Doctor Mirabilis

by James Blish

  Thus, Simon de Montfort’s farewell to his confessor; for he was at once to go on an embassy to Scotland. There was naught left Adam Marsh now, nec spe nec metu, but his judgment, which was not to be found in this world. In greyness and in shadow, he rode without haste toward Oxford to await it.

  XII: THE CONVENT

  And this, then, was the first year of the Age of the Holy Spirit! Small cause 1260 had given Roger Bacon for joy; and though what he had been able to learn about the world outside the convent walls was little, he saw small hope for that world either, except it rejoice in the imminence of Antichrist.

  Within the convent, each day of this putatively great year dripped away exactly as had each day of the preceding three, worn down under the corrosion of his ‘corrective discipline’ – changing straw; sweeping out cells; carrying slops and night-soil; teaching a few young apprentices to the Order; copying Psalms; dipping candles; washing bottles; mending sandals; and praying for deliverance. He could look forward now to naught else.

  In the dragging-past of these lifetimes of days, but little study was possible, and less work; yet for a while he had refused to be defeated. The Reprobationes was finished; and an introduction to a new subject, De laudibus mathematicae, and even the work itself, a Communia mathematica, although only in first recension. But nothing was so time-consuming as computation; and in especial one needed tables, which he had neither the leisure to search out nor the money to buy.

  The money was gone, all gone, leaving behind only a sort of lightness in the head, as that of a man but recently delivered of a fever; or, more to the purpose, of a man in the aftermath of far too much wine, miserable in the knowledge that the only cure is more, and that not to be had.

  Nor was there any help for him from his brothers and superiors. In Oxford he had been at the least a resident master; here, he was nothing. Early on, he had proposed to them that for the fame of the convent, in Paris where scholarship was everything, he should write for them a summary of everything that he had read or found in the natural sciences from the beginning, a Communia naturalium, to be published on to the shelves of the University; surely a better use for a scholar than setting him to changing beds. He had shown them the preface for such a work; they had laughed at it. He did not speak to them now unless spoken to, and that was seldom.

  A few threads to the outside still were allowed him. Eugene wrote to him: outraged at still another prohibition of Aristotle at Toulouse, the younger brother had at last come home to Ilchester and taken up the galling burden of the damaged estate – a victory for Robert which Roger seldom cared to think about. Belatedly, because he had been so long out of England, Eugene had discovered the greatness of Grosseteste, and was buying copies of his works as he could. Unable to share in the problems of the estate, Roger could at least feel with Eugene the poignancy of the murder of the younger man’s studies, and wrote for him a summary of the Capito’s teachings on time and motion, with a commentary; Eugene drank it down like water in a desert and prayed urgently for more, but from the fastness of the convent there was little more to give.

  Too, there were letters from Bungay, who had left Oxford in disgust at Roger’s exile and returned to his post as the vicar of the provincial minister. But they were seldom heartening:

  I must tell thee that the turmoil is in no wise lessened and that most of what was gained in St. Catherine’s chapel hath since been lost, an I understand it aright. No sooner did earl Simon return from his embassy to Scotland than the King charged him with fixing the particulars of the peace with France, a matter which kept him away most of this year; and in the meantime the ‘bachelors’, as they now call those knights and gentry created out of incomes of fifteen pounds a year, those that were formerly contented to be no more than coroners and jurymen, have had a Mad Parliament of their own. Now they demand that the barons concede to them as vassals and tenants those same privileges wrung by the baronage from the supreme landlord the King, and being rebuffed, do repair increasingly to the royal above the seigniorial justice. In this matter earl Bigod appeareth helpless, referring to it as a disturbance in the commonalty, which is in no wise the case, but serveth all the same to drive many a weaker baron to the King also, in hope of better arms against this mythical insurgency. This division Prince Edward hath been quick to exploit, and it feareth me that earl Simon’s return from France hath not been speedy enough to compose it. Thou wilt recall how at the birth of Edward our Henry was so eager to receive gifts of congratulation that it was said at the Court, Heaven gives us this child, but the King sells him to us: I fear that we shall suffer much more at the hands of this prince before we suffer less. Remind thyself however how much of what say needs must be rumour; for that chatterer Matthew Paris the King’s historian is dead, and his thousands of leaves of gossip are shut up by the monks of St. Alban’s; and this year hath died also the most Christian and most noble Adam Marsh, the last of our Order who might have known the truth. – Thos.

