The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  It had an effect however that no chronicler, however sagacious, could possibly have foreseen. Every single one of those six armed men, as well as their leader and his visitor, behaved exactly in the same way. They all were so startled and shocked that they simply dared not comment on what they had heard. Every single one of them pretended—whether to himself as well as to the others who could tell?—that he had heard nothing!

  The shock of what they had heard, for all this pretence, followed them, all the same, through the burning heat of this mid-day in June, as they pressed on, leaving the stone circle to their left, and that lonely stone seat where Lil-Umbra, on an early February morning, had asked Peleg such searching questions, on their right, till they approached, not the small postern this time, for they were too large a party, and it was too cogent an occasion, to use that entrance, but the main gate of the Fortress.

  As soon as Raymond told him they were approaching their journey’s end, Albertus brought their march to a halt and put to his young guide the direct question, which the voice of that cave-devil had for the time postponed.

  “And what,” he asked him, “is your own private attitude to these disputes?”

  The Cone Castle men, who were already alert, now crowded quite close to them, and it became clear to Raymond that they felt unusually concerned. And indeed there was unquestionably something about Albertus Magnus that attracted the attention of intelligent persons wherever he went. He had already held for a couple of years an important bishopric in Germany, but this he had recently resigned together with all the influence and wealth that a bishopric gives in order to devote himself solely and entirely to the metaphysical and botanical and entomological studies that were the main interest of his days upon earth.

  This absorption in the mysterious life of all the creatures of Nature and in the whole problem of mind and matter, since it was combined with a lively interest in men and women for themselves, threw a very singular aura round him, an aura which, though it rendered him separate and aloof, endowed his presence with the peculiar attraction which certain rare and evasive animals and birds and insects possess.

  And not only was Albertus Magnus an unusual, indeed we might say a unique person in himself, but the particular line of philosophical investigation into which he threw his whole nature linked itself with metaphysical thoroughness to his wide natural sympathy. He himself described it as finding the Universal “before” all, “in” all, and “after” all. He was not only a student of plants, trees, flowers, and insects, but of human beings also; and he sought to find this Universal of his in all its three stages of “before”, “in”, and “after”, in every living thing he studied.

  In appearance Albert of Cologne was curiously impressive. He was of medium height but very powerfully built. He always wore, day and night—for it was a weakness of his to be physically sensitive to catching cold, and it was a conviction of his that where he was especially menaced by this affliction was through his head—a curiously shaped white cap that had a remote affinity to an academic cap, and also to the metallic cap of a knight in armour, but was first suggested to him by the singular night-turban worn by an Arabian student of Aristotle with whom he had shared a lodging in early days in Swabia.

  But the chief advantage of this ubiquitous protection against colds was that it was made of such soft stuff that any kind of ceremonial head-gear, from a pontifical mitre to a more secular token of authority, could be squeezed over it.

  The head of Albert of Cologne was if anything not larger, but smaller, than most human heads. He had a long straight nose with wide sensitive nostrils. He had small ears close to his skull, extremely full and very attractively curved lips, a large mouth that was often open and even had a tendency to dribble, an unaggressive and retreating chin and a pair of small hazel eyes under bushy grey eyebrows, eyes that searched affectionately and longingly into every person and thing he looked at, as if seeking to trace “within” this person or thing the Universal in which he believed, the Universal that had been “before” it and would be “after” it. The truth was he was always aware of the contrast between the touchingly pathetic brittleness, feebleness, silliness and conceitedness of the particular small creature he was regarding and the enormous life-force which brought it to birth.

  “What I would like to be able to tell you, Doctor,” replied Raymond hesitatingly, fully aware that his Cone Castle friends were glancing quickly from one to another as they followed his words, “would be that I have steadily tried hard, ever since I realized the bewildering complexity of all these ultimate problems, to keep my mind entirely open and my personal conclusions undecided and hanging in the balance. But such is the weakness and such is the pride of human nature, or at any rate, great Doctor, of my nature, that I cannot resist bringing into the workings of my will and of my faith in myself all manner of obstinate prejudices and too-quickly reached conclusions.”

