The Friar and the Cipher

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Not that Albert did not try to justify his position—during his five-year stay in Paris, he began not one but two massive projects. The first was a commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences, which grew out of his own lectures and eventually ran to seven volumes, and the second was his own Summa Parisiensis, a written account of all of his public disputations at the university. In addition to these two written works, he lectured to theological students, learned what he could of the new translations of Aristotle and the related Arabic commentaries, and handled his share of university responsibilities, which in 1248 included adding his signature to a decree condemning the Talmud as heretical and ordering that the books be burned publicly.

  Roger Bacon, watching all of this from his seat on the arts faculty, was appalled. How could Albert earn a chair in theology in just two years when it had taken Robert Grosseteste and Adam Marsh—far greater men than Albert in Bacon's opinion—more than a decade? And Albert had done all of this without once having to attend an arts class of the kind that Bacon taught and took so seriously. Albert knew no Greek, no Hebrew. What did the Dominican know, what could he know after such a short time, of perspectiva, of mathematics, especially of geometry, the crux of Bacon's own education and at the core of his belief of how the world worked?

  Twenty years later, Bacon would give voice to these objections in a treatise to the pope. He did not mention Albertus Magnus by name, but it is clearly he who is described:

  The . . . one who lives [Albertus Magnus] entered an Order of Friars as a boy. He never taught philosophy anywhere, nor did he hear it in the schools, nor was he in a studium solemne before he was a theologian, nor was he capable of being taught in his own order, as he was the first master of philosophy among them. And he taught others; whence from his own study he had what he knows. And truly I praise him more than all of the common students, because he is a most studious man, and he saw many things, and had money. And so he was able to collect many useful things in the infinite sea of authors. But since he did not have a foundation, for he was not instructed or exercised in hearing, reading, or disputing, it was inevitable, therefore, that he did not know the common sciences. And again, since he did not know the languages, it is not possible that he would know anything great, on account of the reasons which I write concerning the knowledge of languages. And again, since he ignores perspective, just as others of the common students do not know it, it is impossible that he should know anything of worth about philosophy . . . God, however, knows that I have only exposed the ignorance of these men on account of the truth of study. For the common student believes that they [Albertus Magnus and Alexander of Hales, whom Bacon also criticized] know everything and they adhere to them like angels . . . And especially the one who lives [Albertus Magnus]; he has the name of doctor Parisius.

  Albert seems to have been aware of Bacon and his criticisms. At one point, he wrote of “certain indolent people, who looking for comfort in their indolence, look at nothing in script except what they can criticize.”

  Albert became even more of a nemesis to Bacon after he left Paris. He had returned to Cologne by order of the minister general to establish a new university. He set the tone for this new school as Grosseteste had once done for Oxford. Albert, who had come to the new translations only a few years before, now undertook the greatest compilation and analysis of the works of Aristotle ever seen in the Christian world. “Our purpose in natural science,” he wrote, “is to satisfy as far as we can those brethren of our Order who for many years now have begged us to compose for them a book on physics in which they might have a complete exposition of natural science and from which also they might be able to understand correctly the books of Aristotle.”

  Albertus Magnus EDGAR FAHS SMITH COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA LIBRARY

  Albert attacked the task with painstaking deliberation. In page after page, book after book, he explained Aristotle, carefully mirroring the Philosopher's own works, such as the Physics, De mineralibus, De Anima, De vegetabilibus, De animalibus. He covered general principles and universals, changes in animate and inanimate objects, the human soul, the animal soul, the soul of plants, perception, imagination, instinct, memory. He paraphrased when necessary, often adding his own interpretations to the stickier problems and filling in gaps wherever he felt it necessary. Where Aristotle deviated from Christian dogma, Albert simply said that Aristotle was wrong.

  It was this encyclopedic work on Aristotle that made Albertus Magnus famous across Europe. Because his books were intended for use in Dominican schools, they went everywhere. As a result, even though Albert's work lacked critical analysis or depth, it was he and not Roger Bacon who became known as the foremost expert on Aristotle in Christendom, the man most responsible for bringing the Philosopher's work into the classroom.

