Passion of the Western Mind
Page 26
Astrology, conjoined with astronomy, rose again to high status as a comprehensive science, capable of disclosing the universal laws of nature. The planetary spheres—Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—formed successive heavens surrounding the Earth and affecting human existence. For underlying the restored classical cosmology was Aristotle’s fundamental axiom, “The end of every movement must be one of the divine bodies moving in the sky.” As the translations from the Arabic continued during the succeeding generations, the esoteric and astrological conceptions forged in the Hellenistic era, enunciated in the Alexandrian schools and Hermetic tradition and carried forward by the Arabs, gradually achieved widespread influence among the medieval intelligentsia.
But it was when the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology bestowed to Christianity by the Scholastics was embraced by Dante that the ancient world view fully reentered the Christian psyche and was there elaborated and permeated with Christian meaning. Closely following Aquinas in time and spirit, and similarly inspired by the scientific wisdom of Aristotle, Dante realized in his epic poem La Divina Commedia what was in effect the moral, religious, and cosmological paradigm of the medieval era. The Commedia represented, on several counts, an unprecedented achievement in Christian culture. As a sustained act of the poetic imagination, Dante’s epic transcended earlier medieval conventions—in its literary sophistication, in its eloquent use of the vernacular, in its psychological insight and theological innovations, in its expression of a deepening individualism, in its upholding of poetry and learning as instruments of religious understanding, in its implicit identification of the feminine with the mystical knowledge of God, in its bold Platonic amplification of human eros in a Christian context. But especially consequential for the history of the Western world view were certain ramifications of the epic’s cosmological architecture. For by integrating the scientific constructs of Aristotle and Ptolemy with a vividly imagined portrayal of the Christian universe, Dante created a vast classical-Christian mythology encompassing the whole of creation that would exert a considerable—and complex—influence on the later Christian imagination.
In Dante’s vision, as in the medieval vision generally, the heavens were both numinous and humanly meaningful. The human microcosm directly reflected the macrocosm, and the planetary spheres embodied the various forces influencing human destiny. Dante filled out this general conception by poetically uniting the specific elements of Christian theology with the equally specific elements of classical astronomy. In the Commedia, the ascending elemental and planetary spheres that envelop the central Earth culminate in the highest sphere, containing the throne of God, while the circles of Hell, mirroring the celestial spheres in reverse, descend toward the corrupt core of the Earth. The Aristotelian geocentric universe thus became a massive symbolic structure for the moral drama of Christianity, in which man was situated between Heaven and Hell, drawn between his ethereal and earthly abodes, and balanced at the moral pivot between his spiritual and corporeal natures. All of the Ptolemaic planetary spheres now took on Christian references, with specific ranks of angels and archangels responsible for each sphere’s motions, even for their various epicyclic refinements. The Commedia portrayed the entire Christian hierarchy of being—ranging from Satan and Hell in the dark depths of the material Earth, out through the Mount of Purgatory, and on up through the successive angelic hosts to the supreme God in Paradise at the highest celestial sphere, with man’s earthly existence at the cosmological midpoint, all carefully mapped onto the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian system. The resulting Christian universe was a divine macrocosmic womb in which humankind was positioned securely in the center, enclosed on all sides by God’s omniscient and omnipotent being. Thus Dante, like Aquinas, achieved an extraordinarily comprehensive ordering of the cosmos, a medieval Christian transfiguration of the cosmic order set forth by the Greeks.
But the very power and vividness of this Greek-Christian integration was to encourage an unexpectedly critical turn of events in the cultural psyche. The medieval mind perceived the physical world as symbolic to its core, and that perception had gained new specificity with the embrace of Aristotle and Greek science by Christian intellectuals. Dante’s use of the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian cosmology as a structural foundation for the Christian world view readily established itself in the collective Christian imagination, with every aspect of the Greek scientific scheme now imbued with religious significance. In the minds of Dante and his contemporaries, astronomy and theology were inextricably conjoined, and the cultural ramifications of this cosmological synthesis were profound: for if any essential physical change were to be introduced into that system by future astronomers—such as, for example, a moving Earth—the effect of a purely scientific innovation would threaten the integrity of the entire Christian cosmology. The intellectual comprehensiveness and desire for cultural universality so characteristic of the Christian mind in the high Middle Ages, bringing even the details of classical science into its fold, were leading it into directions that would later prove intensely problematic.
The Secularization of the Church and the Rise of Lay Mysticism
In the high Middle Ages, the Christian world view was still beyond question. The status of the institutional Church, however, had become considerably more controversial. Having consolidated its authority in Europe after the tenth century, the Roman papacy had gradually assumed a role of immense political influence in the affairs of Christian nations. By the thirteenth century, the Church’s powers were extraordinary, with the papacy actively intervening in matters of state throughout Europe, and with enormous revenues being reaped from the faithful to support the growing magnificence of the papal court and its huge bureaucracy. By the early fourteenth century the results of such worldly success were both clear and unsettling. Christianity had become powerful but compromised.
