The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox
Figure 9.
As an example of this realistic unease among scientists, and of the reach (well beyond scientific content) that public suspicion can attain, I present a striking example of turning tables (admittedly of a superseded sixteenth-century sort, but with a reminder that similar activities follow more subtle pathways in our time). In chapter 3, I illustrated the passive impediments that early scientists of Newton’s generation felt from the traditions of Renaissance humanism—as represented in natural history by the compendiary tradition of Gesner and Aldrovandi. But, to show that these men also experienced their own more active impediments, I have reproduced Aldrovandi’s imprimatur and dedication to Galileo’s oppressor. I now present an example from his intellectual partner, Konrad Gesner, not based on Gesner’s scientific content but on the intellectually irrelevant circumstance (at least for this book on four-footed beasts) of his Protestant affiliations, as the godson and protégé of the important Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli.
Many years ago I saved my pennies and finally purchased a copy of Gesner’s first and greatest zoological work, volume one, titled De quadrupedis viviparis (on four-footed, live-bearing beasts—that is, terrestrial mammals in modern terms) of his Historia animalium, published in 1551. But when I looked at the title page (reproduced in figure 10), I encountered a fascinating puzzle, resolved only years later when I learned enough Latin to work through the rationales. This book, by the way, served as the prod, initiated long ago and building for more than a decade, to my decision to write this little volume—so I thank Gesner’s expurgator for a personally rewarding spinoff from his dubious practices.
The peculiarities of this expurgation, described just below, have weighed on both my heart and mind ever since this purchase. I used the example, schlepping the book all the way to Washington for penance and prospect, as the focus for my millennial presidential address to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2000—a disquisition on the relationships between science and humanistic study. I also, from this prod, conceived the admittedly quirky and idiosyncratic idea for this book—to base a volume on the well-trodden subject of science and humanities upon largely unknown examples taken from specific passages in antiquarian books from my own collection—a classical technique of humanist scholars, but now attempted by this card-carrying scientist! I, at least, have always felt that evidence of actual and original sources, right before one’s own eyes, indeed in one’s own hand, packs an almost indefinable and quite special emotional punch in its authenticity, at least in my reactions. I will never forget my grandmother’s frequent remark that she would only credit something when the original evidence stood right before her eyes in schvartz—that is, “in black” of print on paper.
Figure 10.
So I gazed upon the title page of my proud acquisition and could not make out what I clearly saw. I could read Gesner’s book title, and the last two words of his identification: medici Tigurini (doctor of Zurich). But his printed name had been obliterated in two distinct ways: first by a clever inking through the printed letters to create the gobbledygook of a meaningless string from the original name; and, second, by the further and literal cover-up (perhaps following the censor’s dissatisfaction with his initial effort) of a strip of paper, once glued directly over the name, but later removed. (A subsequent owner, further countering the censor’s earlier work, then reinserted Gesner’s name, in ink and above the original blottings.)
This laborious, if almost whimsical, excision of Gesner’s name continues throughout the book of 1,104 pages. Just consider (figure 11) the beginning page of text, where Gesner’s name has been inked over and extended into the meaningless and unbroken string of letters, LOQNRIADIVOESNERIATI, just above the charming picture that accompanies the first chapter De alce (on elks) in his alphabetical accounting. As I then proceeded, page by seemingly endless page, through the rest of the book, the resulting pattern eventually struck me as utterly ludicrous rather than seriously evil. The Catholic censor who gained control of this copy faced a peculiar sort of problem: the book itself contained nothing objectionable in religious or moral terms. Gesner had simply recorded everything ever said about a bunch of mammals, and the defensores fidei found nothing offensive in principle therein. In fact, and on matters strictly religious, the censor did little beyond sprucing up the few biblical quotations that Gesner had cited from Luther’s translation by laboriously appending the approved Catholic version from the Latin Vulgate (figure 12). And if these very minor differences of a word or two here and there, primarily in God’s famous oration to Job from the whirlwind, have any theological significance, I can only say that the subtle distinctions thoroughly elude me.
