The twelfth century Master Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon was a curriculum for Parisian students under the abbey’s care. In its third book, we find an interesting exhortation to humility for those who aimed to become academic masters: “Now the beginning of discipline is humility.” Hugh goes on to describe the shameful attitudes that students tend to adopt as their learning proceeds. His words remind us lowly students of a fire that blogging tends to fuel in the world of academic theology, if not in other academic worlds. See for yourself:
Now the beginning of discipline is humility. Although the lessons of humility are many, the three which are of especial importance for the student: first, that he hold no knowledge and no writing in contempt; second, that he blush to learn from no man; and third, that when he has attained learning himself, he not look down upon everyone else.
Many are deceived by the desire to appear wise before their time. They therefore break out in a certain swollen importance and begin to simulate what they are not and to be ashamed of what they are; and they slip all the farther from wisdom in proportion as they think, not of being wise, but of being thought so. I have known many of this sort who, although they still lacked the very rudiments of learning, yet deigned to concern themselves only with the highest problems, and they supposed that they themselves were well on the road to greatness simply because they had read the writings or heard the words of great and wise men. “We,” they say, “have seen them. We have studied under them. They often used to talk to us.” Ah, would that no one knew me and that I but knew all things! You glory in having seen, not in having understood, Plato. As a matter of fact, I should think it not good enough for you to listen to me. I am not Plato. I have not deserved to see him. Good for you! You have drunk at the very fount of philosophy–but would that you thirsted still! “The king, having drunk from a goblet of gold, drinks next from a cup of clay!” Why are you blushing? You have heard Plato!–may you hear Chrysippus too! The proverb says, “What do you not know, maybe Ofellus knows.” There is no one to whom it is given to know all things, no one who has not received his special gift from nature. The wise student therefore, gladly hears all, reads all, and looks down upon no writing, no person, no teaching. From all indifferently he seeks what he sees he lacks, and he considers not how much he knows, but of how much he is ignorant. For this reason men repeat Plato’s saying: “I would rather learn with modesty what another man says than shamelessly push forward my own ideas.”[….]
The good student, then, ought to be humble and docile, free alike from vain cares and from sensual indulgences, diligent and zealous to learn willingly and from all, to presume never upon his own knowledge, to shun the authors of perverse doctrine as if they were poison, to consider a matter thoroughly and at length before judging it, to seek to be learned rather than merely to seem so, to love such words of the wise as he has grasped, and ever to hold those words before his gaze as the very mirror of his countenance. And if some things, by chance rather obscure, have not allowed him to understand them, let him not at once break out in angry condemnation and think that nothing is good but what he himself can understand. This is the humility proper to a student’s discipline.
millinerd | 20-Sep-07 at 11:29 am | Permalink
Interesting that we are to “hold no knowledge and no writing in contempt… blush to learn from no man” AND to “shun the author of perverse doctrine as if they were poison.”
Also from the Didascalicon: “The number of books is infinite. Do not chase after the infinite.”
millinerd | 20-Sep-07 at 11:55 am | Permalink
By the way, by “interesting” I mean the good interesting, not the bad interesting.
Niccolo | 23-Sep-07 at 7:55 pm | Permalink
An interesting tension indeed! Time will tell whether some of our friends will be able to hold that tension gracefully and wisely. My hope, of course, is that they will.
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