The Friar and the Cipher (3 page)

CHAPTER TWO

Logic and Mysticism:
Aristotle, Plato, and Christianity

•   •   •

THE UNIVERSITIES WERE THE STAGE
on which the great approaching struggle between science and religious dogma was to be fought. That the universities had come about at just this time was due to a remarkable group of people that history has dubbed “The Translators,” intermediaries between what was to become the most significant institution in the Christian world and the vast, luminescent Arab Empire.

In the century after the death of Mohammed in 630, Islam had grown with astounding speed, and by 750 the Baghdad Caliphate stretched from Persia and central Asia in the east, across North Africa to the Atlantic in the west, and up into Spain. Although titularly ruled by the caliph, this empire soon became a loosely united group of mini-empires of Turks, Persians, Berbers, Afghans, Syrians, and scores of others, each with its own language, customs, and ethnicity. However, just as Latin was the accepted language of scholarship of the north, Arabic became the accepted language of scholarship of the south.

As early as 830, Caliph al-Mamun established a center in Baghdad, called the “House of Wisdom,” in which scholars were charged with translating into Arabic any works by Greek masters found within the vast boundaries of the caliphate. These included an array of texts by Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, the Pythagoreans, Ptolemy, Seneca, Plato, and Aristotle. Sometimes these texts were in the original Greek, but often works were found already translated into vernacular languages, such as Syraic.

From this storehouse of classical knowledge the scholars of the Arab Empire went to work. Brilliant thinkers such as the mathematicians al-Kindi from Arabia and al-Khwarizimi, an Iraqi from whom we get the words
algebra
and
algorithm,
the metaphysicists al-Farabi, a Turk, and Avicebrol, a Jew, al-Hazan, a Persian, in optics, and Maimonedes, another Jew, in medicine kept creative thought and scientific inquiry alive for four centuries while Europe floundered in an intellectual morass.

In 1085, Christian forces under Alfonso VI retook Toledo for the west after almost four hundred years of Muslim rule and declared it the Spanish capital. Fortified, on a hilltop about seventy miles south of Madrid, Toledo, now better remembered as the setting for El Greco's cloudscapes than for its tradition of enlightenment, had been one of the intellectual centers of the Arab Empire. It was home not only to its Muslim population but also to one of the largest and most thriving Jewish communities in Europe. Demonstrating an insight that future Spanish rulers would lack, Alfonso and his heirs encouraged tolerance and coexistence among the religions.

In the early 1100s, Raymond, Toledo's archbishop, realized that there was treasure adrift in his city. His Arab predecessors had left piles of manuscripts behind both from the Greeks and their own scholars. Raymond, like al-Mamun before him, organized a school of translators, this time for the purpose of producing Latin versions of all the great works of science and philosophy that they could lay their hands on.

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 faculty 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).