Chapter 3 - Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages
1
The man of the Middle Ages had many ignorances in common with the savages of more modern times, and some of his beliefs would certainly suggest savage parallels to an anthropologist. But it would be very wrong to infer from this that he was at all like a savage. I do not only, or chiefly, mean that such a view would depress medieval man beneath his true dignity. That’s as may be; some might prefer the Polynesian. The point is that, whether for better or for worse, he was different. He was in a different predicament and had a different history. Even when he thought or did the same things as savages, he had come to them by a different route. We should be quite on the wrong track if we sought the origin, at least the immediate origin, of even the strangest medieval doctrines in what some even call pre-logical thinking.
Here is an example. In a twelfth-century English poem called the Brut we read the following: ‘There dwell in the air many kinds of creatures which shall remain there till doomsday comes. Some of them are good and some do evil.’ These beings are mentioned to account for the birth of a child for whom no human father could be detected; one of them had in fact begotten Merlin. Now, if we considered this passage in vacuo, we might very well suppose that the poet’s mind was working just like that of a savage, and that his belief in aerial daemons sprang as directly from a tribal culture as coarse grass from uncultivated soil. In reality, we know that he is getting it all from a book, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin History of the Kings of Britain, and that Geoffrey is getting it from the second-century De Deo Socratis of Apuleius, who, in his turn, is reproducing the pneumatology of Plato. Trace that pneumatology back for a few centuries or so and then at last you may come to whatever roots it had in a culture really close to savagery and a thinking possibly pre-logical. But all that is almost as remote from the medieval English poet as it is from us. He tells us about the aerial daemons neither because his own poetic imagination invented them, nor because they are the spontaneous reaction of his age and culture to the forces of nature, but because he has read about them in a book.
Here is another. In a French poem of the fourteenth century Nature personified appears as a character and has a conversation with another personage called Grâcedieu. Grace-of-God would, for various reasons, be a misleading translation, so I will call her Supernature. And Nature says to Supernature ‘The circle of the cold moon truly marks the boundary between your realm and mine forever’. Here again we might well suppose the savage mind at work; what more natural than to locate the houses of the gods at a reasonable distance and choose the Moon for the gate between their world and ours? Yet, almost certainly that is not what is happening. The idea that the orbit of the Moon is a great boundary between two regions of the universe is Aristotelian. It is based on a contrast which naturally forced itself upon one whose studies were so often biological and psychological, but also sometimes astronomical. The part of the world which we inhabit, the Earth, is the scene of generation and decay and therefore of continual change. Such regularities as he would observe in it seemed to him imperfect; terrestrial nature carried things on, he thought, not always but ‘on the whole’ in the same way. It was clear from observing the weather that this irregularity extended a good way upwards above the surface of the Earth. But not all the way. Above the variable sky there were the heavenly bodies which seemed to have been perfectly regular in their behaviour ever since the first observations were made and of which none, to his knowledge, had ever been seen to come into existence or to decay. The Moon was obviously the lowest of these. Hence he divided the universe at the Moon; all above that was necessary, regular, and eternal, all below it, contingent, irregular and perishable. And of course, for any Greek, what is necessary and eternal is more divine. This, with a Christian colouring added, fully accounts for the passage we began with.
Both examples—and it would not be difficult to cite more—point to the same truth, and it is a truth basic for any understanding of the Middle Ages. Their culture is through and through a bookish culture. Millions, no doubt, were illiterate; the masters, however, were literate, and not only literate but scholarly and even pedantic. The peculiar predicament of medieval man was in fact just this: he was a literate man who had lost a great many of his books and forgotten how to read all his Greek books. He works with the rather chancy selection he has. In that way the Middle Ages were much less like an age which has not yet been civilized than like one which has survived the loss of civilization. An exaggerated, but not wholly fake, model would be a party of shipwrecked people setting to work to try to build up a culture on an uninhabited island and depending on the odd collection of books which happened to be on board their ship.
Of course this is grossly oversimplified and I must immediately take notice of one complication which may have already occurred to you. Genealogically, and in some measure culturally, the medieval European had roots in the barbarian life of the north and west as well as in Mediterranean civilization. Along that line, it may be said, he had a much closer link with primitive thought than through its far-off echoes in Latin literature. This of course is true. Fragments of indigenous and spontaneous mythology survive; Germanic, in Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Old High German, or Celtic (to some undefined extent) in the French romances. Popular literature, such as the Ballads, may throw up more or less disguised fragments of this at quite late periods. But we must insist that these things loom much larger in the popular picture of the Middle Ages than they did in the reality. By the time we reach the High Middle Age all the old Germanic literature has been forgotten and the languages in which it was written are unknown. And as for the Ballad and the Romance, it is important to realize that both these attractive products are the reverse of typical. It is easy to be deceived here, because it was the Ballad and the Romance which first excited modern interest in the Middle Ages; Medieval studies began there. The reason is simple. These forms appealed to the Romanticism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even now many of us were first lured to Medieval studies by this romantic attraction. Even now the ‘man in the street’ thinks of the Middle Ages, if at all, in terms of the romances; popular iconography—a joke in Punch, an advertisement—wishing to suggest the medieval, depicts a knight in armour riding through desolate country, adding castles, dragons, and distressed damsels quantum suff. But the paradox is that the note is one which the real Middle Ages struck only in a minority of Ballads and Romances and hardly at all in any other form. That boundlessness, indefiniteness, suggestiveness are not the common or characteristic medieval mood. The real temper of those ages was not romantic. The Arthurian stories represent, perhaps, a truancy or escape from habitual concerns.
