The Sleepwalkers

  Macrobius echoes the Neoplatonist "theory of emanations" which goes back to Plato Timaeus. The One, the Most Perfect Being "cannot remain shut up in itself"; it must "overflow" and create the World of Ideas, which in turn creates a copy or image of itself in the Universal Soul, which generates "the sentient and vegetative creatures" – and so on in a descending series, to the "last dregs of things". It is still a process of degeneration by descent, the very opposite of the evolutionary idea; but since every created being is ultimately an emanation of God, partaking of His essence in a measure diminishing with distance, the soul will always strive upward, to its source.

  The emanation-theory was put into a more specifically Christian shape in The Celestial Hierarchy and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy by the second most influential among the Neoplatonists, known as the Pseudo-Dionysius. He lived probably in the fifth century, and perpetrated the most successful pious hoax in religious history by pretending that the author of his works was Dionysius Areopagite, the Athenian mentioned in Acts XVII, 34, as a convert of St. Paul's. He was translated into Latin in the ninth century by John the Scot, and from then on exerted an immense influence on medieval thought. It was he who provided the upper reaches of the ladder with a fixed hierarchy of angels, which afterwards were attached to the star spheres to keep them in motion: the Seraphim turning the Primum Mobile, 2 the Cherubim the sphere of the fixed stars, the Thrones the sphere of Saturn; the Dominations, Virtues, and Powers the spheres of Jupiter, Mars, and the sun; the Principalities and Archangels the spheres of Venus and Mercury, while the lower Angels look after the moon. 3

  If the upper half of the ladder was Platonic in origin, the lower rungs were provided by Aristotelian biology, which was rediscovered around A.D. 1200. Particularly important became his "principle of continuity" between apparently divided realms of nature:

  "Nature passes so gradually from the inanimate to the animate that their continuity renders the boundary between them indistinguishable; and there is a middle kind that belongs to both orders. For plants come immediately after inanimate things; and plants differ from one another in the degree in which they appear to participate in life. For the class taken as a whole seems, in comparison with other bodies, to be clearly animate; but compared with animals to be inanimate. And the transition from plants to animals is continuous; for one might question whether some marine forms are animals or plants, since many of them are attached to the rock and perish if they are separated from it." 4

  The "principle of continuity" made it not only possible to arrange all living beings into a hierarchy according to criteria such as "degrees of perfection", "powers of soul" or "realization of potentialities" (which, of course, were never exactly defined). It also made it possible to connect the two halves of the chain – the sub-lunary and the celestial – into a single, continuous one, without denying the essential difference between them. The connecting link was found, by St. Thomas Aquinas, in the dual nature of man. In the continuity of all that exists, "the lowest member of the higher genus is always found to border upon the highest member of the lower genus"; this is true of the zoophytes, which are half plant, half animal, and it is equally true of man, who "has in equal degree the characters of both classes, since he attains to the lowest member of the class above bodies, namely, the human soul, which is at the bottom of the series of intellectual beings – and is said, therefore, to be the horizon and boundary line of things corporeal and incorporeal." 5

  The chain, thus unified, now reached from God's throne down to the meanest worm. It was further extended downward through the hierarchy of the four elements into inanimate nature. Where no obvious clues could be found to determine an object's "degree of excellence", astrology and alchemy provided the answer by establishing "correspondences" and "influences", so that each planet became associated with a day of the week, a metal, a colour, a stone, a plant, defining their rank in the hierarchy. A further downward extension led into the conic cavity in the earth, around whose narrowing slopes the nine hierarchies of devils were arranged in circles, duplicating the nine heavenly spheres; Lucifer, occupying the apex of the cone in the precise centre of the earth, marked the bitter end of the chain.

