by Umberto Eco
To interpret the figurative meaning of these facts we must appeal to our knowledge of the world. In De doctrina christiana (II, 57) Augustine insists at length upon the fact that lacunae in our knowledge of things render figurative expressions obscure. If we are to understand why Scripture commands us to be as wise as serpents, we must know that, in the real world, the serpent offers its entire body to the aggressor in order to protect its head. And only if we know that the serpent, by forcing itself through the narrow entrance of its hole, sloughs off its old skin and is endowed with fresh strength, can we understand what the Apostle means when he explains how to put off the old man and put on the new man by passing through the “strait gate” (Matt. 7: 13).19
The same thing is true of precious stones and herbs. Knowing that the carbuncle shines in the dark illuminates many obscure passages of Scripture, while knowing that hyssop is effective in freeing the lungs from catarrh explains why it is said: “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean” (Psalm 51: 7). To understand why Moses, Elijah, and Jesus fasted for forty days we must bear in mind that the course of the day and that of the year are measured in terms of the number 4, the day according to divisions into four groups of hours that make up morning, midday, evening, and night, the year according to the four seasons. Similarly, we need to have a good knowledge of music: if we come across a mention of a psaltery with ten strings, we must be aware that the actual instrument does not call for that many strings if we are to deduce that what we have here is a reference to the Ten Commandments.
It is basically as a response to this need to interpret the Scriptures that medieval encyclopedias come into existence and circulate. They are different from Roman encyclopedias in that, although they too are concerned with explaining what the world is like, they are still more concerned to explain how the sacred texts are to be understood. To give a single example among the many possible, in the ninth century Rabanus Maurus insists that he speaks not only of the nature of things “sed etiam de mystica earumdem rerum significatione” (“but also of the mystical meaning of those things,” De rerum naturis, PL 111, 12d).
The earliest encyclopedia of this type, however, antedates Augustine; we are referring to the first moralized bestiary, the Physiologus, a Greek work by an anonymous author composed in the early centuries A.D., though the Latin versions, each of which incidentally expands upon the original text, only appear toward the seventh century. This little work draws upon works by Pliny and other ancient authors (such as the Polyhistor of Solinus or the Alexander Romance) for information on the various animals, but to the description of each it adds an allegorical or moral interpretation. Here, for example, is the entry on “viper”:
John said to the Pharisees, “Ye generation of vipers” [Matt. 3:7 and Lk. 3:7]. Physiologus says of the viper that the male has the face of a man, while the female has the form of a woman down to her navel, but from her navel down to her tail she has the form of a crocodile. Indeed the woman has no secret place, that is, genitals for giving birth, but has only a pinhole. If the male lies with the female and spills his seed into her mouth, and if she drinks his seed, she will cut of the male’s necessaries (that is, his male organs) and he will die. When, however, the young have grown within the womb of their mother who has no genitals for giving birth, they pierce through her side, killing her in their escape.
Our Savior, therefore, likened the Pharisees to the viper; just as the viper’s brood kills its father and mother, so this people which is without God kills its father, Jesus Christ, and its earthly mother, Jerusalem. “Yet how will they flee from the wrath to come?” [Lk. 3:7].20
As we see, the form and behavior of the viper are described so as to demonstrate why it is a figure for the Pharisees. Or, when he explains how the hedgehog climbs up the grapevine to get at the grapes, then throws the grapes down onto the ground and rolls on them so that the grapes are speared on his spines, whereupon he carries them back to his offspring, leaving the vine shoot bare, the intent is to represent the faithful who must remain attached to the spiritual Vine and not let the spirit of evil climb onto it and strip it of all its grapes.
Based on the model of the Physiologus, with few exceptions, are the medieval bestiaries, herbals, and lapidaries, and the various imagines mundi, from the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville in the seventh century, to the many bestiaries and encyclopedias of the twelfth century, down to Cecco d’Ascoli’s thirteenth-century L’Acerba. All take Pliny as their point of departure and each incorporates the work of previous authors, offering therefore a fairly repetitive repertory of information.