Characteristically, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a spiritual adventurer; he was an organizer, a codifier, a man of system. His ideal could be not unfairly summed up in the old housewifely maxim ‘A place for everything, and everything in its (right) place’. Three things are typical of him. First, that small minority of his cathedrals in which the design of the architect was actually achieved (usually, of course, it was overtaken by the next wave of architectural fashion long before it was finished). I am thinking of a thing like Salisbury. Secondly, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. And thirdly, the Divine Comedy of Dante. In all these alike we see the tranquil, indefatigable, exultant energy of a passionately logical mind ordering a huge mass of heterogeneous details into unity. They desire unity and proportion, all the classical virtues, just as keenly as the Greeks did. But they have a greater and more varied collection of things to fit in. And they delight to do it. Hence the Comedy which is, I suppose, the supreme achievement: crowded and varied as a railway station on a bank holiday, but patterned and schematized as a battalion on a ceremonial parade.
You see how this arises naturally from their situation? I described them as literate people who had lost most of their books. And what survived was, to some extent, a chance collection. It contained ancient Hebrew, classical Greek, classical Roman, decadent Roman and early Christian elements. It had reached them by various routes. All Plato had disappeared except part of the Timaeus in a Latin version: one of the greatest, but also one of the least typical, of the dialogues. Aristotle’s logic was at first missing, but you had a Latin translation of a very late Greek introduction to it. Astronomy and medicine, and (later) Aristotle, came in Latin translations of Arabic translations of the Greek. That is the typical descent of learning: from Athens to Hellenistic Alexandria, from Alexandria to Baghdad, from Baghdad, via Sicily, to the university of Paris, and thence all over Europe. . . . A scratch collection, a corpus that frequently contradicted itself. But here we touch on a real credulity in the medieval mind. Faced with this self-contradictory corpus, they hardly ever decided that one of the authorities was simply right and the others wrong; never that all were wrong. To be sure, in the last resort it was taken for granted that the Christian writers must be right as against the Pagans. But it was hardly ever allowed to come to the last resort. It was apparently difficult to believe that anything in the books—so costly, fetched from so far, so old, often so lovely to the eye and hand, was just plumb wrong. No; if Seneca and St Paul disagreed with one another, and both with Cicero, and all these with Boethius, there must be some explanation which would harmonize them. What was not true literally might be true in some other sense; what was false simpliciter might be true secundum quid. And so on, through every possible subtlety and ramification. It is out of this that the medieval picture of the universe is evolved: a chance collection of materials, an inability to say ‘Bosh’, a temper systematic to the point of morbidity, great mental powers, unwearied patience, and a robust delight in their work. All these factors led them to produce the greatest, most complex, specimen of syncretism or harmonization which, perhaps, the world has ever known. They tidied up the universe. To that tidy universe, and above all to its effect on the imagination, I now turn.
I assume that everyone knows, more or less, its material layout: a motionless Earth at the centre, transparent spheres revolving round it, of which the lowest, slowest, nearest and smallest carries the Moon, and thence upwards in the order Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn; beyond these, all the stars in one sphere; beyond that, a sphere which carries no light but merely imparts movement to those below it; beyond that, the Empyrean, the boundary of the mundus, the beginning of the infinite true ‘Heaven’.
No one, as far as I know, has exaggerated the emotional and imaginative difference between such a universe and that which we now believe ourselves to inhabit; but a great many people have misconceived the nature of the difference. The cardinal error (ubiquitous in earlier modern writers, and still clung to by some who should know better today) may be expressed in the following words. ‘The Earth, both by her supposed size and by her central position, had, for medieval thinkers, an importance to which we now know that she is by no means entitled.’ Hence, of course, the probable conclusion that their theology—here, once more, pre-logical thinking might be suspected—was the offspring of their cosmology. The truth seems to me the reverse. Their theology might be thought to imply an Earth which counted for a good deal in the universe and was central in dignity as well as in space; the odd thing is that their cosmology does not, in any obvious sense, encourage this view.
First, as regards size. That the Earth is, by any cosmic scale, insignificant, is a truth that was forced on every intelligent man as soon as serious astronomical observations began to be made. I have already said that Aristotle thought the region above the Moon more divine than the airy, watery, and earthy realm below it. He also thought it incomparably large. As he says in the Metaphysics, ‘The perceptible world around us’—that is, the realm of growth, decay and weather—‘is, so to speak, a nothing if considered as part of the whole.’ Later in Ptolemy’s compendium, which transmitted Greek astronomy to the Middle Ages, a more precise statement is made; the Earth, we are told, must, for astronomical purposes, be regarded as having no magnitude at all, as a point. This was accepted by the Middle Ages. It was not merely accepted by scholars; it was re-echoed by moralists and poets again and again. To judge from the texts, medieval man thought about the insignificance of Earth more persistently, if anything, than his modern descendants. We even find quite popular texts hammering the lesson home by those methods which the scientific popularizer uses today. We are told how long it would take you to get to the sphere of the fixed stars if you traveled so many miles a day. The figure brings the distance out at something near 118 million miles.
