Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  Thomas (Tomasso d’Aquino in his native Italian) was the youngest son of Landulf of Aquino, an important nobleman whose lands lay between Naples and Rome in the northern reaches of the Kingdom of Sicily, then ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor, Barbarossa’s Hohenstaufen grandson and Thomas’s second cousin, the astonishing Frederick II, known as Stupor Mundi (the Stupefaction of the World). Landulf sired at least six other sons and five daughters, most of whom grew up to take prominent places in the world. Thomas’s mother, Teodora of Chieti, Landulf’s second wife, was a Lombard, but in his veins flowed Norman, German, and Italian blood as well. His ancestry was, in fact, typically continental; and the males of his family, like their fellow knights throughout Europe, were skilled in war and poetry. Their particular war was waged almost continually on behalf of the emperor against the pope, rendering their lovely hill country of Roccasecca and Montesangiovanni full of peril.

  Thomas gave evidence from an early age that he would rather handle a book than a sword. Indeed, so visibly did he shirk the school of chivalry, of horse and target, lance and armor, that Landulf and Teodora resolved quite early in his life to give him to Monte Cassino, the great Benedictine abbey in their neighborhood. With the monks, Thomas advanced from discipline to discipline with amazing speed, despite his heavy gait and growing girth. But physical prowess was so lacking in the boy that even his handwriting was embarrassingly awkward. In later life, it would become, as the manuscripts left to us bear witness, as unintelligible as a doctor’s prescription.

  By the time he was eighteen, the imperial-papal war had reached Monte Cassino itself, so the monks-in-training were removed to the University of Naples in the Kingdom of Sicily to complete their studies. There, under the tutelage of Peter of Ireland, the teenage Thomas was introduced to Aristotle through the recently translated commentaries of the Hispano-Arabic philosopher Averroës. The surviving works of Aristotle had never been lost to the Muslim world (thanks to Arabic-Byzantine connections); and in the relatively tolerant atmosphere of Arabic Spain, all these were gradually translated into Latin in a collaborative Muslim-Jewish-Christian effort. Thomas Aquinas was the first medieval Christian to have such access to all the surviving works (in Latin translation) that he could use them freely to construct his own philosophy.j

  The members of Thomas’s family, unimpressed by his original interest in an ancient Greek philosopher, were thrown into confusion by his decision to leave the Benedictines and join the Dominicans. The Dominicans, like the Franciscans, were not vowed to stability but were known as mendicants (or wandering beggars), because they depended not on the abundance of abbey lands but on handouts from the faithful. Since the Aquinos could never have made Thomas a soldier, they had expected to make him in due course the abbot of Monte Cassino, a distinguished figure appropriate to their heritage. No lord or lady could bear a beggar in the family. The more soldierly Aquinos were dispatched to kidnap Thomas on his way to Bologna, whither he was wending in the company of John of Wildeshausen, master general of the Dominican order, and other friars en route to their annual general chapter. Thomas was confined to the family castle at Roccasecca, where he demonstrated such tenacity of purpose that Donna Teodora gave in at last and released him to rejoin the friars.

  Thomas was fortunate to study at Cologne with the foremost Aristotelian of the day, Albert the Great, a German count who had joined the Dominicans. Albert’s famous exposition De natura rerum (On the Nature of Things) was a landmark attempt to reestablish “natural philosophy”—or science, as we would call it today—in the Aristotelian spirit of observation, analysis, and conclusion. Simple people, amazed by what he seemed to know about the processes of nature, feared him as a sorcerer. He became Thomas’s advance man, informing one and all that this seeming dolt, teased by his fellow students as “the Dumb Ox of Sicily,” was a quiet genius who would outshine them all: “You call him a Dumb Ox; I tell you this Dumb Ox shall bellow so loud that his bellowing will fill the world.” Following Thomas’s ordination to the priesthood (while only in his mid-twenties), Albert recommended him for a teaching post at the University of Paris.

