In Gerbert’s day, these fears of Arab science had not yet crystallized into active clerical opposition, and they certainly did nothing to derail his brilliant career. After an appointment as personal tutor to the son of Otto, the Holy Roman emperor, he traveled to Rheims, where he taught logic and philosophy and later became the head of the cathedral school. Students from far-off corners of Europe flocked to his lectures. Yet just four years before his elevation to the papacy, Gerbert still evoked bitter opposition in some quarters for his worldly and unorthodox outlook. Philosophy, even what little was known of the classics, was still suspect. “The vicars of Peter and their disciples will not have for their teacher a Plato, a Virgil, or any other of that vile herd of philosophers,” the papal legate protested to no avail.35
The Arab-based learning of Gerbert faced more than just the doubts of the clergy and the fears of the superstitious masses. It was also precariously prone to error, misunderstanding, and at times some comic confusion. Gerbert and his students may have represented the brightest lights of their generation, but they were wholly unable to absorb or even comprehend the full reach of Arabic science, with its profound grounding in Aristotelian metaphysics and Greek, Persian, and Hindu learning in general. The most basic concepts of geometry posed a problem. Two of Gerbert’s leading pupils exchanged earnest letters around 1025 in an unsuccessful effort to discern just what the classical geometers might have meant by the interior angle of a triangle, a mystery they never resolved. Nor were they able to work out any geometric theorems. One reports his excitement at having acquired an astrolabe of his own. Stumped by such an elementary matter as the interior angle, they would have been completely unable to comprehend the geometric theory that lies behind the device.36
For this first generation touched ever so slightly by Arab learning, new devices like the astrolabe and the abacus, and new concepts like the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, remained just that—devices to be exploited rather than fully understood. These pioneers were far more concerned with practical use than with theoretical knowledge, more invested in the how than in the why. There was so far no serious attempt to master the underlying Arab knowledge of the heavens, developed over hundreds of years and captured so brilliantly in the polished face of the bronze astrolabe. Nor was there any real appreciation of the broader implications—for the church, for society, or for mankind in general—of this new learning from the East. They were content simply to try to determine the prayer times and make other basic measurements, much as the user of a modern pocket calculator or personal computer may produce accurate results without any real understanding of mathematics.
With much of Bath in ashes after the failed uprising against him, the victorious William the Red turned to Bishop John de Villula in 1088 to restore order and to reconstruct the town’s famous monastery. Eager to secure the loyalties of so able a retainer, the new monarch sold the city to John for five hundred pounds of silver and allowed him to move his see from the unfortified town of Wells to the relative safety of Bath and its surviving stone walls. John’s interest in Bath, however, extended well beyond simple political or military considerations. The town was closer to Worcester and the monasteries of the Severn basin, emerging centers of English learning that John found highly inviting.37
The ambitious cleric was also keen to take full advantage of the political turmoil all around. He seized the extensive holdings of Bath’s Benedictine monastery for his personal property and launched a bold program of civic reconstruction. He attracted fellow French physicians and scholars to the revitalized town, built a medical center, complete with a royal bathhouse, around the famous mineral springs, and generally restored a measure of past glory to what had once been a bustling Roman spa. Construction began on a grand cathedral as well as a school. Under the learned bishop’s patronage, the West Country soon found itself host to a small circle of scholar-monks aware of some of the newest ideas just beginning to reach Christendom from the Arab world.
