Doctor Mirabilis (16 page)

They were not, it was true, particularly hard questions, and Roger was slow to realize why Albert was requiring
that they be answered under so much pressure. When in the middle of his argument on medium and motion the self suddenly presented
him with the key to the riddle, he was furious all over again. Every hailstone in this storm of questions was derived directly
from the thousand-and-one objections to Aristotle’s teachings embodied in the writings of William of Auvergne, Bishop of,
Paris, upon whose review of the written record of this examination Roger’s appointment would finally depend. Albert was rushing
him in hope of provoking a slip or a potential heresy, since he could hardly have supposed that Roger would have come to the
examination unaware of the Bishop’s mountain of quibbles. Evidently the book before Albert was a compendium, including at
the very least the
De universo,
the
De legibus
and the
De anima.

The hall – now so packed that you could not have thrown a-melon without striking a student or a master – was utterly silent,
and the massed faces turned from one man to the other as though following a tossed ball. Probably not one man in ten was able
to follow the argument, since it was being conducted in a subject that had not been taught at the university since before
Roger’s birth; but plainly the crowd had caught its import long before Roger had. As he reached his peroration, Roger faltered,
trying to recall what he had said in his helplessly quick answers which might make grisly interesting reading for Bishop William,
but it was all gone clean out of his head; it was all he could do to conclude the period he had going.

’Sit thema,’
Albert said instantly, and in the same grindingly monotonous voice: ‘Whether the world existed from all eternity, as Aristotle
says; or whether it was created by God.’

As Roger opened his mouth to answer, there was a roar from the hall; and that noise of amazement and delight saved him. Albert
had almost achieved his effect: lulled by the long series of petty points as well known to him as breathing, Roger had been
about to render a quick opinion on the most terrifying problem in the whole of Aristotle. But
the mob had sensed the trap, and its baying cry of appreciation had sprung it prematurely.

Now the ordeal was at last begun again.

‘The world,’ he said slowly, ‘was created by God, nor does the letter of Aristotle’s argument deny this; it is Averroes who
imposes this interpretation upon the text.
Non lumen recipitur, si factus est, in vacuum nec in plenum sed in nihil, et ideo mundus non est eternus secundum Aristotelem
et veritatem.’

‘If God created the world, He had a sufficient reason, otherwise this detracts from His omnipotence.’

‘This I concede, Magister Albert.’

‘Therefore did not this reason exist before the world existed? Did it not in fact exist
ab eterno?’

‘I believe it did, and that this is the sense in which Aristotle must be read.’

‘Then,’ Albert said, ‘was not the Creation in fact
per accidens?’

‘No; because to deny God the power to create the world at some single time also detracts from His omnipotence.’

‘Oho,’ said somebody in the front rows. He was hissed at.

‘Yet if sufficient reason for the world existed
ab eterno,
the Creation implies a failure on God’s part to observe His own holy law.’

‘Not so,’ Roger said. ‘That law applies only in nature;
non valet in voluntaries, nec est querenda cause sue voluntatis.’

Albert shuttered his eyes against a gentle murmur of laughter from the part of the hall where the faculty of theology had
gathered. It could not have been pleasant for him to be reminded before an audience that even in the course of a formal heresy-hunt
he must not question the causes of God’s will.

‘The moment of Creation,’ he said ponderously, ‘divided existence from nothingness, the one after the other, implying the
existence of time
ab eterno.
Motion is the measure of time; therefore motion existed
ab eterno;
therefore the thing moved; therefore the world.’

This fiendish argument left Roger floundering; though he
thought at once of the ‘eternal now’ of Paramedes, he could hardly be sure that it was relevant,
let
alone admissible. The hall held its breath in sympathy.

‘Motion and nature are inseparable,’ he said at last. ‘Thus what came into being at the Creation were those things, which
were to be measured, not measure itself. Time is of God, and eternal, but motion is of the world, and temporal.’

‘Then it follows that time will last to eternity, beyond the world and motion. If for this there is sufficient cause, why
not also for the world?’