Now of course this is a small distance compared with those of which modern astronomers talk. But we are here considering not the accuracy of the figure but its imaginative and emotional impact. From that point of view I maintain that the difference between a million, a hundred millions, and a million millions, is wholly negligible. All these figures can be used, manipulated, with equal ease by anyone who can do simple arithmetic; none of them can at all be imagined in the sense of ‘visualized’, and those who have most imagination know this best.
From that point of view, then, the medieval model of the universe is on a par with the Newtonian (I do not say, with the modern, for I want to defer the consideration of it). Either will allow you to lose yourself in unimaginable distances, to sink and say with Leopardi il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare, and to see the Earth as a speck of dust—if, of course, that is the sort of thing you want to do. And now comes the point I really want to make. I have not said that the difference between the medieval and, say, the Newtonian picture was less than our grandfathers supposed. It was quite as great. But it was not the kind of difference we have been taught to expect.
What it really was I can, here and now, only suggest. The thing really needs to be learned not from a lecture but (you are scientists) by an experiment; an experiment on one’s imagination. It is a simple one. Go out on any starry night and walk alone for half an hour, resolutely assuming that the pre-Copernican astronomy is true. Look up at the sky with that assumption in your mind. The real difference between living in that universe and living in ours will then, I predict, begin to dawn on you.
You will be looking at a world unimaginably large but quite definitely finite. At no speed possible to man, in no lifetime possible to man, could you ever reach its frontier, but the frontier is there; hard, clear, sudden as a national frontier. And secondly, because the Earth is an absolute centre, and Earthwards from any part of this immense universe is downwards, you will find that you are looking at the planets and stars in terms not merely of ‘distance’ but of that very special kind of distance which we call ‘height’. They are not only a long way from the Earth but a long way above it. I need hardly point out that height is a very much livelier notion than distance; it has, the moment it is imagined, commerce with our nerves, with all our racial and infantile terrors, with our pleasures as mountaineers, our love of wide prospects, and a whole vast network of ethical and social metaphors which we could not shake off even if we tried. Now these two factors taken together—enormous but finite size, and distances which, however vast, remain unambiguously vertical, and indeed vertiginous—at once present you with something which differs from the Newtonian picture rather as a great building differs from a great jungle. You can lose yourself in infinity; there is indeed nothing much else you can do with it. It arouses questions, it prompts to a certain kind of wonder and reverie, usually a sombre kind, so that Wordsworth can speak of ‘melancholy space and doleful time’ or Carlyle can call the starry sky ‘a sad sight’. But it answers no questions; necessarily shapeless and trackless, patient of no absolute order or direction, it leads, after a little, to boredom or despair or (often) to the haunting conviction that it must be an illusion. Earth and Man are, if you like, dwarfed by it, but not much more dwarfed than the Solar System, or the Galaxy, or anything else. One cannot be, in any very important sense, small where size has ceased to have a meaning. The old universe was wholly different in its effect. It was an answer, not a question. It offered not a field for musing but a single overwhelming object; an object which at once abashes and exalts the mind. For in it there is a final standard of size. The Primum Mobile is really large because it is the largest corporeal thing there is. We are really small because our whole Earth is a speck compared with the Primum Mobile.
I have been speaking so far only of dimensions. But the effect of the old model becomes even more interesting when we consider order. It is not merely very large, it is a whole of finely graded parts. Everything descends from the circumference with a steady diminution of size, speed, power and dignity. This ninefold division is harmoniously crossed by a threefold division. All above the Empyrean is in a special, immaterial, sense ‘Heaven’, full of the Divine Substance. From the Empyrean down to the Moon is the realm of aether—that strange half-matter in which so many different ages have believed, on what seems to a layman very inadequate evidence—changeless, necessary, not subject to Fortune. From the Moon down to the Earth is the realm of air (for they thought the air extended to the Moon’s orbit), which is also the realm of luck, change, birth, death, and contingence.
You see why I compared it to a building—though indeed any great, complex work of art—Paradise Lost or Euclid’s Elements or Spinoza’s Ethics or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—would have done almost as well. It is a structure, a finished work, a unity articulated through a great and harmonious plurality. It evokes not mere wonder but admiration. It provides food for thought and satisfaction for our aesthetic nature. I think everyone will see what I mean if I say that in passing from the Newtonian to the Ptolemaic cosmos one passes from the romantic to the classical. Milton could describe the Moon as looking
Like one that had bin led astray
Through the Heav’ns wide pathles way.
That hits off admirably the feeling many generations now have had when they look at the night sky: I do not think any ancient or medieval man would have felt so. That particular charm, the charm of the pathless, was one that the old universe lacked; it had a severer, a more robust attraction and appealed to a more formal imagination.
