Vatican Library Manuscripts Serve as Wealth of Knowledge for Academics Across the World
by Nicola Gori
The Vatican Library houses important documents of Christian history. From time to time there are discoveries, true or presumed, that concern the Church's origins and the early centuries, coupled with disputes that succeed in calling into question the historicity of Christ or accuse the ecclesiastical institution of manipulation.
As a historian, I believe that even among Catholic exegetes at times use methods that end by leaving history out of consideration. Another cause of erroneous interpretations is the lack of interdisciplinary comparison in the study of antiquity.
For example in studying the history of persecutions, knowledge of the development of the Roman institutions is necessary, but often unknown to a fair number of scholars. As regards the figure of Jesus, these disputes are as old as Christianity itself. And just as in their time the bad faith of Lucian and Celsus who wrote against the Christians was evident, so today too there is a great deal of bad faith as well as ignorance of course. In this regard the Vatican, like many other libraries, preserves a great many testimonies. There is nothing that is better documented than the history of Jesus of Nazareth, for example, in comparison with other historical figures concerning whom no one would dream of advancing doubts.
Benedict XVI's Visit to the Vatican Library in 2007 underlined this particular, in a certain way secular aspect and perhaps at the same time gave it a new impetus. In what way?
Benedict XVI emphasized one aspect on which we set great store, that is, the Library's direct dependence on the Pope. This is already evident in the name of the "apostolic" library, that is, "palatine", in other words, part of the Apostolic Palace. The Vatican Secret Archives does not have this title, even though the Curia could never do without it.
Paradoxically, it could do without the Library but not the Archives. The Archives, among other things, do not have the Library's problems of space since their premises are three or four times the size of those of the Library.
Without any doubt, the Vatican Library has an ecclesiastical configuration but this might not be very apparent since it has been open to all from the outset. Since its modern foundation, the Library has been open to all scholars, regardless of their faith, culture, and nation, while the Archives were initially exclusively for the use of the Curia.
The statistics show that most of the people who visit the Library are Italian, obviously, but academics come from all over the world: there are no data on the religions to which they belong but naturally the majority are not Catholic.
I tell students of library science that this discipline teaches care and love for books, not only for what they are but also for what they represent, in other words knowledge and the result of man's endeavours concerning knowledge.
I say that the librarian is at the service of books but also of the community. Library science always concerns the organization and preservation of books but also and above all the best way to make books available to the community, for books without readers are dead.
The Catholic Church is at one and the same time religion and culture and there has never been a separation between them. I speak of the Catholic Church rather than of Christianity and this is evident here, where the interaction among knowledge, art and religion continues. And scholars absorb it.
Certain contacts have at times become ecumenical encounters such as the two exhibitions we recently organized in Germany on the Baroque period. They were visited above all by Protestants who realized the importance of the half a dozen Popes against whom prejudice and caricature had been de rigueur for centuries. They now see these Popes in a different light.
Then we have established friendly relations with the Orthodox through our collaboration on a precious manuscript of Basil II, which was far more fruitful from many points of view than many theological discussions.
You are also a Salesian, you have been in touch with the simplest people and with youth. Has not the administration of the Vatican Apostolic Library removed you from this world?
I would not say so. One needs to see first hand how life goes on in here. The management, in my opinion, is becoming more and more important. One manages the actual life of the dependents for whom one is responsible.
Here we have about 100 employees, and in the Archives there are 80. If those who work here part-time are included, that would be about another 50. I receive staff members who come to talk to me about the daily running of the Library and they often also speak of their family problems. There are people here of all ages and I know almost all the employees' families. This is my parish. Of course, when I first came here, I did not find the university atmosphere from which I came.
Then here in the Vatican Library we are only three clerics: the Cardinal, the Prefect and an American priest who is a specialist in legal problems: all the others are lay people.
The foundation of the modern Vatican Library dates back to Nicholas V (1447-1455): What role did he, the founder, intend it to play?
The modern Library is the one Nicholas V founded in the mid-15th century. There is no real act of foundation dating back to that time but one document, the Brief Iamdiu Decrevimus, shows that the Library already existed by 30 April 1451.
A quarter of a century later, on 15 June 1475, Sixtus IV promulgated the Bull Ad Decorem Militantis Ecclesiae with which he reorganized the Library, officially assigning it a librarian, some assistants and financial support.
Nicholas V and Sixtus IV are considered the founders of the modern or "first" Vatican Library (the second one is that of Sixtus V and the third, that of Leo XIII).
Nicholas V, a theologian and scholar, a humanist who had been involved with books and libraries, was aware of the importance of books and was nourished by the ideals of humanistic culture. He also possessed his own personal library, considered large for the times (at least 150 Latin codices). He decided to transform the collection of books which until then had been for the Pope's personal use — about 350 codices — to which he added his, into a library. Its purpose was "to facilitate the research of scholars" (pro communi doctorum virorum commodo).
