P E T R I R A M I OF PETRUS RAMUS

another of R. Ramus.

grandfather.

poverty.

Ramus's spirit and character.

A decorative initial 'P' features floral and foliate motifs.Petrus RAMUS, therefore, was born in the year of our salvation 1515, and was killed in the Paris Matins The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, 1572 in the year 1572. From this it is clear that he lived about 57 years. He was born, I say, in the very year that Francis I was named King of France. His father, a charcoal burner, was thrown in his face as a mark of disgrace. His grandfather, to be sure, as he himself recalls in the preface to his royal professorship, was of the Eburones people, a family of the highest distinction. However, because their homeland was captured and burned by Charles, Duke of Burgundy, he was a refugee in the territory of the Vermandois and, due to poverty, became a charcoal burner, while his father was a farmer. Ramus himself was poorer than both, and thus, by some rich man or other, the poverty of a noble lineage was held against him. But Petrus Ramus was a Christian, and he never thought poverty was an evil. He was not an Aristotelian, such that he would think it difficult for a man to accomplish great things if he lacked great wealth. Compelled by the necessity of fortune, he endured hard servitude for many years; yet he was never a slave in spirit, and he never despaired or cast down his mind. Therefore, God the Best and Greatest, who can raise up children of Abraham from stones, raised up in the grandson of a charcoal burner and the son of a farmer—afflicted by so many indignities—not, indeed, great wealth or a great fortune (for which he had no great need for the instruments of his profession: ink, paper, and a pen), but for his whole life, an upright mind and constant diligence and industry, with which he labored in the furnace of his duty and worked at the plow for the praise of God the Best and Greatest and for the salvation of all academies, which he considered to be the greatest of all goods. Therefore, you, whoever you are, who approach letters in a needy state and lacking everything, join this industry and diligence of Ramus with poverty, and do not despair that poverty can also attain wisdom. The great-grandfathers of Ramus were of an illustrious family; his father was forced to till the fields due to the adversity of fortune. But just as it appears in the fruits of the earth and the produce of trees that they produce less sweet and less abundant fruits in certain years—because nature seems to rest and gather its strength, some calamity having intervened—so it happened in Ramus himself, that the nobility of his lineage seemed to rest as if in some calamity, yet in the end, nature gathered itself, and his noble genius brought forth a golden branch.