So, in one place, we have the ecstasy of godmen and the misery of death, and nowhere in between any love or acknowledgement of the glory that can accompany us on our pilgrimage from darkness through light and back to darkness. What sort of religion is this that carries the mind to a heaven of blue, yet dwells with cadavers?
I have my answer. By these means, splendour and horrid fear combined, the churchmen and princes keep their hold on the souls of the masses who toil for them – for these cathedrals assail the senses with promises of ecstasies always just beyond your reach but ultimately attainable in death, while they terrify with fear of death and everlasting torment. Not only are there colour and light, but there is treasure too, in crosses and croziers, images and vestments. Incense in clouds is released from swung thurifers of polished silver, and music from flutes, fifes, oboes, trumpets, trombones and drums as well as sung. Even that produced by sets of pipes through which air is pumped with a bellows breathes when small slabs of ivory-covered wood are pressed, fills the spaces, colouring them with varied sound… All this magnificence, appealing to every sense save only that most important one of touch, may induce a euphoria as pronounced as that which comes from over-indulgence in bhang, and fools one into thinking that if one is not in heaven then heaven, when it is achieved, will be much like this.
Heaven is thus the bribe the churchmen and princes promise to their hordes of slaves in return for keeping to the calling God has given them and not seeking or striving to climb above their station or escape the misery they are born to. The bribe – and the threat too: for this benign and forgiving god will also leave the souls of those who rebel against his word to rot in endless torment throughout eternity. That, too, is depicted here and there in the lower levels of this edifice.
And there lies the difference between that religion and ours, exemplified by the difference between our temples and theirs, for while theirs soar and carry one upwards to a perfect heaven and by implication spurn what is terrestrial as corrupt, or dwell on terrors, ours, however tall and magnificent they may be, do not attempt to deny their weight, but sit on the earth and glorify it.
Musing thus I made my circuit of this building, which is dedicated to a demi-god called Michael, a warrior angel who, they say, cast into hell the devil, here depicted as a dragon or serpent with Michael's spear in his throat, and finally came back out into the square.
Opposite me now was another building, almost as grand as the first, with a facade of decorated stone, statues in niches, painted and leafed with gold like those in the church, with many rooms and antechambers off it, and with the prisons and torture chambers I now know too well behind and under it. It is dedicated, in name at least, to the same St Mary, or Parvati, but in fact was built for commerce and trade. It is the new Guild Hall, but right now does not serve the purpose for which it was so recently built: it has been occupied for a year or more by King Henry and Queen Margaret, their court and courtiers and all the senior functionaries of government.
And as I step out of the church and into the square, which has a few market stalls in it and above which jackdaws soar and cackle as they dispute the ledges on which they want to build their nests, there is a brief blast of trumpets and a squad of soldiers comes out of the main doors of the Guild Hall, down the steps and marches into the square to join those already there to make a wall between the people and… the cannon in whose wake I came through the city gate.
Following the soldiers comes a small crowd, including the King and Queen, and the seven-year-old boy-child, who is certainly the Queen's but is probably not, I now remember Eddie March telling me, the King's. They pause at the top of the wide flight of steps looking down into the square, facing the cathedral, then descend to look at that awesome tube on wheels in front of which the plumed mules still steam and stamp.
There is not much of a crowd below the steps, just the soldiers who came with the cannon, and no one challenges me as I slip through an arcade of black timbers, sheltering a frontage of shops, to reach the end of the steps which I climb to a point from which I can see and even hear the monarchs…
Whoops! Oh, yes, yes, yes! A piece of mortar has cracked away in the roof of my tunnel, and with a little manoeuvring and twisting I am able to get it free. It's as big as a coconut and, best of all, the stone above it now shifts a little, like a loose tooth in a giant's mouth. If only I had something bigger than these flakes of flint to use as a lever…
Where was I? On the steps of the Guild Hall gawping at the royal party, which is now below and somewhat to the side of where I am standing. The Queen, Margaret, is one of those people at whom, in a crowd, one cannot help looking. Of middling height for a woman, so shorter than most of the grandees and magnates around her, she yet exudes a charisma, a glow. She is thirty years old and in her prime of beauty, physique, intelligence. She stands straight, with her head, supported by a long ivory neck, tilted back a little, which gives prominence to a well-shaped chin. Her nose has a fineness, too, that softens the slight aquiline curve beneath the bridge. Her eyes are small, softly lidded, but piercing and blue, forever alert and seeking to hold and abash the eyes of those who would speak with her. Her fair hair is pulled up and under the velvet cap of a jewelled gold crown. Her purple gown is simple, though pearled and edged with gold, her slippers are cloth of gold too. Her hands are long, with long fingers, rarely still, and with many rings.
