The Sleepwalkers
The dramatic symbol of this fusion is the chapter in St. Augustine's Confessions in which he describes how God "brought in my way by means of a certain man – an incredibly conceited man – some books of the Platonists translated from Greek into Latin." 2 Their impact on him was so powerful that, "being admonished by all this to return to myself, I entered into my own depth" 3 and was thus set on the road to conversion. Although, after his conversion, he complained about the Neoplatonists' failure to realize that the Word was made Flesh in Christ, this proved no obstacle. The mystic union between Platonism and Christianity was consummated in the Confessions and the City of God.
A modern translator of the Confessions wrote about Augustine:
"In him the Western Church produced its first towering intellect – and indeed its last for another six hundred years... What he was to mean for the future can only be indicated. All the men who had to bring Europe through the six or seven centuries that followed, fed upon him. We see Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century reading and rereading the Confessions. We see the Emperor Charlemagne at the end of the eighth century using the City of God as a kind of Bible." 4
Now this Bible of the Middle Ages, the City of God, was begun in 413, under the impact of the sack of Rome; and Augustine died in 430, while the Vandals were besieging his episcopal city of Hyppo. This goes a long way toward explaining his catastrophic views about humanity as a massa perditiones, a heap of depravity, in a state of moral death where even the newborn child carries the hereditary stigma of original sin; where infants who die unbaptized share the fate of eternal damnation with the vast majority of mankind, pagan and Christian. For salvation is only possible through an act of Grace which God extends to individuals predestined to receive it by an apparently arbitrary selection; because "fallen man cannot do anything wellpleasing to God". 5 This terrible doctrine of predestination was taken up again in various forms at various ages by Cathars, Albigenses, Calvinists and Jansenists, and was also to play a curious part in the theological struggles of Kepler and Galileo.
Again, there are countless redeeming aspects, ambiguities and contradictions in Augustine's writings, such as his passionate pleading against the death penalty and judicial torture; his repeated affirmation that Omnis natura, inquantum natura est, bonum est; * it may even be said that " Augustine was not an Augustinian". 6 But these brighter elements were ignored by the generations after him, and the shadow he threw was dark and oppressive; it blotted out what little interest in nature, or inclination to science, still remained.
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*
All nature, in as much as it is nature, is good.
Since, in the Middle Ages, the churchmen became the successors to the philosophers of antiquity, and, in a manner of speaking, the Catholic Church took over from the Academy and the Lyceum, its attitude now determined the whole climate of culture and the course of learning. Hence the importance of Augustine, who was not only the most influential churchman of the earlier Middle Ages, the chief promoter of the Papacy as a supranational authority, and the originator of the rules of monastic life; but above all the living symbol of continuity between the vanished ancient, and the emerging new civilization. A modern Catholic philosopher justifiably said that Augustine was "to a greater degree than any emperor or barbarian war-lord, a maker of history and a builder of the bridge which was to lead from the old world to the new." 7
2. The Bridge to the City
The tragedy lies in the selective nature of the traffic which passed across the bridge that Augustine built. At the tollgate of the City of God, all vehicles carrying the treasures of ancient learning, beauty and hope were turned back, for all pagan virtue is "prostituted with the influence of obscene and filthy devils... 8 Let Thales depart with his water, Anaximenes with the air, the Stoics with their fire, Epicurus with his atoms." 9
And depart they did. Only Plato and his disciples were allowed to pass the bridge and were welcomed, for they knew that knowledge cannot be obtained through the eyes of the body, and provided an allegorical supplement to Genesis, as it were: Adam, expelled from the Garden, was made to proceed straight to Plato's Cave, and to take up the existence of a chained troglodyte.
Most welcome of all was the Neoplatonists' contempt for all branches of science. From them Augustine "derived the conviction, which he transmitted to the succeeding generations of many centuries, that the only type of knowledge to be desired was knowledge of God and the soul, and that no profit was to be had from investigating the realm of Nature." 10
A few quotations from the Confessions will illustrate more vividly the mental attitude toward knowledge at the opening of the Christian era. In the Tenth Book, which concludes his personal narrative, Augustine describes his state of mind twelve years after his conversion, and implores the help of God to overcome various forms of temptations which are still assailing him: the lust of the flesh, which he can resist when awake but not in sleep; the temptation to enjoy his food instead of taking it as a necessary medicine "until the day when Thou wilt destroy both the belly and the meat"; the allurement of sweet scents, to which he is fairly immune; the pleasures of the ear derived from church music at the risk of being "more moved by the singing than by the thing that is sung"; the lure to the eye of "diverse forms of beauty, of brilliant and pleasing colours"; and, last but one, the temptation of "knowing for knowing's sake":
"At this point I mention another form of temptation more various and dangerous. For over and above that lust of the flesh which lies in the delight of all our senses and pleasures – whose slaves are wasted unto destruction as they go far from You – there can also be in the mind itself, through those same bodily senses, a certain vain desire and curiosity, not of taking delights in the body, but of making experiments with the body's aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge... Pleasure goes after objects that are beautiful to see, hear, smell, taste, touch; but curiosity for the sake of experiment can go after quite contrary things, not in order to experience their unpleasantness, but through a mere itch to experience and find out... Because of this disease of curiosity you have the various freaks shown in the theatres. Thus men proceed to investigate the phenomena of nature – the part of nature external to us – though the knowledge is of no value to them: for they wish to know simply for the sake of knowing...
