Descartes' Bones

by Russell Shorto

  Death comes most squarely into our lives at the places where we leave those who have died. In this respect, there is a noteworthy difference between a graveyard and a cemetery. A cemetery is a universe unto itself, an ocean of memories, each of which is always inexorably being carried further out to sea. A cemetery’s vastness restricts the activity that takes place in it: the only reason to go there is to bury loved ones or pay respects. Graveyards, however, usually attached to old churches, are wedged into a human landscape, and everyday life has a tendency to wrap itself around them. Wander into an urban churchyard on a sunny day and you will probably find other people: kids playing tag, a homeless man sipping soup, people strolling, taking stock of their lives. This mingling in of ordinariness seems an unspoken nod to mortality, an acceptance—partial, anyway—of the fact that we, too, will actually die.

  The Adolf Fredriks churchyard, in north-central Stockholm, is today an urban sanctuary rimmed by office buildings and shops. Tombstones scattered across the grass run a gamut of eras and funereal styles. There are tilting, centuries-old mini-obelisks, almost druidic in the angular cut of their tops, their faces weather-blasted of all records of the life that once occupied the remains beneath. There are art deco pink marble slabs, and rectilinear blocks with spare, geometric 1950s simplicity, neatly etched with crosses and the sans-serifed names of the departed: Johansson, Baggström, Thordal, Köpman. The yard is quietly busy; office workers come with lunches to sit among the graves. The most visited site is a raw, smooth, twisting monolith whose only marking is the swirl of a signature. In 1986, on the street that runs along the east side of the churchyard, Olof Palme, Sweden’s outspoken leftist prime minister, was shot to death. The unassuming character of his gravesite suits a country famed for its spare design sense, and it remains a place of continual, understated pilgrimage.

  Three and a half centuries ago, this was a forlorn little graveyard in the countryside, the out-of-the-way place Pierre Chanut chose for his illustrious friend’s final rest. Christina ordered an imposing monument and had its four sides covered with Latin inscriptions, written by Chanut, extolling the epochal wisdom of the deceased and containing the names of both herself and Chanut.

  The tomb is gone today, and so are the remains. In the spring of the year 1666—the first of May, in fact—with a strengthening sun warming the top layer of soil, coaxing life out of the dead land, a shovel bit into the precise spot of earth where, sixteen years earlier, a ceremony of supposedly permanent interment had taken place. Much had changed in those sixteen years. Most convulsively for Sweden, Christina was gone. Her enthusiasm for Greek esoterica had been short-lived, but the gossip about her interest in Roman Catholicism had proven to be on the mark. In 1654, four years after Descartes’ death, she abdicated her throne, converted to Catholicism (in the staunchly Lutheran nation that Sweden had become since the Reformation it was insupportable that the monarch be a Catholic), and moved to Rome. There, as the most famous woman in the world and now either the most notorious or the most revered, depending on one’s religious perspective, she had created an altogether new persona.

  Christina’s dramatic transformation—from enlightened monarch to religious convert of dubious sincerity (in Rome she continually flouted Catholic observances)—sparked incredulous speculation as the events unfolded, and the speculation has never ceased. Almost immediately people blamed—or credited—Descartes, whose commitment to his faith was well known, despite the charges of atheism that dogged him. But the contact between the queen and the philosopher had been limited and strained, so that, despite indications from Christina herself that Descartes had had a hand in her conversion, her biographers have looked elsewhere for sources of influence. Most have found it within her own nature: a deep, quixotic restlessness, a hungry, almost angry search for answers, for certainty. This, perhaps, was where she and Descartes had truly intersected.

  Chanut, too, was gone. He had returned to Paris the year after Descartes’ death and himself had died in 1662. The current French ambassador to Sweden, who watched as the shovel dug deeper and slowly revealed the coffin lid, was a very different sort of man. Where Chanut had been an enthusiastic promoter of science, a futurist who believed in the real-world possibilities of Cartesianism, Hugues de Terlon stood frankly with one foot in the past. He was a knight of St. John, a member of the chivalrous order based on Malta, whose glory dated to the First Crusade. Terlon was an imposing man of fifty-four, with a patrician nose, a thin, curling moustache, and eyes that had seen battle among northern European foes from Lübeck to Piotrków. He maintained an archaic and militaristic form of Catholicism. He was not only a warrior and a diplomat but also a member of a religious order that mandated a vow of celibacy.