The contrast with her husband could not be more marked. He is only ten years older than her but looks twice that. Tall, thin, he wears a brown velvet cap, a brown worsted jerkin, grubby with spilled food, has haunted eyes, red-rimmed and moist, a shambling gait. His thin mouth is a brighter red than one would expect, but not, I think, painted. His only jewellery or sign of rank is a heavy gold chain in which S-shapes alternate with squares in which dull garnets are set and from which hangs a decorated cross with pearls set between the arms.
He is as different from the lords around him as he is from his wife. They all vie with each other like peacocks in slashed and scalloped doublets, jewellery and so forth, or more military accoutrements such as half-suits of armour inlaid with gold, jewelled daggers. These are the men we have heard the Yorkists rail against, the favourites of the Queen, who have ransacked the coffers of the realm for coin and taken the King's lands on whose rents the government of the realm depends.
'It's a fine piece,' the Queen calls out, 'my lord Beaumont has brought us.' Her voice is her least attractive feature, being shrill and often petulant. 'Onghrrree, come here and admire this very fine piece.'
Her accent is clearly French for all she has been England's queen for nearly fifteen years. 'Onghrrree' was the closest she chose to get to 'Henry'.
'But what can we do with it?' she went on. 'It is too big and cumbersome, is it not, to take to battle?'
She turned then to a lean, dark man whom I hail barely noticed, but now recognised to be a chamberlain of the Duke of Somerset's we had seen in the fortress of Guisnes, outside Calais.
'Mountfort, you know the place, would not my lord Somerset be able to knock a hole in the walls of Calais and get himself in with such a piece?'
'Yes, indeed, ma'am. If one could put it in his hands…'
But the King was now stammering and clearly wished to speak. For all they did so with a bad grace, in the way the young humour the elderly or even a precocious child, the small throng fell silent.
'Would not,' he managed at last, 'the French take advantage of such a hole or breach and follow my lord Somerset through it?'
Some of the lords nodded wisely at this, but the Queen was having none of it.
'Onghrrree, you're such a child in such matters. Run along and catch up on your reading, why don't you? Chaucer's translation of Boethius it is just now, is it not? "The Consolations of Philosophy"? So rewarding. I'm sure.'
And, following a sign from her fluttering fingertips, a couple of stewards took the shambling man by the elbows and led him away. One of these was tall and pale and wore a black h
at, the other was fat, short and greasy. I got to know them later – the tall one was John Clegger, the fat one Will Bent.
Meanwhile, the Queen, much like a child with a new toy, took her son's hand and trotted down the steps to the cannon. One of her lords picked up the boy and sat him astride the barrel, while the Queen fell into earnest conversation with another, no doubt discussing the deployment of this new weapon. The cold breeze smoothed her fine dress against her breasts so the nipples showed, and the lord, caressing the gun with one hand, grew red about the neck. At this point I felt a presence at my shoulder, followed by a heavy hand.
It is loose, really loose, my giant's tooth, give me another ten minutes and I think I'll be able to get it out.
There's someone at my shoulder. Mountfort. Bastard.
'I've seen you before somewhere, haven't I? Weren't you with those Oriental chappies who came to Guisnes?'
