The Friar and the Cipher (4 page)

It was at the Lyceum that Aristotelian thought flowered. Aristotle taught in a method much like Socrates—he walked about, followed by his students, lecturing and engaging in discussions of whatever Aristotelian concept happened to be on the agenda. (The term
peripatetic,
meaning “walking about,” came directly from the Lyceum.) Though Aristotle, unlike Socrates, wrote things down, almost nothing of what he wrote for posterity survives. Most of his sometimes cryptic, often ambiguous lecture notes, however, were saved.

Aristotle's concept of God, such as it was, was completely consistent with his methodology and, not surprisingly, rejected the vagueness of Plato's Ideals. Everything, he postulated, was based on motion, and nothing moves unless it is acted on by something else. But in order for this great progression to begin, there must be something that caused motion without having been acted upon itself. This Aristotle called the First Mover or Prime Mover. In the Aristotelian system, God (as the Christians later conceived Him) was reduced to whosoever had pushed the boulder downhill.

Although Aristotle's cold-logic empiricism was almost immediately adopted as the only way to do science—Galen, Ptolemy, and all the other great Greek and Roman scientists were Aristotelians—it occurred to some that Plato's concept of Ideals would be much better suited to mysteries of the infinite and the eternal. The duality of the knowable and unknowable (which would later take shape in Christianity as the conflict between reason and faith) allowed Christian, Jewish, and eventually Islamic theologians to allow for man's inability to perceive the essence of God. Aristotle, on the other hand, both literally and figuratively, lacked soul.

BY THE SECOND CENTURY A.D.,
Christianity had already been established as a dominant religion across much of Europe, Asia Minor, and northern Africa. Still, many Christians did not have a firm idea of the fundamental tenets of their religion. Even the concept of God itself seemed to have any number of different references in the Bible. Was God the Father in heaven, Christ himself, or some other, more ethereal overriding presence? There was also the question of what made Christianity different from other monotheistic religions. The words of the apostles provided direction but not logic, leaving its followers willing but uneasy. Christians needed their own thinkers to give the religion a philosophical base, but in their absence, they cast around among non-Christians to try and provide some answers.

Eventually an Egyptian named Plotinus, after studying ten years with an unemployed dockworker and lapsed Christian named Ammonius Sacchus, asked the question “How could such a flawed corporeal universe spring from the perfection of God?” This was the same question with which many Christians had been wrestling. To answer it, Plotinus extended Plato's duality, added God (sort of), and incorporated both into a movement that came to be called Neoplatonism.

God, Plotinus postulated, tap-dancing around the lack of a specific deity in Plato's work, was merely the Ideal, the unknowable, eternal One, The Good, from which all earthly things emanated, in the predicted imperfect form. From The One came The Intelligence, a kind of all-encompassing reality that in turn engendered The Soul. The Soul, unlike the first two layers, was active, and created all the lesser, individual souls that made up the earth.

To Neoplatonists, God was not an active being who created the universe in a voluntary act but rather merely a contemplative deity. As one moved down the ladder, reality became increasingly material, active, and imperfect. Nonetheless, each individual soul, flawed or besotted though it might be, was still part of The Soul, and therefore The Intelligence, and, ultimately, The One. All the different layers aside, Plotinus succeeded in transforming the concept of Plato's Ideal into a specific deity, which was exactly what Christians had been looking for.

Although his notion of a passive, contemplative God was branded with the epithet “pantheism,” as were all theological constructs that either stated explicitly or implied that knowledge of God was present equally in all beings (a term the
Catholic Encyclopedia
today dismisses as “simply atheism”), Plotinus's concept of the existence of different forms was used by the Nicaean Council in 325 AD to create the Trinity, thereby reconciling the inconsistent definitions of God in the scriptures.

But Plotinus, Neoplatonism, and Plato gained their most significant partisan about fifty years later, when Christianity produced perhaps its greatest theorist ever, St. Augustine of Hippo. Through Augustine, who unlike Plotinus possessed impeccable credentials as a Christian, duality was fully incorporated into scriptural theory.

Augustine was one of a number of great figures in Christian history who began life as hell-raisers, but the others did not see fit to set down a record of their lascivious behavior for posterity. Born in 354, Augustine chronicled his early adult years of carousing in
Confessions
, which he wrote after his conversion.
Confessions
was ripe with phrases such as “hell's black river of lust,” “filth of lewdness,” and “putrid depravity,” but despite the florid prose is lacking in graphic detail. At one point Augustine wrote the famous line “Lord, give me chastity—but not yet.”

Augustine's transformation occurred in his twenties and was a great relief to his overbearing but fanatically pious mother, Monica. After gaining a reputation as a philosopher, he was invited to Rome. He turned down the honor in order to remain as bishop of Hippo (present-day Annaba, on the Mediterranean coast of Algeria, just west of the Tunisian border), a post he had been granted by the townspeople after the death of the previous bishop. He stayed at Hippo for the rest of his life. His last years were spent formulating defenses for the city, which was under threat from barbarian tribes that had already all but destroyed what was left of the Roman Empire.

