The 3 Diseases in Learning

¹ Errors and vanities have intervened in the studies of the learned.

My goal is not to justify the errors, but to:

• justify what is good and sound
• deliver that from the aspersion of the other

This is through a censure and separation of the errors.

Men scandalise and deprave that which retains the state and virtue, by taking advantage on that which is corrupt and degenerate.

This is similar to how the heathens in the primitive Church used to blemish and taint the Christians with the faults and corruptions of heretics.

² There are therefore chiefly 3 vanities in studies.

Curiosity is either in matter or words so that in reason and in experience there are these 3 distempers of learning:

1. Fantastical learning

2. Contentious learning

3. Delicate learning

Delicate Learning

Martin Luther was guided, no doubt, by a higher Providence.

He discovered the degenerate traditions of the Church.

He called on the former times to make a party against the present time.

This caused the ancient works of divinity and humanity, which had long time slept in libraries, to be read.

And so a new appreciation of the ancient style and phrase, and writing. This was opposed to the propounders of those primitive but seeming new opinions had against the schoolmen.

The schoolmen were generally of the contrary part. Their writings were altogether in a differing style and form.

They took liberty:

• to coin and frame new terms of art to express their own sense
• to avoid circuit of speech, without regard to the pureness, pleasantness, and lawfulness of the phrase or word.

The great labour then was with the people (of whom the Pharisees were wont to say, Execrabilis ista turba, quæ non novit legem), for the winning and persuading of them.

There grew of necessity in chief price and request eloquence and variety of discourse, as the fittest and forciblest access into the capacity of the vulgar sort; so that these four causes concurring—the admiration of ancient authors, the hate of the schoolmen, the exact study of languages, and the efficacy of preaching—did bring in an affectionate study of eloquence and copy of speech, which then began to flourish.

This grew speedily to an excess.

Men began to hunt more after words than matter.

Then grew the flowing and watery vein of Osorius, the Portugal bishop, to be in price.

Then did Sturmius spend such infinite and curious pains upon Cicero the Orator and Hermogenes the Rhetorician, besides his own books of Periods and Imitation, and the like.

Then did Car of Cambridge and Ascham with their lectures and writings almost deify Cicero and Demosthenes, and allure all young men that were studious unto that delicate and polished kind of learning.

Then did Erasmus take occasion to make the scoffing echo, Decem annos consuumpsi in legendo Cicerone; and the echo answered in Greek, One, Asine.

Then grew the learning of the schoolmen to be utterly despised as barbarous. In sum, the whole inclination and bent of those times was rather towards copy than weight.

³ The first distemper of learning is when men study words and not matter.

How is it possible but this should have an operation to discredit learning, even with vulgar capacities, when they see learned men’s works like the first letter of a patent or limited book, which though it hath large flourishes, yet it is but a letter?

It seems to me that Pygmalion’s frenzy is a good emblem or portraiture of this vanity; for words are but the images of matter, and except they have life of reason and invention, to fall in love with them is all one as to fall in love with a picture.

⁴ But yet notwithstanding it is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution.

For hereof we have great examples in Xenophon, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and of Plato also in some degree; and hereof likewise there is great use, for surely, to the severe inquisition of truth and the deep progress into philosophy, it is some hindrance because it is too early satisfactory to the mind of man, and quencheth the desire of further search before we come to a just period.

But then if a man be to have any use of such knowledge in civil occasions, of conference, counsel, persuasion, discourse, or the like, then shall he find it prepared to his hands in those authors which write in that manner.

But the excess of this is so justly contemptible, that as Hercules, when he saw the image of Adonis, Venus’ minion, in a temple, said in disdain, Nil sacri es; so there is none of Hercules’ followers in learning—that is, the more severe and laborious sort of inquirers into truth—but will despise those delicacies and affectations, as indeed capable of no divineness.

Thus much of the first disease or distemper of learning.