  Terlon was a loyal servant to Louis XIV, but he had been especially devoted to the Sun King’s mother, Anne of Austria. Anne’s husband, King Louis XIII, had died when their son was five years old, so that the queen took over the government as regent until he reached maturity. To aid her during this interregnum, she had deepened her already quite intense faith and had forged bonds with devout noblemen such as Terlon. Anne attended Mass several times a day and had a dizzying network of churches and convents at which she prayed on various feast days. She also took part in the revival of relic worship that had sprung up in the mid-seventeenth century. She owned several pieces of saints as well as a fragment of the Cross.

  Because Terlon was also known for his piety, as he traveled through the war-scarred landscapes of northern Europe on behalf of the French Crown, displaced members of religious orders sought him out for aid. Along the way, he, too, became a collector of holy relics. Friedrich Wilhelm, the elector of Brandenburg, one of the most powerful men in Europe, on meeting Terlon amid the chaos of battle outside Warsaw in 1656, gave him a coffer of relics that, he said, had been looted from a church in Vilna. In 1657, an advance guard of Swedish soldiers pillaged a convent outside Strasbourg. When Terlon arrived, the nuns emerged from the smoke and ruin and pressed him to take the convent’s most sacred possessions, their relics, for safekeeping, which he did. In both cases, Terlon carried them with him on his journeys and, on returning to Paris, presented them to Anne, the mother of the king.

  Now, in Sweden, Terlon had been asked to deal with relics, and he went about it with the same pious zeal. The unearthing of Descartes’ bones that day in May 1666 must have run like a reversed film of the burial, for after the coffin was undug it was loaded onto a cart and hauled back down the same road, across the same bridge, and carried into the same building in which Descartes had lived and died. This was still the residence of the French ambassador, and Terlon was determined to keep the remains close at hand.

  The sequence of events that unfolded next is important to understanding what was really taking place—as is the level of detail with which the matter of the shipping of a box of bones was committed to written record.

  Terlon had been in the process of leaving Sweden—he was being transferred to the post of ambassador to Denmark—when he had received an official communication from the French government ordering him to quietly approach Swedish officials about the possibility of removing the remains. He asked for and received the permission, and now he took the rather extravagant step of engaging a contingent of Swedish soldiers to guard them around the clock as they lay in the chapel of his residence. Whether Terlon noted it or not, the captain of the Swedish guard, a man named Isaak Planström, seemed to take a particular interest in the assignment.

  Terlon arranged for the body to travel with him as far as Copenhagen. He had a special copper coffin made that was only two and a half feet long. The improbable reason for this—besides the fact that the original wooden box in which the body had been laid had rotted—was that his superiors in France were concerned that if it became known that he was transporting the remains of René Descartes his party might be attacked and robbed. The cult of Cartesianism had grown strong in the years since Descartes’ death, and others had developed an interest in the
remains.

  The manner of Terlon’s subterfuge followed from the state of the remains after sixteen years. When he opened the coffin into which Chanut had had the corpse laid, he found that putrefaction was complete: soft tissue had gone, leaving bones that had loosened apart. A small box—just long enough to accommodate the largest leg bones—would be more inconspicuous than a coffin.

  Another religious ceremony then took place in the chapel of Terlon’s residence. The ambassador had assembled his embassy staff, other members of the French community in Stockholm, and Catholic priests—in fact, “nearly the whole Catholic Church of Sweden,” according to Descartes’ seventeenth-century biographer, who had access to Terlon’s report of the event. That may not have been all that vast an assembly given the semipersecuted state of Catholicism in Sweden at the time, but it was clearly church sanctioned. They were all there to witness a ceremony of repackaging: to the accompaniment of formal prayers, the bones were taken from the rotted wooden coffin and put into the small copper box, where they were stacked one atop another in a manner that was deemed to be “without indecence.”