Chapter Twenty-Nine
A week or so after our talk about Roger Bacon – we were perhaps into April by then, for I remember it was raining sweetly, gently, but enough to keep us indoors – our conversation moved on to the second of Brother Peter's great Inglysshemen. In his upper room with his cased books around us and comfortable chairs to sit in, he began with an apologetic-attack on Avicenna whose version of Aristotle was based on the neo-Platonist Porphyry's interpretation of the Stagyrite. Following William of Occam, and referring to his writings and occasionally to Aristotle's Organon, he demonstrated how Aristotle's speculations regarding entities, essences or Universals had been corrupted by the neo-Platonists. For the latter, essences existed in the mind of God, and were presented corporeally, materially, on earth, in a corrupted, degraded way. Thus the idea of 'cat', for instance, and here my friend fondled the tabby beauty called Winnie, who often slept and purred on his lap, existed in the mind of God as a perfection of cats before cats were created, and no cat that had ever existed was a perfect cat, since corporeality always falls short of the perfection of the idea.
'But this,' he went on, fondling Winnie's throat and forehead, which was marked with a W, 'is to deny what is so markedly the most important feature of Winnie, her haecceity, the fact that she is individual, uniquely herself, unlike every other cat who has ever lived. And she has her own perfection – whether or not she is perfect cat is not for me to say, but certainly she is perfect Winnie.'
'Oh, come,' I replied, 'all cats have many features in common. Quite apart from their appearance and their anatomy, they follow patterns of behaviour which are identical. All wash in the same-way. All eat and drink alike. They all use the same techniques when hunting. I could go on and on, but you know what I mean. You cannot deny there exists an idea we can call 'catness' which includes all these qualities.'
A silence lengthened between us. Then: 'You have never been owned by a cat, have you?'
There was a coolness in his voice that irritated me almost as much as the stupid way in which he had framed the question. I was, perhaps, at that time more than usually easily annoyed – as convalescents often are.
'No,' I replied. 'I like them, be sure of that, but they do not travel well, and I have never remained in the same place for more than six months since I was eight years old. Apart from when I was in the Mountain where I learnt what wisdom I have.'
'Then allow me to speak with more certainty of being right concerning the nature of cats.'
'There you are,' I cried, and leant forward to tap his knee, at which Winnie leapt down to the floor and went to mew at the door. 'You speak of the nature of cats. By that you surely mean the essence, the idea that informs them all.'
'No. I simply mean the characteristics we light upon to distinguish them from other animals of a similar size and familiarity. But what I am asking you to consider is this. It is in the nature of cats to be different from each other. Believe me. And not through the corruption of matter by the fall of man or any other such cant but because that is the way cats are.'
It was clear that if a falling-out was to be avoided, we should remove the conversation to a higher plane.
'And you would apply this to everything, every phenomenon in the perceivable world?'
'I, Aristotle, and William of Occam, yes, we agree.'
A sunbeam pierced the rainclouds and fell briefly on the table-between us.
'Even to two motes of dust?'
'Observe,' said Brother Peter, 'no two motes of dust occupy the same space at the same time. In that at the very least they are different. And I believe if we could grind lenses sufficiently fine and line them up to study even the most PIKpo of particles we would find differences between them – PiKpo is the Greek word for very small.'
'I know very well what PiKpo means. What I am trying to say is we use words to define types. The word "cat" is meaningful. Do not such words indicate ideas, essences?'
'Types, yes. Essences, no. Though I would prefer to use the words "species" for "types" and "universals" for "essences".'
'I am still confused. You are simply swapping terms, but you prove nothing.'
'That is because you give too great a power to words. Words arc tools. Useful, but in themselves they do not contain truth. It is useful to say that beer is beer, by which we indicate a certain species of drink. It is useful because I can say, 'Would you like some beer?' and you will know thereby the sort of experience you are being offered. But this is not to say that there is an essence of beer, a perfect beer in the mind of God. Indeed not. Looked at another way, the word implies quite the opposite, for it allows us to say that this beer is different from that beer, this beer is better than that beer. Do you like this beer?'
