Heretics and Heroes

by Thomas Cahill

  The fluctuating phenomena of physical life, according to Plato, are only minimally real. We can never hope to understand them from the inside, for they are relative, evanescent, and mortal, here today, gone tomorrow. If we are embarked upon the ascent to wisdom, however, these sensible things can lead us upward—from the merely material world to the absolute spiritual world on which all fleeting phenomena depend. What is more fragile than the momentary existence of a flower? But we can come to understand the truth that a flower “can be beautiful only insofar as it partakes of absolute beauty.”

  The phenomena of our world, in Plato’s teaching, are there to lead us to the absolute realities of which they are but partial, momentary expressions. These realities, which Plato called the Forms, are Beauty, Truth, Justice, Unity (or Oneness), and, highest of all, Goodness, since the other Forms are themselves but partial expressions of the ultimate reality, the Good.

  Human beings are bizarre combinations of the physical and the spiritual. Each of us is like a charioteer who must control two steeds: one material, instinctive, unruly, and seeking only its own low pleasures; the other spiritual, brimming with nobility, honor, and courage. The charioteer’s identity survives death, for it is spiritual, the rational principle, the soul. But the steed that is his body must perish.

  Augustine is able to identify Plato’s Good as the God of the Jews. God, incorporeal, existing outside time, is summum bonum, the Ultimate Good of Plato, containing all perfection. The human soul, though created by God and existing in time, is a spiritual principle and thus immortal. Translating Plato’s philosophy to the context of Christian belief, Augustine finds that “out of a certain compassion for the masses God Most High bent down and subjected the authority of the divine intellect even to the human body itself”—in the incarnation of Jesus, the God-Man—so that God might recall “to the intelligible world souls blinded by the darkness of error and befouled by the slime of the body.”

  Note that “slime.” For both Plato and Augustine, human life is a gloomy business, beset by the dross of meaningless matter, mitigated only by the hard-won illumination of that one-in-a-million character, the true philosopher (for Plato), or by the illumination that God bestows on a few blessed individuals (for Augustine). On our own, in Plato’s view, we are capable only of misunderstanding everything important. On our own, in Augustine’s view, we are capable only of sin. But to some few, God has gratuitously granted grace that enables them to see the light and choose the good. They are the ones who will live with God eternally; all the others (most of humanity, including all the unbaptized, even unbaptized babies, and probably you, dear Reader) will spend eternity in Hell.

  This is tough stuff; and no wonder it prompted some thoughtful medieval Christians to look for a path that might soften the grim austerities of the Platonic-Augustinian worldview. In the dissenting works of Aristotle, Plato’s most famous pupil, they discovered a foundation on which they could build an airier, more open structure.

  For Aristotle, there is no world of Forms beyond the world we know and see. The Forms are indeed universal ideas; they do not, however, exist apart somewhere but only in things themselves and in our minds. There is no absolute Beauty in some other world; there is only beauty in, say, the woman that I happen to see before me at this moment and in the idea of beauty that I and other human beings have in our minds. Thomas Aquinas championed this same approach, which came to be called moderate realism, as opposed to the position of Plato and Augustine, which came to be called extreme realism—the assertion that what is really real is not anything we perceive with our senses but the essences that exist elsewhere.

  Not eschewing physical realities, as did Plato, Aristotle was far more open to considering seriously the inner workings of material phenomena. His observations of the natural world, therefore, form the basis of much of what we would deem the science of ancient and medieval thinkers. Indeed, what we call science today was for Aristotle and his followers a perfectly legitimate branch of knowledge that they called natural philosophy. For both Aristotle and Aquinas, the unaided human mind is capable of perceiving reality as it is—an assertion that the pessimistic duo of Plato and Augustine have nothing but contempt for.