An efficient administrator, Bishop John was generous to his lieutenants and their families. He took a strong interest in the upbringing of Adelard, whose family’s position would have given him direct access to both the latest intellectual trends coming from France and the complex construction techniques used by the architects and stonemasons to build the great cathedral and other structures now taking shape under John’s direction. The bishop also provided for Adelard’s early schooling at the Benedictine monastery before securing his advanced education abroad.38
Adelard certainly justified Bishop John’s confidence, and he threw himself into his studies in France despite his considerable doubts about the worthiness of “the moderns.” At Tours, Adelard tells us in On the Same and the Different, he first learned of the constellations from a famous wise man. The experience sends him scurrying to a quiet locale beyond the city limits, where he can pause amid the smell of the flowers and the steadying rhythm of the flowing Loire River and reflect on the enormity of what he has just learned. There he has a mystical vision—one cast in imagery familiar to the readers of his day, who would have recognized the form from Boethius’s popular The Consolation of Philosophy—that sets him on his intellectual journey.39 Two women—one proffering wealth, fame, and power; the other, the mistress of the seven liberal arts—appear before him in a struggle for his heart and soul. Despite earthly temptation, Adelard declares himself a firm partisan of learning and knowledge, and he emerges from his dream more determined than ever to master his studies. “When I had thoroughly read one lesson, I desired the next with a greater passion, as if the one I had read would bring no benefit if what remained was lacking, hoping from this regime that I could keep in check my youth and console my old age.”40
His decision appears confirmed during a trip home from Salerno, in southern Italy, an important early European center of science and medicine where he has gone in search of knowledge and understanding. On the road, Adelard finds himself locked in weighty discussion with “a certain Greek philosopher … who, more than anything else, could talk about the art of medicine and the nature of things.”41 The teacher challenges his new disciple with a difficult question: If a hole were opened all the way through the earth, would a stone tossed in fall out the other side? Adelard’s answer—no, it would come to rest at the earth’s center—appeases the wandering philosopher, who notes sagely that study of the liberal arts is never wasted. The same journey also took Adelard to Syracuse, on the formerly Muslim island of Sicily and once home to Archimedes. He would later praise the mathematical skills of his local host, Bishop William, and dedicate On the Same and the Different to him.
Adelard’s first known work also introduces what was to become his favorite literary convention—an unnamed nephew who serves as intellectual straight man and foil for his own unorthodox views, a character Adelard revisits and refines with greater effect in later writings. Where the younger man stands for traditional Christian learning—rigid, unquestioning, ossified—Adelard increasingly presents himself as the champion of unbridled intellectual inquiry and reason. Where the nephew remains rooted in place, our hero is prepared to go to any length to find what he is seeking. Adelard uses this same literary device to put forward controversial views not so much as his own thinking but as responses to the ceaseless demands of his impatient kinsman.
On the Same and the Different, written when Adelard was in his early to mid-thirties, concludes with his defense against his nephew’s allegations that his early intellectual wanderings in southern Europe were a waste of time. “Now, dearest nephew, I have sufficiently explained to you the cause of my winding journey to teachers of different regions, so that I might both lift from myself the burden of your unjust accusation, and urge the passion for the same studies on you, so that when the others display their riches in many ways, we may simply set forth knowledge. Good-bye and judge for yourself whether I have disputed rightly.”42
Despite his uncommon taste for intellectual adventure, the Adelard who emerges from the pages
of On the Same and the Different is very much a man of his times, albeit one well versed in the contemporary teachings of the leading schools of northern France and wholly at ease with the day’s thorniest scientific and philosophical problems and questions. As a result, the book offers a compelling snapshot of the state of Western education at the beginning of the twelfth century, before encounters with Arab learning became more common. But even Adelard’s unquestionable talent and seemingly limitless curiosity alone were not enough to break the bonds on the Christian imagination imposed by early church fathers.
