The Search for Syene:
What We Can Learn from Medieval Literature
on the occasion of the retirement of Professor Thomas J. Garbáty
Randolph I. Gordon
One can learn much from museums. In our
effort to gain sufficient distance from our own times, so as to employ
a
temporal parallax, they can help us to discern the full range of what
we make of ourselves and the length of the leash held by
our genetic code and innate propensities. Supra luna sunt aeterna omnia.
As Cicero tells us, "Above the moon are all things
eternal." Here below, we find only the shifting currents and tides
of human affairs, and a distant light, even if from a moving
vessel, helps us to gauge the breadth and depth of our freedom and,
in a complementary sense, that of our humanity. The
movements of the civilized world, our history, all for which credit
may be fairly taken, must be measured against the
background of our essential human nature.
Finding Our Ancestors in the Rubble
Occasionally, amid the fragments of ancient artifacts, we catch a glimpse
of our ancestors. It was in the Provincial
Museum in Victoria, British Columbia where I first learned of the practical
economy of our forbears.It is a trait worthy of those
who would survive; as we are all universally the descendants of survivors,
it is only just - and natural - that we appreciate it. I
had always envisioned a Stone Age artisan fashioning stone spearheads
and arrowheads by the skilled sculpting of stone. Not
so. The technique is better described thus: pick up two stones the
size of potatoes and holding one in each hand, smash them
together furiously until the stones are reduced to rubble; sort through
the flakes of stone looking for sharp pieces suitable for
spearheads and arrowheads. The sculpting technique was necessary only
when resources (i.e. stones) were scarce.
In the British Museum, we stand before the colossal, bearded, man-lion
guardians of the Assyrian city. They are
terrifying in their virility. We cannot help but suspect that that
was the effect intended. We let our gazes drop to the flat surface
of the pedestal, a bare two hands deep between the feet of the lion,
carved from this cyclopean block of stone. There, we find
scratched into the surface the faint outline of the board game of the
time, the precursor of backgammon, the game of Ur.
Assyrian guards killing time. And, we learn, once knowing where to look,
that the same faint outlines may be found in museums
the world over. In a flash, we feel a communion with these bored soldiers
far deeper than that with the sculptors of the
unmarred stone.
Shelley observes in "Ozymandias" that "the wrinkled brow and twisted
lip and sneer of cold command, tell us that its sculptor
well those passions read, which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless
things. The hand that mocked them and the heart that
fed."
The Voices of the Past
But it is in the literature of a people that we find the artifacts
of the ancestral mind free from guesswork or poetic
intuition. And, perhaps even more to the point, through literature
we hear the voices of our ancestors directly. As Thomas
Carlyle wrote in The Hero as Man of Letters: "In books lies the soul
of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the
Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished
like a dream."
We learn from Hebrew Scripture the ache of human spirits whose reach
seems forever beyond their grasp. We learn from
Greek drama, and perhaps most from Aristophanes, the tragi-comedy of
the human condition and a kinship with those who
laugh. We learn from Roman law the tools developed by a practical race
for the governing of men. In all these cases, even
(some would say, especially) in Holy Writ still honored by a billion
souls, the intervening years have made a palimpsest of all
that has gone before. It is indeed all too true, that we see through
a glass, darkly, not face to face with our ancestors, through
languages preserved and, in the case of Hebrew, resurrected, but not
fully our own. What is more, respecting antiquity, we are
sufficiently ignorant of, or at least removed from, the basic conditions
of everyday life that the lessons we learn are often
indistinct. When we approach these ancient materials, we may be said
to be like the spider described in Swift's Battle of the
Books, with conceptions spit and spun from our own entrails. In the
end, our conclusions regarding the ancients say more about
what we choose to project upon them from our own world view, than about
them.
The Naming of Names
The capacity (and irresistible inclination) to project internal constructs
onto the world outside may properly be regarded as an
essential, defining characteristic of the human mind. Whether forming
constellations out of the scattered stars in the night sky,
conceiving Platonic ideals on the roofs of caves, or naming animals
as described in Genesis, pattern formation and organization
is a quintessentially, irresistibly human thing to do. In cosmological
inquiries, we find ourselves unable to resolve the
philosophical question of whether the "laws" of Nature are simply an
invention of human minds short of comparing "our" laws
with those of inhuman minds yet to be encountered. The surprisingly
simple algorithms we seek (and, amazingly, seem to
discover[!]) to describe universal gravitation and other phenomena,
seem ineluctable when it comes to explaining human
behavior at any scale, large or small. While it is painfully evident
that we are limited in our capacity to predict individual or
political behavior from day to day, on retrospection we seem to discover
common threads running through human history.