  Albert of Cologne made a quick little inclination of his head, upon which for this journey through the forest of Wessex, he wore above his white skull-cap, a traveller’s variant of a Dominican cowl.

  “Please give me, my dear young guide, and let me tell you I shall certainly congratulate your future parents-in-law on having secured for their daughter such a thoughtful and resourceful bridegroom, some general notion of these fixed ideas of yours before we have to separate.”

  “Well, master; to confess the truth,” and Raymond de Laon looked nervously round him at a receding glade of sun-illumined bluebells in one direction, and at several sumptuous bunches of horse-chestnut blossoms in another direction, and finally at the illimitable gulf, of that early June’s noon-deep, noon-blue infinity above them, and then, with a quiver of unquestioned sincerity in his voice: “What I feel myself, great master,” he said, “is that it’s wrong for the church to forbid Friar Bacon to work at his self-chosen inventions. And I also feel that it’s wrong, and worse than wrong, in fact I think it is devilishly wicked in this Bonaventura, who by some pious people among us is regarded as a saint, and who at one time was the Pope’s Legate, to start the rumour”—here the young man’s voice became broken by a sound in his throat that was clearly a choked-down sob—“that my pure-minded young betrothed and her serious-minded elder-brother Tilton have committed the shocking sin of incest.”

  His voice rose stronger at this point. “This man Bonaventura knows absolutely nothing of us people in the west of England. He knows nothing of the childlike and innocent character of the young man and young girl he is attacking in this gross manner. And further, great master, you must understand that he actually went so far as to urge on a band of notorious outlaws from a castle in this neighbourhood called Lost Towers whose lord is known far and wide as an enemy of God and man, but whom this Bonaventura, for his own secret ends, pretends to have converted, to attack Friar Bacon. It was this rabble who under his direction smashed a shrine which my betrothed’s brother was building, and were on the point of destroying Friar Bacon’s Brazen Head, if it hadn’t been for——”

  Albertus Magnus interrupted him. “You’ve not forgotten I hope, my young friend,” cried the famous teacher, “that it was only your promise that I should be allowed to sleep in the same chamber as this Brazen Head that made me put off my return to Cologne? This particular invention interests me profoundly. To tell you the truth, Raymond de Laon, what I had been hearing from England about the experimental theories concerning physical science originated by your great Robert Grosseteste had led me to aim at something very much on Friar Roger’s lines. It was when they made me a bishop that I had too much work and too much responsibility to be able to go on with such things; and I warrant it was the same with your Grosseteste who must have been both a real scientist and a real saint.

  “But I can tell you this, my lad—I can tell you this, my friends—when a thinker gets an appointment all his thinking’s done. We are just idiots if we imagine we can accept responsible positions in Church or State and go on thinking just the same. I tell
you, my dear lad, I tell you, my excellent friends, the noble words I have already read written by this Friar Bacon have interested me greatly. He knows Aristotle through and through and few scholars have better interpreted the secretum secretorum of all matter, I mean the energeia-akinesis, or ‘energy without fuss’, that is at the heart of the world.

  “And as for his Brazen Head, I have tried myself in my own blundering and amateurish way to invent a machine that can use what we have come to call the agens intellectus, or the mental driving-force, that exists in the ultimate substance of things and which we are told in the scriptures is the Spirit of God. But I seem to be saying things contrary to what you are feeling about all this, my dear son, and I beg you to tell me at once where your difficulty lies; for I can see that many of our friends here are interested in this point, and I shall perhaps have more to tell you when I have spent a night under your betrothed’s roof and in company with your Friar’s Brazen Head.”