  Thomas would spend much of his working life lecturing and writing at Paris, but with a significant interval in Italy, much of it spent setting up a school at the Dominicans’ glorious complex of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill. Wherever he was, he read, lectured, wrote, and, as his obligations multiplied, dictated. Though he was able to read much more of Aristotle than had been available to Abelard, and though (as he remarked gratefully), “I have understood every page I ever read,” Thomas’s philosophical positions hardly differ from those of the earlier Parisian lecturer. The difference is in the tone, seldom contentious, never contemptuous, always serene and reasonable and so tranquilly analytical as to be magisterial. It is a tone that allays his readers’ prejudices, calms their fears, and shores up their confidence. “So far as I can see” is his bland, oft-invoked phrase, even though what follows may contain a novel proposal or a conclusive rejection of some widely held notion.

  In this way, Thomas eventually—by the wide circulation of his voluminous writings after his death—won over almost the whole of the Christian world to his philosophy. In the wake of Thomas Aquinas, medieval Christendom gave up its dread of non-Christian pagan philosophy and adopted most of the philosophical positions of Aristotle, as sorted through Thomas’s careful sieve. The gloomy old Platonism of the early fathers of the church—Plato and his disciples (such as Plotinus) being the only Greeks previously exempted from general condemnation—was set aside somewhat and invoked less and less frequently. For Thomas did not believe that we lived in the gloom of a cave, tied to a decaying mass of matter, and that everything we perceived was illusion or trickery. He believed we lived in our bodies, created good by a good God, and received true perceptions through the media of our five senses, which like clear windows enabled us to form generally accurate impressions of the world as it is. He replaced the shadows of Plato’s Cave with the sunshine of everyday reality.

  Not only had God made us and made us good—and here Thomas’s philosophy slid into his theology—God had deigned to share our humanity in the person of Jesus. Our bodies were not despicable carrion but temples of the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit that brooded over the face of the deep at the world’s creation, the same Spirit that descended from on high to consecrate Jesus at his baptism in the River Jordan, for ours was the same physical humanity that Jesus shared, our senses the same five with which he had perceived the world. The Son of God’s Incarnation had blessed and elevated all matter. With such thoughts as these did the medieval schoolmen (or scholastics) move the Christian worldview away from its previously pessimistic meditations on material corruption and human depravity and toward a worldview that was happier, more incarnational, and more appropriately Judeo-Christian.

  Whether or not Augustine and the other ancient fathers would have consented to such propositions no longer mattered. They were far enough in the past, and Thomas’s voice strong enough in the present, that his moderate realism carried the day, becoming in time the sturdy philosophy on which the Catholic Church would rest its theological structure, a happier edifice altogether than what had served it in earlier centuries. And yet, this considerable change in emphasis still linked the medieval with the ancient world, for a Greek was still at the bottom of the whole thing. When Chesterton, that sly exaggerator, calls this vast embrace by which medieval believer was linked to ancient philosopher “the great central Synthesis of history,” he cannot be far wrong, for surely there is no other synthesis with longer grasp or deeper roots.

  For all his balanced and capacious mind, much that Thomas had to say seems hugely irrelevant today. Modern readers find many passages baffling and wearisome. So many of Aristotle’s distinctions, which Thomas brought over wholesale into his own system, impress us as pretty useless. What contemporary scientist could possibly do much of anything with the distinctions of substance (or essential nature) and accident (or appearance, iness
ential quality)? And yet it was from just such meditations on incarnate reality that medieval science would take its uncertain first steps.

  What is a thing in itself? Is it even possible to understand anything in itself, or do we understand it only through the medium of universal categories? What is any object, and how is it related to the whole—to the rest of reality? These are questions the Presocratic philosophers had asked and which in the time of Thomas Aquinas continued to receive Greek answers.

