by James Blish
Certes, Albert was brilliant. He worked diligently; he had read and observed much; he wrote fluently; he summarized wittily; he talked unceasingly; possibly, with God’s help, he dreamed fruitfully. But all this was magpie labour without some organon of knowledge to which the nuggets and the digging could relate; and of this Albert was almost wholly innocent; he traded instead upon a mixed coinage of dogmatism and intuition. And this, in God’s name, was a fraud; this, in the holy name of God, was sinful beyond all sins, though there was no name in the Scriptures which such a sin might wear with certainty as yet. In the meantime, item: Albert knew nothing but the rudiments of the perspectiva: yet he presumed to write of optics de naturabilis, almost as though a deaf man should lecture on music. Item: Albert was ignorant of speculative alchemy, which treats of the origin and generation of things. Item: languages – he was unable even to use a simple Greek word without defining it in a fashion which threw sense out of the window.
Currently it was being said in Paris that Albert was a magician; and that in fact he had built himself by arts magical a head made of brass, which could’ answer any questions proposed by man. Of course, the head was said to exist no longer; Thomas Aquinas had happened upon it, and finding himself unable to cope with its powers of reasoning, had broken it into a thousand pieces with his staff. It was a pretty fable, but for Roger it stood for everything that seemed to him to be urgently wrong with the University. That Albert could have built no such head was beyond dispute, for of the arts magical he was ignorant beyond all his other ignorances; and as for Thomas, a blow from a staff was an argument without standing in logic. Were heroes made of such clay? Or of such clay as Alexander of Hales was made, for that matter? Yet Albert, through a reputation as a teacher made elsewhere than Paris, was applauded by the whole city as the equal of Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes – and as a scientist could have been put into Master Grosseteste’s pocket without disturbing a fold of the Capito’s gown. Was it for this that Roger had given up Grosseteste, and Oxford as well?
Raymond had listened to this jeremiad to the end with an expression peculiarly undisturbed. When it was over, he had said only:
‘Master, I know nothing of all this against Albert, and in truth I’m sorry to hear of it. Yet it’s all of a piece with Paris, that I’ll agree; the natural sciences here, are in so sorry a state that I’m afraid to tell my father how I’m wasting his money. But there is a remedy. Can I trust your?’
‘Trust me?’ The question was so unexpected that Roger did not have time to take offence at it. ‘In what?’
‘In a secret, idem est, there are real scientists in Pads; but they are not at the University. I can introduce you to a whole circle of such, wherein you will learn more in a day than most masters have to teach in a lifetime. But this is no light matter, I’ll need have oaths from you ere we seek it out; and should you refuse me such, our studies together must end, lest some lapse betray it to you.’
‘No, no, Raymond, I’ll give you my word. But wherein lies the need for such ceremonies?’
‘In more dangers than you know. It’s true that Paris is full of little circles of students and masters where one might discuss a subject in an informal manner, without Queritur and Quod sic videtur and Sed contra. But the University frowns on them, as being “colleges” unauthorized by the charter, and not under the control of the Chancellor. Ours is one such, and its purpose is the study of the natural sciences, and hence of Aristotle too where he applies. You can see how quickly the suspicion of magic, or heresy, or both, could become affixed to such a “college”; wherefore I ask first your most holy and hermatic oaths of secrecy.’
‘Done! Let’s go at once.’
Thus, not at once, but not long thereafter, did Roger make the acquaintance of Pierre de Maricourt, that extraordinary son of minor Provencal nobility who called himself Peter the Peregrine because he had been to Palestine on Gregory’s crusade. Tall, grave, reserved, judicious, and yet almost shaking just beneath his skin with the violence of his love for raw experience, Peter dominated his ‘college’ like a bonfire inside a ring of candles, though every man in the circle was intellectually freakish and unique, a lusus naturae, a lapse of nature’s attention to the forming of men’s minds. By bent, in so far as he could be categorized at all, Peter was a mathematician; but even beyond figures, and relationships, and mensuration, he loved data – drawn nets flashing full of them, traps a-team with them, compost heaps a-squirm with them, skies a-boiling. At first, it appeared, he had been content with many small nets of his own devising: he walked in the fields, he collected specimens, he questioned travellers, he devoured the narratives and the opinions of laymen, old women, country bumpkins; he wanted to know about metals, mining, arms and armoury, surveying, the chase, earthworks, the devices of magicians, the tricks of jugglers – anything at all that an omnivorous soul could call knowledge. Where he could not go himself to find the facts, he sent emissaries, trading first of all upon a small inheritance, and secondly upon his nobility, which he had used as a defence against becoming a religious of any sort, ne monk, friar nor clerk. How he had come to think at length of the still greater net of the ‘college’ he had never said; but they were all his emissaries now.
