Da Vinci's Ghost, page 5
Her condition now accepted and admired, Hildegard began to speak and write openly about what she saw, and this set into motion a rise to fame and influence almost unthinkable for a woman (or just about any man) in the Middle Ages. Word spread fast. “Crowds of people of both sexes came flocking to her,” records one early account, “from every part of threefold Gaul and from Germany.” Even Pope Eugenius III found himself smitten. Quoting the Song of Songs in a letter, he asked, “Who is this woman who rises out of the wilderness like a column of smoke from burning spices?”
Hildegard spent the final decades of her life near the town of Bingen, as the abbess of St. Rupert’s monastery, which she herself had founded at the end of the 1140s. And it was there, unforgettably, that a dazzling sequence of visions arose before her. What appeared to her again and again were human incarnations of the microcosm, and they looked a lot like Vitruvian Man.
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IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO say what happened after Vitruvius finished his Ten Books. Did he present Augustus with a copy? Did the emperor read it? Did he like it and have it distributed? Nobody knows. One ancient source reports that late in his career Vitruvius worked on the aqueducts of Rome, standardizing the size of the water pipes under the direct command of Marcus Agrippa, Augustus’s deputy; this suggests that his book did indeed manage to get the attention of the emperor and that it helped advance Vitruvius’s career.
But one thing is certain: during his lifetime Vitruvius didn’t win the fame he had hoped for. He seems to have died in obscurity; not one reference to him by a contemporary survives. The Ten Books itself disappears almost entirely from the historical record for centuries after his death—and when at last it reemerges, in the eighth century, in the form of a precious manuscript copy being lugged from Italy to England by an Anglo-Saxon abbot named Ceolfrith, the world that Vitruvius had known was long gone. The Augustan body of empire had now split in two. In the west was a Latin-speaking half, based in Italy, and in the east a Greek-speaking half, based in Constantinople.
Those changes alone would have struck Vitruvius as deeply unsettling. But he would have been stunned to learn that both halves of the empire now looked to a new man-god as their supreme authority: not an imperial heir of Augustus but an obscure Jew known to his followers as Jesus Christ. And it was this Christ, born not long before the death of Augustus, who now gave shape to the body of empire. Appealing to pagan sympathies, St. Paul had described Jesus in terms that deliberately echoed descriptions of Augustus and his imperial heirs. “In him all things hold together,” Paul wrote about Christ. “And he is the head of the body, the church.”
By the time Ceolfrith carried the Ten Books to England—and with it the ghost of Vitruvian Man—much of the western half of the empire had been overrun by Germanic tribes from the north. Europe as a whole had devolved into a grimly feudal place, derided by the Byzantines and Arabs alike as geographically and culturally irrelevant. “As regards the peoples of the northern quadrant,” one Arab observer would write in 947, “the warm humor is lacking among them; their bodies are large, their natures gross, their manners harsh, their understanding dull, and their tongues heavy.”
Yet some Roman learning and culture did survive in early medieval Europe, thanks largely to bands of zealots who had begun to establish small communities across the continent: Christian monks. Without their efforts, hundreds of texts from antiquity would not have survived until the age of printing and mass reproduction. That’s certainly true of the Ten Books, which monks in early medieval Europe copied and recopied for centuries in their scriptoria. One recent inventory records that 132 of those manuscripts survive—evidence of a powerful current of interest in Vitruvius that flowed right through the Middle Ages.
The copying of manuscripts was punishingly hard labor in the Middle Ages. Scribes hunched over their writing tables for days and weeks, painstakingly scratching line after line of text onto sheets of vellum, itself prepared laboriously by scraping clean the skins of sheep. “Let me tell you,” one twelfth-century Irish scribe complained to his readers, “the work is heavy. It makes the eyes misty, it bows the back, crushes the ribs and belly, brings pain to the kidneys, and makes the body ache all over. … As the sailor finds welcome in the final harbor, so does the scribe in the final line.”
Given the grueling nature of this work, texts had to have an obvious value to be copied—and at first glance Vitruvius’s Ten Books would not seem to have been worth the effort. The scribes assigned to copy it wouldn’t even have been able to understand most of what they had in front of them; Vitruvius had strewn the work with ideas and terminology that came directly from Greek, a language almost completely forgotten in early medieval Europe. Moreover, the monks who did consult the work would have had little interest in, or ability to understand, its archaic discussions of building techniques and architectural history.
So why keep copying the book? The answer can be deduced from the way in which monks themselves described it. In the ninth century, for example, the librarian of one German monastery catalogued the book in the company of works by the Church Fathers, a choice that suggests he and his brethren valued the book not as a practical manual or historical survey but as a springboard for spiritual contemplation. What early medieval monks sought in ancient texts were passages that, despite the pagan context in which they had been written, provided new ways of conceptualizing the Christian God. And in the case of the Ten Books they found precisely what they were looking for in the description of Vitruvian Man.
