CHAPTER XII
The Growth of Knowledge
1300–1517

I. THE MAGICIANS

THE two centuries whose European history has been so hastily sketched in the preceding chapters were still part of what tradition calls the Middle Ages—which we may loosely define as the life of Europe between Constantine and Columbus, 325 to 1492 A.D. AS we summarize now the science, pedagogy, and philosophy of Western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, we must remind ourselves that rational studies had to fight for soil and air in a jungle of superstition, intolerance, and fear. Amid famines, plagues, and wars, in the chaos of a fugitive or divided papacy, men and women sought in occult forces some explanation for the unintelligible miseries of mankind, some magical power to control events, some mystical escape from a harsh reality; and the life of reason moved precariously in a milieu of sorcery, witchcraft, necromancy, palmistry, phrenology, numerology, divination, portents, prophecies, dream interpretations, fateful stellar conjunctions, chemical transmutations, miraculous cures, and occult powers in animals, minerals, and plants. All these marvels remain deathless with us today, and one or another wins from almost every one of us some open or secret allegiance; but their present influence in Europe falls far short of their medieval sway.

The stars were studied not only to guide navigation and date religious festivals, but also to forecast terrestrial occurrences and personal destinies. The pervasive influences of climate and season, the relation of tides to the moon, the lunar periodicity of women, and the dependence of agriculture upon the modes and moods of the sky, seemed to justify the claims of astrology that the heavens of today forecast the events of tomorrow. Such predictions were regularly published (as now), and reached a wide and avid audience. Princes dared not begin a campaign, a battle, a journey, or a building without assurance from the astrologers that the stars were in a propitious configuration. Henry V of England kept his own astrolabe to chart the sky, and when his queen was lying-in he cast his own horoscope of the child.¹ Astrologers were as welcome as humanists at Matthias Corvinus’s enlightened court.

The stars, men believed, were guided by angels, and the air was congested with invisible spirits, some from heaven, some from hell. Demons lurked everywhere, especially in one’s bed; to them some men ascribed their night losses, some women their untimely pregnancies; and theologians agreed that such infernal concubines were real.² At every turn, at any moment, the credulous individual could step out of the sense world into a realm of magic beings and powers. Every natural object had supernatural qualities. Books of magic were among the “best sellers” of the day. The bishop of Cahors was tortured, scourged, and burned at the stake (1317) after confessing that he had burned a wax image of Pope John XXII in the hope that the original, as the magic art promised, would suffer like the effigy.³ People believed that a wafer consecrated by a priest would, if pricked, bleed with the blood of Christ.

The repute of the alchemists had declined, but their honest research and glittering chicanery went on. While royal and papal edicts denounced them, they persuaded some kings that alchemy might replenish exhausted treasuries, and simple people swallowed “potable gold” ⁴ guaranteed to cure anything but gullibility. (Gold is still taken by patients and physicians in treating arthritis.)

The science of medicine contended at every step with astrology, theology, and quackery. Nearly all physicians related the prognosis of a disease to the constellation under which the sufferer had been born or taken ill; so the great surgeon Guy de Chauliac could write (1363), “If anyone is wounded in the neck while the moon is in Taurus, the affliction will be dangerous.” ⁵ One of the earliest printed documents was a calendar published at Mainz (1462) indicating the astrologically best times for bloodletting. Epidemics were widely ascribed to unlucky associations of the stars. Probably through disillusionment with medicine, millions of Christians turned to faith healing. Thousands came to the kings of France or England to be cured of scrofula by a touch of the royal hand. Apparently the custom had begun with Louis IX, whose saintliness led to the belief that he could work miracles. His power was supposed to have gone down to his successors, and, through Isabella of Valois, mother of Edward III, to the rulers of England. More thousands made pilgrimages to curative shrines, and turned some saints into medical specialists; so a chapel of St. Vitus was frequented by sufferers from chorea, since that saint was believed to be a specific for this disease. The tomb of Pierre de Luxembourg, a cardinal who at eighteen died of ascetic austerities, became a favorite goal, where, within fifteen months after his death, 1,964 cures were ascribed to the magic efficacy of his bones.⁶; Quacks flourished, but the law began to hamper them. In 1382 Roger Clerk, who had pretended to cure disease by applying charms, was condemned to ride through London with urinals hanging from his neck.⁷

Most Europeans believed in sorcery—i.e., the power of persons to control evil spirits and secure their help. The Dark Ages had been comparatively enlightened in this respect: Saints Boniface and Agobard denounced the belief in sorcery as sinful and ridiculous; Charlemagne made it a capital crime to execute anyone on a charge of witchcraft; and Pope Gregory VII Hildebrand forbade inquisition to be made for sorcerers as the cause of storms or plagues.⁸ But the emphasis laid by preachers upon the reality of hell and the wiles of Satan strengthened popular belief in the ubiquitous and iniquitous presence of himself or one of his company; and many a diseased mind or desperate soul harbored the idea of summoning such devils to its aid. Accusations of sorcery were made against a great variety of people, including Pope Boniface VIII. In 1315 the aristocrat Enguerrand de Marigny was hanged for sorcery, and in 1317 Pope John XXII ordered the execution of various obscure persons for plotting to kill him by invoking the assistance of demons. John repeatedly denounced the appeal to demons, ordered prosecutions for it, and prescribed penalties; but his edicts were interpreted by the people as confirming their belief in the existence and availability of demonic powers. After 1320 the indictments for sorcery multiplied, and many of the accused were hanged or burned at the stake. It was a common opinion in France that Charles VI had been made insane by magic means; two sorcerers were engaged who promised to restore his wits; when they failed they were beheaded (1397). In 1398 the theological faculty of the University of Paris issued twenty-eight articles condemning sorcery, but assuming its occasional efficacy. Chancellor Gerson pronounced it a heresy to question the existence or activity of demons.⁹

Witchcraft was the practice of sorcery by persons who were alleged to worship Satan, in nocturnal assemblies or “Sabbaths,” as the master of the demons whom they affected to employ. According to popular belief the witches, usually women, secured supernatural powers at the price of this devil-worship. So commissioned, they were supposed to override natural laws, and to bring misfortune or death to whom they wished. Scholars like Erasmus and Thomas More accepted the reality of witchcraft; some priests in Cologne doubted it; the University of Cologne affirmed it.¹⁰ Most churchmen claimed—and lay historians in some measure agree—that the secret gatherings by night were excuses for promiscuous sexual relations, and for initiating young people into the arts of debauchery.¹¹ Whether through insane delusion, or to secure release from torture, many witches allegedly confessed to one or another of the evil practices charged to them. It may be that these “witches’ Sabbaths” served as a moratorium on a burdensome Christianity, and as a partly playful, partly rebellious worship of Satan as the powerful enemy of a God who condemned so many pleasures to repression and so many souls to hell; or these clandestine rites may have recalled and reaffirmed pagan cults and feasts of the deities of earth and field and forest, of procreation and fertility, of Bacchus, Priapus, Ceres, and Flora.

