The Calendar (27 page)

Whether traditionalists liked it or not, secular time was restarting in Europe, and with it a need to re-evaluate the nature of time--how to measure it, use it and understand it. This issue lay at the heart of a looming larger question: how to react to an influx of new ideas that in some cases directly challenged not only details of Church dogma but the fundamental beliefs of an entire society. This would become the central dilemma of scholars from 1100 to 1300: how to account for knowledge that seemed to come out of nowhere, and in essence offered a new kind of religion that put its faith in observation and logic. It was this debate that would ring across Europe during the High Middle Ages, primarily in the halls and courtyards of this era’s profound new invention: the university.

11 The Battle Over Time

Since the General Council forbade any alterations in the calendar, modern scholars have had to tolerate . . . errors ever since.
John of Sacrobosco, 1235

Imagine the 14-year-old son of a wealthy ship-owner in Pisa, or the second son of a prosperous squire in Kent, circa 1240. How would each have reacted to the news that his father, with the support of the local lord, was sending him to a university in Bologna, or in Oxford?

They might have been dimly aware of the new knowledge arriving in Europe, particularly the boy in Pisa. In the harbour he would have seen dark-skinned Arab traders in turbans haggling with his father and scratching out strange, compact symbols for numbers that differed from the ones Latins used. He might also have heard from former university students about the halls at Bologna, where black-robed masters delivered lectures revealing untold secrets of the ancients: powerful knowledge that his father wanted him to learn so that he could help the family. But it was also dangerous knowledge, or so he might have been told by a local priest or elder looking out for the boy’s spiritual well-being, who warned him to beware ideas that would offend God and the Church.

The boys in Kent and Pisa would have left home in the early autumn, sometime before lectures began on or just after St Michael’s day, 29 September, or some other date no one would have been precise about following. Beyond this, the boys probably gave no more thought to dates and exact times than our farmer on the Rhine or the weaver in France did in the year 800. By now a few people were using reasonably accurate water clocks, but mechanical clocks had not yet been invented--at least, there are no definitive records of any. And public bell towers clanging each hour from the town square remained decades in the future, with several rising up over cities near Pisa in the early and mid-1300s and the first large clock appearing in England at Windsor Castle in 1351.

Otherwise, the boys would have reckoned time by looking up into the sky, eyeballing the arc of the sun as Geoffrey Chaucer does in
The Canterbury Tales
to move us through the timeline of his journey. As the day in his story ends, Chaucer writes (in updated English):

From the south line the sun had now descended
So low, it stood--so far as I had in sight--
At less than twenty-nine degrees in height.
Four o’ the clock it was to make a guess;
Eleven foot long, or little more or less,
My shadow was, as at that time and place,
Measuring feet by taking in this case
My height as six, divided in like pattern
Proportionally; and the power of Saturn
Began to rise with Libra just as we
approached a little thorpe.

Chaucer, who also wrote a treatise on the astrolabe, was undoubtedly more adept at making such ‘guesses’ than our young men from Pisa and Kent. Yet his inclusion in his tales of references to angles of the sun suggests his audience by the mid-1300s was familiar with the idea, though even then the times and measurements are given as ‘more or less’, as if this is close enough for pilgrims trekking leisurely along the road to England’s most holy city.

Packing up a satchel on the appointed day, the squire’s son in Kent would have started off with prayers for a safe journey in the cool darkness of his village church. Then, before the sun rose too high, he would have set off for London, possibly accompanied by a servant, joining a highway like the one Chaucer wrote about: filled with messengers, knights, monks, merchants, ne’er-do-wells, highwaymen and pilgrims.

London would have seemed enormous to this country boy. A city of perhaps 20,000 packed inside thick stone walls, it drew in people from all over England, and a few from foreign lands, with ships at anchor on the Thames from as far away as the Levant. Merchants bought and sold in markets reeking of dung, perfume and exotic spices. Our student-to-be would have seen beggars in rags wailing for a few grains of barley, courtiers in colourful livery from the royal palace, soldiers sporting broadswords in sheaths attached to their belts, and merchants from France and Italy calculating everything so quickly on abacuses that one could hardly see their fingers move.