  But Albert's commentary and analyses did more than promote his own fame. Unlike the work of Grosseteste, who had stayed in a provincial part of provincial England and who never got into the mainstream, Albert's work helped validate science as a legitimate branch of theological study.

  Although both Albert and Bacon each believed that the other was engaged in a perversion of science, they were actually not that far apart in either method or outlook. Both undertook to explain the natural world by extrapolating from sensory observation to more general principles. Bacon was theoretic—more Newtonian—while Albert was a scrupulous observer—more Darwinian. If not for the politics at Paris and, later, rivalry between the orders, the two might have ended up as allies. As it was, the only real source of argument between them was the importance of mathematics to scientific theory. Bacon believed that mathematics underlay everything in nature, and Albert rejected this, although, as was true on many other occasions, he offered no proof or underlying reasoning for his conclusion:

  [It is an] error of Plato [and of others, like Bacon] . . . who held that natural things are founded on mathematical and mathematical being formed on divine, just as the third cause is dependent on the second, and the second on the first; and so [Plato] said that the principles of natural being are mathematical, which is completely false.

  Albertus Magnus would remain Bacon's enemy until the day he died, but it was Albert's protégé, Thomas Aquinas, and his rejection of experimental science that would bring about the ruin of Roger Bacon.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Dumb Ox:

  Thomas Aquinas

  • • •

  ST. THOMAS AQUINAS, one of the most revered names in all of Catholic history, was born Tommaso d'Aquino in 1224 or 1225 in the ancestral castle of Roccasecca, about fifty miles north of Naples, in what was then the kingdom of Sicily. He was the youngest child and only son of his father's second wife, a member of a noble family allied closely to Frederick II. Many of Thomas's uncles and cousins had served the emperor, and his half brothers had been pages at Frederick's court and later soldiers in the imperial army. Although physically, temperamentally, and spiritually no two men could be more different than Frederick and Thomas, they are inexorably linked, both by fortune and coincidence.

  In 1229, when Thomas was four or five years old, Frederick had pulled off the most dazzling coup of an astonishing life. He had long been in contact with al-Kamil, the sultan of Egypt. The two had exchanged geometry problems and gifts, and over time they had become familiar with each other's political realities and ambitions. Frederick wanted Jerusalem, al-Kamil wanted Syria, and they worked out a deal of mutual support. The result was a ten-year truce with powerful Egypt, which included the return of Jerusalem to Christendom. Thus Frederick achieved without the loss of a single human life what hundreds of thousands across Europe had suffered and died for since the very first crusade had been called in 1095.

  Frederick rode into the Holy City on March 17, 1229, and had himself crowned the king of Jerusalem. It had been Thomas's father's cousin, another Tommaso d'Aquino, who had handled the delicate negotiations with al-Kamil.

  There was a tradition in Sicily at the time that the yo
ungest son in a family was given to the Church, and so, at almost the same moment as the emperor was riding into Jerusalem, Thomas's parents sent him off for schooling to the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, just a few miles to the north. The Benedictines were aligned more with the pope than with the emperor, but that did not seem particularly inflammatory at the time. What's more, the Aquino family was sufficiently prestigious (and had donated enough to the abbey) to be fairly confident that Thomas would one day be made abbot.

  Monte Cassino was not much of a school, but it sufficed for primary education. Thomas learned a little reading, a little writing, and a little Latin, along with the psalms. He probably would have stayed on and become a Benedictine monk himself had the further intrigues of Frederick II not intervened.

  Frederick's ambitions were not limited to the Holy Land. He wanted Italy as well, particularly Rome itself. He and Pope Gregory IX—the current ruler in the city—loathed each other with single-minded fury. Gregory had long since excommunicated Frederick and had tried to seize Sicily while the emperor was in Jerusalem by starting a rumor that Frederick was dead. Frederick foiled the plan by turning up alive, and for the next decade the two fought for the future of Europe and the Church.