  The medieval universe, as a modern scholar remarked, is thus not really geocentric, but "diabolocentric". 6 Its centre, once the Hearth of Zeus, is now occupied by Hell. In spite of the continuous nature of the chain, the earth, compared to the incorruptible heavens, still occupies the lowest place, described by Montaigne as "the filth and mire of the world, the worst, lowest, most lifeless part of the universe, the bottom storey of the house". 7 In a similar vein his contemporary, Spenser, bemoans the sway of the Goddess Mutability over the earth, which makes him:

  Loathe this state of life so tickle

  And love of things so vain to cast away;

  Whose flow'ring pride, so fading and so fickle, –

  Short time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle. 8

  The extraordinary power of this medieval vision of the universe is illustrated by the fact that it had the same, undiminished hold on the imagination of the Elizabethan poets at the turn of the sixteenth century, as it had on Dante's at the turn of the thirteenth; and it is still echoed, in a famous passage by Pope, in the nineteenth. The concluding half of the quotation provides a clue to the understanding of the great stability of the system:

  Vast chain of being! which from God began,

  Natures aethereal, human, angel, man,

  Beast, bird, fish, insect ...

  ... from Infinite to thee,

  From thee to nothing. – On superior pow'rs

  Were we to press, inferior might on ours;

  Or in the full creation leave a void,

  Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroy'd;

  From Nature's chain whatever link you strike,

  Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. 9

  The consequence of such a break would be disintegration of the cosmic order. The same moral, the same warning of the catastrophic consequences of any change, however small, in the rigid, graded hierarchy, of any disturbance in the fixed order of things, returns, as a leitmotif, in Ulysses's speech in "Troilus and Cressida" and in countless other places. The secret of the medieval universe is that it is static, immune against change; that every item in the cosmic inventory has its permanent place and rank assigned to it on a rung of the ladder. It reminds one of the pecking hierarchy in a henyard. There is no evolution of biological species, and no social progress; no traffic moves up or down the ladder. Man may aspire to a higher life or condemn himself to an even lower one; but he will only move up or down the ladder after his death; while he is in this world, his preordained rank and place cannot be altered. Thus blessed immutability is made to prevail even in the lowly world of mutability and corruption. The social order is part of the chain, the part which connects the hierarchy of angels with the hierarchy of animal, vegetable and mineral. To quote another Elizabethan, Raleigh – in straight prose for a change:

  "Shall we therefore value honour and riches at nothing and neglect them as unnecessary and vain? Certainly not. For that infinite wisdom of God, which hath distinguished his angels by degrees, which hath given greater and less light and beauty to heavenly bodies, which hath made differences between beasts and birds, created the eagle and the fly, the cedar and the shrub, and among stones given the fairest tincture to the ruby and the quickest light to the diamond, hath also ordained kings, dukes or leaders of the people, magistrates, judges, and other degrees among men." 10

  Not only Kings and Barons, Knights and Squires, have their fixed place in the cosmic hierarchy; the Chain of Being runs even through the kitchen:

  "Who is to take the chief cook's place in case he is absent: the spit-master or the soup-master? Why do the breadbearers and cup-bearers form the first and second ranks, above carvers and cooks? – Because they are in charge of bread and wine, to which the sanctity of the sacrament gives a holy character." 11

>   The Middle Ages had an even greater horror of change, and desire for permanence than the age of Plato, whose philosophy they carried to obsessional extremes. Christianity had saved Europe from a relapse into barbarism; but the catastrophic conditions of the age, its climate of despair, prevented it from evolving a balanced, integrated, evolutionary view of the universe and of man's role in it. The recurrent, panic expectations of the End of the World, the outbreaks of dancing and flagellating manias, were symptoms of mass hysteria,

  "brought on by terror and despair, in populations oppressed, famished, and wretched to a degree almost unimaginable today. To the miseries of constant war, political and social disintegration, there was added the dreadful affliction of inescapable, mysterious, and deadly disease. Mankind stood helpless as though trapped in a world of terror and peril against which there was no defence." 12

  It was against this background that the vision of the walled universe was taken over from the Platonists as a protection against the Black Death of Change – rigid, static, hierarchic, petrified. The Babylonian oyster-world, which lay three and four thousand years back, was full of dynamism and imagination compared with this pedantically graded universe, wrapped in cellophane spheres, and kept by God in the deep-freeze locker to hide its eternal shame. Yet the alternative was even worse:

  ... when the planets

  In evil mixture to disorder wander,

  What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,

  What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,

  Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,

  Divert and crack, rend and deracinate

  The unity and married calm of states

  Quite from their fixture ...