As is the case with Pliny, it appears that the classificatory criteria of the medieval encyclopedias are rather vague (why does Isidore classify the crocodile with the fishes? merely because it lives in the water?) and that they too therefore represent a mere accumulation of haphazard information. Nevertheless, the only example of a fortuitous assemblage is that provided by the Physiologus, given that the animals the author lists (the lion, the sun-lizard, the pelican, the owl, the eagle, the phoenix, the hoopoe, the viper, the ant, the sirens, the hedgehog, the fox, the panther, the whale, etc.) appear to be chosen at random. Evidently, this bestiary was only interested in animals to which tradition had assigned properties that lent themselves to an allegorical and moral interpretation. If, however, we examine the tables of contents of many medieval encyclopedias we observe that the way they are put together is only superficially casual (cf. Binkley 1997 and especially Meier 1997).
Isidore considers the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy), followed by medicine, law, ecclesiastical books and offices, languages, peoples and armies, words, man, animals, the world, buildings, precious stones and metals, agriculture, wars, games, theater, ships, clothing, the home, and domestic chores—and one has to wonder what order lies behind a list of this kind, in which the entries dealing with animals are divided into Beasts, Small Animals, Serpents, Worms, Fish, Birds, and Small Winged Animals. But already in Isidore’s day primary education was subdivided into the Trivium and the Quadrivium, and Isidore dedicates his first books in fact to these subjects, throwing in medicine for good measure. The chapters that follow, devoted to ecclesiastical laws and offices, are included because he was also writing for the learned, that is, for jurists and monks. Immediately afterward, another order becomes apparent: book VII takes as its point of departure God, the angels, and the saints and goes on to deal with mankind, then with the animals, and, from book XIII on, we proceed to consider the world and its parts, winds, waters, and mountains. Finally, with book XV, we arrive at inanimate but man-made objects, that is, at the various trades and métiers. Thus, though he syncretistically juxtaposes two criteria, Isidore does not throw things together randomly, and in the second part he follows an order of decreasing dignity of creatures, from God down to domestic implements.
The De rerum naturis of Rabanus Maurus also appears to be inspired by a casual order but in fact juxtaposes several traditional orders: it begins by following the criterion of decreasing dignity, and accordingly, starting with God, we move on to man, to the animals, to inanimate things, arriving finally at man-made things such as buildings, then the various trades are discussed, probably in the same order in which they were taught in the Carolingian Palatine school, and from the professions we proceed to philosophers, languages, precious stones, weights and measures, agriculture, military matters, games and theater, painting and colors, and the various tools used in cooking or in tilling the fields.21
In the thirteenth century, in his De proprietatibus rerum, Bartholomaeus Anglicus begins with a mixed order, following both dignity (from the angels to man) and the six days of Creation (the hexameral order). He then goes back and begins all over again with an order that may seem bizarre to us but apparently wasn’t so for him, since he explains that, after speaking of the invisible world and of man, and dealing with the creation of the world and of time, he must now speak of the lesser things and
of material creatures. And there follow the entries on air, birds, waters, mountains and regions, precious stones, herbs and animals, and finally various accidents like the senses, colors, sounds, scents, weights and measures, liquids. Bartholomaeus is respecting a philosophical order that is Aristotelian in origin, in that he speaks first of substances and then of accidents.
Furthermore, medieval readers must have perceived an order where we see only an accumulation of information, given that the organization of an encyclopedia also had a mnemonic role to play: a given order among things served to make them memorable, to remember the place they occupied in the image of the world (cf. Carruthers 1990 and Rivers 1997).
Little by little, the encyclopedias tend to make the order that governs them easier to follow: in the thirteenth century, Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum majus, with its 80 books divided into 9,885 chapters, already has the organization of a scholastic Summa. The Speculum naturale is inspired by a strictly hexameral criterion (the Creator, the sensible world, light, the firmament and the heavens, and so on, till we come to the animals, the formation of the human body and the story of mankind). The Speculum doctrinale treats of the human world and includes letters (philosophy, grammar, logic, rhetoric, poetics), morality, mechanics, and technical subjects, and, while the Speculum morale represents a sort of an ethical parenthesis (it is, incidentally, apocryphal), the Speculum historiale deals with human history or salvation history and has a chronological framework.