Gesner’s book had not been placed on the Index, and his more than a thousand pages contained enormous value to any Catholic reader interested in natural history. Yet the censor went through every last page, making funny little blottings here and there, but very carefully, throughout. What had he accomplished? When I finally recognized the pattern, I became more amused than offended. Gesner’s words threatened no Protestant dangers, but his persona, and that of several other folks he quoted, did raise Catholic hackles, especially in this raw first generation, just after Luther’s heresies shook Catholic complacency to the roots and launched a vigorous response, known as the CounterReformation. Thus the censor did very little more, despite extensive effort and expenditure of time, than blot out a few objectionable names, whenever Gesner had dared cite them in print. Moreover, more than half the erasures simply obliterate two names that run throughout Gesner’s text for obvious reasons. (Both men, in fact, remained Catholic, but their iconoclasm and lack of pious orthodoxy made them personae non grata in these highly fractious times.) First, the great Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469–1536), perhaps the most celebrated scholar of the Renaissance, who wrote virtually nothing about zoology as we understand the subject today, but who compiled, in his Adagia, the most complete book of proverbs ever assembled (see my preface, page 2). Since Gesner’s Renaissance compendium cites everything ever said about mammals, with stress on human concepts of their natures and powers, he includes an explicit section on proverbs in each of his chapters, prominently listing all of Erasmus’s entries, properly attributed. So the censor laboriously excised every mention of Erasmus’s person, and retained all the words about the animals themselves. (Well . . . perhaps not every last one. So do stay tuned, for our censor, you shall soon learn, is the Magister of this book’s title and Erasmus is the source of our leading motto about the fox and the hedgehog. So all these themes may just come around again, dear reader, if you maintain the patience to persist to this book’s end, where all these creatures will coalesce to make a closing appearance to conclude this volume on a point of hope!)
Figure 11.
Figure 12.
Second, Sebastian Münster (1489–1552), whose Cosmographia of 1552 described the geography and biology of all parts of the known world—another obvious source for Gesner’s copious citation. At least the censor permitted himself some fun in an otherwise tedious task, for he followed different and consistent schemes in blotting out the various names (figure 13). Erasmus merited just a thick black band through his entire name, but Münster enjoyed enough filigrees over, around, and through his letters to make his moniker unreadable.
Gesner includes a bibliography in the front matter of his book, so we can quickly discern the pattern of names chosen for excision—a pretty simple matter of Protestant (or renegade Catholic) bad, orthodox Catholic good. For example (see figure 14), Christopher Columbus, at Number 169, comes up golden in claiming the New World for the Catholic Majesties of Spain. But Erasmus, at Number 171, disappears both for his Opera (that is, his collected works) and specifically, on the next line, for his Adagia (proverbs). At Number 178, Gaspar Heldelin (whoever he may be) gets the shaft for his Ciconiae encominum (his encomium on storks, whatever that may be). But the great Catholic geologist of Germany, Georgius Agricola, at Number 1
79, passes for his famous work on metals, weights, and measures, and also, on the next line, for his curious little pamphlet De animantibus subterraneis (on living things found underground, including a serious discussion of the gnomes that inhabited German mines, at least by the testimony of local laborers). But the Englishman William Turner, presumably an apostate and supporter of Henry VIII’s takeover of monasteries, gets axed (in elegant filigree to obscure his name) at Number 183 for his book on birds.
Figure 13.