St. Augustine was an unabashed Neoplatonist, lifting duality almost whole from Plotinus. In
City of God,
one of the most important Christian works after the Bible itself, Augustine created a clear separation between the perfection of heavenly things and the corruption of the earthly. In
De Trinitate,
Augustine once again used duality to establish the Trinity once and for all as a cornerstone of Christian faith. He used Platonic concepts to establish most of the other basic tenets of Christian theory that would survive until challenged almost one thousand years later by Thomas Aquinas.

But Platonic duality, while the perfect vehicle for Augustine, presented some unconquerable hurdles down the line. The problem with Plato, one that was to bedevil the Church throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, was that his concept of Ideals—smoky, indistinct, and unknowable—could easily, perhaps inevitably, descend into mysticism, and mysticism has no inherent hierarchy. It doesn't take any special credentials to be a mystic, no particular prerequisite or method, no means of separating mystics who will see things your way from mystics who won't. Anyone, be it a pope, Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, Ignatius of Loyola, or the town shepherd, could claim with equal justification to have been spoken to by God. No training was required to receive a vision, and there was no means other than torture or repression to prevent a mystic from putting forth God's word however it was transmitted to him or her.

So, if dualism fell into the wrong hands, it could rob the Church of the role that it held most dear, and the one that formed the basis of its power—sole and unquestioned intermediary between man and God.

Plato, clearly, would not do.

What the Church required was a system within which it could claim objective authority in the interpretation of God's word and, by extension, the authority to prevent anyone with whom it disagreed from offering an alternative. What was needed here was science, logic, learning—all those specialties over which the Church could claim a virtual monopoly, separating it from the common man—or even from kings.

What they needed, in other words, was Aristotle.

CHAPTER THREE

Logic and Theology:
The Evolution of Scholasticism

•   •   •

IN AUGUSTINE'S TIME,
none of Aristotle's work was known to Christian scholars. In fact, out of the entire incredible range of Aristotelian writings, only one set of manuscripts had been recovered, and even that had not been translated into Latin. Fortunately for the future of Christianity, that set happened to contain writing on the one subject that the religion needed most—Aristotle's work on logic, the
Organon
.

From the
Organon
would come scholasticism, a system of analysis and teaching by which Christianity would leap forward and then be held back, at once the most progressive and reactionary innovation in Christian education and philosophy in its history. Scholasticism was the method that would be used in every university, the rule book in the battle of dogma against science, the system by which Roger Bacon learned and later taught, which molded his philosophy of science and provided its greatest impediment.

The process toward scholasticism began soon after Augustine's death in 430, when a Roman consul named Anicius Manlius Severnius Boethius finally translated the
Organon
into Latin. Boethius—whether he was actually a Christian himself is unclear—was one of the top advisors to King Theodoric, but ruler of Rome was not the elite position it had once been. First of all, Rome itself was no longer the center of the empire. That was in Constantinople, where the Byzantine emperor Justin ran the show. Second, Theodoric was not a Roman but rather an Ostrogoth, one of the many tribes to the north that had once been colonized by Rome but, during the previous century and a half, had virtually annexed what was left of the empire. Even so, Theodoric, who probably never learned to read or write, saw himself as Roman and tried to carry on the great intellectual traditions of past emperors, such as Marcus Aurelius.

Boethius was an exceptional scholar who, because of his learning and Theodoric's cultural ambitions, became a favorite of the king, much as Aristotle had become a favorite of Hermias the Eunuch. Given a free hand, Boethius produced original works on mathematics and science, as well as his translation of Aristotle.

He did not have a chance to do much with it, however, since, as it turned out, he had become a bit too much of the king's favorite. Some of those at court who aspired to be favorites themselves convinced Theodoric that Boethius was part of a plot to kill him. Their proof was a document supposedly signed by Boethius, which Boethius claimed was a forgery. Theodoric, in no position to determine the genuineness of any document for himself, let his Gothic blood win out over his Roman veneer. He chucked Boethius into prison without trial. Boethius slowly rotted in a cell, writing philosophy and commentary. Finally, in 525, Theodoric had Boethius executed in a particularly unpleasant way. A cord was tightened around the condemned man's neck until his eyes popped out, and then he was slowly beaten to death. (Theodoric died two years later. He is said to have cried over the injustice he had perpetrated on an innocent man.)