Staying overnight in a London inn, the boy would have continued westward towards Oxford, following the snaking, narrowing, lazy flow of the Thames, and passing by hedgerows ablaze with autumn colours and the earthy smell of fields turned over for the winter. Arriving at the gates of Oxford, the squire’s son would have seen a small, sleepy market town along the river, where perhaps a few hundred students had come to live among the townspeople--who often found the students loud and obnoxious. Oxford at one point shut down between 1209 and 1214 when a student killed a townswoman, and a local mob hanged two or three students in retaliation.

Mostly the students stayed in modest houses of stone and thatch in the neighbourhood surrounding St Mary’s Church. The boy would have seen none of today’s grand quads, libraries and other university buildings, because in 1240 they had not yet been built. The only evidence that he was in a university town was the sight of other boys and men dressed in black robes; among them a scattering of masters, including perhaps Roger Bacon, who might have been teaching then at Oxford.

Taking a deep breath, the boy would have turned into one of the small, cramped buildings where he was told the registrar kept his records, just as his counterpart in Bologna was strolling into the equivalent office to matriculate in this ancient city in northern Italy. Neither realized that he was headed toward an encounter with the unknown unlike anything their fathers or grandfathers could have imagined, a new way of approaching the world that was already turning the university into a major intellectual battleground between the forces of faith and reason, the sacred and the secular. This battle would alter for ever the way Europeans thought about themselves and the universe, and it would shift the fundamental perception of time away from ‘more or less’ to ever more precise expectations in the generations that followed the boys from Kent and Pisa.

The universities did not start out as crucibles for an intellectual revolution. Originally referred to as
universitas magistrum
or
universitas scholarium--
’university of masters’ or ‘university of students’--at first they were little more than gatherings of students in certain cities, attracted by masters whose fame allowed them to charge fees. Many of the earliest university teachers came from the ranks of translators who had trekked to Toledo and Sicily and returned to teach the ‘secrets’ of Aristotle, al-Biruni and Euclid. These universities operated in rented halls and hostels, with wealthier students renting their own rooms, and those with fewer resources, such as our shipowner’s son and squire’s son living either with their masters or in inns and local hostels. The spirit of these enclaves was one of a shared adventure in learning--a profound experience for young men coming from Pisa, Kent and elsewhere. Students with more ecclesiastic leanings, or in economic straits and in need of free housing, joined one of the new Catholic orders attached to the universities, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans.

The greatest of the early masters was Peter Abelard (c. 1079-1144), son of a minor Breton lord and a proponent of the newfangled logic of Aristotle. An intoxicating lecturer, he is sometimes credited with single-handedly attracting the original crowds of students that made possible the university in Paris. The young Abelard epitomized the sort of person drawn to the new style of learning in the twelfth century. Brilliant and relentless in his scholarship, freewheeling and passionate in his lifestyle and personality, he represented a profound shift away from the cloistered approach of learning and towards a search for the truth in open discourse and disputation, and through the unfettered power of his intellect.

Predictably, conservatives criticized the new thinking and the entire project of the universities, launching a centuries-long battle between traditionalists and men such as Abelard. As early as the 1060s a leading cardinal, Pier Damiani (1007-1072), warned that the new learning represented a grave danger to bedrock medieval beliefs and might eventually cause a split between the world of reason and that of faith. He and others of a similarly contemplative bent worried not only about offending God but about the unsettling effect on the faithful should basic tenets of the Church be undermined. Less philosophical critics simply condemned the new teachings, calling heresy anything that contradicted the Church. Still, the universities proliferated, with Bologna the first to receive an official charter in 1088. Paris received its charter in 1150, as did Oxford in 1167, though the rush did not come until the 1200s and 1300s, when dozens of schools were officially opened, from Salamanca in Spain (1218) to Krakow in Poland (1364).

