The Swerve (5 page)

The monks were to read, whether they felt like it or not, and the Rule called for careful supervision:

Above all, one or two seniors
⁵
must surely be deputed to make the rounds of the monastery while the brothers are reading. Their duty is to see that no brother is so
acediosus
as to waste time or engage in idle talk to the neglect of his reading, and so not only harm himself but also distract others. (49:17–18)

Acediosus
, sometimes translated as “apathetic,” refers to an illness, specific to monastic communities, which had already been brilliantly diagnosed in the late fourth century by the Desert Father John Cassian. The monk in the grip of
acedia
would find it difficult or impossible to read. Looking away from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip but would more likely glance in disgust at his surroundings and at his fellow monks. He would feel that things were better somewhere else, that he was wasting his life, that everything was stale and pointless, that he was suffocating.

He looks about anxiously
⁶
this way and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness.

Such a monk—and there were evidently many of them—had succumbed to what we would call a clinical state of depression.

Cassian called the disease “the noonday demon,” and the Benedictine Rule set a careful watch, especially at reading times, to detect anyone manifesting its symptoms.

If such a monk
⁷
is found—God forbid—he should be reproved a first and a second time. If he does not amend, he must be subjected to the punishment of the rule so that the others may have fear.

A refusal to read at the prescribed time—whether because of distraction, boredom, or despair—would thus be visited first by public criticism and then, if the refusal continued, by blows. The symptoms of psychic pain would be driven out by physical
pain
. And, suitably chastened, the distressed monk would return—in principle at least—to his “prayerful reading.”

There was yet another time in which the Benedictine Rule called for reading: every day at meals one of the brothers was assigned, on a weekly basis, to read aloud. Benedict was well aware that for at least certain of the monks this assignment would occasion pride, and he therefore tried to suppress the sensation as best he could: “Let the incoming reader ask all to pray for him so that God may shield him from the feeling of elation.”
⁸
He was aware too that for others the readings would be an occasion for mockery or simply for chat, and here too the Rule made careful provision: “Let there be
⁹
complete silence. No whispering, no speaking—only the reader’s voice should be heard there.” But, above all, he wanted to prevent these readings from provoking discussion or debate: “No one should presume
¹⁰
to ask a question about the reading or about anything else, lest occasion be given.”

“Lest occasion be given”: the phrase, in a text normally quite clear, is oddly vague. Occasion to whom or for what? Modern editors sometimes insert the phrase “to the devil” and that indeed may be what is implied here. But why should the Prince of Darkness be excited by a question about the reading? The answer must be that any question, however innocuous, could raise the prospect of a discussion, a discussion that would imply that religious doctrines were open to inquiry and argument.

Benedict did not absolutely prohibit commentary on the sacred texts that were read aloud, but he wanted to restrict its source: “The superior,”
¹¹
the Rule allows, “may wish to say a few words of instruction.” Those words were not to be questioned or contradicted, and indeed all contention was in principle to be suppressed. As the listing of punishments in the influential rule of the Irish monk Columbanus (born in the year Benedict died) makes clear, lively debate, intellectual or otherwise,
was
forbidden. To the monk who has dared to contradict a fellow monk with such words as “It is not as you say,” there is a heavy penalty: “an imposition of silence or fifty blows.” The high walls that hedged about the mental life of the monks—the imposition of silence, the prohibition of questioning, the punishing of debate with slaps or blows of the whip—were all meant to affirm unambiguously that these pious communities were the opposite of the philosophical academies of Greece or Rome, places that had thrived upon the spirit of contradiction and cultivated a restless, wide-ranging curiosity.

All the same, monastic rules did require reading, and that was enough to set in motion an extraordinary chain of consequences. Reading was not optional or desirable or recommended; in a community that took its obligations with deadly seriousness, reading was obligatory. And reading required books. Books that were opened again and again eventually fell apart, however carefully they were handled. Therefore, almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks repeatedly purchase or acquire books. In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market fell apart. Therefore, again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks carefully preserve and copy those books that they already possessed. But all trade with the papyrus makers of Egypt had long vanished, and in the absence of a commercial book market, the commercial industry for converting animal skins to writing surfaces had fallen into abeyance. Therefore, once again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks learn the laborious art of making parchment and salvaging existing parchment. Without wishing to emulate the pagan elites by placing books or writing at the center of society, without affirming the importance of rhetoric or grammar,
without
prizing either learning or debate, monks nonetheless became the principal readers, librarians, book preservers, and book producers of the Western world.