In this immense forest of snares and perils, I have cut off and thrust from my heart many sins, as you have given me to do, O God of my salvation; yet when would I dare to say – with so many things of the sort buzzing about our daily life on every side – when dare I say that no such thing can draw me to look at it or through vain curiosity to desire it? Certainly the theatres no longer attract me, nor do I care to know the course of the stars..." 11
But he has not yet succeeded in plucking out of the human heart that sinful desire for knowledge.
He came perilously near to it, though.
3. The Earth as a Tabernacle
Compared with the other early Fathers, Augustine was still by far the most enlightened. Saint Lactantius, who lived in the century before him, set himself to demolish the notion of the rotundity of the earth, with resounding success. The third volume of his Divine Institutions is called "On the False Wisdom of the Philosophers", and contains all the naive arguments against the existence of the antipodes – people can't walk with their feet above their heads, rain and snow can't fall upwards – which, seven hundred years earlier, no educated person could have used without making a fool of himself. Saint Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate, fought a life-long battle against the temptation of reading the pagan classics, until he finally defeated "the stupid wisdom of the philosophers": "Lord, if ever again I possess worldly books, or if ever again I read such, I have denied Thee". 12 Not until about the end of the ninth century was the spherical shape of the earth, and the possible existence of the antipodes reinstated, fifteen hundred years after Pythagoras.
The cosmology of this pe
riod goes straight back to the Babylonians and Hebrews. Two main ideas dominate it: that the earth is shaped like the Holy Tabernacle, and that the firmament is enclosed by water. The latter idea was based on Genesis I, 6, 7:
"And God said let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament."
From this, the notion was derived that the super-celestial waters were resting on top of the firmament, and that their purpose was – as Basil the Great * explained 13 – to protect the world against the celestial fire. His contemporary, Severianus, further explained, that the lower heaven consisted of crystalline or "congealed" water, which prevented it from being set aflame by the sun and stars; and that it was kept cool by the liquid water on top of it, which, on the Last Day, God would use to extinguish all the lights. 14 Augustine, too, believed that Saturn was the coolest planet because it was closest to the upper waters. In answer to those who objected to the presence of heavy water on top of the heavens, he pointed out that there is liquid phlegm present in the heads of men too. 15 The further objection that the spherical surface of the firmament and its motion would cause the waters to slide down or be spilled, was met by several Fathers who explained that the heavenly vault may be round inside but flat on top; or contain grooves and vessels to hold the water in. 16
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*
Fourth century, A.D.
At the same time the notion was spreading that the firmament itself is not round, but a tent or tabernacle. Severianus refers to Isaiah, XL. 22, that God "stretches out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in", 17 and others follow suit. However, the Fathers and Doctors were not sufficiently interested in these wordly matters to go into detail. The first comprehensive cosmological system of the early Middle Ages, destined to replace the teachings of pagan astronomers from Pythagoras to Ptolemy, was the famous Topographica Christiana by the monk Cosmas. He lived in the sixth century, was born in Alexandria, and, as a merchant and seaman, had travelled wide and far through the known world, including Abyssinia, Ceylon and Western India, which earned him the title Indicopleustus, the Indian traveller. He subsequently became a monk, and wrote his great work in a monastery on Sinai.
The first of its twelve books is entitled "Against those who, while wishing to profess Christianity, think and imagine like the pagans that the heaven is spherical". The Holy Tabernacle, described in Exodus, was rectangular and twice as long as it was wide; hence the earth has the same shape, placed lengthwise from East to West at the bottom of the universe. It is surrounded by the ocean – as the table of shew-bread is surrounded by its wavy border; and the ocean is surrounded by a second earth which was the seat of Paradise, and the home of man until Noah crossed the ocean, but is now uninhabited. From the edges of this deserted outer earth rise four vertical planes, which are the walls of the universe. Its roof is a half-cylinder which rests on the north and south walls, making the universe look like a Nissen hut or a Victorian travelling trunk with a curved lid.
However, the floor, that is the earth, is not flat but slants from North-West to South-East – for it is written in Ecclesiastes I, 5 that "the sun goes down, and hasteth to his place where he arose". Accordingly, rivers like the Euphrates and Tigris which flow southward, have a faster current than the Nile which flows "uphill"; and ships sail faster toward the South and East than those which must "climb" to the North and West; the latter are therefore called "lingerers". The stars are carried round the space under the roof of the universe by angels, and are hidden when they pass behind the uptilted Northern part of the earth, which is topped by a huge conical mountain. This mountain also hides the sun at night, the sun being much smaller than the earth.