After the dimensions and the order, we must consider the dynamics. I have already said that movement earthward from any part of the whole was conceived as movement downward. In that sense they understood what we would call gravitation. Thus one philosopher says that if you could bore a hole through the Earth and drop a stone down, the stone would come to rest at the centre. And in the Comedy, Dante and Virgil come to the centre where they find Lucifer embedded and have to climb down his shaggy sides in order to continue their journey to the Antipodes; but Dante finds to his surprise that after they have passed his waist they have to climb up to his feet. For they have of course passed the centre of gravitation. But they never talk of gravitation. Their way of describing it is to say that every natural object has a native or ‘proper’ place and is always ‘trying’ or ‘desiring’ to get there. When unimpeded, flame moves upwards and solid bodies move downwards because they want to go, you may call it, ‘home’. Is this animism? Did they really think that all matter was sentient? Apparently not. They will distinguish animate and inanimate as clearly as we do; will say that stones, for example, have only being; vegetables being and life; animals, being, life and sense; man, being life, sense and reason. The truth is that their language about inanimate bodies was the same kind of language that the modern man uses—I mean, the modern ‘plain’ man, not the modern scientist or philosopher. When a modern says that the stone fell ‘in obedience to the law of gravitation’, he does not really think there is literally a law or literal obedience; that the stone, on being released, whips out a little book of statutes, finds the chapter and paragraph relevant to its predicament, and decides it had better be a law-abiding stone and ‘come quiet’. Nor did the medieval man believe that the stone really felt homesick, or felt at all. Both ways of putting it are analogical; neither speaker would usually know any way of expressing the facts except by an analogy.
But of course it makes a great difference to the tone of your mind which analogy you adopt—whether you fill your universe with phantom police-courts and traffic regulations, or with phantom longings and endeavours. The second alternative, which the Middle Ages adopted, is connected with another and more far-reaching doctrine which is not merely analogical. We are now approaching the junction between their cosmology and their theology. The theology involved is, however, not that of the Bible, the Fathers, or the Councils, but that of Aristotle. Of course they thought it consistent with Christianity; whether they were right in so thinking is not my concern.
The infinite, according to Aristotle, is not actual. No infinite object exists; no infinite process occurs. Hence we cannot explain the movement of one body by the movement of another and so on forever. No such infinite series could, he thought, exist. All the movements of the universe must therefore, in the last resort, result from a compulsive force exercised by something immovable. He thought that such an Unmoved Mover could move other things only by being their end or object or (if you like) target—what he calls their ‘Final Cause’—not as one billiard ball moves another, but as food moves the hungry man, as the mistress moves her lover, as truth moves the philosophical inquirer. He calls this Unmoved Mover either ‘God’ or ‘Mind’. It moves the Primum Mobile (which of course sets all the inferior bodies in motion) by love. But notice that this does not mean what a Christian would naturally mean by the word. There is no question here of a beneficent Being loving the world He has created and descending to redeem it. God, in Aristotle, moves the world by being loved, not by loving; by being the supremely desirable object. This of course implies not only consciousness but high rationality on the part of that which is moved. Accordingly we find (not now by analogy, but in strictest fact) that in every sphere there is a rational creature called an Intelligence which is compelled to move, and therefore to keep his sphere moving, by his incessant desire for God. It was disputed whether the Intelligence is ‘in’ the sphere as the soul is in the body (in which case the sphere must be envisaged as an eternal and exalted animal) or as a man is in a ship (in which case the corporeal sphere is a kind of instrument). On the whole the second view won. A modern may ask why a love for God should lead to perpetual rotation. I think, because this love or appetite for God is a desire to participate as much as possible in His nature; i.e. to imitate it. And the nearest approach to His eternal immobility, the second best, is eternal regular movement in the most perfect figure, which, for any Greek, is the circle. Hence the universe is kept going by the continual effort of its most excellent parts (each a little slower and feebler than the one above it) to conform their behaviour to a model of which they always fall short. That of course is the real meaning of Dante’s (often misunderstood) line about ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’. Even so, love is perhaps too ethical a word; ‘appetite’ would be better. In this scheme God is the quarry, the Intelligences the huntsmen; God is the mistress, all things else the suitors; God the candle, and the universe the moth.
2
In my last lecture I suggested the experiment of a starlit walk taken with the assumption that Ptolemaic astronomy is true. In order to bring that old model into fuller activity, I now want to recall an experience which, I suppose, everyone has had; that of coming out from some indoor function of pomp and importance, an opera or a debate or a feast, and suddenly looking up at the cold stars above the housetops. What seemed so big while we were inside is all at once dwarfed. The sky is like an ironic comment on this and on all other human concerns. If we remember our Pascal, we may even murmur ‘The silence of those eternal spaces frightens me’. After that, we may rally and hit back and say, still using Pascal, that though we are small and transitory as dew-drops, still we are dew-drops that can think, which is (we presume) more than can be said for the galaxies. Let us now try to understand why neither of these reactions—neither the initial deflation nor the come-back—was at all likely to occur to a man of the Middle Ages.