Secular and episcopal courts joined in efforts to suppress what seemed to them the most blasphemous depravity. Several popes—in 1374, 1409, 1437, 1451, and especially Innocent VIII in 1484—commissioned agents of the Inquisition to deal with witches as abandoned heretics, whose sins and machinations blighted the fruit of fields and wombs, and whose pretensions might seduce whole communities into demonolatry. The popes took literally a passage in Exodus (22 :18): “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Nevertheless the ecclesiastical courts, before 1446, contented themselves with mild penalties, unless a pardoned offender relapsed. In 1446 the Inquisition burned several witches at Heidelberg; in 1460 it burned twelve men and women at Arras; and the name V audois given them, as generally to heretics (Waldenses) and witches in France, survived an Atlantic voyage to generate the word Voodooism for Negro sorcery in the French colonies of America.¹² In 1487 the Dominican inquisitor Jacob Sprenger, honestly frightened by the apparent spread of sorcery, published an official guide for the detection of witches, Malleus maleficarum (Hammer of Witches). Maximilian I, then King of the Romans, prefaced with a letter of warm recommendation this “most portentous monument of superstition which the world has produced.” ¹³ These maleficent women, said Sprenger, by stirring up some devilish brew in a caldron, or by other means, can summon swarms of locusts and caterpillars to devour a harvest; they can make men impotent and women barren; they can dry up a woman’s milk, or bring abortion; by a look alone they can cause love or hatred, sickness or death. Some of them kidnap children, roast them, and eat them. They can see things at a distance, and foresee the weather; they can transform themselves, and others, into beasts.¹⁴ Sprenger wondered why there were more female than male witches, and concluded that it was because women were more lightheaded and sensual than men; besides, he added, they had always been favorite instruments of Satan.¹⁵ He burned forty-eight of them in five years. From his time onward the ecclesiastical attack upon witchcraft was intensified until it reached its full fury in the sixteenth century, under Catholic and Protestant auspices alike; in this type of fearful ferocity the Middle Ages were outdone by modern times. In 1554 an officer of the Inquisition boasted that in the preceding 150 years the Holy Office had burned at least 30,000 witches, who, if they had been left unpunished, would have brought the whole world to destruction.¹⁶

Many books were written in this age against superstition, and all contained superstitions.¹⁷ Agostino Trionfo addressed to Pope Clement V a treatise advising him to outlaw occult practices, but Trionfo held it unpardonable in a physician to perform a phlebotomy during certain phases of the moon.¹⁸ Pope John XXII issued powerful blasts against alchemy (1317) and magic (1327); he mourned what he thought was the increasing prevalence of sacrifices to demons, pacts with the Devil, and the making of images, rings, and potions for magical purposes; he pronounced ipso facto excommunication upon all practitioners of such arts; but even he implied a belief in their possible efficacy.¹⁹

The great antagonist of astrology in this age was Nicole Oresme, who died as bishop of Lisieux in 1382. He laughed at astrologers who could not predict the sex of an unborn child but, after its birth, professed to foretell its earthly fate; such horoscopes, said Oresme, are old wives’ tales. Repeating the title and effort of Cicero fourteen centuries back, he wrote De divinatione against the claims of soothsayers, dream interpreters, and the like. Amid his general skepticism of the occult he admitted that some events could be explained as the work of demons or angels. He accepted the notion of the “evil eye”; he thought that a criminal would darken a mirror by looking into it, and that the glance of a lynx could penetrate a wall. He acknowledged the miracles of the Bible, but he repudiated supernatural explanations where natural causes sufficed. Many people, said Nicole, are credulous of magic because they lack acquaintance with natural causes and processes. They accept on hearsay what they have not seen, and so legend—as of a magician climbing a rope thrown into the air—may become a popular belief.²⁰ (This is the oldest-known mention of the rope-climbing myth.) Consequently, Oresme argued, the wide prevalence of a belief is no proof of its truth. Even if many persons claim to have witnessed an event contrary to our ordinary experience of nature, we should hesitate to believe them. Moreover, the senses are so easily deceived! The color, shape, and sound of objects vary with distance, light, and the condition of the sensory organs; an object at rest may seem to be moving, and one in motion may seem at rest; a coin at the bottom of a vase filled with water appears more remote than one so placed in an empty vase. Sensations must be interpreted by judgment, and this too may err. These deceptions of senses and judgment, says Oresme, explain many of the marvels ascribed to supernatural or magical powers.²¹

Despite such brave advances toward a scientific spirit, the old superstitions survived, or merely changed their form. Nor were they confined to the populace. Edward III of England paid a great sum for a phial which, he was assured, had belonged to St. Peter. Charles V of France was shown, in Sainte Chapelle, a phial allegedly containing some of Christ’s blood; he asked his savants and theologians whether this could be true; they answered cautiously in the affirmative.²² It was in this atmosphere that education, science, medicine, and philosophy struggled to grow.

II. THE TEACHERS

The rise of commerce and industry put a new premium on education. Literacy had been a costly luxury in an agricultural regime; it was a necessity in an urban commercial world. Law tardily recognized the change. In England (1391) the feudal landowners petitioned Richard II to enforce the old rule that forbade a serf to send his son to school without his lord’s consent and reimbursement for the loss of a farm hand. Richard refused, and in the next reign a statute decreed that any parent might send any of his children to school.²³

Under this education-emancipation act elementary schools multiplied. In the countryside monastic schools survived; in the cities grade schools were provided by churches, hospitals, chantries, and guilds. Attendance was voluntary but general, even in villages. Usually the teachers were priests, but the proportion of lay instructors rose in the fourteenth century. The curriculum stressed the catechism, the Creed, the basic prayers, reading, writing, arithmetic, singing, and flogging. Even in secondary schools flogging was the staff of instruction. A divine explained that “the boys’ spirits must be subdued”;²⁴ the parents agreed with him; and perhaps ‘tis so. Agnes Paston urged the tutor of her unstudious son to “belash him” if he did not amend, “for I had lever he were fairly buried than lost by default.” ²⁵

Secondary schools continued the religious training, and added grammatica, which included not merely grammar and composition, but the language and expurgated literature of classic Rome; the students—boys of the middle class—learned to read and write Latin, however indifferently, as a necessity in foreign trade as well as in a church career. The best secondary schools of the time were those established in the Lowlands and Germany by the Brethren of the Common Life; the one at Deventer drew 2,000 pupils. The wealthy and energetic Bishop of Winchester, William of Wykeham, set a precedent by founding there (1372) the first of England’s “public” schools-institutions endowed, by private or public philanthropy, to provide college preparatory training for a limited selection of boys. The example was followed by Henry VI, who established (1440) and richly endowed Eton School to prepare students for King’s College, Cambridge.

Above the elementary level the education of women, with some highborn exceptions, was confined to the home. Many women of the middle class, like Margaret Paston, learned to write fair English, and a sprinkling of women acquired some acquaintance with literature and philosophy. The sons of the aristocracy received an education quite different from that of the schools. Till the age of seven they were taught by the women of the house; then they were sent to serve, as pages, a related or neighboring noble. Safe there from the excesses of affection, they learned reading, writing, religion, and manners from the ladies and the local priest. At fourteen they became squires—i.e., adult servitors of their lord. Now they learned to ride, shoot, hunt, joust, and wage war. Book learning they left to their inferiors.

These were meanwhile developing one of the noblest legacies of the Middle Ages—the universities. While the ecstasy of ecclesiastical architecture cooled, the zeal for founding colleges mounted. In this period Oxford saw the establishment of Exeter, Oriel, Queen’s, New, Lincoln, All Souls, Magdalen, Brasenose, and Corpus Christi colleges, and the Divinity School. They were not yet colleges in the modern sense; they were “halls,” places of residence for selected students; hardly a tenth of the pupils at Oxford lived in them. Most university instruction was given by clergymen in schoolrooms or auditoriums scattered about the town. Benedictine monks, Franciscan, Dominican, and other friars maintained their own colleges at Oxford; and from these monastic academies came some of the most brilliant men of the fourteenth century; among them were Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, both of whom did some damage to orthodox theology. Students of law received their training in London, at the Inns of Court.

In Oxford no love was wasted between town and gown—citizens and scholars. In 1355 the hostile camps rushed into open war, and so many heroes were killed that the year was known as that of the Great Slaughter. Despite the introduction of flogging into the universities of England (c. 1350), the students were a troublesome lot. Forbidden to engage in intramural athletics, they spent their energy in profanity, tippling, and venery; taverns and brothels throve on their patronage. Attendance at Oxford fell from its thirteenth-century peak to as low as a thousand; and after the expulsion of Wyclif academic freedom was rigorously curtailed by episcopal control.