The university curriculum began with training in four or five general areas: theology, law, medicine, arts or philosophy and music. The masters also taught what was known about astronomy, mathematics and other sciences, though these more empirical subjects tended to be overshadowed by the deep philosophical and theological controversy touched upon by Hermann the Lame, promulgated by the Arabs, and shouted about by Abelard: what to do about the growing evidence that two truths existed, that of the Church and that suggested by nature and reason.

This was hardly a new quandary. It revisited an old debate from the waning days of the Roman Empire, depicted by St Augustine as the ‘city of God’ versus ‘the city of man’. It also was a recasting of the ancient dispute between, on one hand, the Aristotelian notion of the particular and the individual, of empiricism and logic, and, on the other, the Platonic ideal that the general and the universal are everything, and that perfection exists but is beyond human comprehension. In ancient times a great pendulum had swung back and forth between these two world views, with Caesar and the Rome of the early emperors representing a swing toward the secular, and Constantine and later Augustine swerving over to embrace the sacred.

Now for Europe in the High Middle Ages, this debate had returned in full fury to become an epochal argument, one that would either propel it into a new age of empiricism and secularism or sustain it in a world of mysticism and faith.

For several centuries, until long after Copernicus and even Galileo, the outcome would remain unclear, with traditionalists fighting back at every turn. Abelard himself was eventually destroyed, in part because of his own outrageous departure from acceptable behaviour when he wooed the young Heloise, the teenage niece of a prominent canon in Paris, had a son with her, then married her in secret--which prompted the girl’s irate uncle to have the master scholar castrated. More serious for Abelard’s career, if not his anatomy, was his practice of intentionally upsetting his enemies by publishing such works as his
Sic et Non,
which explicitly laid out the contradictions of various Church leaders on important theological points. He also challenged orthodox views on the nature of God, Christ and the Holy Spirit, a sore spot of Catholicism since the age of Constantine, when the Council of Nicaea condemned Arianism over this same issue.

After being charged with heresy for his ideas, Abelard retired to a hermitage, became an abbot, and was eventually tried by his enemies--led by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153). The French-born leader of a movement towards more mysticism and reliance on faith, not less, Bernard spoke for the old guard when he criticized those who learned ‘merely in order that they may know’, insisting that ‘such curiosity ... is blameable’. Calling Abelard a ‘hydra of wickedness’ he condemned all learning that was not directly necessary to serve God, proclaiming that the only road to truth was to maintain a ‘pure conscience and unfeigning faith’.

Abelard’s downfall did not squelch the new thinking, as Bernard undoubtedly hoped it would. But it did remind scholars of a need to be prudent in what they said and wrote, at least in public. ‘When the object of the dispute can be explained more clearly through the rules of the art of logic,’ wrote the Italian scholar and ecclesiastic Lanfranc (c. 1005-1089), a confidant of William the Conqueror and later the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘I conceal the logical rules as much as I can within the formulas of faith, because I do not wish to seem to place more trust in this art than in the truth and authority of the Holy Fathers.’

Despite this, a growing number of intellectuals followed Abelard’s lead in seeking truth through logic and nature--though few as effectively as an Arab in Cordoba named Abu al-Walid Mohammed Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), known in the West as Averroes. A teenager when Abelard died, Ibn Rushd lived in an era when the Islamic world itself had been locked in a debate between the sacred and the secular, with the same enormous stakes. By now, however, the great Islamic empire was long gone, succeeded by shifting emirates and sultanates that tended to be religiously conservative and uninterested in learning. And with it was gone the era of the House of Wisdom, when Aristotle and Mohammed could be studied side by side. One exception had long been Moslem Spain, though it was now ruled by North Africans more orthodox than previous emirs, even as the Moors slowly lost territory to the Christians.