He did not think that the spaces he looked up at were silent, or dark or empty. Far from being silent, they were perpetually filled with sweet, immeasurable sound. The vast hollow spheres, turning each at its proper interval inside its superior, gave out a blended harmony. There were various explanations of the fact that we do not hear it. One of the oldest and most pleasing was based on the travellers’ tale that those who lived near the great cataract on the Nile were unconscious of its noise. Because they had always heard it, they never heard it. The same would obviously hold true in an even higher degree of the music of the spheres. This is the only sound which has never for one split second ceased in any part of the universe; with this positive we have no negative to contrast. Presumably if (per impossibile) it ever did stop, then with terror and dismay, with a dislocation of our whole auditory life, we should feel that the bottom had dropped out of our lives. But it never does. The music which is too familiar to be heard enfolds us day and night and in all ages.
Nor were those high regions dark. The darkness in which the stars (for us) are set is merely the darkness of the long, conical shadow cast by the Earth when the sun is below our feet. They knew, from their theory of lunar eclipses, that the apex of this dark cone must fall well above the moon. Beyond that apex the higher heavens are bathed in perpetual sunshine. In a sense, no doubt, we should say the same. But then we are aware (as they, I think, were not) of the part played by the air in diffusing sunlight and producing that bubble of luminosity which we call day; we have even, in stratospheric ascents, gone high enough to see the blue curtain grow thin at the zenith so that blue turns to black and the night of space almost shows through. They knew that, up yonder, one was above the air, in whatever they meant by aether; they did not know that one would see the sun flaming in a black pit. They thought on the contrary that they would be floating (for Milton is here a medieval) in
those happie climes that lye
Where day never shuts his eye,
Up in the broad fields of the skye.
And these spaces, bright and resonant, were also inhabited. We have already peopled them with the Intelligences who either animate or guide the spheres. Distinct from these, but of course equally immortal and superhuman, are the angels. Their natural habitat is between the Empyrean and the Moon and their number is probably enormous. Unlike the aerial daemons who live between Moon and Earth, they have no bodies—such, at least, was the view that finally prevailed—but are naked minds. We, like them, are rational, but there is a great difference. We have an immediate and intuitive grasp only of axioms and have to seek all other knowledge by the laborious process of discursive thinking. They are wholly intuitive; concepts are as palpable to them as apples or pennies are to us. In fact, their reason is to ours as noon to dusk. Clearly when you look up at a sky peopled by such creatures as these, it is just no good asserting ‘I am a dew-drop that thinks’. The very necessity of ‘thinking’ (as we ordinarily understand the word) is the measure of our inferiority.
Understand that the vast majority of these bodiless minds have no concern at all with us. We touch only the lowest fringe of angelic life. For angelic life also is graded; the word angel is, rather unfortunately, used both for the whole lot and also for the lowest rank—just as we use sailors sometimes in contrast to ships’ officers, but sometimes in a sense that covers all who enable the ship to sail. They are ordered in nine classes which are arranged in three groups of three classes each. The top hierarchy, which consists of the creatures classified as Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, looks exclusively God-wards, absorbed in contemplation of the Divine essence, and unconcerned with the created universe. The next hierarchy (Dominations, Virtues, and Powers) has some responsibility for the general order of nature. The lowest hierarchy deals with human affairs; Principalities with the destiny of nations, Archangels and Angels, in varying ways, with those of individuals. You will notice that even at such a unique crisis as the Annunciation the Mother of Christ was visited only by an Archangel, a member of the lowest class but one. That gets the perspective right. It is this conception, as well as the poet’s own genius, which gives to Dante’s angels a sublimity and masculinity never captured by later art. It is the loss of this conception which finally vulgarizes the angels into those consumptive girls with wings that figure in so much Victorian stained glass. The full degradation of the Cherub—the fat baby who has played that rôle ever since Raphael—will perhaps be clearest if we remember that the word probably comes from the same root as gryphon. Even for Chaucer a cherub was a creature of fire: not at all ‘cuddly’.
But I must crowd the sky a little more. Medieval man looked up at a sky not only melodious, sunlit, and splendidly inhabited, but also incessantly active; he looked at agents to which he, and the whole earth, were patients. Besides the Intelligences and the angelic hierarchies there are the planets themselves. Each of them is doing things to us at every moment. First, on the physical side, the beams of each planet (which penetrate through the Earth’s crust) find the appropriate soil and turn it into the appropriate metal; Saturn thus producing lead, Mars iron, the Moon silver, and so forth. The Moon’s connexion with silver, and the Sun’s with gold, may be real survivals (at many removes) of pre-logical, pictorial, thinking. Venus is, perhaps, a maker of copper because she was, centuries earlier, Kupris, the lady of Cyprus, and that accursed island produced copper in ancient times. Why Saturn made lead, or Jove tin, I do not know.
