Read Raptor for Free Online Page B

Echo.
    My Latin reading Brother Hilarion taught me by using the Vulgate Bible that St. Jerome had translated from the Greek of the Septuagint Bible, and St. Jerome’s Latin was quite comprehensible, even for a beginner. But learning to read Gothic was a matter of more difficulty because, for his teaching, Brother Methodius employed the Bible rendered into the Old Language by the Bishop Wulfilas. Before that bishop’s time, the Goths had had no mode of writing except the age-old runes, and Wulfilas found those inadequate for a proper rendition of the Holy Scriptures. So he invented an entire new alphabet for the Gothic language—making some of its letters from the runic futhark, some from Greek, some from Roman—and that alphabet has been widely in use among most of the Germanic nations ever since.
    Once I had some grasp of the art of reading, I found in the abbey’s scriptorium books less difficult and more interesting—the Biuhtjos jah Anabusteis of Gutam, which was a compilation of the “Laws and Customs of the Goths,” and the Saggwasteis af Gut-Thiudam, which was a collection of many of the “Epic Songs of the Gothic Peoples”—and numerous other works, both in Gothic and in Latin, relating to my ancestors and kinfolk, such as Ablabius’s De Origine Actibusque Getarum, which was a history of the Goths from their earliest encounters with the Roman Empire.
    In mentioning such works, I use the word “was” because I have reason to suspect that I and others of my generation will have been the last persons ever to read any of those books I have cited. Even when I was first perusing them, the Church had for long been frowning darkly on every work written by a Goth, or written about the Goths, or written in the Old Language, whether in the futhark runes or in the more modern alphabet concocted by Wulfilas.
    The Church’s disapproval was founded, of course, on the fact that both the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths were of the detested Arian faith. Over the years, all those books have been ever more fervently preached against by Catholic Christian clerics, and more relentlessly banned, burned, obliterated from existence. After my time, I fear, there will remain not so much as one written fragment of Gothic history or heritage, and the very name of “Goth” will have become only one more among the long roster of peoples extinct and unworthy of remembrance.
    Dom Clement was as steadfastly opposed to Arianism as was every proper Catholic Christian cleric, but he had what most churchmen do not: a loving regard for the sanctity of books in themselves. That was why he allowed those various works dealing with the Visigoths and Ostrogoths to remain in St. Damian’s scriptorium. During his years as a seminary teacher, Dom Clement had acquired a considerable library of his own, and had brought with him to our abbey a whole cartload of his codices and scrolls. He had continued ever since to procure for us more and more works, until we had a library that would have been admired by any book-collecting rich man.
    Of course the religious instruction and secular education of any postulant like myself was supposed to be restricted to the study of only pious works to which Mother Church could not take exception. Dom Clement never forbade me to open any book I might discover in the scriptorium. So, while I dutifully read the Latin writings of the Church fathers and those works sanctioned by the Church fathers: Sallust’s histories, Cicero on oratory, Lucan on rhetoric, I also read many that were discountenanced by the Church. In addition to the comedies of Terence, approved because they were “uplifting,” I read the comedies of Plautus and the satires of Persius, disapproved because they were “misanthropic.”
    As a result of my voracious curiosity, my young mind eventually teemed with a mishmash of contradictory beliefs and philosophies. I even came upon books that refuted not only the Church-approved chorographies of Seneca and