  Raymond de Laon looked round at the faces about him, and he was forced to admit to himself that they did indeed look surprisingly interested as to what he would say in reply to all this. He made up his mind to blurt out the precise truth.

  “You are quite right, master,” he said, making a peculiar gurgling noise in his throat before each word he uttered, as if it had been projected out of him by squeezing his wind-pipe. “There is a thing that I really must ask you, master, while I have a chance, for there is no telling how long my destiny will enable me to remain at Cone Castle where already I am by no means, as my friends here could tell you, what at Oxford they call a persona grata with everybody. But what I want to ask you is this, for my betrothed’s younger brother, whose name is John, and whose quickness in learning things has been a tremendous help to the Friar, has recently, in his talk anyway, shown a tendency to follow some of the more satirical Latin poets and to grow sceptical about our holy faith and I am not clever enough, nor is my betrothed, to refute young John’s arguments; but I certainly think he goes much further in the direction of unbelief than the Friar himself does, who indeed, from what I’ve been able to pick up, remains an entirely orthodox Christian. My question, great doctor, is simply this: Where, in a world composed of matter possessed of this energeia-akinesis, does God come in? What place in fact is left, in a world of such self-creative energy as you describe, for any sort of Creator?”

  The moment was a singularly intense one for that small group of about a dozen men. The average intelligence among the retainers of the Lord of Cone was a good deal higher than it was at the Fortress; and ever since Raymond’s official betrothal to Lil-Umbra, whose young brother was known to be a reckless supporter of the Friar, there had been lively discussions in the ground-floor reception-hall, as well as in the kitchen, as to whether the Friar was inspired by God or by the Devil.

  Not for nothing had Albertus been an active bishop for a couple of years. By his use-and-wont contacts under such conditions with all sorts of people he had developed, to a degree unusual in such a speculative thinker, an awareness of the thoughts and feelings of the people that surrounded him, or that at any moment accompanied him, or that happened to be listening to him.

  From boyhood he had been a naturalist, and by this time he knew much more about birds and beasts and insects than any other thinker of that epoch who was proficient in Greek and Latin.

  At this moment as he encountered the earnest faces round him and noted the almost distressed look in the long thin countenance of Raymond de Laon, a countenance that already bore more wrinkles between the eyebrows than seemed natural for so handsome and diplomatic a youth, he suddenly caught sight of a butterfly he had come to name a “Wood Argus” because of the markings on its wings, that now had settled, since this group of two-legged monsters seemed inclined to be quiescent, on a little poplar-twig just above a regular bed of bluebells.

  A particularly brilliant ray of June sunshine was at that second turning into a shining little arrow-head of gleaming silver the white stalk of one of these flowers, and as he watched it, Albert of Cologne couldn’t help wondering whether this particular “Wood-Argus” came regularly at this particular hour to this particular spot.

  In a small leafy grove just outside Cologne he had frequently constituted himself a patient and watchful sentinel of whatever light-winged butterfly-emperor ruled that forest-glade, a sentinel big enough to ward off any feathered freebooter, who might come sweeping down through the fragrant air-gulfs of the noon-heat, with the deliberate intention of snapping up so divine a mouthful.

  He now had the experience and the wit to see clearly that by his reference to the self-creative energy of the “Hulee”, or “raw-material” or “formless timber”, as Homer might have called it, out of which the world is made, he had touched an extremely ticklish subject, in fact the subject of all subjects, he now told himself, about which, in connection with Friar Roger, the intelligent minority was most hotly divided.

  “I must be careful,” he thought. “O how mixed up, how cruelly mixed up with our personal prejudices, is every exciting topic we touch!”

  And then, when it must have been clear to them all that he was longing to say something that was very important to himself, but found it hard to get the right words for it, his eyes were caught by the largest of a few dark holes in the ground in front of him, obviously caused by the cloven hooves of some wandering steer or heifer, and which had been filled with water by last night’s rain. Upon this small black pool, in his effort to decide what it would be best to say, he was now fixedly staring. As he stared, he suddenly grew aware that the mid-day Sun was also busy with this hand’s-breadth of dark water, and that he was now staring into his own reflected visage, above which his complicated head-wear had already become among the bluebells a portentously hovering shadow.

