Chapter 9
THE DEATH OF “GOD”

I. The Crime of Galileo

Whereas you, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzio Galilei, of Florence, aged seventy years, were denounced in 1615, to this Holy Office, for holding as true a false doctrine taught by many, namely, that the sun is immovable in the center of the world, and that the earth moves, and also with a diurnal motion; also, for having pupils whom you instructed in the same opinions; also, for maintaining a correspondence on the same with some German mathematicians; also for publishing certain letters on the sun-spots, in which you developed the same doctrine as true; also, for answering the objections which were continually produced from the Holy Scriptures, by glozing the said Scriptures according to your own meaning; and whereas thereupon was produced the copy of a writing, in form of a letter professedly written by you to a person formerly your pupil, in which, following the hypothesis of Copernicus, you include several propositions contrary to the true sense and authority of the Holy Scriptures; therefore (this Holy Tribunal being desirous of providing against the disorder and mischief which were thence proceeding and increasing to the detriment of the Holy Faith) by the desire of his Holiness and the Most Eminent Lords, Cardinals of this supreme and universal Inquisition, the two propositions of the stability of the sun, and the motion of the earth, were qualified by the Theological Qualifiers as follows:

1. The proposition that the sun is in the center of the world and immovable from its place is absurd, philosophically false, and formally heretical; because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scriptures.

2. The proposition that the earth is not the center of the world, nor immovable, but that it moves, and also with a diurnal action, is also absurd, philosophically false, and, theologically considered, at least erroneous in faith.

Therefore…, invoking the most holy name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His Most Glorious Mother Mary, We pronounce this Our final sentence.…: We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo… have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world; also, that an opinion can be held and supported as probable, after it has been declared and finally decreed contrary to the Holy Scripture, and, consequently, that you have incurred all the censures and penalties enjoined and promulgated in the sacred canons and other general and particular constituents against delinquents of this description. From which it is Our pleasure that you be absolved, provided that with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, in Our presence, you abjure, curse, and detest, the said error and heresies, and every other error and heresy contrary to the Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome…^{Note 1}

II. The New Reality

The date of this quaint document is 1630 a.d., midway between Dante and James Joyce; and on the broad canvas of our present study it can be seen to mark the termination of an age of mythic thought that opened in the Near East c. 7500 b.c., with the invention of agriculture, and came to maturity c. 3500 b.c. in Sumer. The symbolic image of the axial World Mountain of the Goddess, with the city of the Lord of Earth on its summit, abyssal waters beneath, and circling celestial spheres above, which we have seen illustrated in the ziggurat of Nippur,^{Note 2} recognized again in the Tower of Babel, Mount Sinai, and Olympus, and found developed in Dante’s work as a figure of the journey of the soul, represents, from first to last, the world period that Leo Frobenius termed the Monumental Stage of human history. In his view, this age — during the five-thousand-year course of which all the great high cultures arose and in their time expired — was preceded by the long, time­less millenniums of primitive man, foraging for his sustenance in environments dominated not by himself but by the animal and plant worlds. With the development in the nuclear Near East of the arts of agriculture and stockbreeding, however, when a constellation of settled communities of steadily increasing size appeared and, having spread gradually westward and eastward, reached, about 3000 b.c., the Atlantic and Pacific shores, new forms and possibilities of experience were opened to the eyes, mind, sentiments, and organs of action of man: the same old species, Homo sapiens, but acquiring now new masteries, creating his own environment, and dreaming his old, inevitable dreams of childhood, youth, maturity, and age through a context of new forms. And it was upon this broadly shared agricultural base that every one of the Monumental high cultures arose — whether in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean; India, China, and the New World; classical Greece and Rome; the Magian-Byzantine-Mohammedan Levant; or, finally, Gothic Europe, where, in the period of Heloise and Abelard, the Grail and Tristan poets, Joachim of Floris, Eckhart, Dante, and Cusanus, the beginnings of the next great stage in the evolution of consciousness appeared.

Frobenius called this new age, now upon us, the period of World Culture. Its technical determinants are to be the scientific method of research and the power-driven machine, as were agriculture and stockbreeding (c 7500 b.c.), with the arts of writing and coercive government (c. 3500 b.c.), of the Monumental. And the distinguishing feature of its new mankind — as heralded in the lives and works of those through whom it was announced — has already been suggested in Wolfram’s Parizval: that is ,to say, a mankind of individuals, self-moved to ends proper to themselves, directed not by the constraint and noise of others, but each by his own inner voice.