Christian education, as it was to persist through the Renaissance, began to take form soon afterward. Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus, a friend and pupil of Boethius's, read the Latin translation of the
Organon
, then produced a text,
The Course of Religious and Secular Studies
. In it, Cassiodorus folded Aristotelian logic into the old Greek method of dividing a curriculum into the seven liberal arts, grouped into a language
trivium
(grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and science
quadrivium
(arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music) and asserted that this was the proper way to teach Christians. Cassiodorus did not have a great deal of competition in the philosophy of education arena, and so the seeds of scholasticism were sown.

In 529, the new Byzantine emperor, Justinian, Justin's adopted son and an avowed Christian, closed the Academy in Athens, by then the last stronghold of Neoplatonism. That date is often considered the beginning of what has been called, with some justification, the Dark Ages. Still, although there was a virtual halt in creative thought in Europe, Boethius and Cassiodorus had nonetheless created an Aristotelian framework within which Christianity could function, as it did, almost unchanged for half a millennium.

During this time, scholasticism ever so slowly ripened—it took three hundred years just to get past the rote-based master-lectures-student stage. Instruction took place largely in monasteries and cathedral schools, and so one-sided was the process that it was the teacher rather than the method that was referred to as “scholastic.”

Finally, in the tenth century, scholasticism began to acquire an intellectual pulse. Masters reached more deeply into the works of Boethius and Cassiodorus and reintroduced the Socratic dialectic as a teaching vehicle. When students became involved, the masters actually had to find answers to difficult questions every once in a while, and new and better arguments were forced into the process. This in turn led to more sophisticated questioning, which required more thought and study in the replies.

Within a century, scholasticism had matured into the most powerful tool for maintaining and perpetuating doctrine that the Church had ever seen. Almost in gratitude, Aristotle and his logic were adopted by Church fathers and the man himself (now called simply “the Philosopher”) was said to be infallible. Even Augustine's (and Plato's) duality was now formalized and tempered on the Aristotelian anvil.

Regardless of the degree of sophistication, however, the basic aim of the scholastics had not changed. They remained uninterested in uncovering new knowledge, only in cementing the unlikely but now solid bond between Aristotle's logic and the Bible's revelation. Scholastics argued that since God was the supreme power in the universe, and that revealed truth (as set down in scripture) was His message to man, human reason was subordinate and, if ever it seemed to contradict revelation, must give way. In other words, if science and faith butted heads, either the science was wrong (most likely) or someone had made an incorrect scriptural interpretation. Scholastics came to call philosophy the servant of theology, because they used philosophy to understand and explain revelation.

In 1150, a teacher at the cathedral school in Paris named Peter Lombard institutionalized the entire system in a work titled
Four Books of Sentences
. “Sentences” were the method pioneered by Cassiodorus to subject religious truths to the full dialectic treatment. Lombard now used this technique as the structure of his work. Taking what were then the standard divisions, he devoted the first book to God and the Trinity, the second to creation, the third to incarnation and redemption, and the fourth to the sacraments. In each book, he presented a series of propositions (
quaestio
), and then subjected each to dialectic examination (
pro
and
contra
). This process came to be known as disputation (
disputatio
). Neither Lombard's propositions nor his arguments were original—almost everything he cited came from St. Augustine—although he threw some more contemporary Church masters into the mix for topicality.

What Lombard achieved was the ultimate ecclesiastic textbook, a systematic, ordered, encyclopedic compilation of every important piece of Church dogma, complete with every objection that had been raised against it, to which Lombard supplied the appropriate counterargument. When there were counters to the counter, Lombard showed students how to answer those as well, and on and on until every proposition had been irrefutably cemented.

Four Books of Sentences
became the standard Church text for the next two centuries, and soon after it was published it became impossible to gain a degree in theology in any cathedral school in Europe—or later, any university—without writing a commentary on the text. So it developed that theology itself became the ultimate science and the logic of Aristotle was employed to prove the very arguments the man himself had spent his life trying to disprove.

But just when it seemed that the Church could sit back and relax, secure in having tamed Plato, duality, pantheism, and other heterodoxy with Aristotelian logic, a body of new knowledge prepared to flood through Europe. Most of this knowledge came from a single source, one man, one philosopher whose works were so obviously true that it was going to take everything the Church had to hold him off.

It was Aristotle.

This time, he came from the Arabs.

WHILE EUROPE HAD ACCESS
only to Aristotle's works on logic, scholars from countries across the Arab Empire possessed Arabic translations of the full range of the Philosopher's work. With the fall of Toledo and the subsequent efforts of the Translators, many of the lost writings of Aristotle came north and seeded the universities. Much of this material was scientific and therefore welcome as part of the new learning. But then there were metaphysical works, such as
De Anima (On the Soul
). This segment of the Aristotelian corpus was less appealing to the Church, as it contained arguments on questions of man, God, and eternity that could not be blended quite so easily into Christian dogma as had the
Organon
. In fact, there were some specific passages that might even be seen as contradicting axioms of the Christian faith.

