagery of these men, Demochares—or perhaps it was Crates—is reported to have said wittily: ‘Just as no one could fashion a spear from savory, so neither could one fashion a blameless soldier from Socrates.’”
I could certainly have wished so learned a man to speak more circumspectly. For he could have been moved by the reasons which he himself brought forward. Socrates, in Book 5 of Plato’s Republic (On Justice), says: “Unless philosophers become masters of cities, or those who are now called kings and potentates philosophize legitimately and sufficiently, and unless civil power and philosophy meet in the same persons, while these are not—as now happens—handled by different dispositions, there will be no rest from evils for the city or, as my opinion bears, for the human race; nor will this state which we have set forth in words arise according to its powers and behold the light of the sun before then.”
And Tully writes to his brother Quintus: “Plato, the chief of intellect and learning, judged that this conjunction of power and wisdom could be the salvation of cities.” Julius Capitolinus also relates that Antoninus the philosopher-emperor kept the same maxim upon his lips. These are Caelius’s own words.
But the things which he himself advanced are weak. We do not admit Ariston the Epicurean to be a philosopher: he was ignorant of defining, dividing, and discoursing, a child in physics, and depraved in morals, since he did everything for his own sake alone. But that aim is diametrically opposed to the office of a prince, whose duty it is to prefer the public good to private advantage.
The other is Critias, one of the Thirty Tyrants and by far the cruelest and most avaricious of them. But I marvel greatly that Caelius, a man
πολυμαθῆ,
learned in many things, uses against learning that example by which learning itself is most clearly illustrated. For Xenophon relates in Book 1 of the sayings and deeds of Socrates that Socrates was accused on account of his pupils Critias and Alcibiades. I shall disclose Xenophon’s words, though they are rather lengthy, because in the same manner this same lawsuit is brought against our Society and against many academies.
Xenophon’s words are these: “Yet the accuser said that he had been the cause of the laws of the city being despised, by saying that it was foolish for magistrates in the city to be chosen by votes, since no one ever employs a helmsman, a craftsman, a flute-player, or any others like them appointed by lot, although mistakes in those occupations inflict much lighter injuries than those committed in a city by its rulers. He said that these discourses incited young men to despise the state and rendered them violent.
“But I judge that those who cultivate prudence and think that by admonition they can show their fellow citizens the things that are advantageous to them ought least of all to be violent, since they know that force is followed by enmities and dangers, whereas by persuasion the same things can be accomplished without danger and with friendship. For those who are compelled hate as though they had been despoiled; but those who have been persuaded love as though they had received something pleasing. It therefore by no means belongs to those who cultivate prudence to inflict violence upon anyone, but to those who possess power without reason. Moreover, he who dares to employ force needs no small number of helpers; but he who persuades needs none, for he thinks himself sufficient by himself to persuade. Furthermore, it least of all falls to such men to kill anyone. For who would wish to destroy someone rather than use him alive and persuaded as he wishes?
“But the adversaries also added this: that Critias and Alcibiades, after hearing Socrates, afflicted the city with many injuries. For Critias, when the constitution of the city had come into the hands of a few, became one of them and was by far the most avaricious and violent of all. Alcibiades, however, while the people still held command, was the most unjust and incontinent of all. If they brought any evil upon the city, I shall not answer for it; but I shall narrate how their association and familiarity with Socrates arose.
“These men were by nature by far the most ambitious of all Athenians. They desired all things to be conducted through themselves and desired to become as celebrated as possible. Since, therefore, they knew that Socrates lived abundantly upon very little money, was most abstinent from all pleasures, and used all who conversed with him as he wished by the power of his discourse, when they saw these things and possessed the character stated a little above, would anyone think that they desired Socrates’ company from a longing for his life and moderation, or because they supposed that, if they enjoyed his company, they would become most capable of saying and doing whatever they wished? For I judge that, if one of the gods had given them the choice either to live their whole life as they saw Socrates living or to die, they would rather have chosen death. This is clear from their deeds. For as soon as they judged themselves more eloquent than others in persuading, they immediately left Socrates and devoted themselves to governing the state, the principal reason for which they had desired to hear Socrates.
“But perhaps someone will say in reply that Socrates ought first to have handed down sobriety and moderation to his hearers, and only afterwards the science of governing the state. I do not contradict this. Yet I see that all who teach both show their pupils in their own persons how they do the things which they teach and introduce them by discourse. I also know that Socrates showed himself to his hearers as a good and honorable man and discoursed most excellently about virtue and all other human matters. I know too that those men were moderate and sober while they associated with Socrates—not because they feared suffering some injury or being beaten with blows by Socrates, but because at that time they judged this to be advantageous to themselves.
