From the Tree to the Labyrinth (42 page)

Theoretically speaking, we have two reciprocal doubles when, given two objects, Oa and Ob, their matter displays the same physical characteristics, in the sense of their molecular composition, and their form is similar, in the mathematical sense of congruence (the features to be compared for similarity are determined by the type). But who is to determine the criteria for similarity? The problem of doubles is ontological in theory, but pragmatic in practice. It is the user who decides under which description—that is, from what practical standpoint—the two matters and the two forms are, ceteris paribus, “objectively” similar, and therefore, from the practical point of view, interchangeable. Under a microscopic analysis, or in the light of other chemical tests, it could be proven that two sheets of office paper of different brands display fairly relevant differences, but a normal user habitually sees them as doubles (and hence interchangeable) in every respect.

We have a case of pseudo-doubles when only one token of the type (the privileged token) takes on a special value in the eye of one or more users, for one or all of the following reasons: (i) on account of
temporal priority,
such as occurs for instance when the first product off the assembly line of particular model of automobile (if it can be identified as the first) is displayed in a museum as a unique specimen;
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(ii) because that particular token contains evidence of previous possession, as occurs in the case of a copy of a book with an inscription by the author or the signature of an illustrious former owner; (iii) because that token has been used in a special context (this would be the case with the Holy Grail, the chalice used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, if it could ever be discovered and authenticated); (iv) because the particular token is of such material and formal complexity that no attempt to imitate it can reproduce all the characteristics recognized as relevant (a typical case would be an oil painting on canvas painted in a particular style with special paints, so that the chromatic shadings, the microscopic grain of the canvas, the flow of the brushstrokes—all features judged indispensable to the total fruition of the object—can never be completely imitated.
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In all of the above cases, for various reasons, these “unique” objects become the type of themselves, and any reproduction of these objects, when not honestly presented as a facsimile or imperfect copy produced for a didactic or documentary purpose, is made with a
false identification
in mind.
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We have false identification when, given a hypothetical object Oa, produced by author A in historical circumstances t
₁
, and, given another object Ob, produced by author B in historical circumstances t
₂
, somebody (an individual or a group) decides that Ob is identical with Oa, to the point of being indiscernible. In the concept of falsification the malicious intentions of the falsifier are generally implicit. The problem of malice on the part of B, the author of Ob, seems to us irrelevant: he is fully aware that Ob is not identical to Oa, but he may have produced it with no intention to deceive, as an exercise, as a joke, or by mere chance. The
Constitutum Constantini (Donation of Constantine)
was probably first produced as a rhetorical exercise, and it was only in later centuries that (in good or bad faith) it came to be considered authentic (see De Leo 1974). What interests us more is the intention of the person performing the false identification (the Identifier) who asserts that Oa and Ob are identical (of course, in a case of malice aforethought, the Identifier and author B of Ob may be one and the same person).

Historical forgery
does not belong in this category. It concerns a document Ob, produced by B, who is entitled to produce it as his own, but whose purpose in producing it is to assert (in a mendacious fashion) something inexact or invented. This is the case, for instance, when someone writes a letter bearing false witness, a report that misrepresents the results of a scientific experiment, a dispatch or communiqué issued by a government that lies about the results of an election (electoral fraud), and so on. A historical forgery is an instance of a deliberate lie and in this sense it is to be distinguished from a diplomatic forgery, which we will come to later.
⁷

In order for a process of false identification to occur a culture must have criteria, considered somehow objective, by which to establish indiscernibility or equivalence between objects, and therefore criteria for establishing the authenticity of an object Ob. These criteria can be valid (i) for objects that were not produced for communicative purposes, such as paleontological finds, objects in use in archaic or primitive cultures (which can be interpreted as signs, symptoms, traces, or clues to events distant in space and time); or (ii) for objects produced for explicitly communicative purposes (documents, visual works of art, hieroglyphic inscriptions, epigraphs, etc.). Both kinds of objects are generally understood to be “documents,” though objects belonging to type (ii) are considered both for their expression and their content, while objects belonging to type (i) are evaluated only for their expression, seeing that the content (or meaning) attributed to them by the addressee did not exist for the sender (the archaic producer of an iron knife blade undoubtedly intended to signify the practical function of the object he was constructing, but only the modern archeologist reads that knife as a sign of the fact that, when it was produced, people knew how to work iron).

The contemporary disciplines of identification (which we will refer to generically as philological disciplines) recognize four methods of authentication. We will see, case by case, that the criteria available to medieval culture were far more vague.

We have physicochemical methods for determining the period of fabrication and the quality of the material support (parchment, paper, canvas, wood, etc.). Nowadays these methods are considered sufficiently scientific, and therefore intersubjectively verifiable, but the medieval scholar almost never had the opportunity to encounter original documents in their original language (even the translators were working from manuscripts at a considerable remove from their archetypes), and all they knew of past civilizations were seriously contaminated ruins. Christianity discovers history (the sequence creation-original sin-redemption-parousia), but not historiography. It knows the past solely through the information handed down by tradition. The legal opinions handed down in the High Middle Ages ascertaining the counterfeit nature of the documents produced by one of the litigating parties confine themselves at best to a discussion of the authenticity of the seal. Remi of Trèves asks Gerbert d’Aurillac (the future pope Sylvester II) to send him one of his leather armillary spheres, and Gerbert (an enthusiast of the classical authors) asks for a copy of Statius’s
Achilleid
in exchange. Remi sends it to him; but the
Achilleid
was left unfinished by its author. Gerbert is unaware of this and accuses Remi of sending him a defective manuscript and, to punish him, sends him an inferior painted wooden sphere. Gerbert had no accredited sources for knowing the physical conditions of the original manuscript (see Havet 1889: 983–997 and Gilson 1952: 228–229).