  They alternated between a war of words and one of deeds. Frederick called the pope “the abomination of Babylon,” while Gregory spread the word that the emperor was the Antichrist. At the end of the twelfth century, a Calabrian monk named Joachim of Flora had prophesied that a representative of Satan was to bring about the end of the world, the Day of Judgment, and a new era in or around the year 1260. Joachim's prophesies had spread throughout Europe, gaining adherents throughout the Church, particularly among the Franciscans and others prone to mysticism. Gregory simply attached Frederick to Joachim's prophesy. “With fangs and claws of iron it seeks to destroy everything and trample the world to fragments beneath its feet . . . behold the head and tail and body of the Beast, of this Frederick, this so-called emperor,” Gregory noted in a proclamation.

  By 1236, in one of the more active periods of this conflict, Frederick had decided to take Lombardy, and full-scale war ensued. There was a decisive battle at Cortenuova, which Frederick won by skill and daring. Within the week he had swept into the principal city of Cremona in full regalia, his prisoners trailing behind him, the nobles in chains. The foremost prisoner, a Milanese aristocrat, was tied to the mast of a captured Milanese vessel, which was pulled through the streets by Frederick's ever-present elephant. The man chosen to oversee the guarding of these prisoners was Thomas's father. His father's cousin, the other Tommaso d'Aquino, was Frederick's envoy in Rome.

  Eventually, in 1239, imperial troops took over the abbey of Monte Cassino, and it was suddenly inconvenient for a member of the Aquino family to be a novitiate at a facility even loosely aligned with the pope. Thomas left and came home.

  Thomas was at just the right age to go to university, so his parents sent him off almost at once to the new school Frederick had established at Naples. Not surprisingly, Frederick's university was like no other in Europe. Unlike the schools at Paris, Oxford, and Bologna, which had grown out of a tradition of scholarship, Naples had been created by imperial fiat for the express purpose of finding talented boys and training them to be civil servants. In those days, this meant the study of law. Frederick even appointed his own chief judge as a professor and paid other qualified legal professionals to teach. It was the only school in Europe funded not by the students but by the state.

  The arts program in which Thomas enrolled was therefore heavily weighted to law, which became his first discipline, just as math and science had been Bacon's. Because this was Frederick's school, however, it also taught the libri naturales and the related Arabic commentaries—Michael Scot's translations were available in Naples years before they came to Paris—and Aquinas studied these as well. But he would always come at natural philosophy from a lawyer's point of view, and it does not appear that he had much if any mathematical training. In 1241, midway through Thomas's stay in Naples, Gregory IX died just as Frederick's armies were closing in on Rome.

  Thomas stayed at the University of Naples until 1244, long enough to incept as a master of arts, although he never actually earned his degree. Instead, like Albertus Magnus twenty years before him, he fell under the spell of the Friars Preachers.

  A deeply religious man, Aquinas had never given up the notion of going into the Church, but the Benedictine order was not what he was looking for. Although the studious side appealed to him, it was too removed from participation in Church and social policy. Years later, he would write in his Summa Theologica, “the highest place among religious orders is held by those which are ordained to teaching and preaching, which functions belong to and participate in the perfection of bishops.” “Teaching and preaching”—that was certainly the Dominicans. They had been in Naples since 1227, no doubt lured by the presence of the university. In 1231 they were given a church and priory, and it was here, in 1244, that the nineteen-year-old Thomas entered the order.

  The Dominicans were naturally pleased with this new aristocratic recruit, but having an Aquino around the priory was a mixed blessing. The Friars Preachers were by now known to be the pope's men and thus only barely tolerated by Frederick. The order had already had one irate noble Italian family aligned with the emperor break in and take back a son who had pledged to become a Dominican novitiate.

  The friars decided that the best course of action would be to get Thomas out of town, so they assigned him to the University of Paris. The master general of the order himself, John of Wildeshausen, the man who had sent Albertus Magnus to Paris to take the Dominican chair at the university, undertook to escort Thomas to France. Naturally, they walked.

