The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization (Politically Incorrect Guides) (29 page)

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Authors: Anthony Esolen

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Why does Chretien de Troyes have Lancelot cross a twenty foot long sword-bridge set on edge, maiming his bare hands and feet and knees, to save Guinevere, held in custody in a castle on the other side, kidnapped by a man who “loves” her as unreasonably as Lancelot does?
18
Or, if you are an aristocratic lady at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, do you follow the advice of her chaplain Andrew, who says that Love demands that the beloved deny nothing to the lover? Or is the good priest winking at “courtly” amours, slyly revealing them for the follies they are?
19
 
The point is that in medieval song and poetry and art we are never far from the passions, but also never far from that divine Love that Dante says is his sole inspiration:
 
I’m one who takes the pen when Love breathes wisdom into me, and go finding the signs for what he speaks within. (
Purgatory,
24.52–54)
 
 
Then the artists could not take the passions for granted. “God is Love,” says Saint John (1 Jn. 4:8), and “God is not the author of confusion,” says Saint Paul (1 Cor. 14:33). So then if love brings confusion, as anyone with eyes open can see, we must distinguish between love and love, between passions that are licit and illicit, passions rightly ordered and disordered. In other words, precisely because they took the passion so seriously, medieval thinkers searched for a way to see how true human love springs from the love that comes from God and is God. Consideration of love brings us inevitably to theology.
 
PC trope: Dancing angels and pinheads
 
Here we must debunk another charge against medieval thinkers: that they were divorced from the world, wasting centuries arguing about metaphysical trivia. Set aside for the moment whether, during their two hundred years of brightest glory, their metaphysical debates were in fact trivial. Were they divorced from the world?
 
Certainly there were mystics, as there are today (and as there will be in any age) whose imaginations soared into realms where only a contemplative can go. Richard of Saint Victor was one. He described, with painstaking attention to the progress of actual people on their spiritual journeys, how we climb, step by step, from contemplation of the material creatures around us to loving union with their Creator.
20
Saint Bonaventure called such an ascent the mind’s journey
into
God, and he too insisted that the soul must begin by reading the Book of Nature, written by the hand of God.
21
 
If such language seems quaint, we should note that it is anchored in physical things that we can see and touch, here and now. No medieval thinker could say, with the Gnostic heretics of the first two centuries after Christ, or some German idealists after the Enlightenment, that this world is an evil illusion, a mere husk. The Incarnation of Christ—the
enfleshing—
forbids it. Christ was wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. His mother nursed him at the breast. He worked with his carpenter father at the plane and the lathe. For the first time in Christian history, Christmas, the day that most powerfully celebrates the fleshliness of the Savior, assumes its place, second only to Easter, at the heart of the Christian calendar. It is from the Middle Ages that we derive our first Christmas carols. It is Francis of Assisi, that earthy beggar and mystic, who constructs the first Christmas creche.
 
Then the things about us are blessed, as the Incarnation shows. It follows that we should pay them heed. Saint Albert the Great taught his students to do just that. Albert was by avocation a biologist, gathering and classifying examples of flora and fauna, and compiling accounts of creatures he saw, creatures described in books, and creatures reported by travelers (who do engage in exaggeration).
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In the same mind, Albert welcomed into his school the close study of Aristotle. Muslim philosophers in Spain and North Africa had long been fascinated by Aristotle’s works, and had been attempting, without much success, to reconcile his metaphysical deductions with the Koran. So the works of the man whom the medieval schoolmen came to honor as simply The Philosopher had been reintroduced into the West via translations and commentaries from the Arabic, particularly those of Averroes, whom they honored as The Commentator.
 
What was important about this? Aristotle insisted, against Plato, that everything we know, we learn first from the senses. Now, many medieval thinkers hedged, believing that our finest way of knowing is by direct intuition of the truth, an illumination by God. But many agreed with The Philosopher, as did the great student of Albert, Thomas Aquinas.
 
In his
Summa Theologiae
(
The Encyclopedia of Theological Questions
is a fair translation), Thomas aligns himself with one side of this vigorous debate, and insists that all of our knowledge, including our knowledge of God, comes to us first through the senses. That does not mean we are limited to knowing only what we can sense, he says, since the existence and operation of a cause we cannot sense can be inferred from its effects.
23
Thomas, I’d like to assert, is not less of a rationalist and an empiricist than a modern scientist would be, but
more.
He allows reason a broad scope. He encourages us to see everything about us (including human passions), and draw rational conclusions from them, rather than limiting our attention only to those things we can place on the scales or measure with a ruler. Thomas combines the most precise metaphysical acuity with common sense, and in this regard he is both the best and the most typical of the medieval thinkers.
 
 
 
The Dark Ages?
 
Comparing medieval civic life to that of today’s atomistic, isolated, air-conditioned, commercialized suburban America, it’s hard to use the slur “Dark Ages” against medieval Europe:
 
Men, women, and children in medieval towns did not, like the denizens of the crowded slums in some modern cities, go from one end of the year to the other with scarcely a glimpse of nature or a moment under the open sky. Medieval towns were much more careful of the public health than used to be supposed. Many of them had municipal physicians; hospitals and public baths were common; such occupations as butchers were under strict hygienic regulation.
 