  Though Thomas distinguished carefully between natural reality and supernatural, he found that his (and Aristotle’s) philosophical categories could be useful instruments for dealing with matters of faith. Thus, substance and accident were distinctions useful for the study of the Christian Eucharist. All such matters as the Eucharist, the Trinity, the Incarnation were mysteries inexplicable. Yet the mind could not be stopped from considering them, turning them over as if they were specimens in a laboratory, and trying to make some human sense of them. In the mystery of the Eucharist, ordinary bread and wine became Christ’s body and blood, so that our bodies might feed on him and our souls be nourished. But when the priest pronounced the words of consecration used by Jesus at his Last Supper—“This is my body”; “This is my blood”—what happened? The elements did not change their appearance. No, said Thomas, the accidental appearances of bread and wine remain, but the substance, the essential nature of the elements, is metaphysically transubstantiated into Christ’s body and blood.

  The ancient fathers of the church, men from Clement to Augustine to Gregory the Great and beyond, had felt no need to pick apart such mysteries so clinically. They preferred to guard them, then leave them in the realm of mystery. But by the time of Thomas a great shift had already occurred. Centuries of eucharistic enactments—liturgies, masses, viaticums, communion services, eucharistic benedictions, expositions of the Blessed Sacrament, Corpus Christi processions through the streets—had introduced into inquiring minds a series of insistent questions: what is going on here? what is its meaning? is anything happening and, if so, how? Many were as dissatisfied with Thomas’s (and the church’s) explanation as would have been Aristotle himself, who taught that an accident could not exist if it did not adhere to a substance. For there is no floating whiteness in our world, only the white picket fence. And since the accidents of bread and wine could hardly be said to adhere to Christ’s body, was not this church teaching logical nonsense? Such a question pushed the questioner back to ancient Presocratic inquiries: what is this thing? what is its nature? what is that thing? what is everything? what is the world?

  Thomas Aquinas died before he reached fifty, as pious a priest as ever lived and more industrious than any other, leaving behind twenty-five packed volumes of Latin (in the definitive Parma edition of 1873). Yet he stopped writing in his last days because, he said, “Everything I’ve written seems to me like so much straw compared to what I have seen.” What he had seen we don’t know but we probably have some hint of it in his eucharistic hymns, some composed at the invitation of the pope and showing a hidden side of Thomas, deeply devotional and surprisingly poetic. His hymns are untranslatable, their Latin too pithy and witty. The greatest one, the soaring “Pange lingua” (Sing, My Tongue), is still sung throughout the world each Maundy Thursday but never sounds quite right in English. Another, “Adoro te devote, latens Deitas” (Faithfully Do I Adore Thee, Hidden Deity), is almost as challenging to translate, though Gerard Manley Hopkins made a laudable attempt:

  Adoro te devote, latens Deitas,

  Quae sub his figuris vere latitas:

  Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit,

  Quia te contemplans totum deficit.

  Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore

  Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more,

  See, Lord, at thy service low lies here a heart

  Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.

  Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur;

  Sed auditu solo tuto creditur:

  Credo quidquid dixit Dei Filius:

  Nil hoc verbo veritatis verius.

  Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived;

  How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed:

  What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do;

  Truth himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.

  In cruce latebat sola Deitas,

  At hic latet simul et humanitas:

  Ambo tamen credens atque confitens

  Peto quod petivit latro paenitens.…

  On the cross thy godhead made no sign to men;

  Here thy very manhood steals from human ken:

  Both are my confession, both are my belief,

  And I pray the prayer of the dying thief.…k

  In this poetic pondering, those old, reliable senses of ours are found to be deceived by the silent but overwhelming mystery of God. Behind the meditation unanswered questions surely press upon us—matters psychological, metaphysical, theological, and scientific. But the hymn removes the obscuring veil of centuries from the medieval mind, showing us a humble but questing spirit that must soon advance into unknown territory.