The Church hierarchy was visibly prone to financial and political motivation. The pope’s temporal sovereignty over the Papal States in Italy involved it in political and military maneuverings that repeatedly complicated the Church’s spiritual self-understanding. Moreover, the Church’s extravagant financial needs were placing constantly augmented demands on the masses of devout Christians. Perhaps worst of all, the secularism and evident corruption of the papacy were causing it to lose, in the eyes of the faithful, its spiritual integrity. (Dante himself had made the distinction between spiritual merit and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and felt compelled to consign more than one high Church official to the Inferno for betraying the Church’s apostolic mission.) The very success of the Church’s striving for cultural hegemony, at first spiritually motivated, was now undermining its religious foundations.
In the meantime, the secular monarchies of the European nation-states had gradually gained power and cohesion, creating a situation in which the papal claim to universal authority was inevitably leading toward serious conflict. At the height of its wealth and worldly expansiveness, the Church suddenly found itself caught up in a century of extreme institutional disruption—first with the transfer of the papacy to Avignon under French control (the “Babylonian captivity”) and subsequently with the unprecedented situation of having two, and then three, popes simultaneously claiming primacy (the “Great Schism”). With the sacred papal authority so obviously at the mercy of wayward political forces, worldly pomp, and personal ambition, the Church’s actual spiritual role was becoming increasingly obscured and the unity of Western Christendom dangerously threatened.
During these same years of the Church’s accelerating secularization, in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an extraordinary wave of mystical fervor swept through much of Europe, especially the Rhineland, involving thousands of men and women—laypersons as well as priests, monks, and nuns. Intensely devotional, Christ-centered, and aimed at achieving a direct inner union with the divine, this religious outpouring took place largely without regard to the established structures of the Church. The Christian mystical impulse that found in Aquina
s and Dante a theological expression of considerable intellectual complexity took a more purely affective and devotional character in the central European lay population. Intellectuality of great subtlety played a role here too in the person of Meister Eckhart, the movement’s leading teacher, whose metaphysical vision derived philosophical support from Aquinas and Neoplatonism, and whose original formulations of the mystical experience sometimes appeared to threaten the limits of orthodoxy: “The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see him; my eye and his are one.” Yet the impact of his widely heard sermons, and of the teachings of his disciples Johann Tauler and Heinrich Suso, was not primarily intellectual or rational but moral and religious. Above all, their concern was with direct religious illumination and a sanctified life of Christian love and service.
But with such an emphasis on internal communion with God, rather than on the need for the Church’s institutionalized sacraments and collective forms of worship, the Church itself was seen as less mandatory for the spiritual enterprise. With advanced religious experience now perceived as directly available to lay people as much as to clergy, the priest and bishop were no longer regarded as necessary mediators of spiritual activity. Similarly, the relative unimportance of words and reason in the context of the soul’s relationship to God made the highly rationalist development of theology and the contentious subtleties of Church doctrine seem superfluous. From the opposite side of the issue from Scholasticism, but with identical effect, reason and faith were growing ever further apart.
Of greater immediate import was the growing divergence between the ideal of Christian spirituality and the reality of the institutional Church. In the view of the new mystical preachers and lay brotherhoods, personal piety took precedence over ecclesiastical office, just as internal experience superseded external observance. The true Church, the body of Christ, was now increasingly identified with the humble souls of the faithful and the graciously illuminated, rather than with the officially sanctioned Church hierarchy. A new stress on the Bible and faith in God’s Word as the basis of that true Church began to displace the institutional Church’s stress on dogma and papal sovereignty. A life of renunciation and simplicity was upheld as the authentic path to God, in contrast to the life of wealth and power enjoyed by the privileged officeholders of the ecclesiastical establishment.
All of these widely experienced dichotomies suggested a potential break from the traditional structure of the medieval Church. Yet that break did not occur. Those involved were devout Christians who generally recognized no need for active rebellion against the Church. Where reform and renewal were sought, as these were by several major religious movements in the later Middle Ages, it was still generally within the existing Church framework. But a seed was sown. The life of Christ and the apostles was acknowledged as the paradigm of spiritual existence, but that life appeared to be neither represented nor mediated by the contemporary structures of the Catholic Church. And the new spiritual autonomy embraced by the Rhineland mystics, as well as by others in England and the Low Countries, tended to place the Church in a secondary role in the realm of authentic spirituality. Already at the turn of the thirteenth century, Joachim of Fiore had set forth his influential mystical vision of history as divided into three eras of increasing spirituality—the Age of the Father (the Old Testament), the Age of the Son (the New Testament and Church), and a coming Age of the Spirit, when the whole world would be suffused with the divine and the institutional Church would no longer be necessary.
