From the Tree to the Labyrinth (6 page)

Foucault sees this tendency as typical of the sixteenth-century
episteme,
whereas, as we have seen and as we will see, it is a characteristic of
every
idea of encyclopedia, from Pliny to the present day. In fact what distinguishes a contemporary encyclopedia like the
Britannica,
the French
Larousse
or the Italian
Treccani
from Pliny’s encyclopedias or the medieval encyclopedias or Aldrovandi’s encyclopedia and so on, is simply the critical attention devoted to separating legendary ideas from those that are scientifically proven (but only because today this difference too, ontological in nature, is considered part of what every educated person should know). Aside from this difference—which acquires relevance, let’s say, between Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Diderot and D’Alembert’s mid-eighteenth-century
Encyclopédie
—a contemporary encyclopedia is also expected in principle to tell us everything that has been said, whether it be about sulfuric acid or Apollo or the sorcerer Merlin.

Compared with Pliny, medieval encyclopedias have a different origin and serve different purposes. If we are to understand their nature, we must begin with Augustine, whose concern was with the problem of the correct interpretation of Scripture and took into consideration, not only the signs produced by human beings in an effort to convey meaning, and the natural phenomena that may be interpreted as signs (
De doctrina christiana
II, 1, 1), but also, since Scripture speaks not only
in verbis
but also
in factis
(
De trinitate
XV, 9, 15), events and things of sacred history that have been supernaturally arranged so as to be read as signs.
¹⁸
Augustine taught how to resolve the question of whether a sign was to be understood in a literal or a figurative sense, and he said that we must suspect a figurative sense whenever Scripture appears to go against the truths of faith and moral behavior or gets lost in
superfluitates
or brings into play expressions not especially meaningful from the literal point of view (proper names, numbers and technical terms, elaborate descriptions of flowers, natural prodigies, precious stones, vestments and ceremonies, objects and events irrelevant from the spiritual point of view).

To interpret the figurative meaning of these facts we must appeal to our knowledge of the world. In
De doctrina christiana
(II, 57) Augustine insists at length upon the fact that lacunae in our knowledge of things render figurative expressions obscure. If we are to understand why Scripture commands us to be as wise as serpents, we must know that, in the real world, the serpent offers its entire body to the aggressor in order to protect its head. And only if we know that the serpent, by forcing itself through the narrow entrance of its hole, sloughs off its old skin and is endowed with fresh strength, can we understand what the Apostle means when he explains how to put off the old man and put on the new man by passing through the “strait gate” (Matt. 7: 13).
¹⁹

The same thing is true of precious stones and herbs. Knowing that the carbuncle shines in the dark illuminates many obscure passages of Scripture, while knowing that hyssop is effective in freeing the lungs from catarrh explains why it is said: “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean” (Psalm 51: 7). To understand why Moses, Elijah, and Jesus fasted for forty days we must bear in mind that the course of the day and that of the year are measured in terms of the number 4, the day according to divisions into four groups of hours that make up morning, midday, evening, and night, the year according to the four seasons. Similarly, we need to have a good knowledge of music: if we come across a mention of a psaltery with ten strings, we must be aware that the actual instrument does not call for that many strings if we are to deduce that what we have here is a reference to the Ten Commandments.

It is basically as a response to this need to interpret the Scriptures that medieval encyclopedias come into existence and circulate. They are different from Roman encyclopedias in that, although they too are concerned with explaining what the world is like, they are still more concerned to explain
how the sacred texts are to be understood.
To give a single example among the many possible, in the ninth century Rabanus Maurus insists that he speaks not only of the nature of things “sed etiam de mystica earumdem rerum significatione” (“but also of the mystical meaning of those things,”
De rerum naturis,
PL 111, 12d).

The earliest encyclopedia of this type, however, antedates Augustine; we are referring to the first moralized bestiary, the
Physiologus,
a Greek work by an anonymous author composed in the early centuries
A.D.
, though the Latin versions, each of which incidentally expands upon the original text, only appear toward the seventh century. This little work draws upon works by Pliny and other ancient authors (such as the
Polyhistor
of Solinus or the
Alexander Romance
) for information on the various animals, but to the description of each it adds an allegorical or moral interpretation. Here, for example, is the entry on “viper”:

John said to the Pharisees, “Ye generation of vipers” [Matt. 3:7 and Lk. 3:7]. Physiologus says of the viper that the male has the face of a man, while the female has the form of a woman down to her navel, but from her navel down to her tail she has the form of a crocodile. Indeed the woman has no secret place, that is, genitals for giving birth, but has only a pinhole. If the male lies with the female and spills his seed into her mouth, and if she drinks his seed, she will cut of the male’s necessaries (that is, his male organs) and he will die. When, however, the young have grown within the womb of their mother who has no genitals for giving birth, they pierce through her side, killing her in their escape.

Our Savior, therefore, likened the Pharisees to the viper; just as the viper’s brood kills its father and mother, so this people which is without God kills its father, Jesus Christ, and its earthly mother, Jerusalem. “Yet how will they flee from the wrath to come?” [Lk. 3:7].
²⁰

As we see, the form and behavior of the viper are described so as to demonstrate why it is a figure for the Pharisees. Or, when he explains how the hedgehog climbs up the grapevine to get at the grapes, then throws the grapes down onto the ground and rolls on them so that the grapes are speared on his spines, whereupon he carries them back to his offspring, leaving the vine shoot bare, the intent is to represent the faithful who must remain attached to the spiritual Vine and not let the spirit of evil climb onto it and strip it of all its grapes.

