Imagine this man, who could possess any woman, buy any honor, own any thing, desiring above all to live as much as possible like a private person. Surely that is the proof of virtue. If not, then what does virtue mean?
chapter four
The Middle Age
When did the Middle Age begin? When did it end? These are interesting questions and, as Sir Thomas Browne, that great old seventeenth-century antiquarian said, “not beyond conjecture.”
A little numerology may help us. For example, Plato’s Academy was founded in the year 387 BCE. It was closed by the Emperor Justinian in 529. Hence it endured for 916 years, longer perhaps than any other school, college, or university in the history of the world. The year 529 was notable for another event: the promulgation of the “Rule” of Saint Benedict, which inaugurated the epoch of the monasteries, which may be said to have ended around 1450, give or take a generation. From 529 to 1450 is 921 years.
The convenient date of 1450 corresponds to the passage of the Renaissance, which began a hundred years before in Italy, to France and thence to England, Spain, and finally Germany, where its arrival was delayed by the devastation of the Thirty Years War.
When did it begin in Italy? Dante died in 1327; in many respects he was the last great truly medieval man. Bits and pieces of medievalism endured for a century or two beyond his death, but they were only fragments that the spirit of the Renaissance succeeded in wiping out as time passed. By 1550 they were almost all gone.
Petrarch and Boccaccio were the first to undertake this great change, which they believed had to happen. Neither was interested in the great cultural tradition they were seeking to displace. Oh, they admired Dante of course, and they remembered fondly some of the works of the troubadours, which they considered charming but primitive. But they saw a new world (actually an old one, because the Renaissance really was the rebirth of an old world that had passed away a millennium before).
The nine hundred years, more or less, that can be called the Middle Age is sometimes divided into two parts: the first half, which was considered a Dark Age, and the second half, which seemed to be full of light, but a strange light that was different from anything that existed before or since. In what follows I have allowed four figures to stand in some way for that darkness, which of course was mainly brought about by the fall of the Roman Empire, which didn’t really fall but only moved from Europe to Asia, from Rome to Ravenna to Constantinople. These four figures were Ptolemy, who lived in the second century; Boethius, who lived at the end of the fifth; Saint Augustine, who lived mostly in the fourth; and finally the author, whoever he was, of The Song of Roland, who wrote that great poem some time before the year 1000.
The second half is on the whole more interesting because it includes Aquinas, Dante, and Chaucer. But there were other, lesser lights, several of them anonymous because only at the end of the medieval age did it become customary for poets, especially, to sign their works. This anonymity also applied to most of the architects who built the great cathedrals of France during the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Almost all of these astounding buildings were dedicated to the Virgin Mary; indeed, the Mother of God was the inspiration for most major works of art of all kinds in those waning years of the Middle Age. The two centuries were hers and hers almost alone. When you read the little story, “The Tumbler of Our Lady,” you will see why—or if you read the Divine Comedy or visit Chartres. It was a wonderful and beautiful time.
PTOLEMY
fl.2nd century
The Almagest
“Almagest” means “the greatest” in Arabic. When Ptolemy’s work on astronomy (written by Claudius Ptolemaeus in the second century) came to be used by the Arabs of the early Middle Ages as a textbook of the subject they honored it with that name, and the Almagest it is to this day.
Its greatness can be attributed to the fact that it was the most complete and satisfying of all the ancient astronomical texts. Complete because it dealt with everything that such a book should deal with: the Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the planets, and all the fixed stars. It described their motions and showed how to predict astronomical events like eclipses of the Sun and Moon.
It was satisfying because it explained every astronomical phenomenon according to a unified theory. “Phenomenon” comes from the Greek word for “appearance.” All that any scientist has to go on are phenomena, or appearances. His theory of why the appearances are the way they are must adequately “save” the appearances, as the Greeks said. Ptolemy’s theory saved all the astronomical appearances that were evident to the men of his day, and of a good many days after him—his theory prevailed for more than a thousand years.
Ptolemy’s theory was simple and, therefore, beautiful. In the sublunary world—the world beneath the Moon, the one in which we, who inhabit the Earth around which the Moon revolves, find our home—motions are complex and difficult to measure and understand. Above the Moon, Ptolemy believed, all motion is regular, uniform, and circular, as Aristotle had said. It was a fine idea.
The hypothesis of regular circular motion, whereby all celestial bodies revolve around one central point, which is the center of the Earth, does not actually save the appearances. The Moon does not seem to simply orbit the Earth, nor do the planets. But the hypothesis does not have to be abandoned. It will still save the appearances if we make some small adjustments. These involve allowing the Moon and the planets to revolve around points that in turn revolve around the Earth. All celestial motion is still uniform and circular, and that is the main thing. All is right with the world.
Why these adjustments have to be made, and indeed why the Earth must be supposed to be the unmoving central point of the cosmos, and why (for example) the great sphere that surrounds us and on the inside of which the stars appear to be placed (and which was therefore referred to as the Sphere of the Fixed Stars) must also be supposed to revolve around it once every day, is all explained in Ptolemy’s book. It is not only explained, it is also proved mathematically. The whole system is still satisfying in its way.
The Greeks invented science; that is, they were the first people to believe what the majority of humankind now believes, that the universe is intelligible and that we can understand how it works. When men like Pythagoras and Archimedes and Ptolemy first said this was so, the vast majority of mankind still thought the world was essentially unintelligible, at least to them, and therefore unpredictable. We live more comfortably today because we have come to recognize that those old Greeks were right. And among them Ptolemy was far from being the least right, even though in certain respects he was absolutely wrong. The Moon revolves around the Earth, all right, but the Sun does not, and neither do the fixed stars, which are not fixed after all but instead are speeding at enormous velocities away from us. The apparent motions of all these objects are better explained, because more simply explained, by supposing that the Earth rotates, not the cosmos around it. But when I say that, it is obvious that I am doing the same thing Ptolemy did—saving the appearances. That is still and forever will be the major task of science.