We both drank. I allowed myself beer at the priory because Peter said it was weak and because the water was river water, there being no well on the islet.
'Yes,' I said. 'And it is different. You are right.'
'That is because this beer is made with hops of a particular species. Some of our Hussite brothers from Pils in Bohemia sent us a sack. But we must return now to William of Occam. Let me sum up what he had to say about words. There are terms of first intention, which is what we call words that are the names of individual things and which, in Inglysshe anyway, we qualify with an article: the cat at the door. This cat at that door. There is a cat at the door. And there are words used as terms of second intention, as universals, genera, or species. Cats like fish. Cats wash behind their ears when there-is rain about. A universal is thus a sign of many things, in this case the many things that make up a cat. Universals do not exist. The only existence they have is as qualities of individual cats.' 'Hum,' said I.
'Words used thus are merely tools,' he repeated, 'which we resort to for convenience' sake: they do not describe something that has a reality of its own. Only individual things have that reality. That is what Aristotle, properly understood, thought. That is what Occam meant when he said: "Essentia non sunt multiplicandai praeter necessitatem." A sharp dictum that slices through a lot of cant. Essences, universals should not be multiplied except out of necessity, and ultimately the only Necessary Universal is God, the Prime Mover. And.' here he lowered his voice for what he was about to utter was a burning matter, 'and he, or it, goes back a long, long way. Maybe all it was was a bang, a big bang like the bang of the Brazen Head, but with the motto "Time is. Time will be. Time might just as well go on for ever".'
He had gone beyond me now, as sometimes he did when a sort of divine afflatus, an ability to prophesy, fell on him. I tried to bring him back to earth. 'Is it not the case that your Friar Bacon was kept mute in the cells of the Franciscan order in Paris for many years, that Occam was imprisoned as a heretic, that even John Wycliffe might have been burnt but escaped?'
'But. my dear Ali… one moment while I let Winnie out. See? Like many cats once disturbed she will not resume her former comfort, but not all cats reach with their front paws to rattle the latch to signify they want to go out. There. They were… gunpowder. They threatened to blow apart the whole structure of our society. They undermi
ned the very foundations on which the authority of Church and king can be said to stand for they privileged, as inevitable consequences of their thought, individual observation, individual judgement; they revealed ways to the truth that did not depend on the authority of Mother Church nor the divine right of kings, but on knowledge obtained by practical everyday experience, as it was said those doctors of antiquity who relied on experience and observation did. the ones known as empirici. What gives a pope or emperor the right to rule? Why, if you take away frail and unsuited authority, custom, the opinion of the unlearned crowd, the display of apparent wisdom, if you take away the idea that a pope or king embodies, albeit corporeally and with earthly corruption, the essence or entity of priesthood and royalty as conceived in the mind of God, you are left with two things, two justifications for investing certain individuals and institutions with authority over the rest of us.' 'And they are?'
'The power to unleash force, death, torture and deprivation on those who would gainsay you.'
'That I understand. But brute force is scarcely justification.' 'Quite so. Nor, really, is the other.' 'And that is?'
'The willing consent of the ruled.'
'But,' said I, 'that does seem a justification. Better, anyway, than brute force.'
Brother Peter again became animated.
'It depends,' he said, and the words tumbled out like nuts from a sack, 'how that willing consent is obtained. If lies are fed to the people for generation after generation and never questioned, they become part of the unconsidered background to their mental lives, never truly looked at or examined, hardly even thought of, but controlling everything in the foreground of their thoughts. By these means, as powerful, as all-pervading but as unnoticed as those that cause an object released in air to drop, is the consent of the people contrived and maintained. And anything that threatens to undermine this invisible wall of belief, the way gunpowder can blow down a castle wall, must be treated as anathema, a burning matter.' He sighed, looked around, then up and out of the cloudy glazing of the window. 'It's stopped raining. Wycliffe, the last of our three, was feeling towards all this. But that is enough for now. Let us walk through our garden, admire the raindrops on the cherry-blossom, then perhaps feed our fish.'
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