“Who is that ‘other,’” asks Ortega y Gasset, “those ‘others,’ to whom I entrust the task of being me?”

“Oh — no specific person!” he replies to his own question.

“Who is it that says what ‘they say’? Who is the responsible subject of that social saying, the impersonal subject of ‘they say’?”

“Ah — people! And ‘people’ is not this person or that person — ‘people’ is always someone else, not exactly this one or that one — it is the pure ‘other,’ the one who is nobody. ‘People’ is an irresponsibile ‘I,’ the ‘I’ of society, the social ‘I.’ When I live on what ‘they say’ and fill my life with it, I have replaced the I which I myself am in solitude with the mass ‘I’ — I have made myself ‘people.’ Instead of living my own life, I am de-living it by changing it to otherness.”

And he concludes: “What I am saying is simply that life has a reality that is neither goodness nor meritoriousness, but pure and simple reality in the degree that it is genuine, that each man feels, thinks, and does what he and only he, in the most individual sense, must feel, think, and do.”^{Note 3}

Such a statement could never have been made in Sumer. It would have been simply meaningless. Authority there was from aloft, the order of the heavens, translated, interpreted, and administered by priests. The holy spectacle of the Royal Tombs of Ur, where the entire court of the dead king descended alive into his grave,^{Note 4} tells of the awesome, noble impersonality of lives lived thus, in dedication to a priestly play: a mythological play, performed in honor of heaven’s law, derived from observations of the mathematically measurable cycling of the moon, the planets, sun, and stars. That is to say, just as primitive hunters based their social orders upon rites, and the rites upon fancied relationships and covenants with their animal neighbors; and as primitive planters, in their gruesome mysteries of sacrifice, burial, and supposed rebirth, imitated the order of the vegetal world, where life springs ever anew from the womb of earth: so in the great world age of the monumental ziggurats, pyramids, temple towers, and cathedral spires (“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven!”), the lesson that man sought to know and to follow was written above, for all time and for all — either in the stars (as in the earlier Bronze Age dispensation) or in the pages of a book dictated from “up there” and the words of one come down from “up there,” miraculously “made flesh.” Whereas the new center and source of awe, truth, virtue, and being, made known to us already in the courage and loyalty of Heloise, the prophecies of Joachim, the Grail Quest theme, Dante’s dream, and Eckhart’s birth of Christ in the heart, is for each his own, made known within. “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay on “Self-Reliance.”^{Note 5}

But the finding of this center implies not only courage in one’s own truth but also respect for its equivalent in others; once again, the principle of God as an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. Hence it was perhaps no mere accident, but historically symbolic, that, at the very time when Galileo was on trial, the individualist Roger Williams (c. 1604–1684) sailed away from England to the New World, arrived in Boston in February 1631, and, when banished by the Massachusetts court for expressing and teaching his opinion that the power of a state cannot properly claim jurisdiction over the consciences of men (moreover, that the king’s patent to the colonists conveyed no just title to the land, which should have been bought from its rightful owners, namely the Indians), departed and with four companions founded, in June 1636, on land purchased from the Narragansett sachems Canonicus and Miantonomo, as “a shelter for persons distressed for conscience,” the first secular state in history, terming himself in religion a “Seeker,” and naming his city, in thanks for “God’s merciful providence to him in his distress,” Providence.

Emerson (1803–1882), New England’s own philosopher-sage of the century of Schopenhauer, when celebrating in his spirited style “that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty,” puts the mystery before us very simply and clearly when he states: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal one.”^{Note 6} Which is exactly, of course, Paul Tillich’s “Ground of Being, and would be India’s brahman, too, as well as the Buddhist “body of truth” (dharmakāya),^{Note 7} were it not for a particular and great stress given throughout the works of the Western writers to the personal, individual embodiment of the mystery as a value in itself: as though to suggest that the place to recognize the personality of God (so important to theology) is not in transcendence, “out there,” beyond thought, beyond personality, but here in this life, in its immanence, in the faces, personalities, loves, and lives all around us, in our friends, our enemies, and ourselves. Or, returning to the language of Wolfram, touching the battle of Parzival and Feirefiz: My brother and I is one body — like good man and good wife. One flesh and blood, here battling from loyalty of heart, and doing itself much harm.

