Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [148]
DIETRICH AND Ockham passed the evening over a supper of pumpernickel and cheese and wholesome amounts of ale. News of the great, wide world drifted through the High Woods on the lips of travelers; and Ockham had been at the center of that world.
“I was told,” Dietrich said, “you are to make your peace with Clement.”
Will shrugged. “Ludwig is dead, and Karl wants no quarrel with Avignon. Now that all the others are dead—Michael, Marsiglio, and the rest—why pretend that we were the true Chapter? I sent the Seal of the Order back, the one that Michael took with us when we fled. The Chapter met on Pentecost and told Clement of my gesture, and Clement sent to Munich offering better terms than Jacques de Cahors ever did. So we will kiss and pretend that all is well.”
“You meant Pope John.”
“The Kaiser never called him anything but ‘Jacques de Cahors.’ He was a religious man.”
“Ludwig, religious!”
“Certainly. He created his own pope and carted him all over Italy. You can’t get more religious than that. But when you have said ‘hunting’ and ‘feasting’ and ‘bohorts,’ you have limned the man in all his essentials. Oh, and securing his family’s good fortune. A simple man, easily guided by his more subtle advisors—he would never have gone into Italy but for Marsiglio’s wheedling—but his stubbornness could rebut the subtlest of reasoning. Karl, on the other hand, is much taken with the arts, and intends a university for Prague to rival Montpellier or Oxford, if not Paris itself. A place free of the rigid orthodoxies of established scholars.”
He meant free of Thomists and Averröeists. “A place where they may pursue nominalism?” Dietrich teased.
Ockham snorted. “I am no nominalist. The problem with teaching the Modern Way is that lesser scholars, excited by the novelty, seldom bother to master my insights. There are lips on which I heartily wish my name had never rested. I tell you, Dietl, a man becomes a heretic less for what he writes than for what others believe he has written. But I will outlive all my enemies. The false pope Jacques is dead, and that old fool Durandus. One hopes the odious Lutterell will soon follow. Mark me. I shall dance on their graves.”
“‘Doctor Modern’ was hardly an ‘old fool’ …” Dietrich ventured.
“He sat on the tribunal that condemned my theses!”
“Durandus himself once faced the tribunal,” Dietrich reminded him. “Peer-review is the fate of all philosophers worth reading. And he did exert his influence favorably on two of your propositions.”
“Out of fifty-one on trial! Such a mewling favor is more insult than the honest hostility of the odious Lutterell. Durandus was a falcon that had choosen not to fly. He would have been less a fool had he been less brilliant. One does not criticize a stone for falling. But a falcon? Come, who else did we know at Paris?”
“Peter Aureoli … No, hold. He was raised archbishop, and died the year before you came.”
“Is an archbishopric often so fatal?” Ockham said with amusement.
“You and ‘Doctor Eloquent’ would have found much in common. He shaved with your razor. And Willi is archdeacon now in Freiburg. I posed him a question this past market.”
“Willi Jarlsburg? The one with the pouty lips? Yes, I remember him. A second-rate mind. An archdiaconate suits him, for there he will never be called upon to utter an original thought.”
“You are too harsh. He always treated me kindly.”
Ockham regarded him for a moment. “His sort would. But a kindly man may yet own a second-rank intellect. The assessment is no insult. The second rank is far more than what most scholars achieve.”
Dietrich recalled Ockham’s agility in taking shelter behind his precise words. “The Herr brought me a tract by a young scholar now at Paris, Nicholas Oresme, who has a new argument for the diurnal motion of the earth.”
Ockham chuckled. “So, you still debate the philosophy