Some of the earliest excerpts and summaries of the Ten Books, dating from the ninth and tenth centuries, include the passage on Vitruvian Man copied out in full. It’s easy to understand why. In the form in which Vitruvius described him, as an exemplar of Augustus, the figure bore an uncanny resemblance to Christ. Each was the son of a god; each represented a cosmic ideal; and each, in its spread-eagled pose, inhabited temples, held the empire together, and embodied the world.
Other early medieval librarians and writers placed the Ten Books in a different place: alongside treatises on geometry, land surveying, and astronomy. This would seem an entirely different way of thinking about the book—but, as was the case with the Ten Books, monks turned to these works not so much for practical information as for analogies of the divine. “We use whatever appropriate symbols we can for the things of God,” one widely read sixth-century authority declared, adding elsewhere that God had created geometrical forms so that “he might lift us in spirit up through the perceptible to the conceptual, from sacred shapes and symbols to the simple peaks of the hierarchies of heaven.”
The most popular geometrical treatise in Europe from the ninth to eleventh centuries, often known simply as Geography I, put this way of thinking into practice. The work brought together excerpts and summaries of all sorts of ancient astronomical and geometrical theories—and made it very clear to readers that their importance was metaphysical, not practical. Astronomy and geometry, the author explained, represented the perfect way “to approach the heavens with the mind, and to investigate the entire construction of the sky, and in some measure to deduce and to recognize, by sublime mental contemplation, the Creator of the world, who has concealed so many beautiful secrets.”
This was the top-down approach. One dutifully contemplated the heavens in all of their vastness—the macrocosm, as the Greeks had called it—and then tried to discern in them an image of God. But early in the Christian era some authorities began to propose another way. Did not the Bible itself declare that God had created man in his own image? In the fourth century, just after the Roman emperor Constantine the Great had officially embraced Christianity, the Latin astronomer Julius Firmicus Maternus seized on the idea and ran with it. “God,” he wrote,
the fabricator of man, created his form, his condition, and his entire material frame in the image and likeness of the cosmos. For he made the body of man just as of the world, from the mixing together of the four elements, namely of fire, water, air, and earth, in order that the harmonious union of all these might adorn the living being in the form of a divine imitation.
Writing in the seventh century, Isidore of Seville, the greatest encyclopedist of the so-called Dark Ages, reprised the theme. “All things are contained in man,” he wrote. “And in him exists the nature of all things.” In the following century the Venerable Bede, one of the most influential of all medieval Christian theologians, took the idea a step further. One way of gaining access to the secrets of the heavens, and thus of understanding the nature of God, he noted, was to study the nature of the human being—“whom the wise,” he wrote, “call a microcosm, that is, a little world.”
In time, this analogy would come to underlie much of medieval and Renaissance thought, occupying a position as central in any explanation of the natural order as evolution does for us today. But Isidore and Bede alluded to it primarily as a kind of thought exercise, as the diagrams with which they illustrated it make clear (Plates 1 and 2). European theologians and artists wouldn’t give these abstract schemes a specifically human form for a few centuries, but when at last they did, in the twelfth century, what they drew soon insinuated itself directly into the visions of Hildegard of Bingen.
HILDEGARD RECORDED HER visions of the microcosm in the Book of Divine Works, her most ambitious work. Describing one of her visions, she wrote, “A wheel of marvelous appearance became visible. … In the middle of the giant wheel appeared a human figure. The crown of its head projected upward, while the soles of its feet extended downward as far as the sphere of sheer white and luminous air. The fingertips of the right hand were stretched to the right, and those of the left hand were stretched to the left, forming a cross extending to the circumference of the circle.” The wheel contained a human figure who at its center embodied Adam and Christ, and at its circumference embodied the Holy Spirit, whose arms enfolded the whole of the cosmos in an open embrace. Presiding over the scene outside the limits of both time and space was the Godhead.
Hildegard described the scene in great detail but in a convoluted mystical style that’s often hard to follow. Fortunately, an illustration of what she saw, perhaps based on a drawing of her own, survives in a copy of the Book of Divine Works. It dates from a only few decades after her death and is astonishing to behold (Plate 5).
In the opening lines of her book, Hildegard explained the miraculous origins of this vision. “In the year 1163,” she wrote, “a voice from heaven resounded, saying to me: O wretched creature and daughter of much toil, even though you have been thoroughly seared, so to speak, by countless grave sufferings of the body, the depth of the mysteries of God has completely permeated you. Transmit for the benefit of humanity an accurate account of what you see with your inner eye. … This vision has not been contrived by you, nor has it been conceived by any other human being.”
That final remark is telling. For Hildegard to have admitted any human influence would have marred her status as a visionary, and in the Book of Divine Works, consequently, she made not a single reference to the ideas or writings of any other author. But there was much more to her visions than she let on. Although she described them as being of heavenly origin, they had some obviously earthly sources.
THE CURRENTS OF European thought changed course so dramatically during the twelfth century that historians often describe the period as a mini-Renaissance. Much ink has been spilled trying to define the nature of the movement, but there’s a simple way of summing it up: after having focused for centuries on the renunciation of earthly things, Christian scholars in medieval Europe began to reengage with the world around them.
