Da Vinci's Ghost (8 page)

Hildegard described the scene in great detail but in a convoluted mystical style that’s often hard to follow. Fortunately, an illustration of what she saw, perhaps based on a drawing of her own, survives in a copy of the
Book of Divine Works
. It dates from a only few decades after her death and is astonishing to behold (
Plate 5
).

In the opening lines of her book, Hildegard explained the
miraculous origins of this vision.
“In the year 1163
,” she wrote, “a voice from heaven resounded, saying to me:
O wretched creature and daughter of much toil, even though you have been thoroughly seared, so to speak, by countless grave sufferings of the body, the depth of the mysteries of God has completely permeated you. Transmit for the benefit of humanity an accurate account of what you see with your inner eye. … This vision has not been contrived by you, nor has it been conceived by any other human being.
”

That final remark is telling. For Hildegard to have admitted any human influence would have marred her status as a visionary, and in the
Book of Divine Works
, consequently, she made not a single reference to the ideas or writings of any other author. But there was much more to her visions than she let on. Although she described them as being of heavenly origin, they had some obviously earthly sources.

T
HE CURRENTS OF
European thought changed course so dramatically during the twelfth century that historians often describe the period as a mini-Renaissance. Much ink has been spilled trying to define the nature of the movement, but there’s a simple way of summing it up: after having focused for centuries on the renunciation of earthly things, Christian scholars in medieval Europe began to reengage with the world around them.

A technological revolution took place alongside this intellectual shift. It, too, involved a reengagement with the natural world, which Europeans began to harness with all sorts of new tools: windmills, water wheels, and mills turned by animals; various systems of weights, cogs, and gears designed for use
in agriculture, architecture, and war; devices that permitted a growing mastery of the open ocean, such as the keel, the rudder, and the compass; and more. Some writers observing the shift began to imagine the whole of the natural world as a single animate being pulsing with a cosmic life force that was humanity’s to tap.

Here’s a useful way of thinking about the intellectual shift that took place. For centuries in Europe, from late antiquity into the Middle Ages, Christian scholars had merged their beliefs with a select group of ideas from Plato, whose emphasis on the ideal forms of things had suited an otherworldly approach to religion. St. Augustine, in particular, had borrowed from Plato to advance his own theological agenda. But in the twelfth century scholars began to turn away from the abstractions of Plato and Augustine. Instead, they developed an interest in the empirical observations of Aristotle, who had focused on the makeup of the physical world and the causes of natural phenomena. Perhaps God could best be apprehended, they suggested, not by focusing on what the world should be but what it actually
was
.

Many theologians viewed this idea with horror. Why on earth would one abandon the serene contemplation of divine ideals in order to wallow in the muck of reality? The whole idea seemed a giant distraction—the sort of thing, one theologian sermonized, that would draw
“the scholar away from theology
altogether, by making him too interested in the secular arts and in useless questions about the natural world.” Human beings simply had no business, as another writer put it, trying to understand
“the composition of the globe
, the nature of the elements, the location of the stars, the nature of animals, the
violence of the wind, the life-processes of plants and of roots.” Heaven forbid!

Debate on the subject raged during the first half of the century. One of the most vocal members in the Aristotle camp was the philosopher William of Conches, who insisted that for Christian theology to be true, it would have to be reconciled with the realities of the physical world. Had not Plato himself suggested in the
Timaeus
, one of the only works of his known to medieval Europeans, that the cosmos was a world soul and body whose many parts all partook of the same universal principles of design? If so, there were logical conclusions to draw. By definition, the natural order had to be in complete sympathy with the heavenly order—which meant, in turn, that all of creation had to be explored in detail.
“To slight the perfection
of created things is to slight the perfection of the divine power,” William explained and went on to heap contempt on those who felt otherwise.
“Ignorant themselves
of the forces of nature,” he wrote, “and wanting company in their ignorance, they don’t want people to look into anything. They want us to believe like peasants and not ask the reason behind things. … But we say the reason behind
everything
should be sought out.”

This, of course, was precisely what Aristotle had tried to do. In works that explored everything from cosmology to biology, he had sought out the causes of things. Today we call most of what he was doing science, but in the ancient and medieval world, and indeed until just a couple of centuries ago, it had a different name: natural philosophy.

William was one of the first medieval European scholars to find his way to the works of Aristotle, most of whose works
had been lost for centuries in the west. But scholars working in the Islamic world had preserved and written commentaries on many of them, and during William’s lifetime Latin retranslations of those texts began to appear in Europe, thanks largely to contacts among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Moorish Spain. It was while reading those works that William and other scholars in Europe began to recognize that the study of natural philosophy might provide them with a new way of exploring the relationship between the human being and the cosmos—and of harnessing the divine forces that animated them both.

The key to it all was the careful study of astrological influences, as many ancient and Islamic authorities had made clear. This highlights a development in the history of ideas that’s not well appreciated today. Many of the disciplines we now consider the most scientific—astronomy, geography, geometry, mathematics, medicine, physics—first returned to medieval Europe, as one modern scholar has put it,
“riding the magic carpet
of astrology.”