But of course, as everyone has heard, the planets had a more than physical effect. They influenced the course of events and they influenced human psychology. Born under Saturn, you were disposed to melancholy; born under Venus, to amorousness. At this point, clearly, there is a rich survival of classical Paganism into medieval culture. And of course the names of the planets, and their representations in art, are those of the ancient planetary gods. As far as my reading goes, no one appears to have been at all worried about it. There was, indeed, a quarrel between the theologians and the astrologers, but not exactly about that. So far as I know, no theologian denied the general theory of planetary influences. The important question, theologically, was whether the planets compelled or merely disposed men to action. If they compelled, then of course there was an end of human freedom and responsibility. If they merely disposed, then planetary influence, like heredity or health or education, was merely part of the concrete situation handed over to the individual to do the best he could with. The theologians were in fact, as so often, fighting against determinism. Nor were they fighting against a phantom: in renaissance times, if not before them, astrological determinism was very widely accepted. It seemed (odd as this sounds to us) to have the support of age-old experience and common sense, and the theological resistance seemed idealistic wishful thinking. In the Middle Ages men’s minds no doubt wavered. The ordinary, moderate, respectable view was summed up in the maxim sapiens dominabitur astris; a wise man, assisted by Grace, could get over a bad horoscope just as he could get over a naturally bad temper.
That, as I have said, was the important question on the theoretical level. On the practical level orthodox people, while admitting planetary influence, strongly disapproved of ‘judicial astrology’, the lucrative practice of foretelling the future. They did not need to deny that some astrological predictions of human behaviour might be correct. Planetary influence could not remove free will but it could alter the states of mind and imagination which free will has to deal with. Any man can master this psychological raw material and thus refute the prediction; but few men do and therefore the predictions will succeed as regards the majority. Just in the same way and for similar reasons a modern theologian might say that Marxian predictions based on economic determinism or Freudian predictions based on psychological determinism will usually be true, and true about mass-behaviour, but not necessarily about a given individual.
I stress the parallel between astrology and more modern forms of determinism in order to bring out a point which, though I have made it elsewhere, is too important to be passed over. We must never allow ourselves to think of astrology as something that belonged to the romantic or dreaming or quasi-mystical side of the mind; above all, we must not connect it with magic. Astrology was a hard-headed, stern, anti-idealistic affair; the creed of men who wanted a universe which admitted no incalculables. Magic sought power over nature; astrology proclaimed nature’s power over man. Hence the magician is the ancestor of the modern practising or ‘applied’ scientist, the inventor; the astrologer, of the nineteenth-century philosophical materialist. Neither figure, by the way, is specially typical of the Middle Ages. Both flourished as much, if not more, in the ancient and in the renaissance world.
I have already said that the medieval man thought he was looking up at a luminous universe through the dark shadow of the Earth. He was also looking up at the region of aether through the region of air. The air was the medium through which all the influences from above reached him. The whole air could become healthy or unhealthy as the result of certain conjunctions in the upper sky. Hence a medieval doctor could explain widespread illness by saying ‘It’s due to this influence’. If he were talking Italian he would no doubt say questa influenza, and that word has stuck. I mention the air, however, not merely to bring in that curiosity but for two other reasons.
First: the air is below the Moon. That is, as you have heard, it is excluded from the region of necessity and regularity. In the air, as on the Earth, you have contingence and the irregular; in the air you have the aerial daemons who can, like men, do either good or evil. Here we come to an important difference between medieval and modern man. The ordinary modern (I do not mean the modern scientist) would regard regularity—or, if you like, monotony—as a symptom of inferiority. The fact that the heavenly bodies always behave in the same way, while men do this and that and change their minds, would be for him presumptive evidence that the former are irrational and inanimate and that we, we ‘dew-drops’ that think, are to that extent their betters. For the same reason, if he believed in the aerial daemons and the planetary Intelligences, he would probably prefer the daemons. The Middle Ages inherited from the Greeks a very different view. Aristotle in the Metaphysics remarks that in a household (he is of course assuming a household with slaves) the free members are precisely those who have least chance to live ‘at random’. The slaves can do that; for the free people ‘everything is mapped out’. It is a surprising picture but, I have no doubt, a true one; all ancient literature goes to show that a house-slave is, of all servants, the least like a robot. But I quote it here for a different reason. Though Aristotle does not make it perfectly clear, scholars are agreed that he is intending to compare the heavenly bodies with the free people and the salves with us. For the heavenly bodies ‘everything is mapped out’; our liberty to live ‘at random’ marks our inferior status. We, like slaves, have or take ‘spare time’ and in it ‘potter about’, chatting, making love, playing games, cracking nuts or ‘just sitting’; they, like Aristotle himself, have their strict programme.
Secondly, the mediation of celestial influences through the air illustrates a principle that runs through the whole universe. Last time I compared that universe to a great building: I should now like to compare it to a fugue—the orderly and varied reiteration of the same ‘subject’. When Donne says
On man heavens influence workes not so,
But that it first imprints the ayre,
he is making one statement of that subject. You have here, you see, a triad in the form: Agent (the planets), Medium (the air), Patient (man, and, in general, Earth). It is a triad which still has its appeal; I suppose that aether, at no very distant period, was accepted because we wanted a medium or go-between. But it appealed very much more strongly in the Middle Ages. The Triad is repeated on every level.
