In the fifth and last book the argument is closer, and succeeding generations were unable to pluck out of it many isolated plums. But this does not mean that it proved less influential. It underlies every later treatment of the problem of freedom.
The conclusion of the previous book has left us with a new difficulty. If, as its doctrine of Providence implies, God sees all things that are, were, or will be, uno mentis in ictu,109 in a single act of mind, and thus foreknows my actions, how am I free to act otherwise than He has foreseen? Philosophia will not put Boethius off with the shift that Milton is reduced to in Paradise Lost (III, 117), that, though God foreknows, His foreknowledge does not cause, my act. For the question never was whether foreknowledge necessitates the act but whether it is not evidence that the act must have been necessary.
Can there, then, be foreknowledge of the indeterminate? In a sense, yes. The character of knowledge depends not on the nature of the object known but on that of the knowing faculty. Thus in ourselves sensation, imagination, and ratio all in their several ways ‘know’ man. Sensation knows him as a corporeal shape; imagination, as a shape without matter; ratio, as a concept, a species. None of these faculties by itself gives us the least hint of the mode of knowledge enjoyed by its superior.110 But above ratio or reason there is a higher faculty, intelligentia or understanding.111 (Long afterwards Coleridge reversed this by making reason the higher and understanding the lower. I postpone further consideration of the medieval terminology till a later section.) And Reason cannot conceive the future being known except as it would have to be known, if at all, by her; that is, as determinate. But it is just possible even for us to climb up to the intelligential level and get a glimpse of the knowledge which does not involve determinism.
Eternity is quite distinct from perpetuity, from mere endless continuance in time. Perpetuity is only the attainment of an endless series of moments, each lost as soon as it is attained. Eternity is the actual and timeless fruition of illimitable life.112 Time, even endless time, is only an image, almost a parody, of that plenitude; a hopeless attempt to compensate for the transitoriness of its ‘presents’ by infinitely multiplying them. That is why Shakespeare’s Lucrece calls it ‘thou ceaseless lackey to eternity’ (Rape, 967). And God is eternal, not perpetual. Strictly speaking, He never foresees; He simply sees. Your ‘future’ is only an area, and only for us a special area, of His infinite Now. He sees (not remembers) your yesterday’s acts because yesterday is still ‘there’ for Him; he sees (not foresees) your tomorrow’s acts because He is already in tomorrow. As a human spectator, by watching my present act, does not at all infringe its freedom, so I am none the less free to act as I choose in the future because God, in that future (His present) watches me acting.113
I have so ruthlessly condensed an argument of such importance, both historical and intrinsic, that the wise reader will go for it to the original. I cannot help thinking that Boethius has here expounded a Platonic conception more luminously than Plato ever did himself.
The work ends with Philosophia thus speaking; there is no return to Boethius and his situation, any more than to Christopher Sly at the end of The Taming of the Shrew. This I believe to be a stroke of calculated and wholly successful art. We are made to feel as if we had seen a heap of common materials so completely burnt up that there remains neither ash nor smoke nor even flame, only a quivering of invisible heat.
Gibbon has expressed in cadences of habitual beauty his contempt for the impotence of such ‘philosophy’ to subdue the feelings of the human heart. But no one ever said it would have subdued Gibbon’s. It sounds as if it had done something for Boethius. It is historically certain that for more than a thousand years many minds, not contemptible, found it nourishing.
Before closing this chapter it will be convenient to mention two authors who are later in time and very much inferior in rank. They are not, like those whom I have been describing, contributors to the Model, but they sometimes supply the handiest evidence as to what it was. Both are encyclopaedists.
