Love & Book Learning
The last time I saw the proverb, “Cave homo unius libri” (“Beware of the one-book man”), it was pinned up in a used bookstore whose owner had an obvious commercial interest in it—although I saw indications in his shop that it was probably a message to people with too much respect for a one-volume religious authority, namely, the proverbial Christian ignoramus, and perhaps even the orthodox Jew or Muslim. Still, there is clearly something true in the maxim, which I would rather appeared as, “Don’t rely on the authority of people whose intellectual horizons are too narrow,” which would be even better stated as, “Don’t trust people who don’t pay attention.”
The reliability of a person’s opinions is related not to the number of books he can display but to his understanding, which is to say, his ability to discern what is true from what he has observed, however much or little its literary mass. For this, he must have at least a rudimentary belief in truth (or goodness or beauty) and the ability to weigh one thing against another in light of that belief. Underlying this there must be the preliminary gift of the will to do it, which will not be present without faith that it is not a waste of time—that it has an end worthy of the effort required.
Which brings to mind another useful apothegm, this one from old Flanders: “You can send an ass to Paris, but it won’t make a horse of him.” This is to say that unless a person is inclined by nature to love wisdom and understanding in the sense the father in the Book of Proverbs commended them to his son, university training of the highest order (“Paris”) will do nothing but make him a greater ass than he was when he slouched in.
In our day this is something that doesn’t require much proving, but taking it to heart is difficult—not so much for people of a single book, perhaps, as for people who aren’t paying attention.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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