It took me a while to realize—and more time to translate the tiny, if elegant, handwriting, replete with abbreviations—that the key to this peculiar form of “suppression lite” could be found in the cryptic line (figure 15) penned on the blank page just before the title (my thanks to David Freedberg and Tony Grafton for puzzling through this with me with their far superior knowledge both of Latin and of sixteenth-century handwriting):Sine anathematis periculo liber iste d. historia animaliu. quadru-pediu. viviparos legi potest. Na. ex mandato b. R. C. Inquisitionis Pisano diocosis Mag[ist]ri Lelii medices expuncta ac obliterata sunt ex albo quae del[en]da visa sunt. (This dangerous book on the history of live-bearing, four-footed animals may be read without anathema. For, under the mandate of Magister [literally “teacher,” but probably, in this case, meaning a graduate of the university] Lelio Medice of the Holy Roman Catholic Inquisition of the Diocese of Pisa, all [passages] that ought to be [so treated] have been expunged and obliterated from this volume.)
A bit chilling—what else can one say—despite the bumbling and innocuous character of the copious excisions. Magister Lelio Medice will not go down in history as a friend of science or scholarship—even though he has won some dubious form of transient notoriety in the title of this book!
And yet, before leaving this subject and closing the first part of this book, I should state that I advance no secular conviction that bookburning, expurgation, and unpersoning represent exclusive strategies of religious dogmatists and other bedfellows of reactionary movements dedicated to protecting the status quo from all social or intellectual novelty. Our all-too-human temptation to censor or annihilate perceived enemies transcends the particularities of institutions, sacred or secular, and spreads across the full political spectrum, right to left. As a painful example—for this incident led to the death of one of the greatest scientists in history—consider the title page of an apparently humble pamphlet of enormous practical and historical importance, a booklet of instructions for the establishment of workshops to produce purer forms of saltpeter, an essential ingredient of gunpowder (figure 16).
Figure 14.
Figure 15.
This edition, published in 1793 at the height of ardor for the most radical phase of the French Revolution (including the Reign of Terror), reprinted a work that had been written and edited in the most auspicious of all years for revolution, 1776, and then published in 1777. The great chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, appointed as régisseur des poudres (director of gunpowder), had perfected the manufacturing techniques, and then written most of the resulting pamphlet, that gave France the finest supply of purified gunpowder in the world. Indeed, without Lavoisier’s successes, the beleaguered revolutionary armies might not have been able to repel the powerful invasion of otherwise better equipped and far more numerous foreign troops that had threatened to overthrow the new government.
Figure 16.
This title page surely does not scrimp in expressing signs of revolutionary ardor, including the martial symbol of drums and banners, and the giveaway date printed at the bottom of the page: “An II de la République, Une et Indivisible”—year two of the Republic, one and indivisible. (The revolutionary government began time anew at the foundation of the Republic in September 1791, and then introduced a novel calendar of twelve months, named for weather and climate rather than monarchs and gods, each with thirty days, and with a celebratory addition of five days [six for leap years] at the end of each sequence.) However, amid this revolutionary paraphernalia, we must also note one conspicuous omission from the title page—the name of the author, the great Lavoisier himself. No mystery attends the excision of authorship, for at the moment of publication, during the Reign of Terror, Lavoisier languished in jail, under capital sentence for the supposedly non-capital offense of excessive diligence in his day job as a collector of taxes. Thus Lavoisier’s name disappeared from the discoveries and publications that had saved a revolution now ready to terminate his life as well. Lavoisier had his date with the guillotine just three months before the abrupt termination of the Terror and the subsequent guillotining of the guillotiner Robespierre. The bitter eulogy of Lavoisier’s dear friend, the mathematician Lagrange, may stand as a dramatic and more than merely symbolic reminder of how slowly we build our fragile intellectual structures, and how rapidly they can crumble when the zealots and philistines grab power: “It took them only an instant to cut off that head, but France may not produce another like it in a century.”