Order takes on a preponderant role, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with Raimon Llull’s Arbor scientiae (Tree of Science)—a veritable portrayal of the Great Chain of Being through a representation of the great chain of knowledge—from which burgeon the Arbor elementalis (objects of the sublunar world made up of the four elements: fire, air, water, and earth, with precious stones, trees, animals), the Arbor vegetalis, the Arbor sensualis, the Arbor imaginalis (the mental images that are the similes of the things represented in the other trees), the Arbor humanalis (memory, understanding, will, and the various arts and sciences), and then the Arbor moralis (virtues and vices), the Arbor imperialis (government), the Arbor apostolicalis (the Church), the Arbor caelestialis (astrology and astronomy), the Arbor angelicalis (angelology), the Arbor aeviternitalis (the Otherworld kingdoms), the Arbor maternalis (Mariology), the Arbor christianalis (Christology), the Arbor divinalis (Divine attributes), the Arbor exemplificalis (the contents of knowledge), the Arbor quaestionalis (40,000 questions on the various professions).
1.3.3. From the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century: Toward the Labyrinth
Some of Llull’s trees (the Arbor elementalis, for example) could still be interpreted as representations of the world and its parts, after the model of the Arbor Porphyriana. But, rather than a classification of reality, others suggest a classification of knowledge about reality. This is the bent that the Llullism of the humanists and the Renaissance will appear to take, in which more or less tree-like structures are designed to organize universal knowledge into “chapters.”22 What we have here is not a classification of substances and accidents, but the index of a possible encyclopedia and an attempt to propose an organization of knowledge—an organization so important to the encyclopedist that at times the proposal is limited to the metalinguistic project of organizing this knowledge, putting off its actual investigation till a later date.
The Margarita philosophica of Gregor Reisch (1503) is still conceived in a postmedieval spirit. In it, the author, after devising an arboriform index that appears as a schematic frontispiece designed to facilitate consultation, proceeds to “fill it in” with 600 pages of actual encyclopedic information. But often the index is proposed without filling in the blanks, as we see, for instance, in the case of Politian, whose 1491 Panepistemon is a meticulously structured summary under the aegis of Philosophy personified as mother of the arts or mater artium.
Under the influence of Llull, the Dialecticae institutiones (1543) and the Dialectique (1555) of Pierre de la Ramée (also known as Petrus Ramus) both propose a rigorous method for listing in order, without repetitions or omissions, all the branches of knowledge—and the project will be taken up again in the Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta of Johann Heinrich Alsted (1620). In the last case, starting with a series of Praecognita disciplinarum, we go on to the investigative tools (lexica, grammar, rhetoric, logic, oratory, and poetics) needed to confront the major questions addressed by so-called Theoretical Philosophy (metaphysics, pneumatics, physics, arithmetic, geometry, cosmography, uranometry, geography, optics, music), then on to Practical Philosophy (ethics, economics, politics, scholastics), arriving eventually at theology, jurisprudence, medicine, and the mechanical arts, as well as a hodgepodge of less well-organized disciplines (farragines disciplinarum) such as mnemonics, history, chronology, architectonics, down to issues like euthanasia, gymnastics, and tobaccology.
Here the index is at the very heart of the encyclopedic project, the bones and nerves, as it were, of the discipline (“quasi ossa et nervos disciplinarum”), while the purpose of the project is the form that the universe of knowledge is supposed to assume. As Tega (1999: 113) remarks, “we should not expect to find in the encyclopedia the body, blood and spirit of each single discipline, but only a form devoid of any concrete and particular content.” Alsted’s is thus “the idea of an encyclopedia that not by accident takes as its model, not the work of the polyhistor or the philosopher or the scholar, but that of the architect whose job it is to produce a blueprint—or rather, in Alsted’s case, a table—of a building that others will construct in stone and marble, while others still will decorate and fill it with objects.”