Poggio and the other humanists on the trail of lost classics knew all this. Having already sifted through many of the monastic libraries in Italy and having followed Petrarch’s lead in France, they also knew that the great, uncharted territories were Switzerland and Germany. But many of those monasteries were extremely difficult to reach—their founders had built them in deliberately remote places, in order to withdraw from the temptations, distractions, and dangers of the world. And once an eager humanist, having endured the discomforts and risks of travel, managed to reach the distant monasteries, what then? The number of scholars who knew what to look for and who were competent to recognize what they had come to find, if they had the good fortune to stumble across it, was extremely small. There was, moreover, a problem of access: to get through the door a scholar would have to be able to persuade a skeptical abbot and a still more skeptical monastic librarian that he had a legitimate reason to be there. Access to the library was ordinarily denied to any outsider. Petrarch was a cleric; he could at least make his appeal from within the large institutional community of the Church. Many of the humanists by contrast were laymen and would have aroused immediate suspicion.

This daunting list did not exhaust the problems. For if a book hunter reached a monastery, got past the heavily barred door, entered the library, and actually found something interesting, he would still need to do something with the manuscript he had found.

Books were scarce and valuable. They conferred prestige
on
the monastery that possessed them, and the monks were not inclined to let them out of their sight, particularly if they had any prior experience with light-fingered Italian humanists. On occasion monasteries tried to secure their possession by freighting their precious manuscripts with curses. “For him that stealeth,
¹²
or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner,” one of these curses runs,

let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.

Even a worldly skeptic, with a strong craving for what he had in his hands, might have hesitated before slipping such a book into his cloak.

If the monks were poor or perhaps simply venal, they could be offered some money to part with their books, but the very interest showed by a stranger would inevitably make the price soar. It was always possible to ask the abbot to allow a manuscript to be carried off, with a solemn promise that it would be shortly returned. But though exceptionally trusting or naive abbots existed, they were few and far between. There was no way to compel assent, and if the answer was no, the whole venture was a dead loss. As a last resort, one could always defy curses and try theft, of course, but monastic communities were cultures of surveillance. Visitors would be watched particularly carefully, the gates were shut and locked at night, and some of the brothers were stout churls who would not scruple to beat an apprehended thief to within an inch of his life.

Poggio was almost uniquely suited to meet these challenges. He had been exceptionally well trained in the special skills needed to decipher old handwriting. He was a wonderfully gifted Latinist, with a particularly acute eye for the telltale diction, rhetorical devices, and grammatical structures of classical Latin. He had read widely and attentively in the literature of antiquity and had committed to his capacious memory the dozens of clues that hinted at the identity of particular authors or works that had been lost. He was not himself a monk or a priest, but his long service in the papal curia or court had given him intimate, inside knowledge of the institutional structures of the Church, as well as personal acquaintance with many of its most powerful clerics, including a succession of popes.

If even these exalted connections should prove insufficient to get him through the locked doors that led to a remote abbey’s library, Poggio also possessed considerable personal charm. He was a marvelous raconteur, a sly gossip, and an indefatigable teller of jokes, many of them off-color. He could not, to be sure, converse with the German monks in their native language. Though he had lived for more than three years in a German-speaking city, by his own account he had learned no German. For so gifted a linguist, this ignorance seems to have been willed: German was the language of the barbarians, and Poggio evidently had no interest in acquiring it. In Constance he probably cocooned himself almost entirely in a Latin- and Italian-speaking social world.

But if a failure to speak German must have been vexing on the road, at inns or other way stations, it would not have posed a serious problem once Poggio had arrived at his destination. The abbot, the librarian, and many other members of the monastic community would have spoken Latin. They would not in all likelihood have possessed the elegant classical Latin that Poggio had painstakingly mastered but rather, to judge from the many vigorous contemporary literary works
that
survive, a vital, fluent, highly flexible Latin that could swoop effortlessly from the subtlest of scholastic distinctions to the earthiest of obscenities. If Poggio sensed that he could impress his hosts with moral seriousness, he could have discoursed eloquently about the miseries of the human condition; if he thought he could win them over by making them laugh, he could have launched into one of his tales of foolish rustics, compliant housewives, and sexually rapacious priests.

Poggio possessed one further gift that set him apart from virtually all the other book-hunting humanists. He was a superbly well-trained scribe, with exceptionally fine handwriting, great powers of concentration, and a high degree of accuracy. It is difficult for us, at this distance, to take in the significance of such qualities: our technologies for producing transcriptions, facsimiles, and copies have almost entirely erased what was once an important personal achievement. That importance began to decline, though not at all precipitously, even in Poggio’s own lifetime, for by the 1430s a German entrepreneur, Johann Gutenberg, began experimenting with a new invention, movable type, which would revolutionize the reproduction and transmission of texts. By the century’s end printers, especially the great Aldus in Venice, would print Latin texts in a typeface whose clarity and elegance remain unrivalled after five centuries. That typeface was based on the beautiful handwriting
¹³
of Poggio and his humanist friends. What Poggio did by hand to produce a single copy would soon be done mechanically to produce hundreds.