Doctor Mirabilis

by James Blish

  Roger laughed. ‘But this would seem to mean that there must be some men in Rome to whom you could talk of learning, Milord’

  Piccolomini only shrugged; it was the girl who answered. ‘Father may be the only collector in the city who reads books.’

  Once more, Roger was shocked into silence. Though Luca had used almost the same words on the Via Lata, they had then seemed only banter.

  ‘Then the matter is concluded,’ the marquis said. ‘You will live with us. I am sure nothing but good can come of it. As a beginning, let me show you the library now.’

  The library was in fact a marvel, second only to the University’s own at Paris, and far superior to any Roger had seen at Oxford, even Grosseteste’s. But it was only one marvel of many.

  The beauty of the villa itself was of a nature wholly new to Roger. The omnipresent thatch-roofed pines under their multiple spindly trunks were no novelty, but he had never seen cypresses before; here they were everywhere, marching in straight lines right across the landscape to the horizon. Under his window, and in almost every other sheltered spot, grew low bushes with shiny dark green leaves which bore oranges – small ones, but to Roger marvellous enough, for until now the fruit had been only a name to him. Piccolo-mini’s vineyards were familiar enough in principle, for Roger had seen grapes aplenty around Paris and even at home; but his father had told him often enough that the vineyards of Ilchester were the outcome of an unprecedented century of fair weather, and that the time would surely come again when there would be no such tipple as British wine.

  At Tivoli all this abundant natural beauty had been subdued into a kind of order, made to grow against and soften a backdrop of marble arches and pillars, or taught to sweep into exfoliative Euclidean curves and aisles. The Piccolomini gardens were not large by comparison with those of many of the marquis’ neighbours, but they had been laid out by Lorenzo di Cosmati, grandfather of Luca, before Roger had been born, and were such a work of art as Hadrian’s villa itself could not boast: a serene and ravishing island in which to walk in the morning, amid a purity of doves. And over it all was the Tyrrhenian sky, even more intensely blue than it had seemed over the city proper, out of which poured sunlight in overwhelming profligacy.

  And the food! Roger had never before dreamed that there could be so many different kinds of things to eat. Northern food repeated itself endlessly, disguised only by its many sauces and spices. Here he seldom recognized what was in his bowl, and on some occasions was sorry to have asked; he was, exempli gratia, more than fortunate to discover that squid was delicious before learning what he was eating. But this passed quickly; there was too much of moment on his mind to allow him a pause in which to become also the inventor of squeamishness.

  The standards of cleanliness were equally new to him, and had to be taught him, none too gently, by the attendant assigned to him: a stout old housekeeper, once Livia’s nurse, who overcame with granite obduracy his initial scandal at being tended by a woman, and saw to it that his linens were fresh, his sandals mended, and his feet clean. Piccolomini’s estate made its own soap, a substance rarer than diamonds; here it was largely lapis Albanis, a mixture of lava and ashes, which eventually wore down to a central sliver abrasive enough to point nails, but the old matron saw to it that he learned its use. He found himself taking more baths in a month than he had formerly taken in a year.

  The housekeeper herself was harder to become accommodated to. Pro forma monasticism in this warm radiant air did not put up a serious battle, but his old bitter distrust yielded less easily. It was several months before he could bring himself to accept that her warm and rather quarrelsome concern with him was totally without predatory intent, and ran much deeper than he could in any justice have expected or asked. She had of course been assigned to him by the marquis; Roger was her task, like any other task; but beyond that, she worried actively and constantly about the pale English friar, often to a knife-edge beyond which he did not know whether he would shout with exasperation or burst into helpless laughter. She was the first woman of this kind that he had ever encountered; and he awoke one dew-cold morning to her morning scolding, after nearly half a year had gone by, with the realization that he liked it.

  Livia was the second. It was through her that Roger first came to understand the essence of her father’s loneliness, his generosity to a stranger, the curious tone of wistfulness that perpetually underlay even his most abstract and scholarly conversations. Most of the Piccolomini fortune was founded in lead mines – half the plumbing in modern Rome had come out of them – and no subject interested the marquis less than public works, except perhaps lead itself, or politics. Of his surviving children there were only two, and the other was the son of whom his wife had died in childbirth: Enea Silvio, who had fled the marquis’ bewildered hostility the moment he had come into a marriage portion, and lived now in Siena, incommunicado and – Roger deduced – disinherited. No one was left the marquis but Livia, whom he had given at his own hands the broad humanistic education that Enea Silvio had sullenly refused to suffer, let alone absorb.

  (‘That explains much,’ Roger said in the library, when they were alone together. ‘I have never heard a woman speaking Latin before. It surprised me.’

  (‘It explains more than I find comfortable,’ the marquis said. ‘That precisely is why Latin is only spuriously a universal language, friar Bacon. It is never spoken to women any more. Women are confined to the vernacular, whatever that may be. On this account alone, Latin is dying.’

  (‘Surely not! It is the language of scholars, everywhere; and the only written language of note. Under those circumstances, surely it can hardly matter whether or not it is spoken to women.’