For more than six hundred years, the authoritative teachings of St. Augustine had directed the Christian faithful to see only God’s mystery in an unknowable world around them. Everyday life was imbued with allegorical meaning: The moon represented the church, for it reflected the divine light; the wind symbolized the Holy Spirit; and the number eleven stood for sin because it “transgressed” the number ten, which clearly represented the Commandments.43 In fact, numbers in general were valued more for their scriptural meaning than as simple units of counting or calculation. Three clearly represented the Trinity, while four stood for the Creation; their sum, seven, revealed “perfection.” This, in turn, explains the tendency of religious imagery—angels, seals, trumpets—to come in sevens.44 When occasional tentative efforts were made to adopt the technological novelties starting to trickle in from the Arab world—the astrolabe, or the water clock that Caliph Harun al-Rashid of The Thousand and One Nights fame sent as a gift, along with an elephant, to Charlemagne in 801—the devices were either dismissed as curiosities, ignored outright, or condemned as black magic. As far as medieval Christians were concerned, God was the sole determining force in daily life; there was no reason to explore “the nature of things”—and thus no science.
St. Augustine of Hippo, born to a Christian mother and a pagan father, diagnosed the soul-damning “disease” of curiosity back in the fifth century. “Men proceed to investigate the phenomena of nature—the part of nature not beyond us—though the knowledge is of no value to them: for they wish to know simply for the sake of knowing.”45 Upon his conversion to Christianity in 387 while a professor of rhetoric at the imperial court in Milan, Augustine forswore both art and science: “Certainly the theaters no longer attract me, nor do I care to know the course of the stars.”46 Paul’s Letter to the Galatians had already dismissed the tracking of time as too worldly for true believers: “Now that you have come to know God, or rather to be known by God, why do you turn back again to the weak and miserable elemental principles, to which you desire to be in bondage all over again? You observe days, months, seasons, and years” (Galatians 4:9–10). Many Christians had clung to Augustine’s one-dimensional vision of life ever since. Earthly existence was but a shadow of Christ’s eternal kingdom, and any attempt to delve into the mysteries of existence could only lead to error and sin.
Accounts of natural phenomena were presented as moralizing tales, fables pumped full of allegory for the betterment of the soul. One popular example can be found in the medieval bestiaries, collections of written texts and illustrations designed to edify humans rather than to describe nature. Stags, lions, and birds, even insects and rocks, were all proof of God’s wisdom and mercy and, if properly studied, offered behavioral advice for the pious. “The Lord … created different creatures with different natures not only for the sustenance of men, but also for their instruction, so that through the same creatures we may contemplate not only what may be useful in the body, but also what may be useful in the soul,” explains the English theologian Thomas of Chobham, in a guide to effective preaching.47 The development of these works in the Middle Ages mirrors perfectly the way Christendom reworked what it retained of classical knowledge to meet its own spiritual needs.48 In this moral taxonomy, the stag was loyal; the fox, a heretic; the bee, industrious; and the panther, sweet and beloved.49 By discarding the recognizable elements of natural science, the authors of the bestiaries were imitating—perhaps unwittingly but just as surely—Augustine’s determination to ignore the course of the stars.
Even where Augustine had some rare words of praise for the natural world—“All nature, in so far as it is nature, is good”—they were totally disregarded by his devoted readers.50 In this way, the early medieval church benefited from the gloss of intellectual respectability provided by Augustine while still maintaining its general contempt for the philosophers. Augustine drew his own inspiration from Plato and, more important, from a school of thought developed in the third century A.D. by the Greek philosopher Plotinus and his successors. Since then, their ideas had predominated in all three leading centers of philosophy—Alexandria, Rome, and the Athenian Academy. Early Christian thinkers like Augustine helped introduce selective elements of these teachings into church doctrine. Crucially, this process saw the formulation of two powerful notions that would reign unchallenged for centuries: the unbridgeable distinction between the saintly kingdom of heaven and the “vile” existence of earthly life; and the inability of man to apprehend the universe through his rational faculties—that is, through experience, including the practice of science.
