Secret of Secrets

[Page 140]
they are not found to be harmful in any way. Indeed, in the books of Galen, Alexander, Averroes, Aristotle, and even Plato, many things are found that would cause scandal, nay, which are most openly repugnant to our true faith, and yet they are not for this reason left unread by the most religious and even most holy men. But one ought to imitate the little bee, which, flying to every flower and to every shrub, leaving behind what is harmful, extracts only that which is conducive to the making of honey; this is what the Divine Jerome confirms, writing to Damasus, saying: the type of this wisdom (he was surely speaking of the doctrine of the Gentiles) is also described in Deuteronomy under the figure of the captive woman, about whom the divine voice commands that if the Israelite wishes to have her as a wife, he should make her bald, cut her nails, and remove her hair, and when she has been made clean, then she may pass into the embraces of the victor. If we understand these things according to the letter, are they not ridiculous? And so, we also are accustomed to do this when we read the philosophers, when books of secular wisdom come into our hands. If we find anything in them useful, we convert it to our dogma; if anything, however, is superfluous—concerning idols, love, or the care of secular things—we scrape these away, we induce baldness upon them, we cut them away with the sharpest iron as if they were nails.