  It is here that great events of state collided with a small family drama to produce a saint.

  AFTER GREGORY DIED IN 1241, the civil authorities in Rome understood the urgent need for a papal successor. To ensure the prompt participation of the cardinal-electors, they had them rounded up by soldiers and harried through the streets to the meeting place, one older cardinal apparently dragged by his hair.

  The election was headquartered in a ruin of a building, and all ten cardinals were herded into a small suite of rooms and locked in. The soldiers were lodged in the rooms directly upstairs. The structure was so decayed that the floors were rotting, which was convenient for the soldiers, since they could use the holes in the floor as toilets. This made the cardinals' bedroom in effect the soldiers' bathroom. Add to these foul conditions the sweltering heat of August, and it should come as no surprise that all ten cardinals fell ill and three died.

  Despite what must have been a strong incentive toward a swift choice, it took two months to pick Gregory's successor. Finally the remaining cardinals chose one of their own, but his rule lasted exactly seventeen days before he died from the fever he had caught while deliberating in his own election. By that time, the other cardinal-electors had fled Rome. They weren't going through that again. It would be 1243 before Gregory's successor would be enthroned. Still, the interregnum had its advantages—rather than continue battle, Frederick waited to see who would inherit the papacy.

  The new pope—who, tellingly, chose the title Innocent IV—demanded the return of all of the papal territory that Frederick had conquered while Gregory was alive. Frederick refused but asked to negotiate. Innocent agreed to meet him in Terni, north of Rome, in August 1244. Where Frederick went, so went his army, and in his army was Reginald d'Aquino, Thomas's older brother. Reginald had gotten wind from the family that Thomas was walking to Paris in the company of the master general of the Dominicans. By August they had made it as far as Terni.

  What happened next was written down by Tolomeo of Lucca, a chronicler and early biographer of St. Thomas:

  No sooner had Reginald heard that his brother was in the neighborhood (Frederick meanwhile pretending not to know what was about to happen) than he took Peter of Vineis with him and some men at arms, and we
nt and violently separated his brother from the master general, and forcing him to mount a horse, sent him off with a strong guard to one of the family castles in the Campagna calle San Giovanni.

  The soldiers first used a manly approach to dissuading Thomas from his new brethren: they shut him in a room with what James Weisheipl described as “a ravishing girl, seductively attired.” Thomas sent her away by brandishing a flaming stick from the fire. When he hurled it at the fleeing maiden, the story goes, the torch made the sign of the cross on the bedroom door. Thomas considered this a sign from God. Voluptuous farm girls failing, Reginald then handed Thomas over to his mother and sister for further persuasion (his father had died the year before), but it was Thomas who succeeded in persuading his sister to take orders and become a Benedictine nun.

  Negotiations between Frederick and Innocent failed, and the pope escaped to Lyon. There, beyond Frederick's reach, he called a council and declared the emperor officially deposed. The Aquino clan, hedging its bets, then decided that perhaps having a Dominican in the family wasn't such a bad idea after all. Thomas's mother accordingly allowed him to “escape” (he climbed out a window of the family castle), and in 1245 he finally arrived in Paris.

  AS A STUDENT IN PARIS, Thomas was quiet and without distinction. Albert doesn't even mention knowing him, although clearly he must have since the two of them left together for Cologne in 1248. Even at Cologne, Thomas, a heavyset man with large, sad eyes, spoke so little that his classmates called him Boven Mutum—“Dumb Ox.”

  Then one day a fellow student offered to help Thomas with his homework and wound up getting a lesson himself. He then begged Aquinas to tutor him. A little later, another student picked up some notes that Aquinas had dropped on the floor after class and showed them to Albert. Albert was so impressed with the line of argument that he called on Thomas at the very next session to respond to a particularly dense bit of scholastic reasoning. Aquinas's performance was brilliant, and from that day on he became Albert's protégé.