With the new emphasis given to the individual’s direct and private relation to God, the elaborate institutional forms and regulations of the Church were devalued at the same moment that the secularization of the Church made its spiritual mission appear increasingly open to question. As the medieval era reached its final stages, the earnest cries for reform, always present in Church history, found strong voice in a growing diversity of figures—Dante, Marsilius of Padua, Dietrich of Niem, John Wycliffe, Jan Hus—and became, from the hierarchy’s perspective, ever more heretical in character.
Critical Scholasticism and Ockham’s Razor
While one cultural stream, represented by the new lay mysticism, moved toward religious autonomy, the Scholastic stream continued its remarkable development of the Western intellect under Aristotle’s tutelage. And if the Church’s spiritual role was now ambiguous, its intellectual role was no less so. On the one hand, the Church was supporting the whole academic enterprise in the universities, where Christian doctrine was explicated with unprecedentedly rigorous logical method and increasingly greater scope. On the other hand, it attempted to keep that enterprise under control, either by condemnation and suppression, or by giving doctrinal status to certain innovations such as those of Aquinas—as if to say, “This far and no further.” But within this ambivalent atmosphere, the Scholastic inquiry went on, with increasingly weighty implications.
The Church had largely accepted Aristotle. But the culture’s new interest in Aristotle did not stop with the study of his writings, for that interest signified a broader, and ever-broadening, interest in the natural world and a growing confidence in the power of human reason. Aristotelianism in the late Middle Ages was more symptom than cause of the developing scientific spirit in Europe. Already Scholastics in England such as Robert Grosseteste and his pupil Roger Bacon were performing concrete scientific experiments (moved in part by esoteric traditions such as alchemy and astrology), applying the mathematical principles held supreme by the Platonic tradition to the observation of the physical world recommended by Aristotle. This new focus on direct experience and reasoning was beginning to undermine the Church’s exclusive investment in the authoritativeness of the ancient texts—now Aristotelian as well as biblical and patristic. Aristotle was being questioned on his own terms, in specifics if not in overall authority. Some of his principles were compared with experience and found lacking, logical fallacies in his proofs were pinpointed, and the corpus of his works was subjected to minute examination.
The Scholastics’ exhaustive critical discussions of Aristotle and their often shrewd suggestions of alternative hypotheses were forging a new intellectual spirit, increasingly perceptive, skeptical, and open to fundamental change. In particular, their probings were creating an intellectual climate that not only encouraged a more empirical, mechanistic, and quantitative view of nature, but would in time more easily accommodate the radical shift of view necessary for the conception of a moving Earth. By the fourteenth century, a leading Scholastic such as the Parisian scholar and bishop Nicole d’Oresme could defend the theoretical possibility of a rotating Earth (even while personally rejecting it), out of sheer logical vigor proposing ingenious arguments against Aristotle concerning optical relativity and falling bodies—arguments that would later be used by Copernicus and Galileo to support the heliocentric theory. To solve difficulties presented by Aristotle’s theory of projectile motion, Oresme’s teacher, Jean Buridan, developed an impetus theory, applying it to both celestial and terrestrial phenomena, which would lead directly to Galileo’s mechanics and Newton’s first law of motion.7
Aristotle continued to provide the terminology, the logical method, and the increasingly empiricist spirit of the developing Scholastic philosophy. But ironically, it was Aristotle’s very authority that, by inviting such intense examination, was contributing to his eventual overthrow. And it was the meticulous and energetic attempt to synthesize Aristotelian science with the indubitable tenets of Christian revelation that was bringing forth all the critical intelligence that would ultimately turn against both the ancient and the ecclesiastical authorities. In retrospect, Aquinas’s summa had been one of the final steps of the medieval mind toward full intellectual independence.
This new autonomy was portentously asserted in the fourteenth century in the paradoxical figure of William of Ockham, a man at once strangely modern and yet altogether medieval. A British philosopher and priest born soon after Aquinas’s death, Ockham looked at matters
with the same passion for rational precision as Aquinas, but arrived at sharply different conclusions. In the service of upholding Christian revelation, he employed both a highly developed logical method and an augmented empiricism. Yet in the wake of the Church’s condemnation of the Parisian secularists, Ockham strove above all to limit the presumed competence of the natural human reason to grasp universal truths. Although his intentions were entirely to the contrary, Ockham proved to be the pivotal thinker in the late medieval movement toward the modem outlook. And although the modern mind itself would largely dismiss the intellectual conflicts that concerned him as the insignificant quibblings of a decadent and overwrought Scholasticism, it would be precisely those recondite conceptual battles that had to be fought before modern thought could establish its radical revision of human knowledge and the natural world.