The Dream of Scipio (24 page)

“So? What is he?”

“He is a man of learning, my dear Olivier, and his people value this so much that they give him money merely to make himself more learned. You, no doubt, would appreciate this habit of theirs. He is what they call a rabbi, and what we would call a philosopher, as he seems to exercise no priestly functions at all. He lives in Carpentras and rarely leaves his house. Even the pope almost has to beg him to answer his letters. You can take it as an indication of his worth that His Holiness is willing to do so. I will get you a letter of introduction and you must go and see him. He will talk to you if de Deaux insists. Do not expect to like him, however, for he tries hard to make himself disagreeable and generally succeeds very well.”

 
 
 
 
IT IS HARD to believe that so little is known about one of the greatest philosophers of the Middle Ages that no one is even sure within thirty years when he died, and yet this is the case with Levi ben Gershon, also known as Gersonides and, to those with a cryptic turn of mind, as Ralbag from the Hebrew letters of his name. Officially he died in 1344, as this is the last time his name appears in the archives and in 1352 he is referred to as being already dead. Others, however, dismiss this and point to evidence that suggests he was still alive in 1370. No one, however, has devoted much time to the mystery, as his life is such a blank page that discovering when he died would add little. Apart from the fact that he lived his entire life in Provence, and was known to the curia of Avignon, almost nothing remains of his daily existence.

Instead, there is his work, one of the most extraordinary outpourings of his, or any other, age. Gersonides was a polymath who turned his mind at various stages to astronomy, chemistry, the Talmud, ancient philosophy, medicine, and botany. Only politics, the art of statecraft, did he leave well alone, perhaps a wise decision considering his position. Few people would have thanked him for his thoughts. Instead he turned his particular situation—utterly isolated from the society around him, devoid of any influence but rather vulnerable and subject to any of its whims—into an aspect of the philosophic position that he painstakingly created over so many years. In contrast to his great predecessor Maimonides, he advanced the proposition of the superiority of the contemplative life to the active one, dismissing the notion of an ideal balance between action in this life and preparation for the one that comes after. For one of his most important works was on the existence of the soul, a matter that had also concerned Sophia but which Christian thought rather tended to take for granted as something that needed no demonstration.

He had once—with some considerable reluctance—set out his line of argument to Ceccani, who had struggled to grasp the concepts that the Jew had brought to bear on the problem, and it was because of this conversation that the cardinal, a few years later, dispatched Olivier to see him. It should not be thought that Ceccani had befriended him in any way; both were much too proper for any such connection, and in any case, Gersonides belonged to Cardinal de Deaux. Ceccani would no more have broken the law by breaking bread with Gersonides than Gersonides would have accepted any such invitation. Ceccani, equally, did not hurry to let anyone know of his occasional contact, even though he consulted him on matters such as medicines and astrological forecasts—another area in which the Jew had a more profound knowledge than anyone except, perhaps, a professor in Paris fully in the pay of the king of France and hence somewhat unreliable.

Nor did Ceccani like him much, although he was intrigued by the man’s demeanor, a sense of his own worth that was haughty and unflinching. Other Jews he had met—not that there had been many, and even these had always been purely business meetings—had been well mannered, excessively so. Ceccani knew that it was insubstantial, this persistent politeness, a mask to disguise their nervousness at dealing with one as powerful as he, but did nothing to discourage it or set them at greater ease. With the rabbi there was no such uncertainty.

“Why,” he said to himself after one of their earlier meetings, “I do believe the man feels sorry for me! He talks to me like a backward pupil.” It was a measure of the cardinal’s qualities—one which Gersonides also sensed—that he was faintly amused, rather than outraged, by the realization.

As for Gersonides himself, he found the assorted prelates who badgered him a distraction, not quite an irritant but certainly an honor he was quite ready to do without. He did not wish to be consulted by princes of the church, and took no satisfaction from their attentions. It was a service that might, perhaps, do some good one day. He did not wish to turn away anyone with a genuine desire to know, and both cardinals de Deaux and Ceccani—though no philosophers, and too much men of power to cultivate any true passion—perhaps had some spark within them.

