From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation

by Umberto Eco

  Modern philology has developed techniques of identification to establish whether an Ob is identical to an Oa, but these procedures presuppose that we know the properties Oa has or should have. Now, the techniques by which we establish the characteristics of Oa are the same as those by which we identify Ob. In other words, in order to say that a reproduction of the Mona Lisa is not authentic, somebody has to have analyzed and authenticated the original Mona Lisa using the same techniques used to decide that the reproduction of it is different. For modern philology the traditional evidence that the Mona Lisa in the Louvre was put there, let’s say, by Leonardo right after painting it is not enough. This fact must be proven by means of documents, but for these documents too the question of their authentication must be posed. And if there is any doubt about the documents, the presumed original of the Mona Lisa is analyzed to decide whether its material and morphological attributes lead us to conclude that it was painted by Leonardo.

  Our modern culture, therefore, must assume that (i) a document authenticates traditional information and not vice versa; (ii) authenticity means historical primitivity and authorial originality (this is the only way to establish the priority of Oa over Ob); and (iii) primitivity and originality are established by considering the object as a sign of its origin, and the techniques of authentication described in section 5.2 are applied to this end.

  These checks call for scientific and historical knowledge of which the Middle Ages had only a vague and ambiguous grasp, for reasons intimately connected with its concept of historical truth.

  5.5. Historical Truth, Tradition, and Auctoritas

  The Middle Ages could not conceive of a document that would authenticate traditional data because the only reliable form of documentation it possessed was traditional data.

  The Middle Ages could only argue based on the testimony of the past, and the past had chronological abscissas that were quite vague. The medieval procedure of recourse to authority has the form of a synecdoche: an author or a single text stands for the globality of tradition and always functions outside of any context. Le Goff (1964: 397–402) has remarked that the medieval form of wisdom is folkloristic, and is symbolized by the proverb. Feudal law and practice are sanctioned by custom.

  The same Le Goff cites a 1252 lawsuit between the servants of the chapter of Notre Dame de Paris in Orly and the canons: the canons say the servants must pay tithes because tradition requires it. The oldest inhabitant of the region is consulted and he says that it has been that way “a tempore a quo non extat memoria” (“from time immemorial”). Another witness, the archdeacon Jean, affirms that he has seen certain ancient documents in the chapter which attest to the existence of the custom, and the chapter has put its faith in these documents out of respect for the antiquity of the writing. No one of course thought to check the existence, let alone the nature, of the documents: it was sufficient to hear they existed, for centuries.

  For the Middle Ages, the problem of tradition, in historiography and hermeneutics, is that it does not have to be reconstructed: it is already given from the beginning; it must simply be recognized and interpreted in the proper way.

  Apart from the data of tradition, only one document is recognized, and it is the text (translated) of the Holy Scriptures. Other documents are not distinguished as original and nonoriginal: they have either been handed down or they don’t exist. If they have been handed down, they are true only insofar as they agree or can be made to agree with the truth of Scripture: “Certus enim sum, si quid dico quod Sacrae Scripturae absque dubio contradicat, quia falsum est” (“For I am certain that, if I say anything which clearly opposes Holy Scripture, it is false”) (Anselm, Cur Deus homo, 1, 18, PL 153, 38).

  Still, the problem is not so simple, because, in order to establish the truth of Scripture, it must be correctly interpreted. After Origen proposed the principle of the complementarity of the two testaments and their parallel reading, the problem arose of how to legitimate their interpretations. On the one hand a correct interpretation must legitimize the Church, but on the other what decides whether and how an interpretation is correct is the interpretive tradition, legitimized by the Church as the guardian of truth: an embarrassing situation, and the origin of every theory of the hermeneutical circle (see Compagnon 1979).

  This is why the Middle Ages must amass a treasury of authoritative opinions, or auctoritates. In the course of the philosophical and theological debate, authority materializes in the form of quotes that become “authentic” opinions and therefore authoritative in themselves. They are clarified, when they are obscure, by their glosses, but these too must come from an “authentic” author.

  As Grabmann remarks (1906–1911), when it came to the explanation of Scripture, historical grammatical interpretations or independent research on the concepts and connections of the biblical text carried no weight; what counted were above all collections of passages extrapolated from the Fathers of the Church. Pre-Scholastic theological literature “is placed under the sign of reproduction,” and appeals to florilegia and catenae. But little by little the original manuscripts of the Fathers are neglected or lost, and their opinions survive only in the florilegia. When we consider that this process occurs through free transcriptions and translations, we can see how the modern idea of authenticity could find itself in considerable difficulty.

