The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [22]
From 1200 the writings of Aristotle and many other Greek scholars began to arrive in Europe, either in their original language or translated directly into Latin. With the help of the Arab commentators, scholars could now understand the full complexity of the originals, many of them translated by William of Moerbeke, a Dutchman. Each text that arrived brought more of the knowledge that the Church wished to see controlled, as well as the more confident use of reason and empirical observation.
In 1217 the Dominicans, and in 1230 the Franciscans, were sent to Paris by the Pope to attempt to stem the tide of free thought. It was too late. The availability of Aristotle’s books on metaphysics, natural history, physics, ethics, the universe, meteorology, animals and plants, as well as Euclid’s Elements, Hero’s work on pneumatics, and Ptolemy’s great compilation of astronomy, the Almagest, meant that the battle was all but lost.
In the early years of the thirteenth century came one last shock, with the commentaries on Aristotle by the Arab philosopher Ibn Rushd, known to the West as Averroes. Translated in Spain by Gerard of Cremona, one of the most prolific of all translators, Averroes gave the West the clearest analysis yet of pure Aristotle. He became known as ‘the commentator’, so widely was he read. Averroes submitted all but divinely revealed truth to the cold light of reason. He claimed that the act of Creation had taken place before the beginning of time, and that once the act had been performed certain events inevitably followed. Beyond this point God could no longer intervene. This posed one more major problem for the Church, concerning the relationship between free will and Providence. Augustine had said that man could not be saved except by divine grace, but if there were no free will, man could not help sinning. And if no intervention by God were possible, no grace could be given. God had been given limitations.
Under the guidance of a northerner called Siger of Brabant, some of the Averroist students proposed splitting philosophy apart from theology. Finally, on 19 March 1255, the Church caved in and permitted all Aristotelian work on to the curriculum. Full heterodox Aristotelianism was now let loose. It took one of the supreme Church intellects to tame it. Thomas Aquinas, in his great Summa Theologica, was to reconcile the dual modes of thought by approving a kind of double standard. There would be areas of truth that related to revelation, which would be the province of theology. As for the natural world, reason could handle that. Philosophy was finally granted independence.
While these arguments raged, the profound change they had caused was beginning to take effect. Even the great Aquinas bowed to the inevitability of mathematical rationalism. In a list of things God could not do, among such limitations as ‘change Himself, ‘forget anything’ and ‘commit sins’, Aquinas included: ‘God cannot make the sum of the internal angles of a triangle add up to more than two right angles.rsquo;
The new humanist self-confidence was monumentally expressed in architecture. Communities of craftsmen and professionals, using money and logic, increasingly aware of how nature might be controlled by the new water-powered technology, with ambition and the expectation that tomorrow would be better than today, changed the style of the building in which they worshipped God. Gothic architecture may have been principally a technical advance due to the Islamic vaulted arch and, later, the flying buttress, but it also gave people in the late Middle Ages the chance to express their new-found power. They did so by building giant cathedrals that thrust into the sky all over Europe.
A detail from a Chartres window shows the work of two of the guilds which contributed to the costs of the cathedral: top, a cobbler; below, a stonemason.
Between 1140 and 1220 they built cathedrals in Sens, Noyons, Senlis, Paris, Laon, Chartres, Reims, Amiens and Beauvais. The buildings were encyclopedias in stone, ornamented