As the weeks of Roman summer passed into harvest time, Tommaso ranged to and fro among the philosophical works surrounding the late fifteenth century, like a peasant scything the wheat on either side of a stone in his field. Ficino had read deeply, in the leisure of his Florentine Academy and noble patron, and bits of his astrological theories could be gleaned in many books, even (and especially) in the work of the ancients, Proclus and Iamblichus, whose experiments in musical theurgy seemed to Campanella more valuable than all the later ramblings about Hermetic talismans and the necessity of concealing such truths from the vulgus. Still, these talismans should not be dismissed, for a man who sets seven ill-designed fish traps and one good one will still have his dinner. And Ficino escaped condemnation; it was best, thought Tommaso, to dress his own preparations in as much Ficinian garnish as he could.
As he walked back to the Palace in the late afternoon light, Tommaso heard a sniveling sound coming from within a narrow alley.
Peering inside, he saw a small boy, his face smeared with snot and tears, struggling to button his trousers.
“What is troubling you, my son? Pants easier opened than closed?” Tommaso was amused.
The boy looked up, lower lip trembling. He took a few steps backward, as though embarrassed to be seen by the priest, then turned to run. Glancing back over his shoulder, however, he stumbled over his drooping cuffs, and the ill-cut trousers slid down from his little rump. Alarmed and vulnerable, the boy bent to pull them up, but with a foot planted on his cuff, his efforts only threw him off balance. His expression miserable, he looked toward Tommaso in bewildered entreaty.
Tommaso’s face darkened. He raised his stick and pointed it like a sword. “Tell your masters they are vile,” he thundered. He turned on his heel and strode away, swinging the stick to scatter a pile of rubbish with a crash.
He was shaking with rage by the time he reached the Palace. The monk who sat within the door looked up in surprise—hadn’t expected to see him return?—as Tommaso swept past, and a young acolyte leapt out of his way. Tommaso considered bursting in upon Father Niccolo, but knew that the smooth functionary would disclaim any knowledge of the trap. Instead he climbed the stairs—one hand gripping the polished banister as his stick rapped angrily on the marble steps—and reached the library trembling with exhaustion.
Sitting in the peacefulness of its confines, Tommaso at length collected himself, and set about taking stock of his situation. So: He has enemies, not simply the passive grudging of those who resent his freedom. They credit old calumnies, so are fools. They do not scruple to debauch a child.
Resolve slowly hardened, like mortar. They dare not strike at the Pope, so aim blows where they imagine weakness. Guessing wrong, they lose the advantage of surprise, which they will not recover. Tomasso, a defended fastness, shall not fall.
With an effort of will he imposed tranquility upon his heart, like poured oil stilling churned water. A book lay at his side, and he took it up. The library was an arsenal, and Tommaso bent to the task of arming himself.
The university library was a sober, vaulted structure, so severe in its gothic rectitude that Amy could feel a silent admonition that those who cross its threshold banish all worldly thoughts and restrict themselves to pursuits as austere and edifying as its upright form. Kissing Paul goodbye in its high-ceilinged vestibule, Amy imagined the touch of lips as her last human contact for the rest of a penitential day, amour yielding the field to abstraction. As Paul headed for the reading room with its plush armchairs, Amy consulted the card catalogue, then took an elevator upward into the stacks.
She realized that there was no point in delving further into the Renaissance notions of the spiritus until she understood what the Neopla-tonists—not the Renaissance Neoplatonists: the original pagan ones— meant by the concept of the pneuma. Collecting studies of Chrysippus, Plotinus, Porphyre, and Galen—many, unhappily, in Latin (she grabbed a copy of Verbeke’s L’Evolution de la doctrine du Pneuma du Stoicisme a S. Augustin with relief)—Amy found a study carrel and spread her books before her, with her desktop opened at their head like an escritoire.
Working her way through chapters, she traced patiently how the concept of the pneuma, though as discrete and fixed as a continent, had drifted with the passage of centuries. First propounded as a purely medical phenomenon—Zeno spoke of it, Verbeke reports, “avec un signification essentiellement matérielle”—the pneuma evolved in time into an aspect of perception (producing the phantasms that were the only form of data perceptible to the soul), and eventually into the wholly immaterial vapor of Saint Paul. While the Stoics argued down the centuries with the Hippocratic physicians, the “ecole pneumatique” (which Verbeke also refers to engagingly as “les pneumatistes”), and others as to whether the seat of the pneuma is the heart or the brain, none of the ancient philosophers ever questioned its material nature.
A substance, she thought, like phlogiston. Most of these writers did not regard the function of the pneuma as possessing a moral dimension, although it was Epictetus (rather than a Christian) who compared it to a reflecting body of water, which must be kept pure and tranquil to hold a proper image. So the care of one’s pneuma became a matter of spiritual hygiene, for dissipation would cloud or pit its surface.
The pneumatists located the hegemonikon—the faculty that synthesized raw perceptions into phantasms and displayed them to the soul—in the heart, and believed that the pneuma circulated through the arteries. Inhaled from the ambient air, it mixed with effluvia from the blood (Like the spiritus, Amy wrote) and throughout the body. Theirs was an especially mechanistic system: the incessant motion of the pneuma produced heat, which must be carried away by exhaled breath. This brought in the lungs, although they seemed not to recognize that the heart functioned as a pump, and never quite grasped the principle of the circulation of the blood.
The Stoics, on the other hand, placed the hegemonikon in the brain, and paid little attention to the heart and lungs. Their system emphasized the fiery nature of the pneuma, which they knew was not like earthly fire, so did not produce heat that must be dissipated. They also believed the pneuma to be co-extensive with the celestial heavens, whereas for the pneumatists it was the earthly atmosphere.
So which model was right? Galen, a physician rather than philosopher and thus of a presumably empirical bent, decided to conduct experiments, which Amy found cheering. He took animals and blocked their neck arteries, on the assumption that if the hegemonikon was located in the brain, they would die. The animals suffered no evident distress (Amy frowned at this), which led the physician to conclude something about the importance of breathing through the nose: air thus inhaled goes directly to the brain.
No experimental tradition, she typed disgustedly. The philosophers simply developed systems that felt right to them, like psychotherapists.
And what of phantasms? Ficino had never mentioned them, claiming the vibratory dynamics of sound to be superior to the static nature of mere “images.” But phantasms lay at the heart of pneumatic perception: it was the purpose of the pneuma to create a phantasmic image for the soul. “The soul,” declares Aristotle, “can understand nothing without phantasms.”