  Here indeed was cause for sorrow, and for despair. Who now was left to him but Eugene, and Bungay? There still existed the small circle of the Peregrine College, but he had been able to visit that only the once since his exile, and had found all there strangers to him but Peter de Maricourt himself. Moreover, it was dangerous to keep such arcane company, never for Roger more so than now.

  He moved about through his galling chores in a mist of lassitude and weariness. The days went by. Were it not for the frequent Holy Days, he would have lost all track of them. Listlessly, he recast his notes from his lecture-battle with Richard of Cornwall into a small volume, but even the panoplies of that demonic vision had lost all power to move him now; the words came as slowly from the clotting quill-tip as those of a neophyte, and the temptation to write ‘Finis’ at the bottom of each new page was almost irresistible. In the end, he dispatched it as a letter to Eugene, who was baffled by it, particularly by the passage on black-powder, which Roger in a moment of prudence had partially reencyphered.

  It was well that he had not published it. But a month after, there was read forth to the brothers of the convent at early Mass, by order of Bonaventura, the new Constitutions of the Chapter of Narbonne:

  ‘Let no one glory in the possession of virtue in his heart if he puts no guard on his conversation. If anyone thinks that he is religious and does not curb his tongue, but only allows his heart to lead him astray, then his religion is vain. It is therefore necessary that an honourable fence should surround the mouth and other senses and acts, deeds and morals, that the statutes of the regulars may not be destroyed by perfect men, but kept intact, lest they should be bitten by a snake when they let down the barrier.…

  ‘Let the brothers carry nothing in words or in writing which could conduce to the scandal of anyone.…

  ‘Let no brother go to the court of the Lord Pope, or send a brother, without the permission of the Minister-General. Let them, if they have gone otherwise, be at once expelled from the Curia by the procurators of the Order. And let no one apply to the Minister-General for permission unless serious cause or urgent necessity demand it.

  ‘We prohibit any new writing from being published outside the Order, unless it shall first have been examined carefully by the Minister-General or Provincial, and the visitants in the provincial chapter.… Anyone who contravenes this shall be kept at least three days on bread and water, and lose his writing.…

  ‘Let no brother write books, or cause them to be written for sale, and let the Provincial Minister not dare to have or keep any books without the licence of the Minister-General, or let any brothers have or keep them without the permission of the provincial ministers.…

  ‘We lay under a perpetual curse anyone who presumes either by word or by deed in any way to work for the division of our Order. If anyone contravenes this prohibition, he shall be considered as an excommunicate and schismatic and destroyer of our Order … brothers incorrigible in this shall be imprisoned or expelled from the Order.…

  ‘If anyone
think that the penalty for the breach of statutes of this kind is severe, let him reflect that, according to the Apostle, all discipline in the present life is not a matter for rejoicing, but for sorrow; yet through it, it will bear for the future the most peaceful fruit of justice for those who have endured it.’

  It was an immense document, the proclamation of which consumed most of the morning, but the sense of these rubrics was all too clear: for the defence of the orders against the seculars, and the defence of the Order against itself, the Minister-General had instituted a censorship.

  His friends dead, or beyond his reach; himself forbidden to publish; the vision a vapour. Wherein lay the usefulness of labour, if nothing was to come of it? Wherein the beauty: where there were none to see it? Why write at all, if there were to be none to read? He prayed for guidance; but the silence flowed on, unresponsive.

  Another year. Silence, and apathy.