Cambridge profited from the Wyclif controversy and the Lollard scare; cautious conservatives kept their sons from Oxford and sent them to the younger university, so that by the end of the fifteenth century the rival institutions had a fairly equal registration. New “halls” were founded along the Cam: Michaelhouse, University or Clare, Pembroke, Gonville and Caius, Trinity, Corpus Christi, King’s, Queen’s, St. Catherine’s, Jesus’, Christ’s, and St. John’s. Like the residence halls at Oxford, these became colleges in our sense during the fifteenth century as more and more teachers chose them as the places where their lectures would draw the largest attendance. Classes began at six in the morning, and continued till five in the afternoon. Meanwhile Scotland and Ireland, out of their poverty, founded the universities of St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, and Trinity College, Dublin—four institutions destined to pour genius, generation after generation, into the intellectual life of the British Isles.

In France, education, like almost everything else, suffered from the Hundred Years’ War. Nevertheless the rising demand for lawyers and physicians, added to the traditional attractions of an ecclesiastical career, encouraged the establishment of new universities at Avignon, Orléans, Cahors, Grenoble, Orange, Aix-en-Provence, Poitiers, Caen, Bordeaux, Valence, Nantes, and Bourges. The University of Paris, perhaps because the monarchy was near collapse, became in the fourteenth century a national power, challenging the Parlement, advising the king, serving as a court of appeals in French theology, and recognized by most continental educators as universitas universitatum. The rise of provincial and foreign universities reduced registration at Paris; even so the faculty of arts alone was reputed to have a thousand teachers and ten thousand pupils in 1406 ;²⁶ and in 1490 the entire university had nearly twenty thousand.²⁷ Some fifty “colleges” helped to house them. Discipline was laxer than at Oxford, and the morals of the students complimented their virility rather than their religion. Courses in Greek, Arabic, Chaldaic, and Hebrew were added to the curriculum.

Spain had founded its leading universities in the thirteenth century—at Palencia, Salamanca, and Lérida; others now rose at Perpignan, Huesca, Valladolid, Barcelona, Saragossa, Palma, Sigüenza, Valencia, Alcalá, and Seville. In these institutions ecclesiastical control was complete, and theology predominated; however, at Alcalá, fourteen chairs were given to grammar, literature, and rhetoric, twelve to divinity and canon law. Alcalá became for a time the greatest educational center in Spain; in 1525 it had an enrollment of seven thousand. Scholarships were provided for needy students. The salary of a professor was regulated by the number of his pupils; and every professor was required to resign quadrennially, being eligible for reappointment if he had proved satisfactory. At Lisbon King Diniz had founded a university in 1300, but the turbulence of the students led him to remove it to Coimbra, whose pride it is today.

Mental activity was in this period more vigorous in Central Europe than in France or Spain. In 1347 Charles IV founded the University of Prague, which soon became the intellectual head and voice of the Bohemian people. Other universities appeared at Cracow, Vienna, Pécs, Geneva, Erfurt, Heidelberg, Cologne, Buda, Würzburg, Leipzig, Rostock, Louvain, Trier, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Greifswald, Basel, Ingolstadt, Pressburg, Mainz, Tübingen, Copenhagen, Uppsala, Frankfurt-an-Oder, and Wittenberg. In the second half of the fifteenth century these institutions seethed with students and debates. Cracow alone had 18,3 38 pupils at one time.²⁸ The Church provided most of the funds, and naturally called the tune of thought; but princes, nobles, cities, and businessmen shared in endowing colleges and scholarships. The Elector Frederick of Saxony financed the University of Wittenberg partly from money that came from the sale of indulgences, but which he refused to remit to Rome.²⁹ Scholasticism sat in the chairs of philosophy, while humanism grew outside the university walls. Hence most of the universities of Germany adhered to the Church during the Reformation, with two significant exceptions: Erfurt, where Luther studied, and Wittenberg, where he taught.

III. THE SCIENTISTS

The scientific mood was hardly more popular with the pundits than with the people. The spirit of the age inclined to the “humanities”; even the revival of Greek studies ignored Greek science. In mathematics the Roman numerals obstructed progress; they seemed inseparable from Latin culture; the Hindu-Arabic numerals seemed heretically Mohammedan, and were coldly received, especially north of the Alps; the Cour des Comptes—the French Bureau of Audit—used the clumsy Roman figures till the eighteenth century. Nevertheless Thomas Bradwardine, who died of the plague (a 349) a month after being consecrated archbishop of Canterbury, introduced into England several Arabic theorems in trigonometry. His pupil, Richard Wallingford, Abbot of St. Albans, was the leading mathematician of the fourteenth century; his Quadripartitum de sinibus demonstratis was the first major work on trigonometry in Western Europe. He died of leprosy at forty-three, mourning the time he had taken from theology for science.

Nicole Oresme led an active ecclesiastical career, and yet invaded a dozen sciences successfully. He paved the way for analytical geometry by developing the systematic use of co-ordinates, and by employing graphs to show the growth of a function. He played with the idea of a fourth dimension, but rejected it. Like several of his contemporaries he adumbrated Galileo’s law that the speed of a falling body increases regularly with the duration of its fall.³⁰ In a commentary on Aristotle’s De caelo et mundo he wrote: “We cannot prove by any experiment that the heavens undergo a daily movement and the earth does not”; there are “good reasons indicating that the earth, and not the sky, undergoes a daily motion.”³¹ Oresme fell back upon the Ptolemaic system, but he had helped to prepare for Copernicus.

When we consider that no telescope or camera existed as yet to watch or record the sky, it is encouraging to note the energy and intelligence of medieval astronomers, Moslem, Jewish, and Christian. Jean de Liniers, after years of personal observations, described the positions of forty-eight stars with an accuracy then rivaled only by Moslems; and he calculated the obliquity of the ecliptic to within seven seconds of the most modern estimate. Jean de Meurs and Firmin de Beauval (1344) proposed to reform the Julian calendar—which was outstripping the sun—by omitting the quadrennial February 29 for the next forty years (which would have erred by excess); the reform had to wait till 1582, and still awaits international and interfaith understandings, William Merle of Oxford rescued meteorology from astrology by keeping record of the weather through 2,556 days. Unknown observers or navigators discovered in the fifteenth century the declination of the magnetic needle: the needle does not point due north, but inclines toward the astronomic meridian at a small but important angle, which, as Columbus noted, varies from place to place.

The peak figure in the mathematics and astronomy of this epoch was Johann Müller, known to history as Regiomontanus from his birth (1436) near Königsberg in Lower Franconia. At fourteen he entered the University of Vienna, where Georg von Purbach was introducing humanism and the latest Italian advances in mathematics and astronomy. Both men matured early and died soon: Purbach at thirty-eight, Müller at forty. Resolved to learn Greek in order to read Ptolemy’s Almagest in the original, Müller went to Italy, studied Greek with Guarino da Verona, and devoured all available texts, Greek or Latin, on astronomy and mathematics. Returning to Vienna, he taught these sciences there, and with such success that he was called to Buda by Matthias Corvinus, and then to Nuremberg, where a rich burgher built for him the first European observatory. Müller equipped it with instruments built or improved by himself. We feel the pure breeze of science in a letter that he wrote to a fellow mathematician in 1464: “I do not know whither my pen will run; it will use up all my paper if I don’t stop it. One problem after another occurs to me, and there are so many beautiful ones that I hesitate as to which I should submit to you.”³² In 1475 Sixtus IV summoned him to Rome to reform the calendar. There, a year later, Regiomontanus died.

The short span of his life limited his achievement. He had planned treatises on mathematics, physics, astrology, and astronomy, and had hoped to edit the classics in those sciences; only fragments of these works found form and survival. He completed Purbach’s Epitome of the Almagest. He composed an essay De triangulis—the first book devoted solely to trigonometry. He was apparently the first to suggest the use of tangents in astronomic calculations, and his tables of sines and tangents facilitated the calculations of Copernicus. He formulated astronomical tables more accurate than any drawn up before. His method of calculating latitude and longitude proved a boon to mariners. Under the title of Ephemerides he issued (1474) an almanac showing the daily position of the planets for the next thirty-two years; from this book Columbus would predict the lunar eclipse that would fill the stomachs of his starving men on February 29, 1504. The observations made of Halley’s comet by Regiomontanus laid the bases of modern cometary astronomy. But his personal and living influence was greater than that of his books. His popular lectures in science helped to raise an intellectual exhilaration in Nuremberg in Dürer’s youth; and he made the city famous for its nautical instruments and maps. One of his pupils, Martin Behaim, drew in color on vellum the oldest known terrestrial globe (1492), still preserved in the Germanisches Museum in Nuremberg.