  Furthermore, the florilegia are arranged for the most part in alphabetical order, which excludes the kind of systematic classification that might have made for comparison and discussion of contradictory passages. With the twelfth century, the florilegia and traditional opinions are supplemented by sententiae modernorum magistrorum, even though these so-called modern masters are such only by academic convention (as authors of glossae magistrales), and Thomas often dares to contradict them (“haec glossa magistralis est et parum valet,” [“this is a master’s annotation and has little value”] In I Timeum 5, 2).12

  To the anarchy of the authorities, the Middle Ages proved incapable of opposing a practice of verification of historical originality. Scrutiny (and the dialectical discussion intended to resolve contradictions) was not philological but philosophical. Hence the decision, asserted without hypocrisy in the twelfth century, to treat authorities with a pinch of salt. “Authority has a nose of wax, in other words, it can be bent in different directions” [“Auctoritas cereum habet nasum, id est in diversum potest flexi sensum,” Alain de Lille, De fide catholica 1, 30]). Authorities must be accepted, but, given their insufficiencies and contradictions, they must be interpreted reverently, exponere reverenter, and, as Chenu notes (1950: 122), we should make no mistake over the meaning of this expression: what we are dealing with are small but efficacious adjustments, fine-tuning, rectifications to the meaning of the text.

  5.6. On the Shoulders of Giants

  Bernard of Chartres, as we know, supplied the moral and historical justification for these interpretive liberties, with his famous aphorism that compared contemporary thinkers to dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants.13 But the same idea (if not the metaphor of the dwarves) appears six centuries earlier in Priscian, and this brings us to the question of whether the aphorism is modest or presumptuous in its intent. In fact it can be interpreted in the sense that what we know today, though we may know it somewhat better, is what the ancients have taught us, or, alternatively, that, however much we owe to the ancients, we know far more than they did. A similar aphorism, that appears in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (Bernardus Carnotensis) and speaks of gleaners following in the footsteps of the reapers, leaves no room for doubt, because the gleaners gather only the gleanings left behind by the reapers. Where Priscian stood remains ambiguous: for him it seems that the moderns are more perspicacious than the ancients, though not necessarily more learned.14

  But perhaps we should be debating not the meaning of the aphorism but how it has been interpreted in various historical periods. What does William of Conches mean when, commenting on the aphorism, he declares that the moderns are �
�perspicaciores” (“more perspicacious”) than the ancients? It is no accident that, taking Newton as his point of departure, Merton (1965) sees the aphorism as decisive in the modern debates over influence, collaboration, borrowing, and plagiarism. But the notion of plagiarism, and the idea of staking one’s life on being or not being the first to see something, can exist only in a period in which what is prized in every field of discourse is originality, or in the spirit of that modernity characterized by Maritain with the telling formula to the effect that, after Descartes, every thinker becomes a “debutant in the absolute.” In the Middle Ages that was not how it was at all.

  In the Middle Ages what was true was true because it had been upheld by a previous authority, to the point that, if one suspected that the authority had not espoused the new idea, one proceeded to manipulate the evidence, because authority has a nose of wax. It comes naturally to the Middle Ages to employ the aphorism, because the mode of discussion typical of the period is the commentary or the gloss. One must always take a giant as one’s point of departure. But it is up for grabs whether a medieval thinker using the aphorism is vindicating the superiority of the moderns or arguing for the continuity of knowledge.

  To read the aphorism in a Hegelian sense we do not have to wait for Hegel, but neither must we assume that Bernard thought like Newton. Newton knew full well that, since Copernicus, a revolution in the universe was under way; Bernard didn’t even know that revolutions in knowledge were possible.

  Indeed, since one of the recurrent themes of medieval culture is the progressive senescence of the world, Bernard’s aphorism could be interpreted to mean that, given that mundus senescit (the world is getting older and older), and inexorably at that, the best we can do is to play up some of the advantages of this tragedy.15

  On the other hand, Bernard, following Priscian, uses the aphorism in the context of a debate on grammar, in which what is at stake are the concepts of knowledge and imitation of the style of the ancients. Nothing to do then with notions like the cumulative nature and progress of theological and scientific knowledge. Still, Bernard (our witness is still John of Salisbury) scolded those among his pupils who slavishly imitated the ancients, saying that the problem was not writing like them, but learning from them to write as well as they did, so that, in the future, “someone will be inspired by us as we are inspired by them.”16 Therefore, though not in the same terms as we read it today, an appeal to independence and courage was nonetheless present in his aphorism. And it is not without significance that John of Salisbury takes up the aphorism no longer in the context of grammar but in a chapter in which he is discussing Aristotle’s De interpretatione.

  A few years earlier Adelard of Bath had inveighed against a generation that considered acceptable only the discoveries made by the ancients, and in the coming century Siger of Brabant will declare that auctoritas by itself is not enough, because we are all men exactly like those we are inspired by, and therefore “why should we not devote ourselves to rational research like them?” (Beonio-Brocchieri Fumagalli 1987: 232). We are clearly on the threshold of modernity. But we have a long way to go as far as the concept of originality and the neurosis of plagiarism are concerned.

