Eifelheim - Michael Flynn [79]
“What if the being owned the seeming of a beast,” Dietrich ventured, “and not that of a man.”
“A beast!”
“A swine, perhaps, or a horse, or a … or a grasshopper.”
Willi laughed. “Such a vain argument! Beasts possess the souls appropriate to them.”
“And if the beast could speak and build devices and …?”
Willi stopped walking and cocked his head. “Why so agitated, Dietl, over a secundum imaginationem? Such questions make fine school-puzzles in logic, but they have no practical significance. We were made in God’s image, but God had no material body.”
Dietrich sighed and Willi placed a hand on his arm. “But for the sake of old Paris days, I will give the matter thought. That is the problem with the schools, you know. They should teach the practical arts: magic, alchemy, mechanics. All that dialectic is in the air.” The archdeacon waved a hand above his head, fluttering the fingertips. “Na, folk like nothing better than a good disputation. Remember the crowds at the weekly quodlibets? I’ll tell you my first thoughts.” The archdeacon pursed his lips and lifted a forefinger. “The soul is the form of the body, but not as the shape of a statue is formatio et terminatio materiae, for form does not exist apart from material. There is no whiteness without a white object. But the soul is not a form in this simple sense, and in particular, is not the shape of the material it informs. Therefore, the shape of a being does not affect the being’s soul, for then something lower would move something higher, which is impossible.”
“The Council of Vienne declared otherwise,” Dietrich suggested. “The ninth article decreed the soul to be a form as any other form.”
“Or seemed to. Poor Peter Aureoli. He tried so hard to reconcile that decree to the teachings of the Fathers, but that’s what happens when you let a committee of amateurs muck around in these matters. Now, Dietl, give me an embrace and I will part to consider your problem.”
The two wrapped arms for a few moments before granting each other the kiss of peace. “God be with you, Willi,” Dietrich said when they parted.
“You ought to visit Freiburg more often,” the archdeacon said.
OUTSIDE THE minster, Dietrich craned his neck searching the gargoyles infesting the eaves until he found the one that Gregor had mentioned: a demon clinging to the walls with spindly limbs, but with its ass stretched over the plaza. Runnels in the limbs channeled rain water through the figure’s ass onto the marketplace below. Folks called it “The Shitter.”
Dietrich’s laughter attracted the attention of a frowsy dame selling smoked fish at a nearby booth in the minster-place. “Good day, t’ye, priest,” the woman said in the accents of the Elsass. “Nothin’ like the Ladychurch where you come from, I wager.”
“No. Nothing like it. But here there is nothing like where I come from, either.”
She gave him a peculiar look. “Contrary, are ye? I knew a man like that once, I did. I could show him a beautiful sunrise and he would quote some Paris high-and-mighty who thought it might be the Earth turning below the sun. Always had a second way to look at things.” She cocked her head and studied him. “I saw y’ before, and y’ favor him some … Here, put your hand here. One thing I’d never forget is the touch of his hand on my breast.”
Dietrich recoiled, and the woman laughed. “But he weren’t no cold fish,” she said. “No, he never recoiled from these sweet things. Nor from this more tart one, eh?” She laughed again, but slowly fell quiet. When Dietrich turned away, her voice halted him before he had taken more than a few paces. “They looked for ‘im,” she said. “Maybe more’n I did, for they wanted to hang ‘im and I didn’t want near that much. I don’t suppose he was the right man for me, anyways, fine-spoken as he was. They don’t look for him no more, but they might still hang ‘im, if they happen on ‘im.”
Dietrich hurried across the square to Butter Alley, where he vanished into the nest of streets that led to the Swabian Gate. At the last, he glanced behind and saw that a boy had joined the fishwife—a dark-haired