III. Names and Forms

A realization of the catastrophic implications for theology of the idea of “transcendence” was first delivered to Christian Europe through that “Invincible Doctor,” as he was called, the nominalist William of Occam (c. 1300–1349), after whose quick keen slash across the whole great big balloon, scholastic “philosophy” collapsed of its own dead weight. Already in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, in whose vast Summa Theologica the art of inflating revelation with reason came to culmination, there is at least one great word in recognition of the ineffable as just that, ineffable; namely, in the Summa contra Gentiles, the phrase, already cited: “For then alone do we know God truly, when we believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think of God.”^{Note 8} However, the Angelic Doctor went on then to expatiate in his Summa Theologica on God as Being, First Cause, a Personality, Immutable, et cetera, refuting heresies right and left (other people’s concepts of the inconceivable), as far as to the beginning of an exposition of the sacraments — when, saying Mass one morning in the chapel of Saint Nicholas at Naples, he experienced a sort of thunderclap from aloft, a raptus mentis:

“He was smitten with a wonderful change,” we read in the report of this catastrophe in the Acta Bollandiana, based on the words of his closest confidant, Reginald of Pipemo, “and after that Mass he neither wrote nor dictated anything more, but suspended his writing in the third part of the Summa, in the treatise on Penance.”

And when Brother Reginald saw that Brother Thomas had ceased to write, he said to him: Father, why have you put aside so great a work, which you began for the praise of God and the enlightenment of the world? And the said Brother Thomas replied: I cannot go on. But the said Brother Reginald, fearing that he had fallen into madness as a result of too much study, kept on pressing the said Brother Thomas to go on with his writing, and likewise Brother Thomas replied: I cannot do it, Reginald, everything I have written seems as worthless as straw.

Then Brother Reginald, overcome with surprise, so arranged matters that the said Brother Thomas went to visit his sister, the Countess of San Severino, of whom he was very fond; he hastened to her with great difficulty, and when he arrived and the Countess came to meet him, he hardly spoke to her. Then the Countess, in a state of great fear, said to Brother Reginald: What is all this? Why is Brother Thomas all struck with a stupor, and hardly speaks to me? And Brother Reginald answered: He has been like this since about Saint Nicholas’s day, and since then he has not written anything. And the said Brother Reginald began to press the said Brother Thomas to tell him for what reason he refused to write and why he was stupefied like this. And after a great many pressing questions from Brother Reginald, Brother Thomas replied to the said Brother Reginald: I adjure you by the living God Almighty and by your duty to our Order and by the love you have for me, that so long as I am alive you will never tell anyone what I am going to tell you. And he went on: Everything that I have written seems to me worthless in comparison with the things I have seen and which have been revealed to me.

And as the aforesaid Countess continued to be very taken aback, Brother Thomas departed and returned to Naples, and then resumed his journey to the Council according to the invitation he had received,* *To the Council of Lyons, January 1274, on the invitation of Pope Gregory X. writing nothing whatsoever. And on the road, in the village of Magentia in Compania, he was attacked by the illness from which he afterwards died.^{Note 9}

Riding along absent-mindedly on a mule, he had struck his head on a branch and fallen unconscious. In Maezna, where he then remained for a while with his niece Francisca of Aquino, he asked to be taken to the Cistercian monastery of Saint Mary at Fossanova. (We are following in life the legend of Galahad, on his journey in Solomon’s ship.) The report continues:

