The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  When Suger first stepped in his sun-filled church, he described his feelings: “It seems to me I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe.” This was a region that “neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven.” However, “by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world” thanks to the mediating power of light—or what later will be called the beauty of holiness. “The dull mind rises to the truth through material things,” Suger said, echoing the Celestial Hierarchy, “and having seen the light, [the mind] arises from its former submergence.”40

  In 1144, the finished choir at Saint Denis was consecrated in an elaborate ceremony. The king of France was there and his queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. So was Bernard of Clairvaux. All around them was evidence of a new Neoplatonic spirit arising in the Catholic Church, inspiring a fresh appreciation of the physical world. It was the result of a synthesis of Saint Augustine’s belief in the power of love and faith and Neoplatonism’s belief in the power of visible order to bring the human soul closer to God.41

  Thanks to Suger, Neoplatonism became virtually the property of the French monarchy and a lasting cultural legacy for France. All the most nearly perfect Gothic cathedrals until about 1230 would be built in France. Today, it is hard to find much trace of Suger’s original Gothic church at Saint Denis. Only part of the ambulatory at the far eastern end, or chevet, still survives. If we want to see the Gothic in its full original Neoplatonic splendor, we need to travel southwest of Paris by about fifty miles, to the town of Chartres.

  There had been a bishop of Chartres, and a basilica, since Carolingian times. However, in about 1100 a group of scholars set up shop in the wealthy market town in order to teach local boys Latin and theology, but also to examine the complex mysteries of Plato’s one surviving text in the West, the Timaeus. When the old cathedral burned down in 1020, and then caught fire again in 1194, the so-called school of Chartres would have a direct hand in its reconstruction, including its plan and decorative sculptures.

  The new Chartres was rebuilt with all the features of the Gothic style. There are the pointed arch windows and circular rose windows (including one donated by the queen of France, Blanche of Castile) and ribbed interior vaults. There is the soaring spire, almost 350 feet high, symbolizing the soul’s aspiration to be one with God. As for Chartres’s famous flying buttresses, the first ever constructed, they were built to relieve stress on the cathedral’s walls, so that windows could be available for yards and yards of glittering stained glass.

  At the same time, the scholars at Chartres also gave Suger’s “style of continuous light” (they too were avid fans of the Pseudo-Dionysius) a new richness and complexity, thanks to their reading of the Timaeus. Later, some would claim they tried to replace theology with geometry.42 All they were really doing was using Plato and the Gothic style to offer a new insight into the nature of the existing world—not just to prepare for union with God in the next.

  The God of Plato’s Timaeus is the Demiurge, the Architect of the Universe—in a profound sense, the Master Builder. Plato tells us He constructs the physical world from the five Platonic solids by incorporating the four physical elements—earth, air, fire, and water—in proportions to ratios such as 1:2:4:8 and 1:3:9:27. What holds Plato’s world together is literally “geometrical proportion.”43 Thanks in large part to the school of Chartres, by 1150 the image of God as Geometer was appearing everywhere, in medieval manuscripts and in statuary. And the most important geometric form of all was the cube, the only figure with a 1:1:1:1 ratio, which every student of Plato or Pythagoras knew was the symbol of divine unity or Oneness.

  Just such a cube forms the central crossing of Chartres Cathedral. This is no great surprise. However, tipping a cube at a forty-five-degree angle will also produce a hexagon. A hexagon is constructed out of six equilateral triangles, another figure charged with Pythagorean significance. It also formed the basic figure that medieval builders used to generate their system of continuous proportion, called ad triangulum.44

  Too confusing and esoteric? Not to the builders and scholars at Chartres. A mind trained by the Pseudo-Dionysius was always open to mediating symbols. The very existence of such complexity would be ipso facto proof of the work of a divine hand: proof that the order of nature enjoys a geometric perfection that must bring us closer to God.

  And so, as scholar John James recently proved, the builders of Chartres Cathedral expanded the cubic space of the central crossing into a hexagonal matrix of intersecting triangles, using the vaults and pillars of the adjacent bays. These then grew out, triangle by triangle, to the next set of bays and then the next, all according to the ad triangulum formula and all in perfect proportion to one another.

  Chartres Cathedral interior, with hexagons forming the central crossing

  The hexagons that result do much more than define the line of columns across the transepts of Chartres. When the diagonals of the overall scheme are linked up, the position of every column in the entire building suddenly emerges. Those positions then define the positions of the windows within the rectangle of the church interior; those in turn define the height of the windows and walls; and so on. The ad triangulum principle, like a hologram, runs through every individual subunit that forms the interior of the cathedral—a dynamic exercise in proportion that is almost an exact copy of how Plato’s Demiurge in the Timaeus built the visible material world.45

  Platonic geometry plays its part in the outside of Chartres as well. As scholar Otto Simson notes, the total height of the cathedral and the western portal, with its magnificent sculpted figures, follow a series of ratios based on the square and once again the equilateral triangle. (The resulting rectangles are called “golden rectangles,” since all their sides are related as a ratio of 1:2:4:8.)46

  Likewise, Chartres’s famous statues of kings, queens, saints, and scholars are all arranged proportionately to one another and to the whole, since the elbow of each figure forms a golden section relative to the length of the entire figure.47 And around the portal of the Virgin Mary in Majesty are arrayed figures of the seven Liberal Arts, including Geometry, clearly the queen of the arts just as Mary is the queen of heaven.

