by Will Durant
Thirty students registered for the course. At its opening Paracelsus appeared in the customary professorial robe, but at once he cast it aside, and stood forth in the rough garb and sooty leather apron of the alchemist. His lectures on medicine were given in a Latin form prepared by his secretary Oporinus (who later printed Vesalius’s Fabrica); on surgery he spoke in German. This was a further shock to the orthodox physicians, but hardly so disturbing as when Paracelsus proposed that “no pharmacist should act in collusion with any doctor.”84 As if to signalize his scorn of traditional medicine, he merrily threw into a bonfire—lit by students to celebrate St. John’s Day (June 24, 1527)—a recent medical text, probably the Summa Jacobii. “I threw into St. John’s Fire,” he said, “the Summa of the books, so that all the misfortunes might go up in the air with the smoke. Thus the realm of medicine has been purged.”85 Men compared the gesture with Luther’s burning of a papal bull.
Paracelsus’ life in Basel was as heterodox as his lectures. “The two years I passed in his company,” said Oporinus, “he spent in drinking and gluttony, day and night.... He was a spendthrift, so that sometimes he had not a penny left.... Every month he had a new coat made for him, and gave away his old one to the first comer; but usually it was so dirty that I never wanted one.” 86 Heinrich Bullinger gave a similar picture of Paracelsus as a hard drinker, and “an extremely dirty, unclean man.” 87 But Oporinus testified to remarkable cures performed by his master; “in curing ulcers he almost did miracles in cases which had been given up by others.” 88
The profession disowned him as a degreeless quack, a reckless empiric, incapable of dissection and ignorant of anatomy. He opposed dissection on the ground that the organs could be understood only in their united and normal functioning in the living organism. He returned the scorn of the doctors in the liveliest billingsgate. He laughed at their barbarous prescriptions, their silk shirts, finger rings, sleek gloves, and haughty gait; he challenged them to come out of the classrooms into the chemical laboratory, to put on aprons, soil their hands with the elements, and, bending over furnaces, learn the secrets of nature by experiment and the sweat of their brows. He made up for his lack of a degree by taking such titles as “Prince of Philosophy and Medicine,” “Doctor of Both Medicines” (i.e., physician and surgeon), and “Propagator of Philosophy”; and he salved the wounds of his vanity with the confidence of his claims. “All shall follow me,” he wrote, “and the monarchy of medicine shall be mine.... All the universities and all the old writers put together are less talented than my a—“89 Rejected by others, he took as his motto, Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest—“Let him not belong to another who can be his own.” 90 History rebuked his boasts by making his family name Bombast a common noun.
Whether through collusion with the university faculty, or in a spontaneous revolt of students against a dogmatic teacher, an anonymous Basel wit composed—and prominently exposed—a lampoon in dog-Latin, purporting to be written by Galen himself from Hades against his detractor, whom he called Cacophrastus—Dung-speaker. It made great fun of Paracelsus’ mystical terminology, called him a madman, and suggested that he hang himself. Unable to find the culprit, Paracelsus asked the town council to question the students one by one, and to punish the guilty. The council ignored the request. About this time a canon of the Basel Cathedral offered a hundred guilders to anyone who would cure him of his disease; Paracelsus cured him in three days; the canon paid him six guilders, but refused the rest on the ground that the cure had taken so little time. Paracelsus sued him in court, and lost. He lost his temper too, denounced his critics as Bescheisser and Arschkrätzer (cheaters and rear-scratchers), and published, anonymously, a pamphlet branding the clergy and magistrates as corrupt. The council ordered his arrest, but deferred execution of the order till the next morning. During the night Paracelsus fled (1528). He had been ten months in Basel.
In Nuremberg he recapitulated his experience at Basel. The city fathers gave him charge of a prison hospital; he worked impressive cures; but he inveighed against the jealous medicos of the town for their dishonesty, their opulence, and the size of their wives. Noting that the majority of the council was Protestant, he defended Catholicism. The Fuggers, who sold guaiac, were alarmed by his contention that this “holy wood” was useless in the treatment of syphilis. In 1530 he persuaded an obscure printer to publish Three Chapters on the French Disease, which so berated the doctors that a storm of opposition forced him to resume his wandering. He wished to publish a larger work on the same subject, but the city council forbade its printing; Paracelsus, in a letter to the council, pleaded with ineffective eloquence for the freedom of the press; the book was never printed in his lifetime. It contained the best clinical description of syphilis yet written, and advised internal doses, rather than external applications, of mercury. Syphilis became a battleground of vegetable vs. chemical therapy.
Moving to Saint-Gall, Paracelsus lived for half a year in the house of a patient. There and later he wrote his Opus paramirum—“the very wonderful work”—his Paragranum—“against the grain”?—and Die grosse Wundartzney (The Great Surgery), all in rough German. They are heaps of crude ore, with here and there a gem. In 1534 he relapsed into magic, and composed Philosophia sagax, a compendium of the occult.
When his patient in Saint-Gall died he took to the road again, passing from place to place in Germany, sometimes begging his bread. In his youth he had uttered some religious heresies—that baptism has only symbolic significance, that the sacraments are good for children and fools, but useless for men of intelligence, and that prayers to the saints are a waste of time.91 Now (1532), poor and defeated, he experienced religious “conversion.” He fasted, gave his remaining goods to the poor, wrote essays of devotion, and consoled himself with hopes of paradise. In 1540 the Bishop of Salzburg offered him asylum, and the man who had encouraged revolution there fifteen years before accepted gratefully. He made his will, bequeathing his few coins to relatives, his instruments to the barber surgeons of the city; and on September 24, 1541, he yielded his body to the earth.
He was a man overcome by his own genius, rich in varied experience and brilliant perceptions, but too little schooled to separate science from magic, too undisciplined to control his fire, too angrily hostile to infuse his influence into his time. Perhaps his career, along with Agrippa’s, helped to swell the legend of Faust. Until a century ago people suffering an epidemic in Austria made a pilgrimage to his grave in Salzburg, hoping to be healed by the magic of his spirit or his bones.92
VIII. THE SKEPTICS
The sixteenth century was a poor time for philosophy; theology absorbed the active thinkers, and faith, ruling every roost, kept reason in its train. Luther rejected reason as inclining to atheism,93 but cases of atheism were rare. A Dutch priest was burned at The Hague (1512) for denying creation, immortality, and the divinity of Christ,94 but he was not clearly an atheist. “This year,” wrote an English chronicler under 1539, “there died in the University of Paris a great doctor, which said there was no God, and had been of that opinion since he was twenty years old, and was above fourscore years old when he died; and all that time he had kept that error secret.”95 Guillaume Postel, in 1552, published a book Contra atheos, but the word atheist was seldom distinguished from deist, pantheist, or skeptic.
Skeptics were numerous enough to win a blow from Luther. “For the blind children of the world,” he is reported to have said, “the articles of faith are too high. That three persons are only one God, that the true Son of God was made man, that in Christ there are two natures, divine and human, etc.—all this offends them as fiction and fable”; and some, he added, doubted whether God had created men whose damnation He had foreseen.96 In France there were some skeptics of immortality.97 Bonaventure Desperiers, in his Cymbalum mundi (1537), ridiculed miracles, the contradictions of the Bible, and the persecution of heretics. His book was condemned by Calvin and the Sorbonne, and was burned by the official hangman. Marguerite had
to banish him from her court at Nérac, but she sent him money to keep him alive at Lyons. In 1544 he killed himself, leaving his manuscripts to Marguerite, “prop and safeguard of all goodness.”98
The spirit of doubt appeared in politics in the form of attacks on the divine right and inviolability of kings; and here the skeptics were usually Protestant thinkers uncomfortable under Catholic rulers, or Catholic thinkers smarting under the triumph of the state. Bishop John Ponet, resenting Mary Tudor, published in 1558 A Short Treatise of Politique Power, which argued that “the manifold and continual examples that have been, from time to time, of the deposing of kings and killing of tyrants, do most certainly confirm it to be most true, just, and consonant to God’s judgment.... Kings, princes, and governors have their authority of the people... and men may recover their proxies... when it pleaseth them.”99 John Major, a Scottish professor who helped to form the mind of John Knox, argued likewise that since all secular authority derives from the will of the community, a bad king may be deposed and executed, but only by due process of law.
The most interesting opponent of royal absolutism was a young Catholic who achieved a modest immortality by dying in Montaigne’s arms. Étienne de la Boétie, said the incomparable essayist, “was the greatest man, to my mind, of our age.”100 Son of a high official in Périgord, Étienne studied law at Orléans, and, before the prescribed age, was admitted as a councilor to the Parlement of Bordeaux. About 1549, as a youth of nineteen inspired with republican ideas by his study of Greek and Roman literature, he wrote—he never published—a passionate attack on absolutism. He called it Discours sur la servitude volontaire, but as it denounced the dictatorship of one over many, it came to be called Contr’un, Against One. Hear its flaming appeal:
What a shame and disgrace it is when countless men obey a tyrant willingly, even slavishly! A tyrant who leaves them no rights over property, parents, wife, or child, not even over their own lives—what kind of a man is such a tyrant? He is no Hercules, no Samson! Often he is a pygmy, often the most effeminate coward among the whole people—not his own strength makes him powerful, him who is often the slave of the vilest whores. What miserable creatures are his subjects! If two, three, or four do not revolt against one, there is an understandable lack of courage. But when hundreds and thousands do not throw off the shackles of an individual, what remains there of individual will and human dignity? .... To free oneself it is not necessary to use force against a tyrant. He falls as soon as the country is tired of him. The people who are being degraded and enslaved need but deny him any right. To be free only calls for the earnest will to shake off the yoke.... Be firmly resolved no longer to be slaves—and you are free! Deny the tyrant your help, and like a colossus whose pedestal is pulled away, he will collapse and break to pieces.101
La Boétie proceeded to formulate Rousseau and Tom Paine. Man naturally longs for liberty; inequalities of fortune are fortuitous, and lay upon the fortunate the obligation to serve their fellow men; all men are brothers, “made from the same mold” by the same God. Strange to say, it was the reading of this radical pronouncement that attracted the normally cool and cautious Montaigne to La Boétie, and led (1557) to one of the most famous friendships in history. Montaigne was then twenty-four, Étienne was twenty-seven; perhaps Montaigne was then young enough to harbor radical sentiments. Their friendship was soon ended by La Boétie’s death at the age of thirty-two (1563). Montaigne described the final days as if remembering Plato’s account of the death of Socrates. He so keenly felt the loss of the warmhearted youth that seventeen years later he spoke of it with deeper feeling than of anything else in his experience. He had not favored the printing of the Discours, and mourned when a Genevese pastor published it (1576). He ascribed the composition to the generous spirit of youth, and predated it to the age of sixteen. It was almost the voice of the French Revolution.
IX. RAMUS AND THE PHILOSOPHERS
Quite as romantic was the life, and more violent the death, of Petrus Ramus—Pierre de la Ramée—who undertook to overthrow the tyranny of Aristotle. Here was a one-man rule that had lasted three centuries and more, over not one nation only but many, and over not the body but the mind, almost over the soul, for had not the pagan thinker been made an official philosopher of the Church? The humanists of the Renaissance had thought to displace him with Plato, but the Reformation—or fear of it—was strangling humanism, and in Protestant Germany as well as Catholic France Aristotelian Scholasticism was still in the saddle when Luther, who had cursed it, died (1546). To depose the Stagyrite from his throne seemed to intellectual youth the most legitimate form of tyrannicide. Applying for the master’s degree at the University of Paris in 1536, Ramus, aged twenty-one, took as his thesis—to be defended through a whole day against faculty and all challengers—the unequivocal proposition, Quaecumque ab Aristotele dicta essent commentitia esse—“Whatever was said by Aristotle is false.”
Ramus’s career was an ode to education. Born near Calvin’s Noyon in Picardy, he twice tried to walk to Paris, hungry for its colleges; twice he failed, and returned defeated to his village. In 1528, aged twelve, he succeeded by attaching himself as servant to a rich student matriculating in the Collège de Navarre—the same that Villon had robbed. Serving by day, studying by night, Pierre made his way, for eight years, through the heavy curriculum in the faculty of “arts.” He almost lost his eyesight in the process, but he found Plato.
When I came to Paris, I fell among the subtleties of the sophists, and they taught me the liberal arts through questions and disputings, without showing me any other advantage or use. When I had graduated... I decided that these disputes had brought me nothing but loss of time. Dismayed by this thought, led by some good angel, I chanced on Xenophon and then on Plato, and learned to know the Socratic philosophy.102
How many of us have made that same exhilarating discovery in youth, happy to meet in Plato a philosopher who had wine and poetry in his blood, who heard philosophy in the very air of Athens, caught it on the wing, and sent it down the centuries still bearing the breath of life, all those voices of Socrates and his pupils still ringing with the lust and ecstasy of debate about the most exciting subjects in the world! What a relief after the prosy pages of Aristotle, after reams of middle-of-the-road, and not-so-golden mean! Of course we—and Ramus—were unfair to Aristotle, comparing his compact lecture notes with the popular dialogues of his master; only white hairs can appreciate the Stagyrite. The Aristotle that Ramus knew was chiefly the logician of the Organon, the Aristotle of the schools, barely surviving the ordeal of translation into Scholastic Latin, of transmogrification into a good Christian orthodox Thomist. Three years, said Ramus, he had spent studying Aristotle’s logic, without ever being shown a single use or application of it in science or in life.103
It is to the credit of the Paris faculty, as well as to the learning and skill and courage of Ramus, that he was given his master’s degree; perhaps the professors too were weary of logic and moderation. But some of them were scandalized, and felt that their stock-in-trade had been damaged by that day’s debate. Enmities began that pursued Ramus to his death.
His degree entitled him to teach, and he began at once, at the university, a course of lectures in which he mingled philosophy with Greek and Latin literature. His classes grew, his earnings mounted, and he was able to reimburse his widowed mother for the savings that she had sacrificed to pay for his graduation fee. After seven years of preparation he issued in 1543 (the annus mirabilis of Copernicus and Vesalius) two works that continued his campaign to overthrow the Aristotelian logic. One—Aristotelicae animadversiones—was a frontal assault, sometimes phrased in impetuous invective; the other—Dialecticae partitiones (Divisions of Logic)—offered a new system to replace the old. It redefined logic as ars disserendi, the art of discourse, and brought logic, literature, and oratory together in a technique of persuasion. The university authorities forgivably saw some dangers in this approach. Moreover they viewed with suspicion cert
ain propositions in Ramus that smelled of heresy, such as, “Unbelief is the beginning of knowledge”104—Cartesian doubt before Descartes; or his plea to replace the tomes of the Scholastics with more study of the Scriptures—this had a Protestant ring; or his definition of theology as doctrina bene vivendi—which threatened to reduce religion to morality. And there were Ramus’s irritating ways, his pride and pugnacity, his violent controversial tone, his dogmatic superiority to dogma.
Soon after publication of these books the rector of the university cited Ramus before the provost of Paris as an enemy of the faith, a disturber of the public peace, a corrupter of youth with dangerous novelties. The trial was held before a royal commission of five men—two appointed by Ramus, two by his accusers, one by Francis I. Dissatisfied with the procedure of the trial, Ramus withdrew his appointees. The remaining three decided against him (1544), and a royal mandate forbade him to lecture, or to publish, or to attack Aristotle further. The condemnation notice was placarded throughout the city, and was sent to other universities. Students staged burlesques ridiculing Ramus, and Rabelais made heavenly fun of the fracas.
After holding his peace for a while, Ramus opened a course of lectures at the Collège Ave Maria, but he confined himself to rhetoric and mathematics, and the government winked at his disobedience. In 1545 he became assistant rector of the Collège de Presles, and his lecture room was soon crowded. When Henry II succeeded Francis I he repealed the sentence against Ramus, left him “free in both tongue and pen,” and, a year later, appointed him to a chair in the Collège Royale, where he would be exempt from university control.
Having reached his pinnacle as now the most famous teacher in Paris, Ramus devoted much time and effort to reforming pedagogical methods. If he stressed “rhetoric”—which then meant literature—it was not only to revivify philosophy with poetry, but also to infuse a vibrant humanism into courses grown dry and hard with abstractions and scholastic rules. In five treatises on grammar he applied logic to language; he begged French spelling to become phonetic, but it went its reeling way; however, he succeeded in introducing into the French alphabet the letters j and v to replace consonantal i and u. Remembering his own penniless striving for an education, he encouraged the establishment of scholarships for poor students, and condemned the heavy fees required for graduation. At the same time he labored to raise the remuneration of teachers.