II
FROM PARADOXICAL AGES OF BACON TO SWIFT SWEETNESS AND LIGHT
5
The Dynasty of Dichotomy
BACON’S PARADOX, NEWTON’S APHORISM, AND THE ADULT USE OF MOTHER GOOSE
IN PROMOTING THE CAUSE OF NEW KNOWLEDGE, WON BY OBSERVATION and experiment under a basically mechanical view of natural causation, and in denying the Renaissance’s chief premise that scholarship would best advance by recovering the superior understanding achieved in Greece and Rome, the leaders of the Scientific Revolution popularized two metaphors with long pedigrees in Western literature. But these old sayings developed sharp edges in a quite conscious (and often virulently contentious) argument that swept through the intellectual world of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century France and England, and entered the record of history as the debate between Ancients and Moderns.
Francis Bacon, avatar of the Scientific Revolution, pushed his favored image so hard, and so often, that the saying became widely known as Bacon’s paradox. The formulation is, indeed, a true and literal paradox—that is, a problem with two contradictory resolutions, each logical and correct in its own context. Bacon noted that our reverence for the classical giants of Greece and Rome often rested upon an impression of their venerable antiquity as expressed in their maximal distance (among known literary cultures) from our current efforts. At this great separation from ourselves, Plato and Aristotle seem old and full of wisdom. But, Bacon then observed, such an accounting might well be viewed as proceeding in exactly the wrong direction. After all, if knowledge accumulates through time, then with respect to a beginning point way back when, Plato can only be reckoned as a child and we must be deemed the old graybeards. For Plato and Aristotle cavorted during the youth of the world, and can only represent the bumptious boyhood of scholarship, while we Moderns carry both the accumulated weight of their youthful insight plus everything added since.
Bacon expressed this paradox in a famous aphorism: Antiquitas saeculi, juventus mundi—or roughly, the good old days were the world’s youth. Why, then, should we indulge the Renaissance reverence for a time that can only represent the adolescence of knowledge, not the completion of wisdom. Time itself, not authority, Bacon added in a truly memorable line, is the “author of authors.” Bacon, who knew and respected the Ancients even as he denied their claims to inherent superiority, then reminded his readers of the famous classical aphorism: “Truth is the daughter of time.”
If Bacon was the avatar, Isaac Newton represents the apotheosis of this triumphant movement. We owe the second, and more famous, epigram (and visual icon) of the Scientific Revolution to a statement in a private letter that Newton wrote in February 1675 (as he dated the page, but as most of the rest of Europe, following the reformed Gregorian calendar, would have called 1676) to Robert Hooke, his colleague of similarly crusty disposition—a conjunction of temperament that led to frequent personal tension despite their basically similar view of life. In the midst of a personal squabble involving proper credit for work on the theor
y of colors, Newton, with uncharacteristic modesty and conciliation, wrote to Hooke, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
The two statements apply markedly different images to the same basic argument: the affirmation that knowledge progresses through time, and that the procedures advocated by the Scientific Revolution, rooted in observation and experiment under a mechanical view of causality, can best fertilize this growth, whereas the model of recovery, advocated by Renaissance scholars, must stymie progress by misreading an inchoate beginning as a completed acme. But Bacon’s formulation is more pungent and unforgiving, while Newton’s strikes a chord of diplomacy in affirming our reverence for the Ancients and asserting that we can exceed their achievement only because we add our puny novelties upon their magnificent foundations.
The history of this metaphor about the shoulders of giants, clearly devised to have it both ways (rendering obeisance to the Ancients while still asserting the accumulative character of knowledge and the consequent improvements of Modern times), enjoys a long and remarkable pedigree. (Most scientists credit the remark to Newton as a witty and original statement. Those who know differently often accuse Newton of sneaky borrowing, if not outright plagiarism, because he put no quotes around the utterance and cited no prior sources. But such claims are silly and trivial. After all, Newton wrote the line in a private letter to Hooke. He knew perfectly well, even if we have since forgotten, that he cited a standard image of his widely shared culture. Why would he invest the statement in quotation marks, or cite sources as if he were writing a scholarly paper? Do I, in every e-mail to a colleague, have to cite Andy Warhol if I talk about fifteen minutes of fame, or Churchill if I mention the end of the beginning?)