A technological revolution took place alongside this intellectual shift. It, too, involved a reengagement with the natural world, which Europeans began to harness with all sorts of new tools: windmills, water wheels, and mills turned by animals; various systems of weights, cogs, and gears designed for use in agriculture, architecture, and war; devices that permitted a growing mastery of the open ocean, such as the keel, the rudder, and the compass; and more. Some writers observing the shift began to imagine the whole of the natural world as a single animate being pulsing with a cosmic life force that was humanity’s to tap.
Here’s a useful way of thinking about the intellectual shift that took place. For centuries in Europe, from late antiquity into the Middle Ages, Christian scholars had merged their beliefs with a select group of ideas from Plato, whose emphasis on the ideal forms of things had suited an otherworldly approach to religion. St. Augustine, in particular, had borrowed from Plato to advance his own theological agenda. But in the twelfth century scholars began to turn away from the abstractions of Plato and Augustine. Instead, they developed an interest in the empirical observations of Aristotle, who had focused on the makeup of the physical world and the causes of natural phenomena. Perhaps God could best be apprehended, they suggested, not by focusing on what the world should be but what it actually was.
Many theologians viewed this idea with horror. Why on earth would one abandon the serene contemplation of divine ideals in order to wallow in the muck of reality? The whole idea seemed a giant distraction—the sort of thing, one theologian sermonized, that would draw “the scholar away from theology altogether, by making him too interested in the secular arts and in useless questions about the natural world.” Human beings simply had no business, as another writer put it, trying to understand “the composition of the globe, the nature of the elements, the location of the stars, the nature of animals, the violence of the wind, the life-processes of plants and of roots.” Heaven forbid!
Debate on the subject raged during the first half of the century. One of the most vocal members in the Aristotle camp was the philosopher William of Conches, who insisted that for Christian theology to be true, it would have to be reconciled with the realities of the physical world. Had not Plato himself suggested in the Timaeus, one of the only works of his known to medieval Europeans, that the cosmos was a world soul and body whose many parts all partook of the same universal principles of design? If so, there were logical conclusions to draw. By definition, the natural order had to be in complete sympathy with the heavenly order—which meant, in turn, that all of creation had to be explored in detail. “To slight the perfection of created things is to slight the perfection of the divine power,” William explained and went on to heap contempt on those who felt otherwise. “Ignorant themselves of the forces of nature,” he wrote, “and wanting company in their ignorance, they don’t want people to look into anything. They want us to believe like peasants and not ask the reason behind things. … But we say the reason behind everything should be sought out.”
This, of course, was precisely what Aristotle had tried to do. In works that explored everything from cosmology to biology, he had sought out the causes of things. Today we call most of what he was doing science, but in the ancient and medieval world, and indeed until just a couple of centuries ago, it had a different name: natural philosophy.
William was one of the first medieval European scholars to find his way to the works of Aristotle, most of whose works had been lost for centuries in the west. But scholars working in the Islamic world had preserved and written commentaries on many of them, and during William’s lifetime Latin retranslations of those texts began to appear in Europe, thanks largely to contacts among Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Moorish Spain. It was while reading those works that William and other scholars in Europe began to recognize that the study of natural philosophy might provide them with a new way of exploring the relationship between the human being and the cosmos—and of harnessing the divine forces that animated them both.
The key to it all was the careful study of astrological influences, as many ancient and Islamic authorities had made clear. This highlights a development in the history of ideas that’s not well appreciated today. Many of the disciplines we now consider the most scientific—astronomy, geography, geometry, mathematics, medicine, physics—first returned to medieval Europe, as one modern scholar has put it, “riding the magic carpet of astrology.”
Astrology seemed to be the universal science. Didn’t the daily and yearly travels of the sun profoundly affect changes in the seasons and the weather? Didn’t its heat and movements make possible the generation of all earthly life? Likewise, didn’t the moon possess immense powers, literally tugging vast bodies of water to and fro across the planet? It made sense, then, as the ancients themselves had argued, that the movements of the other planets and the constellations exerted similar powers over the world and human beings, and that only by studying them in meticulous detail could human affairs be brought into healthy alignment with the celestial order. One early Christian maxim, repeated often during the Middle Ages, summed up the idea this way: “When man looks to the signs in the heavens, God is revealed. And when God is revealed, man is healed.” The twelfth-century philosopher Bernardus Sylvestris, one of the most important sources of Hildegard’s ideas about the microcosm, put it more expansively. “I would have you survey the heavens,” he had God declare, “inscribed with their manifold array of symbols, which I have set forth for learned eyes, like a book with its pages spread open, containing things to come in secret characters.”
The mini-Renaissance of the twelfth century returned this sort of ancient thinking to the fore. It’s why William of Conches, in the first half of the century, felt so strongly about seeking out the reason behind everything—and it’s why Hildegard, in the second half of the century, following his lead, would write an entire treatise on astrology and medicine titled Causes and Cures.
