In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon - Tapa blanda

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https://thinkingafterivanillich.net/ Ivan Illich  (1926 - 2002)  became a parish priest in New York in 1951. He was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University in Puerto Rico in 1956. In 1961 he founded CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación) at Cuernavaca in Mexico where he developed many of the ideas in his books. He is the author of Deschooling Society, Celebration of Awareness, Tools for Conviviality, The Right to Useful Unemployment, Energy and Equity, Shadow Work, Gender, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, Disabling Professions, and In the Mirror of the Past.

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Ivan Illich (1926 - 2002) became a parish priest in New York in 1951. He was appointed vice-rector of the Catholic University in Puerto Rico in 1956. In 1961 he founded CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación) at Cuernavaca in Mexico where he developed many of the ideas in his books. He is the author of Celebration of Awareness, Tools for Conviviality, The Right to Useful Unemployment, Energy and Equity, Shadow Work, Gender, H2O and the Waters of Forgetfulness, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, Disabling Professions, Deschooling Society and In the Mirror of the Past.

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Studium (from the first chapter, Reading toward Wisdom)

When we translate the incipit as “of all things to be sought, the first is wisdom,’ it would be easy to get full approval from any first-year student of Latin. Prima is the first. But, precisely this seeming transparency of the Latin word presents the difficulty encountered by anyone who attempts to English such a text. No doubt omnium expetendorum prima says ‘of all reachable things the (very) first.’ Yet, if I translate prima with “first,” I cannot but cause misunderstanding. For us today, the first thing is that which comes at the beginning of a series or is closest at hand. We take the first of many steps when we start a book, or research project, suspecting that our endeavour will lead us on, perhaps beyond our present horizon. But the thought of an ultimate goal of all readings is not meaningful to us. Even less is there any idea that such a goal could motivate or “cause” our action whenever we open a book. We are steeped in the spirit of engineering and think of the trigger as the cause of the process. We do not think of the heart as the cause of the bullet’s trajectory.

            We live after Newton. When we see a stone that is falling, we perceive it as being in the grip of gravity. We find it difficult to share the perception of a medieval scholar who sees the same phenomenon as caused by the stone’s desire to approach the earth: this is the causa finalis, the “final cause” of this movement. Instead, we perceive a force that is pushing the heavy body. The ancient desiderium naturae, which is a natural desire of the stone to come to rest as close as it can be to the bosom of the earth, has become for us a myth. Even more thoroughly, the idea of one first or primary Final Cause, one ultimate motivating reason of all desires that are hidden in the nature of the stone or of the plant or of the reader, has become foreign in our century. ¹⁸ “End stage” in the twentieth-century mental universe connotes death. Entropy is our ultimate destiny. We experience reality as monocausal. We know only efficient causes.

            This is the reason why the translation of prima as “first” is at once a perfect translation and a misleading interpretation. If in modern English I want to refer to the Good, Beauty, or Truth that in the traditional sense motivates all existence I must speak of the “ultimate reason” that brings everything into existence by tugging rather than pushing.

            De studio legendi, the subtitle of the book, is just as challenging to translate. What legere and lectio meant for Hugh is the subject of the entire book. One cannot spell it out here in a few words. But when I had to translate the first term, de studio, I was happy that I followed my hunch to look it up in the OED rather than in the Oxford Latin Dictionary.

            For the word study, sb. ME, the OED gives the following first and second meaning: “I. (Chiefly in translations from Latin): Affection, friendliness, devotion to another’s welfare: partisan sympathy; desire, inclination; pleasure or interest felt in something—NB: all these meanings are obsolete since 1697.  2. An employment, occupation—obsolete since 1610.”

It would therefore be wrong to say that the book is the introduction to that which is as culturally obsolete as the causa finalis.¹⁹

            Only with this qualification can the book be called a guide to higher studies. Studies pursued in a twelfth-century cloister challenged the student’s heart and senses even more than his stamina and brains. Study did not refer to a liminal epoch of life, as it usually does in modern times, when we say that someone is “still a student.” They encompassed the person’s daily and lifelong routine, his social status, and his symbolic function. No doubt this book can be talked about as a medieval precursor of the propaedeutic literature which provided curricula for first-year university students in later centuries. In this book Hugh gives advice on the division of the disciplines of his time and the methods which fit them. He also discusses at length how the fields of the knowable are to be divided. He lists the canon of classics with which he expects students to be familiar. However, what in Hugh’s view is the most central issue  are the virtues needed for and developed by “reading”.