First, among the angels themselves. The Middle Ages learned all about their triadic organization from a Latin version of a (probably sixth-century) Greek theologian whom we know as Pseudo-Dionysius. The method by which he dovetails his triadic angelology into his Old Testament, where (by our standards) nothing like it is to be found, is a charming example of the process I mentioned before—the great medieval labour of harmonization and syncretism. He points out that in Isaiah vi the angels are crying out ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ not (as we might expect) to God but to one another. Why? Obviously because each angel is handing on his knowledge of the Divine Sanctity to the angel next below him. The only exception is the Seraphim. They alone of all creatures apprehend God immediately. But as soon as you reach the Cherubim you have a triad; God as agent, Seraphim as medium, Cherubim as patient. Then below that, Seraphim as agent, Cherubim as medium, Thrones as patient. And then the same triad within the second hierarchy and the third; and of course between the first, second, and third hierarchies as wholes. It is a continual devolution as if God, who in a sense does all things, will yet do nothing immediately which can possibly be done through the mediation of His creatures. And as if even this were not enough, we are then told that within each individual angel, of whatever class, the triad occurs again; each has primary faculties which act through the medium of secondary faculties on tertiary faculties. Thus you get not only triad above triad but triad within triad till the mind is dizzy with them.
All this, within the angelic world itself. But the moment one steps outside that world one finds that it itself, collectively, is part of a vaster triad. For God governs the world through the angels; the whole angelic population, without prejudice to its complex internal triads, is the medium between God as agent and Nature (or Man) as patient. Just so on Earth a King governs the commons through the barons. But this of course was not, for the medieval mind, a mere analogy. It was the real earthly and social reproduction of the triad. I say ‘social’ to distinguish it from ‘individual’; for within the individual man, as within the individual angel, the triad is repeated.
It is indeed repeated twice, once on the ethical and once on the psychological level. Ethically (and here, at many removes, they were following Plato) the triad is Reason, Emotion, and Appetite. Reason, seated in the head, governs the Appetites, seated in the abdomen or beneath it, by the aid of the more fully human and civilized emotions which were located in the thorax; such things as shame, honour, pity, self-respect, affection. This ethical triad was accepted for millennia. The effort now sometimes made to lead a civilized life on reason alone, rejecting the emotions, the attempt of the monarchic head to rule the plebeian belly without the aid of that aristocracy in the thorax, would have seemed to Plato a rash venture; like what motorists call ‘driving on your brakes’. It is hard on the brakes and leads to skids. On the psychological level the individual triad depends on the doctrine of the triple soul. But the word anima had a larger and less exclusively religious range of meaning than soul; ‘life’ would sometimes be a better translation. There is vegetable soul, common to all plants, which gives only life; sensitive soul, which gives life and sensation; and rational soul, by which we think. Man of course has all three: when things are going right inside him, his rational governs his vegetable through his sensitive.
A thirteenth-century author, Alanus, works out the theological, the social, and the individual triads in terms of castle (or citadel), city, and the lands beyond the city walls. These are literally given, of course, in the social one; a king in his citadel, the barons in the city, the peasants in the fields outside. In the individual the head is the citadel, where the empress Sapience keeps her court. In the City of the Breast lives the high baronage of Magnanimity. Outside, in the abdomen, or still more outside, in the genitals, live the common appetites. But it is the theological triad that most concerns us at the moment. The castle of God is the Empyrean, the region beyond the outermost sphere. In the city, in the vast ethereal spaces, dwell the cosmic nobility, the nine orders of angels. Down here on Earth there is a place permitted to us ‘as to aliens’, he says, ‘outside the wall’.
Outside the wall—that is the point. Go back for a moment to the experience I mentioned at the beginning; that of looking up at the stars as you come out from an opera or a feast. The full contrast between the medieval experience and ours is only now apparent. For whatever else we feel, we certainly feel that we are looking out; out of somewhere warm and lighted into dark, cold, indifferent desolation, out of a house on to the dark waste of the sea. But the medieval man felt he was looking in. Here is the outside. The Moon’s orbit is the city wall. Night opens the gates for a moment and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps which are going on inside; staring as animals stare at the fires of the encampment they cannot enter, as rustics stare at a city, as suburbia stares at Mayfair.
I have spoken advisedly of ‘high pomps’. My account so far has perhaps made this complex, densely peopled cosmos a little too severe, made the operations of the spheres and the angels sound, as we should say, ‘a little too like work’. I could correct that more easily if I had slides. I am thinking in particular of one picture which represents the Intelligence of the Primum Mobile itself. It is of course wholly symbolical; they knew perfectly well that such a creature—it had no body—could not be literally depicted at all. But the symbol chosen is delightfully significant. It is a picture of a girl dancing and playing a tambourine; a picture of gaiety, almost of frolic. And why not? These spheres are moved by love, by intellectual desire, never sated because they can never completely assimilate themselves to their object, and never frustrated because they continually do so to the fullest extent which their nature admits or requires. Their existence is thus one of delight. The motions of the universe are to be conceived not as those of a machine or even an army, but rather as a dance, a festival, a symphony, a ritual, a carnival, or all these in one. They are the unimpeded movement of the most perfect impulse towards the most perfect Object.