And the said witness said moreover, that when the said Brother Thomas began to be overcome with sickness in the said village of Magentia, he besought with great devotion that he might be borne to the monastery of St. Mary at Fossanova: and so it was done. And when the said Brother Thomas entered the monastery, weak and ill, he held on to a door post with his hand and said: This is my rest for ever and ever.… And he remained for several days in that monastery in his ill state with great patience and humility, and desired to receive the Body of our Savior. And when that Body was brought to him, he genuflected, and with words of wondrous and long-drawn-out adoration and glorification he saluted and worshiped it, and before receiving the Body he said: I receive thee, viaticum of my pilgrimage, for love of whom I have studied and watched and labored and preached and taught; never have I said aught against thee unless it was in ignorance: nor am I obstinate in my opinion, but if I have said aught ill, I leave it all to the correction of the Roman Church. And then he died, and was buried near the high altar of the church of that monastery, in a marshy place close to the garden of the said monastery, where there is a stream, from which a water wheel takes up water, by which all that place is watered, as the witness himself has often and carefully observed.^{Note 10}

Albertus Magnus (1193–1280), the first great master of the very brief period of the scholastics, who had been Aquinas’s master, is reported to have felt the moment of his pupil’s death telepathically; and whenever afterward Thomas’s name was mentioned, he would burst into tears so violently that people thought he had succumbed to senile decay.^{Note 11}

One is strongly reminded of Nietzsche’s sudden collapse at the height of his powers, 1888–1889, at the age of forty-five, and his eleven years thereafter, in the care of his mother and sister, in a state of torpid, paralyzed insanity. What sets fire to such minds? “It has not been sufficiently appreciated,” states one biographer, “that Saint Thomas Aquinas died from having contemplated God in an ecstatic vision.”^{Note 12}

The philosopher Karl Jaspers’ analysis of Nietzsche’s at least superficially similar case indicates both spiritual and physical influences.^{Note 13} Nietzsche had lived all his life in a sphere of boundary experiences. However, illness too had been his constant state; and, as Thomas Mann has demonstrated in his “classic dialogue on sickness and health,” The Magic Mountain, men’s spiritual modes and their states of physical health are by no means unrelated. Nietzsche himself, as Jaspers shows, understood the value to him of his Amfortas wound.

“I am sufficiently aware of my general advantage in my variable health over all those sturdy intellectuals,” he once wrote. “A philosopher who has made his way through many states of health and makes it again and again, has also gone through just as many philosophies; he simply cannot help constantly transmuting his condition into the most spiritual form and distance. Philosophy is just this art of transfiguration.”^{Note 14}

“Sickness,” comments Jaspers, “points the way to many and opposing sorts of thinking. It becomes ‘the teacher of the great suspicion.’”^{Note 15}

But exactly this realization of the relativity of thought and spirituality to states of mind, and of these to states of the body, is what has supplied the rationale both of Indian yoga and of Christian monastic asceticism. In both (and they are historically related, derived from a single stock) the physical austerities yield states of mind susceptible to raptures that seem to most ascetics to be of a deeper, greater validity than the experiences of health. Not so, however, to Nietzsche. As Jaspers tells:

He not only experiences the arrogance of cool clairvoyance, but also the intoxication of recuperation; and in this manner he views the healthy from the perspectives of illness, the sick from those of health. At one time he exposes his thoughts to the pressure of illness in order to see what will become of them, and at another time he subjects the sick thoughts to the criticism of health.^{Note 16}

And we have Nietzsche’s own words on the influence of Alpine air, upon which theme Mann developed the whole symphony of The Magic Mountain:

No one is able to live everywhere, and for anyone who has great tasks to perform that require all his powers, there is a very narrow choice. The influence of climate on metabolism, its retardation, its acceleration, is so great that a mistake in the choice of place and climate can not only alienate a person from his vocation, but even keep him from knowing what it is: he never discovers it. His animal vigor never is great enough to spill over into that spiritual state in which one realizes: that, only I can do.… Even a little intestinal sluggishness that has become habitual is quite enough to convert a genius into something mediocre, something “German”: the German climate itself suffices to fatigue powerful, even heroically gifted intestines. The tempo of metabolism stands in an exact relationship to the mobility or lameness of the spirit’s feet: the “spirit” itself, in fact, is only a kind of metabolism. Just consider the places where men of great spirit live and have lived, where wit, raffinement, disdain for comfort belong, where Genius almost inevitably makes itself at home: they all have marvelously dry air. Paris, Provence, Florence, Jerusalem, Athens — these names signify something: that Genius is conditioned by dry air, by a clean sky — i.e., by rapid metabolism, by the possibility of gathering to oneself, again and again, great, even prodigious quantities of energy.^{Note 17}

In Aquinas’s case, the moment of supreme rapture had apparently so diminished his respect for the long, sober, “healthy” labor of his life, that his energies could not return to it. They had passed to another sphere: the same at sight of which Galahad, trembling right hard, as when flesh begins to behold spiritual things, held up his hands to heaven and gave thanks and asked to die. It was ineffable, beyond words, beyond signs: transcendent.