 
Lynn Thorndike
,
The History of Medieval Europe
(338)
 
Let’s see how this reasoning, both practical and metaphysical, works in practice. Consider the question, “Is it ever morally justified to swerve from the letter of the civil law?”
24
Thomas understands that, in answering this question, reason must begin with the everyday objects around us, and the situations in which we may find ourselves. That is where reason
begins.
But, since reason is a far more powerful tool than modern man believes, that is not where it ends. So if a man in fury wants you to return the sword he lent you, even though the law says you must return it, you can justly refuse. That’s because laws are created for the general case, and cannot foresee every event in which they might be used for harm. You must use prudence to apply the law to the circumstances. We of course agree with Aquinas here; it’s an easy case.
 
Yet there
are moral absolutes,
as patently offensive as that would be today, and these too are discoverable by reason. “Is it ever justified to tell a lie?” Thomas asks. Here, unlike the case of the man who wants to keep the sword from his hot-tempered friend, we are dealing with the very nature of man. We see that a dog, for example, wants food and water and a place to rest, but man is not satisfied only with these things. Man possesses an intellect. He hungers to know the truth, and his principal means of learning and teaching is language. To say what you know is not true, then, is to strike at the heart of who we are: “For since words are natural signs of the intellect, it is unnatural and uncalled for to use words to signify what is not in your mind. That is why [Aristotle] says that
the lie is in itself crooked and to be avoided, while the truth is good and to be praised
” (
Summa Theol.
2.2.110.3). Here we see Aristotle taken seriously—not simply as an ancient thinker whose thoughts should be dissected, diagrammed, and analyzed—but as a philosopher whose conclusions about right and wrong, articulated in a most judgmental and politically incorrect way (“in itself crooked” vs. “good and to be praised”), ought to guide our actions.
 
While clear and absolute in his moral teachings, St. Thomas was not at all simplistic, regardless of what our more ethically-creative peers might say. One can, for instance, refrain from revealing the truth to wicked men, or refrain from speaking at all. The good sisters in
The Sound of Music
were shrewd Thomists, not lying to the Nazis pursuing the Von Trapp family, but neither telling them where they were, and managing to remove their car’s distributor cap to boot. It is a sign of our intellectual confusion that we can no longer fathom the difference between law and prudence; we sin with abandon, but will set a murderer free over a legal stutter.
 
But that flatfooted, earthbound, commonsense observation, that man alone among beasts hungers to know, leads Thomas to potent conclusions. For there is no other creature whose principal faculties are in vain. The dog has teeth, and there are deer for his prey. Man has a mind, and there are things around him to know, but these things by themselves fail to satisfy. I see a crystal, and I experience real pleasure in beholding it, testing it for hardness, chiseling it apart, learning why, chemically, it has its pale violet color. But if I investigated a million such, I would be no wiser about who I am than before. I want not only to know, but to know the highest things.
 
And in fact, Thomas affirms, we can know much about those highest things without the revelation of God.
25
We see a table, a stream, a stalk of corn, and know, by experience, that none of these things need have been. They are contingent. If the carpenter had not worked the wood, there would be no table. If the earth had not had a sufficient mass, there would have been no atmosphere to hold the vapor for rain to fill the stream. If the seed had not fallen to the earth, there would have sprung no corn. We can regard the whole world as a great collection of such things, no one of which need have been, though each of which, once it exists, is bound by the necessities governing it, as a droplet in the desert must evaporate. Then the collection itself, because it is only a collection, need not have been. But the world—the
cosmos
—exists: we see it. Therefore there must be, Thomas concludes, something whose existence is not contingent, but necessary in itself, “not possessing the cause of its necessity from somewhere else, but the cause of the necessity of other things” (
Summa Theol.
1.2.3).
 
The attention to the question of God, then, is not browbeaten into the heads of docile scholars. It springs from the observable nature of man as a knowing creature, and from the observable order
and insufficiency
of the world. If we limit reason to detecting the hairs on a pussy willow preserved in a lump of coal, as fascinating as that may be, we will never accost those questions of greatest importance, as “What is this world for?” and “What is it good for me to be?” and “Where did I come from, and where am I going?” Perhaps, if medieval men had plied their minds to study hydraulics and optics and agriculture (and some of them did, preparing the way for the explosion of natural science in the Renaissance) then people would have had superior wells, and eyeglasses, and white bread. But Aquinas and Bonaventure, for all their stark differences on the question of how we know things, agreed that man, by that nature of his that we can see before our eyes, needs far more than wells and eyeglasses and white bread. The low bar set by our secular materialistic culture today makes it hard to comprehend, but maybe modern conveniences and healthy bodies are badly purchased at the price of modern vices and sick souls. Medieval Europe, we may have to admit, had its greatest minds aimed in a worthier direction.
 
So it is not true that there were no scientists and mathematicians then. Setting aside men like the number-wizard Fibonacci, who was exactly what we would call a mathematician, the schools were bursting with people who plied their reason, beginning with observations of visible things, to grasp after the truth; and with people who, beginning with what is bodily, came to understand things that are not bodily, and to examine their necessary characteristics. These too were their scientists, these too were their mathematicians.

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