  a The tradition of Irish prudery is of recent origin. Though its roots may be traced in part to the post-Reformation education of Irish Catholic clergy in French institutions tinged by Jansenism (Calvinism in its Catholic manifestation), its most obvious source is the English language itself, learned by the great majority of Irish people only in the nineteenth century—and then in its sexually repressed and respectability-obsessed Victorian form. In any case, it is not of medieval origin. See How the Irish Saved Civilization, p. 214n and passim.

  b Rue du Fouarre (or Straw Street) still exists, though most of its curved extent has been renamed rue de Dante; and it continues to attract hordes of young people—today to its cluster of comic book shops. It may be found across the Seine just south of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. A few steps west of rue du Fouarre, once strewn with straw to keep down dust, stands the twelfth-century Church of Saint Julien-le-Pauvre, Paris’s oldest surviving building. The winding streets surrounding this little church still speak of medieval matters.

  c The idea of separately chartered entities began with chartered towns, which provided the models for chartered universities. Medieval craft guilds, which were a combination of professional associations and labor unions, provided the models for university faculties as well as for professors banding together to achieve common goals not directly connected to teaching.

  d The medieval course of studies can be traced at least as far back as Julius Caesar’s librarian, Varro, who died in 27 B.C. He, however, enumerated nine liberal arts: the seven recognized by medievals plus medicine and architecture—which were dropped from the list by certain early medieval figures, such as Cassiodorus (d. 585) and Isidore of Seville (d. 636).

  e Charlemagne (or Carolus Magnus), the first Holy Roman Emperor, instigated the short-lived Carolingian renaissance of the ninth century, often referred to as medieval Europe’s first renaissance. The renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the subject of this book—is the second. The Renaissance of the sixteenth century is the third.

  f In medieval philosophy, this dispute was called “the problem of universals.” A universal signifies a unity with reference to some plurality—i.e., “mankind” versus individual men. Any intellectual concept—beauty, goodness, justice, etc.—is a universal, for it stands as a unity against individual beauties, individual persons of goodness, individual acts of justice, etc. The basic philosophical question is what reality these universals possess. Plato believed they had a reality separate from earthly things and existed in the World of the Forms, which was far superior to the shadowy realities of our world because earthly realities were real only insofar as they partook of the existence of their ultimate models in the World of the Forms (the “really real”). This philosophical position is called—paradoxically, from a modern standpoint—extreme realism; Augustine of Hippo w
as its most outstanding later proponent. Aristotle, the father of moderate realism, believed that universals do exist but only in the real objects of sense experience and that human beings perceive the universal dimension intellectually (i.e., I know my neighbor Sam is an individual; I also know him to be human and therefore partaking of the universal, humanity). Thomas Aquinas would in the thirteenth century become the most important proponent of the Aristotelian position. “Everything,” said Thomas, “that is in the intellect has been in the senses.” Though it was to the Aristotelian school that Abelard attached himself, he was ingeniously anticipating Aristotle’s solution, since Aristotle’s writings on this subject were not available in the West till after Abelard’s time. Other positions are possible, such as nominalism, which contends that universals are but words. A fairly concise discussion of this mind-scrambling business may be found in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, XIV, 322ff—though you are advised to read at your own risk.

  g The popular medieval hymn “Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est” (Where caritas and amor are, there is God) displays this blurring of meanings. There is an innocence to Abelard that probably blinded him to Fulbert’s more primitive thought patterns. This flower-child aspect certainly evidences itself in the name the lovers bestowed on their child. An astralabe (now, more commonly “astrolabe”) was an analogue computer invented by the ancient Greeks, and improved by the Arabs, to measure the altitude of stars and other heavenly bodies. In the twelfth century, thanks to Arab mariners, Western Europeans had begun to use it to plot the course of seagoing vessels and to make vast improvements in astronomical (and calendrical) predictability. To name a child Astralabe was to suggest that he was destined to be a very modern (and starry) trendsetter. It brings to mind the avant-garde rock musician Frank Zappa, who named his daughter Moon Unit.