In theology the word “transcendence” generally is read to refer (I am quoting Webster) to “the relation of God to the universe of physical things and finite spirits, as being, in his essential nature, prior to it, exalted above it, and having real being apart from it; — opposite to immanence.” In a philosophical, specifically Kantian sense, however, the term “transcendent” (again quoting Webster) means: “beyond the limits of all possible experience and hence beyond knowledge”; i.e. (and Kant makes this very clear), beyond all the forms and categories of experience and knowledge: space and time, as well as quantity (unity, plurality, or universality), quality (reality, negation, or limitation), relation (substantiality, causality, or reciprocity), or modality (possibility, actuality, or necessity). All these are the preconditions or presuppositions of human experience and thought. Hence to imagine a creation (causality) and creator (First Cause) of the universe is only to project the categories of human experience and reason beyond their field; that is too say, to become in a rather refined way as guilty of anthropomorphism as any savage.

And that exactly is what the Invincible Doctor, William of Occam, demonstrated in his own brilliant way in the early fourteenth century. By simply stating in so many words that there can be no abstractive cognition where there has not first been a perceptive cognition, Occam disqualified the application of concepts to the mystery called “God.” Concepts are functions of the mind, i.e., of individual minds. They may be derived from and signify perceptions, perceptions of things in the field of space and time; or they may derive from and signify acts of the mind, the minds of thinking individuals; but in no case can they signify entities other than those in the mind or those perceived. The concept “dog,” for example, is in the mind and signifies certain perceptions of creatures of a certain alikeness outside. It cannot be assumed to signify some metaphysical quidditas, “whatness,” or general substance dog, as an idea in a “divine” mind somewhere else, of which all the living and dead individuals classified by analogy as “dog” are representations. “Dragon,” “angel,” and “God,” on the other hand, find no referents outside of the mind. “Essentia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: Beings or essences are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” With this formula, known as “Occam’s razor,” the Invincible Doctor closed with a single phrase the book of scholastic “realism,” wherein substantial “reality” had been attributed to ideas; and on September 25, 1339, his “nominalism” was the object of a special censure by the Paris Faculty of Arts.

In effect, the import of Occam’s slash across the field of names and forms was to convert metaphysics into psychology. The archtypes of mythology (God, angels, incarnations, and so forth) could no longer be referred to a supposed metaphysical sphere but were of the mind. Or if they referred to anything outside the mind (as, for instance, the crucifixion of Jesus, crossing of the Red Sea, or serpent in the Garden) it could be only to individual facts, historical events that were once actually perceived in the field of space and time.

Half a century before Occam, in the Condemnations of 1277, the point had been made that neither Scripture nor its interpretation by the Church could be reconciled with reason. One could choose to stand either with reason or with Scripture and the Church, but not with both. The Averroists tried to advocate both (how sincerely, who can say?) in their doctrine of the double truth. With Occam’s stroke, however, reason had been disqualified as a vehicle of substantial truth. Scripture, however, as a record of historical events, sheer facts, seemed to many to have escaped untouched from Occam’s razor. And if the recorded facts were extraordinary — as they certainly were — well then, that proved the extraordinary claims of both Israel and the Church. Moreover, in Christ’s own words and acts, so recorded, he had shown himself to be God. Q.E.D. There followed the absolutely anti-intellectual piety of the so-called Devotio moderna, of which the Imitatio Christi (c. 1400) and Theologica Germanica (c. 1350) are the outstanding documents. The latter, through its influence on Martin Luther (1483–1546), became a contributing force in the inspiration of the indomitable churchly and scriptural positivism of the Protestant Reformation and subsequent centuries of bibliolatry; the sum and substance of the whole movement being epitomized in that supine formula of John Gerson already cited: “Repent and believe the Gospels, all Christian wisdom lies in this.”

