Descartes' Bones (8 page)

Then there were those like Terlon for whom any inquiry into the heart of nature was at the deepest level a spiritual inquiry. What is the nature of light? Why does salt form crystals? How does the experience of fire touching the skin transmit through the body and record as pain in the mind? We think of such questions as frankly the realm of science, but for a seventeenth-century European, nature, including the human body, was inarguably the terrain of the Almighty; to come to understand it more fully than had ever been done was, as it were, to touch the face of God.

Today we associate the reverence of relics mostly with the Middle Ages, but while the Council of Trent, a century before Descartes' death, put an end to the commercial trade in relics, Catholic theologians continued to stress their importance, and ordinary people as well as the highborn continued to venerate them. The veneration of relics meant more than the mere honoring of a great person but less than worship. It was a deep meditation on the physical being of humans and on the body as a “temple of the Holy Ghost.” We are used to thinking of Christianity's emphasis on the afterlife and its view of the body as sinful, but Catholic tradition in the early modern period emphasized the physical. Bodily remains were keys to the deepest of mysteries, links in the chain between life and death, and, as the Council of Trent said, the bones of prophets, saints, and others “now living with Christ . . . are to be venerated by the faithful.” In asking for a relic of Descartes, the chevalier de Terlon was standing at the crossroads of the ancient and modern. He was applying to a modern thinker—the inventor of analytic geometry, no less—a primitive tradition that extends back not only to the institutionalization of Christianity in the fourth century, when Christians first broke into the tombs of saints to gather relics, but farther still, beyond the horizon of recorded history. The request is all the stranger for the fact that the man whose remains were treated in this quasisaintlike way would go down in history as the progenitor of materialism, rationalism, and a whole tradition that looked on such veneration as nonsense.

The priests granted the request; the chevalier was allowed to take the finger. He must have kept it until his death in 1690—he certainly didn't give it to Anne of Austria, who had died earlier that year—perhaps keeping it on his person as he traveled the next ten years between Paris and Copenhagen. On his death he was required to bequeath his property to his order, the Knights of St. John. The inventory of the order contains no artifacts from Terlon and no index finger labeled as Descartes'. Terlon's branch of the order, based in Toulouse, was, like many other Catholicholy places, pillaged during the French Revolution. Perhaps the finger bone of Descartes—we might call it the first modern relic—slipped through the fingers of a sans culotte, into the dirt and out of history.

The verb
to translate
has a particular meaning in a Catholic context. In the year 787, the Second Council of Nicaea ruled that the new churches that were proliferating across Europe should each be anchored in sanctity by a holy relic. This ruling created an official market in bones, as priests and bishops sought portions of prominent or relevant saints for their new churches. The transfer of relics from, say, a tomb in Sicily to a church in Lombardy was referred to as a translation, and throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period holy bones in translation—housed in boxes of precious metal, adorned with drapes and candles—were part of the traffic on the highways of Europe.

Terlon's translation party left Stockholm in June 1666. The remains were loaded onto a ship and placed under the care of two members of Terlon's staff, the sieur de l'Epine and the sieur du Rocher. There was a fuss at the port when the sailors learned that human remains were part of the cargo, which in their lore spelled bad luck, but Terlon managed to quell the uproar, perhaps by showing them the small copper box and convincing them that they weren't so much shipping a dead body as translating relics.

Terlon was anxious about theft. Descartes' seventeenth-century biographer, Adrien Baillet, wrote that the fear was that “this precious cargo would fall into the hands of the English, among whom Descartes had an infinity of worshippers . . . and who would build a magnificent mausoleum in their country, under the pretext of erecting a temple to Philosophy.” Before the ship left, Terlon wrote to Louis XIV informing the king of the steps he had taken with regard to Descartes' bones and reminding His Majesty of the illustriousness of the deceased. Louis wrote back granting royal authority for the translation of the remains. Not content with this, Terlon also personally disguised the copper reliquary, giving it “the appearance of a bundle of rocks.” The ship then set out from Stockholm bound for its first port of call, Copenhagen.

