Richard de Bury, from Philobiblon ("The Book-Lover"), on Allegory and Poetry.

CHAPTER XIII

All the varieties of attack directed against the poets by the lovers of naked truth may be repelled by a two-fold defense: either that even in an unseemly subject-matter we may learn a charming fashion of speech, or that where a fictitious but becoming subject is handled, natural or historical truth is pursued under the guise of allegorical fiction.

Although it is true that all men naturally desire knowledge, yet they do not all take the same pleasure in learning. On the contrary, when they have experienced the labor of study and find their senses wearied most men inconsiderately fling away the nut, before they have broken the shell and reached the kernel.' For man is naturally fond of two things, namely, freedom from control and some pleasure in his activity; for which reason no one without reason submits himself to the control of others, or willingly engages in any tedious task. For pleasure crowns activity, as beauty is a crown to youth, as Aristotle truly asserts in the tenth book of the Ethics.' Accordingly the wisdom of the ancients devised a remedy by which to entice the wanton minds of men by a kind of pious fraud, the delicate Minerva secretly lurking beneath the mask of pleasure. We are wont to allure children by rewards, that they may cheerfully learn what we force them to study even though they are unwilling. For our fallen nature does not tend to virtue with the same enthusiasm with which it rushes into vice. Horace has expressed this for us in a brief verse of the Ars Poetica, where he says:

All poets sing to profit or delight. (l. 333)

And he has plainly intimated the same thing in another verse of the same book, where he says:

He hits the mark, who mingles joy with use. (l. 343)

So much we have alleged in defense of the poets; and now we proceed to show that those who study them with proper intent are not to be condemned in regard to them. For our ignorance of one single word prevents the understanding of a whole long sentence. As now the sayings of the saints frequently allude to the inventions of the poets, it must needs happen that through our not knowing the poem referred to, the whole meaning of the author is completely obscured, and assuredly as Cassiodorus says in his book of the Institutes of Sacred Literature: "Those things are not to be considered trifles without which great things cannot come to pass." It follows therefore that through ignorance of poetry we do not understand Jerome, Augustine, Boethius, Lactantius, Sidonius, and very many others, a catalogue of whom would more than fill a long chapter...

Taking this salutary instruction to heart, let the detractors of those who study the poets henceforth hold their peace, and let not those who are ignorant of these things require that others should be as ignorant as themselves, for this is the consolation of the wretched. And therefore let every man see that his own intentions are upright, and he may thus make of any subject, observing the limitations of virtue, a study acceptable to God. And if he have found profit in poetry, as the great Virgil relates that he had done in Ennius, he will not have done amiss.