Isidore, Bishop of Seville from 600 to 636, wrote the Etymologiae. As the title implies his ostensible subject was language, but the frontier between explaining the meaning of words and describing the nature of things is easily violated. He makes hardly any effort to keep on the linguistic side of it, and his book thus becomes an encyclopaedia. It is a work of very mediocre intelligence, but often gives us scraps of information we cannot easily run to ground in better authors. It also has the enormous advantage of being accessible in a good modern edition.114
The same, unhappily, is not true of Vincent of Beauvais (ob. 1264). His huge Speculum Majus is divided into the Speculum Naturale, the Speculum Doctrinale, and the Speculum Historiale. We might expect that the ‘Doctrinal Mirror’ was concerned with Theology. Actually, it deals with morals, arts, and trades.
CHAPTER 5
THE HEAVENS
Man, walke at large out of thi prisoun.
HOCCLEVE
A. THE PARTS OF THE UNIVERSE
The fundamental concept of modern science is, or was till very recently, that of natural ‘laws’, and every event was described as happening in ‘obedience’ to them. In medieval science the fundamental concept was that of certain sympathies, antipathies, and strivings inherent in matter itself. Everything has its right place, its home, the region that suits it, and, if not forcibly restrained, moves thither by a sort of homing instinct:1
Every kindly thing that is
Hath a kindly stede ther he
May best in hit conserved be;
Unto which place every thing
Through his kindly enclyning
Moveth for to come to.
(Chaucer, Hous of Fame, II, 730 sq.)
Thus, while every falling body for us illustrates the ‘law’ of gravitation, for them it illustrated the ‘kindly enclyning’ of terrestrial bodies to their ‘kindly stede’ the Earth, the centre of the Mundus, for
To that centre drawe
Desireth every worldes thing.
(Gower, Confessio, VII, 234.)
Such was the normal language in the Middle Ages, and later. ‘The see desyreth naturely to folwen’ the Moon, says Chaucer (Franklin’s Tale, F 1052). ‘The iron’, says Bacon, ‘in particular sympathy moveth to the lodestone’ (Advancement).2
The question at once arises whether medieval thinkers really believed that what we now call inanimate objects were sentient and purposive. The answer in general is undoubtedly no. I say ‘in general’, because they attributed life and even intelligence to one privileged class of objects (the stars) which we hold to be inorganic. But full-blown Panpsychism, the doctrine of universal sentience, was not (to the best of my knowledge) held by anyone before Campanella (1568–1639), and never made many converts. On the common medieval view there were four grades of terrestrial reality: mere existence (as in stones), existence with growth (as in vegetables), existence and growth with sensation (as in beasts), and all these with reason (as in men).3 Stones, by definition, could not literally strive or desire.
If we could ask the medieval scientist ‘Why, then, do you talk as if they did,’ he might (for he was always a dialectician) retort with the counter-question, ‘But do you intend your language about laws and obedience any more literally than I intend mine about kindly enclyning? Do you really believe that a falling stone is aware of a directive issued to it by some legislator and feels either a moral or a prudential obligation to conform?’ We should then have to admit that both ways of expressing the facts are metaphorical. The odd thing is that ours is the more anthropomorphic of the two. To talk as if inanimate bodies had a homing instinct is to bring them no nearer to us than the pigeons; to talk as if they could ‘obey laws’ is to treat them like men and even like citizens.
But though neither statement can be taken literally, it does not follow that it makes no difference which is used. On the imaginative and emotional level it makes a great difference whether, with the medievals, we project upon the un
iverse our strivings and desires, or with the moderns, our police-system and our traffic regulations. The old language continually suggests a sort of continuity between merely physical events and our most spiritual aspirations. If (in whatever sense) the soul comes from heaven, our appetite for beatitude is itself an instance of ‘kindly enclyning’ for the ‘kindly stede’. Hence in The King’s Quair (st. 173)
O wery gost ay flickering to and fro
That never art in quiet nor in rest
Til thou com to that place that thou cam fro
Which is thy first and very proper nest.4
The ultimately sympathetic and antipathetic properties in matter are the Four Contraries. Chaucer in one place enumerates six: ‘hoot, cold, hevy, light, moist, and dreye’ (Parlement, 379). But the usual list gives four: ‘hot, cold, moist and dry’, as in Paradise Lost, II, 898. We meet them in Milton’s Chaos thus raw because Chaos is not the universe but only its raw material. In the Mundus which God built out of that raw material we find them only in combination. They combine to form the four elements. The union of hot and dry becomes fire; that of hot and moist, air; of cold and moist, water; of cold and dry, earth. (In the human body they combine with a different result, as we shall see later.)5 There is also a Fifth Element or Quintessence, the aether; but that is found only above the Moon and we mortals have no experience of it.