So, every time he was summoned, he sighed wearily, put on his cloak, and made his way to Avignon, a monument to greed and excess he detested. And there he gave answers and opinions as best he could. His reward in 1347, three years after we are told he died but in fact a year that saw him still in rude good health, was a knock on the door and a visit from Olivier de Noyen. It was a fateful meeting for reasons even more important than the explication of an obscure text in the tradition of late Neoplatonism. In Olivier, Gersonides felt the flame burning brightly, the same one that Sophia had felt in Manlius when he, too, had come to her door. Like her, he could not resist. Unlike her, however, he cursed his ill fortune.

The phrase of Manlius that led Olivier to the rabbi was at least a considered one, and one of the greatest importance. Indeed, it was at the summation of nearly eight hundred years of thought on the relationship that must exist between the physical and the metaphysical. “The soul dies when it falls to earth.” More Christian heresies were contained in this statement than in almost anything else in the entire document. It contradicted the idea that the soul is created
ex nihilo—
at birth, at quickening, or at conception, a question never precisely answered. It contradicted the idea that man is born and dies once only; it contradicted the idea that salvation lies through God alone; indeed it suggests that man is responsible for his own salvation, but through knowledge, not through deeds or faith. The idea that birth is death and death is life again hardly sat easily with contemporary Christian doctrine, although it echoed all too readily with the heresies of the Cathars.

More important, it did not accord at all with the ideas that Olivier had learned so far from his readings of Cicero and Aristotle, containing a mystical, magical element entirely absent in their works.

In truth, they were ideas all but dead in the West when Manlius put them on paper, although they survived in ever more feeble form in the East until the emperor Justinian closed the Academy of Athens and ended nearly a millennium of teaching that began with Socrates. It was a long time since anything of the sort had been taught in Gaul, and Manlius and his circle only came into contact with it when they encountered Sophia, the intellectual legatee of Alexandria.

It was a duty, not a labor of love, that made her teach, for she could not but be aware that each newcomer to her door, however curious, knew less than the one he replaced. The ability to argue diminished; the grasp of basic concepts weakened; and the knowledge that comes from study grew perpetually less. Christianity, which spread over men’s minds like a blanket, put faith above reason; increasingly those brought up under its influence scorned knowledge and thought. Even those with a spark given to them by the gods wanted to be told, rather than wanted to think. Getting them to accept that the goal was thought itself, not any conclusion at the end of thought, was hard indeed. They came to her for answers; all they got instead were questions.

But she continued, because every now and then, just often enough, someone like Manlius came to her door and she tasted the joy of guiding someone whose curiosity was boundless, whose desire to approach truth inexhaustible. As Manlius grew into manhood he came to disguise this under the sneering façade of gentlemanly idleness, but it was only ever buried, not extinguished. And she felt an urgency that slowly changed their relationship from teacher and pupil into something more complex and dangerous. For after a while it was not simply that he wanted to learn from her; she also felt the desperate need to teach him, to pass on to him something so that at least it would be preserved awhile longer. For the first and only time in her life she put aside all doubts, and almost willfully refused to see him whole. She knew that Manlius had his weaknesses, knew that the regime of contemplation she offered could subdue but not quell his pride and his desire for renown. She suspected that the Manlius who retired to his estates and the Manlius who emerged to impose himself on the province were in opposition to each other, not two facets of a harmonious soul. But she ignored this, because she needed to.

