In the Wake of the Plague

by Norman F. Cantor

  Eventually, seven centuries later, this philosophy would generate modern medicine and its capacity to combat infectious disease, something beyond imagining in the time of the Black Death.

  Bradwardine was the end product of the great Oxford intellectual movement that had begun in the 1240s and reached its end point with him and with an English Franciscan philosopher who had died of the Black Death one year before, in faraway Munich, Bavaria. This was another Oxford prodigy, William of Occam.

  Occam was by 1348 an old man, in his mid-sixties, and he had not been in England since the second decade of the fourteenth century. Occam’s disrespect for the absolute authority of the pope—or even of a general council of the church—inevitably attracted the attention of the papal court at Avignon and he was summoned there to be present during an investigation for heresy. As often happens today in Roman law countries, such as France or Italy, the investigation then conducted by a commission of cardinals and church lawyers was interminable.

  After a couple of years Occam felt increasingly uncomfortable in Avignon, at once fanatical and corrupt, and he proceeded eastward and found refuge at the court of the erratic German emperor, Louis IV of Bavaria, who was at odds with the papacy over indefinable matters of church-state relations and prepared to offer protection to radical clerics like Occam.

  In Munich at the emperor’s court Occam was joined by another provocative thinker and writer, an Italian-born professor from the University of Paris, Marsilio of Padua. As a graduate student, Marsilio had actually been elected rector of the University of Paris for a year in an ill-fated democratic experiment. Marsilio’s sensational book, The Defender of the Peace (1324), called for subjection of the church everywhere, including the papacy, to the sovereign state. Only by this secular centralization could the peace of men be assured. So from somewhat different angles William of Occam and Marsilio of Padua were attacking the institutional power of the papacy in the church and society.

  Bradwardine was not attuned to the Occamist-Marsilian frontal assault on the papacy. Whatever his opinion of what was going on in Avignon, he kept it to himself. In politics and society Bradwardine was a conformist and a conservative, deeply loyal to Edward III and his militarist state and at least outwardly obedient to the pope as long as the Plantagenet monarchy and the Avignon papacy maintained their somewhat tense but good formal relations.

  Bradwardine was an intellectual partner of Occam in the realms of science, philosophy, and theology, but not in the theory of church organization. This intellectual movement was inaugurated at Oxford in the 1230s by Robert Grosseteste, who rose from being an orphan begging in the streets of Lincoln, to lecturer to the new group of Franciscan friars studying at Oxford, to the rich and powerful bishopric of Lincoln. In reaching this exalted level, Grosseteste’s delicate service as tutor to the child king Henry III stood him in good stead.

  Grosseteste was not formally a member of the Franciscan order of friars, but he was their official protector in England and sometimes wore their gray habit. In those days, Oxford did not have its own bishopric; it was part of the huge midland diocese of Lincoln. As bishop of Lincoln, Grosseteste was the chancellor of the university (a position equivalent to chairman of the board of trustees of an American university today). But he participated in the intellectual life of the university and wrote prolifically on a wide variety of philosophical and theological subjects.

  He was also a pioneering experimental scientist (some historians say the first experimental scientist). His work on optics led to invention of corrective eyeglasses, a terrific boon to the near-sighted monastic scribes and university scholars who ruined their eyesight by working long hours by smoky candlelight.

  The Order of the Friars Minor (Little Brothers) founded by St. Francis of Assisi around 1220, with a good deal of prodding and supervision from Rome, was supposed to be devoted to social welfare services for the poor and steer clear of the baggage of academic life. That was to be the mission of the other new Order of Preachers, the Dominicans. By 1260 the Dominicans had indeed come to dominate the graduate faculty of theology and philosophy at the University of Paris, through the prolific teacher and writer Albert the Great and his more famous and influential disciple, the Neapolitan aristocrat turned Dominican friar, Thomas Aquinas.

  But under Grosseteste’s leadership the English Franciscans became the vanguard for intellectuals at Oxford. By 1270 the two great northern universities were in competition—under Franciscan and Dominican aegis—for dominating progressive thinking within Latin Christian culture. Thomas Aquinas stood against the Oxford Franciscans who succeeded Grosseteste—Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and above all William of Occam—who took an opposite view of the relationship between faith and reason.

  It was an intellectual split at the center of late medieval thought. The two sides continued their battles down into the sixteenth century. With Oxford’s decline at the end of the fourteenth century—partly because it had become a hotbed of political as well as ecclesiastical radicalism and thereby antagonized the monarchy and nobility—the Occamist tradition migrated to the newly founded German universities. “I am an Occamist,” said Martin Luther around 1510. He was an Augustinian friar teaching theology at a boondock new university in eastern Germany.

  This was the intellectual world and academic milieu in which Thomas Bradwardine developed and rose to academic prominence. Unlike Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, and William of Occam, Bradwardine was not a Franciscan friar, a member of a religious order. He was an ordinary secular cleric, which gave him great intellectual freedom if at the same time denying him the protection and financial aid the Order of Friars Minor provided to its intellectuals.