Modern geography was created not by geographers but by sailors, merchants, missionaries, envoys, soldiers, and pilgrims. Catalonian skippers made or used excellent maps; their portolani—pilot guides to Mediterranean ports—were in the fourteenth century almost as accurate as the navigation charts of our time.³³ Old trade routes to the East having fallen into Turkish hands, European importers developed new overland routes through Mongol territory. The Franciscan friar Oderic of Pordenone, after spending three years in Peking (c. 1323–26), wrote an illuminating record of his trip to China via India and Sumatra, and of his return via Tibet and Persia. Clavijo, as we shall see, gave a fascinating account of his embassy to Timur. Johann Schnittberger of Bavaria, captured by the Turks at Nicopolis (1396), wandered for thirty years in Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Russia, and Siberia, and wrote in his Reisebuch the first West-European description of Siberia. In 1500 Juan de la Cosa, one of Columbus’ pilots, issued an extensive map of the world, showing for the first time in cartography the explorations of his master, of Vasco da Gama, and others. Geography was a moving drama in the fifteenth century.

In one particular the most influential medieval treatise on geography was the Imago mundi (1410) of Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, which encouraged Columbus by describing the Atlantic as traversable “in a very few days if the wind be fair.” ³⁴ It was but one of half a dozen works that this alert ecclesiastic wrote on astronomy, geography, meteorology, mathematics, logic, metaphysics, psychology, and the reform of the calendar and the Church. Reproached for giving so much time to secular studies, he replied that a theologian should keep abreast of science.³⁵ He saw some science even in astrology; and on astrological grounds he predicted a great change in Christianity within a hundred years, and world-shaking events in 1789.³⁶

The best scientific thought of the fourteenth century was in physics. Dietrich of Freiburg (d. 1311) gave essentially our modern explanation of the rainbow as due to two refractions, and one reflection, of the sun’s rays in drops of water. Jean Buridan did excellent work in theoretical physics; it is a pity that he is famous only for his ass, which may not have been his.* Born near Arras before 1300, Buridan studied and taught at the University of Paris. He not only argued for the daily rotation of the earth, but he eliminated from astronomy the angelic intelligences to which Aristotle and Aquinas had ascribed the guidance and motion of the heavenly bodies. Nothing more is needed to explain their movements, said Buridan, than a start originally given them by God, and the law of impetus—that a body in motion continues its motion except as hindered by some existing force; here Buridan anticipated Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The motions of planets and stars, he added, are governed by the same mechanical laws that operate on earth.³⁷ These propositions, now so trite, were deeply damaging to the medieval world view. They almost date the beginning of astronomical physics.

Buridan’s ideas were taken to Germany and Italy by his pupils, and influenced Leonardo, Copernicus, Bruno, and Galileo.³⁸ Albert of Saxony carried them to the university that he founded at Vienna (1364), Marsilius von Inghen to the university that he founded at Heidelberg (1386). Albert was one of the first to reject the Aristotelian notion that a vacuum is impossible; he developed the idea of a center of gravity in every body; he anticipated Galileo’s principles of static equilibrium and the uniform acceleration of falling bodies; and he held that the erosion of mountains by water, and the gradual or volcanic elevation of the land, are compensating forces in geology³⁹—an idea that fascinated Leonardo.

Practical mechanics made some modest advances. Complicated windmills were used to pump water, drain soil, grind grain, and do other chores. Water power was employed in smelting and sawing, in driving furnace bellows, tilt hammers, silk-spinning machines. Cannon were cast and bored. Steel was made in sizable quantities; large blast furnaces were set up in northern Europe in the fourteenth century. Well boring is mentioned in 1373; wiredrawing was practiced at Nuremberg in the fifteenth century; a pump composed of buckets on an endless chain is pictured in a manuscript of 1438.⁴⁰ In a drawing by the Hussite engineer Conrad Keyser (c. 1405) occurs the earliest known representation of reciprocating motion converted into rotary motion: two arms, moving in alternation, revolve a shaft precisely as the pistons turn the crankshaft of an automobile.⁴¹

Better mechanisms for measuring time were demanded as commerce and industry grew. Monks and farmers had divided the daylight into the same number of periods in all seasons, making the periods longer in summer than in winter. City life required more uniform divisions of time, and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries clocks and watches were made that divided the day into equal parts throughout the year. In some places the hours were numbered from one to twenty-four, as in the military chronometry of our time; and as late as 1370 some clocks, like that of San Gotardo in Milan, struck the full number. This proved to be a noisy extravagance. By 1375 the day was regularly divided into two halves of twelve hours each.

The essential principle of the mechanical clock was a weight slowly turning a wheel, whose revolution was checked by an escapement tooth sufficiently resistant to allow the wheel to turn by only one cog in a given interval of time. Such a timepiece had been described about 1271. The first mechanical clocks were set up in church towers or belfries visible through large areas of a town. One of the earliest was installed (1326–35) in the abbey of St. Albans by Richard Wallingford; it showed not only the hours and minutes of the day but the ebb and flow of the tide, and the motions of the sun and moon. Later clocks added a medley of gadgets. The clock (1352) in Strasbourg Cathedral showed a crowing cock, the three Magi, and a human figure on which were indicated, for each part of the body, the proper time for bloodletting. The cathedral clock at Wells used a moving image of the sun to point the hour, and a small star, moving on an inner circle, to indicate the minute; a third circle gave the day of the month; and on a platform above the dial four horsemen emerged and charged as each hour struck. On a fifteenth-century clock at Jena a buffoon’s head opened its monstrous mouth to receive a golden apple from a pilgrim, only to have the apple snatched away as his mouth began to close upon it; this comedy was performed every hour of every day for hundreds of years; and the clock still exists. A similar clock at Nuremberg, set up in 1506 and rudely interrupted by the second World War, resumed its theatrical performances in 1953.

To make watches a spiral spring was substituted (c. 1450) for the hanging weight: a band of fine steel, rolled up into a small circle or drum, produced, by its gradual unwinding, the effect of the weight on the retarded wheel. By the end of the fifteenth century watches were numerous, some as large as a hand, some as small as an almond, many ovoid like the “Nuremberg eggs” made by Peter Hele (1510). The principle of weight, escapement, and wheel was applied to other purposes, so that the mechanical clock became the parent of a myriad diverse machines.

While physics thus foreshadowed the Industrial Revolution, alchemy slowly grew into chemistry. By the close of this age the alchemists had discovered and described zinc, bismuth, liver of sulfur, regulus of antimony, volatile fluorine of alkali, and many other substances. They distilled alcohol, volatilized mercury, and made sulfuric acid by the sublimation of sulfur. They prepared ether and aqua regia, and a scarlet dye superior to those now used.⁴² They bequeathed to chemistry the experimental method that would prove the greatest gift of medieval science to the modern mind.

Botany was still mostly confined to manuals of husbandry or to herbals describing medicinal plants. Henry of Hesse (1325–97) suggested that new species, especially among plants, might evolve naturally from old ones;⁴³ this 500 years before Darwin. Royal or papal menageries, animal breeding, veterinary medicine, treatises on hunting or fishing or the culture of bees or silkworms, bestiaries that told animal stories to insinuate morality, and books on falconry, like the Miroir de Phoebus (1387) of Gaston III Count of Foix, half unwittingly gathered material for a science of zoology.

