THE MESSENGER

VOL. XLIII.

MARCH, 1905.

No. 3.

THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPÆDIA. (1)

THE announcement of the projected publication of a Catholic encyclopædia in the English language cannot fail to awaken a widespread interest amongst Catholics in this country and abroad. We have so long devoutly wished for it, so universally felt its want, so often and acutely realized our great handicap in the world of letters and knowledge in not possessing a work of such a nature, that now, when we learn that it is actually in preparation under auspices that give us every assurance of its success, we sing our Te Deum with grateful hearts.

Such a vast Catholic English-speaking population without some standard and authentic reference work to represent them before the general public, as well as to meet their own requirements in the way of accurate and comprehensive information about so great and universal an institution as the Catholic Church, is an anomaly which has endured too long among peoples who by their numbers and influence make one of the most potent and progressive factors in the civilization of the English-speaking world.

A Catholic encyclopædia as a source of general information about the Catholic religion is a work in keeping with the spirit of the times. Although a novelty hitherto unknown in the English tongue, a Catholic encyclopædia has not been a novelty in France and Germany, which have long enjoyed the benefits and advantages of admirable popular reference works of this character. It seems a reproach to

(1) "The Catholic Encyclopædia" (Robert Appleton Co., No. 1 Union Square, N. Y.). The work is to be completed in fifteen volumes, quarto. Its Board of Editors are: Charles George Herbermann, Ph.D., LL.D.; Edward Aloysius Pace, Ph.D., D.D.; Condé Benoist Pallen, Ph.D., LL.D.; Thomas Joseph Shahan, J.U.L., D.D., and John J. Wynne, S.J.

us that our brethren beyond the seas have outstripped us in so great and glorious an enterprise.

The encyclopædia has become in our day the common source of popular information, but we are not to imagine, as is generally erroneously supposed, that the encyclopædia is a peculiarly modern product, though in its present form it is true it dates only from the seventeenth century, when the transition from the logical and analytical arrangement of its matter to the synthetical or alphabetical order of its topics was first effected. The desire to know everything is not an intellectual passion, which first welled up into human consciousness in the seventeenth century.

Antiquity also had its bulky volumes, embracing the entire round of human learning. To gather the sum of man's knowledge into stout quartos and launch them into the stream of time like great hulks miscellaneously laden to the gunwales, has not been the achievement of these piping times of modernity only. Even the Chinese dispute the palm of Encyclopædism in ages remoter than the dimmest epochs of Egypt's prehistoric dynasties. But with the Celestials we need not dispute this fabulous claim; for with a people whose alphabet runs into some forty or fifty thousand characters there can be no argument.

Among the ancient Greeks we are told by those who know that Galen, Herodotus, Stobaeus, and, par excellence, Aristotle, are to be ranked as encyclopædists, for was not the range of their information the universe and all that it contained, and their exposition of its contents in volumes innumerable? Galen comes down to us as the author of some five hundred different treatises-what could have been left out in such a vast excursion of inquiry? Aristotle was the supreme inquisitor of learning in his times-what in the sum of knowledge could have escaped the wide sweep of so profound and keen a mind? Stobaeus, the Macedonian, made an immense compilation of the learning that preceded him in that Greece, whose glory in his day was a memory of the past. His encyclopædic Anthology has come to us only in fragments, for the tooth of time has made its ravages in his huge collection of the five hundred authors whose works he had gathered in true encyclopædic fashion as a treasury of the erudition of the best that Greece had given to the world in poetry, oratory, philosophy, history and science.

Amongst the Romans we are to account Varo and Pliny, the

elder, as foremost in the making of encyclopædic works. So prodigious was Varo's energy that, according to Aulus Gellius, he had composed four hundred and ninety volumes at the age of eighty years, and continued to write up to the day of his death, ten years later! A wondering, if not a grateful, posterity has conferred upon him the surname of Polygraph. Pliny the elder was a worthy successor and rival of Varo. His insatiable thirst for knowledge led him an indefatigable pilgrim in its quest over the known world, and his exhaustless energy of compilation consumed not only his days, but his nights. When he ate and when he walked he kept at his side a lector to read to him and a copyist to transcribe extracts from what was read. According to his own statement he laid under contribution two thousand volumes in making his great Natural History.

From Pliny we may pass to the Christian era, for the period between his day and the age when we meet the first notable name among Christian encyclopædists was not remarkable for the making of works, which may lay claim to an encyclopædic character. The only names of learning within the province of our inquiry up to the end of the sixth century are those of Boethius and Cassiodorus, which shine with a more than ordinary brilliancy in an age when barbarism sat enthroned in the palace of the Cæsars, and the light of letters, save in their instance, burned only in the dark backward and abyss of time, like a setting star upon a far horizon, At the close of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh century, we meet with a name of rare distinction in the history of encyclopædia making. In the stricter sense of the word, St. Isidore, of Seville, may be called the father of the post-classical encyclopædia, for his great work, entitled Etymologiarum Libri XX, was in purpose, conception and execution an encyclopædia in the more specific acceptation of the term, a repertory of all human knowledge gathered to purvey general information.

The Venerable Bede follows close in time as an encyclopædist upon St. Isidore. Though not an encyclopædist in that strict sense which may be applied to his Spanish predecessor in the temple of learning, the extent and the variety of his works entitle him to a place amongst those authors whose writings, when taken together, form a complete library-the sum of the knowledge of their times. But in Rabanus Maurus, who lived a century after Bede, we discover the encyclopædist who composes a work formally designed.

to encompass the universe of knowledge, de re omni scibili. His great work, De Universo, in twenty-two books, is divided into two sections, the first of which treats the sacred and the second the profane sciences. Like St. Isidore's Etymologiarum, the De Universo of Rabanus Maurus is in content and purpose an encyclopædia; in method and treatment a general exposition of the diverse subject matter of all human knowledge correlated in a logical unity. Hugh of St. Victor, in the first part of the twelfth century, may be classed as an encyclopædist in the secondary sense, and St. Hildegarde (a woman) deserves to be ranked in the same category. Roger Bacon, in the thirteenth century, is an encyclopædist in the secondary sense, but Vincent of Beauvais, his contemporary, gave the world the greatest encyclopædia of the Middle Ages.

Brunto Latini, the teacher of Dante, also in the thirteenth century, wrote in French a work of encyclopædic character entitled Li Livres dou Tresor, but by no means comparable with the great work of Vincent of Beauvais, which may lay just claim to be the greatest and most complete encyclopædia of the Middle Ages. After this time, through the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, encyclopædic works of more or less note rapidly multiplied. All were constructed upon the analytical plan or the distribution of their matter in that arrangement into which its major division naturally fell, according to the author's logical conception of their correlated unity. But in the seventeenth century a momentous change came about in the construction of the encyclopædia, and the modern encyclopædia-or the encyclopædia as we know it-may be said to date from that century. The invention of printing and the cheapening of the processes of making paper had made the publication of books an easy matter, and the spread of popular information was a logical sequence. It was in that century that the encyclopædia virtually took its present form. The logical and analytical arrangement of the subject matter of encyclopædias gave way to the more convenient dictionary form in alphabetical order. Encyclopædia making now grew apace. Among the most notable was Moreri's Le Grand Dictionnaire Historique, soon followed by Bayles's Dictionnaire Historique et Critique. From this time on encyclopædic dictionaries were launched upon the seas of popularity with astonishing frequency, and the cargoes of the successive fleets of erudition were generally made up of the same freightage. As they successively appeared each calmly pirated in large measure the literary wares of