The sixth-century Topographica Christiana, written by the monk and former merchant sailor Cosmas Indicopleustes, presented the era’s first real cosmological schema, one that reflected the general tenor of the day. The title of its first book leaves little to the imagination: “Against Those, Who While Wishing to Profess Christianity, Think and Imagine like the Pagans That the Heaven Is Spherical.”51 No less an authority than Isidore of Seville took the same stance, although somewhat less stridently: “The globe derives its name from the roundness of the circle, because it resembles a wheel; hence a small wheel is called a ‘small disk.’ Indeed, the Ocean that flows around it on all sides encompasses its furthest reaches in a circle,” Isidore earnestly informed his countless readers.52
The good bishop’s description—“It is divided into three parts, one is called Asia, the second Europe, the third Africa”53—was the basis for the long-running popularity of the so-called T-O maps of the world, in which the Mediterranean was depicted as a T, with Asia above it and Europe and Africa on either side of the stem; a great circle of water, the O, provided the map’s outer boundaries. Holy Jerusalem, revered burial place of Christ, generally stood at the center. Those philosophers even willing to contemplate the existence of lands in the southern hemisphere, known since antiquity as the antipodes, saw little need to depict such an “absurd” region, where men—if there were any, that is—would have to walk upside down and endure life without the possibility of Christian redemption. Perhaps the only thing as absurd to us as the notion of an uninhabitable and unsanctified southern hemisphere, where trees would grow downward and the rain and snow fall upward, is the fact that the most serious thinkers of the age once debated it. Still, such controversies became a staple of medieval intellectual life, up there with the famous puzzlers of Thomas Aquinas and his fellow scholastics: How many angels could dance on the head of a pin? And what of the cannibal? How could he arise from the dead to face Judgment Day once he had consumed enough human parts that he was no longer himself but a composite of his victims, who would likewise be resurrected?54
The seeming unwillingness on the part of medieval Christendom to formulate or even imagine laws of nature gave rise to an obsessive fear of change and bouts of general hysteria amid the era’s wars, famine, rampant disease, and periodic predictions that the end of the world was finally at hand.55 The social chaos unleashed by the sudden appearance in Europe of the black death, in the mid-fourteenth century, offers a powerful case in point: Unfamiliar with any real notion of contagion, hygiene, or epidemiology in general, the Christian West was gripped by a frenzy of violence induced by the mass casualties of the plague. The French poet Guillaume de Machaut was so traumatized by his experience of the disease that he, like others of his day, refused to even utter the words “plague” or “black death” and instead took refuge in the more clinical, but t
hen uncommon, euphemism of epydimie.56 “Nor was there any physician or doctor who really knew the cause or origin, or what it was (nor was there any remedy), yet this malady was so great that it was called an epidemic,” says Guillaume in his Judgment of the King of Navarre.57 To the horror of many established churchmen, flagellant movements, seeking to regain God’s favor through atonement and the bloody scourging of the body, flourished, and apocalyptic tales ran wild. The burning of Jews—accused of poisoning public drinking water, practicing witchcraft, and otherwise spreading the disease to destroy Christian Europe—was widespread in Germany, southern France, and Spain, while immigrant Catalans bore the brunt of similar public outrage and terror in Sicily.58
Many years before, on the final day of the year 999, Gerbert d’Aurillac, pioneer of abacus and astrolabe, found himself at the vortex of just such a storm. Now Pope Sylvester II, he was to officiate over midnight mass at St. Peter’s in Rome on the eve of the millennium, a day some believers were certain would let slip the Beast of the Apocalypse. After all, the book of Revelation says, “And he cast him into the abyss, and closed and sealed it over him, that he should deceive the nations no more, until the thousand years should be finished. And after that he must be let loose for a little while” (20:3). Others yearned to be reunited with Christ and hurried to sell their possessions so they might travel to Jerusalem to witness the Last Judgment.59 Sylvester and other senior churchmen did their best to counter these prophecies of doom, but the simple village priests, peasants, and townsfolk were wary of the learned pontiff, with his strange foreign ways and newfangled ideas. Sylvester’s standing was further undermined by another prophecy, namely a coming alliance between a pope and the Antichrist.60 That the end of days had not arrived as expected on New Year’s morning was of little comfort; it was, many suspected, just a matter of time.
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