Until now, in fact, there had been only three great sciences; but Peter, Roger thought, might be said to have found a fourth. It lacked only a name by which to hail it. The science of tests? No, that was too mean, it suggested uroscopy, or auspices. It was a science of the whole of experience, as distinguished from theory alone, theory superior, autonomous, empty: it was a scientia experimentalis, serving all other sciences and arts, yet somehow superior to all, out of which might come either confirmations of systems, or things as yet beyond systems. The notion was strange in his grasp; it conformed to nothing that he knew, and already was sliding evasively away in the deceptive colourless moonlight.
As he fought to hold it, someone directly beside him groaned most piteously. He straightened with a start and an almost universal twinge and cast about, one hand clapping his side for the sword of which stringent Paris had deprived him; but there was nobody in sight, not even at his elbow where the sound had seemed to well up.
Then there was a rustle and a grunt, and out of a thick black pool of shadow there rose into the moonlight the head of Raimundo del Rey, almost like the head of John the Baptist except that it was blinking rheumily. He looked at Roger for a moment without recognition, and Roger could smell traces of his sweet vitriol still freighting his breath. He licked his lips two or three times, rubbed his eyes, and looked about.
‘Ah,’ he said at last. ‘So you’re awake. That was a very shambles; I little suspected how far the fumes would penetrate in that stable of a cellar. And then, finding you here, Master, I feared I’d done you some ill too, and I sat me down to watch—’
‘Nay, I was only asleep.’ Roger smiled into the darkness, visualizing Raymond himself nodding while on sick watch; he still had far to go to make an apothecary. Yet he forbore to loose the shaft, ready though it was at his lips. It had occurred to him lately that he had lost John of Livonia in part through some fault in himself, in that he had always been too little giving of himself no matter how innocently John might invite such confidence; so that with Raymond, he was resolved to be less cautious, wherever it might lead. But there was caution and caution; to allow his tongue to vent its mockery too readily would not be a valued gift for a poor young student.
‘A strange business,’ Raymond said, getting up and looking about once more. ‘And do you know, Master, the very dish sublimed into the air after the sweet vitriol in it – a thing I never saw before. There was no man with us with the wit to steal it, that I’ll certify.’
‘Oho, Raymond, there give I you the lie. I had, and I did. I set it here – no, a little to the left.…’
But of course it was gone, taken while Roger slept, nor could anyone honestly call the taker a thief. There it had sat on the open street, a perfectly useful dish of glazed clay with a
fine pouring lip and not a crack in it, and how could the sleeping clerk six feet upwind of it be its owner?
‘Nor were you,’ Raymond said ruefully. ‘Well reasoned all around; I’ll just bake me another. And therefore, let’s be off. By the look of the stars, real thieves aplenty are abroad by now, and I’m not steady enough for any sort of fight.’
‘Certes; lead on, for I’ve clean forgot the way back.’
They moved slowly, feeling for the stepping-stones; this had been a Roman trackway with ruts for the wheels of carts cut into the roadbed. Several times in the cool moonlight Roger could see the forking of the ruts which indicated the start of a siding, where one cart might wait while another passed on the main track; but of course the sidings had long since been built over.
‘And how like you our circle of real experimenters, Magister Roger?’
‘More than well, Peter in particular.’