Lacking a neat algorithm for the human equation, we nonetheless are
able to bring order out of chaos by a series of anecdotes.
In the last years of the Twentieth Century, how many more verses have
been added to Lydgate's Fall of Princes and Sackville's
Mirror for Magistrates? The Preacher in Ecclesiastes tells us there
is "nothing new under the sun."
The Search for Essential Humanity
Do we wish to be able to distinguish our cultural inheritance from
our innate propensities? To what end? This: to know
why we believe as we do. To know the extent to which our thoughts are
derived from the knowledge gained by a free and
inquiring society of minds or, conversely, the extent to which our
world view is genetically programmed and instinctually
ordained. To establish our free will and to escape from the deterministic
"box." To be able rightfully to take credit for the
products of our minds and hands requires that our works be something
different in kind from the ant hill, bird nest, mole hill,
beaver dam, which we take to be the products of instinct. To distinguish
man from machine.
Is modern civilization more advanced in its understanding of the world
or does it simply enjoy a stronger public relations
department touting its technological and analytical tools? Reflexively,
our initial self-justifying impulse leads us to conclude: we
think as we do because we are right and more knowledgeable than our
ancestors. Further reflection requires us to ask whether
we feel the same way respecting our descendants. In the resultant quandary,
we must either conclude either that of all times
past and future, our generation has, alone, hit upon the ultimate truth
of the world around us, yet, paradoxically, been unable to
pass that truth down to our descendants, or, that we, too, are in error,
yet unable at present to discern in what way our
descendants will find us wanting.
We come to recognize that we also seem satisfied with fewer answers
than our forebears. Perhaps we have abandoned some
of the questions.
The Search for Syene
Where then shall we turn to take the measure of humankind in our search
for self-knowledge? If our reasoning is correct thus
far, then literature will provide our surest insights. But surely not
that of our own time. For that, we lack perspective enough to
learn the lessons needed. If Carlyle was right in his History of the
French Revolution that "History is a distillation of rumour,"
then we need to allow enough time for the process of distillation.
No, it will not do to choose our own time, or any time in
which we continue to have a vested interest. In the United States,
even going to our own roots in colonial times over two
centuries ago, it still makes headlines when flaws or hypocrisies are
discovered in a Founding Father. These Founding Fathers
are our cultural icons or, as Tennyson's Ulysses might have put it,
our "household gods," from a time to which Americans look
for heroes. Such a time is singularly unsuitable for the dispassionate
stance we wish to assume.
Yet we must avoid a time so distant that we cannot interpret its lessons,
or a time which tempts us to counterfeit
understanding with anachronistic projection, like the New Testament
scholar who cannot interpret the Tanakh in its own terms
without seeing everywhere predictions of things to come. The ideal,
if it could be had, would be our lineal cultural ancestors
placed at a time sufficiently remote and distinct from our own for
us to distinguish our cultural inheritance from our natural bent,
but not so distant that we must indulge our impulse to fill in gaps
in knowledge with our own hopeful projections. We must
concede that our knowledge of daily life of the ancients is largely
conjecture; all too often, archaeology must speculate on the
uses of common artifacts. (The favorite in museums seems to be either
fertility figures or ceremonial vessels.) We are more
confident of more recent times.
The proper study of mankind is man, we have assumed. And our very interest
in this undertaking reveals much of our own
pedigree. For our focus on ourselves is revelatory of a mindset inherited,
not innate, which dates only from the Age of Reason.
"Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, the proper study of mankind,
is man," Alexander Pope tells us in his Essay on
Man. The way we think and feel about man's place in society and the
Universe, about ourselves, how we approach questions,
how we evaluate answers, and our view of felicity, are constrained
by relatively recent intellectual acquisitions. To penetrate the
veneer of modern thought and consider what lies beneath, we must dig
down through our inheritance from Descartes, Spinoza,
Newton, Rousseau, Locke, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein.
Eratosthenes determined the size of the earth by measuring midday in
Alexandria and Syene, some 5000 stadia removed, at the
same hour. Upon learning that, in Syene (now Aswan), at noon, on the
summer solstice, when the sun was at its zenith, a well
was lit up through all its depth so that the solar disk appeared on
the surface of the well water, he measured the zenith distance
of the sun at Alexandria. By this means he determined that the distance
of Alexandria and Syene corresponded to 1/50th of the
great circle of the earth. Similar longitude, different latitudes.