If that were not enough, two of the greatest Arab thinkers had done substantial analysis of Aristotle's metaphysical works—very persuasive analysis, as it turned out—and Latin translations of their commentaries came north as well. By the time Roger Bacon was sent off for his schooling, these commentaries had become as much a part of university learning—although often covertly—as the
Sentences
. While sometimes the work of these men lent support to Christian theology, more often it lent itself to reexamination of heretofore unquestioned precepts.

The first of the two was Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Abdallah Ibn Sina, who is generally (and more economically) referred to in the West by his Latin name, Avicenna. Avicenna was one of the great theorists in the history of Islam, and probably one of the greatest minds ever. He was born in 980 in Bukhara, in present-day Uzbekistan, then part of the decaying Samarind Empire. By age ten, largely self-taught, Avicenna had memorized the Qu'ran, and by thirteen was studying mathematics, medicine, and philosophy. By sixteen, he was treating patients, and one year later he had the good fortune of curing the Samarind king Nu ibn Mansur of an illness that all the other doctors had assured him was fatal. Asked to name his reward, Avicenna desired only to be allowed access to the Royal Library.

From there, he produced a large volume of commentary on Aristotle that philosophically was pure Neoplatonism. He ascribed to a hierarchal order of God and then a single active intelligence from which individual human personalities sprang. Instead of the vague concept of the One, however, Avicenna plugged in Aristotle's Prime Mover. For Christians, this would prove helpful because it established a method of retaining the unknowable ideal without sacrificing the scriptural truth that God created the universe consciously by an act of will. Still, if theologians accepted Avicenna's construct, it seemed certain that the old problem with mysticism was going to resurface. Moreover, Avicenna had stuffed more intermediaries between God and man than Plotinus had. As such, his theology never really caught on in Europe (unlike his
Canon of Medicine
, which became the standard medical text for the next five hundred years). Still, his Aristotelian contribution seemed to have helped solve a fundamental problem for Church scholars.

Helping along Christian theology, of course, was the farthest thing from Avicenna's mind. He was interested in a better Islam. His idea of attaining that end by using Greek thought rather than the Qu'ran itself not surprisingly made him any number of enemies. In 1150, all of his philosophical works were ordered burned by Caliph Mustanjid. (It is civilization's luck that by then the work of Avicenna had spread beyond the caliph's reach across the known world.) He was imprisoned twice (once escaping disguised as a mystic holy man), forced to flee more often than that, and died mysteriously in 1037, quite possibly after being poisoned.

While Avicenna, brilliant as he was, produced some Aristotelian commentary that made its way into theological debate, no Muslim in history had more impact on Christianity and Western civilization than the second great Arab philosopher, Abu al-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd, who came to be known in Europe as Averroës.

Like Avicenna, Averroës was a physician. He was also a judge, astronomer, and counselor to kings. He was born into wealth and position in 1126, the son and grandson of chief justices in Cordoba. By that time, the cultural center of the Arab Empire had moved to Spain. As a young man already with a reputation as a prodigious scholar, he was brought before the emir in 1153 and asked if he thought the heavens were eternal. Averroës hesitated and then said he did not know.

He would spend the rest of his life trying to find out.

For more than thirty years, Averroës went through Aristotle line by line, translating, interpreting, and producing commentary. Because only Aristotle's lecture notes survived, just what the Philosopher meant by this passage or that had often been open to question. Averroës's scholarship was so great, his knowledge of Aristotle so complete, that he became known simply as “The Commentator.” In the slack moments when he wasn't working on Aristotle, Averroës had time to serve as chief justice in Seville, then in Cordoba, be appointed as personal physician to the emir, and discover both the function of the retina and that immunity to smallpox is conferred on those who survive the disease.

What Averroës concluded after his study was to shake the foundations of not only his own religion but Christianity as well. Like Aristotle, he believed that reason, not revelation, represented the highest plane of wisdom, a point of view with which Europeans had yet to contend, since they had until recently been restricted to the
Organon
. Averroës extended Aristotle's reason-over-revelation contention with the notion that philosophy—the science of reason—(and therefore wisdom) is only for the elite. For Averroës, the vast majority of humanity was by nature unequipped to master the subtleties of higher thought, and thus incapable of enlightenment. These people were, in fact, happiest and most fulfilled when told what to do and what to think. For them, faith and revelation would more than suffice, and on no account should philosophy or dialectic be introduced to confuse them. A second, far smaller group needed a more rigorous explanation of why one proposition was true and another was false. This group could be taught philosophy, but only in a more or less rote manner. Finally, there were those few actually capable of reaching a higher plane. For these special men only did reason provide greater insight than faith, and therefore only they should be permitted to study or teach philosophy. (If Averroës, the consummate Aristotelian, was aware of how close in this construct he was drifting toward Plato's
Republic,
he never let on.)