  Take but degree away, untune that string,

  And hark, what discord follows. Each thing meets

  In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters

  Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

  And make a sop of all this solid globe. 13

  2. The Age of Double-Think

  I have said that the Herakleidian system, in which the two inner planets circle the sun, and not the earth, had been rediscovered toward the end of the first millennium. But it would be more correct to say that heliocentricism had never been quite forgotten, even at the time of the tabernacular universe. I have already quoted (pp. 71-72), among others, Macrobius to that effect. Now Macrobius, Chalcidius and Martianus Capella, three encyclopaedic compilers of the period of Roman decadence (all three of the fourth-fifth century A.D.), were, together with Pliny, the main sources on natural science available till the Greek revival; and they all propounded the system of Herakleides. 14 It was again taken up by John the Scot in the ninth century, who made not only the inner planets, but all of them except distant Saturn, satellites of the sun; and from then onward, Herakleides remains firmly established on the medieval scene. 15 In the words of the best authority on the subject:

  "the majority of the men who, from the ninth to the twelfth century, have written on astronomy, and whose books are preserved, were acquainted with and adopted the planetary theory designed by Herakleides of Pontus." 16

  And yet at the same time, cosmology had reverted to a naive and primitive form of geocentrism – with concentric crystal spheres determining the order of the planets and the accompanying hierarchy of angels. The highly ingenious systems of Aristotle's fifty-five spheres, of Ptolemy's forty epicycles were forgotten, and the complex machinery was reduced to ten revolving spheres – a kind of poor man's Aristotle which had nothing whatever in common with any of the observed motions in the sky. The Alexandrian astronomers had at least tried to save the phenomena; the medieval philosophers disregarded them.

  But a complete disregard for reality would make life impossible; and thus the split mind must evolve two different codes of thought for its two separate compartments: one conforming to theory, the other to cope with fact. Up to the end of the first millennium and beyond, the rectangular and oval, tabernacle-inspired maps were piously copied out by the monks; they provided a kind of Sunday idea of the shape of the earth according to the patristic interpretation of Scripture. But co-existing with these was an entirely different kind of map of amazing accuracy, the so-called Portolano charts, for practical use among Mediterranean seamen. The shapes of countries and seas on the two types of maps are as unrelated to each other as the medieval idea of the cosmos and the observed events in the sky. 17

  The same split can be traced through the most heterogenous fields of medieval thought and behaviour. Since it is against man's nature to go on blushing because he has a body and a brain, a thirst for beauty and an appetite for experience, the frustrated half took its revenge through extremes of coarseness and obscenity. The disembodied, ethereal love of the troubadour or serving knight for his lady, coexist with the brutal publicity given to the wedding bed, which makes marriages resemble public executions. The fair lady is compared to the Goddess of Virtue, but is made to wear a cast-iron chastity belt on her sublunary sphere. Nuns must wear shirts even in the privacy of their baths, because, though nobody else, God can see them. When the mind is split, both halves are debased: earthly love sinks to the animal level, the mystic union with God acquires an erotic ambiguity. Confronted with the Old Testament, the theologians save the phenomena in the Song of Songs by declaring that the King is Christ, the Shulamite the Church, and that the praise for various parts of her anatomy refers to corresponding excellences in the edifice that St. Peter built.