  Beyond these very basic differences between the Platonic-Augustinian and the Aristotelian-Thomistic schools, the gulf between the two great philosophical syntheses continues to widen, as each embraces opposed positions in many areas of thought. Without elaborating on these oppositions here, we may remind ourselves that the two schools are nonetheless both designated as species of realism and that other positions are possible. Against realism of any variety stands the philosophical school of idealism, which asserts that what Plato calls the Forms are to be found only in the human mind. All we have are the workings of our minds—our ideas—and, according to idealists, it is illegitimate (if tempting) for philosophers (or anyone) to speak of anything outside the mind itself. Idealists of more than one variety are also called nominalists, those who assert that the concepts (or nomina, names) we attribute to the physical universe—lion, chair, star—are convenient labels without ultimate meaning. The most frequently encountered nominalism of our own day is called logical positivism.

  I mean here merely to nod in the direction of such controversies, which could easily fill a book I have no wish to write. Though the centuries-long game of philosophical tennis may excite you at first, absorb and draw you into its ups and downs (and its sometimes surprising upsets), its mesmerizing back-and-forths can lull you into a kind of trance and finally threaten to become a serious bore. Let’s just keep at the back of our minds the poc-poc of the philosophical tennis ball as it hits the meshed rackets of our sweating champions and turn our attention, rather, to a few of the unsettling events that in the course of the late thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries signal that we are on the road to the Renaissance and the Reformation.

  1 With the rise of scientific materialism, the pendulum swung back in the Aristotelian direction and has pretty much remained there, though there are those among us who still worship at the altar of Plato. The recent pope, Benedict XVI, for instance, identified himself pretty openly as a Platonic Augustinian.

  INTRODUCTION

  DRESS REHEARSALS FOR PERMANENT CHANGE

  Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar-school; and whereas, before, our forefathers had no other books but the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and, contrary to the king, his crown, and dignity, thou hast built a paper-mill!

  Henry VI, Part 2

  1282: THE SICILIAN VESPERS

  “Moranu li Franchiski!” screamed the Sicilians in their peculiar dialect. “Death to the Frenchmen!”

  A large, festive crowd had gathered outside the Church of the Holy Spirit, a half mile southeast of the Sicilian capital of Palermo. It was early evening of Easter Monday 1282, and the prayer service of vespers was soon to commence inside the church. An unwelcome contingent of uniformed French officials, representatives of the hated occupation forces, showed up, possibly a little tipsy on spring wine, and attempted to consort with some of the pretty, young Sicilian women in the crowd. Sicilians were a historic mixture of prehistoric peoples—called Sicani and Siculi—ancient Greeks, Orthodox Byzantines, Italian mainlanders, North African Arabs and other “Saracens,” and the Northmen (or Normans) who were originally Norwegian Vikings. But the one thing they all knew they were not was Franchiski. The Frenchmen claimed to be checking for weapons, while surreptitiously fondling female breasts. One sergeant made the mistake of petting a young bride whose outraged husband carried a knife, which was swiftly put to use. The other Frenchmen, attempting to close ranks against the crowd, found rocks raining down on them, then blades slashing into them, as the Sicilians rose in a body.

  “Moranu li Franchiski!” rang out as the bells of the church proclaimed that vespers was about to begin. Their message was taken up by bells throughout Palermo, as was the cry “Moranu li Fra
nchiski!” All Sicily rose in revolt. “By the time the furious anger at their insolence had drunk its fill of blood,” in the words of one early chronicler, “the French had given up to the Sicilians not only their ill-gotten riches but their lives.” Many thousands lay dead throughout the island, two thousand French corpses in Palermo alone.

  This was no spontaneous uprising, however; it had been planned well in advance by an international consortium. King Peter III of Aragon just happened to be sailing nearby at the head of a fleet he had constructed for a crusade against Islam—or at least this is what he had told the pope when the pope expressed concern about Peter’s warlike preparations. Supposedly changing course on their way to North Africa and landing instead in Sicily, Peter’s forces were welcomed by the Sicilians, and he was brought with great dispatch to the Palermo cathedral, where he was crowned King Peter I of Sicily. In this way the Sicilians hoped to rid themselves of the cruel French despot Charles of Anjou, whom the pope had forced upon them. Peter’s wife, Constance, was a Hohenstaufen and sole legitimate heir to Frederick Barbarossa, late, great Holy Roman Emperor of the West, whose territories included not only the German-speaking lands, the Low Countries, and Spain but much of the Italian peninsula.

