Doctor Mirabilis (32 page)

‘We prohibit any new writing from being published outside the Order, unless it shall first have been examined carefully by
the Minister-General or Provincial, and the visitants in the provincial chapter.… Anyone who contravenes this shall be kept
at least three days on bread and water, and lose his writing.…

‘Let no brother write books, or cause them to be written for sale, and let the Provincial Minister not dare to have or keep
any books without the licence of the Minister-General, or let any brothers have or keep them without the permission of the
provincial ministers.…

‘We lay under a perpetual curse anyone who presumes either by word or by deed in any way to work for the division of our Order.
If anyone contravenes this prohibition,
he shall be considered as an excommunicate and schismatic and destroyer of our Order … brothers incorrigible in this shall
be imprisoned or expelled from the Order.…

‘If anyone think that the penalty for the breach of statutes of this kind is severe, let him reflect that, according to the
Apostle, all discipline in the present life is not a matter for rejoicing, but for sorrow; yet through it, it will bear for
the future the most peaceful fruit of justice for those who have endured it.’

It was an immense document, the proclamation of which consumed most of the morning, but the sense of these rubrics was all
too clear: for the defence of the orders against the seculars, and the defence of the Order against itself, the Minister-General
had instituted a censorship.

His friends dead, or beyond his reach; himself forbidden to publish; the vision a vapour. Wherein lay the usefulness of labour,
if nothing was to come of it? Wherein the beauty: where there were none to see it? Why write at all, if there were to be none
to read? He prayed for guidance; but the silence flowed on, unresponsive.

Another year. Silence, and apathy.

And then, abruptly, he was awake; it was as though he had been plunged into icy water. The convent had a visitor – not in
itself unusual, nor that Roger should know the man, albeit but slightly. His name was Raymond of Laon, but it was what he
was that mattered: he was a clerk in the suite of Guy de Foulques.

A friend alive – never mind how remote a friend – and a Cardinal! There was help here, could he but engineer it; why had he
not thought of this expedient before?

Moreover, it required scarcely any engineering, for Raymond himself asked to see Roger, and permission was granted.

‘The Cardinal charged me to make certain of your whereabouts, Master Roger,’ Raymond said nervously. Obviously he had been
warned that the case confronting him now had
been one of peculiar fractiousness, and still full of potentialities for schism.

‘Make him aware, I beg of you, Raymond. There was a time when he spoke with interest of my studies in the sciences, and asked
for writings. Tell him I would make him a book of these, were it not for the decrees of Narbonne.’

‘He has no power to exempt anyone from those,’ Raymond objected. ‘True that he’s a Cardinal, but also a secular; durst not
interfere with the rules of the Orders.’

‘Of course; but surely he might relieve me of my burdens in some way? As matters stand today, I am forbidden to keep books,
let alone write them – I have preserved all my manuscripts only by keeping them circulating among certain friends here in
Paris, and even this may be “publication” within the meaning of the sixth rubric of the Narbonne Constitutions.’

Raymond was thoughtful. ‘I will tell him what you say,’ he declared at last. ‘I know of no prohibition against it, though
belike he may. And the very worst he can say in reply, to me or thee, is, No.’

‘God bless you, Raymond. I shall pray for you all my days.’

The dirt flew under Roger’s besom that afternoon, albeit he was otherwise careful to show the brothers no elation after the
interview; neither, however, did he satisfy their curiosity – seen solely in their glances, for they would have scorned to
speak it. – as to the business of a Cardinal’s household with an inconsequential friar under corrective discipline. Nor did
he reveal the secret elsewhere as yet, so that Eugene must have been baffled all over again to receive of a sudden this from
his exiled brother:

Man, in so far as he is man, has two things, bodily strength and virtues, and in these he can be forced in many things; but
he has also strength and virtues of soul, that is, of the intellectual soul. In these he can be neither led nor forced, but
only hindered. And so, if a thousand times he is
cast into prison, never can he go against his will unless the will succumbs.

