The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [14]
The novelty of this approach cannot be overestimated. At the time, all over Europe, ‘going to the law’ still meant visiting a priest who would pray for signs and give what advice he could. It might often involve the ordeal of trial by fire, or by tying up suspected persons and throwing them into a river; if they drowned, they had been innocent. Much legal decision-making was left to astrologers, who would judge right or wrong according to the accused man’s date of birth. To approach the matter of jurisprudence in a rational and analytical way was a tremendous step forward.
A manuscript of the Epistle of St Paul to the Romans from the middle of the twelfth century. The initial shows scenes from the saint’s life. The smaller script is the gloss: over the text itself the gloss relates to grammar, in the right-hand margin it describes the saint.
A similar step was being taken, hesitantly, elsewhere - at the cathedral school of Chartres, founded in the early eleventh century by Fulbert, a pupil of Gerbert of Aurillac. As the attempt to understand classical texts like those of the law continued, the consequent involvement with pre-Christian classical thinking, some of which had survived in the work of the fifth-century philosopher Boethius and was already on the school curriculum, aroused interest in the Roman use of language. Emphasis began to swing away from the style and rhetoric of writing, towards grammar.
Grammatical analysis helped to clarify the meaning of complex and obscure arguments. The scholars at Chartres who first used the technique wanted only to strengthen their faith. Their idea was to find better, more accurate means of understanding God’s work. In searching for ways to do so they too set off a fundamental change in the attitude of the West towards man’s position in society and in the cosmos.
Influenced by Plato’s Timaeus, with its description of an ordered universe created out of chaos by God, intelligible through reason and understanding, the Chartres scholars argued that God had endowed man with the ability for rational thought, the use of which would enhance what was distinctively human. God had also designed a rationally working universe: rational man was part of that universe, and therefore he must be capable of understanding how it worked.
It is impossible to guess what might have become of these early intellectual stirrings in Bologna and Chartres, spurred on as they were by the rapidly changing life of the towns, the growing exchange of ideas and material goods travelling down newly opened roads, where money gave opportunity to the ambitious and talented, in a world increasingly concerned with understanding how things work. The means available to the curious were pitifully few. The medieval mind was still weighed down by centuries of superstition, still fearful of new thought, still totally obedient to the Church and its Augustinian rejection of the investigation of nature. They lacked a system for investigation, a tool with which to ask questions and, above all, they lacked the knowledge once possessed by the Greeks, of which medieval Europe had heard, but which had been lost.
In one electrifying moment it was rediscovered. In 1085 the Arab citadel of Toledo in Spain fell, and the victorious Christian troops found a literary treasure beyond anything they could have dreamed of. Europe had known something of Arab Spain for over a century. At some time in the last decade of the tenth century Gerbert of Aurillac, looking for information on astrology and astronomy, had gone to Vich, near Barcelona, with Borellus, Duke of Cis-Espana, where he studied under the protection of the local