In the sublunary world—Nature in the strict sense—the four elements have all sorted themselves out into their ‘kindly stedes’. Earth, the heaviest, has gathered itself together at the centre. On it lies the lighter water; above that, the still lighter air. Fire, the lightest of all, whenever it was free, has flown up to the circumference of Nature and forms a sphere just below the orbit of the Moon. Hence Spenser’s Titaness in her ascent passes first ‘the region of the ayre’, then ‘the fire’, before reaching ‘the circle of the Moone’ (F.Q. VII, vi, 7, 8), and in Donne the soul of Elizabeth Drury is travelling from air to Moon so quickly that she does not know whether she went through the sphere of fire or not (Second Anniversary, 191–4). When Don Quixote and Sancho believed they had reached this stage in their imaginary ascent, the knight was very afraid they would be burnt (II, xli). The reason why flames always move upward is that the fire in them is seeking its ‘kindly stede’. But flames are impure fire, and it is only their impurity that makes them visible. The ‘elemental fire’ which forms a sphere just below the Moon is pure, unadulterated fire; hence invisible and completely transparent. It was this ‘element of fire’ that was ‘quite put out’ by ‘new Philosophy’. That was part of Donne’s reason for making Elizabeth Drury pass too quickly to solve the vexed question.
The architecture of the Ptolemaic universe is now so generally known that I will deal with it as briefly as possible. The central (and spherical) Earth is surrounded by a series of hollow and transparent globes, one above the other, and each of course larger than the one below. These are the ‘spheres’, ‘heavens’, or (sometimes) ‘elements’. Fixed in each of the first seven spheres is one luminous body. Starting from Earth, the order is the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn; the ‘seven planets’. Beyond the sphere of Saturn is the Stellatum, to which belong all those stars that we still call ‘fixed’ because their positions relative to one another are, unlike those of the planets, invariable. Beyond the Stellatum there is a sphere called the First Movable or Primum Mobile. This, since it carries no luminous body, gives no evidence of itself to our senses; its existence was inferred to account for the motions of all the others.
And beyond the Primum Mobile what? The answer to this unavoidable question had been given, in its first form, by Aristotle. ‘Outside the heaven there is neither place nor void nor time. Hence whatever is there is of such a kind as not to occupy space, nor does time affect it.’6 The timidity, the hushed voice, is characteristic of the best Paganism. Adopted into Christianity, the doctrine speaks loud and jubilant. What is in one sense ‘outside the heaven’ is now, in another sense, ‘the very Heaven’, caelum ipsum, and full of God, as Bernardus says.7 So when Dante passes that last frontier he is told, ‘We have got outside the largest corporeal thing (del maggior corpo) into that Heaven which is pure light, intellectual light, full of love’ (Paradiso, XXX, 38). In other words, as we shall see more clearly later on, at this frontier the whole spatial way of thinking breaks down. There can be, in the ordinary spatial sense, no ‘end’ to a three-dimensional space. The end of space is the end of spatiality. The light beyond the material universe is intellectual light.
