Barış Bıçakçı and Jean Gerson and Aphorisms

Easily Circulating Sentences

This week I took a look at an incunable print of Jean Gerson’s “De Contemptu Omnium Vanitatum Mundi” in the HRC based on the name. I too have contempt for all of the vanity of the world. I was not disappointed. This small, easily portable and digestible book was made up of 4 sections divided into chapters of relatively short length, about a page each. The content of the work was immediately digestible as well. Written in Latin as short and simple sentences, I could make out the meaning of the some of the most declarative sentences: “oculos habentes non videmus” or “Veritas est in Scripturis sanctis quærenda, non eloquenda”. I even began jotting them down in my notes for later use in an ironic meme or the text for an instagram post. The text immediately appealed to even a non-Latin reader like me as a little treasury of sayings I could share at parties; swirling the olive in my martini glass and declaring “cito enim inquinamur vanitate, et captivamur.” To verify I had the meanings correct, I tried googling some of the sentences, with the assumption that such pithy observations could not have escaped digitization at this point.

It was at this point that I learned that this was in fact a copy of the infamous “The Imitation of Christ” under another name. The book is infamous because it was not, in fact, written by Jean Gerson, but had been attributed to him since 1483, and had reappeared in nearly 50 editions before 1500. The edition in the HRC is from Venice 1496 and so would have probably been part of this wave of interest in the book, in part related to his reputation as an author. According to Hobbins, the question surrounding true authorship of the book was the course of a “scholarly controversy lasting centuries.” Recent scholarship has concluded that the book was originally written by Thomas a Kempis, but Jean Gerson’s name remains attached to it in several digitized editions, as well as in the archives of the HRC.

It is, however, just as helpful for me to have chosen a book incorrectly attributed to Jean Gerson this week as it would have been to look at something that had actually been written by him. “The Imitation of Christ” seems to be even more-Gerson-than-Gerson and it is through this exaggeration that much is revealed about the relationship between rhetoric and mass appeal. Even if it has been decidedly proven to not be the work of Gerson, the tone of the book “aligns so closely with his temper and spirit that plausible arguments can be made for his authorship.”

Specifically, I was interested in this masterful use of aphorism in the book: so effective as to be appealing to a non-Latin speaker centuries later. The use of aphorism seems to be the perfect vehicle for accomplishing Gerson’s own promotion of rhetoric as a way to appeal to audiences outside of the faculty of theology. While Hobbins goes to great length in chapter 4 of his book to demonstrate just how ambiguously Gerson stood between the currents of scholasticism and humanism, aphorism would seem to simultaneously satisfy the twin requirements of precision and literary effect. Indeed, he was fond of quoting the statement “Dialectic is the art of arts” and admired those great schoolmen who has “used the scholastic idiom to treat mystical theology in clear and proper terminology.” The special ability for aphorisms to be memorized and their tendency to be casually cited would be particularly useful for the transmission of theological truths to the widest possible audience. What Thomas de Quincey called ”slender rivulets of truth silently stealing away into light,” aphorisms act like self-contained kernels of knowledge able to germinate far beyond the work in which they were first written down, across centuries, and even into digital space.  

All of which reminded me of a passage from another book, completely unrelated, that I read two weeks ago for my class on contemporary Turkish literature. In the novel “The Author of Mosquito Bites” by Barış Baçakçı, the narrator is an aspiring author trying to get his work published, and has a discussion with his editor about a trend which is plaguing modern literature: aphorisms.

“And there’s a danger in these aphorisms!” said the editor.

Aphorisms...you know, that thick white cream we spread over our bread for breakfast. It doesn’t nourish you but it fills you up.

“True!” said Cemil.

“In this day and age too many writers’ books are nothing more than a collection of aphorisms. We no longer find a unique world inside of books and stories.” she said while rubbing her fingers together. “Sentences which can easily get into circulation...It’s too bad that literature is turning into easily circulating sentences. People are in pursuit of expressions they can write and say to one another. It’s even wearing down sensitive readers.”

The irony was not lost on anyone in class who had read the book, knowing that the novel itself is completely full of little more than aphorisms, profound observations about life in a story otherwise completely devoid of a plot. Our professor remarked that despite this feigned humility in the form of a textual nod and a wink, Baçakçı nevertheless still relies heavily on the appeal of aphorisms and enjoys a wide cult popularity in Turkey from having understood the current generation of readers, mainly interested in literature for the opportunities it provides for social media. A simple search for the hastag #bıçakçı easily turns up a number of these aphorisms, often in a splayed open book resting next to a cup of tea.

The reason for this digression is that current habits in social reading have much to tell us about what might have been the habits of readers and audience in pre and early print culture. Just as we, as increasingly social readers, are so eager to share sound bites from the books we read, to what extent, did the appeal of these “easily circulating sentences” help to make Imitation of Christ the “literary bombshell” that it was in the late medieval period? We know that Jean Gerson himself loved to quote Peter of Spain’s textbook. There can be no doubt that readers, both literate and illiterate, would have found something memorable to take away with them from the book to add to their own cache in the form of an aphorisms. What could work as an easier path to demonstrating erudition than having one of these phrases at the ready? Even better if they could be attributed to an author of as much renown as Jean Gerson. Rather than thinking of Gerson’s popularity in terms of the use of his name attached to codexes and early texts as the organizing principle, maybe we should think of the aphorism as the vehicle which most effectively spread his name around Europe.

Hobbins explains the difficulty with which books circulated in the 1400s, often limited to the growing sense of national boundaries, the technical limits of book production, or the specific networks of distributional circles. Aphorisms, on the other hand, were already memes, and unbound by any of these restrictions. They were easily circulating sentences. The ways in which they traveled in personal letters, private conversations, and in the minds of the public is a central untold chapter in the history of the distributional networks. Regardless of whether or not Gerson was the author of these sayings, his name was attached to them at least during the incunable period, a fact which no doubt created interest for his actual written work. Readers were told, after all:  

 “Non quæras quis hoc dixerit, sed quid dicatur attende”