The cautionary tale of the reception and translations of the
Corpus Dionysianum
is an episode worthy of reflection. When Byzantine emperor Michael II the Stammerer sent it as a gift to Frankish king Louis the Pious in 827 as the work of a disciple of Saint Paul who was the first bishop of Paris, no one thought to question its authenticity. The testimony of the donor, the prestige of the alleged author, the interest of the text—all were sufficient guarantees. Scotus Eriugena had doubts about the identity of Paul’s disciple and the first bishop of Paris, but not about the venerable age of the text.

The form of the document must be in keeping with the rules of formation of the period to which it is attributed. The first example of philological analysis based on the form of the expression was provided in the fifteenth century by Lorenzo Valla (
De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio,
XIII), when he demonstrated that the use of certain linguistic expressions in Latin was completely implausible at the beginning of the fourth century
A.D.
Isaac Casaubon (
De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes,
XIV) proved that the
Corpus Hermeticum
was not a Greek translation of an ancient Egyptian text, because it did not contain a single trace of Egyptian idiomatic expressions. Modern philologists have shown that the Hermetic
Asclepius
was not translated, as was once believed, by Marius Victorinus, because in all his writings Victorinus always put the conjunction
etenim
at the beginning of the sentence, whereas in the
Asclepius
the word occurs in the second position twenty-one times out of twenty-five.

According to the semiosic system, recourse is made to paleographic, epigraphic, lexicographic, grammatical, iconographic, and stylistic and other criteria. These methods are today judged sufficiently scientific, even when based on conjecture. The Middle Ages had no paleographic criteria, and its lexicographic, grammatical, and stylistic criteria were fairly vague. Men like Augustine and Abelard, and eventually scholars like Thomas Aquinas, recognized the problem of establishing the reliability of a text on the basis of its linguistic features. But, apropos of the text of the Bible, Augustine, who had small Greek and less Hebrew, in the pages where he discusses the technique of
emendatio,
advises at most to compare the various Latin translations with each other, in order to make a conjecture, taking account of the differences, about the “correct” reading of the text. He is looking for a “good” text, not the original text, and he rejects the idea of checking the Hebrew version because he believes it has been manipulated by the Jews: hence, not only does he not go back to the presumed original, he mistrusts it. Better a translation inspired by God that an original corrupted by a malicious intent (
De doctrina christiana
2, 11–14).

As Marrou (1958) remarks, none of his commentaries presupposes a preliminary effort to establish a critical text. There is no analysis of the manuscript tradition. Saint Augustine is content to compare the largest possible number of manuscripts and to take into consideration the largest possible number of variants.

When Saint Jerome’s translation
ex hebraeo
conflicts with that of the Septuagint, Augustine tends to suspect Jerome’s translation, because he considers the Septuagint divinely inspired. He never chooses the Vulgate over the Septuagint. In the
De civitate Dei
(15, 10–11), in calculating the age of Methuselah, the text of the Septuagint (but not the Vulgate) is contradictory, since it has Methuselah die after the Flood, but Augustine refrains from committing himself, suggesting the hypothesis of a correction introduced by the perfidious Jews to undermine the confidence of Christians vis-à-vis the Septuagint version. It is curious that Augustine should think that the Hebrew original might be corrupt (a useful suspicion on the part of a philologist), while he is not overly concerned over the corruptness of the translations, convinced that he can resolve the issues with a bland comparative approach, in which the last word will be uttered not by philology but by a righteous will to interpret and fidelity to traditional knowledge (see Marrou 1958: 432–434).

Bede and other authors analyze the rhetorical figures of Holy Scripture, but they are ignorant of the Hebrew original, and the language they are analyzing is that of a translation. It is not until the thirteenth century that an effort will be made to return to the Hebrew original with the help of converted Jews (see Chenu 1950: 117–125 and 206).

In any case, etymological practice has much to teach us about the weakness of medieval philology, whether the etymologies in question be those of Isidore of Seville or Virgil of Toulouse. Medieval etymology has nothing to do with the history of the lexicon. It is philosophical, theological, moral, or poetic. Every medieval etymology is, from the etymological point of view, a fake.

As for their insensitivity to language, the case of the thirteenth-century Modistae (see
Chapter 7
) is exemplary: all of their speculative grammar is an example of philological highhandedness. They attempt to elaborate a general theory of language on the basis of a single language, Latin. They do not believe that other languages displaying other grammatical (and therefore mental) structures exist. They identify
modus essendi
and
modus significandi.
Their ethnocentric impermeability is equal only to that of those twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon linguists who construct theories of linguistic universals on the basic of a single language, English.

True, the Abelard of
Sic et non
invites us to beware of words used in an unusual sense, of the corrupt state of a text as a sign of a work’s inauthenticity, but the practice will remain imprecise, at least down to Petrarch and the proto-humanists.
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In this case we must decide whether the categories, the taxonomies, the styles of argument, the iconographic configurations, and similar phenomena can be traced back to the cultural universe to which the document is attributed. Even for the modern period such criteria are highly conjectural in nature, though they appeal to relatively accepted notions with regard to the “worldview” typical of a given historical period.