Cosmas himself was not a high ecclesiastical authority, but his ideas are all derived from the Fathers of the preceding two centuries. There were more enlightened men among them, such as Isidore of Seville ( sixth-seventh century) and the Venerable Bede ( seventh-eighth century). Yet Cosmas' Topographica Christiana is typical of the general view of the universe prevailing during the early Middle Ages. Long after the spherical shape of the earth was reinstated, and indeed up to the fourteenth century, maps were still produced representing the earth either as rectangular, after the shape of the Tabernacle, or as a circular disc with Jerusalem as its centre, because Isaiah had spoken of the "circuit of the earth" and Ezekiel had stated that "God had set Jerusalem in the midst of the nations and countries". A third type of map made the earth oval-shaped, as a compromise between the tabernacular and circuitous view; the Far East was usually occupied by Paradise.
Once again we are impelled to ask ourselves: Did they really believe in all this? And again the answer must be both yes and no – depending on which compartment of the split mind was involved. For the Middle Ages were the era of the split mind par excellence; I shall return to the subject at the end of this chapter.
4. The Earth is Round Again
The first medieval churchman to state unequivocally that the earth is a sphere, was the English monk Bede, who rediscovered Pliny, as it were, and often quoted him verbatim; yet he still clung to the notion of the super-celestial waters and denied that there were people living in the antipodal regions; for those regions being inaccessible on account of the vast ocean, its supposed inhabitants could neither have descended from Adam, nor be redeemed by Christ.
A few years after Bede's death, a curious incident took place. A certain Irish ecclesiastic by name of Fergil or Virgil, who lived as an abbot at Salzburg, became involved in a quarrel with his superior, Boniface, who denounced Virgil to Pope Zacharias on the grounds that the Irishman taught the existence "of another world and other people under the earth" – meaning the antipodes. The Pope replied that Boniface should call a council and expel Virgil from the Church for his scandalous teaching. But nothing happened – except that Virgil in due time became Bishop of Salzburg and held that see till his death. The episode reminds one of the futile denunciation of Aristarchus by Cleanthes; it seems to indicate that even in this period of benightedness, orthodoxy in matters of natural philosophy (as distinct from matters theological) was maintained less by threats than by inner compulsion. At least I am not aware of any recorded instance of a cleric or layman being indicted for heresy in this heresy-ridden age because of his cosmological views.
This danger was further diminished when, in A.D. 999, Gerbert, the most accomplished classical scholar, geometer, musician and astronomer of his age, ascended the papal throne as Sylvester II. He died four years later, but the impression that the "magician Pope" made on the world was so powerful that he soon became a legend. Though he was an exceptional individual, far in advance of his age, his papacy, at the symbolical date A.D. 1000, nevertheless marks the end of the darkest period of the Middle Ages, and a gradual change of attitude toward the pagan science of antiquity. From now onward, the spherical shape of the earth, and its position in the centre of space, surrounded by the spheres of the planets, became again respectable. What is more, several manuscripts from approximately the same period show that the "Aegyptian" system of Herakleides (where Mercury and Venus are satellites of the sun) had been rediscovered, and that elaborate drawings of the planetary orbits were circulating among the initiates. But they did not make any noticeable impression on the dominant philosophy of the age.
Thus by the eleventh century A.D., a view of the universe had been achieved roughly corresponding to that of the fifth century B.C. It had taken the Greeks some two hundred and fifty years to progress from Pythagoras to Aristarchus' heliocentric system; it took Europe more than twice that time to achieve the corresponding progress from Gerbert to Copernicus. The Greeks, once they had recognized that the earth was a ball floating in space, had almost at once set that ball in motion; the Middle Ages hastily froze it into immobility at the centre of a rigid cosmic hierarc
hy. It was not the logic of science, not rational thought that determined the shape of the next development, but a mythological concept which symbolized the needs of the age: the tabernacular universe was succeeded by the universe of the Golden Chain.
II THE WALLED-IN UNIVERSE
1. The Scale of Being
IT was a walled-in universe like a walled-in medieval town. In the centre lies the earth, dark, heavy, and corrupt, surrounded by the concentric spheres of the moon, sun, planets and stars in an ascending order of perfection, up to the sphere of the primum mobile, and beyond that the Empyrean dwelling of God.
But in the hierarchy of values, which is attached to this hierarchy in space, the original simple division into sub-lunary and supra-lunary regions has now yielded to an infinite number of sub-divisions. The original, basic difference between coarse, earthly mutability and ethereal permanence is maintained; but both regions are sub-divided in such a manner that the result is a continuous ladder, or graded scale, which stretches from God down to the lowliest form of existence. In a passage, frequently quoted throughout the Middle Ages, Macrobius sums up the idea:
"Since, from the Supreme God Mind arises, and from Mind, Soul, and since this in turn creates all subsequent things and fills them all with life ... and since all things follow in continuous succession, degenerating in sequence to the very bottom of the series, the attentive observer will discover a connection of parts, from the Supreme God down to the last dregs of things, mutually linked together and without a break. And this is Homer's Golden Chain, which God, he says, bade hang down from heaven to earth." 1