  (Piccolomini had given him a long, slow look, and at last seemed to be about to comment; but instead, again, he only shrugged.)

  Nevertheless, it was not too hard to see that Livia’s learning had unfitted her as a woman, as witness her spinsterhood still persistent in her third, decade, in despite of both her father’s wealth and her dark personal beauty. Young Roman princes bored her, and she alarmed them; and now there was added the simple problem of age, itself a proof that there was something amiss with the girl, a proof that grew more convincing simply by itself growing older.

  None of this could matter to Roger, who found himself able after only a few months to accept her presence in the library, and her knowledge of subjects in the scholarly province. To him, everything at Tivoli was strange and hence might well be usual; he had no touchstones. She was inarguably well read – no match for Luca, who seemed to have vast stretches of the library by rote, but on the other hand more than simply a reflection of her father. She not only knew the texts, but often saw into them in a way entirely her own. After a while, Roger was taking so little notice of her sex that he talked to her in much the same style he might have adopted with any fellow scholar, maugre the parcel of respect he owed his noble host, and was occasionally surprised to find that he had been assuming knowledge on her part that in fact she lacked. By ordinary, this amused her, though he could not imagine why.

  She was also far more sympathetic to Roger’s interest in engineering than was her father, who was actively depressed by the practicality of his imperial ancestors; the marquis was not precisely pleased that the Goths had cut the aqueducts nine centuries bygonnen, but there was something in the manner in which he had referred to the incident which suggested that he thought it had served the Romans right for being so in love with piling one stone on top of another. About this difference Roger and his host drew nigh to real disputatiousness until Livia stepped in, diverting Roger into daytime tours of the Roman public works and so freeing his mind for nocturnal conversations more to the Piccolomini taste. When the marquis was ill with the Roman fever, as he was with increasing frequency as the second summer wore on, Roger and Livia walked in the garden and talked – of the lost secret of mortar, of active geometry, of what the buried floor of the Forum might have looked like, of the crime of q
uarrying ancient monuments, and other suitable subjects, while the housekeeper, Roger’s servant, kept to her marble bench and looked up at the stars, sighing resignedly.

  But there was nothing to sigh about. Roger had never before felt so well, so young, so totally alive. The climate, the sunlight, the food, the beauty, the feast of reason, the antiquities, the friendships, the solicitude, all seemed conspiring to make him positively sleek. Sometimes in the fluttering evening in the Piccolomini gardens, listening to Livia’s grave melodious voice and breathing draughts of citron and other perfumes, he would hear also through the doves’ wings a long, long story being told by a nightingale; and with it came down around him such an imminence of the glory of God that he could not even give thanks silently, but only hold Livia’s hand until some cough or stir from the marble bench brought back the lateness of the hour. Then they would part; there was always tomorrow; and besides, Roger was now required to wash his feet.

  Above all there was the library, and the marquis of Modena himself. It was surprising how infrequently Roger could bring himself to think of the cipher, for all the wealth of help he now had; but somehow it never seemed to be a suitable subject for conversation. Piccolomini’s enthusiasms lay elsewhere; he was a humanist, not a digger. Yet he would talk gladly of the sciences, so long as Roger cleaved to Nature as a source of correction for corrupt texts, and stayed clear of aqueducts and other plumbing. Moreover, they had early found in their joint admiration for Seneca – of whose works the marquis owned the most extensive collation Roger had ever seen, including portions of books previously quite unknown to him – a common ground in moral philosophy which widened and deepened with every evening’s conversation, until Roger had to invoke a fortnight’s retreat to assimilate all this magnificence, and make it his own.

  It was difficult, in part because he had written nothing in nearly two years. It was, furthermore, not a formal book that was wanted here, but a schema, a hierarchy, which should of course be logical, but must in a sense be architectural as well, related in all its parts like the stones of an arch. He found himself spending almost as much time drawing diagrams as in penning argument. The struggle was protracted, for there were at least three grand elements struggling for mastery in his mind, each of which had somehow to be reconciled to the others: First, the vision of a universal science which had begun to haunt him ever since he had first read the Secret of Secrets; next, the domain of experiment versus revealed knowledge; and finally, the domain of the moral law, which could be allowed supremacy over the other two, but only in so far as it could be shown to derive from them.

  At the end he was still unsatisfied, and gave over reworking the manuscript only out of regard for his host’s patience. He did not read it that night, however, but instead used it only as in the past he had used lecture notes. The marquis listened attentively to the solemn friar who might have been his son; but he did not stint to ask questions.

  ‘First of all, we have all the several separate sciences as they have come down to us, that is, imperfectly,’ Roger began. ‘I mean to include mathematics, and then medicine, alchemy, perspective, agriculture, all the sciences of natural philosophy. It is clear enough that they are all connected together and depend upon each other, as you can see most clearly in a science like medicine where the physician who knows neither alchemy nor astrology cannot be a scientist at all. He must know equally well the connections between these other sciences, as well as their relationships to his own.’

  ‘In what way? It seems a lot to ask. I can see that some knowledge of the patient’s auspices might be useful, and that a knowledge of drugs is essential. But otherwise the connections are superficial, are they not?’