But there was much preparation to be done while Guy’s reply was awaited; and this Roger prosecuted with a cunning which surprised
even himself. It could not be concealed that he was suddenly and furiously writing again – in fact his best pupil Joannes,
a brilliant thirteen-year-old who worshipped his Master, was under orders to report such an event at once – but to the expected
prompt question Roger was able to proffer nothing more incendiary than a set of fearsomely complex tables of numbers.

‘To what purpose?’

‘These are notes toward a better calendar, Father. Doth it not seem ridiculous that with the one we have, we cannot even say
with certainty what is the veritable date of Easter? That can hardly be pleasing to Our Lord, that we must celebrate His resurrection
on the wrong day, more often than not.’

This was unexceptionable; in due course the censors, though uncertain whether to be suspicious or to rejoice in the reclamation
of an erring brother, even allowed
De termine Paschali
to be copied and published. By that time, Roger was deep into the composition of a
Computus
, which on early inspection by the brothers proved to be even more technical – so much so, as Roger had foreseen, that nobody
else in the convent but young Joannes could have even a hope of understanding it.

Thereafter, when they saw him drawing geometrical diagrams, the brothers avoided asking questions which might prove embarrassing
to themselves. Thus they also successfully avoided discovering that these were not part of the incomplete
Computus
at all, but instead were the visible signs of a process destined to reduce the very Ark of the Covenant to naught more than
the passage of sunlight through raindrops.

In all this, young Joannes was a willing conspirator. He was a black-haired, hollow-eyed youngster, painfully thin
and awkward, of no known family – a charge of the Church. He was eager and quick, despite his talent for knocking things over
when he was excited, and was filled with delight at being made privy to the secret. He was even more delighted to realize
that he and he alone, of all the learned minds in the convent, was capable of following the racing of his Master’s thought;
and in sober truth, at Roger’s hands he already knew more of the laws of optics than had the great Grosseteste himself, as
Grosseteste had known more than Alhazen.

Even Joanna, however, despite the most careful and elaborate instruction, was left gasping at the next leap, which went soaring
directly from the propagation of vision into the propagation of force:

Every efficient cause acts by its own force which it produces on the matter subject to it, as the light of the sun produces
its own action in the air, and this action is light diffused through the whole world from the solar light. This force is called
likeness, image, species and by many other names, and it is produced by substance as well as accident and by spiritual substance
as well as corporeal. Substance is more productive of it than accident, and spiritual substance than corporeal. This force
produces every action in this world, for it acts on sense, intellect and all the matter in the world for the production of
things, because one and the same thing is done by a natural agent on whatsoever it acts, because it has no freedom of choice;
and therefore it performs the same act on whatever it meets.… Forces of this kind, belonging to agents, produce every action
in this world. But there are two things now to be noted respecting these forces; one is the propagation itself of the action
and of force from the place of its production; and the other is the varied action in this world due to the production and
destruction of things. The second cannot be known without the first. Therefore it is necessary that the propagation itself
be first described.

… But when they say that force has a spiritual existence
in the medium, this use of the word ‘spiritual’ is not in accordance with its proper and primary meaning, from ‘spirit’ as
we say that God and angel and soul are spiritual things; because it is plain that the forces of corporeal things are not thus
spiritual. Therefore of necessity they will have a corporeal existence, because body and soul are opposed without an intermediate.
And if they have a corporeal existence, they also have a material one, and therefore they must obey the laws of material and
corporeal things, and therefore they must mix when they are contrary, and become one when they are of the same category of
forces. And this is again apparent, since force is the product of a corporeal thing, and not of a spiritual; therefore it
will have a corporeal existence. Likewise it is in a corporeal and material medium, and everything that is received in another
is modified by the condition of the recipient.… When, therefore, Aristotle and Averroes say that force has a spiritual existence
in the medium and in the senses, it is evident that ‘spiritual’ is not taken from ‘spirit’ nor is the word used in its proper
sense. Therefore it is used equivocally and improperly, for it is taken in the sense of ‘Imperceptible’; since everything really
spiritual … is imperceptible and does not affect the senses, we therefore convert the terms and call that which is imperceptible
spiritual. But this is homonymous and outside the true and proper meaning of a spiritual thing.… Moreover, it produces a
corporeal result, as, for example, the action of heat warms bodies and dries them out, and causes them to ‘putrefy, and the
same is true of other forces. Therefore, since this produces heat, properly speaking, and through the medium of heat produces
other results, force must be a corporeal thing, because a spiritual thing does not cause a corporeal action. And in particular
there is the additional reason that the force is of the same essence as the complete effect of the producer, and it becomes
that when the producer affects strongly the thing acted upon.

