The Friar and the Cipher

by Lawrence Goldstone

  So, if dualism fell into the wrong hands, it could rob the Church of the role that it held most dear, and the one that formed the basis of its power—sole and unquestioned intermediary between man and God.

  Plato, clearly, would not do.

  What the Church required was a system within which it could claim objective authority in the interpretation of God's word and, by extension, the authority to prevent anyone with whom it disagreed from offering an alternative. What was needed here was science, logic, learning—all those specialties over which the Church could claim a virtual monopoly, separating it from the common man—or even from kings.

  What they needed, in other words, was Aristotle.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Logic and Theology:

  The Evolution of Scholasticism

  • • •

  IN AUGUSTINE'S TIME, none of Aristotle's work was known to Christian scholars. In fact, out of the entire incredible range of Aristotelian writings, only one set of manuscripts had been recovered, and even that had not been translated into Latin. Fortunately for the future of Christianity, that set happened to contain writing on the one subject that the religion needed most—Aristotle's work on logic, the Organon.

  From the Organon would come scholasticism, a system of analysis and teaching by which Christianity would leap forward and then be held back, at once the most progressive and reactionary innovation in Christian education and philosophy in its history. Scholasticism was the method that would be used in every university, the rule book in the battle of dogma against science, the system by which Roger Bacon learned and later taught, which molded his philosophy of science and provided its greatest impediment.

  The process toward scholasticism began soon after Augustine's death in 430, when a Roman consul named Anicius Manlius Severnius Boethius finally translated the Organon into Latin. Boethius—whether he was actually a Christian himself is unclear—was one of the top advisors to King Theodoric, but ruler of Rome was not the elite position it had once been. First of all, Rome itself was no longer the center of the empire. That was in Constantinople, where the Byzantine emperor Justin ran the show. Second, Theodoric was not a Roman but rather an Ostrogoth, one of the many tribes to the north that had once been colonized by Rome but, during the previous century and a half, had virtually annexed what was left of the empire. Even so, Theodoric, who probably never learned to read or write, saw himself as Roman and tried to carry on the great intellectual traditions of past emperors, such as Marcus Aurelius.

  Boethius was an exceptional scholar who, because of his learning and Theodoric's cultural ambitions, became a favorite of the king, much as Aristotle had become a favorite of Hermias the Eunuch. Given a free hand, Boethius produced original works on mathematics and science, as well as his translation of Aristotle.

  He did not have a chance to do much with it, however, since, as it turned out, he had become a bit too much of the king's favorite. Some of those at court who aspired to be favorites themselves convinced Theodoric that Boethius was part of a plot to kill him. Their proof was a document supposedly signed by Boethius, which Boethius claimed was a forgery. Theodoric, in no position to determine the genuineness of any document for himself, let his Gothic blood win out over his Roman veneer. He chucked Boethius into prison without trial. Boethius slowly rotted in a cell, writing philosophy and commentary. Finally, in 525, Theodoric had Boethius executed in a particularly unpleasant way. A cord was tightened around the condemned man's neck until his eyes popped out, and then he was slowly beaten to death. (Theodoric died two years later. He is said to have cried over the injustice he had perpetrated on an innocent man.)

  Christian education, as it was to persist through the Renaissance, began to take form soon afterward. Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus, a friend and pupil of Boethius's, read the Latin translation of the Organon, then produced a text, The Course of Religious and Secular Studies. In it, Cassiodorus folded Aristotelian logic into the old Greek method of dividing a curriculum into the seven liberal arts, grouped into a language trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and science quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) and asserted that this was the proper way to teach Christians. Cassiodorus did not have a great deal of competition in the philosophy of education arena, and so the seeds of scholasticism were sown.

  In 529, the new Byzantine emperor, Justinian, Justin's adopted son and an avowed Christian, closed the Academy in Athens, by then the last stronghold of Neoplatonism. That date is often considered the beginning of what has been called, with some justification, the Dark Ages. Still, although there was a virtual halt in creative thought in Europe, Boethius and Cassiodorus had nonetheless created an Aristotelian framework within which Christianity could function, as it did, almost unchanged for half a millennium.

