Didascalicon, Book III: the art of study (discipline and method)
Chapter XV. On zeal for inquiry
Zeal for inquiry belongs to exercise, in which the reader needs exhortation more than teaching. For whoever wishes to look carefully at what the ancients endured for the love of wisdom, what memorials of their virtue worthy of remembrance to posterity they left, will see that his own diligence is inferior in any degree. Some trampled on honors, some cast away riches, some rejoiced at injuries received, some despised punishments, some, deserting the company of men and penetrating the inmost retreats and secrets of the desert, dedicated themselves to philosophy alone, that they might the more freely be at leisure for contemplation, because they had subjected their minds to none of the desires which are wont to hinder the way of virtue. The philosopher Parmenides is read to have sat fifteen years on an Egyptian rock. And Prometheus, for his immoderate care of meditation, is recorded to have been exposed to a vulture on Mount Caucasus. For they knew that the true good is hidden not in the esteem of men but in pure conscience; and that those are no longer men who, clinging to perishable things, do not recognize their own good; therefore they showed by the very distance of places how far they differed from the rest in mind and understanding, lest one dwelling hold those whom the same intention did not unite. Someone said to a philosopher: “Do you not see that men are laughing at you?” And he said: “They laugh at themselves, and the asses at them.” Think, if you can, how much he valued being praised by those by whom he did not fear to be blamed. Of another again it is read that after all the studies of the disciplines and the acuteness of the arts he descended to the potter’s work; and of another’s disciples, when they extolled their master with praises, among other things they boasted that he did not lack skill in the cobbler’s craft. This diligence, then, I would wish in our readers, that wisdom never grow old in them. Abisag the Sunamite alone warmed the old David (3 Kings 1), because the love of wisdom, even when the body fades, does not desert its lover.
Almost all the powers of the body are changed in the old, and as wisdom alone increases the rest decrease. For the old age of those who have trained their youth in honorable arts and actions becomes more learned with age, more practiced by use, wiser with the progress of time, and reaps the sweetest fruits of old studies. Hence that wise man of Greece, Themistocles, when he saw that he was dying at one hundred and seven years old, is said to have said: “that he grieved that he was leaving life when he had begun to be wise.” Plato died writing at the age of eighty-one. Socrates completed ninety-nine years in the labor of teaching and writing. I pass over the other philosophers, Pythagoras, Democritus, Xenocrates, Zeno and the Eleatic, who in a long span of age flourished in the studies of wisdom.
I come to the poets Homer, Hesiod, Simonides, Terpsichorus, who, advanced in years, sang something swan-like and sweeter than usual at the approach of death. Sophocles, when after extreme old age and neglect of his household affairs he was accused by his own of madness, recited to the judge the tale of Oedipus which he had lately written, and gave such a proof of wisdom in an age already broken that he turned the severity of the tribunals into favor for the theatre. Nor is it wonderful, since even Cato the Censor, the most eloquent of the Roman race, in old age was neither ashamed nor despaired to learn Greek letters. Certainly Homer reports that from the tongue of Nestor, already aged and almost decrepit, sweeter speech flowed. Consider, then, how much they loved wisdom whom not even decrepit age could recall from its pursuit. This so great love of wisdom, this such abundance in the old, is fittingly gathered also from the interpretation of the aforesaid name. For Abisag is interpreted my father is superfluous, or the roaring of my father, from which it is shown that the thunder of divine speech dwells most abundantly, and beyond human voice, in the senses. For the word superfluous in this place signifies fullness, not redundancy. Moreover, Sunamitis in our language is called scarlet, which may quite fittingly signify the fervor of wisdom.