Anatomy and physiology had for the most part to depend upon the dis section of animals, the wounds of soldiers, and occasional cases where the law required post-mortem autopsy. Honest Christians felt reasonable objections to the dissection of human bodies which, however dead, were supposed to rise intact from the grave at the Last Judgment. All through the fourteenth century it was difficult to get cadavers for anatomical study; north of the Alps very few physicians, before 1450, had ever seen a dissected human corpse. Nevertheless, about 1360, Guy de Chauliac persuaded the authorities at Avignon (then ruled by the papal court) to turn over to medical schools, for dissection, the bodies of executed criminals.⁴⁴ Dissections were performed before medical students at Venice in 1368, Montpelier in 1377, Florence in 1388, Lérida in 1391, Vienna in 1404; and in 1445 the University of Padua built the first known anatomical theater. The results for medicine were endless.

IV. THE HEALERS

In the science and practice of medicine, as in literature and art, northern Europe was half a century or more behind Italy; and even Italy had by 1300 barely regained the medical knowledge reached by Galen and Soranus a thousand years before. But the medical schools at Montpelier, Paris, and Oxford were making good progress, and the greatest surgeons of this age were French. The profession was now well organized, and defended its privileges lustily; but as the demand for health always exceeded the supply, herbalists, apothecaries, midwives, wandering leeches, and barber surgeons—not to mention quacks—everywhere competed with trained practitioners. The public, inviting disease by wrong living, and then seeking infallible diagnoses and cheap overnight cures, made the usual complaints about mercenary or murderous doctors. Froissart considered it “the object of all medical men to gain large salaries” ⁴⁵—as if this were not a disease endemic to all civilization.

The most interesting medical men of the age were the surgeons. They had not yet persuaded the physicians to recognize them as equals; indeed, the University of Paris would admit no student to its school of medicine in the fourteenth century except on his oath never to perform a surgical operation. Even bloodletting, which had already become a panacea, was forbidden to physicians, and had to be left to their underlings. Barbers were still used by the people for many operations; but the barber surgeons were now abandoning tonsorial practice, and were specializing in surgery; in 1365 there were forty such barber surgeons in Paris; in England they continued till 1540.

An ordinance of 1372 restricted them in France to the treatment of “wounds not of a character likely to cause death”; and thereafter major operations could be legally performed only by “master surgeons” dedicated to their specialty. A Royal College of Surgeons was chartered at Edinburgh in 1505.

The great names in surgery, in the first half of the fourteenth century, were Henri de Mondeville and Guy de Chauliac. Froissart might have noted that Mondeville, though always in great demand, remained poor to the end of his days, and carried on his work despite his own asthma and tuberculosis. His Chirurgia (1306–20), the first work on surgery by a Frenchman, covered the whole field with a thoroughness and competence that earned a new standing for surgeons. His distinctive contribution was the application and development of a method which he had learned from Theodoric Borgognoni at Bologna for treating wounds by complete cleansing, prevention of suppuration, exclusion of air, and dressings with wine. He defended his innovations by warning against a supine acceptance of Galen or other classic authorities. “Modern authors,” he wrote, using a favorite medieval adjective, “are to the ancient like a dwarf placed upon the shoulders of a giant; he sees all that the giant sees, and farther still.”⁴⁶

The generation after him produced the most famous of medieval surgeons. Born of peasant stock in the French village that gave him its name, Guy de Chauliac so impressed the lords of the manor that they paid his tuition at Toulouse, Montpelier, Bologna, and Paris. In 1342 he became papal physician at Avignon, and held that difficult position for twenty-eight years. When the Black Death struck Avignon he stayed at his post, ministered to the victims, contracted the pestilence, and barely survived. Like any man, he committed serious errors: he blamed the plague now on an unfortunate conjunction of planets, now on Jews aiming to poison all Christendom; and he retarded the surgery of wounds by rejecting Mondeville’s simple cleansing method and returning to the use of plasters and salves. But for the most part he lived up to the finest traditions of his great profession. His Chirurgia magna (1363) was the most thorough, systematic, and learned treatise on surgery produced before the sixteenth century.

Social and individual hygiene hardly kept pace with the advances of medicine. Personal cleanliness was not a fetish; even the King of England bathed only once a week, and sometimes skipped. The Germans had public bathslarge vats in which the bathers stood or sat naked, sometimes both sexes together;⁴⁷ Ulm alone had 168 such Badestuben in 1489. In all Europe—not always excepting the aristocracy—the same article of clothing was worn for months, or years, or generations. Many cities had a water supply, but it reached only a few homes; most families had to fetch water from the nearest fountain, well, or spring. The air of London was befouled by the odor of slaughtered cattle, till such carnage was forbidden in 1371. The smell of latrines detracted from the idyllic fantasies of rural life. London tenements had but one latrine for all occupants; many houses had none at all, and emptied their ordure into the yards or streets. Thousands of privies poured into the Thames; a city ordinance of 1357 denounced this, but the practice continued. In 1388, prodded by several returns of the plague, Parliament passed the first Sanitary Act for all England:

Similar ordinances were promulgated in France about this time. In 1383 Marseille, following the example of Ragusa (1377), ordered the isolation of plague-stricken persons for forty days—a quarantine. Epidemics continued to occur—the sweating sickness in England (1486, 1508), diphtheria and smallpox in Germany (1492)—but with diminished virulence and mortality. Though sanitation was lax, hospitals were relatively abundant; in 1500 England had 460, York alone had sixteen.⁴⁹

The treatment of the insane gradually passed from superstitious reverence or barbaric cruelty to semi-scientific care. In 1300 the corpse of a girl who had claimed to be the Holy Ghost was dug up and burned by ecclesiastical order, and two women who expressed belief in her claim perished at the stake.⁵⁰ In 1359 the Archbishop of Toledo commissioned the civil authorities to burn alive a Spaniard who professed to be a brother of the Archangel Michael, and to visit heaven and hell daily.⁵¹ Matters improved in the fifteenth century. A monk named Jean Joffre, filled with compassion for lunatics who were being hooted through the streets of Valladolid by a mob, established there an asylum for the insane (1409); and his example was followed in other cities. The hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, founded in London in 1247, was transformed into an insane asylum in 1402, and the word Bethlehem, corrupted into Bedlam, became a synonym for a place of insanity.

Confirmed lepers were still outcast from society, but leprosy almost disappeared from Western Europe in the fifteenth century. Syphilis took its place. Possibly a development of the gros vérole previously known in France, possibly an importation from America,* it appeared definitely in Spain in 1493, in Italy in 1495; it spread so widely in France that it came to be called morbus gallicus; and some cities in Germany were so ravaged by it that they begged exemption from taxation.⁵² As early as the end of the fifteenth century we hear of mercury being used in treating it. The progress of medicine ran a brave race then as now with the inventiveness of disease.

V. THE PHILOSOPHERS

Though the age of the system-makers had passed, philosophy was still vigorous; indeed in the fourteenth century it shook the whole dogmatic structure of Christendom. A change of emphasis ended the sway of the theologians in philosophy: the leading thinkers now took a major interest in science, like Buridan, or in economics, like Oresme, or in Church organization, like Nicholas of Cusa, or in politics, like Pierre Dubois and Marsilius of Padua. Intellectually these men were quite the equal of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Siger de Brabant, Bonaventura, and Duns Scotus.

Scholasticism—both as a method of argument and exposition and as an attempt to show the consistency of reason with faith—continued to dominate the northern universities. Aquinas was canonized in 1323; thereafter his fellow Dominicans, especially at Louvain and Cologne, felt it a point of honor to maintain his doctrine against all challenges. The Franciscans, as a loyal opposition, preferred to follow Augustine and Duns Scotus. One unmoored Dominican, William Durand of Saint-Pourçain, shocked his order by going over to the Scotists. At thirty-eight (c. 1308) he began a vast commentary, which he finished in old age. As he progressed he abandoned Aristotle and Aquinas, and proposed to put reason above the authority of “any doctor, however famous or solemn”—here was a philosopher with some sense of humor.⁵³ While remaining overtly orthodox in theology, he prepared for the uncompromising nominalism of Ockham by restoring the conceptualism of Abélard: only individual things exist; all abstract or general ideas are merely the useful shorthand concepts of the mind. William’s friends called him Doctor Resolutissimus; his opponents called him Durus Durandus—Durand the Hard—and warmed themselves with the hope that the fires of hell would soften him at last.