  During this time, scholasticism ever so slowly ripened—it took three hundred years just to get past the rote-based master-lectures-student stage. Instruction took place largely in monasteries and cathedral schools, and so one-sided was the process that it was the teacher rather than the method that was referred to as “scholastic.”

  Finally, in the tenth century, scholasticism began to acquire an intellectual pulse. Masters reached more deeply into the works of Boethius and Cassiodorus and reintroduced the Socratic dialectic as a teaching vehicle. When students became involved, the masters actually had to find answers to difficult questions every once in a while, and new and better arguments were forced into the process. This in turn led to more sophisticated questioning, which required more thought and study in the replies.

  Within a century, scholasticism had matured into the most powerful tool for maintaining and perpetuating doctrine that the Church had ever seen. Almost in gratitude, Aristotle and his logic were adopted by Church fathers and the man himself (now called simply “the Philosopher”) was said to be infallible. Even Augustine's (and Plato's) duality was now formalized and tempered on the Aristotelian anvil.

  Regardless of the degree of sophistication, however, the basic aim of the scholastics had not changed. They remained uninterested in uncovering new knowledge, only in cementing the unlikely but now solid bond between Aristotle's logic and the Bible's revelation. Scholastics argued that since God was the supreme power in the universe, and that revealed truth (as set down in scripture) was His message to man, human reason was subordinate and, if ever it seemed to contradict revelation, must give way. In other words, if science and faith butted heads, either the science was wrong (most likely) or someone had made an incorrect scriptural interpretation. Scholastics came to call philosophy the servant of theology, because they used philosophy to understand and explain revelation.

  In 1150, a teacher at the cathedral school in Paris named Peter Lombard institutionalized the entire system in a work titled Four Books of Sentences. “Sentences” were the method pioneered by Cassiodorus to subject religious truths to the full dialectic treatment. Lombard now used this technique as the structure of his work. Taking what were then the standard divisions, he devoted the first book to God and the Trinity, the second to creation, the third to incarnation and redemption, and the fourth to the sacraments. In each book, he presented a series of propositions (quaestio), and then subjected each to dialectic examination (pro and contra). This process came to be known as disputation (disputatio). Neither Lombard's propositions nor his arguments were original—almost everything he cited came from St. Augustine—although he threw some more contemporary Church masters into the mix for topicality.

  What Lombard achieved was the ultimate ecclesiastic textbook, a systematic, ordered, encyclopedic compilation of every important piece of Church dogma, complete with every objection that had been raised against it, to which Lombard supplied the appropriate counterargument. When there were counters to the counter, Lombard showed students how to answer those as well, and on and on until every proposition had been irrefutably cemented.

  Four Books of Sentences became the standard Church text for the next two centu
ries, and soon after it was published it became impossible to gain a degree in theology in any cathedral school in Europe—or later, any university—without writing a commentary on the text. So it developed that theology itself became the ultimate science and the logic of Aristotle was employed to prove the very arguments the man himself had spent his life trying to disprove.

  But just when it seemed that the Church could sit back and relax, secure in having tamed Plato, duality, pantheism, and other heterodoxy with Aristotelian logic, a body of new knowledge prepared to flood through Europe. Most of this knowledge came from a single source, one man, one philosopher whose works were so obviously true that it was going to take everything the Church had to hold him off.

  It was Aristotle.

  This time, he came from the Arabs.

  WHILE EUROPE HAD ACCESS only to Aristotle's works on logic, scholars from countries across the Arab Empire possessed Arabic translations of the full range of the Philosopher's work. With the fall of Toledo and the subsequent efforts of the Translators, many of the lost writings of Aristotle came north and seeded the universities. Much of this material was scientific and therefore welcome as part of the new learning. But then there were metaphysical works, such as De Anima (On the Soul). This segment of the Aristotelian corpus was less appealing to the Church, as it contained arguments on questions of man, God, and eternity that could not be blended quite so easily into Christian dogma as had the Organon. In fact, there were some specific passages that might even be seen as contradicting axioms of the Christian faith.

