Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  For all that, Bacon was in some respects more medieval than the philosophers Abelard and Aquinas. For despite his status as “the first man of science in the modern sense” (in the accurate description of the British historian of science Charles Singer), Bacon was also an astrologer who raised his eyes to the heavens and an alchemist who searched beneath the earth—like the Alexandrian mathematicians who were his true forebears, a reader of stars and their significance and a practitioner of “this cursed craft,” as the alchemist’s assistant in The Canterbury Tales names the dark art of mining base metals for the purpose of changing them into gold. To appreciate how a great scientist could also be a magus and sorcerer, we must consult what we have already learned about the medieval worldview.

  All early societies and civilizations believed that patterns in the heavens were predictive of life on earth and that the stars controlled our destinies. Such ideas entered the medieval world indirectly by way of the ancient civilizations of Egypt, India, and China and more directly by way of Greece, Rome, and, during the twelfth-century recovery of additional Greek texts, Arabia. These heavy influences were countered, to some extent, by the inconstant condemnations of the church, which could never approve wholeheartedly of astrology because it seemed to erase the moral contribution of the human will in decision making. Augustine of Hippo, in particular, had heaped scorn on the whole business. But it would take the elaboration of a solidly based science of astronomy in the time of Galileo and Shakespeare (both born in 1564) to render the claims of astrology incredible—at least among well-informed people.

  Shakespeare’s famous lines “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves” are unlikely to have been expressed so definitely much before his time. In Bacon’s time, what appears to us a confusion of astrology and astronomy was still unresolved. It was indeed Aquinas, rather than Bacon, who gave the first push toward separating the two. Aristotle, like all ancient philosophers, thought the universe eternal. Aquinas knew it had been created by God.b Building his exposition on an earlier one by the seminal Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, Aquinas argued that though Aristotle’s analysis was logically correct, God had in fact created all things from nothing, choosing in his overflowing generosity that there be Something—the original mystical miracle—rather than nothing. Once the eternality of the universe was done away with, the inexplicably independent power of the stars was doomed to follow. One cannot logically believe in both free will and a provident God and yet continue to hold to belief in separate arbitrary powers.

  Even deeper in the subconscious of medieval Europe than its superstitious reverence for the stars was its pagan nightmare of a world of shapeshifters, where anything might turn into anything else. German stories of a prince turned into a frog or a revolting beast by an evil witch vied with Celtic stories of druids who turned themselves into ravens and children who in their sorrow turned into swans. The prehistoric Irish wizard Tuan Mac Cairill celebrated his ability to turn himself into just about anything:

  A hawk to-day, a boar yesterday,

  Wonderful instability! …

  Among herds of boars I was,

  Though to-day I am among bird-flocks;

  I know what will come of it:

  I shall still be in another shape!

  Knowing nothing of science in our modern sense, people of the centuries before Abelard believed that anything might become anything else—and that anyone might become anyone else (as can still happen so easily on a blind date).

  But this prejudice in favor of shapeshifting melded well with Aristotle’s theory that four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—were the building blocks for everything in our world. If everything was composed of these four in different proportions, it must be possible to make one thing into another by recombining the elements in a new balance. Thus, both the surviving manuscripts of Greek science and the underground imaginings of European paganism encouraged a predisposition toward finding alchemy credible. Within even the most orthodox forms of Christianity, one can find evidence of this predisposition. For who was a greater alchemist than the priest who changed bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ? Who were greater quarriers of hidden gold than the faithful who harvested the grain and baked the bread, who grew the grapes and trod the winepress, decanted the brew and consumed the sacrament?

