The Friar and the Cipher Read online

  This was not a straightforward operation. It was laborious and involved a daunting polyglot of languages and dialects. While many of the Greek texts had been translated into Arabic, some were still in vernacular languages, some in Greek, and others in Hebrew. Even those already in Arabic presented a challenge for a Europe that had largely shunned all languages but its own.

  Into this breach stepped the Jews, the most advanced linguists of the age. In one of history's most obvious examples of the advantages of tolerance over persecution, like “fertilizing subterranean streams,” as the historian Will Durant put it, Jews shuttled between diverse societies, making available the information that would create a vibrant Christian scientific culture. Word of the effort got out, and European scholars flocked to Toledo, eager to get a first look at the material and add their expertise. As each new manuscript gained a Latin translation, scribes were employed to make copies and send them north.

  So enormous was the volume and so disparate the subject matter that for the first time in Christian history, scholars were forced to specialize in one form of learning or another. There was a lot of overlap—geometry, for example, had a direct bearing on optics, which in turn had a direct bearing on astronomy. Specialists in one field had need of specialists in others. It was natural that scholars of different subjects, or even within the same subject, would begin to gravitate toward one another. By degrees a handful of cities attracted attention as centers of learning, which in turn drew more scholars and more manuscripts, and in each the embryo of a university was formed.

  As a result of the new influx of information, for the first time in almost a millennium, scientific thought seemed poised to overpower the forces of ignorance and superstition that had dominated Europe through the Dark Ages. But would the Church allow scientific or intellectual inquiry to exist outside a strict, literal, and conservative interpretation of scripture?

  Each side of this issue claimed to represent the true spirit of Christianity, and each used as its most pervasive and powerful weapon the words of a man, effectively an atheist, who had died more than three hundred years before Christ was born.

  ARISTOTLE WAS THE LAST OF A STRING of three brilliant philosophers whose lives spanned what was certainly the most important hundred years in the history of human thought. Although the range of subjects that Aristotle studied and in which he came to be considered the authority was astounding—everything from botany to metaphysics, zoology to astronomy, poetry to politics to how to have better sex—his contribution was not to be found in any particular discovery. In fact, he often turned out to be wrong about specifics.

  What Aristotle did achieve was the creation of logic itself, a method of ordered thought and analysis, of classifications and subclassifications, that remains the basis of most natural and social science to this day. Logic's essential building block, the syllogism (all Aristotelian conclusions are correct; that logic is a route to knowledge is an Aristotelian conclusion; therefore logic is a route to knowledge), is Aristotle's invention.

  Aristotle's method of viewing the physical and metaphysical has survived intellectual challenge, mysticism, religious conflict, ludicrous parsing, and misapplication. His influence is still felt today by every student, businessperson, and politician—anyone who has ever written a book report or done an outline in bullet points or enjoyed Sherlock Holmes is walking in Aristotle's shadow. His contribution has become so basic, so fundamental to every aspect of scientific endeavor, that many of those reading him today might say, “So what? Everybody knows that.”

  The very quintessence of the Greek philosopher, Aristotle was not considered a true Greek at all, but rather a kind of provincial, having been born in Stagira in Greek Macedonia in 384 BC. His father, Nichomachus, was court physician to the king of Macedonia and had used his position to amass an impressive real estate portfolio. When Nichomachus died, Aristotle went off to live with his cousin and began to spend his sizable inheritance on decidedly unphilosophical pursuits. At seventeen, already bored with mindless pleasure-seeking, Aristotle journeyed to Athens—that was really Greece—and enrolled in Plato's Academy.

  Plato, the scion of one of Athens's most distinguished political families, had turned to philosophy after unsuccessful flings at poetry and qualifying for the Olympics. (His real name was Aristocles, but he had acquired the moniker “Plato,” which means “broad,” as a result of his prowess as a wrestler.) While looking for something else to do with his life, he happened to meet the great Socrates.

  (In fact, we can only assume that Socrates was great, since he confined himself to the spoken word and never wrote anything down. Most of what we know of his philosophy is from Plato's dialogues in which the character Socrates has any number of extremely profound things to say. The use of dialogue is in itself Socratic—Socrates taught by a question-and-answer method called the dialectic, in which an argument was proposed, then either supported or destroyed during a process of give-and-take.)

  Plato studied with Socrates for the next nine years. After Socrates was forced to commit suicide by the supposedly democratic rulers of Athens, Plato wandered around a bit, was sold into slavery then ransomed by friends, and finally set up a school in the Grove of Academe, just outside Athens. Over the next forty years, he proceeded to produce some of the most provocative, profound, and beautifully written philosophy that the world has ever seen.