  Bradwardine had to make his way as a student and young don on his own, without special group support. This perhaps drove his precocity, although William of Occam was similarly an adolescent prodigy who started teaching at Oxford when he was barely twenty.

  Bradwardine was intellectually as well as institutionally a free agent. He did not necessarily agree with the Oxford Franciscan tradition in all its doctrines and assumptions. But he was a product of the great Oxford intellectual renaissance of 1240–1380—not to be seen at the old English university again until the nineteenth century—and worked within the Oxford intellectual tradition as compared to the very different perspective of Parisian Thomism.

  The Thomist school grew from the consequences of the penetration into the Paris University around the middle of the twelfth century of the cast corpus of Aristotelian science and philosophy through the medium of Arabic and Jewish schools (also writing in Arabic) in Spain and Sicily.

  The Aristotelian corpus was translated in the eastern Mediterranean by Byzantine monks and Arab Muslim scholars into Arabic between 800 and 1000 and found its way, accompanied by various mathematical and medical texts, into Cordoba, Spain, and Palermo, Sicily, by 1050. Previously only Aristotelian logic was available in the West, which was thoroughly dominated by the Platonic idealistic and mystical rather than the Aristotelian scientific and rational frame of thought. By the middle of the thirteenth century Aristotle’s writings were being translated directly from Greek into Latin rather than through Arabic mediation, and these improved translations were available to the corpulent and good-humored Dominican friar at Paris, Thomas Aquinas.

  What drove the Thomist mission was a concern that Catholic doctrine was founded on the Bible, church authority, and the more mystical and irrational part of ancient culture, not on reason and Aristotelian science. It was to defend this established faith and high culture—something that the Cairo rabbi Maimonides had already attempted for Judaism, to deep resentment from the Orthodox rabbinate—that Thomas Aquinas, following his Parisian Dominican mentor Albert the Great, set out to show the large-scale compatibility of Catholic faith and Aristotelian reason and science.

  Thus the Incarnation was based on revelation and historicity, but the existence of God could be proven by science and logic—there cannot be an infinity of ca
usation; there has to be a First Cause in nature. A minimally decent Christian life—not one of saints and martyrs but of solid citizens—could be construed from Aristotelian ethics, with its advocacy of the Golden Mean and its insistence that “one swallow does not make a summer,” that is, ethical behavior is habitually conditioned. The law of the state derived its legitimacy from the laws of nature (reason) and ultimately divine law.

  In God’s eyes and mind there was one truth about nature and man, Thomism claimed. Human reason could not fully establish this synchronous core truth but it could come close enough to qualm fears that faith and reason, science and revelation, were so separated and discrete that there was a “double truth,” not a single one, as claimed by the radical Arabic philosopher Averroes and some of his followers at the University of Paris, such as Aquinas’s adversary Siger of Brabant.

  The Oxford Franciscan school, in whose wake Bradwardine followed, was having none of the Thomist synthesis. While not explicitly endorsing Averroes, they arrived at a similar position. They acknowledged that there existed a world of science, which could establish the rules of natural operation, preferably expressed mathematically. But it was superseded by a truth imparted by faith, an amalgam in varying proportions, depending on who was talking, of biblical revelation, church tradition and authority, and personal religious experience.

  This is close to the modern position enunciated by Immanuel Kant around 1795 and which became the standard academic view after the intellectual and cultural wars over Darwinian evolution in the 1860s and 1870s. Kant’s philosophy showed there was no other modus vivendi in university life and research.

  Thus the Oxford approach of the early fourteenth century led ultimately to the modern scientific world, which, after about 1940 with the development of antibiotics, could actually counter an outbreak of infectious disease. Occam and Bradwardine were theoretically on the right track (along with an early-fourteenth-century Parisian master, John Buridan). But nothing tangible came of their remarkable scientific work, in which some historians have seen the clear beginnings of modern science, that was useful in any way against the Black Death.

  In the first place, they worked only at physics and in that field their way was blocked until the sixteenth century by inadequate knowledge of algebra (derived from the Arabic world and ultimately from India). The only chemistry that was done was wasted on the dead end of alchemy. The way to biomedical science was blocked by reluctance to engage in dissection of the human body (created in God’s image) and by the persistence of the medical theory propounded by Galen around A.D. 200 that good health was a matter of maintaining a balance of “humours” rather than combating specific disease-carrying microbes.

  Since scientists had no microscope until around 1600 and no powerful one until around 1870, they could not see the disease-carrying bacilli. Therefore, in spite of some good work by Bradwardine and the Oxford school in the realm of theoretical physics (where it was relatively easy to catch Aristotle in error), the powerful and learned Oxford intellects had nothing to put forward to explain the Black Death.

  Physicians attributed the plague to physiological imbalance, and when that story paled in the face of a raging pandemic, other explanations were trotted out. A commission of Parisian scholars assembled by the king soberly announced that the problem was astrological, something about Saturn in the house of Jupiter.