William of Ockham was much harder, but did not wait till death to burn; his whole life was one of hot controversy, cooled only by occasional imprisonment, and the compulsion of the times to phrase his heat in Scholastic form. He admitted in philosophy no authority but experience and reason. He took his theorems passionately, and set half of Europe by the ears in defending his views. His life, adventures, and aims prefigure Voltaire’s, and perhaps his effect was as great.

We cannot say precisely where or when he was born; probably at Ockham in Surrey, toward the end of the thirteenth century. While yet young he entered the Franciscan order, and about the age of twelve he was sent to Oxford as a bright lad who would surely be a shining light in the Church. At Oxford, and perhaps at Paris, he felt the influence of another subtle Franciscan, Duns Scotus; for though he opposed the “realism” of Scotus, he carried his predecessor’s rationalist critique of philosophy and theology many steps further to a skepticism that would dissolve alike religious dogmas and scientific laws. He taught for six years at Oxford, and may have taught at Paris. Apparently before 1324—while still a tyro in his twenties—he wrote commentaries on Aristotle and Peter Lombard, and his most influential book, Summa totius logicae—a summary of all logic.

It seems at first sampling to be a dreary desert of logic-chopping and technical terminology, a lifeless procession of definitions, divisions, subdivisions, distinctions, classifications, and subtleties. Ockham knew all about “semantics”; he deplored the inaccuracy of the terms used in philosophy, and spent half his time trying to make them more precise. He resented the Gothic edifice of abstractions—one mounted upon the other like arches in superimposed tiers—that medieval thought had raised. We cannot find in his extant works precisely the famous formula that tradition called “Ockham’s razor”: entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem—entities are not to be multiplied beyond need. But he expressed the principle in other terms again and again: pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate—a plurality (of entities or causes or factors) is not to be posited (or assumed) without necessity;⁵⁴ and frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora—it is vain to seek to accomplish or explain by assuming several entities or causes what can be explained by fewer.⁵⁵ The principle was not new; Aquinas had accepted it, Scotus had used it.⁵⁶ But in Ockham’s hands it became a deadly weapon, cutting away a hundred occult fancies and grandiose abstractions.

Applying the principle to epistemology, Ockham judged it needless to assume, as the source and material of knowledge, anything more than sensations. From these arise memory (sensation revived), perception (sensation interpreted through memory), imagination (memories combined), anticipation (memory projected), thought (memories compared), and experience (memories interpreted through thought). “Nothing can be an object of the nterior sense” (thought) “without having been an object of the exterior sense” (sensation);⁵⁷ here is Locke’s empiricism 300 years before Locke. All that we ever perceive outside ourselves is individual entities—specific persons, places, things, actions, shapes, colors, tastes, odors, pressures, temperatures, sounds; and the words by which we denote these are “words of first intention” or primary intent, directly referring to what we interpret as external realities. By noting and abstracting the common features of similar entities so perceived, we may arrive at general or abstract ideas—man, virtue, height, sweetness, heat, music, eloquence; and the words by which we denote such abstractions are “words of second intention,” referring to conceptions derived from perceptions. These “universals” are never experienced in sensation; they are termini, signa, nomina—terms, signs, names—for generalizations extremely useful (and dangerous) in thought or reason, in science, philosophy, and theology; they are not objects existing outside the mind. “Everything outside the mind is singular, numerically one.”⁵⁸ Reason is magnificent, but its conclusions have meaning only in so far as they refer to experience—i.e., to the perception of individual entities, or the performance of individual acts; otherwise its conclusions are vain and perhaps deceptive abstractions. How much nonsense is talked or written by mistaking ideas for things, abstractions for realities! Abstract thought fulfills its function only when it leads to specific statements about specific things.

From this “nominalism” Ockham moved with devastating recklessness into every field of philosophy and theology. Both metaphysics and science, he announced, are precarious generalizations, since our experience is only of individual entities in a narrowly restricted area and time; it is mere arrogance on our part to assume the universal and eternal validity of the general propositions and “natural laws” that we derive from this tiny sector of reality. Our knowledge is molded and limited by our means and ways of perceiving things (this is Kant before Kant); it is locked un in the prison of our minds, and it must not pretend to be the objective or ultimate truth about anything.⁵⁹

As for the soul, it too is an abstraction. It never appears in our sensations or perceptions, external or internal; all that we perceive is will, the ego asserting itself in every action and thought. Reason itself and all the glory of intellect are tools of the will; the intellect is merely the will thinking, seeking its ends by thought.⁶⁰ (This is Schopenhauer.)

God Himself seems to fall before this razor philosophy. Ockham (like Kant) found no conclusive force in any of the arguments used to prove the existence of deity. He rejected Aristotle’s notion that the chain of motions or causes compels us to assume a Prime Mover or First Cause; an “infinite regress” of motions or causes is no more inconceivable than the unmoved Mover or uncaused Cause of Aristotle’s theology.⁶¹ Since nothing can be known save through direct perception, we can never have any clear knowledge that God exists—non potest sciri evidenter quod Deus est. ⁶² That God is omnipotent or infinite, omniscient or benevolent or personal, cannot be shown by reason; much less can reason prove that there are three persons in one God, or that God became man to atone for Adam and Eve’s disobedience, or that the Son of God is present in the consecrated Host.⁶³ Nor is monotheism more rational than polytheism; there may be more worlds than one, and more gods to govern them.⁶⁴

What then remained of the majestic edifice of Christian faith, its lovely myths and songs and art, its God-given morality, its fortifying hope? Ockham recoiled before the ruin of theology by reason, and in a desperate effort to save a social order based on a moral code based on religious belief, he proposed at last to sacrifice reason on the altar of faith. Though it cannot be proved, it is probable that God exists, and that He has endowed each of us with an immortal soul.⁶⁵ We must distinguish (as Averroës and Duns Scotus had advised) between theological truth and philosophical truth, and humbly accept in faith what proud reason doubts.

It was too much to expect that this caudal appendage in honor of “practical reason” would be accepted by the Church as atoning for Ockham’s critique of pure reason. Pope John XXII ordered an ecclesiastical inquiry into the “abominable heresies” of the young friar, and summoned him to appear at the papal court in Avignon. Ockham came, for we find him, in 1328, in a papal prison there, with two other Franciscans. The three escaped, and fled to Aiguesmortes; they embarked in a small boat, and were picked up by a galley that took them to Louis of Bavaria at Pisa. The Pope excommunicated them, the Emperor protected them. William accompanied Louis to Munich, joined Marsilius of Padua there, lived in an anti-papal Franciscan monastery, and issued from it a torrent of books and pamphlets against the power and heresies of the popes in general, and of John XXII in particular.

As he had in his metaphysics outdone the skepticism of Scotus, so now in his practical theory Ockham carried to daring conclusions the anticlericalism of Marsilius of Padua. He applied his “razor” to the dogmas and rites that the Church had added to early Christianity, and demanded a return to the simpler creed and worship of the New Testament. In a pugnacious Centiloquium theologicum he brought before the tribunal of his reason a hundred dogmas of the Church, and argued that many of them led logically to intolerable absurdities. If, for example, Mary is the Mother of God, and God is father of us all, Mary is the mother of her father.⁶⁶ Ockham questioned the Apostolic Succession of the popes, and their infallibility; on the contrary, he urged, many of them had-been heretics, and some had been criminals.⁶⁷ He advocated a lenient treatment of heresy, proposing that all expression of opinion be left free except for the dissemination of conscious falsehood.⁶⁸ What Christianity needed, he thought, was a return from the Church to Christ, from wealth and power to simplicity of life and humility of rule. The Church should be defined not as the clergy alone but as the whole Christian community. This entire fellowship, including the women, should choose representatives, including women, to a general council, and this council should choose and govern the pope. Church and state should be under one head.⁶⁹

The state itself should be subject to the will of the people, for in them is vested all final sovereignty on the earth. They delegate their right of legislation and administration to a king or emperor on the understanding that he will enact laws for the welfare of all. If the common good requires it, private property may be abolished.⁷⁰ If the ruler commits a great crime, or is guilty of negligence so extreme that it threatens the survival of the state, the people may justly depose him.