  Here Terlon paused the proceeding in order to make a request. He asked the assembled Catholic clergy if he might “religiously” be allowed to take one of the bones for himself. In particular, he had his eye on the right index finger—a bone “which had served as an instrument in the immortal writings of the deceased.”

  It’s worth pausing to consider this request. Those in Paris who had worked through channels in the French government to have the bones removed and brought to France had their own reasons for doing so, which had to do with philosophy and politics, as will become clear in the coming pages. Terlon’s interest was quite different but just as noteworthy. He was no mere courier: he was a knowledgeable man of the world. Descartes’ fame had spread in sixteen years, and both Cartesianism and the man whose name it bore were the subject of rumors, hopes, and fear. Here in Sweden, the estate of the clergy, the branch of the government controlled by the Lutheran Church, had tried, two years earlier, to outlaw the teaching of Cartesianism, so great was the threat they felt from it. In Leiden and Utrecht, after the first debates about Cartesianism had flared up, the philosophy had become rooted, so that while Terlon was overseeing the disinterral Cartesianism was growing in strength in nearly all branches of the universities. In France, Spain, Germany, and Italy, men who had been students during Descartes’ lifetime were now professors, churchmen, and physicians and had brought with them certain convictions about the truth of the Cartesian method of acquiring knowledge and the overall approach to nature that it implied. In each place, a battle was intensifying and becoming more complicated. It wasn’t a case of “science” versus “religion,” or even of the purely new versus the utterly old. Some, like Gysbert Voetius at Utrecht, believed the materialism in the new philosophy was a direct attack on Christianity. At the same time, however, important Jesuits and Oratorians—two of the most prominent and intellectually driven Catholic orders—had become Cartesians and actually saw the philosophy as a way to protect the faith.

  Then there were those like Terlon for whom any inquiry into the heart of nature was at the deepest level a spiritual inquiry. What is the nature of light? Why does salt form crystals? How does the experience of fire touching the skin transmit through the body and record as pain in the mind? We think of such questions as frankly the realm of science, but for a seventeenth-century European, nature, including the human body, was inarguably the terrain of the Almighty; to come to understand it more fully than had ever been done was, as it were, to touch the face of God.

  Today we associate the reverence of relics mostly with the Middle Ages, but while the Council of Trent, a century before Descartes’ death, put an end to the commercial trade in relics, Catholic theologians continued to stress their importance, and ordinary people as well as the highborn continued to venerate them. The veneration of relics meant more than the mere honoring of a great person but less than worship. It was a deep meditation on the physical being of humans and on the body as a “temple of the Holy Ghost.” We are used to thinking of Christianity’s emphasis on the afterlife and its view of the body as sinful, but Catholic tradition in the early modern period emphasized the physical. Bodily remains were keys to the deepest of mysteries, links in the chain between life and death, and, as the Council of Trent said, the bones of prophets, saints, and others “now living with Christ . . . are to be venerated by the faithful.” In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker—the inventor of analytic geometry, no less—a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense.

  The priests granted the request; the chevalier was allowed to take the finger. He must have kept it until his death in 1690—he certainly didn’t give it to Anne of Austria, who had died earlier that year—perhaps keeping it on his person as he traveled the next ten years between Paris and Copenhagen. On his death he was required to bequeath his property to his order, the Knights of St. John. The inventory of the order contains no artifacts from Terlon and no index finger labeled as Descartes’. Terlon’s branch of the order, based in Toulouse, was, like many other Catholicholy places, pillaged during the French Revolution. Perhaps the finger bone of Descartes—we might call it the first modern relic—slipped through the fingers of a sans culotte, into the dirt and out of history.