  The popes, who had invented the notion of a Holy Roman Emperor of the West, had come to regret investing so much power in the hands of one man. They now preferred the French royals as counterweights to the Holy Roman Hohenstaufens; thus their support of Charles. What Martin IV, pope at the time and himself a Frenchman, did not know was that Spanish Peter had built his fleet with funds sent by Michael Paleologos, Roman Emperor of the East, from his capital of Constantinople. For, as Paleologos knew, there was also another fleet, sitting in the Sicilian harbor of Messina, built by Charles for the purpose of invading Constantinople. This fleet the Sicilians set afire in their island-wide rampage, dashing Charles’s bellicose intentions.

  The pope, who had excellent sources of information, also knew of the existence of the fleet at Messina but had been assured by Charles that it was in aid of his crusade against Islam. Oh, all right then, said the pope, so long as you don’t intend to use it against the Eastern emperor, whom I hope to lure into an ecumenical agreement, thus reuniting our divided churches. Whether reunification was to be achieved through talk (à la Pope Martin) or through conquest (à la Charles), the formal schism between East and West, little more than two centuries old, still looked healable to many, if not most, European Christians. After the Sicilian Vespers, however, there would be but one more attempt to reunite Christendom—at the Council of Florence in 1439—and by then failure was the expectable outcome.

  Though the bishops of East and West found themselves in substantial agreement at Florence, the monks and the ordinary Christians of the East firmly rejected reunion. Far more conscious of nationality than they had once been (if not so well versed in theological abstractions), they felt they would be giving up too much autonomy should the proposed reunion go forward. This meant that Christianity was to exist in the world in two permanent forms, Orthodox and Catholic, and that these would remain significantly different in fairly obvious ways. Such divergence could only encourage speculation that there might be even more diversity in the future—almost as much diversity, perhaps, as was to be found among the various nation-states then forming inchoately.

  As A. N. Wilson has remarked, “The long dominance of the island [of Sicily] by Charles of Anjou was over. Charles, the most powerful figure in the Mediterranean, had been on the point of invading Constantinople. Egged on by a succession of French, or Francophile, popes, he had hoped not merely to regain Byzantium for the West, but also to subjugate the Eastern Orthodox Church to the authority of the papacy. With the Sicilian Vespers, there died any possibility of a universal papacy dominating Christendom. The foundations had been laid for the phenomena that shaped modern Europe—the development of nation states and, ultimately, of Protestantism.”

  The story of the Sicilian Vespers—and of the impossibility of successfully imposing French punctiliousness on Sicilian fluidity— has long claimed a hold on the European imagination. It was referred to in the fourteenth century by Boccaccio, whom we shall have the pleasure of consulting next. In the nineteenth century it helped fuel Italian nationalism to such an extent that Verdi wrote an opera about it. Perhaps most famously, it crept slyly into a sixteenth-century conversation in which the bluff King Henry IV of France—who, as he said, “ruled with weapon in hand and arse in the saddle”—boasted to the Spanish ambassador of his fearsome martial capabilities. “I will breakfast in Milan, and I will dine in Rome,” roared the king ahead of a planned campaign.

  “Then,” said the ambassador, smiling pleasantly, “Your Majesty will doubtless be in Sicily in time for vespers.”

  1353: HOW TO SURVIVE THE BLACK DEATH

  “It’s only human to have compassion for the afflicted—a good thing for everyone to have, especially anyone who once needed comfort and found it in someone else; and speaking of such need, if anyone ever needed compassion or appreciated it or delighted in it, I’m the guy.”