‘Sufficient cause exists, but not sufficient virtue,’ Roger said. ‘Infinite virtue exists in the First Cause, which if He
filled the world with virtue, could make it last forever; but He chooses to give the world finite virtue only, so that it
may last a long time, but not forever, as He will last. Equally, He could end the world now, but has promised us He will not,
till the number of the elect be made up.’

‘It is not reasonable to suppose that Aristotle knew the number of the elect,’ Albert said harshly.

‘This I concede. Nevertheless he was divinely inspired and does not deny the faith. He says that without
time
there is no motion, implying that motion did not begin in time, which we have shown to be true; and in the
Metaphysics
he says that there are always first things, otherwise there would be no later things; hence even in Aristotle the world has
a beginning, as all else.’

‘He says it will have no end; no time nor motion.’

‘Which any philosopher may say, Magister Albert; this lies not in the realm of the provable, since it lies in the future which
is not knowable by argument; nor does a beginning assume an end. In the future all that is knowable is by revelation.’

‘I concede this,’ Albert said with a sour grin.

‘Then it may be shown that this revelation was vouchsafed,’ Roger said evenly, ‘and that Aristotle knew that motion would
end, though time might not. He has it in the
Ethics that
if man is to have happiness, it can only be after death. How can this be? Only after the resurrection of the
body; and this will never happen until the number of the elect is filled, in Aristotle exactly as it is in
Revelation vii.’

People were standing up now all over the hall, and there was a growing shuffle and drumming of feet. The students were beginning
to demand that Albert concede; already the examination had set records for severity and for patience, and the long low sunbeams
slanting over the benches from the mullioned windows were an unnecessary reminder that even the second meal of the day would
be missed should Albert persist still longer. The German set his lips and glowered at his book.

‘If the world is not
ab eterno—’
he said, and the hall shook with howls of protest. He straightened his back and stared over all their heads, waiting. It
took a long time.

‘If the world, nor motion, nor even time,’ he said, and though his face would never show itself shaken, the zigzag grammar
betrayed him into Roger’s hand as surely as a written surrender, ‘and the Word of God tells us that these three things are
true, is it nevertheless
possible
that the world was and is eternal?’

‘No, it is not,’ Roger said. ‘Since everything that is comes from something, all causes must regress indefinitely to that
one thing which comes from nothing and was caused by nothing. That, being prime and perfect, can be God and none other; wherein
lies the eternity of which Aristotle speaks, and not elsewhere.’

The hall hung on the breathless verge of riot. Albert lowered his head, but he was still looking at Roger. In that look Roger
knew that they were to be enemies forever, and was content.

‘Quod concedendum est,’
Albert said, and closed his book.

To Adam Marsh the abrupt disappearance from Oxford of Roger Bacon, that winter of 1237, without word or screed, was puzzling;
surely the boy could not have imagined that Adam would hold against him a quarrel born from the twin agents of miasma and
wine? Yet was it so Roger-like as to raise no eyebrow even among the boy’s few acquaintances who soon forgot; but it remained
on Adam’s mind until word came that Roger was indeed in Paris. Then Adam’s mind was freed for higher matters.

The world was moving, and be Adam never so agile, its heavy footfalls were thudding in his spoor. Frederick II had taken an
Empress less than seven weeks after Grosseteste’s consecration as Bishop of Lincoln. This Empress Isabel had seemed, at first,
of little moment to him, especially compared to the letters that Pope Gregory had sent throughout Christendom on September
fourth preaching a new crusade; but both meant heavier papal levies upon England, a matter about which Grosseteste was already
incensed and which hence could not but be of moment to Adam whether he willed it or no. In his natural mind, nothing would
have moved him so much that same year as the death of Michael Scot: for of kings and princes there were, the groaning world
well knew, far too many, but of great scholars never more than a famine; but now it was these very kings and princes who were
to be Adam’s familiars, and this, mathinketh it hem with whatever saving irony he might, by his own devious intercession –
there being no pebble too small to lame the cloven hoof of the world, and set it to limping ponderously at one’s back thenceforward.