  In the Chartres portal, as in the cathedral’s school, these allegorical figures summed up human knowledge from the Gothic and Neoplatonic points of view. They symbolize the Church’s reconnection with the West’s classical heritage as an imperfect but still necessary revelation of God’s divine order. In the words of Abbot Suger’s friend the mystic Hugh of Saint Victor, “All human learning can serve the student of theology.”48

  There is a female figure representing Dialectic or Logic, with Aristotle busily writing at his desk underneath. There is Rhetoric, with Cicero, similarly engaged; and Grammar, with a Roman author, Priscian, who taught countless medieval boys their lessons in Latin. In fact, one boy is shown diligently copying under Grammar’s direction, while another boy mischievously pulls his classmate’s hair.

  Arithmetic is teamed with a portrait of Boethius, just as Euclid is teamed with Geometry and Ptolemy with Astronomy. Pythagoras, meanwhile, poses with the allegorical figure of Music, who chimes out her perfect melodies with a harp and a set of hanging bells.

  So where is Plato? The answer is, nowhere and everywhere. At once the most famous but also the most unknown of Greek thinkers, he was transformed by the school of Chartres in the twelfth century into the great unifying intelligence of the High Middle Ages. The Gothic mind saw him as the one philosopher capable of drawing all human and divine knowledge into a harmonious whole.

  Abelard had made Aristotle the greater intellectual polarizer. The anti-Aristotle backlash led by Saint Bernard put Saint Augustine in a similar polemical position. To scholars like William of St. Thierry, who knew both warring scholars, only Plato and Neoplatonism seemed to offer the possibility of an orderly synthesis, where mind, body, and spirit “have each been ordered and disposed in its
rightful place,” as William wrote, “and a man may begin perfectly to know himself.”49

  It was a brilliant prediction, but wrong. At the beginning of the twelfth century, one of the chancellors of the Chartres school had declared that scholars of his generation were “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants”—meaning antiquity. By the end of the century, the men at Chartres began to realize just how gigantic those Greek and Roman minds really were. A flood of new learning was sweeping over western Europe from strange and unexpected sources. A grand synthesis was indeed in the works.

  Its pivotal figure, however, would turn out to be not Plato, but Aristotle.

  * * *

  * See chapter 9.

  † This was John Scotus Erigena, one of the very few intellectuals in the Dark Ages West who could read Greek. Erigena was a Neoplatonist of some distinction. At some point, he may have left the Carolingian court for England to work as an adviser to King Alfred the Great. There, according to tradition, Erigena’s students became so frustrated with his lessons that they stabbed him to death with their pens. The story is a salutary warning to every boring teacher. Alas, it is probably untrue.

  ‡ The compass and T square are still their official emblem.

  § The music metaphor is appropriate since these spaces were filled with the sound of Gregorian chants, which were written to a musical scale made from the same Pythagorean proportions.

  Aristotle, from the western portal of Chartres Cathedral. Thanks to the Arabs, he was about to become the philosopher for the Middle Ages.

  Fourteen

  AT THE SUMMIT: ARABS, ARISTOTLE, AND SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS

  Although grace is more efficacious than nature, yet nature is more essential to man.

  —St. Thomas Aquinas

  Allah Akbar!

  The high, thin cry to prayer split the early morning air of Toledo. God is Great! The first time the young man from Italy had heard it, the sound must have seemed like an audial illusion, like the cry of a bird that you briefly mistake for a human voice.

  Then he heard it again. The ritual of Islam was asserting itself against the natural sluggishness of the city as it lay half-asleep in the postdawn chill. Hayya ala salaah, hayya ala salaah. Come to prayer, come to prayer, repeated twice. Then twice again: A salaatu khairun min-an-naum. Prayer is better than sleep.

  Every morning, every year, the same exotic process had unfolded itself before his eyes. Muslim men in colorful caftans and women in silken chadors threading their way through the streets to Toledo’s central mosque; Jews in their high-crowned hats emptying the bazaar to go to synagogues in the Jewish Quarter; Spanish Christians headed toward services at the cathedral. And as the young man wandered Toledo’s narrow alleyways, he could see the massive towers of the former Moorish fortress, the Alcázar, looming over all of them.

  Ever since the legendary El Cid took back Toledo from the Moors in 1067, its citizens had lived under Christian rule. Castile’s king Alfonso had upheld the customs of his Muslim predecessors and worked to preserve Toledo as a city in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims could live and work side by side. This tradition of official toleration and interreligious harmony, called conviviencia, had resulted in a rich cultural and commercial interface between East and West that made Toledo Europe’s first cosmopolitan capital.

  It was also what drew the young man from Cremona in Italy. He had been bored with his teachers and set out for Spain in search of something new. He had arrived in Toledo in 1140—the same year that Abbot Suger was hard at work on his church at Saint Denis and Peter Abelard was being condemned to the priory of Cluny, still grumbling and complaining about his fate.