… Since, therefore, the action of a corporeal thing has a really corporeal existence in a medium, and is a real corporeal
thing, as was previously shown, it must of necessity be
dimensional, and therefore fitted to the dimensions of the medium.… If, therefore, the propagation of light is instantaneous,
and not in time, there will be an instant without time; because time does not exist without motion. But it is impossible that
there should be an instant without time, just as there cannot be a point without a line. It remains; then, that light is propagated
in time, and likewise all forces of a visible thing and of vision.…

The poor youngster was not to be censured for his incomprehension; for Roger, as he himself well knew, was reinventing physics,
an endeavour in which he had had no predecessors since Aristotle himself. The existence of this seminal document, like that
of the
Perspectiva
, was hidden with Joannes’ aid as runner by putting it into circulation in the Peregrine College, which now as before did
not care to reveal its own existence, let alone what it was reading. Peter, Joannes reported, said of it only:

‘Were this from any other hand, I would have called it gibberish.’

No matter; as an experimenter first and foremost, Peter could not be expected to have much knowledge of or patience with the
ancient problem of the multiplication of species –as Aristotle and the Arabs had called the propagation of action; and besides,
the work would in the end be only a part of that
Communia naturalium the
proposal of which the convent brothers had so scorned. Its comprehension could likewise wait; for the ignorance of the times
there were sufficient causes – not alone the coming of Antichrist foreshadowed in the strife of which Bungay wrote anxiously:

Civil war hath broken out anew, and no man may say from one day to the next how he views his expectations. Henry the King
hath repudiated the Provisions of Oxford, and the barons, led by earl Simon, have taken to the field. Of late they have made
several victories in the West and South, and have taken London with the greatest fanfare of welcome from the stinking populace.
Yet methinks our Henry is but temporarily cowed, for it is most clear that
Leicester’s support is still much divided. Give thanks to God that thou art where thou art.

– but, also, as Roger saw upon one false dawn among many, the whole failure of any scholar in history to divine how knowledge
(it mattered not what knowledge) might be made trustworthy.

Since the days of revelation, in fact, the same four corrupting errors had been made over and over again: submission to faulty
and unworthy authority; submission to what it was customary to believe; submission to the prejudices of the mob; and worst
of all, concealment of ignorance by a false show of unheld knowledge, for no better reason than pride.

‘I had better get this out of the house right away,’ Joannes said, when he had caught his breath.

‘Memorize it first, while the ink dries. If the College loses it, we will need to write it again.’

‘I don’t even want to think of it again, Master. Uhm … it lacks a title.’

‘So it does,’ Roger said. ‘Very well. Write at the top,
De signis et causis ignorantiae modernae.…
It is dry? Then, run.’

Joannes ran like a deer; but no industry of his could take that explosive doctrine away. Within a week, Roger was writing
it again: the
scientia experimentalis
, that knowledge from experience of which even Ptolemy had spoken and henceforth had ignored, had found its method and its
sieve, by the mercy of God, the negative fervour of Socrates, and the voiceless, pervasive whisper of Roger Bacon’s imprisoned
demon Self.