This is because Alsted was working in a cultural climate in which a project of Pansophia was making headway, a form of universal wisdom that includes the entire encyclopedia of knowledge, foreshadowed in the so-called Theaters of the World, ideal architectural structures that attempt to encompass everything memorable, halfway between a mnemonics and an encyclopedia, whose most famous exemplar, never actually realized, remains that laid out in Giulio Camillo’s 1550 Idea del theatro.23 The index is intended to demonstrate that the reunification of knowledge is possible, and it does so because in such a climate the reorganization of knowledge is related to the utopian ideal of the reunification of the Christian world, but, like all utopias, it announces a reform without succeeding in bringing it about.
If the purpose of the Arbor Porphyriana, true to its Aristotelian inspiration, was to propose a methodology for “scientific” demonstration or better definition, the aim of the pansophic index was a presentation of the sciences (cf. Luisetti 2001: I, 1). In other words, pansophy is a classification of the sciences, and we observed in section 2.1 how far removed classification is from definition.
The Renaissance and Baroque encyclopedia is therefore an ideal rather than a practical project that avoids “filling in” because, even if we were to exhaust the content of every discipline classified, the knowledge we would end up with would always be incomplete, just like the knowledge of any single individual. As far as the encyclopedia goes (as Alsted reminds us, in the “Admonitio” with which his Encyclopaedia begins), individuals “are like so many ‘containers,’ each of which is capable of holding a content in keeping with its receptive capacity, none of which, however, is able to contain in itself the whole of knowledge” (Tega 1999: 114).
But, precisely because knowledge is never complete, Ramus begins to conceive of an encyclopedia that can also take into consideration the constitution of disciplines as yet unknown or ill-defined. It is with Francis Bacon that the idea first appears of an encyclopedia based upon data derived from scientific experimentation and criticism of the erroneous opinions expressed in the past (the idola)—an open repertory, in other words, in a continuous process of development. Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) contains an appendix entitled “Parasceve ad historiam naturalem et experimentalem” (“Introduction to Natural and Experimental History”) in which, after clarifyi
ng that we must steer clear of appealing to the authority of the ancients so as to avoid taking on apocryphal information, he draws up an ideal index which includes, in a reasonably logical order, celestial bodies, atmospheric phenomena, the earth, the four elements, natural species (mineral, vegetable, and animal), man, diseases and medicine, the arts, including the culinary arts, equitation, and games. Salomon’s House, envisaged in his New Atlantis (1627), is an encyclopedic museum, and we can certainly speak of farragines disciplinarum apropos of his Sylva Sylvarum (1626), in which, taking into account only the first Century of the Table of Experiments, we find, jostling up against one another, considerations, for instance, concerning the nature of flame and the different techniques for coloring hair and feathers.
The metaphor of the sylva or forest is significant. A forest is not ordered according to clear binary disjunctions; instead it is a labyrinth. The labyrinth is explicitly mentioned in the preface to the Instauratio Magna (1620): “Aedificium autem hujus universi, structura sua, intellectui humano contemplanti, instar labyrinthi est; ubi tot ambigua viarum, tam fallaces rerum et signorum similitudines, tam obliquae et implexae naturarum spirae et nodi, undequaque se ostendunt” (“But the universe to the eye of the human understanding is framed like a labyrinth; presenting as it does on every side so many ambiguities of way, so many deceitful resemblances of objects and signs, natures so irregular in their lines, and so knotted and entangled”).24 To the contemplating intellect, the edifice of the universe manifests itself as a labyrinth, with a maze of ambiguous routes, of deceptive appearances of things and signs, of winding and complicated nodes and spirals—and we will see eventually, apropos of the rhizomic nature of an encyclopedia, how truly prophetic this vision of “obliquae et implexae naturarum spirae et nodi” would prove to be.