  None of this meant much to the young man from Cremona, whose name was Gerard. He had come to Toledo in search of certain secret books. Now, finally, they were within his grasp.

  He knocked at the stout, iron-studded door of a large house. It opened to reveal a servant, who silently beckoned him in. Gerard stepped into the cool, dark courtyard. It had taken him months of searching to track down the books, and it would take many more months of study to be able to read them. He had met with nearly every important scholar in Toledo, Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike, including the great Jewish theologian Abraham ibn Ezra. It may have been Ibn Ezra himself who taught Gerard how to read Arabic, in order to unlock the secrets the books contained.1

  For there, on the table, were the precious manuscripts. Gerard opened the first, its parchment pages turning crisply in his trembling fingers. The title page read: “On the Heavens.” He opened to another page and read:

  The evidence of the senses further corroborates the fact that the earth is round. How else would eclipses of the moon show segments shaped as we see them? In eclipses the outline is always curved; and since it is the interposition of the earth that makes the eclipse, the form of this line will be caused by the form of the earth’s surface, which is therefore spherical.…

  The text was in Arabic, but the author was a Greek.2 The man’s name, Gerard noted, was Aristotle. He read on.

  “Again, our observations make it evident, not only that the earth is circular, but also that it is of no great size.” Even as he read Aristotle’s words with growing excitement, Gerard was reaching a decision that would have huge consequences for the history of civilization.

  Gerard decided that his life’s work would be to translate all these lost texts and make them available once again to the Christian West. He had everything he needed here in Toledo: lots of time, lots of help from other scholars, and lots of texts to translate. All around him were stacks of books in Arabic on mathematics, astronomy, astrology, physics, and philosophy by various Greek and Arabic authorities. They included many works by Aristotle that no one in western Europe had opened in six hundred years.

  Gerard would also need an eager and grateful audience for his translations. Fortunately he had that already, thanks to that most disreputable event in medieval history, the Crusades.

  Most people who have taken a high school history class know that the Crusades, that long-standing effort by medieval Christendom to retake Jerusalem from the Muslims, were a political and religious disaster. The First Crusade did manage for a brief time to capture the city in 1099, after which Crusaders went on a spree of murder and mayhem until the blood, an eyewitness said, splashed up to their horses’ reins.3 Then the city where Jesus had been crucified, buried, and resurrected was lost to the Muslims again in 1187 and Christian Europe never got it back. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux had given up everything in order to preach in favor of what became the Second Crusade to regain lost territory in the Holy Land. Its failure shattered Bernard’s reputation (his friend Abbot Suger had silently disapproved) and probably hastened his death.

  The Third Crusade (1187–92) is probably the most famous, since its participants included two great national heroes, King Richard the Lion-Hearted of England and King Philip Augustus of France. But it proved no more successful than the ones that preceded it or the ones that followed with steadily diminishing effort and enthusiasm, until the French king Louis IX, or Saint Louis, died a miserable death from fever and disease on the last one in 1270.

  The Crusades were a notorious waste of lives and reputations. However, economically and culturally they were an undeniable success. They opened up Latin Christendom to trade with the more affluent world of Byzantine Greece and Islam. New goods and products entered ports and cities. A new affluent lifestyle caught the imagination of Europe’s nobility. They began wearing silk gowns and perfume, eating food laced with Asian spices, playing chess and polo, listening to music played on lutes and rebecs, and reading new forms of poetry and literature—as well as taking regular baths, a custom borrowed from the East.4

  The Crusades also triggered an interest in the intellectual riches of the same world. The original warriors against Islam were interested in loot, not books or information. But the crusading spirit opened the frontier between Islam and Christendom to a steady trickle of scholars who traveled t
o Sicily and southern Italy, Asia Minor, and above all Spain.5

  Their names should be better known than they are. Adelard of Bath risked starvation and death to travel to Sicily and Antioch, where he translated the works of Euclid and various Arab writers on astronomy and mathematics and wrote his own treatise on the astrolabe. Around 1150, James of Venice put together the first Latin translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and On the Soul.

  Dominic Gundisalvi or Gonzalez was a converted Jew who rose to become archdeacon of Segovia. He translated key works by Islamic philosophers, on and about Aristotle. In fact, Gundisalvi respected the ancient Peripatetic master so much that he proposed that Aristotle should be the basis for a complete revision of Europe’s intellectual culture—a sign of things to come.

  The most dedicated and most important, however, was Gerard of Cremona. Until his death in 1187, he translated no fewer than eighty-seven books from the Arabic, including Ptolemy and Euclid, and a precious hoard of texts by Aristotle. These included the Posterior Analytics, which completed the West’s knowledge of Aristotle’s works on logic.* Gerard also turned out Latin versions of Aristotle’s pathbreaking scientific treatises, not only On the Heavens but the Physics, On Generation and Corruption, and Meteorology, as well as Arab commentaries on the Metaphysics and On the Soul—the key texts of Aristotle’s entire philosophy. Aristotle’s Politics, Nicomachean Ethics, and Rhetoric had to wait a few more years to find a suitable translator.