  So begins Giovanni Boccaccio in the prologue to his revolutionary collection of streetwise stories, the Decameron, written midway through the fourteenth century. A lifelong admirer of the elevated diction of Dante’s truly divine Comedy, Boccaccio nonetheless makes scant attempt to imitate the sublime poetry of his literary hero. Though Dante composed his masterpiece in medieval Tuscan (which would become the chief font of modern Italian), the model for his written style was Virgil, most exalted of all Latin poets, so that Dante’s tightly controlled Italian often owes more to the ancient Romans than to any of his Florentine contemporaries. The Tuscan prose of Boccaccio’s characters—starting right here at the outset, in the voice of Boccaccio’s own persona—can be so flatly realistic, so accidental, so resolutely conversational that it may appear at times almost to echo occasional monologues in The Sopranos. For readers who have previously immersed themselves in Dante’s precision, a dip into what one critic calls Boccaccio’s “decidedly non-canonical vocabulary” can be a shock. The meanderings of Boccaccio’s characters, the ladies and gentlemen of the late Middle Ages, sometimes stray closer to the denizens of low-life New Jersey than to anything Virgilian.

  But what flights of hilarity Boccaccio’s earthiness brings forth! The scamps and pirates, the schemers and adventurers, the calculating merchants and their inventively adulterous wives, the priests and nuns with nothing but sex on the brain, the representatives of law and order who fail to uphold either or anything else—all these assorted scapegraces (along with the very occasional saint or sage) dance through Boccaccio’s pages, entertaining centuries of readers in a series of witty, quickly moving novelle (brief tales or short stories).

  If Dante’s hallowed Comedy, his imaginative visit to the world beyond the grave, must be ranked as the greatest of all Italian literary feats, Boccaccio’s Decameron (or Ten Days, in which a hundred rollicking stories are told by seven beautiful young women and three handsome young men for their mutual entertainment) surely rates as a close second. But the latter work, only about thirty years younger than the earlier one, is so different in tone as to give any reader pause. Why does Boccaccio, fellow Florentine, unparalleled admirer and interpreter of Dante, sound so different from his acknowledged master?

  One could point to the difference in subject matter (Dante treats of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, while Boccaccio confines himself to this life) and to the difference in diction and effect between poetry and prose, but neither of these considerations takes us far enough. The deep difference between the two maestros lies in their attitudes toward life itself, Dante always grave and serious, Boccaccio cynical and … disappointed. Boccaccio is so imaginative, so creative that he can use his cynicism—his worldly-wise pose of “Well, what did you expect?”—to mask his disappointment. Dante, despised and persecuted by a corrupt pope, then suffering lifelong political banishment from his beloved Florence, knew all too well t
he injustices wrought by both church and state; Boccaccio expects less of Florentines, as well as of all human beings, than does Dante. Whereas Dante’s tripartite vision gives us as discriminating a map as we shall ever have of the moral universe and of the earthly choices we must make if we are to reach God, Boccaccio repeatedly advises us to snatch whatever pleasure we can as it presents itself, for we may not be given a second chance.

  Is there a funnier scene in all of anticlerical literature than the one in which the grand abbess Madonna Usimbalda of Lombardy, learning from her tattletale nuns that the novice Isabetta has a man in her cell, dresses in the dark and sweeps out of her bedroom into the nighttime darkness of the unlit convent? Unfortunately for Usimbalda, who was “good and holy in the opinion of her nuns and of everyone who knew her,” she has failed to realize that in her haste she has draped over her head not her veil but the pants of the priest who sleeps with her. The abbess’s indignant castigation of Isabetta quickly loses steam as the novice and then the other nuns notice the pants on the abbess’s head, their “suspenders dangling down on either side of her face.” When, however, the realistic abbess realizes what headdress she is sporting and that “there was no way of concealing her own sin from the nuns, who were all staring at her with eyes popping right out of their heads,” concludes Boccaccio’s storyteller,