The dimensions of the medieval universe are not, even now, so generally realised as its structure; within my own lifetime a distinguished scientist has helped to disseminate error.8 The reader of this book will already know that Earth was, by cosmic standards, a point—it had no appreciable magnitude. The stars, as the Somnium Scipionis had taught, were larger than it. Isidore in the sixth century knows that the Sun is larger, and the Moon smaller than the Earth (Etymologies, III, xlvii–xlviii), Maimonides in the twelfth maintains that every star is ninety times as big, Roger Bacon in the thirteenth simply that the least star is ‘bigger’ than she.9 As to estimates of distance, we are fortunate in having the testimony of a thoroughly popular work, the South English Legendary: better evidence than any learned production could be for the Model as it existed in the imagination of ordinary people. We are there told that if a man could travel upwards at the rate of ‘forty mile and yet som del mo’ a day, he still would not have reached the Stellatum (‘the highest heven that ye alday seeth’) in 8000 years.10
These facts are in themselves curiosities of mediocre interest. They become valuable only in so far as they enable us to enter more fully into the consciousness of our ancestors by realising how such a universe must have affected those who believed in it. The recipe for such realisation is not the study of books. You must go out on a starry night and walk about for half an hour trying to see the sky in terms of the old cosmology. Remember that you now have an absolute Up and Down. The Earth is really the centre, really the lowest place; movement to it from whatever direction is downward movement. As a modern, you located the stars at a great distance. For distance you must now substitute that very special, and far less abstract, sort of distance which we call height; height, which speaks immediately to our muscles and nerves. The Medieval Model is vertiginous. And the fact that the height of the stars in the medieval astronomy is very small compared with their distance in the modern, will turn out not to have the kind of importance you anticipated. For thought and imagination, ten million miles and a thousand million are much the same. Both can be conceived (that is, we can do sums with both) and neither can be imagined; and the more imagination we have the better we shall know this. The really important difference is that the medieval universe, while unimaginably large, was also unambiguously finite. And one unexpected result of this is to make the smallness of Earth more vividly felt. In our universe she is small, no doubt; but so are the galaxies, so is everything—and so what? But in theirs there was an absolute standard of comparison. The furthest sphere, Dante’s maggior corpo is, quite simply and finally, the largest object in existence. The word ‘small’ as applied to Earth thus takes on a far more absolute significance. Again, because the medieval universe is finite, it has a shape, the perfect spherical shape, containing within itself an ordered variety. Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest—trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The ‘space’ of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.
This explains why all sense of the pathless, the baffling, and the utterly alien—all agoraphobia—is so markedly abse
nt from medieval poetry when it leads us, as so often, into the sky. Dante, whose theme might have been expected to invite it, never strikes that note. The meanest modern writer of science-fiction can, in that department, do more for you than he. Pascal’s terror at le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis never entered his mind. He is like a man being conducted through an immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea. The modern feeling, I suspect, first appears in Bruno. With Milton it enters English poetry, when he sees the Moon ‘riding’
Like one that had bin led astray
Through the Heav’ns wide pathless way.
Later, in Paradise Lost, he invented a most ingenious device for retaining the old glories of the builded and finite universe yet also expressing the new consciousness of space. He enclosed his cosmos in a spherical envelope within which all could be light and order, and hung it from the floor of Heaven. Outside that he had Chaos, the ‘infinite Abyss’ (II, 405), the ‘unessential Night’ (438), where ‘length, breadth and highth And time and place are lost’ (891–2). He is perhaps the first writer to use the noun space in its fully modern sense—‘space may produce new worlds’ (I, 650).
It must, however, be admitted that while the moral and emotional consequences of the cosmic dimensions were emphasised, the visual consequences were sometimes ignored. Dante in the Paradiso (XXVII, 81–3) looks down from the sphere of the Fixed Stars and sees the northern hemisphere extended from Cadiz to Asia. But according to the Model the whole Earth could hardly be visible from that altitude, and to talk of seeing any markings on its surface is ridiculous. Chaucer in the Hous of Fame is lower by unimaginable distances than Dante, for he is still below the Moon in the air. But even so, it is extremely unlikely that he could have made out ships and even, though unethes (with difficulty), ‘bestes’ (II, 846–903).