Nevertheless it had somewhile seemed to him that his cross might be lifted from him – grief though that lightening might be
– and thus fit him to bear more gladly such lesser
burdens as kings and princes and offices. And in truth the world seemed docile enough to his management at first. In the stifling,
unpromising calm of 1236 King Henry had allowed Simon de Montfort sufficiently to shake off the royal displeasure to attend,
as lord high steward, his marriage to another Eleanor, daughter of Ramon Berenger, count of Provence; and therefore to attend
with gradually increasing frequency such meetings of the royal council as Henry could be persuaded to call. As spiritual adviser
to the new queen, as well as to de Montfort, and as lawyer and theologian to Boniface of Savoy, the queen’s uncle, Adam’s
excuses for avoiding the confessional of Eleanor of Pembroke became more and more many-coloured and plausible (though not
without night-thoughts of the state of sin in which he stood even now, through having heard her past confessions with emotions
he himself dared to confess to no one, at least not yet). Furthermore, he was all the better placed to advance the one cause
which would divide him from Eleanor as cleanly and finally as the knife-stroke which split Hermaphrodite and Salmacis into
the two sexes in the Greek story: the marriage of Eleanor to Simon.

Confession, he thought hurriedly – yet again and again –could follow. As deliberately he shied away from imagining what Grosseteste
would say when he heard it. Grosseteste had himself urged Adam not to shun offices: whence all else.

The marriage first, confession after, and abide the outcome. It was, he well knew, a poor formula for salvation; but damnation
spread its cold green talons wherever else he might turn.

It was far from easy to predict with any confidence what the king would make of such a marriage, but Adam hazarded that he
would endorse it. It had been Henry who had effectively delivered Leicester into Simon’s hands, by forcing Amaury de Montfort
either to concede to his brother or become an Englishman; the loss of Normandy had taught Henry, it seemed, the dangers of
a divided allegiance. Was not the next step obviously that of allying Leicester with the
Crown, as the other earldoms had already fallen? So Adam conceived it.

And so indeed it fell out, with in fact more royal favour than Adam had dared to pray for, with a ceremonial marriage at Westminster
in 1238 on the day after Epiphany; the king himself gave his sister away. The ceremony was secret, on Henry’s insistence;
and as secretly Adam Marsh crept away to savour in his wound the salt of his self-congratulation, and repair if he could his
soul for confession.

Into which vigil without any pause came the grinning mask of his folly, to remind him that even now, like that hero of Horace,
he trod on smothered fires, scarce extinct –and that like any silly scholar he had trusted the ambition of a king to be somewhat
less fond than the follies of churchmen and lovers.

For of course the secret could not be kept: Henry’s very reasons for holding the wedding privately were warrants of publication
and torches to the faggots. Henry could hardly have cared that the marriage of his sister to a foreigner would be gravel in
the craw of the common mob, ne more did this occur to Adam, so new was he to these high concerns, until far too late; but
the outcry of the barons, Adam knew equally belatedly, could have been no surprise to Henry. After all, the queen was still
barren; were that curse to persist Eleanor of Pembroke’s child might one day inherit the throne, and this a child by a man
still no more than an alien – no matter when, if ever, Henry chose to confer Leicester formally upon Simon.

The uproar was terrifying even to Adam, and he could imagine with anguish what ill it was working in his spiritual charge,
who had trusted him utterly in the engineering of this very disaster. And between the mob and the barons the tinder of another
rebellion seemed to await no more than the first spark.

‘Which I would abide,’ Simon told him quietly, lid I think aught to be gained. But the barons are children to be rattling
their swords against Henry over such a trifle, and did I let it proceed so far, I’d find myself on the wrong side
to the offending of mine entire good sense. I’ll not divide England for a marriage, even to Eleanor.’

To this Adam for a while had no reply; but remained at gaze through a long low window, wherein was framed beyond a deep, gloomy
sea of still forest, part of a low but rugged range: the Charnwood Hills, hazy in a pelting cold rain I was here in the hunting
lodge of Simon Iv. de Montfort, the dead earl Simon’s father, some nine miles from Leicester near Hugglescote, that Simon
had been accustomed these six years past to entertain Adam, and Adam’s increasingly weed-choked rivulet of advice; but lately
the Franciscan had become more and more a stranger in the lodge.