Pope Nicholas V consequently made accessible to external readers too what until then had been a library for the exclusive use of the Papal Curia. This is not only old history, because still today Nicholas V's statement in the Brief is one of the foundations of the Vatican Library and is explicitly recalled in the first article of our Statutes.
The Pontiff had a suitable place prepared in the Vatican Palace and began to collect books in accordance with a vast plan that would make it possible to build up a library that was truly universal, in accordance with humanistic criteria.
The "universality" desired by Nicholas V was to be achieved by following two criteria in particular. First of all, books were to be collected that were written in both the languages of study and culture, that is, Greek and Latin. This was a highly innovative' decision when we remember that the papal library at Avignon did not possess a single Greek manuscript.
And the second criterion concerned the disciplines that the books addressed; the word used was facultates. The library of which the Pope was dreaming was to be able to cover all the "faculties".
Thus it was not merely a specialized collection, for example, of theological or legal works like the great university libraries at that time but was to encompass all the areas of knowledge, including literature, with the collection of the Latin and Greek classics and the sciences, with books on medicine, astronomy and mathematics.
To do this the Pope ordered the purchase of books in all the markets of the East and the West, sending out trusted men even to distant regions. They were charged to transcribe, at his expense, important books which could not be purchased, in order that a copy of them might reach Rome.
Nicholas V's efforts were successful: from the inventory made when he died in 1455 and from other lists there were more than 1,200 manuscripts, a third of which were Greek and the rest Latin. The quality and quantity of its texts made it one of the richest libraries in Europe. It is not surprising that the learned men of the time praised the initiative of the great humanist Pope, comparing him to Ptolemy, the founder of the Library of Alexandria, Egypt.
How is the Vatican Library organized?
Today the Vatican Apostolic Library possesses one of the largest collections of manuscripts in the world, the result of its being constantly increased. However, to answer your question better, it would be right to describe the general organization of the Library.
The Cardinal Librarian presides over the direction of the Library — he is also Archivist and is thus responsible also for the Secret Archives — and it is managed by the Prefect with the collaboration of the Vice-Prefect. The staff is organized in three large sectors. First of all are the offices that serve the prefecture directly and they are those of the secretariat (protocol, correspondence, current and historical archives of the prefecture, the office for the reproduction of rights and copyright and so forth), and the purveying office.
Then there are the departments: the first is that of manuscripts with two sections (manuscripts and archives), then the printed works with seven sections (accessions, catalogue, reading rooms, ancient books, print room, non-library material), and lastly, there is the numismatic hall.
The services follow: the exhibitions office, restoration laboratory, photographic laboratory, data processing centre, printers, library-science school and the coordination of computer services. The Manuscripts Department is the heart of the Vatican library and its principal feature.
What is preserved in the Library?
The manuscripts are divided into about 130 collections, open and closed. The latter consist of the historical libraries, of princes and private people, acquired down the centuries by the Library: for example, the Urbinate, the Reginense, the Palatina.
These old libraries no longer increase.On the other hand, we continue to add to the open or Vaticani collections. These are almost ex lusively divided into the alphabets in which they are written: Vaticani latini, Vaticani greci, Vaticani siriaci, Vaticani ebraici, and so forth.
The enormous quantity of manuscripts kept in the Vatican Library covers practically all of the branches of human knowledge: literature; history, art, law, astronomy, mathematics, the natural sciences, medicine, liturgy, patristics, and theology.
To mention a few examples, some of the oldest copies of works by Homer, Euclid, Cicero, Virgil and Dante are kept here; and the numerous biblical codices include the most important Codice Vaticano (or Codex B, the Vaticano greco 1209), one of the oldest complete biblical codices which dates back to the beginning of the fourth century, and the third-century Bodmer VIII Papyrus, which contains the Two Letters of St Peter. Among the Arab codices there is the only known example of an illustrated Muslim manuscript that comes from Spain, the Vaticano arabo 638.
Excluding the archivistic codices there are more than 75,000 manuscripts. Most of these are medieval and humanistic, with several important ancient copies and many others from the modern epoch.
The "Latin", in other words the documents written in the Latin alphabet (in Latin, Italian, English, French, Spanish, German, Provencal, and so on) amount to about 60,000 and those in Greek, to about 5,000. There are about 800 in Hebrew and about 9,000 in other Oriental languages (including Arabic, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic), and about 2,000 in Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Then there is a substantial patrimony of early printed works (about 8,300 incunabula, a great number from the 16th and 17th centuries), prints, (more than 70,000 including engravings, prints, drawings, maps and so forth), drawings, objects, coins and medals (more than 300,000 in one of the largest numismatic collections in the world), and then there are the modern prints.
The selection of, and accession to, the prints, especially in recent decades, permits the study of the manuscripts. There are about 1,650,000 volumes of prints.
The Vatican Library recently acquired a very ancient New Testament manuscript: what is its importance?