  The medieval alchemists never succeeded in finding their “philosopher’s stone,” by the powder of which they believed base metals could be turned into gold and youth could be restored. This powder, they theorized, would prove an elixir (from the Arabic, al-iksir, thence from the Alexandrian Greek xerion for “healing powder”—thus demonstrating the ultimate paternity of this idea in the late antique civilization that rose from the mud of the Nile Delta). As the American historian of science Robert P. Multhauf has described the philosopher’s stone, “a substance capable of inducing a chemical transformation solely by its presence, and that in small quantity, its meaning comes very near to that of the modern term ‘catalyst’ ”—not in itself a crazy idea. At any rate, the alchemists’ patient experiments did succeed in isolating alcohol in the twelfth century and nitric, sulfuric, and hydrochloric acids in the thirteenth. Their bizarre laboratories, filled with urns and tubes, vials and vessels, lights and mirrors, fire and smoke, became, therefore, the forerunners of our chemistry labs, and they our proto-chemists. In later centuries, German and Low Country chemists—such as Botticher, van Helmont, and Glauber—still searching for the philosopher’s stone, will stumble on the manufacture of porcelain, the nature of gas, and the composition of many chemicals.

  Why did the alchemists connect gold with eternal youth? Gold, they perceived correctly, is different from any other earthly substance. Unlike all other metals, which rust or gradually corrode, gold cannot be damaged by heat or by any other natural process. In the words of Terry Jones, the English comedian-turned-medievalist, “It can be hammered to one-thousandth of the thickness of a sheet of newsprint, and drawn into a wire finer than a human hair, and remains quite unchanged. In a mortal world, gold is incorruptible.” And if it is incorruptible, it may possess the ability to restore to human beings the incorruptibility that was lost when God banished Adam and Eve from eternal Eden, sending them into our world of death and decay.

  It is easy, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, to dismiss an early scientist such as Bacon. It is easy to dismiss Richard of Wallingford, born around the time of Bacon’s death, a student at Oxford—by then Europe’s chief center for the study of the mathematical disciplines of the quadrivium—who later in life when he was abbot of the Benedictine motherhouse at nearby Saint Albans wrote the first medieval treatise on trigonometry and invented the first astronomical clock, a sort of mechanical astrolabe, despite the hideous deformations that leprosy was causing in his face and hands. It is easy to dismiss the fourteenth-century French cosmologists Jean Buridan and Nicholas Oresme, who were the first to realize that the earth rotates on its axis. It is easy to dismiss the enterprising Italian physicians Hugh of Lucca, Roland of Parma, William of Saliceto, and Mondino da Luzzi, who incorporated into their studies the recently recovered medical treatises of Hippocrates and Galen (whom we met previously in late antique Alexandria) and who added considerably to the knowledge of anatomy, especially because of their daring in dissecting human corpses. They all made mistakes; and their preference for a unified vision of reality, their refusal to be confined to discrete disciplines, often led them down blind alleys.

  But their insistence on the essential unity of human knowledge remains the real philosopher’s stone, still sought by modern scientists with the same zeal with which it was sought by Roger Bacon. Albert Einstein’s attempts to uncover a “grand unified theory” that would explain the universe is one with Bacon’s encyclopedic efforts. “It was characteristic of the medieval Western thinker,” remarks Singer, “that, like the early Greek thinker, he sought always a complete scheme of things.” Once again, we hear echoes of Chestert
on’s “great central Synthesis of history,” a synthesis that began with the Greeks, that medieval philosophers—including natural philosophers, or scientists—married to a Judeo-Christian worldview, and that flowed naturally into the thought of even the greatest theoretical physicist of the twentieth century.

  a Medieval Christians used the Julian calendar, promulgated in the reign of Julius Caesar in the first century B.C. This calendar, because of an astronomical miscalculation, was about eleven minutes longer than the actual solar year. Bacon was aware of the discrepancy, which had grown to ten days by the time Gregory XIII resolved to correct the problem. Though the pope suppressed ten days of the year 1582, the role of the papacy was by then in dispute across Europe. It took Protestant England, for instance, almost two additional centuries to accept the Gregorian reform. The Orthodox Church has never accepted it, which is why major Christian feasts are normally celebrated later in Orthodox lands than in the West.