“The believer,” as Nietzsche observed, “is not free to have any conscience at all for the question ‘true or untrue’: to have integrity on this point would be his end. The pathological condition of his point of view turns those convinced by it into fanatics — Savonarola, Luther, Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Simon — the oppositiontype to the strong spirit who has become free. Yet the grand pose of these sick spirits, these epileptics of the concept, takes effect on the great mass. The fanatics are picturesque. Mankind would rather see gestures than hear proofs.”^{Note 18}

But the historicizing miracle-mongering of the scriptural fanatics was not the only response of the time to the slash of Occam’s razor. Of more respectable spiritual, though not nearly as great historical, significance was a movement away from reason in the opposite direction: not to scriptural positivism, but to psychological absorption in the stages, spheres, and crises of inward realization symbolized in the imagery of the Christian mystical heritage — as in the vision of Dante (1265–1321) or in the sermons of Meister Eckhart (1260?–1327). A technical argument soon developed here, however — notably between the two chief followers of Eckhart, Tauler (1300?–1361) and Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) — as to whether an experience of union with the mystery called “God” should be expressed in terms of “identity” (unitive mysticism) or “relationship” (epithalamian mysticism, the “marriage” of the soul to God) (c ≠ = x, or cRx; compare The Balance.), and Christians generally have made a great deal of this distinction. Eckhart and Tauler spoke in terms of identity, Ruysbroeck of relationship. And since the experiences in question were of the mind, the psyche, and, moreover, intimately particular to each mystic, it is really wonderful that Pope John XXII (r. 13l b - 1334), who was no mystic at all, should have thought himself qualified to censure as false Eckhart’s description of what he had experienced.

In India, where, in yoga, they have had a little more experience of this inward way than we in the West, Eckhart and Tauler would simply have been said to have experienced nir-vikalpa samādhi, absorption without distinction; and Ruysbroeck, sa-vikalpa samādhi, absorption with distinction: the former dissolved in nir-guṇa brahman, the unqualified absolute, and the latter enjoying sa-guṇa brahman, the qualified.

“Do you like to speak of God with form or without form?” the Indian saint Ramakrishna (1836–1886) used to ask those coming to him for instruction. “Once upon a time a sannyasi entered the temple of Jagganath. As he looked at the holy image he debated within himself whether God had a form or was formless. He passed his staff from left to right to feel whether it touched the image. The staff touched nothing. He understood that there was no image before him; he concluded that God was formless. Next he passed the staff from right to left. It touched the image. The sannyasi understood that God has form.”^{Note 19}

And so, equally, from the lucid spirit of Nicholas Cusanus (1401–1464) — whom Giordano Bruno called “divine” — we have not only the wonderful work on “learned ignorance,” De docta ignorantia (1440), wherein all knowledge is recognized as conjecture and divinity as one’s own transcendent essence (immanent, since God is in all and all is in God, whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, yet transcendent of all categories of thought), but also, following that publication, his delightful devotional message to the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of Tegernsee, De visione dei, “Of the Vision of God” (1453), in which he wrote of the way to an intuition of the mystery of God through the contemplation of an image.

I will now show you, as I promised you, dearest brethren [Cusanus wrote], an easy path to mystical theology. For, knowing you to be led by zeal for God, I think you worthy of the opening up of this treasure, as assuredly very precious and most fruitful. And first I pray the Almighty to give me utterance, and the heavenly Word who alone can express Himself, that I may be able, as you can receive it, to relate the marvels of revelation, which are beyond all sight of our eyes, our reason, and our understanding. I will endeavor by a very simple and commonplace method to lead you by experience into the divine darkness; wherein, while you abide you shall perceive present with you the light inaccessible, and shall each endeavor, in the measure that God shall grant him, to draw even nearer thereunto, and to partake here, by a sweetest foretaste, of that feast of everlasting bliss, whereto we are called in the word of life, through the gospel of Christ, who is blessed for ever.

If I strive in human fashion to transport you to things divine, I must use a comparison of some kind. Now among men’s works I have found no image better suited to our purpose than that of a visage that is omnivoyant — its face, by the painter’s cunning art, being made to appear as though looking on all around it. There are many excellent pictures of such faces — for example, that of the archeress in the market place of Nuremberg; that by the eminent painter,. Roger [van der Weyden, 1400–1464], in his priceless picture in the governor’s house at Brussels; the Veronica in my chapel at Coblenz, and, in the castle of Brixen, the angel holding the arms of the Church, and many others elsewhere. Yet, lest you should fail in the exercise, which requires a figure of this description to be looked upon, I send for your indulgence such a picture as I have been able to procure, setting forth the figure of an omnivoyant, and this I call the icon of God.