  “What place is left for a Creator?” was now the question which the mind behind that bulging forehead, those quivering nostrils, those small deep-set tearful eyes, had to answer; and as, aware of that attentive group of men, and of that more than attentive young lover, the great teacher from Cologne struggled with the riddle of existence, he felt as if this floating “something” that was himself, now confronted by this likeness of a not very striking human face in the wet hoof-print of an animal, was being carried, just as that reflected face looked as if it were being carried, up, up, up, through all Space and all Time, searching for the thrice-blessed gulf of absolute nothingness that is beyond all that has a name.

  At last the words came. “There are some of us,” he said, speaking slowly, and beneath and against and under, so it felt to him, the warm breath of every star in the firmament, “who hold that all the ideal words that we philosophers use, such as ‘matter’ and ‘substance’ and ‘form’ and ‘essence’ and ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ and ‘transitory’ and ‘eternal’ and ‘nature’ and ‘super-nature’ are only so many names, sounding syllables that signify nothing. Others hold that these words represent ultimate and basic realities by the use of which we recognize and interpret the Entelecheia of existence, that would be just meaningless smoke without them!

  “Now what I hold, my dear friends, is especially difficult to make clear because it partakes of the opposite opinions of both those two camps of thought. I do hold, as strongly and as absolutely as it is possible to hold anything, that behind all the visible and intelligible phenomena of the cosmos there exists the invisible and unintelligible reality which we call God.

  “According to the philosophy of the greatest of all philosophers—I speak of Aristotle—the material stuff of which the Cosmos is composed is eternal, and contains within itself the creative energy that builds the world and produces all the innumerable lives around us, such as we know and such as we are. But we Christians have been given a—a—a——”

  Here he hesitated and a very queer sound came from his body as he stood there before them, like a great black rook come down from a nest that a quarter of a year ago has served its purpose to the limit and now awaits its disso
lution, a sound that might have been an explosion of wind, either from mouth or from anus, but a sound that resembled the cry of an unborn child, that with the permission of nature had been engendered in the duodenum of an elderly man by deliberate impregnation from a superhuman minotaur—“have been given a—a Revelation that alters from top to bottom the whole situation.”

  Here his voice rose just as used to rise the voice of each of the Homeric heroes at some special crisis in the Trojan War. “We cannot, we dare not, we must not, lest we become the murderers of the truth that is in us, deny the integrity of our own reason. And if we accept our reason we must recognize that the deepest, wisest, completest embodiment of it, so far, and until this moment, is to be found in the works of Aristotle; and Aristotle maintains that since matter is eternal in its inherent essence and is capable, in itself and by its own secret energy, of renewing the universe, and of bringing into existence an everlasting recurrence of the multiple forms we see around us, we are driven by our reason to assume that the cosmos is eternal. But this whole assumption, this whole implication, this whole conclusion is surpassed and transcended”—Albert’s voice became the voice of a trumpet—“by the Revelation brought by Christ, the revelation of Christ Himself and the revelation of the Holy Spirit!”

  The warrior-retainers from Cone Castle were so accustomed to associate any reference, in any formal service of worship, to the Holy Ghost, as a sign that this same service had reached its termination, that now they all solemnly and mechanically, just as in some ordinary daily ceremonial, lowered one knee to the earth, and then, standing erect, murmured the word “amen”.

  Albert of Cologne would never have become what undoubtedly he had, by the pure power of his intrinsic personality, quite deservedly become, the best philosophical teacher in Europe, if he hadn’t long ago acquired the power of not losing his temper, or the thread of his discourse, or even his own zest for the subject, when the bulk of his audience missed the whole point, as they certainly did now.