  And then, abruptly, he was awake; it was as though he had been plunged into icy water. The convent had a visitor – not in itself unusual, nor that Roger should know the man, albeit but slightly. His name was Raymond of Laon, but it was what he was that mattered: he was a clerk in the suite of Guy de Foulques.

  A friend alive – never mind how remote a friend – and a Cardinal! There was help here, could he but engineer it; why had he not thought of this expedient before?

  Moreover, it required scarcely any engineering, for Raymond himself asked to see Roger, and permission was granted.

  ‘The Cardinal charged me to make certain of your whereabouts, Master Roger,’ Raymond said nervously. Obviously he had been warned that the case confronting him now had been one of peculiar fractiousness, and still full of potentialities for schism.

  ‘Make him aware, I beg of you, Raymond. There was a time when he spoke with interest of my studies in the sciences, and asked for writings. Tell him I would make him a book of these, were it not for the decrees of Narbonne.’

  ‘He has no power to exempt anyone from those,’ Raymond objected. ‘True that he’s a Cardinal, but also a secular; durst not interfere with the rules of the Orders.’

  ‘Of course; but surely he might relieve me of my burdens in some way? As matters stand today, I am forbidden to keep books, let alone write them – I have preserved all my manuscripts only by keeping them circulating among certain friends here in Paris, and even this may be “publication” within the meaning of the sixth rubric of the Narbonne Constitutions.’

  Raymond was thoughtful. ‘I will tell him what you say,’ he declared at last. ‘I know of no prohibition against it, though belike he may. And the very worst he can say in reply, to me or thee, is, No.’

  ‘God bless you, Raymond. I shall pray for you all my days.’

  The dirt flew under Roger’s besom that afternoon, albeit he was otherwise careful to show the brothers no elation after the interview; neither, however, did he satisfy their curiosity – seen solely in their glances, for they would have scorned to speak it. – as to the business of a Cardinal’s household with an inconsequential friar under corrective discipline. Nor did he reveal the secret elsewhere as yet, so that Eugene must have been baffled all over again to receive of a sudden this from his exiled brother:

  Man, in so far as he is man, has two things, bodily strength and virtues, and in these he can be forced in many things; but he has also strength and virtues of soul, that is, of the intellectual soul. In these he can be neither led nor forced, but only hindered. And so, if a thousand times he is cast into prison, never can he go against his will unless the will succumbs.

  But there was much preparation to be done while Guy’s reply was awaited; and this Roger prosecuted with a cunning which surprised even himself. It could not be concealed that he was suddenly and furiously writing again – in fact his best pupil Joannes, a brilliant thirteen-year-old who worshipped his Master, was under orders to report such an event at once – but to the expected prompt question Roger was able to proffer nothing more incendiary than a set of fearsomely complex tables of numbers.

  ‘To what purpose?’

  ‘These are notes toward a better calendar, Father. Doth it not seem ridiculous that with the one we have, we cannot even say with certainty what is the veritable date of Easter? That can hardly be pleasing to Our Lord, that we must celebrate His resurrection on the wrong day, more often than not.’

  This was unexceptionable; in due course the censors, though uncertain whether to be suspicious or to rejoice in the reclamation of an erring brother, even allowed De termine Paschali to be copied and published. By that time, Roger was deep into the composition of a Computus, which on early inspection by the brothers proved to be even more technical – so much so, as Roger had foreseen, that nobody else in the convent but young Joannes could have even a hope of understanding it.

  Thereafter, when they saw him drawing geometrical diagrams, the brothers avoided asking questions which might prove embarrassing to themselves. Thus they also successfully avoided discovering that these were not part of the incomplete Computus at all, but instead were the visible signs of a process destined to reduce the very Ark of the Covenant to naught more than the passage of sunlight through raindrops.