This is the Bodmer Papyrus XIV-XV, known by the abbreviation "P75", which is the oldest testimony of the texts of Luke and John. They were given to Benedict XVI by a Catholic from the U.S., Frank J. Hanna III. The codex was transcribed in the last decades of the second century or a little later, that is, less than a century and a half after the canonical Gospels had been written, that is, in the second half of the first century. But it is not only its age that gives this papyrus its inestimable value.
The data gleaned from studying it have actually made it possible to reconstruct definitively part of the history of the Gospels.
The "established" text of P75 is very trustworthy and above all is not the product of editions standardized at the time of the great manuscripts in capitals during the Constantinian age, as had been supposed, because the text of the Gospels was established, precisely, very much earlier, that is, shortly after the middle of the second century.
Discovered in 1952 in Jabal al-Tarif, in the heart of Egypt near the ruins of an ancient monastery and purchased in 1955, together with other important papyruses, by the Swiss collector Martin Bodmer, the text of P75 was published in 1961 by Victor Martin and Rudolph Kasser.
P75 is more or less the size of a medium-sized book (about 26 cm x 13 cm wide). It consisted of 36 double leaves of papyrus, folded in two and stitched together to form a codex of 72 pages written on both sides, constituting a total of 144 sides in accordance with the book format introduced in the first century which, because it was practical and manageable, immediately became the favourite format of Christians for their texts.
Fifty-one of the original 72 leaves have survived (that is, 102 sides), entire or in fragments, which contain almost all of Luke's Gospel and about half of John's.
Transcribed in sober and elegant capitals, the date of the codex has been established on the basis of comparison with other manuscripts as between 175 and 225, but its text — and this accounts for the great importance of this very ancient manuscript — is very like that attested, in the Constantinian age, by Codex B (the famous Vaticano greco 1209), which, with the Sinai Codex (most of which is kept in London today) is the most ancient complete testimony of the Greek Bible.
Has the reconstruction work of the Library made good progress?
The restructuring concerns four sites on which work is underway. Work on the first two will probably be concluded in 2008, or at the latest by Easter 2009. The first site is that of the numismatic and medals room. The second includes the three floors of the restoration laboratories for manuscripts, and the photographic and digital laboratories with their archives. This site is linked to the construction of an external lift in the Library's internal courtyard, planned and built by Italcementi. This lift will link the three floors of laboratories with the manuscripts' consultation room and will go down to the storeroom for manuscripts.
The third site will concern the manuscripts bunker. The delicate operation of the packing and transfer of all the manuscripts to near and safe premises has just been completed.
Advanced technology will be used to dig out and build the bunker's emergency exit, the whole area will be repaved with special fire-proof material and paint; the walls and the cement ceiling will be treated likewise, the electricity circuits will be renewed, as well as the climatization and humidity control systems, and all the systems for security and conservation will be according to regulations.
The bunker will be enlarged with a newly dugout air-conditioned strong-room for the conservation of papyruses.
The structure of the machine room, next to the entrance to the bunker will be renewed, simplified, and equipped with proper control systems.
A fourth work site will concern the storeroom of periodicals. This storage space has also been emptied and work begun to extend it to three floors. It will be equipped with compact shelving that will save a considerable amount of space for the periodicals and for a store to be used by the purveying office.
The work on the third and fourth site are due to be completed by October 2009. A fifth site, recently approved, envisages the return of the Sistine Hall to the Vatican Library: this historical hall will be arranged as a second consultation room for printed editions.
To give access to it, the small existing lift will be replaced, and it will be in working order at the very latest by June 2009.
How are the people who work in the Vatican Library trained?
Several years ago we reintroduced the competitive examination for the scriptores. For other employees, rather than what was done previously, we now engage personnel who are qualified to assume the role for which they were interviewed. I have to say that Italy now has high quality schools of library science, archiving, conservation and the restoration of cultural goods in which to find them.
It is also easy to foresee in the near future a further increase in the number of qualified women on the roll of the Vatican Library. The percentage of women employees, which has already increased considerably in the past 10 years, has already reached 35 percent.
The Library takes part in many important exhibitions across the world. What are your projects for the future?
First of all, the current exhibition on Federico da Montefeltro in the ducal Palace of Urbino should be mentioned. The idea was to celebrate the Duke of Urbino, as the "new" man of the Renaissance who was able to combine political and military duties with concern for the humanistic sciences and art; the most beautiful illuminated codices of Federico's library and other objects of his time are on show there. Seventeen important and richly illuminated codices of the Vatican are on display for the occasion.
Another important exhibition has been organized in the Papal Basilica of St Paul Outside-the-Walls for the Pauline Year. Then an exhibition on Matilda of Canossa, the Papacy and the Empire opened in Mantua on 31 August and will run until 11 January 2009.
Lastly, an exhibition will open in the Museum of History and Culture, Nagasaki, from November 2008 to January 2009, organized on the occasion of the beatification on 24 November 2008 of the 188 Japanese martyrs. This event is not only involving the Christian communities but the entire Japanese nation. The celebration is in fact seen as a celebration for the whole of Japan and the Vatican's contribution acquires a special value in the context of intercultural dialogue.
This item 8455 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