  If that were not enough, two of the greatest Arab thinkers had done substantial analysis of Aristotle's metaphysical works—very persuasive analysis, as it turned out—and Latin translations of their commentaries came north as well. By the time Roger Bacon was sent off for his schooling, these commentaries had become as much a part of university learning—although often covertly—as the Sentences. While sometimes the work of these men lent support to Christian theology, more often it lent itself to reexamination of heretofore unquestioned precepts.

  The first of the two was Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Abdallah Ibn Sina, who is generally (and more economically) referred to in the West by his Latin name, Avicenna. Avicenna was one of the great theorists in the history of Islam, and probably one of the greatest minds ever. He was born in 980 in Bukhara, in present-day Uzbekistan, then part of the decaying Samarind Empire. By age ten, largely self-taught, Avicenna had memorized the Qu'ran, and by thirteen was studying mathematics, medicine, and philosophy. By sixteen, he was treating patients, and one year later he had the good fortune of curing the Samarind king Nu ibn Mansur of an illness that all the other doctors had assured him was fatal. Asked to name his reward, Avicenna desired only to be allowed access to the Royal Library.

  From there, he produced a large volume of commentary on Aristotle that philosophically was pure Neoplatonism. He ascribed to a hierarchal order of God and then a single active intelligence from which individual human personalities sprang. Instead of the vague concept of the One, however, Avicenna plugged in Aristotle's Prime Mover. For Christians, this would prove helpful because it established a method of retaining the unknowable ideal without sacrificing the scriptural truth that God created the universe consciously by an act of will. Still, if theologians accepted Avicenna's construct, it seemed certain that the old problem with mysticism was going to resurface. Moreover, Avicenna had stuffed more intermediaries between God and man than Plotinus had. As such, his theology never really caught on in Europe (unlike his Canon of Medicine, which became the standard medical text for the next five hundred years). Still, his Aristotelian contribution seemed to have helped solve a fundamental problem for Church scholars.

  Helping along Christian theology, of course, was the farthest thing from Avicenna's mind. He was interested in a better Islam. His idea of attaining that end by using Greek thought rather than the Qu'ran itself not surprisingly made him any number of enemies. In 1150, all of his philosophical works were ordered burned by Caliph Mustanjid. (It is civilization's luck that by then the work of Avicenna had spread beyond the caliph's reach across the known world.) He was imprisoned twice (once escaping disguised as a mystic holy man), forced to flee more often than that, and died mysteriously in 1037, quite possibly after being poisoned.

  While Avicenna, brilliant as he was, produced some Aristotelian commentary that made its way into theological debate, no Muslim in history had more impact on Christianity and Western civilization than the second great Arab philosopher, Abu al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd, who came to be known in Europe as Averroës.

  Like Avicenna, Averroës was a physician. He was also a judge, astronomer, and counselor to kings. He was born into wealth and position in 1126, the son and grandson of chief justices in Cordoba. By that time, the cultural center of the Arab Empire had moved to Spain. As a young man already with a reputation as a prodigious scholar, he was brought before the emir in 1153 and asked if he thought the heavens were eternal. Averroës hesitated and then said he did not know.

  He would spend the rest of his life trying to find out.

  For more than thirty years, Averroës went through Aristotle line by line, translating, interpreting, and producing commentary. Because only Aristotle's lecture notes survived, just what the Philosopher meant by this passage or that had often been open to question. Averroës's scholarship was so great, his knowledge of Aristotle so complete, that he became known simply as “The Commentator.” In the slack moments when he wasn't working on Aristotle, Averroës had time to serve as chief justice in Seville, then in Cordoba, be appointed as personal physician to the emir, and discover both the function of the retina and that immunity to smallpox is conferred on those who survive the disease.