Based on the model of the
Physiologus,
with few exceptions, are the medieval bestiaries, herbals, and lapidaries, and the various
imagines mundi,
from the
Etymologies
of Isidore of Seville in the seventh century, to the many bestiaries and encyclopedias of the twelfth century, down to Cecco d’Ascoli’s thirteenth-century
L’Acerba
. All take Pliny as their point of departure and each incorporates the work of previous authors, offering therefore a fairly repetitive repertory of information.

As is the case with Pliny, it appears that the classificatory criteria of the medieval encyclopedias are rather vague (why does Isidore classify the crocodile with the fishes? merely because it lives in the water?) and that they too therefore represent a mere accumulation of haphazard information. Nevertheless, the only example of a fortuitous assemblage is that provided by the
Physiologus,
given that the animals the author lists (the lion, the sun-lizard, the pelican, the owl, the eagle, the phoenix, the hoopoe, the viper, the ant, the sirens, the hedgehog, the fox, the panther, the whale, etc.) appear to be chosen at random. Evidently, this bestiary was only interested in animals to which tradition had assigned properties that lent themselves to an allegorical and moral interpretation. If, however, we examine the tables of contents of many medieval encyclopedias we observe that the way they are put together is only superficially casual (cf. Binkley 1997 and especially Meier 1997).

Isidore considers the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy), followed by medicine, law, ecclesiastical books and offices, languages, peoples and armies, words, man, animals, the world, buildings, precious stones and metals, agriculture, wars, games, theater, ships, clothing, the home, and domestic chores—and one has to wonder what order lies behind a list of this kind, in which the entries dealing with animals are divided into Beasts, Small Animals, Serpents, Worms, Fish, Birds, and Small Winged Animals. But already in Isidore’s day primary education was subdivided into the Trivium and the Quadrivium, and Isidore dedicates his first books in fact to these subjects, throwing in medicine for good measure. The chapters that follow, devoted to ecclesiastical laws and offices, are included because he was also writing for the learned, that is, for jurists and monks. Immediately afterward, another order becomes apparent: book VII takes as its point of departure God, the angels, and the saints and goes on to deal with mankind, then with the animals, and, from book XIII on, we proceed to consider the world and its parts, winds, waters, and mountains. Finally, with book XV, we arrive at inanimate but man-made objects, that is, at the various trades and métiers. Thus, though he syncretistically juxtaposes two criteria, Isidore does not throw things together randomly, and in the second part he follows an order of decreasing dignity of creatures, from God down to domestic implements.

The
De rerum naturis
of Rabanus Maurus also appears to be inspired by a casual order but in fact juxtaposes several traditional orders: it begins by following the criterion of decreasing dignity, and accordingly, starting with God, we move on to man, to the animals, to inanimate things, arriving finally at man-made things such as buildings, then the various trades are discussed, probably in the same order in which they were taught in the Carolingian Palatine school, and from the professions we proceed to philosophers, languages, precious stones, weights and measures, agriculture, military matters, games and theater, painting and colors, and the various tools used in cooking or in tilling the fields.
²¹

In the thirteenth century, in his
De proprietatibus rerum,
Bartholomaeus Anglicus begins with a mixed order, following both dignity (from the angels to man) and the six days of Creation (the
hexameral
order). He then goes back and begins all over again with an order that may seem bizarre to us but apparently wasn’t so for him, since he explains that, after speaking of the invisible world and of man, and dealing with the creation of the world and of time, he must now speak of the lesser things and of material creatures. And there follow the entries on air, birds, waters, mountains and regions, precious stones, herbs and animals, and finally various accidents like the senses, colors, sounds, scents, weights and measures, liquids. Bartholomaeus is respecting a philosophical order that is Aristotelian in origin, in that he speaks first of substances and then of accidents.

Furthermore, medieval readers must have perceived an order where we see only an accumulation of information, given that the organization of an encyclopedia also had a
mnemonic role
to play: a given order among things served to make them memorable, to remember the place they occupied in the image of the world (cf. Carruthers 1990 and Rivers 1997).

Little by little, the encyclopedias tend to make the order that governs them easier to follow: in the thirteenth century, Vincent de Beauvais’s
Speculum majus,
with its 80 books divided into 9,885 chapters, already has the organization of a scholastic Summa. The
Speculum naturale
is inspired by a strictly hexameral criterion (the Creator, the sensible world, light, the firmament and the heavens, and so on, till we come to the animals, the formation of the human body and the story of mankind). The
Speculum doctrinale
treats of the human world and includes letters (philosophy, grammar, logic, rhetoric, poetics), morality, mechanics, and technical subjects, and, while the
Speculum morale
represents a sort of an ethical parenthesis (it is, incidentally, apocryphal), the
Speculum historiale
deals with human history or salvation history and has a chronological framework.

Order takes on a preponderant role, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with Raimon Llull’s
Arbor scientiae (Tree of Science)
—a veritable portrayal of the Great Chain of Being through a representation of the great chain of knowledge—from which burgeon the
Arbor elementalis
(objects of the sublunar world made up of the four elements: fire, air, water, and earth, with precious stones, trees, animals), the
Arbor vegetalis,
the
Arbor sensualis,
the
Arbor imaginalis
(the mental images that are the similes of the things represented in the other trees), the
Arbor humanalis
(memory, understanding, will, and the various arts and sciences), and then the
Arbor moralis
(virtues and vices), the
Arbor imperialis
(government), the
Arbor apostolicalis
(the Church), the
Arbor caelestialis
(astrology and astronomy), the
Arbor angelicalis
(angelology), the
Arbor aeviternitalis
(the Otherworld kingdoms), the
Arbor maternalis
(Mariology), the
Arbor christianalis
(Christology), the
Arbor divinalis
(Divine attributes), the
Arbor exemplificalis
(the contents of knowledge), the
Arbor quaestionalis
(40,000 questions on the various professions).