‘The Most Beautiful and Glorious Task of Learned Men’

“The most beautiful and glorious task of learned men” — that may be the best description of textual criticism I’ve ever come across. It’s from the sixth-century Roman senator, Christian writer, and monk Cassiodorus. In his book Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, he has an entire section on the importance of correcting biblical manuscripts as part of the proper study of the Bible. 

Ezra in Amiatinus (source)

He closes his section on the three ways the Scriptures have been divided (by Jerome, Augustine, and the LXX) by saying, “Now it remains for us to say how we ought to correct scribal errors in Holy Scripture.  What use is it to read through many texts and not to know what should properly be corrected in them?” (XIV.5). His next section (XV) gives 16 points on how to do it properly. Here is his first one:

1.  You, therefore, who have a good knowledge of divine and secular letters and the understanding to discover what is not in harmony with common usage, read through sacred literature in the following manner; for the few who are learned must prepare material for the simple and less educated community. Therefore, first read carefully and correct the errors of the writers in such a way that you do not deserve criticism for trying to correct others without due deliberation; this kind of correction is, in my opinion, the most beautiful and glorious task of learned men.

And here are his last two.

15.  I pray also that you who presume, nevertheless, to emend, make the letters you add so beautiful that they appear to have been written by the scribes.  For it is wrong to find in that beauty anything foul which afterwards may shock the eyes of scholars. Consider, therefore, the sort of case entrusted to you, your service to Christians, the treasury of the Church, the enlightenment of souls. See carefully to it, therefore, that no error is left in the truth, no falseness in the purity, and no scribal mistakes in the corrected text. 

16.  First, with the Lord’s aid, we have listed the nine volumes of the law and detailed the introductory writers with their commentaries as carefully as we could. Next we touched on the three divisions of the whole divine law which our ancestors have given us. Then we included a section on the rules covering emendation of texts of divine authority to prevent disruption as well as the transmission of troublesome confusion in the text to posterity because of excessive liberty with the text.  Now we must discuss in all respects the excellence of divine reading so that each passage may abound in its own sweetness.

The whole thing is worth reading, and it’s online here courtesy of James W. and Barbara Halporn. 

Among the reasons Cassiodorus is important is that he is thought by some to be the inspiration behind the famous depiction of Ezra the Scribe in Codex Amiatinus. The nine books in Ezra’s bookcase do match Cassiodorus’s description of the Bible into nine parts.

Now the next time someone tells you textual criticism is boring, you just tell them it’s actually the most beautiful and glorious task of learned men!