  b May no one use this passage to bolster an argument for “intelligent design.” I am describing medieval science in the process of its being born—at a time when it was not yet absolutely separated from philosophy and theology. Science, as Bacon and others understood, must confine itself to experiment, observation, calculation, confirmation, and similar procedures. There is no way of devising a controlled experiment with God as its object, so God cannot be subjected to scientific proof—or disproof. Simply put, God cannot be made the subject of science. Despite this, it should be obvious that the Judeo-Christian prejudice in favor of a Creator (and of a beginning for time and for the universe) provides a much better prelude to the scientific enterprise than did the eternal universe of the Greeks.

  FIVE

  Padua, Chapel of Flesh

  The Artist’s Experiment and Its Consequences

  Both the man of science and

  the man of art live always

  at the edge of mystery.

  —J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

  AND THE PURSUITS OF BOTH, WE may say, are inevitably informed by whatever philosophical outlook they may have attached themselves to. In reading the works of Roger Bacon, one cannot go far without running into his Plotinian assumptions—his belief that the basis of the world is mystical but that our ultimate focus must be on the other world, the unchanging one, for ours is a sorry world of decay. If he was influenced in practical ways by Aristotle—as was every philosopher of the thirteenth century, for Aristotle was in the air they breathed—his ultimate loyalty was to the Christianized version of Plato that Augustine of Hippo had served forth so forcefully.

  In midlife, Bacon entered the Franciscan order, approximately a half century after Francis had founded it; and his attachment to a neo-Franciscan mind-set is a notable aspect of his later work. Francis’s original idea that his followers should own nothing but live as perpetual beggars had proved difficult, almost impossible, to abide by as time went on and as the order’s duties called it to administer educational and medical institutions of various kinds. An enduring split opened up within the order between literalists and absolutists, on the one hand, who came to be called Spirituals, and those, on the other, who were more practical and relativist and who came to be called Conventuals. (Roger’s affinity was with the Spirituals.)

  But this split, which at times sank even to violence and threatened the dissolution of the order, was as nothing compared to the gulf that opened between the followers of Saint Francis, the gentle, ill-educated Italian poor man, and the followers of Saint Dominic de Guzmán, the well-educated but militant Spanish nobleman who transformed himself into a riveting preacher against heretics. Dominic had founded his order not as a model of evangelical poverty but as an assault engine; and his followers, Dominicani, came to be satirized as “Domini canes,” dogs of the Lord, snarling and relentless in their pursuit of heretics.

  The universities of Paris and Oxford, to which both orders supplied faculty, were periodically convulsed by waves of faculty discord, much of it Dominican versus Franciscan. Of course, non-friars—masters who were either diocesan priests or clerics in minor orders (and therefore free to marry)—could take a dim view of all friars, whether Dominican or Franciscan,a and even assert that no friar had any business teaching at a university. To hell with these peace-disturbing routiers; let them return to the roads where they claim to belong.

  In the second half of the thirteenth century, the Franciscans became more and more suspicious of the renaissance of Greek-inspired philosophy that was emerging in their midst. Taking refuge under Augustine’s banner, they came to see Aristotle’s thought as a sometimes useful but awfully dangerous instrument that assigned far too much value to unaided reason. The muddled human mind, damaged by sin, wanders too easily astray, so reason requires God’s illuminating revelation to keep it on the straight path. Indiscriminate reading of Aristotle and his commentators—so many of them Muslims, Jews, and heretical Christians—can lead only to disaster. Thomas Aquinas, in the course of his short life, had no such qualms either about Aristotle or about the central philosophical (and scientific) value of reason, whether aided or unaided by revelation. His writings formed the Dominicans’ blueprint for teaching, and “Thomism” became their rallying cry, as dear to Dominicans as it was fraught with peril to Franciscans.b

  For his positive positions on Aristotelian thought and the value of reason, operating independently, Thomas, that most considered and undemonstrative of men, gained a posthumous reputation as an unreliable radical. In 1277, on the third anniversary of Thomas’s death, Étienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, solemnly condemned 219 “Aristotelian” propositions as heretical and grounds for the excommunication of anyone who was found to hold them. Tempier’s list largely consisted of propositions from the loonier liberal fringe of the neo-Aristotelian movement, but included in the list were a score of propositions drawn from the works of Thomas Aquinas. This condemnation was enthusiastically seconded by Robert Kilwardby, archbishop of Canterbury and himself a Dominican. So we may say that, in the short run, Thomism lost.