I maintain that our Syene is medieval England. It is precisely
the site sought after to establish our temporal parallax.
Against the backdrop of essential humanity through both modern and
medieval eyes, we can best take our own measure. For in
medieval England we find a lineal cultural ancestor in a language closely
related to our own, literate, with conditions of daily life
not too mystifying (similar longitude), and on the other side of the
great intellectual divide of the Renaissance which colors all
our present day thinking (different latitude).
For good or ill, we remain today products of the humanism of the Renaissance
-- the science, technology, innovation,
and industrial revolution which has continued to the present day. We
have abandoned the theocentrism of the universal
construct preceding our own.
Medieval Marvels; Modern Hubris
Let me directly contrast the modern and medieval constructs. As C.S.
Lewis wrote in The Discarded Image:
"All
power, movement and efficacy descend from God to the Primum Mobile and
cause it to
rotate." The cause, we are told, is this: "The Primum Mobile is moved by
its love for God,
and, being moved, communicates motion to the rest of the universe."
It is a large step to the world view of Laplace who, with respect to
the role of God in maintaining the motion within the solar
system, stated: "nous n'avons pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là"
("we do not have need of that hypothesis"). Again from C.S.
Lewis: "The human imagination has seldom had before it an object so
sublimely ordered as the medieval cosmos." How
different from the reaction of Pascal describing "le silence eternel
de ces espaces infinis" ("the eternal silence of these infinite
spaces"). Comparing the medieval to the modern in outlook, C.S. Lewis
says: "He is like a man being conducted through an
immense cathedral, not like one lost in a shoreless sea."
The medievals, asking the same questions we do about "nature" and "nurture,"
resolved them neatly by distinguishing between
the propagative vegetable soul, the sensitive animal soul and the rational
human soul. Troubling questions about our place in the
world were resolved with the Great Chain of Being. And while the Bestiaries
reflect what we would regard as a childish
knowledge of zoology, in practical matters involving animal husbandry,
horses, hawks, and hogs, it is we moderns who, on the
whole, must be found wanting. (The poet of Gawain and the Green Knight
(1325 ff.) assumes his audience shared his
intimate knowledge of the anatomy of a deer.) The Greek Mnemosyne,
Muse of Memory, has been given short shrift in a
modern society with widespread literacy: we no longer only know what
we can carry in our heads. In sum, it may be said that
we would likely surpass the medievals in an "open book" examination.
There are many lost arts. Commissioned in 1220, Salisbury Cathedral
was built with a foundation only four feet deep (on a
natural gravel bed through which runs a spring), has a spire about
two feet off center, and presented problems even Christopher
Wren begged off addressing. Nearly eight centuries later, Salisbury
Cathedral still feels like a country church and a place of
worship in a way that St. Paul and Canterbury Cathedrals do not. Its
spire viewed from afar remains among the most beautiful
architectural visions. Could we recreate it today?
Theoretically, I should say we could. In some sense, we currently have
the ability to build the Great Pyramids, Salisbury
Cathedral, and go to Mars. But we have done none of these things. Yet,
if we could, why do we not? It is surely not because
our building efforts have been expended on structures of greater beauty
or even equivalent durability. I maintain that being able
to do something theoretically, is much like the perpetual spectator
opining that, if he got into shape, he could run a marathon.
The fact is, the basic motivations and conditions of modern life are
such that it cannot be rebuilt. It would, perhaps, not make
financial sense. The zoning ordinances and building codes would forbid
it. An environmental impact statement would have to be
filed. Stone masons of sufficient experience would be difficult to
track down. But analyzing things in that way demonstrates the
shortcomings of the modern age, not its triumph. The fact is, we are
not motivated to do it. Our hearts are not in it. We have
not done it. They were. Theirs were. They did.
"The Sea of Faith/Was, once, too, at the full ..."
Let us ask the obvious question. What need had Medieval Europe
for so many cathedrals? Europe, an agricultural
civilization, with under one-fifth of its current population, built
vast temples which even modern society must struggle to
maintain. It seems that there is scarcely a cathedral in modern England
which is free of scaffolding. The French Church was
nearly bankrupted with the effort.
Consider the scope of the Norman construction efforts in England: St.
