Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (16 page)

The intellectual core of criticism was provided by the foremost academic of his day, John Wyclif. From his base at the University of Oxford, he issued a devastating deconstruction of ecclesiastical corruption and hypocrisy. This powerfully moral attack on the Church erupted in the national uprising of 1381. Modern historians tell us that the causes of the revolt were economic and political, but in 1381 the Church itself had no doubt that the chief instigators were John Wyclif and his followers who had been busy for the last decade stirring up criticism of the ecclesiastical hierarchy for the precise reason that the church now lay at the heart of the economy and of politics. The rebels beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury and many abbeys came under attack.

At Bury St Edmunds the abbey was once again sacked and looted. The prior was executed and his severed head stuck on a pike in the Great Market. At Norwich the rebels were unfortunate enough to run into a fighting bishop, Henry Despenser, who for most of his ill-spent youth had been one of the pope's military commanders. The bishop happened to be fully armed and armoured. He personally executed the leader of the party.

The uprising was crushed, but the Church's critics were not. Wyclif continued to insist that the clergy ought not to own property, and that the king could legally confiscate any held by the Church. It was an interesting proposition to which many theologians felt they could subscribe. But the men who then ran the Church were not theologians. The most powerful bishops and archbishops were career politicians, with little or no theological training. For them the Church was a political and economic power base. There was no way these proud and wealthy prelates were going to heed a call for a return to biblical simplicity and poverty. They would do whatever they could to hold on to their wealth and power.

THE CHURCH DEFENDS ITSELF WITH FIRE

Their tactic was not to defend the indefensible but to go on the attack. Luckily for them, Wyclif had challenged the official Church position on the Eucharist – the part of the Mass where the bread and wine are blessed and become the body and blood of Christ. Since 1215, the line had been that a miracle takes place, and after the blessing there is no bread and no wine left – they become, despite what our senses tell us, flesh and blood.

However, the Church in England had never pressed this point and people were left to interpret the miracle as they liked. Wyclif proposed that the bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ in a spiritual or symbolic sense. It was a proposition that would have roused little controversy in the past, but after 1381 the worldly bishops, headed by the aristocratic and powerful William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury, saw the issue as a block on which to lay the heads of the Church's critics. From 1401 archbishops were able to enjoy the privilege of handing over anyone who suggested that the bread and wine were not literally the body and blood of Christ to be burnt at the stake – a brutally effective way of retaining the status quo.

Nonetheless, opposition to corruption in the Church struggled on. In 1410 there was an attempt to pass a Bill in Parliament to strip the Church and the monasteries of their assets. But Henry IV had been helped to the throne by the then archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, and the Bill was indignantly rejected. In fact, an abject Commons had to beg for it to be struck from the record.

THE END OF THE MONASTERIES

The unpopularity of the monasteries simmered under the surface. When religious houses were founded as penance for the murder of Richard II, it was very difficult to find anyone to inhabit them. Syon monastery near London, for instance, was occupied by a Swedish order of nuns, who later took over another of the new foundations at Brentford, also near London, which had remained empty since being established.

Nuns had, in fact, replaced monks in people's minds as being value for money. The classic idea of a nunnery had been a place of retreat for well-off ladies with nowhere else to go; but in the decades that followed the Black Death the attitude to women in religious life changed rather dramatically.

Nuns evidently chose to live by different standards from those of monks with their rich endowments and glorious buildings. People seem to have been much more conscious of this by the fifteenth century, and also to have become aware that if they were donating funds for anniversaries, for pittances, for regular prayers, for burial, women were more likely to deliver the goods. Wealthy men and women frequently made bequests to ‘the poor nuns who will pray for their souls', and increasing numbers of women's religious houses were founded. This suggests that women's prayers were perceived to have more efficacy than men's, and that donors and patrons thought nunneries were doing a better job than monasteries.

Monks and nuns were both finally swept away in the years following 1535, when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and redistributed their phenomenal wealth among his cronies. The inquiry by Thomas Cromwell which led up to this produced a spectacular list of abuses and scandals, none of which represented anything new, but which were now being exposed in a world in which reform, rather than abolition, hardly seemed an option any more.

And all we have left are beautiful fairy ruins . . . that whisper of a life of dedication and piety and simplicity that became corrupted on a magnificent scale.

Perhaps money is the root of all evil.

Of course, there were always sincere and dedicated monks who devoted themselves to a life of prayer and religious contemplation. But looking back through the story of the monasteries it's possible to conclude that once prayer had acquired a monetary value, the game was up. The monasteries – the prayer factories – became commercial enterprises; and subsequently there was just no way they could fulfil their original function.

Monks couldn't really cut themselves off for ever from the wicked world, no matter how hard they tried. They were part of the wicked world and, what's more, a lot of the time they ran it. But they were never allowed to get away with it unscathed. Criticism and condemnation was constant; it was the motor that drove one new monastic movement after another, and ultimately pulled down the entire edifice. The true legacy of the medieval church in England, and all those fat monks, is the powerful sense of social justice that the monastic movement itself taught, that it used to speak out against its own corruption, and that in the end became the weapon that destroyed it.

And that has shaped political debate in England ever since.

CHAPTER FIVE

PHILOSOPHER

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Nature, and Nature's laws lay hid in night.

God said
, Let Newton be!
and all was light.