  Medieval historians must also live by double-think. The cosmology of the age explained away the disorder in the skies by ordered motions in perfect circles; the chroniclers, faced with worse disorder, had recourse to the notion of perfect chivalry as the moving force of History. It became to them

  "... a sort of magic key by the aid of which they explained to themselves the motives of politics and of history... What they saw about them looked primarily mere violence and confusion... Yet they required a form for their political conceptions and here the idea of chivalry came in... By this traditional fiction they succeeded in explaining to themselves, as well as they could, the motives and the course of history, which was thus reduced to a spectacle of the honour of princes and the virtue of knights, to a noble game with edifying and heroic rules." 18

  The same dichotomy is carried into social behaviour. A grotesque and rigid etiquette governs every activity, designed to freeze life in the image of the heavenly clockwork, whose crystal spheres turn on themselves yet always remain in the same place.

  Humble refusals to take precedence in passing through a door take up a quarter of an hour, yet bloody feuds are fought for that same right of precedence. The ladies at Court pass their time poisoning each other with words and philtres, yet etiquette

  "not only prescribes which ladies may hold each other by the hand, but also which lady is entitled to encourage others to this mark of intimacy by beckoning them... The passionate and violent soul of the age, always vacillating between tearful piety and frigid cruelty, between respect and insolence, between despondency and wantonness, could not dispense with the severest rules and the strictest formalism. All emotions required a rigid system of conventional forms, for without them passion and ferocity would have made havoc of life." 19

  There are mental disorders whose victims feel compelled to walk on the centres of flagstones, avoiding the edges, or to count the matches in the box before going to sleep, as a protective ritual against their fears. The dramatic outbursts of mass-hysteria during the Middle Ages tend to divert our attention from the less spectacular, but chronic and insoluble mental conflicts which underlie them. Medieval life in its typical aspects resembles a compulsive ritual designed to provide protection against the all-pervading potato-blight of sin, guilt, and anguish; yet it was unable to provide it so long as God and Nature, Creator and Creation, Faith and Reason, were split apart. The symbolic prologue to the Middle Ages is Origen cutting off his private parts ad gloriam dei; and the epilogue is provided b
y the parched voices of the schoolmen: Did the first man have a navel? Why did Adam eat an apple and not a pear? What is the sex of the angels, and how many can dance on the point of a pin? If a cannibal and all his ancestors have lived on human flesh so that every part of his body belongs to somebody else and will be claimed by its owner on the day of resurrection, how can the cannibal be resurrected to face his judgment? This last problem was earnestly discussed by Aquinas.

  When the mind is split, departments of it which should complete each other, develop autonomously by inbreeding, as it were, insulated from reality. Such is medieval theology, cut off from the balancing influence of the study of nature; such is medieval cosmology, cut off from physics; such is medieval physics, cut off from mathematics. The purpose of the digressions in this chapter, which seem to have led us so far away from our topic, is to show that the cosmology of a given age is not the result of a unilinear, "scientific" development, but rather the most striking, imaginative symbol of its mentality – the projection of its conflicts, prejudices and specific ways of double-think onto the graceful sky.

  III THE UNIVERSE OF THE SCHOOLMEN

  I. The Thaw

  I HAVE compared Plato and Aristotle to twin stars which alternate in visibility. Broadly speaking, from the fifth to the twelfth century, Neoplatonism in the form in which St. Augustine and the pseudo-Dionysius had imported it into Christianity, held the sway. From the twelfth to the sixteenth century, it was the turn of Aristotle.

  Except for two of his logical treatises, 1 Aristotle's works had been unknown before the twelfth century – buried and forgotten, together with Archimedes, Euclid, the atomists and the rest of Greek science. What little knowledge survived had been handed down in sketchy, distorted versions by the Latin compilers and the Neoplatonists. Insofar as science is concerned, the first six hundred years of established Christendom were a glacial period with only the pale moon of Neoplatonism reflected on the icy steppes.