  In the very long run, however, things would turn out rather differently. Thomism never disappeared from university circles because the dons could never stop arguing over it—and a vigorous episcopal condemnation so often foretells future success. Less than fifty years after his death, Thomas Aquinas was raised to the altars as a canonized saint by Pope John XXII, who found the Franciscans repulsive. (With their one habit each and their bare feet trailing street offal in a time before the invention of sanitation departments, you could certainly smell the Spirituals coming long before they made their appearance.) In 1879, Thomas’s philosophical and theological writings were finally accepted by Pope Leo XIII as the official teaching of the Catholic Church. But this late papal approbation was something of a Pyrrhic victory, for the pope who proposed it viewed Thomism principally as a weapon to be used against the rising political and social liberalism of nineteenth-century Europe. By the time Leo gave his seal of approval (more than six centuries after Thomas’s death), many Thomistic categories, strategies, and interpretations had outlived their usefulness and grown archaic, unwieldy, and irrelevant to contemporary concerns.c

  Thomas, the Dominican figure with the most enduring historical influence, nonetheless takes a backseat to Francis, whose influence was never narrowly intellectual but broadly cultural. Hard as it would be to imagine the likeness of any Dominican being used as a contemporary ikon, everyone still knows the identification of the simple cinctured figure with arms extended who stands in so many modern gardens, usually in the middle of the birdbath. Francis the gesturer, le jongleur de Dieu, God’s tumbler (as he was called in his lifetime), continues even in our day to enthrall imaginations. When I find myself in New York—that most contemporary of cities—in early October, I seldom fail to attend the spectacular chanted celebration of Francis’s feast day at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, complete with a stately main-aisle procession of animals small and large, domestic and exotic—an ox, an ass, rare birds, insects,
and reptiles, a camel, a horse, sometimes even an elephant—the great mock-Gothic church resounding (below the celestial sounds of Paul Winter’s Missa Gaia) with the earthly cries of all the New York pets whose owners have brought them to be solemnly blessed for the coming year.

  Whereas Thomas impressed intellectuals, Francis has always captivated ordinary people, and I suspect he always will. The gentle presence of Assisi’s Little Poor Man so reverberates through contemporary attitudes toward nature, ecology, and the animal kingdom that it needs no further elaboration here. What the reader is less likely to be aware of, however, is Francis’s lasting impact on the arts, especially on the plastic arts, theater, and (believe it or not) film. To appreciate this impact, we must return to the moment—which we studied earlier in the apse of Santa Maria in Trastevere—when Western art moved to separate itself from static Greek formalism and began to become its irrepressibly lively self.

  The moment was not really a moment, more like a century. This “moment” of movement began in anonymous demonstrations of happiness, such as the famous “smiling angel” of Rheims or the almost comically contented face of the Trastevere Christ greeting his mother in Heaven—so far removed from the humorless angels (who saw nothing funny about anything) and the scowling, all-powerful Pantocrator (All-Ruler) Christs who had previously dominated Greek and Roman apses. But in the disposition of figures, the Trastevere apse follows the old Byzantine model. The figures (except for Christ and Mary) are not related to one another: they stand as abstractions against a cold gold background. They have no context but the gold that surrounds them, no identity but their particular form of dress, no individuality but the symbols they hold in their hands. Expressionless, they stare down at us, a panel of heavenly judges.