Albans Abbey (begun 1075); Ely Cathedral (1081);
Rochester (1083); Worchester (1084); Old St. Paul's (1087); Gloucester
(1089); Durham (1093); Norwich (1096),
Chichester (1100); Tewkesbury (1103); Exeter (1112); Peterborough (1116);
Romsey Abbey (1120); Fountains Abbey
(1140); St. David's in Wales (1176). All but Durham were rebuilt in
Gothic style, together with York Minster (built 1075 on a
Norman plan; reclothed in a Gothic form in 1291) and Lincoln Cathedral
(originally Gothic 1075; rebuilt in Gothic after the
1185 earthquake). [Will Durant, The Age of Faith, p. 863 ff.] Referring
to them, Durant states: "These are not names, they are
masterpieces; shame bows us at leaving them after a few hours, or dismissing
them in a line." They were joined by the great
steeples of Salisbury, Norwich and Lichfield and the Gothic flowering
of Wells Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and Canterbury
Cathedral. We are told that when the choir of Canterbury burnt down
in 1174, a short four years after the murder of Becket at
Canterbury, "[t]he people of the town beat their heads against the
wall in anger and bewilderment that the Almighty had
permitted such disaster to a shrine ...." [Jackson, Gothic Architecture,
I, 189, Cambridge University Press:1915.]
The cathedral-building efforts of medieval society represent the mobilization
of society for an otherworldly goal. Gothic
architecture itself reveals the straining of earthly materials towards
the heavens. The ribbed vaulting and columns were the bones
and sinew of medieval society. A source of communal pride, the cathedral
served the community as its place of assembly, its
school for the young, house of worship, technical school of arts and
crafts for guilds, and, during construction, lifetime
employment for generations of artisans. All about was community trade
and life, with the cathedral the enduring structure for
many in a short life marked by travail, sickness, and poverty, the
church present at all the stations along the great circle of
medieval life. The repeated collapse of the vault of Beauvais Cathedral
perhaps best serves as the metaphor for the
estrangement between man's yearning and his attainment, between the
essential and existential man. Scholastic philosophers,
both Aristotelian Dominicans and Platonic Franciscans, concurred that
in God only were the existential and essential natures
congruent; God's essential perfection was fully actualized.
The medieval cosmology and theology were closely allied: the sublunary
sphere was both literally and morally a step down from
the perfection of the heavens. The cathedral, as the embodiment of
the upward reaching of man's spirit towards his creator,
strained and, at Beauvais, exceeded the capacity of the materials.
It embodied the aspirations of the time - at the time.
Today, these places no longer are the focus of contemporary life. They
can barely be filled even on the holiest of Holy
Days and our footsteps would echo hollowly were it not for the press
of tourists. Though one can still feel in some cathedrals --
Salisbury, for instance -- the worshipful spirit of a living congregation,
many more partake of the coldness and emptiness of the
tomb.
Matthew Arnold, perhaps, said it best, in his "Dover Beach":
The
Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath neither really joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
I do not think our medieval ancestors would have envied us.
Chaucer's Essential Humanity
There can scarcely be a more vivid depiction of the difference in perspective
between the medieval and the modern
than the conclusion of Troilus and Criseyde. Having been slain without
pity by the fierce Achilles, the tale continues:
And whan that he was slayn in this manere,
His lighte goost ful blisfully is went
Up to the holughesse of the eighthe spere,
In convers letyng everich element;
And ther he saugh, with ful avysement,
The erratik sterres, herkenyng armonye
With sownes ful of hevenyssh melodie.
And down from thenes faste he gan avyse
This litel spot of erthe, that with the se
Embraced is, and fully gan despise
This wrecched world, and held al vanite
To respect of the pleyn felicite
That is in hevene above; and at the laste,
Ther he was slayn, his lokyng down he caste.
And in hymself he lough right at the wo
Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste;
And dampned al oure werk that foloweth so
The blynde lust, the which that may nat laste,
And sholden al oure herte on heven caste.
In its conclusion, we see all the elements of the medieval cosmology,
but, we also see the human struggle which continues to this
day in each of us to keep the true felicity in view, to keep the smaller
questions of daily life from consuming the larger ones.
This tension we feel today. We, too, were "born on the isthmus of a
middle state," as Alexander Pope was to put it
centuries after Chaucer and centuries before our time. Of both modern
and medieval man it may be said:
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err...
[Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle II].
Chaucer has drunk deeply of the philosophical foundations and literary
conventions of his time. But the expression of the
philosophy of Boethius is not limited to his Boece. If Boethius tells
us of a man seeking the "sovereyne good" who knows not
which path to take "ryght as a dronke man not nat by which path he
may retourne hom to his hous" [Boece, III, Pr.2, ll.
84-87], Chaucer finds still another use for that image:
We faren as he that dronke is as a mous.