  The core of Plato's philosophy revolved around a duality pitting necessarily flawed sensory perceptions against an unknowable reality that was composed of Ideals or Forms. A person looking at a green chair, for example, perceives only an imperfect conception of the idea of a chair and an equally imperfect conception of the idea of greenness. True green and true chairness are beyond his or her capacity to understand. Wisdom is defined merely as progress on this road to the Ideal, as well as the awareness that the Ideal exists in the first place. Plato had no real place for an interactive deity in his construct—God, as He would later be conceived of by Christians, would simply have been the sum of the Forms.

  One surprising aspect of Plato's otherwise subjective construct was his reliance on mathematics, which in his day meant geometry. Over the gate of his school was written, “No one ignorant of geometry shall enter.” To Plato, every Ideal, and thus all that made up the world, had a mathematical base and was held together by geometric elegance.

  There were times when Plato's Ideals—geometrically elegant or no—led him down some slippery paths. The work for which he is best known, the Republic, culminates in his call for rule by a philosopher-king. In the Republic, personal possessions are eliminated, there is no need for marriage among the elite, and children are taken from their parents at birth to be parented, in effect, by the state. Until age twenty, they would be educated in gymnastics and martial music. Those who showed promise would then be educated in astronomy and mathematics. (Those who did not were sent off to be menials.) After ten years, those who could not handle the schoolwork were sent to the military, and the survivors studied philosophy. At age thirty-five, the budding philosophers studied the practical aspects of government for the next fifteen years. Finally, when the generation reached age fifty the pyramid would be complete when the best of the group was chosen and the philosopher-king took his station to rule firmly but fairly, with wisdom, empathy, and justice.

  The Republic, like most of Plato's work, is a dialogue starring Socrates, who here set down his vision of a just society, although whether or not Socrates ever advocated this odd mixture of fascism and communism is open to some question. That in practice this sort of autocracy was not the least bit Ideal but almost always degenerated to some form of ruthless dictatorship was not lost on future generations of scholars.

  When Aristotle arrived, the Academy, as the school was called, was at the pinnacle of Greek intellectual life. It did not take long for Plato (and everyone else) to realize that his new enrollee was, to say the least, unusual. Aristotle quickly ceased being a student and became what amounted to a facul
ty member. It also did not take long before Aristotle found some significant areas of disagreement with his boss. Principally, he thought the notion of Forms as the highest plane of knowledge was hooey. He did not think much of the philosopher-king idea either.

  From there, in reasonably short order, Aristotle and Plato found that they disagreed on almost everything. Plato was fond of higher, ethereal, unknowable truths, and Aristotle thought knowledge began with and flowed from that which could be observed. Plato, the former wrestler, was a manly man who dressed simply. He probably growled. Aristotle, on the other hand, was skinny, dressed in the most fashionable togas, wore lots of rings, and spoke with a lisp. Plato is known to have referred to him as “a mind on legs,” and scrawny legs at that. Aristotle, who had the money to do so, had also amassed a vast private library far grander than that of Plato, a disparity that was unlikely to draw the men closer. Reports that the two grew to loathe each other are probably overstated, but the notion of mere good-spirited intellectual rivalry is almost certainly too mild.

  One thing that each of these philosophers never did, however, was underestimate the ability of the other and, when Plato died in 347 BC, empiricism or no, Aristotle assumed that the leadership of the Academy would fall to him. When he found out that Plato had instead granted the title to his own cousin, the foul-tempered Speusippus, whom Aristotle considered a dolt, Aristotle packed up and left. (Speusippus eventually justified Aristotle's faith in him by being forced to commit suicide after he was humiliated in a debate by Diogenes the Cynic.)

  Aristotle headed back across the Aegean to where he had grown up and went to work for a minor king, the floridly named Hermias the Eunuch. Hermias, whose disability did little to improve his humor, was an authoritarian tyrant, but he also harbored ambitions to bring the flower of Greek culture to the déclassé provinces. He welcomed Aristotle, even encouraged him to marry his either niece, daughter, or former concubine, Pythias, who was twenty-one years younger than the great philosopher.

  Aristotle moved around a bit after his marriage. Then Phillip of Macedonia, whose father had been treated by Aristotle's father, asked him to become tutor to his son, the thirteen-year-old Alexander, later to be known as “The Great.” It must have been frustrating for one of the greatest minds in history to attempt to instruct a young, single-minded, bloodthirsty maniac in the niceties of higher thought. After four years, Aristotle gave up, returned to Athens, and, after getting passed over once again for the top post at the Academy, started his own school near the Temple of Apollo Lyceus (Apollo as a wolf), which he called the Lyceum (thus providing a convenient name for a theater in virtually every major city in the English-speaking world).

  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 Al
geria, 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.