So Jerome to Pope Damasus on the prodigal son:
=Priests are blameworthy who, to the neglect of the Gospels, read
comedies.=
We see priests of God, to the neglect of the Gospels and the
Prophets, reading comedies, singing the Amatory words of bucolic
verses, keeping Vergil in their hands, and making that which
occurs with boys as a necessity (_k_) ground for accusation
against themselves because they do it for pleasure.
Idem:
=They walk in the vanity and darkness of the senses who occupy
themselves with profane learning.[B]=
Does he not seem to you to be walking in the vanity of the
senses, and in darkness of mind, who day and night torments
himself with the dialectic art; who, as an investigator of
nature, raises his eyes athwart the heavens and, beyond the
depths of lands and the abyss, is plunged into the so-called
void; who grows warm over iambics, who, in his over zealous mind,
analyses and combines the great jungle of metres; and, (to pass
to another phase of the matter), who seeks riches by fair means
and foul means, who fawns upon kings, grasps at the inheritances
of others, and amasses wealth though he knows not at the time to
whom he is going to leave it?
(_h_) In this thirty-seventh division Gratian asks[C] whether one who
is to be ordained ought to be acquainted with profane literature.
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