It's unlikely that any pilgrim has ever retraced the translation route of this particular collection of relics. From Copenhagen, the party, which from here would be led by the two members of Terlon's staff, set out on a morning in early October, heading south. They made an uneventful passage through the wilds of northern Europe—Jutland bogs, North Sea coastal marshes, fog bound villages of Lower Saxony, through heath and forest and ultimately into the flat expanse of Flanders—until they reached the northern French town of Péronne. Here, customs officials took an interest in the train; finding the curious package and discovering that its outward appearance belied a bright copper interior, they demanded that the knights open it, making it clear that they suspected contraband. L'Epine and du Rocher affected official indignation; they produced a letter that Terlon had given them from no less an official than Pierre d'Alibert, the treasurer general of France; they pointed to the ambassadorial seal that Terlon had affixed to the box. But the officials wanted it opened, the strong iron bands that Terlon had taken the precaution of wrapping around the box perhaps increasing their suspicion. In the presence of witnesses, the bands were snapped, the box was opened, the officials peered inside . . . and it was as they had been told, maybe even less noteworthy, for, due to the rotting of the original coffin, parts of the skeleton were reduced to fragments, on which individual bones now rested. Presumably, however, they didn't sift or perform even a perfunctory inventory, because there was a striking observation to be made, and nobody made it. A vital bone—the most obvious part of a skeleton—was missing.

The box was resealed, horses were retethered, and off they went again, headed, without further interruption, for Paris.

E
VERY
W
EDNESDAY EVENING IN
the late 1650s and through most of the 1660s, a cross-section of French society could be found packed into a house on a narrow alley in Paris known as the rue Quincampoix, a few steps from the raucous and reeking market of Les Halles. The mix was atypical for the time, almost scandal-worthy. Women and men, both single and married, were thrown together, high government officials alongside uncouth provincials, as well as princes and prostitutes and canons of the church—a profusion of frilled collars, puffed sleeves, and flowing, curled hair filling all three floors of the home. Today the narrow building lies just a few steps from the pedestrian-only rue Rambuteau, lined with kebab sellers, piercing booths, and shops selling paté sandwiches and the ubiquitous Robert Doisneau photos of Paris in the 1950s. The upper floors of the house remain residential; the street level is a karaoke bar. Three and a half centuries ago, as the home of Jacques and Geneviève Rohault, the building was well furnished, ornamented with tapestries and paintings, but, more remarkably, strategically littered with beakers, tubes, syringes, microscopes, prisms, compasses, magnets, and lenses of various shapes and sizes, as well as such curiosities as an “artificial eye” and a large mirror affixed to the floor.

The visitors to
les mercredis,
as these weekly happenings became known, included some of the most famous names of the century, among them France's supreme playwright, Molière, the socialite Madame de Sévigné, and the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens, who invented the pendulum clock, discovered celestial bodies, and helped develop calculus. They all came to see Rohault, a physicist who was known as the greatest living Cartesian. This description in itself suggests the gulf between that time and ours. Today, or twenty years ago, or a century ago, a student of philosophy learned about Descartes as a philosopher, a man who refashioned the landscape of the mind. For the generation that succeeded him, Descartes was that, but he was also an investigator of nature, and, for these men and women, the two things were intricately connected.

In 1667, Rohault was forty-seven years old, built like a bulldog, with a personality to match. He could be short to the point of irascible with those who failed to grasp a principle he had repeatedly tried to explain. At least part of the shortness came as a byproduct of zeal. His devotion to the master was such that he had married into the circle of Cartesians. His wife was the daughter of Claude Clerselier, caretaker of Descartes' writings (many of which were as yet unpublished). Like Descartes himself, Rohault was intoxicated with the new means of comprehending the physical world and seemed to believe that any observation, any datum, from whatever field of inquiry, was liable to tip the balance from ignorance toward knowledge and mastery. He had made himself an authority on astronomy, geography, and anatomy. He wrote a detailed commentary on Euclid's geometry and how to put its principles to work; his
Traité de physique
remained a standard textbook on physics for decades. And he didn't restrict himself to the scholarly realm but roamed the alleys of Paris in which various craftsmen practiced their trades, watching them build clocks and distill brandy, querying them, trolling for notions and clues and methods.