A modern mind will of course say that the men of that age fashioned heaven in the likeness of Earth and, because they liked high pomps, the Mass, coronations, pageants, tournaments, carols, attributed such activities par excellence to the translunary world. But remember that they thought it was the other way round. They thought that the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the social hierarchy on Earth were dim reproductions of the celestial hierarchies. The pageantry and ceremony which they indulged in to the utmost of their powers were their attempt to imitate the modus operandi of the universe; to live, in that sense, ‘according to nature’. That is why so much medieval art and literature is concerned simply with asserting the nature of things. They liked to tell, and to be told again and again, about the universe I have been describing. Any poet in any poem is liable to start describing the angels, the spheres, the influences, the metals, and a hundred other things I have not had time for—gems, beasts, the Zodiac, the Seven Virtues, the Seven Sins, the Nine Worthies, the nature of winds, the divisions of the soul, herbs, flowers, what not. They wrote it, they sang it, painted it and carved it. Sometimes a whole poem or a whole building seems almost nothing but verbalized or petrified cosmology. In all this I have never found one trace of the savage idea that by representing the things on Earth you somehow helped them to happen in the universe. Their minds were not like that. It was rather the spontaneous desire of us ‘aliens outside the city wall’ to participate as far as we can in the glory of the life of the city; like the Mothers’ Union doing in the village hall the same play that was done in London—a legitimate, absurd attempt, and very good fun for all concerned.
Two points which may have caused some discomfort remain. Is it, imaginatively and emotionally, tolerable to have the Earth spatially central and, at the same time, in some other sense, a furlong outside the wall? And is it quite satisfactory to have an infinite space outside the highest heaven? It is, if we take their thought at its highest level. On that level it involves something of which no model could be drawn on a blackboard, nor even easily made in three dimensions.
Aristotle had said ‘Whatever is outside the highest Heaven is of such a sort that it needs no place, nor does time affect it’. It is typically Aristotelian in its dry caution, typically pagan in its reverent timidity. Taken over by Christians, this of course turns into something much more positive and resounding. As one author says, all that heaven is Deo plenum, full of God. Or, as Dante says, it is luce intellectual piena d’ amore (Paradiso, XXX, 40). In other words there isn’t exactly any space beyond the cosmos. The Empyrean is the boundary of space, not in the absurd sense which would force us to put more space outside it but in the sense that it is the point at which the spatial mode of thought breaks down. To reach the end of space is to reach the end of spatiality.
Dante makes this vivid to us by an astonishing tour de force. He cannot of course make the spaceless imaginable in the strict sense. What he does is to show us space turning inside out; that teaches us pretty effectively that spatial thinking, as we ordinarily know it, has broken down. First, to prepare us, he gives us this remarkable image. The Primum Mobile is described as the ‘vase’ in which time has its roots—‘look elsewhere for its leaves’ (Paradiso, XXVII, 118–20). Time, of course, in the old philosophy, was generated by the movement of the Primum Mobile. But consider the image—a gigantic tree growing downwards through those 118 million miles, its roots in the stars, its leaves being the days and minutes we live through on Earth. I had almost said ‘the leaves of its topmost branches’, for one cannot help thinking of them as topmost: what is down for us must be up for the tree, its sap must be coming up, its roots must be its lowest point. Thus he begins to turn the universe inside out. Then, later, in the Empyrean itself, he is shown a point of light round which nine lights are circling, the nearest to the centre moving at the highest speed and the furthest out at the lowest. Of the centre Beatrice says ‘Heaven and all nature hangs upon that point’ (Paradiso, XXVIII, 41–2); it is what Aristotle says in so many words of the Unmoved Mover. The point is an exposition of God; the nine (so to call them) planets are the nine angelic hierarchies and you see that this is our universe inside out. In our visible world the circumference, the Primum Mobile, moves quickest and is nearest to God; the Moon moves slowest and is nearest what we call the Centre—i.e. the Earth. But the true nature of the universe is exactly the opposite. In the visible and spatial order Earth is centre; in the dynamic, invisible order the Empyrean is centre, and we are indeed ‘outside the city wall’ at the end of all things. And the centre of that Centre, the centre of Earth, is the edge, the very point at which all being and reality finally peter out. For in there (as we call it), out there (as we ought to call it) is Hell—the last outpost, the rim, the place where being is nearest to not-being, where positive unbeing (so to call it) asymptotically approaches that zero it can never quite reach.
Such was the medieval cosmos. It had of course one serious drawback. It wasn’t—or a good deal of it wasn’t—true. I have rather been inviting you to consider it as a work of art; perhaps, after all, the greatest work of art the Middle Ages produced. Of course it was not a mere fantasy. It was intended to cover, and up to a point did cover, the facts as they knew them. And perhaps in calling it untrue, we should all now mean something other than our grandfathers meant. They would have taken the Newtonian account as simply true and the medieval as simply wrong. It would be for them like the difference between a good map and a bad one. I suppose most people would now admit that no picture of the universe we can form is ‘true’ in quite the sense our grandfathers hoped. We would rather speak of ‘models’. And since all are only models, we should be prepared to find in each something of the nature of the artist as well as something of the object. From that point of view, too, a study of the various models has its interest. I think the medieval and Newtonian models—the one so ordered, so sublime, and so festive, the other so trackless, so incapable of form—reflect the older, more formal and intellectual world and the later enthusiastic, romantic world pretty well. What our own models—if you continue to allow us models at all—will reflect, posterity may judge.