This picture, brethren, you shall set up in some place, let us say, on a north wall, and shall stand round it, a little way off, and look upon it. And each of you will find that, from whatsoever quarter he regards it, it looks upon him as if it looked on no one else. And it will seem to a brother standing to eastward as if that face looked toward the east, while one to southward will think it looks toward the south, and one to westward, toward the west. First, then, you will marvel how it can be that the face should look on all and each at the same time. For the imagination of him standing to eastward cannot conceive the gaze of the icon to be turned to any other quarter, such as west or south. Then let the brother who stood to eastward place himself to westward and he will find its gaze fastened on him in the west just as it was before in the east. And as he knows the icon to be fixed and unmoved, he will marvel at the motion of its immovable gaze.

If now, while fixing his eye on the icon, he walks from west to east, he will find that its gaze continuously goes along with him, and if he returns from east to west, in like manner it will not leave him. Then he will marvel how, being motionless, it moves, nor will his imagination be able to conceive that it should also move in like manner with one going in a contrary direction to himself. If he should wish to experiment on this, he will cause one of his brethren to cross over from east to west, still looking at the icon, while he himself moves from west to east; and he will hear that it moves in a contrary direction, even as with himself, and he will believe him. But, had he not believed him, he could not have conceived this to be possible. So by his brother’s showing he will come to know that the picture’s face keeps all in sight as they go on their way, though it be in contrary directions; and thus he will prove that that countenance, though motionless, is turned to east in the same way that it is simultaneously to west, and in the same way to north and to south, and alike to one particular place and to all objects at once, whereby it regards a single movement even as it regards all together. And while he observes how that gaze never leaves any, he sees that it takes such diligent care of each one who finds himself observed as though it cared only for him, and for no other, and this to such a degree that one on whom it rests cannot even conceive that it should take care of any other. He will also see that it takes the same most diligent care of the least of creatures as of the greatest, and of the whole universe.^{Note 20}

IV. The New Universe

“We believe in something with a live faith when that belief is sufficient for us to live by, and we believe in something with a dead, a sluggish faith when, without our having abandoned it, being still grounded in it, we no longer experience it efficaciously in our lives.” So Ortega y Gasset.^{Note 21}

The disintegration of the foundations for that faith which, during the centuries of its own collapse, became (ironically!) one of the most influential, simultaneously constructive and destructive, forces in the history of mankind, proceeded, and is proceeding still, from two irresistible influences, the same to which the modern process of cultural transformation as a whole has become irrevocably consigned; namely the scientific method of research and the power-driven machine. The latter, of course, did not become a significant force before the end of the eighteenth century; but already in the early thirteenth, important new inventions were being put to use. From the Orient, paper and the compass arrived about 1260 (the time of the voyages of the Polo brothers). About 1320 gunpowder was applied to the propulsion of projectiles, water power came into use in industry and the stern rudder for ships, the mechanical clock was invented, also the windmill, and with the introduction of Arabic numerals a sudden advance was achieved in mathematics, giving promise of more discoveries to come.

The immediate danger to the faith, however, lay in the astonishingly rapid development, even in the period of Aquinas, of an attitude of independent inquiry in fields that for centuries had been allowed to rest about as Aristotle had left them. Adelard of Bath, in his Questiones naturales, proposed as early at 1115, the time of Heloise and Abelard, a series of queries in natural history, beginning with the earth and its plants, and proceeding to the lower and higher animals, then on to human psychology, and concluding with the cosmic phenomena of ocean, air, and sky.^{Note 22} Today some of the questions sound ridiculous. They did not, however, in their time. No one knew where such queries might lead.