  In all this, young Joannes was a willing conspirator. He was a black-haired, hollow-eyed youngster, painfully thin and awkward, of no known family – a charge of the Church. He was eager and quick, despite his talent for knocking things over when he was excited, and was filled with delight at being made privy to the secret. He was even more delighted to realize that he and he alone, of all the learned minds in the convent, was capable of following the racing of his Master’s thought; and in sober truth, at Roger’s hands he already knew more of the laws of optics than had the great Grosseteste himself, as Grosseteste had known more than Alhazen.

  Even Joanna, however, despite the most careful and elaborate instruction, was left gasping at the next leap, which went soaring directly from the propagation of vision into the propagation of force:

  Every efficient cause acts by its own force which it produces on the matter subject to it, as the light of the sun produces its own action in the air, and this action is light diffused through the whole world from the solar light. This force is called likeness, image, species and by many other names, and it is produced by substance as well as accident and by spiritual substance as well as corporeal. Substance is more productive of it than accident, and spiritual substance than corporeal. This force produces every action in this world, for it acts on sense, intellect and all the matter in the world for the production of things, because one and the same thing is done by a natural agent on whatsoever it acts, because it has no freedom of choice; and therefore it performs the same act on whatever it meets.… Forces of this kind, belonging to agents, produce every action in this world. But there are two things now to be noted respecting these forces; one is the propagation itself of the action and of force from the place of its production; and the other is the varied action in this world due to the production and destruction of things. The second cannot be known without the first. Therefore it is necessary that the propagation itself be first described.

  … But when they say that force has a spiritual existence in the medium, this use of the word ‘spiritual’ is not in accordance with its proper and primary meaning, from ‘spirit’ as we say that God and angel and soul are spiritual things; because it is plain that the forces of corporeal things are not thus spiritual. Therefore of necessity they will have a corporeal existence, because body and soul are opposed without an intermediate. And if they have a corporeal existence, they also have a material one, and therefore they must obey the laws of material and corporeal things, and therefore they must mix when they are contrary, and become one when they are of the same category of forces. And this is again apparent, since force is the product of a corporeal thing, and not of a spiritual; therefore it will have a corporeal existence. Likewise it is in a corporeal and material medium, and everything that is received in another is modified by
the condition of the recipient.… When, therefore, Aristotle and Averroes say that force has a spiritual existence in the medium and in the senses, it is evident that ‘spiritual’ is not taken from ‘spirit’ nor is the word used in its proper sense. Therefore it is used equivocally and improperly, for it is taken in the sense of ‘Imperceptible’; since everything really spiritual … is imperceptible and does not affect the senses, we therefore convert the terms and call that which is imperceptible spiritual. But this is homonymous and outside the true and proper meaning of a spiritual thing.… Moreover, it produces a corporeal result, as, for example, the action of heat warms bodies and dries them out, and causes them to ‘putrefy, and the same is true of other forces. Therefore, since this produces heat, properly speaking, and through the medium of heat produces other results, force must be a corporeal thing, because a spiritual thing does not cause a corporeal action. And in particular there is the additional reason that the force is of the same essence as the complete effect of the producer, and it becomes that when the producer affects strongly the thing acted upon.

  … Since, therefore, the action of a corporeal thing has a really corporeal existence in a medium, and is a real corporeal thing, as was previously shown, it must of necessity be dimensional, and therefore fitted to the dimensions of the medium.… If, therefore, the propagation of light is instantaneous, and not in time, there will be an instant without time; because time does not exist without motion. But it is impossible that there should be an instant without time, just as there cannot be a point without a line. It remains; then, that light is propagated in time, and likewise all forces of a visible thing and of vision.…

  The poor youngster was not to be censured for his incomprehension; for Roger, as he himself well knew, was reinventing physics, an endeavour in which he had had no predecessors since Aristotle himself. The existence of this seminal document, like that of the Perspectiva, was hidden with Joannes’ aid as runner by putting it into circulation in the Peregrine College, which now as before did not care to reveal its own existence, let alone what it was reading. Peter, Joannes reported, said of it only: