Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  h We have lost Abelard’s songs to Héloïse in the days of their courtship (though some may have been incorporated anonymously into the famous collection Carmina Burana). Besides his works of ethics and theology, his later liturgical songs, his letters to Héloïse, and his autobiography (called Historia Calamitatum and usually appended to the letters), he left an intriguingly modern account entitled Dialogue Between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian.

  i “Friar” (from frere, or brother, in both Old French and Middle English) was the normal designation for a man of one of the wandering orders, such as the Franciscans, not vowed to remain in a particular place and sing the hours of the church’s office (or official prayer).

  j Latin translations from Arabic, as well as original Latin works making use of Arabic—and often of Hebrew—words, begin to appear in Europe as early as the mid-tenth century. Such Oriental influences also figure in the works of Gerbert of Aurillac, who was one of the first to introduce “Arabic” (actually Indian) numerals to replace the clumsy Roman system, which required the use of an abacus even for many simple calculations. (In 999, Gerbert became the first French pope, dying in office four years later.) Another early route by which Greek learning reached the West was that of Sicily and southern Italy, which long retained their Greco-Arabic culture. Salerno, in particular, which was a medical center from at least the ninth century, provided the medieval world with continuous, if flickering, illumination by Greek science. The great irony in all this cultural borrowing was that as Greek works in translation became generally available to Europeans, Islam, which had served the role of cultural conduit, was in retreat throughout Europe.

  k “The dying thief” is one of two criminals crucified on either side of Jesus. In Luke’s Gospel, the thief asks Jesus to remember him “when you come into your Kingdom.” Jesus replies: “I tell you solemnly: today you will be with me in Paradise.”

  FOUR

  Oxford, University of Earthly Things

  The Alchemist’s Quest and Its Consequences

  He fed them with corn fat

  and filled them with

  honey from the rock.

  —INTROIT, CHOSEN BY THOMAS AQUINAS, FOR THE FEAST OF CORPUS CHRISTI

  THE LONG JUDEO-CHRISTIAN HISTORY of God’s interventions in human affairs—from the feeding of the Chosen People in the parched Sinai desert to the feeding of the baptized people of Europe with Corpus Christi, the Flesh of God’s Son—suggested to the medieval mind that reality was not pedestrian but fabulous, that is, replete with incredible marvels. Medieval lives may have been, by our standards, prosaic and predictible, but medieval imagination, the lens through which medieval men and women viewed the world, gave its viewers a more lively and grand account of reality than anything we would dare assay.

  Nonetheless, the wave that emanated from Thomas Aquinas intellectualized Europe beyond any surge previously known, drawing the attention of all to the primacy of human reason in the struggle to come to terms with human experience. Not even God’s revelation, filtered through scripture and church, could replace reason’s role in tackling and settling questions—since even God’s revelation must be approached, absorbed, and digested by human reason. Just as the five senses are the mind’s windows on the world, the individual mind’s reasoning capacity must be for each one of us the final interpreter of the extraordinarily diverse and often confusing data that the senses supply us with. Such a philosophy must necessarily reduce the role of revelation and of church in the lives of those who subscribe to it, for it is the human mind, and it alone, that ultimately sits in judgment on the meanings of the scriptures and the pronouncements of the church, as on all else. “Reason in a human being,” reasoned Thomas analogously, “is rather like God in the world.” Just as it is God who animates the world and its myriad manifestations and enables them to function, so reason animates the human being and enables him to function. Reason, therefore, is what gives human beings their link to divinity, for it is the possession of reason that makes us most like God.

  Though the new intellectualism necessarily confined religion somewhat, it hardly eliminated it. Thomas, like all his colleagues, was an orthodox believer. He might, for the sake of a particular disputation, take an atheistic or heretical position, but he never adopted such a position as his own. He, too, found reality fabulous—and far too serious for intellectual clowning. “Three things are necessary,” he wrote, “for a human being’s salvation: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.” Reasonable, yes, and respectful of rational knowledge above all else, but sober and focused on what truly mattered.

  The unicorn, a symbol of Christ, about to lay his head in the lap of a virgin. The holly tree behind the unicorn is also a symbol of Christ. From a fifteenth-century French tapestry. (Photo Credit 5.1)

  There was, however, a nonphilosophical form of knowledge far more appealing to the mass of human beings who hardly had time or aptitude for the endless disputations of the schoolmen: pictures, whether actual pictures or word pictures. From the twelfth century onward, an explosion of storytelling and a riot of color and form begin to invade street corner, church, castle, and library to the delight of ordinary people, who could find little or no delight in Thomas’s tight reasoning. The famous series of stained-glass windows (in every cathedral and abbey church) that tell the stories of the Old Testament and the life of Christ, so often called “the Bible of the poor,” were not the only visual feasts. There were tableaux, verbal and visual, that went beyond the scriptures to speak more theoretically, if always appealing as much to the eye and the ear as to the mind.

  One of these was the story of the unicorn, who purifies water with his horn and can be captured only if he lays his head in the lap of a virgin. He is of course Christ, who lays his being in the womb of the Virgin and cleanses the world of its impurities. Another was the story of the pelican, who was believed to tear her breast with her beak to feed her young. She, too, was Christ, who nourishes us through excruciating but self-inflicted suffering. Both stories were told and retold in the illustrated books known as bestiaries, which purported to explain the symbolic significance of all God’s creatures.

  In the twelfth-century church of San Clemente in Rome, the brilliant mosaic apse over the main altar presents us with a view of reality that is both cosmic and eucharistic; and there is no sight in all of Rome more worthy of contemplation. The central image is of the crucified Christ, mildly accepting his suffering and death, his face full of peace. Perched on the four extremities of the dark, red-rimmed cross are twelve white doves, symbolic apostles, rapt in contemplation though about to fly off to the ends of the earth. Jesus’s mother, Mary, and the Beloved Disciple stand in mourning beneath the arms of the cross. But spiraling forth from the foot of the cross, where it is watered by the blood of Christ, a stupendous acanthus bush curls outward and upward, encircling nearly a hundred separate images. These include flowers of many varieties, an oil lamp, a basket of fruit, beasts wild and tame, and people of all kinds involved in all kinds of labor. Each figure has a special meaning: a caged bird, for instance, represents the Incarnation, whereas wild birds flying upward are souls freed by death on their way to union with God. The humility of many of the figures is meant to remind us that not only have we been redeemed, but so has the whole world and everything in it. The spiraling branches of the acanthus embrace even two pagan Roman gods, Baby Jupiter, formerly king of the gods, and Baby Neptune, formerly king of the deep, who rides a slippery-looking dolphin. Even the ancient pagans have been redeemed, and their mythologies are usable by us, so long as we reduce them to less fearful and more apposite dimensions.

  The twelfth-century apse of San Clemente, Rome. (Photo Credit 5.2)

  Most tender of all are the depictions of ordinary medieval life, shepherds with their flocks and herds, farm children helping their parents, a lord and a lady watching the proceedings, a tonsured monk giving food and water to a colorful bird, and a bos
omy lady in white, wearing flowing sleeves and an enormous brooch (neither of which would have found approval with Bernard of Clairvaux) while feeding her excited hens. One soon notes how many of these images are of creatures nourishing creatures or of creatures taking nourishment on their own, as in the case of two stags drinking directly from streams that flow from the root of the acanthus. “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, my God,” we are meant to recall in the words of Psalm 42.

  Detail of San Clemente apse: a woman feeding her hens. (Photo Credit 5.3)

  Detail of San Clemente apse: one of two stags drinking from the streams of water that flow from the acanthus bush below the cross of Christ. (Photo Credit 5.4)

  To appreciate the impact of this mosaic it is nearly necessary to attend a mass celebrated at the altar below the apse. As the ritual of the mass unfolds beneath the cosmic wildness of the apse, we reflect that we are all caught up in the universal mystery of Christ, who has redeemed us and all of creation, even the humblest humans and the humblest things, so that he might come to us as bread.

  It may strike the reader that a meditation on the meaning of the Eucharist is an extremely odd way for science to rise from the ashes of the Dark Ages, but that is more or less how it happened. Not only the mysterious bread and wine but the mysterious pelican, the mysterious bear, the mysterious lion, the mysterious stars, and even the lowly ant (whose economic thrift is a lesson in how to conduct our lives)—all these and many more natural phenomena presented themselves to the medieval observer first of all as God’s creations, as gifts descended from Heaven to us below. But at length the desire to interpret their meaning, to understand what they were there for, was refined—under the persistent influence of philosophers like Abelard and Aquinas—by Aristotle’s logic and Aristotle’s stress on the importance of natural observation. And so, in its rudimentary essentials, science may be said to have risen in the medieval world in a cloud of Christian imaginings, but borne aloft on an air current of new respect for reason and observation.

  Detail of San Clemente apse: symbolic animals and objects, as well as scenes of various medieval people at their labors (including the woman feeding hens, lower left), all within the curled branches of the acanthus bush that is nourished by the blood of Jesus. (Photo Credit 5.5)

  Nowhere in Europe did the new scientific sensibility stride more boldly into view than at the University of Oxford in the time of Roger Bacon. Though Oxford was then one of the newly chartered European universities, it had like Paris existed as a center of learning for longer than anyone could remember. Bacon was already a student at Oxford when Thomas Aquinas was a boy, for he was a decade older than Thomas (and would survive him by eighteen years, dying in 1294 when he was in his late seventies). Bacon’s first model of the inquiring scientist was Oxford’s broadminded chancellor Robert Grosseteste, later bishop of Lincoln, just about the first European to employ controlled experiments, using data that could be measured, quantified, and cross-checked mathematically. Bishop Grosseteste’s range was as broad as his industriousness was deep: in addition to philosophical tracts and commentaries on many of the books of the Bible, he wrote groundbreaking treatises on the tides, solar heat, colors and the rainbow, meteors and comets. His Latin translation of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and his commentaries on other works of Aristotle, such as the Physics, advanced the work of both general philosophers and those specialized philosophers who would come to be called scientists.

  If little remains today (at least beyond the bourne of Merton, the university’s oldest college) of the Oxford of Bacon’s time, the town must already have had some of the feeling of antiquity that Matthew Arnold loved, “so venerable, so lovely … steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age.” It certainly boasted many of the miniature delights that Hopkins enumerates in his vision of medieval Oxford: “Towery city and branchy between towers; / Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmed, lark-charmed, rook-racked, river-rounded …” It was far less bustling than Paris and far less international, but the very insularity of its “folk, flocks, and flowers,” its polished brasses and painted doors, its happy conjunction of town and countryside, gave Oxford its own well-swept, tucked-in charm. Though Latin was the only language officially permitted to students, we know that Chaucerian English—that wonderful mishmash of Anglo-Saxon and French—often resounded through the quads, if only because of the punishments meted out to any scholar who lapsed into his mother tongue. (He was, upon a second offense, obliged to eat his dinner alone in a corner of the refectory.)

  Like Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon studied under Albert the Great and taught for a while at Paris (when Aquinas was there), but it is with Oxford and its heralded spirit of no-nonsense practicality and experimental positivism that he will ever be associated. Bacon took the great Dominican’s enshrinement of reason and brought it a step further. “Reasoning,” he wrote, “draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth—unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.” Bacon then imagines a man coming upon the phenomenon of fire for the first time. The man might by reason arrive at the conclusion that fire burns, injures, and destroys. But this reasoning would not in itself tell him all we know of fire. He would need to put his hand in it, or, if not his hand, “some combustible substance,” and “prove by experience what reasoning teaches. But when he has had the actual experience of combustion, his mind is made certain and rests in the full light of truth. Therefore,” concludes Bacon axiomatically, “reasoning does not suffice, but experience does!”

  Experience, by way of observation and experiment, beats unaided reason every time. Reason is necessary; we cannot function without it. But only experience can confirm what reason proposes. Albert had already taken a turn in this direction, declaring that in many matters “Experimentum solum certificat” (Experiment—or experience—alone gives certainty). But though Albert was for his time a great botanist, cataloguing and accurately describing a staggering profusion of trees, plants, and herbs, it would fall to his English pupil to embark upon seas of experience previously uncharted.

  We know that Thomas was a fat friar and Francis a bone-thin ascetic, that Hildegard was a sickly nun and Eleanor a radiant queen. Of Roger we have no description at all, and he seems at times in his surviving writings so much a sprite, a will-o’-the wisp, that he would be too quick for anyone’s pen to capture on a page. Realizing the need for accurate translations from foreign tongues, he compiled extensive grammars of the Greek and Hebrew languages and attempted, though never completed, a grammar of Arabic. But more important than these tremendous accomplishments (which would have been for most men the work of a lifetime or two), Bacon was the first medieval Christian to set forth an entire system of natural knowledge, based wholly on observation and experiment.

  He experimented with lenses and mirrors; he seems to have invented a telescope and perhaps, as he is credited in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, eyeglasses. He demonstrated that white light can be broken up into the spectrum of colors by passing it through glass beads. (Four and a half centuries ahead of a similar experiment that Isaac Newton would one day perform, Bacon alarmed his students by the uncanny magic of bringing a rainbow to earth.) His writing on the subject of the human eye remained the standard text till Johannes Kepler would take up optics and visual theory in the year 1600. Bacon declared that the speed of light, though enormous, was finite. But since this phenomenon cannot be observed by the naked eye and since it would take many more centuries to establish it as scientific fact, no one is sure how he came by his insight. He created astronomical tables far more accurate than anything previously conceived; and he urged the pope to reform the calendar, a reform that was accomplished by Pope Gregory XIII only in the late sixteenth century (and that produced what remains our calendar t
o this day, despite occasional, usually religious, objections).a

  He was the first systematic geographer since ancient times, describing Europe, Asia, and much of Africa after doggedly collecting information from travelers; and he recognized that the earth was a sphere. (But then, so did virtually everyone in the medieval world. The stuff about “flat-earthers,” medieval churchmen who condemned as heretics all who claimed that the earth was round, was a calumny invented by two fabulists working separately: Antoine-Jean Letronne, an anticlerical nineteenth-century Frenchman, and Washington Irving in the same century in his unreliable biography of Columbus.) Bacon, in particular, wrote as clearly and dispassionately as did the ancient Greeks on the “curvature of the earth.”

  Bacon’s Opus maius is an enormous encyclopedia of all medieval knowledge in the arts and sciences. He created a general systemization of chemical knowledge; and his description of the composition and manufacture of gunpowder is the earliest known in the West: “One may cause there to burst forth from bronze [ordnance] thunderbolts more formidable than those produced by nature. A small quantity of prepared matter occasions a terrible explosion accompanied by a brilliant light. One may multiply this phenomenon so far as to destroy a city or an army.” He even predicted the inventions of the steam engine and internal combustion: “Art can construct instruments of navigation such that the largest vessels governed by a single man will traverse rivers and seas more rapidly than if they were filled with oarsmen. One may also make carriages which without the aid of any animal will run with remarkable swiftness.” In addition to foreseeing the coming of automobiles and steamships, he made plans, despite incredulous responses from his contemporaries, to construct a flying machine in which he believed men would one day travel.