“Perhaps certain of those who call themselves philosophers will say that a just man can never become unjust, a moderate man insolent, or one learned in any matter in which teaching has been handed down unlearned in that which he learned. But I think differently about these matters. For I see that, just as bodily actions cannot be done well by those who do not exercise their bodies, so too those who do not exercise the mind are least able to perform the mind’s actions. For they can neither do the things which must be done nor abstain from those from which they must abstain.
“For this reason, even if fathers know their sons to be sober, they nevertheless prohibit them from conversation with depraved men, as though association with good men were an exercise of virtue and that of depraved men its destruction. The poet who says this also bears witness:
You will indeed learn good things from good men; But if you mingle with the depraved, you will lose even your inborn understanding.
“And so does he who says:
A good man is at one time strong, at another weak.
“I too assent to them. For I see that, just as those who do not employ continual practice readily forget songs, so those who neglect the discourses and admonitions of their teachers hand them over to oblivion. But when someone has forgotten those discourses, he also forgets those things by which his mind is moved to desire sobriety. Once this has happened, it is surely no marvel that he also hands sobriety itself over to oblivion.”
Thus Critias and Alcibiades were corrupted by vices before they approached Socrates. They approached familiarity with Socrates not for the sake of philosophizing but for hunting after fame and eloquence. Nevertheless, during that time they conducted themselves modestly. Finally, when they again lived with the wicked, each returned to his own disposition and held Socrates in hatred. Indeed, as tyrants were bound to do, they enacted a law that no one should speak about virtue, justice, or temperance unless he was thirty years old. They therefore touched philosophy too lightly to be able to dishonor it by their impure contact.
§ 7. I do not know of what Rhodiginus especially accuses Pythagoras, for by authority and persuasion he recalled the Crotoniates, who had been ruined by luxury, to frugality and the pursuit of justice. He then migrated to Metapontum and died there. He exercised no tyranny except against vices.
He even defames the seven men of Greece whom they call sages. This is done not only with injustice but with scarcely pardonable
ἀνεξοφία,
that is, folly. Solon certainly was not cruel, for he mitigated Draco’s laws, written in blood, which punished every offense with death, even the fault of idleness and the theft of vegetables. At length, fleeing the tyranny of Pisistratus, he went to Egypt and then Cyprus. He also conferred very much upon Croesus, until at last in Cilicia Solon founded an Athenian colony, becoming in part a new father of his country.
I confess that Periander the Corinthian acted as a tyrant, but he was cruel through fear. For it was not safe for him to escape from the royal power handed down to him by his father Cypselus as though by hereditary right, lest he expose himself, his father’s friends, and his whole family to the fury of a most corrupt populace. Nevertheless, he adorned the city, continually waged wars, held the kingdom for forty years, and, like Augustus, when wearied of cruelty at last admitted clemency. Aristotle certainly defends his cruel model in Book 3 of the Politics, chapter 12: when he answered Thrasybulus nothing, but leveled the crop by cutting off the taller ears. Pittacus administered the state of Mytilene with modesty of life and learning, without any suspicion of tyranny. Nor did Bias commit any other offense against Priene, his fatherland, than this—if it is an offense—that, fleeing when it was captured, he said, “I carry all my possessions with me.”
Chilon the Lacedaemonian, who was one of the sages, employed no tyranny, unless these sayings of his which were consecrated at Delphi are held to be tyrannical: “Know yourself”; “Desire nothing excessively”; “Misery is the companion of debt and litigation.” He died from the force of joy upon hearing that his son was victor at the Olympic games, and thus all Greece attended his funeral. It would never have done this for a tyrant, for the name of tyrant is hateful even when stripped of power.
Cleobulus, or Cleobolus, was far removed from tyranny. He said that good must be done to friends and enemies: to enemies in order that we may render them friends, to friends in order that we may render them still more friendly. Tyrants destroy enemies, distrust friends, and thereby make them enemies.
Thales of Miletus did not even hold command. He lived peaceably and died in extreme old age while watching the games in the fifty-eighth Olympiad.
Athenion, after releasing the prisoners in the workhouses and the volones, subdued Drepanum. He was a prudent and learned man, but the cause of the war is obscure. It has therefore in no way been proved that philosophy and learning are the cause of tyranny, just as a pottery does not fashion tyrants although Agathocles was the offspring of a potter. Learned men can nevertheless aspire to command more easily, since they cannot be ignorant of histories, passions, revolutions, deceits, and frauds, and know the entire art of ruling. If justice and piety are absent, it is no wonder that they readily occupy a tyranny and render it secure by political arts once occupied.