A dronke man woot wel he hath a hous,
But he noot which the righte wey is thider,
And to a dronke man the wey is slider.
And certes, in this world so faren we;
We seken faste after felicitee,
But we goon wrong ful often, trewely.
[The Knights Tale, I (A) 1261-1267.]
Likewise, if Boethius tells us of "the moste precyous kynde/of rychesses,
that is to seyn, thi verray freendes" [Boece, II, Pr. 8,
ll. 47-48], then it remains for the Wife of Bath to tell it to us in
her way:
Poverte ful ofte, whan a man is lowe,
Maketh his God and eek hymself to knowe.
Poverte a spectacle is, as thynketh me,
Thurgh which he may his verray freendes see.
[The Wife of Bath's Tale, III (D) 1201-1204.]
Nor is the convention of Boccacio in De Casibus Virorum Illustrium,
with which Chaucer appears to be familiar, limited to a
relatively narrow work such as Lydgate's Fall of Princes or Sackville's'
Mirror for Magistrates. Chaucer presents this tradition
through the person of the Monk:
Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie,
As olde bookes maken us memorie,
Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee,
And is yfallen out of heigh degree
Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly.
[The Prologue of The Monk's Tale, VII, 1973-1977.]
The peculiar gift of Chaucer is the breadth of his depiction of contemporary
society, having captured so much of the essence of
his time that his name evokes the age itself. This is a select company
including Shakespeare and, possibly, Dickens. For our
purposes, here, however, the essential humanity and realism of Chaucer's
work is his great gift. In the canon of Chaucer's
writings, and especially in The Canterbury Tales, we are granted the
opportunity to observe an amazingly inclusive description
of his contemporary society. Of the twenty-three pilgrims who get their
turn to speak, we have representatives of courtly
society in the Knight and Squire, clergy, members of learned professions
of law and medicine, merchants, craftsmen, and
common folk.
Most of all, we are privileged to witness the genteel, the venal, the
hypocritical, the bawdy, the pretentious, the churlish, the
drunk, and good natured, in a way that a more formal literature would
surely have denied us. We are soon satisfied that these
personalities, for good and ill, are our parents and that humanity
has, for good and ill, bred true through the ages. We have
resolved the basic questions of our place in the world with different
philosophies, each leaving mysteries to be unravelled by the
future generations, but we have confronted the challenges of daily
life with the same tools and weapons. As Mark Twain wrote:
For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective
weapon - laughter. Power, money, persuasion,
supplication, persecution - these can lift at a colossal humbug - push
it a little - weaken it a little, century by century;
but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against
the assault of laughter nothing can stand. [Twain,
"The Mysterious Stranger" in The Family Mark Twain, New York: Barnes
& Noble, 1992, p. 1245.]
It is with shared laughter, the wit and humor, of Geoffrey Chaucer,
that we make our closest communion with those who have
gone before, confirming through them our own essential humanity.
What We Learn from Medieval Literature
We started with the proposition that there was value in learning about
our ancestors. On its face, as we have presented
it, our undertaking to uncover the "essential" human nature may seem
abstruse. But, at base, our inquiry is founded on simple
curiosity. It is really no more profound than a person approaching
middle age asking his parents about the family medical
history. We ask because it tells us something of ourselves. We have
established that the voices of our ancestors are best heard
through their literature, and that the literature most valuable to
us is one of our English-speaking predecessors at a remove from
our present times. And we are observed that Chaucer perhaps best captures
the humanity of his age, preserved for us today.
What we have learned enriches us. It gives added meaning to our lives
and personal aspirations. We reach across the
chasm of generations and find renewed kinship with ancestral humankind.
The humanity of Chaucer calls to us across the
centuries. Across an ocean of water and time, in a modern descendant
of the Chaucerian tongue, another poet wrote, affirming
this bond:
The others that follow me, the ties between me and them,
The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
* * *
It avails not, time nor place - distance avails not,
I am with you , you men and women of a generation, or
ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the
bright flow, I was refresh'd,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift
current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the
Thick-stemm'd pipes of steamboats, I look'd.
[ Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"]
So it is that the joy of life and literature is shared and passed down,
undiminished, as the Hebrew says, l'dor v'dor,
from generation to generation.
copyright ©2000 by Randolph I. Gordon
Randolph I. Gordon is a prominent member of the Washington State
Bar Association, and has written on the Lawyer-as-Superhero and the
navigation of workmen's compensation regulations in issues of multiple
chemical sensitivity. He has received the WSTLA Public Justice Award and
serves as adjunct to the Seattle University Law School.