We know little of Ockham’s fate. The beer of Munich could not console him for the lost wine of Paris. He compared himself to John the Evangelist on Patmos, but he dared not leave the protective orbit of the Emperor. According to a Franciscan chronicler the rebel in his final years signed a recantation of his heresies. Perhaps the reconciliation of Louis with the Church made this advisable; and William may have come to feel that to question the truth of a religion’s dogmas is jejune. He died of the Black Death in 1349 or 1350, still in the prime of life.⁷¹

Long before his death he was recognized as the most forceful thinker of his age, and the universities shook with disputes over his philosophy. Many theologians accepted his view that the basic tenets of the Christian religion could not be proved by reason;⁷² and the distinction between philosophical truth and religious truth was as widely spread in the fourteenth century as is today the tacit truce between scientific inquiry and religious ministrations. At Oxford a school of Ockhamists took form, called itself the via moderna (as Abélard had called his conceptualism 300 years before), and smiled at the metaphysical realism of Scotus and Aquinas.⁷³ The modernists were especially victorious in the universities of Central Europe; Huss at Prague and Luther at Erfurt were taught nominalism, and may have been conditioned by it for their revolt. At Paris the university authorities forbade (1339–40) the teaching of Ockham’s views, but many of the students, and some masters, acclaimed him as the standard-bearer of free thought, and more than once the opposed factions, as in our times, fought with words and fists in the cafés or the streets.⁷⁴ It was probably in reaction against Ockhamism that Thomas à Kempis condemned philosophy in The Imitation of Christ.

Ockham played a part, if only as a voice, in the uprising of the nationalist state against the universalist Church. His propaganda for ecclesiastical poverty influenced Wyclif, and his assaults upon the papacy, as well as his constant appeal from the Church to the Bible and early Christianity, prepared for Luther, who ranked Ockham as the “chiefest and most ingenious of Scholastic doctors.”⁷⁵ His voluntarism and individualism expressed in advance the heady spirit of the Renaissance. His skepticism passed down to Ramus and Montaigne, perhaps to Erasmus; his subjectivist limitation of knowledge to ideas foreshadowed Berkeley; his attempt to rescue faith through “practical reason” anticipated Kant. Though philosophically an idealist, his emphasis on sensation as the sole source of knowledge gave him a place in the procession of empirical English philosophy from Roger and Francis Bacon through Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill, and Spencer to Bertrand Russell. His occasional sallies into physical science—his perception of a law of inertia, his doctrine of action at a distance—stimulated thinkers from Jean Buridan to Isaac Newton.⁷⁶ The general effect of his work, like that of Duns Scotus, was to undermine the basic assumption of Scholasticism—that medieval Christian dogma could be proved by reason. Scholasticism maintained till the seventeenth century a pallid post-mortem existence, but it never recovered from these blows.

VI. THE REFORMERS

While ibn-Khaldun was founding sociology in Islam, Pierre Dubois, Nicole Oresme, Marsilius of Padua, and Nicholas of Cusa were developing kindred studies, less systematically, in Christendom. Dubois served Philip IV of France as Ockham and Marsilius served Louis of Bavaria, by aiming intellectual broadsides against the papacy, and singing doxologies to the state. In a Supplication du peuple de France au roi contre le pape Boniface (1308), and in a treatise De recuperatione terre sanete (On the Recapture of the Holy Land, 1305), the ardent lawyer recommended that the papacy should shed all its temporal possessions and powers, that the rulers of Europe should repudiate the papal authority in their realms, and that the French Church should divorce itself from Rome and submit to secular authority and law. Moreover, proceeded Dubois, all Europe should be united under the French king as emperor, with his capital at Constantinople as a bastion against Islam. An international court should be established to adjudicate the quarrels of nations, and an economic boycott should be declared against any Christian nation that should open war against another. Women should have the same educational opportunities and political rights as men.

No one seemed to pay much attention to these proposals, but they entered into the intellectual currents that undermined the papacy. Two centuries after Dubois, Henry VIII, who doubtless had never heard of him, followed his program, and Wyclif’s, in religion; and in the early nineteenth century Napoleon set up for a moment a united Europe under French leadership, with the pope a captive of the state. Dubois belonged to that rising legal profession which aspired to replace the clergy in administering the government. He won his battle; we live in the heyday of his victory.

Oresme, who stirred so manv pools, wrote toward 1355 one of the clearest and most straightforward essays in all economic literature—On the Origin, Nature, Law, and Alterations of Money. The money of a country, he argued, belongs to the community, not to the king; it is a social utility, not a royal perquisite; the ruler or government may regulate its issue, but should make no profit from minting it, and should maintain its metallic quality undebased. A king who dilutes the coinage is a thief.⁷⁷ Moreover, bad money (as “Gresham’s Law” would say two centuries later) drives good money out of circulation; people will secrete or export good coin, and the dishonest government will receive in its revenues only its depreciated currency. These ideas of Oresme were not merely ideals; he taught them, as tutor, to the son of John II. When his pupil became Charles V, the young King, after one desperate devaluation, profited from his teacher’s instruction by restoring the shattered finances of war-ridden France to a sound and honest basis.

Marsilius of Padua was of more volatile temperament than Oresme: an uncompromising individualist proud of his intellect and courage, and making his political philosophy an inextricable part of his hectic life. Son of a notary in Padua, he studied medicine at the university; probably he owed some of his anticlerical radicalism to the atmosphere of Averroistic skepticism that Petrarch found and denounced there in the same generation. Passing to Paris, he became for a year rector of the university. In 1324, with the minor collaboration of John of Jandun, he composed the most remarkable and influential political treatise of the Middle Ages —Defensor pacts (The Defender of Peace). Knowing that the book must be condemned by the Church, the authors fled to Nuremberg and placed themselves under the wing of the Emperor Louis of Bavaria, then at war with the pope.

They could not have expected so lusty a fighter as John XXII to take calmly their bellicose defense of peace. The book argued that the peace of Europe was being destroyed by strife between state and Church, and that peace could be restored and best maintained by bringing the Church, with all her property and personnel, under the same Imperial or royal authority as other groups and goods. It was (ran the argument) a mistake for the Church ever to have acquired property; nothing in Scripture justified such acquisition.

Like Ockham, the authors defined the Church as the whole body of Christians. As the Roman people, in Roman law, was the real sovereign, and merely delegated its authority to consuls, senate, or emperors, so the Christian community should delegate, but should never surrender, its powers to its representatives, the clergy; and these should be held responsible to the people whom they represent. The derivation of the papal supremacy from the Apostle Peter is, in Marsilius’s view, an historical error; Peter had no more authority than the other Apostles, and the bishops of Rome, in their first three centuries, had no more authority than the bishops of several other ancient capitals. Not the pope but the emperor or his delegates presided over the first general councils. A general council, freely elected by the people of Christendom, should interpret the Scriptures, define the Catholic faith, and choose the cardinals, who should choose the pope.⁷⁸ In all temporal matters the clergy, including the pope, should be subject to civil jurisdiction and law. The state should appoint and remunerate the clergy, fix the number of churches and priests, remove such priests as it finds unworthy, take control of ecclesiastical endowments, schools, and income, and relieve the poor out of the surplus revenues of the Church.⁷⁹

Here again was the strident voice of the upsurging national state. Having, through the support of the rising middle classes, subdued the barons and the communes, the kings now felt strong enough to repudiate the claims of the Church to sovereignty over the civil power. Seizing the opportunity presented by the deterioration of the Church’s international and intellectual authority, the secular rulers now dreamed of mastering every phase of life in their realms, including religion and the Church. This was the basic issue that would be fought out in the Reformation; and the triumph of the state over the Church would mark one terminus of the Middle Ages. (In 1535 Henry VIII, at the height of his revolt against the Church, had the Defensor pads translated and published at governmental expense.)