  The verb to translate has a particular meaning in a Catholic context. In the year 787, the Second Council of Nicaea ruled that the new churches that were proliferating across Europe should each be anchored in sanctity by a holy relic. This ruling created an official market in bones, as priests and bishops sought portions of prominent or relevant saints for their new churches. The transfer of relics from, say, a tomb in Sicily to a church in Lombardy was referred to as a translation, and throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period holy bones in translation—housed in boxes of precious metal, adorned with drapes and candles—were part of the traffic on the highways of Europe.

  Terlon’s translation party left Stockholm in June 1666. The remains were loaded onto a ship and placed under the care of two members of Terlon’s staff, the sieur de l’Epine and the sieur du Rocher. There was a fuss at the port when the sailors learned that human remains were part of the cargo, which in their lore spelled bad luck, but Terlon managed to quell the uproar, perhaps by showing them the small copper box and convincing them that they weren’t so much shipping a dead body as translating relics.

  Terlon was anxious about theft. Descartes’ seventeenth-century biographer, Adrien Baillet, wrote that the fear was that “this precious cargo would fall into the hands of the English, among whom Descartes had an infinity of worshippers . . . and who would build a magnificent mausoleum in their country, under the pretext of erecting a temple to Philosophy.” Before the ship left, Terlon wrote to Louis XIV informing the king of the steps he had taken with regard to Descartes’ bones and reminding His Majesty of the illustriousness of the deceased. Louis wrote back granting royal authority for the translation of the remains. Not content with this, Terlon also personally disguised the copper reliquary, giving it “the appearance of a bundle of rocks.” The ship then set out from Stockholm bound for its first port of call, Copenhagen.

  It’s unlikely that any pilgrim has ever retraced the translation route of this particular collection of relics. From Copenhagen, the party, which from here would be led by the two members of Terlon’s staff, set out on a morning in early October, heading south. They made an uneventful passage through the wilds of
northern Europe—Jutland bogs, North Sea coastal marshes, fog bound villages of Lower Saxony, through heath and forest and ultimately into the flat expanse of Flanders—until they reached the northern French town of Péronne. Here, customs officials took an interest in the train; finding the curious package and discovering that its outward appearance belied a bright copper interior, they demanded that the knights open it, making it clear that they suspected contraband. L’Epine and du Rocher affected official indignation; they produced a letter that Terlon had given them from no less an official than Pierre d’Alibert, the treasurer general of France; they pointed to the ambassadorial seal that Terlon had affixed to the box. But the officials wanted it opened, the strong iron bands that Terlon had taken the precaution of wrapping around the box perhaps increasing their suspicion. In the presence of witnesses, the bands were snapped, the box was opened, the officials peered inside . . . and it was as they had been told, maybe even less noteworthy, for, due to the rotting of the original coffin, parts of the skeleton were reduced to fragments, on which individual bones now rested. Presumably, however, they didn’t sift or perform even a perfunctory inventory, because there was a striking observation to be made, and nobody made it. A vital bone—the most obvious part of a skeleton—was missing.

  The box was resealed, horses were retethered, and off they went again, headed, without further interruption, for Paris.

  EVERY WEDNESDAY EVENING IN the late 1650s and through most of the 1660s, a cross-section of French society could be found packed into a house on a narrow alley in Paris known as the rue Quincampoix, a few steps from the raucous and reeking market of Les Halles. The mix was atypical for the time, almost scandal-worthy. Women and men, both single and married, were thrown together, high government officials alongside uncouth provincials, as well as princes and prostitutes and canons of the church—a profusion of frilled collars, puffed sleeves, and flowing, curled hair filling all three floors of the home. Today the narrow building lies just a few steps from the pedestrian-only rue Rambuteau, lined with kebab sellers, piercing booths, and shops selling paté sandwiches and the ubiquitous Robert Doisneau photos of Paris in the 1950s. The upper floors of the house remain residential; the street level is a karaoke bar. Three and a half centuries ago, as the home of Jacques and Geneviève Rohault, the building was well furnished, ornamented with tapestries and paintings, but, more remarkably, strategically littered with beakers, tubes, syringes, microscopes, prisms, compasses, magnets, and lenses of various shapes and sizes, as well as such curiosities as an “artificial eye” and a large mirror affixed to the floor.