  ‘By no means,’ Roger said warmly. ‘For example, what might suffice against a disease of the kidneys, which are ruled by Venus? It would not be enough to know in what house Venus stood when the patient was born, which is astrology; or in what house she stands now, which is astronomy; or in what houses she will stand for the rest of the course of treatment, which is mathematics. There are likewise herbs that are governed by Venus, which is agriculture; and so is the element copper, which is alchemy. And the worst pitfall here is that the traditional medical texts say almost nothing of all this. I would rather not go into it now, but I have counted no fewer than thirty-six such grave defects in the classical teachings; I mean to write a book about it some time soon.’

  ‘Do so, I pray,’ the marquis said, blinking ‘I did not mean to tempt you into a divagation.’

  ‘Then I mean to ask, how do we know what we know? These imperfections are rampant. They are even in Aristotle, partly because of the abominable translations we use, and partly because he concealed some knowledge for good reasons, as you can see in his book of secrets. Here we see the defect of revealed knowledge and belief, that again there is no certitude in it.’

  ‘Is this not a dangerous doctrine?’

  ‘No. St. Augustine himself counsels us against making fools of ourselves by quoting the Word of God to deny some plain fact of nature, because when such an apparent conflict exists, it must mean that we have misunderstood the Word. People are constantly misunderstanding the Word – otherwise we should not be plagued by heretics. Now this brings me to my experimental science, which is not a part of the sciences of natural philosophy or mathematics, not a “true” science in that sense, but nevertheless is superior to them all. It unites natural philosophy with revealed knowledge because it gives them both certitude; and imparts to each and all three dignities, which are its three prerogatives. I have written them down, thus:

  ‘First, verification. Until you have this in your hand, anything you “know” about natural philosophy, from revelation and authority, is simple credulity, which is only the first stage of knowledge.’

  ‘Even from Aristotle?’ the marquis said. ‘Even from this mysterious book of secrets?’

  ‘O, that is only the other side of the same coin. I will believe anything, no matter how apparently incredible, if it comes to me from a sufficient authority; but that means I must have faith that he has performed the experiments he says he has performed, and observed what he says he has observed. Aristotle passes this test – I have actually repeated some of his observations myself, and they were correct. And this is a necessary proviso, for no man can live long enough to repeat every experiment in history; perfect scepticism. Josephus says that the ancients lived long lives simply out of the necessity to understand what they had learned.’

  ‘I am answered. What is the second dignity?’

  ‘The second is the one that we have already exposed, the drawing together of the separate sciences so as to see their relationships to each other, quod in terminus aliarum explicat veritates quas tamen nulla earum potest intelligere nec investigare. Again to cite an example, who has not seen sick dogs eat grass? Might not a man study the behaviour of animals to see how they prolong their lives, and thus recover knowledge of some healing herb long lost? Here would be a plain case of two sciences contributing to each other in a way that the man working only in one science could never hope to see. And here, most plainly, experiment is not a separate science in the usual sense, but a leaven of power at work throughout natural philosophy. And this represents the second stage of knowledge, which is simply experience.

  ‘Now at last we come to the third dignity, again emerging from experiment: The use to which all this knowledge is to be put, for the protection of Christianity, the greater glory of God, and the greater welfare of man. And precisely here lie the greatest difficulties, because this is the domain of the third stage of knowledge, that is, reason, which must also decide to what uses knowledge ought not to be put. The man who sees the possibilities of the several sciences, and uses them as Archimedes did to make engines to defend Syracuse, is a man of power – of awful power if the book of secrets is correct, and I myself have had certain revelations … but of these I am still too uncertain to speak.

  ‘Still it is clear, Milord, that the pinnacle
of this schema must be an ethics. Moral philosophy is its outcome and its king. And it is here that I have made no progress at all. There is of course the ethics of Aristotle, but that emerges from natural philosophy, revelation and authority as he knew them. His knowledge is better than ours on most counts, but poorer on some crucial matters – most obviously, that he could not be a Christian, but there are others as well. And this is why our converse over Seneca impelled me to the impoliteness of all this scribbling.’

  ‘The study of nature is not my study,’ the marquis said gravely, ‘and on the whole I do not regret my incomprehension. But I have believed since the death of my wife that God meant my house to be the womb of something greater than the continuance of my line. And, praise Him, I have been allowed a glimpse of it. I might have been vouchsafed more had I not been jealous of it, for which I beg your forgiveness.’

  ‘Mine? Milord Modena, your kindnesses will be remembered in my prayers all my life long.’

  ‘Perhaps not,’ the marquis said. ‘You see, while you were in retreat, Luca brought me a letter for you. I kept it, not wanting to abort the work for which I might some day be remembered, if only in God’s eye. I failed to think until too late of the injury I might be doing you, were it a letter of moment. With shame, I give it to you now.’

  He handed the packet across the table, and Roger broke the seal without haste; he had already recognized the hand, that of one of Adam Marsh’s familiars. The message was brief – a mercy, since the candles were now burning very low.