Astrology seemed to be the universal science. Didn’t the daily and yearly travels of the sun profoundly affect changes in the seasons and the weather? Didn’t its heat and movements make possible the generation of all earthly life? Likewise, didn’t the moon possess immense powers, literally tugging vast bodies of water to and fro across the planet? It made sense, then, as the ancients themselves had argued, that the movements of the other planets and the constellations exerted similar powers over the world and human beings, and that only by studying them in meticulous detail could human affairs be brought into healthy alignment with the celestial order. One early Christian maxim,
repeated often during the Middle Ages, summed up the idea this way:
“When man looks
to the signs in the heavens, God is revealed. And when God is revealed, man is healed.” The twelfth-century philosopher Bernardus Sylvestris, one of the most important sources of Hildegard’s ideas about the microcosm, put it more expansively.
“I would have you survey
the heavens,” he had God declare, “inscribed with their manifold array of symbols, which I have set forth for learned eyes, like a book with its pages spread open, containing things to come in secret characters.”

The mini-Renaissance of the twelfth century returned this sort of ancient thinking to the fore. It’s why William of Conches, in the first half of the century, felt so strongly about seeking out the reason behind everything—and it’s why Hildegard, in the second half of the century, following his lead, would write an entire treatise on astrology and medicine titled
Causes and Cures.

T
HE EARLIEST ILLUSTRATIONS
of the human body as a microcosm, which date to the twelfth century, amount to little more than adaptations of the diagrams that had long appeared in manuscripts by such writers as Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede (see
Plate 3
).

Soon, however, writers and illustrators began to describe a set of almost biological relationships between parts of the heavens and the human body. Hildegard herself clearly spent time poring over their work.
“From the very top of our cranium
,” she wrote in the
Book of Divine Works
, “seven points are found, separated from one another by equal intervals. This symbolizes
the planets, which are also separated from one another in the firmament by like intervals.” In
Causes and Cures
she expanded on this idea, writing,
“The firmament
, as it were, is man’s head; sun, moon, and stars are as the eyes; air as the hearing; the winds are as smell; dew as taste; the sides of the world are as arms and as touch.”

Hildegard didn’t illustrate all of this herself, but plenty of her contemporaries did, in works that she could easily have consulted in monastery libraries—and their visions clearly underlie her own. One twelfth-century German manuscript, for example, contains an illustration (
Figure 12
) that corresponds almost exactly to Hildegard’s description above. Christ appears as an embodiment of the microcosm; his halo is said to represent the celestial sphere; and the set of rays dividing it up into equal parts connects the seven planets to the seven openings of his head. The four material elements appear in the corners of the picture, where they are attached to lines that connect them to the different bodily senses. Many specific body parts and functions are themselves likened to aspects of the natural world, echoing ideas that date back to Philo of Alexandria and beyond: breath and coughing are wind and thunder; the stomach is the ocean, into which all waters flow; the feet hold up the body, just as the earth supports all things. At an even more microcosmic level, the hair is grass, bones are rock, and nails are trees.

What’s particularly striking about this image is its newly anatomical emphasis. There’s a close-up attention to body parts and bodily functions that would surely have made traditional Latin Christians squirm. The makeup of the body might well correspond to the makeup of the world, they would have admitted—but such things were for God’s eyes only.

Figure 12.
Christ as a microcosm, from a twelfth-century German manuscript produced during the lifetime of Hildegard of Bingen. The image illustrates many of the relationships between the human body and the heavens that Europeans began to explore with renewed vigor in the twelfth century: the openings of the head are linked to the planets, the human senses are connected to the four elements, and more.

The intellectual tide was turning, however. By the middle of the century translations of Arabic texts on human anatomy were beginning to appear in Latin. Some preserved the works of ancient medical and astrological authorities, others reproduced commentaries and treatises by Islamic sages, and all laid bare a wealth of detail about the human anatomy that most Christian thinkers had been turning their eyes away from for centuries. Many of these texts even contained illustrations: typically, a standard sequence of squatting anatomical figures that have been traced back to the Greek medical writers of Alexandria. Each of the figures laid bare a different aspect of the human anatomy, hence the names by which they’re known today: Bone Man, Muscle Man, Nerve Man, Artery Man, and Vein Man. And, as it happens, some of the earliest European copies of these figures (
Figure 13
) appeared in the same German manuscript that contained the above illustration of Christ as a microcosm.

The arrival of these anatomical texts and illustrations in Europe had a profound effect on the continent’s astrologers, doctors, mystics, and theologians. Here, after all, was a way of peering, however crudely, into the hidden nature of the microcosm—a sight that had already sent many Islamic sages into a rapture of analogy.
“The body itself
,” declared one influential tenth-century Arabic encyclopedia called the
Epistles of the Brethren of Purity
,

is like the earth, the bones like mountains, the brain like mines, the belly like the sea, the intestine like rivers, the nerves like brooks, the flesh like dust and mud. The hair on the body is like plants; the places where hair grows, like
fertile land; and where there is no growth, like saline soil. From its face to its feet, the body is like a populated state, its back like desolate regions. Its top is like the east, its bottom the west, its right the south, its left the north. Its breath is like the wind, words like thunder, sounds like thunderbolts. Its laughter is like the light of noon, its tears like rain, its sadness like the darkness of night, and its sleep is like death as its awakening is like life. The days of its childhood are like spring, youth like summer, maturity like autumn, and old age like winter. Its motions and acts are like the motions of stars and their rotation. Its birth and presence are like the rising of the stars, and its death and absence like their setting.