  Of course moralists pronounced the plague to be divine retribution for sin, and while the sermonizers worked overtime to disseminate this conventional explanation, it was not convincing when the good and bad perished in equal numbers in the Black Death. Serpents and snakes were thought to be carriers of the plague, or it was attributed to Jewish malevolence.

  In Germany in the fourteenth century it was widely claimed that the plague was the result of Jewish conspiracy—the Jews had poisoned the wells. This could not be a good explanation for the plague in England or France, however, because the Jews had already been expelled from England and from France, except Alsace, between 1292 and 1306.

  The Black Death helped to make apparent that Thomism was an intellectual dead end. It failed to perceive the necessity for quantification in determining natural processes. It had no inkling of the crucial importance of experimentation. It was burdened with a strictly observational and rhetorical approach to science and furthermore remained specifically committed to Aristotle’s error-driven physics.

  Thomism looked liberal on the outside, a progressive philosophy that imagined a rationally constructed world. But Bradwardine knew the world was not rational. It was governed by an incomprehensible and awful deity whose actions, such as the Black Death, made no sense to humans.

  The way forward to modern science and the medicine that finally conquered the plague was to accept emotionally, on faith, a fearsome and unpredictable deity of absolute power, who ruled this and possibly other worlds and spaces. Scientists then progressed through experimentation and quantification to the understanding of immediately complex, natural processes in very small segments.

  This was the route advocated by Bradwardine, Occam, and the Oxford school. It led over long time to modern biochemically grounded medicine. Thomism, ordained in the sixteenth century as the official philosophy of the Catholic Church, led to liberal dogmas, happy dispositions, and intellectual nullity.

  Thomas Aquinas was as learned an intellectual, as powerful a thinker and writer as existed in the medieval world. One segment of his doctrine, on the philosophy of law, endures today in what is called natural law theory and is still embraced by many liberal-minded professors in the better American law schools.

  The intellectual road Thomas pursued—inaugurated by the Jewish thinker Maimonides in the twelfth century—seemed attractive and compelling at the time, but it did not lead to modern science. It did all the wrong things if that goal—which in the end distinguished Western European civilization from other cultures—was to be gained. It sought close compatibility between biblical faith and secular learning. It aimed at synthesis (“summa”) of all important knowledge, while Galileo, Newton, and above all Einstein knew that truth was in the details, that knowledge of nature was gained by the closest possible scrutiny of very small segments of natural processes.

  Instead Thomas decided that Aristotle was right about most things, including natural science. But Aristotle was wrong about many scientific things, as became evident to thinkers in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially though not exclusively at Oxford University.

  Bradwardine and his Oxford colleagues did not quite make the breakthrough to modern science. The quest had to be restarted in the seventeenth century, when algebra and scientific equipment were much more developed and the cultural ambience and academic reward system more propitious. But the archbishop knew the way to go, as Thomas did not: Focus on details, use quantification, do not try to force syntheses between science and theology. If the Black Death had not struck down the new archbishop, would the outcome have been different? Would the history of modern science in England date from fourteenth-century Oxford rather than from late-seventeenth-century Cambridge? The biographies of Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein prove that a single great mind in a position of power and academic leadership can create an intellectual revolution.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Women and Men of Property

  NINETY PERCENT OF THE wealth of England in 1340 lay in land. Of this land perhaps 40 percent was owned by the king and the royal family and the high aristocracy that usually carried the titles of duke, earl, baron, or simply “lord.” Another 30 percent of the land was held by ecclesiastical officers and corporations. This left nearly 30 percent of the land to be owned by the rural upper middle class, who came to be called gentry in the fifteenth century. At most 2 percent was in the hands of free peasants, later called yeomen.

  In England before the Black Death there were probably around half a million people in the gentry class, including women and children. By 1400 the gentry comprised half that nu
mber. Their family incomes varied as greatly as those of the American middle class today: anywhere from the equivalent of fifty thousand dollars a year in today’s money to three or four million dollars a year. The lesser gentry were sometimes called esquires, an obsolete military term. Perhaps half of the upper gentry were called “knights,” another obsolete military term. Knighthood entitled the senior male (as today) of the family to use the title of Sir and his wife to be given the honorific appellation of Lady. But a significant portion of wealthy gentry families resisted the official awarding of knighthood from the king because to be a “belted knight” could increase military and tax liabilities and put a heavier strain on the hospitality and entertainment budget of the family.

  Marriage, the production of progeny, and inheritance were the core of gentry life. A gentry family in the fourteenth century could rise from relative mediocrity by favor of the king, by collecting booty in the French wars, or—less commonly—by careful “husbandry” or estate management.

  But another and common route up the social and economic ladder was a series of good marriages—that is, those that brought in heavy dowries—plus the availability of male heirs steadily over several generations to keep the estate perpetually intact.

  On the other hand, marrying a woman of modest means and thin dowry, or losing her rich dowry after her death because of complicated legal maneuvers by which most of the landed dowry was returned to her family, and absence of male heirs, or even widows who lived too long and sat on a big share of family income, could damage or ruin a great family. This relationship between generations and property was the central and certainly most interesting theme in the life of fourteenth-century gentry families.