This combination of intellect, acute observation, and missionary fervor came together in Rohault's weekly demonstrations. There was an element of performance involved, and no doubt some of those who came did so for the show. Colored flames, bubbles, explosions: Cartesianism had become a spectacle. It was also rumored to offer glimpses beyond the material, into the realm of the supernatural, and some were titillated by the possibility of peeking behind the screen of ordinary existence. But Rohault and most of his visitors were after something else. There was an order in nature; one could proceed from the unseen bedrock of philosophical principles—the Cartesian method—by rungs up into the realm of matter and its manipulation. His weekly event was a salon, but one in which people took notes, scribbling fast as they tried to grasp something genuinely new.

The notes taken by an anonymous lawyer who frequented the
mercredis
have survived. This
avocat
's account of one evening gives a sense of the scope and the intensity that people from all walks of life brought to the abstract stuff of philosophy. Rohault began the lecture by discussing the two states of waking and sleep—“The first sees true,” the lawyer wrote, “the second false”—followed by a discourse on the study of dreams. In these introductory words, Rohault was asking his audience to develop perspective on the mind and its proper functioning. Then he moved into an analysis of Descartes' reorientation of how we know. The key, he said, was the “cogito,” which gives us certainty about our individual existence. Everything else, the lawyer noted, is only “probability.” And there, in his carefully wrapping that strange and deeply modern word in quotation marks, this nameless amateur philosopher gives us a shiver of what it must have been like, sitting amid the Louis XIV coiffures and the chalk-and-vinegar aroma of face powder, to first glimpse the horizon of the modern world.

From here, Rohault moved into Descartes' division of reality into mind and matter. Remarkable—maybe even limitless—improvements were possible in every field of endeavor, but faster coaches, stronger swords, and more sensitive lenses required a truer understanding of the physical world and how we know it.

What exactly constitutes a material object? Attempting to answer that question plunged the physicist and his audience into the depths of philosophy. “In connection with the ‘belief' in the existence of the ‘physical being,' ” the lawyer noted, “we seek to understand what it is that persuades us of this belief. For example, heat is not the essence of a thing, because there are cold things. Nor is coldness the essence, because there are hot things.” And: “It is neither the hardness nor the liquidity which is the essence of a thing, and for the same reason.”

Here Descartes and his followers had set themselves in opposition to the Scholastic notion of matter. According to the traditional way of thinking about these things, the sky has blueness in it, water has wetness, garlic has its odor. These perceivable qualities are embedded in the underlying substance of a thing. Rohault, in particular, found this to be faulty logic that impeded material progress. The Aristotelians, he wrote, reason that “it would be impossible for luminous or colored bodies to cause those sensations in us which we feel, if there were not in them something very like what they cause us to feel, for, they say, nothing can give what it has not.” Rohault dismantles this logic with a simple example: the fact that a needle poked into the skin causes pain clearly does not mean that the pain is somehow in the needle. The pain is in the mind. And so, in some sense, is the blueness of the sky, the wetness of the water, the smell of the garlic. This is the root of what Descartes bequeathed not only to his immediate disciples but to most of the rest of us who came after. There is a divide in the universe—there are two distinct substances. One is matter. The other is mind. Reality is not “that out there” but a dance involving the sensor and the sensed.

Abstract as this all is, the notion was of the essence for the Cartesians. Strange to say, it was also dangerous. These conceptual, seemingly otherworldly notions had political import. As much as the Cartesians themselves wished it were not so, Cartesianism threatened certain centers of worldly power. As they met at Rohault's
mercredis
and other, sometimes fancifully named Cartesian salons in Paris and around Europe (the Société des lanternistes in Toulouse, for example, took its name from the torches its members carried to light their way to its evening sessions), these men and women were acutely aware of doing so under a threat, which eased and intensified as various church and state officials modified their understanding of the new philosophy. In the case of each institution, the fear was of having its power undermined. If this new sect, Cartesianism, professed to be able to show, for example, that the body was a kind of machine and death was an absolute barrier, then where did that leave the doctrine of the afterlife or of Christ's bodily resurrection? If miracles could be authoritatively dismissed as nonsense, a faith built upon the miraculous was groundless. For an autocratic government the threat was equally serious. While Rohault was giving physics demonstrations in Paris, in Amsterdam Baruch Spinoza—also picking up where Descartes left off—was using reason as the base from which to argue that democracy, not absolute monarchy, was the only just form of government. Such ideas were whispered in Cartesian circles, leaving rulers around Europe to view those circles as suspect, if not treasonous.