  5.7. Tamquam ab iniustis possessoribus

  The Middle Ages copied without acknowledgment because that was the way it was done and ought to be done. What’s more, a notion akin to that contained in the aphorism was anticipated by Augustine and developed by Roger Bacon, when he said that if we find good ideas in pagan texts we are entitled to appropriate them as ours “tamquam ab iniustis possessoribus,” (“as it were from unjust possessors”) because, if the ideas are true, then Christian culture has every right to them. This explains why medieval notions of forgery and what is fake are very different from our own.

  True, the falsification of auctoritates is an act of critical freedom that reaffirms the principle of discovery against every kind of dogmatic constraint. But this liberation is obtained at the expense of what we would define today as “philological correctness.” If the dwarf is to see further than the giant he can and must adjust the giant’s thought to show that innovation does not contradict tradition. Non nova sed nove (“Not new things, but in a new way”). This is why medieval culture could not avoid a casual approach to philology.

  Let us close with a significant example. Thomas’s choice of translations seems never to be inspired by philological considerations. His commentary on the De interpretatione follows the translation by Boethius, despite the fact that he already had William of Moerbeke’s new version available to him, and without realizing that Boethius was guilty of a misreading of considerable interpretive importance. In De interpretatione 16a Aristotle says that words are symbola of the passions of the soul, but shortly thereafter he adds that they can also be taken as semeia of the same passions, and hence as symptoms. The passage can be explained as meaning that words are conventional symbols, but they may also be interpreted as symptoms of the fact that the speaker has something on his or her mind. As we already saw in Chapter 4 on the barking of the dog, Boethius translates both Greek terms with nota (a fairly vague multipurpose expression), which leads Thomas to interpret both cases with the word signum—a choice that seriously compromises a correct reading of the text.

  But note what happens with Roger Bacon, who was so convinced that, in order to snatch the truth from the infidel, “tamquam ab iniustis possessoribus,” we have to know languages, to be able to check the translations—an ideal shared by Robert Grosseteste and in general by the Oxford Franciscans (“Cum ignorat linguas non est possibile quod aliquid sciat magnificum, propter rationes quam scribo, de linguarum cognitione,” Opus Minus, p. 327). Bacon knows Greek and perhaps he realizes Boethius’s error. But even after realizing it, for reasons that have to do with his own theory of signs, he continues to see the relationship between words and things as purely symptomatic, as if Aristotle had used the term semeion in both instances (De signis, V, 166).

  Bacon is aware that a translation Ob is not the equivalent of the original Oa, but he has no qualms in transforming Oa into a third text that simply turns Ob upside down. He certainly acted without any clear intention to deceive, and felt authorized to do what he did because he was convinced that in so doing he was better serving the interests of truth. But the truth was his truth, not the truth of the original text.

  It is episodes like this that lead us to conclude that, though there were forgeries in the Middle Ages, what was missing was the awareness of forgery. Medieval notions of true and false attribution and manipulation of a text were not the same as ours.

  5.8. Conclusions

  We could say, as tradition has it, that the new philological awareness begins with Petrarch, and subsequently with Lorenzo Valla. But the fact that this awareness surfaced does not mean that European culture changed its attitude toward its sources overnight. The proof, furnished by Casaubon, of the Hellenistic origins of the Corpus Hermeticum appeared at the beginning of the seventeenth century, but even afterward, and for a considerable length of time, most of European culture continued to believe in the text’s antiquity.

  We would be better advised to reflect on the regeneration of the processes of falsification in the contemporary world. Setting aside the fabricators who continue to repeat the time-honored counterfeiting techniques (false attributions, fake genealogical tables, copies of paintings), we find ourselves faced, in the political universe and in the mass media, with a new form of falsification. Not only do we have false information, but also apocryphal documents, placed in circulation by a secret service or a government or an industrial group, and leaked to the media, in order to create social turmoil, confusion in public opinion. We speak of “false information,” without appealing to epistemological considerations, because the news is bound to be discovered as false sooner or later. Indeed we might say that it is disseminated as true precisely in order for it to be revealed as false a little time later.

  Its purpose in fact is not to create
a false belief but to undermine established beliefs and convictions. It serves to destabilize, to throw suspicion upon powers and counterpowers alike, to make us distrust our sources, to sow confusion.

  We conclude then that the people of the Middle Ages falsified in order to confirm their faith in something (an author, an institution, a current of thought, a theological truth) and to uphold an order, whereas our contemporaries falsify in order to create distrust and disorder. Our philological age can no longer permit itself falsifications that present themselves as truths because it knows they will be unveiled in no time; and it operates instead by spreading falsifications that have no fear of philological examination, because they are destined to be unmasked immediately. We are not dealing with an isolated fake that masks, hides, and confuses, and to that end endeavors to seem “true.” It is the quantity of falsifications recognizable as such that functions as a mask, because it tends to undermine the reliability of all truth.

  We do not know how the people of the Middle Ages, with their ingenuous concept of authenticity, would have judged this brash and cynical concept we have of noningenuous falsification. One thing is for sure: no historical period has the right to moralize about any other.