A
LEXANDER POPE'S EPITAPH
for Sir Isaac Newton, written in 1730 (three years after the great man's death), seems to tell us all we need to know about medieval science. The natural philosophers of the Middle Ages floundered in ignorance and superstition until Newton changed the study of the world by basing his investigations on experiment and mathematics.

The typical medieval experimental philosopher was, supposedly, a man like the thirteenth-century Franciscan friar Roger Bacon, hunting for the philosopher's stone. Bacon was an alchemist who tried to turn base metals into gold, pursuing delusions, and who was then forbidden by his own order to continue his strange experiments.

Odd, then, that it should be Bacon who said ‘Mathematics is the door and the key to the sciences' and wrote an explanation of experimental science for the pope. Odder still that Isaac Newton was also actually an alchemist, and that by far the greater part of his writings was devoted to alchemy and interpreting the Book of Revelation. We choose to ignore the truth about the history of natural philosophy. It doesn't fit into the story of human progress as we like to tell it.

THE ALCHEMISTS AND THE SEARCH FOR GOLD

Roots of science lie in alchemy – the study of how one substance can be changed into another. Alchemists were exploring a world whose nature, in their eyes, derived not from mechanical laws but from the mind of God.

The word ‘alchemy' comes from Arabic and Egyptian roots (
al-khimia
refers to the black soil of the Nile); the study was said to have been devised by the god Hermes, creator of the arts and sciences. It was called the Hermetic art and was certainly explored by Greeks in Alexandria in the third century AD. Much of the Eastern Roman Empire, including Egypt, was ultimately conquered by Islam in the seventh century, and Arab inquirers pursued, and elaborated on, the ideas and knowledge that had been developed there. Eventually the secrets of alchemy were passed on to medieval Europe through Arabs in Spain.

Roger Bacon explained that, ‘Alchemy is a Science, teaching how to transform any kind of metal into another: and that by a proper medicine, as it appeared by many Philosophers' Books.' And alchemy certainly had the transmutation of base metals into gold at the top of its priorities. Gold was special but that was because it was so very different from any other substance – this was its significance for alchemists. Gold cannot rust. No natural process damages it. Heat it to white-hot and when it cools off it will be the same metal as it was before. It can be hammered to one-thousandth of the thickness of a sheet of newsprint, and drawn into a wire finer than a human hair, and remains quite unchanged. In a mortal world, gold is incorruptible.

To the alchemists it was perfection. The basis of alchemy was the belief that the world contained the possibility of perfectibility, and it was the duty of the inquirer to strive towards that. Once, in the Garden of Eden, everything had been perfect. Then sin had been introduced, men and women were barred from the garden and the world was now corrupt. But everything – animate and inanimate – was slowly striving to restore itself, and the existence of gold, rare as it was, demonstrated that such a restoration to perfection was real and did happen.

And because everything was tending towards a state of perfection, all metals that were still underground must be gradually changing themselves into gold. The alchemists were simply helping a natural process. Giving God a hand.

Before we scoff, we should bear in mind that even in the twentieth century miners have argued that metals grow in the ground. In a sense, they are correct. For example, if you leave scrap iron in a wet place in a worked-out copper mine, and seal the mine, a few years later you will find that copper has grown. It has migrated into the scrap iron from the moisture, copper atoms replacing iron ones.

To the alchemists it seemed to follow that, if metals grow, those that are left in the ground for the longest time will grow closest to perfection. That explained why there was so little gold in the world – in the fourteenth century all the gold in Europe would have filled a medium-sized room. Most metal, it was deduced, is brought to the surface too soon. The purpose of alchemy, as Bacon wrote, was to provide the solution to this problem:

Alchemy therefore is a science teaching how to make and compound a certain medicine, which is called Elixir, the which when it is cast upon metals or imperfect bodies, does fully perfect them.

This was the basis for the hunt for the philosopher's stone (or elixir). Alchemy required that an inquirer should study all knowledge. Human beings, the heavens and the earth were intimately linked, having been created together in the mind of God.

THE PURPOSE OF ‘PHILOSOPHY'

Philosophers like Roger Bacon did not see themselves as challenging biblical orthodoxy. Their credo was ‘as above, so below'. In other words, the world itself is part of creation, so studying its secrets can help you to understand the Bible. Bacon argued that scientific study was essential to perceiving the hidden meaning of religious texts – only when you know about the world can you see what is being said. Alchemy was a religious inquiry that happens to look like bad science to our uncomprehending eyes.

For example, Bacon described the vastness of the universe in a way that sounds surprisingly modern:

Even the smallest of the stars visible to our sight is bigger than the earth; but, compared to the heavens as a whole, the smallest star has no effective magnitude at all . . . The sun is about 170 times as big as the whole earth, as Ptolemy proves (Almagest 5) . . . One could walk all the way round the earth in less than three years. So we see that the magnitude of things below is simply incommensurable with that of the heavenly bodies.

BACON
,
Operis Majoris

Just as we assume that Newton transformed physics by ‘introducing' the importance of mathematics, we are taught that Galileo transformed cosmology by inventing the astronomical telescope. But Bacon describes how to use lenses, and his own use of them in an instrument that must have been a telescope. He claimed it could make the most distant object appear near, and that it could make stars appear at will. But every time we think an alchemist is talking modern science, we are mistaken. Bacon goes on . . .