Marsilius, like Ockham and Luther, after proposing to replace the authority of the Church with that of the people, was compelled, both for social order and for his own security, to replace it with the authority of the state. But he did not raise the kings into ogres of omnipotence. He looked beyond the triumph of the state to the day when the people might actually exercise the sovereignty that legal theorists had long affected to vest in them. In ecclesiastical reform-he advocated democracy: each Christian community should choose its representative to church councils, each parish should choose its own priests, control them, dismiss them if need should be; and no member of the parish should be excommunicated without its consent. Marsilius applied similar principles to civil government, but with hesitant modifications:

This is a remarkable statement for its time (1324), and the conditions of the age justify its hesitations. Even Marsilius would not advocate equal suffrage for all adults in a Europe where hardly one person in ten could read, communication was difficult, and class divisions were mortised in the cement of time. Indeed, he rejected complete democracy, wherein policy and legislation would be determined by a count of noses (egenorum multitudo—“a multitude of needy people”); and to correct this “corruption of a republic” he was willing that individuals should have political power commensurate with their value to the community—though he did not say how or by whom this was to be judged. He left room for monarchy, but added that “a ruler who is elected is greatly to be preferred to rulers who are hereditary.”⁸¹ The king is to be a delegate and servant of the public; and if he seriously misbehaves it may rightly depose him.⁸²

These ideas had a medieval, even an ancient, origin: the Roman lawyers and the Scholastic philosophers had regularly endowed the people with a theoretical sovereignty; the papacy itself was an elective monarchy; the pope called himself servus servorum Dei—“servant of the servants of God”; and Thomas Aquinas had agreed with John of Salisbury on the right of the people to overthrow a lawless king. But rarely in Christendom had these ideas been extended to so explicit a formulation of representative government. Here in one man, in the fourteenth century, were the ideas of both the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution.

Marsilius was too far ahead of his time to be comfortable. He rose rapidly with Louis of Bavaria, and fell rapidly with his fall. When Louis made peace with the popes he was required to dismiss Marsilius as a heretic. We do not know the sequel. Apparently Marsilius died in 1343, an outcast alike from the Church that he had fought and from the state that he had labored to exalt.

His temporary success would have been impossible had not the rising legal profession given to the state an authority rivaling that of the Church. Over the ruins of feudal and communal law, beside and often against the canon law of the Church, the lawyers raised the “positive law” of the state; and year by year this royal or secular law extended its reach over the affairs of men. The law schools of Montpelier, Orléans, and Paris turned out bold and subtle legists who used Roman law to build up, as against papal claims, a theory of divine right and absolute power for their royal masters. These ideas were strongest in France, where they evolved into L’état c’est moi and Le roi soleil; they prevailed also in Spain, preparing the absolutism of Ferdinand, Charles V, and Philip II; and even in parliamentary England Wyclif expounded the unlimited authority of the divine king. Lords and commons opposed the theory, and Sir John Fortescue insisted that the English king could not issue laws without the consent of Parliament, and that English judges were bound, by their oath, to judge by the law of the land, whatever the king might desire; but under Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth, England too would kneel to absolute rulers. Between the rival absolutisms of popes and kings some idealistic spirits clung to the notion of a “natural law,” a divine justice implanted in the human conscience, phrased in the Gospels, and superior to any law of man. Neither the state nor the Church paid more than lip service to this conception; it remained in the background, professed and ignored, but ever faintly alive. In the eighteenth century it would father the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and would play a minor but eloquent role in a revolution that for a time upset both the absolutisms that had ruled mankind.

Nicholas of Cusa fought, and then resigned himself to, the absolutism of the papacy. In his varied career he showed the best face of organized Christianity to a Germany always suspicious of the Church. Philosopher and administrator, theologian and legist, mystic and scientist, he combined in one powerful personality the best constituents of those Middle Ages that were closing with his life. Born at Cues, near Trier (1401), he learned a medley of scholarship and devotion in the school of the Brethren of the Common Life at Deventer. In a year at Heidelberg he felt the influence of Ockham’s nominalism; at Padua he was touched for a time with the skepticism of Averroës; at Cologne he absorbed the orthodox tradition of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas; all the elements were mixed in him that would make him the most complete Christian of his time.

He never quite abandoned the mystical mood that had reached him from Meister Eckhart; he wrote a classic of mysticism in De visione Dei; and in a philosophic defense of such visions (Apologia doctae ignorantiae) he coined a famous phrase—“learned ignorance.” He rejected the Scholastic rationalism that sought to prove theology by reason; all human knowledge, he felt, is relative and uncertain; truth is hidden in God.⁸³ Generally he rejected astrology; but, succumbing to the delusions of his epoch, he indulged in some astrological calculations, and reckoned that the end of the world would come in 1734.⁸⁴ Amid a life crowded with ecclesiastical activity he kept abreast of scientific thought. He urged more experiment and more accurate measurements; he suggested timing the fall of different bodies from different heights; he taught that the earth “cannot be fixed, but moves like other stars”;⁸⁵ every star, however fixed it may seem, moves; no orbit is precisely circular; the earth is not the center of the universe, except in so far as any point may be taken as the center of an infinite universe.⁸⁶ These were sometimes judicious borrowings, sometimes brilliant aperçus.

In 1433 Nicholas went to Basel to present to the ecclesiastical council there the claims of a friend to the archiepiscopal see of Cologne. His plea failed, but he took the opportunity of presenting to the council—then at odds with the pope—a work of some moment in the history of philosophy. He called it De concordantia Catholica, and its general purpose was to find terms of accord between the councils and the popes. In an elaborate analogy with a living organism, he pictured the Church as an organic unity, incapable of successful functioning except through the harmonious co-operation of its parts. Instead of concluding, as the popes might have done, that the parts should be guided by the head, Nicholas argued that only a general council could represent, express, and unify the interdependent elements of the Church. He repeated Aquinas and Marsilius, and almost plagiarized Rousseau and Jefferson, in an idealistic passage:

The sovereign people delegates its powers to small groups equipped by education or experience to make or administer laws; but these groups derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. When the Christian community delegates its powers to a general council of the Church, that council, and not the pope, represents the sovereign authority in religion. Nor can the pope rest his claim to legislative absolutism on the supposed Donation of Constantine, for that Donation is a forgery and a myth.⁸⁸ A pope has a right to summon a general council, but such a council, if it judges him unfit, may rightly depose him. And the same principles hold for secular princes. An elective monarchy is probably the best government available to mankind in its present depraved condition; but the secular ruler, like the pope, should periodically convene a representative assembly, and should submit to its decrees.’

Nicholas’ later life was a model for prelates. Made a cardinal (1448), he became in person a Catholic Reformation. In a strenuous tour through the Netherlands and Germany, he held provincial synods, revived ecclesiastical discipline, reformed the monasteries and nunneries, attacked priestly concubinage, furthered the education of the clergy, and raised, at least for a time, the level of clerical and popular morality. “Nicholas of Cusa,” wrote the learned Abbot Trithemius, “appeared in Germany as an angel of light and peace amid darkness and confusion. He restored the unity of the Church, strengthened the authority of her Supreme Head, and sowed a precious seed of new life.”⁸⁹

To his other titles Nicholas could have added that of humanist. He loved the ancient classics, encouraged their study, and planned to print for wide circulation the Greek manuscripts that he himself had brought from Constantinople. He had the true scholar’s tolerance. In a Dialogue on Peace, composed in the very year when Constantinople fell to the Turks, he pleaded for mutual understanding among the religions as diverse rays of one eternal truth.⁹⁰ And in the dawn of modern thought, when the rising freedom of the intellect was an intoxication, he wrote sound and noble words:

Had there been more such Nicholases there might have been no Luther.