There were some illusions she could not hold on to; she saw clearly that whatever he took from her would not be philosophy in any pure form. Yet through him, something might survive, and Sophia desperately wanted it to do so. She spent her life in thought, and held that thought was its own end; yet she was still sufficiently of this world to wish that something would outlast her. She scorned the body, rejected marriage, and was past the age of children; the ideas and concepts that she deposited in the mind of Manlius would be her only legacy, her only memorial. Without realizing it, she came to depend on him more than she ever dreamed possible, and this need, which rose from the depths of her soul, often showed itself in a hectoring, lecturing, critical harshness that revealed little but her desire. She loved him because he was all she had; and worried about him for the same reason.

“The soul dies when it falls to earth.” It was not a literal belief; nothing she taught was to be held literally; this was one of the most difficult concepts that her poor pupils had to grasp. For Christians had taken from Greece the idea of the
logos,
the word, simplified it, stripped it of its meaning, and then identified it with the God they worshiped. Sophia taught that the divine was not only beyond words but beyond meaning; only the process of thought could give an approximation of it. The phrase was a metaphor, an illustrative myth to show the magnitude of the thought journey the individual had to travel to grasp the essence of the divine and approach God in the mind. After many months’ study, much reading from Sophia’s library of texts, and detailed discussion, Manlius began to understand, and when he did, the fatuousness of Christianity was borne in on him all the more.

Olivier, however, had no such advantages; the context had vanished, the associated texts were destroyed or buried in monasteries scattered around the Mediterranean. All he had was this one text, without the means of decipherment.

And so, with great trepidation, he knocked on the door of Rabbi Levi ben Gershon. The door was opened by his servant, Rebecca, whom Pisano wanted as his model for Saint Sophia, and whom Olivier had first glimpsed two years previously hurrying along the street in her brown cloak, as the Christian stood on the steps of the church, thinking about love.

 
 
 
HE DID NOT make a good first impression; only the 
clipped recommendations of cardinals de Deaux and Ceccani persuaded Gersonides to allow the young man to return, for Olivier was so flustered after his unexpected encounter on the doorstep that he could scarcely speak. And being in the presence of the learned Jew made him distinctly uncomfortable. He had never talked to such a person before, only spied them in the street; Gersonides’s manner also was intimidating: gruff and ill-humored, rude and excessively critical in his remarks, but only partly managing to disguise a humanity that showed through in flashes of dazzling insight. Olivier was both admiring and repelled and did not know how to react or behave. All he did know was that after the meeting he could remember every word the old man had said, and had in his mind dozens of other questions he needed answered. And knew, also, that only Gersonides could help him find those answers.

Only toward the end of their initial meeting, when he began to talk of the things he had discovered, of the manuscripts he had read, did his speech become animated and his face light up. Even so, the old man remained in a bad mood, for he was feeling his age that day, and was crotchety about being interrupted from his work. Olivier’s youth reminded him of how little time he had left to study.

“You talk too much about the language, and not at all of the content,” he said with annoyance at one stage. “Is that all you think matters? You think ignoble thoughts become less so if they are phrased beautifully?”

“I assume ugly things cannot be disguised.”

“Then you think wrongly. Indeed, you are scarcely thinking at all. I have spent my life in study and have witnessed all too often the words of the devil coming from the mouths of angels. You bring me this manuscript—which I must confess I have never seen before. I am grateful for that. It is, as you would no doubt say, written beautifully. Elegant. Charming. Even witty. But is what he says beautiful? And what do you know of the author? Is he therefore elegant and charming? You suggest only good people can write beautiful things.”

“You do not agree?”

Gersonides levered himself up from his chair with a groan, then leaned on the table in front of him as he felt his head spinning. Olivier jumped up to support him. “Sit down, sir, please. I do apologize. I never realized you were ill. I’ll go away and come back when you are better.”

“Stop fussing over me,” said Gersonides more sharply than the young man’s consideration deserved. “I cannot stand it. I am an old man. This is what happens when we grow old. It is neither unexpected nor unwelcome. Go and get me that book you see on the shelf over there.”

It took some time to pinpoint which one he meant, but eventually Olivier found it and brought it to him. Gersonides flicked through it.