The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [6]
A twelfth-century German illustration of the concept of the central, though passive, involvement of man in the cosmic structure. The medieval universe is shown encompassed and contained by the heavenly embrace.
In the Light of the Above
The traffic lights turn red, the traffic slows, and you cross the road. In doing so you express a modern confidence in the way society functions that was generated in Western Europe over eight hundred years ago.
The rule of law regulates every social event and transaction, from international trade and the running of a country to handling private property, planning a career and having children, and in doing so it guarantees social stability. Under whatever political system, it sets out to be fair, to treat every member of society as equal, to restrain arbitrary use of power, to punish the transgressor.
Because the rule of law exists, and above all because it encourages and protects acts of innovation with patent legislation, we in the modern world expect that tomorrow will be better than today. Our view of the universe is essentially optimistic because of the marriage between law and innovation. Law gives an individual the confidence to explore, to risk, to venture into the unknown, in the knowledge that he, as an innovator, will be protected by society.
In many ways the purpose of European law has changed little since the system was first established, even though the society for which it was developed has changed beyond all recognition. Modern Western law and the institutions that came with it sprang from a society totally different from ours, with a view of the universe alien to us in almost every way. The emergence of law and of the desire to innovate peculiar to Western society began with two men who lived in the fifth century in the same Roman city, both with very different reactions to what they regarded as the imminent end of the world.
One of the men, a teacher who had turned Christian, was Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, in North Africa. The other was a Roman public official, the lawyer proconsul Martianus Capella. The city in which they both lived was Carthage, capital of the Roman province of Africa.
For more than a century Carthage had been the principal source of corn and oil for Rome. The fruitful combination of sunshine and irrigation made the people of Carthage among the richest in the Empire. Isolated and comfortable in their sleepy backwater, where the calm was disturbed only by the Christians with their obscure sectarian quarrels, the Carthaginians reacted with horror to the news of the sack of Rome in AD 410 at the hands of Alaric the Goth. The barbarians had been looting and pillaging all over the Empire for decades, but now that the unthinkable had happened and Rome had fallen, it seemed only a matter of time before the whole gigantic, bureaucratically complex structure of Roman civilisation would fall apart and take everybody down with it. Darkness and death seemed inevitable.
Augustine’s reaction was to offer a way of escape. At the time, the Christian Church was much influenced by the thinking of the Neoplatonists, which was based on the writings of Plato. His philosophy was attractive to a new religious sect accustomed to persecution by the state, because it made suffering easier to accept.
Plato’s philosophy drew a distinction between reality and appearance as well as between opinion and knowledge. The everyday world of the senses was worthless because it was only a shadow of reality, a product of opinion. True knowledge lay in the mind and consisted of the pure, ideal forms or ‘ideas’ of observed things. For Plato, the word ‘table’ meant all tables, the ideal table, but not any particular table that existed. So all observed tables were merely ‘shadow’ tables. Only the ideal, other-world ‘table’ mattered.
By implication, everything in the daily life of the Neoplatonist Christian was a shadow of the truth. The miseries and trials he had to suffer were transient, as was all else in the