  What Averroës concluded after his study was to shake the foundations of not only his own religion but Christianity as well. Like Aristotle, he believed that reason, not revelation, represented the highest plane of wisdom, a point of view with which Europeans had yet to contend, since they had until recently been restricted to the Organon. Averroës extended Aristotle's reason-over-revelation contention with the notion that philosophy—the science of reason—(and therefore wisdom) is only for the elite. For Averroës, the vast majority of humanity was by nature unequipped to master the subtleties of higher thought, and thus incapable of enlightenment. These people were, in fact, happiest and most fulfilled when told what to do and what to think. For them, faith and revelation would more than suffice, and on no account should philosophy or dialectic be introduced to confuse them. A second, far smaller group needed a more rigorous explanation of why one proposition was true and another was false. This group could be taught philosophy, but only in a more or less rote manner. Finally, there were those few actually capable of reaching a higher plane. For these special men only did reason provide greater insight than faith, and therefore only they should be permitted to study or teach philosophy. (If Averroës, the consummate Aristotelian, was aware of how close in this construct he was drifting toward Plato's Republic, he never let on.)

  Although Averroës was a devout Muslim, he was not himself a theologian or even a philosopher per se. That is perhaps why, like Avicenna, although his aim was to integrate Aristotle and Plato into Islam, he looked more to the Greeks than to the Qu'ran for the basis of his work. Also as with Avicenna, this approach did not endear him to what was becoming an increasingly fundamentalist Islamic clergy. Averroës, enjoying the protection of kings, continued to work until, in 1194, Emir al-Mansur ordered all of his writings (except a small number that were considered pure science) burned. The emir also decreed that no one at all should read philosophy and that his subjects should throw all philosophical works into the fire. Averroës was sent into exile for heresy. He was recalled four years later but died soon afterward, in 1198, just as Innocent III was ascending to the papacy.

  The death of Averroës coincided with a pivotal juncture in European history. For his own people, it marked the final downturn of e
mpire. As the Arabs retreated further and further into religious fanaticism and intolerance, infidels began to carve up their possessions. Within decades, all Spain except Granada was lost to the Christians, crusaders took Jerusalem, and the Mongols under the Khans swept through Muslim Asia and attacked and destroyed Baghdad.

  But as the legacy of Averroës faded along with the glory of the Islamic south, it was accelerating a new blaze of science and empirical thought in the Christian north. European scholars traveled to areas of Arab influence, control, or legacy expressly to seek new learning and then returned to the universities to pass it along. As a result, from an odd swirl of languages, religions, and nationalities, Europe became the beneficiary of the single most prolific infusion of knowledge in its history.

  ALTHOUGH TOLEDO WAS THE FIRST SOURCE of the new learning, another kingdom to the west soon rivaled Spain for the importance of the translated material that it sent to the universities of Italy and northern Europe. It was the Sicily of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II.

  The Holy Roman Empire was a loose, often shifting confederation of kingdoms in central and southern Europe. Shaped by wars, alliances, and treaties, by the thirteenth century the Holy Roman Empire—described by Voltaire as “neither holy, Roman, nor an empire”—was primarily German, but it included the wealthy and strategically placed island of Sicily.

  Entitled by birth to rule both Sicily and Germany, Frederick, grandson of the ferocious Barbarossa (“Redbeard”) and heir to the Hohenstaufen dynasty, had been made a ward of Innocent III after the death of his parents when he was four. Innocent, seizing the opportunity to retain the empire for the papacy, shunted him off with guardians.

  When Frederick was about seven, he began to be seen as a rallying point in Sicily by those opposed to papal rule. Some of those appointed by Innocent to “care” for the boy then attempted to kill him, but Frederick was snatched away by supporters. He was taken in and fed by one family after another and proceeded to grow up on the streets of Sicily, hiding from his powerful enemies and learning to live by his wits. Sicily was then the center of the world, the meeting place of all cultures—Christians, Muslims, Byzantines, Africans, and Jews—a wealthy, exotic milieu of tastes and smells, customs and tongues. Frederick, who had been taught to read somewhere along the way, acquired an affinity for history and mathematics. He learned Arabic and Hebrew, as well as Latin. By the time he was in his mid-teens, Frederick was already every bit the pope's match for intelligence, cunning, and ambition.