‘Peter of Picardy is the noblest intelligence of these degenerate times,’ Raymond said forcibly. After a moment’s silence, he produced an apologetic cough. ‘Your pardon, Magister Roger, but when I think of all those tonsured donkeys sitting on their gilded chamber-pots at the University, while a mind like Peter’s cannot draw a class except by some mean device as these our arcane trappings and oaths, I lose all my patience. You’ll be well astonished when I tell you what he’s launched on now—’
‘I’m certain of it, Raymond, but say on more softly, else some cutthroat will be stalking us.’
‘Yes, certainly,’ Raymond said, in a voice perhaps a tithe softer. ‘He’s preparing a treatise on the lodestone, and on all the species of magnetism. He does strange things with corks and bowls of water, and says that they prove that the world is a sphere. Not a new idea, certes; but to claim proof, that’s a long bold leap upward from a floating cork.’
‘It’s plain you’re not from a seafaring people,’ Roger said, ‘for there’s proof aplenty of that in ordinary experience; otherwise how could a man on top of a mast see a port in the distance before his mates on deck can descry it? Were the world flat, those on deck would be closer to the port than the man on the mast is, and should see it better, not worse.’
‘How so?’ Raymond said, scratching his head.
‘Why, in accordance with the Elements – eighteenth and nineteenth propositions in Book One. The line from deck to port is one leg of a right triangle, while the line from mast to port is its hypotenuse, which is necessarily longer. But now our score is even, for no more can I see what lodestones have to do with the matter than you can.’
‘Hm. It’s not the geometry that confuses me, but the instance. I don’t think of the propagation of sight as Euclidean.’
‘It is totally Euclidean; I can show this; in fact I’m thinking of writing a book about it.’
Raymond stopped so suddenly that Roger bumped into him.
‘Another book? Master – again I ask your pardon, but I ask my question from love, and hence for forgiveness on that account. How long can you keep your health, working day and night in this kind? Small wonder that you fell asleep in the street – you the least affected of all the company by my sweet vitriol, as your light-fingered exit showed forth. But well I know that you are already working on some commentary, for I’ve seen the pages lying here and there when I’ve visited your room; and you’ve your classes; and the study of Arabic with me, a bad teacher in a difficult language; and your experiments, as with the goat, and the rates of freezing of ice; and then these night-wanderings to Peter’s house, and perhaps to more such colleges unknown to me.’
He turned left and a strange dim light fell across his face; then he vanished. Turning the corner after him, Roger saw that they had debouched into Straw Street. It was only slightly brighter than the rest of that part of Paris through which they had walked, but their eyes had become so used to the darkness that the difference was immediate. The noise, too, was much as usual; some part of the student nations was always awake.
‘Fear not for me,’ Roger said gently. ‘I’m a wobbly spring lamb no more, nor yet the dotard of the flock; I know what I do. And do you persist, I’ll put you that same question: for where I teach, there do you study; where I study, you teach; and prosecute experiments more dangerous than mine, by the look of that we’ve just but barely escaped; and sit at Peter’s feet of nights, longer than I. All that needs be added is a book in the writing, and I’ll give you a florin if you’ll deny it exists.’
Raymond stared at Roger for an instant, and then began to laugh helplessly. ‘Magister Roger, I fear me you are a magician before me, I that burn to master the art so that I can hardly sleep in the few hours I’m abed. Indeed there’s to be a book, though as yet it’s scarce more than a title, since I’m still striving to learn what it shall contain. And so I lose a florin. When I bring you your lesson tomorrow, I beg you let me bite it, for I think I’ve never seen a real one before.’
It was only by biting his own cheek that Roger was able to prevent himself from offering the florin anyhow, and that only out of bitter memory of how divisive the money had already proven. The self, ordinarily so fuming with heady, notions and the startling bubble-bursts of aphorisms unwritten, slept as quietly as a coiled snake at moments like this; though he was certain that, like the snake, its eyes were open, it remained as silent as it must have been at the dawn of the world, when then as now it saw everything, but then did not know what to think of it. Roger was by now quite certain that the thing was ignorant of morals, and therefore lived in some intermediary region between his highest faculties and his vegetative soul; yet all his other attempts to assign it a sphere of action had failed – perhaps because it knew that when he found it, he would extirpate it, if he could.
‘Certes I will, and my thanks, Raymond,’ he said before the door of his house. They shook hands, a little solemnly, for the custom was still new to Raymond; and then, with a more practised bow, the student-master was gone toward his own poor room.
Upstairs, the goat, on a short tether, was nevertheless chewing upon a book. She sprang sidewise with fear at Roger’s sudden snatching of the manuscript, and hit the end of the tether so hard that she fell down all of a scramble. No real harm had been done, however; the book was only a copy of the simplistic Sentences of Peter Lombard, which Roger knew now by heart and despised with equal thoroughness. With a grimace, he threw the goat the rest of the despoiled pages and knelt to check the wound under the old rag knotted around her left forearm, just below the elbow next to her chest.
The wound was healing without incident. While he examined it, the goat butted at his neck and shoulder with such gentle solemn affection that he kissed the end of her nose before going back to his lectern. That version of the Sentences had been a fair copy, made at a cost of nearly three pounds from the original Lombard manuscript on the University shelves, and might have been sold – or better still, traded for a book of Seneca or something else worth reading; but never mind; it had found its ideal audience.
Waiting for him on the lectern was his own manuscript, a commentary, as Raymond had guessed easily enough – for almost all the new books produced in at least the past two centuries had been commentaries on older authors. But as Roger stood to it in the flickering light of the single candle at the head of the board, he found that his head was still too adrift with sweet vitriol, even after so long a walk, to permit him to write. Instead, he drew to him his older author: that book that John of Livonia had left behind as a gift, now for Roger Bacon the book of all books beyond every other in the world, save only the Word of God.
For on the morning after Roger had bested Albertus Magnus in full University, he had found that book to be The Secret of Secrets – a letter to Alexander the Great from his teacher, Aristotle.
Roger had never seen it before; he doubted that anyone else in Paris had; the very existence of such a document seemed to be unknown. Yet no man who knew the style of the Stagarite could read this infinitely precious document and think it anything but authentic. W
here John had come by it was a mystery, but that he had known or guessed at its value was suspect in the manner of its arrival: a gift to Roger, in return for Roger’s gifts to John of books that John loved or might find useful. Or perhaps John had not guessed, but had only recognized as any literate man would the name of Aristotle, and had bought the book in the hope that his difficult Aristotelian room-mate might be pleased.
Justice is Love, the self sang, and Roger nearly upset his high stool in the violence of his urge to kick out at that interior prompter. That the voice spoke the truth was undeniable, as any man could read in the Book of Job; but it was a less than welcome truth at this moment.
All the same, here was the great letter with its incalculable riches, the Secretum secretorum itself: wherein the secrets of the sciences were written, but not as on the skins of goats or sheep so that they might be discovered by the multitude, to the breaking of the celestial seal; from a hand that would rather love truth than be the friend of Plato. Here it was said that God revealed all wisdom to his holy patriarchs and prophets from the beginning of the world, and to just men and to certain others whom He chose beforehand, and endowed them with dowries of science; and this was the beginning and origin of philosophy, because in the writings of these men nothing false was to be found, nothing rejected by wise men, but only that which is approved. And yet on account of men’s sins the study of philosophy vanished by degrees until Thales of Miletus took it up again, and Aristotle completed it, in so far as was possible for a man in a pre-Christian time.
Pope Gregory was dead, otherwise only a single section of the Secretum secretorum would force the complete revision of Roger’s book on old age; this being a chapter called the Regimen of Life, wherein it appeareth that the inestimable glory of medicine, as being more necessary to men than many other sciences, was discovered to the sons of Adam and Noah, they being permitted to live so ‘long for the sake of completing its study. Nor was the shortening of life from that time on due to the decay of the stars from their most favourable position at the moment of creation, as was commonly taught; but in part to the accumulated sins of men, which be remediable under Christ, and in part to accident, which is remediable by medicine; so that it is not in the stars that a man must pass a weakened constitution and a shorter lifespan to his sons, but a better pathway there be if he but know how to take it; for God the most high and glorious had prepared a means and a remedy for tempering the humours and preserving health, and for acquiring many things with which to combat the ills of old age and to retard them, and to mitigate such evils; and there is a medicine called the ineffable glory and treasure of philosophers, which completely rectifies the whole human body.