When one tree is grafted upon another, why is all the fruit of the nature of the grafted portion? Why do some brutes ruminate; why are some animals without stomachs; and why do some that drink make no water? Why do men grow bald in front? Why do some animals see better in the night than in the day and why can a man standing in the dark see objects that are in the light, while a man standing in the light cannot see objects that are in the dark? Why are the fingers of the human hand of unequal length and the palm hollow? Why do babies not walk as soon as born, and why are they first nourished on milk? Why does milk not agree equally with young and old? Why do we fear dead bodies? Why can the voice penetrate an iron wall? How is the terrestrial globe upheld in the midst of space?^{Note 23}

In a second work, De eodem et diverso, the same inquisitive author observes: “The senses are reliable in respect neither to the greatest nor to the smallest objects”; and then he asks: “Who has ever comprehended the space of the sky with the sense of sight?… Who has ever distinguished minute atoms with the eye?”^{Note 24} And with this, as Professor Lynn Thorndike remarks in his eight-volume History of Magic and Experimental Science, the inevitability is already announced of Galileo’s telescope. Moreover, that the author of these inquiries knew exactly what he was doing to the mansion of belief is evident from a rather startling rebuke that he delivers in his Questiones to an imagined interlocutor:

It is difficult for me to talk with you about animals: for I have learned from my Arabian masters under the guidance of reason; you, however, captivated by the appearance of authority, follow your halter. Since what else should authority be called than a halter? For just as brutes are led where one wills by a halter, so the authority of past writers leads not a few of you into danger, held and bound as you are by bestial credulity. Consequently some, usurping to themselves the name of authority, have used excessive license in writing, so that they have not hesitated to teach bestial men falsehood in place of truth.… Wherefore, if you want to hear anything more from me, give and take reason. For I am not the sort of man that can be fed on a picture of a beefsteak.^{Note 25}

It is in the light of inquiries and researches of this kind that one must understand the effort of Aquinas in the later portion of his Summa Theologica to keep separate the two fields of science and the Christian faith. “The reason why science and faith cannot be about the same object, and in the same respect,” he wrote, “is because the object of science is something seen, whereas the object of faith is the unseen.”^{Note 26} However, among the matters of the faith that he and his Church were proposing for belief, as touching the unseen, were not only the dogmas of the Athanasian Creed^{Note 27} but also, as defined in the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215 a.d., the doctrine of the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the eucharist; and further, behind and supporting all this, the entire geo- and Judeo-centric fairytale of the Old Testament: of Adam and Eve, the serpent in the Garden, the universal flood, the Tower of Babel and plagues of Egypt, Moses’ parting of the Red Sea, Joshua’s stopping of the sun, the boys in the fiery furnace, and Jonah in the whale. So that obviously not only things unseen, but seeable things as well — quite concrete, historical, and cosmological things — were being here proposed to faith: things of the past, of which archaeology presently would tell, and things of the present, the form of the universe, et cetera, which in Aquinas’s time had already begun to come under investigation.

In England, for example, the Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste (1175?–1253?), an older contemporary of Aquinas, and a clergyman like himself, who in a work entitled On the Order of the Emanation of Things Caused by God had expressed the earnest wish that men should cease questioning the scriptural account of the age and beginning of the world,^{Note 28} nevertheless, in his own treatise on the Sphere, was willing to propose that the sphericity of the earth and all the stars and planets “is made evident both by natural reasons and by astronomical experiences.”^{Note 29} And the reference here to experiences, instead of to the usual authority, is marvelously important: a word of infinite promise. For it is the heralding word, at last, of Europe against Asia, future against past, individual quest, and the sharp cut of “proof” into the grip of “faith.” It marks the beginning of that irretrievable break from untested error that was to uproot and demolish, within the next four centuries, every support of that age of the monumental arts which for a period of some five millenniums had held mankind enchanted in a dream of toil and beauty, misery and wonder, serving gods abiding in a house of myth only a league or so beyond the moon. The term defines the first absolutely indispensable requisite of any sort of science or maturity of mind whatsoever.

Grosseteste himself was experimenting, among other matters, with lenses; and showing thereby, as he declared, “how to make things very far off seem very close at hand, and how to make large objects that are near seem tiny, and how to make distant objects appear as large as we choose, so that it is possible for us to read the smallest letters at an incredible distance, or to count sand or grain or grass or any other minute objects.”^{Note 30} Galileo’s telescope (invented 1608 in Holland) and the Dutchman Zacharias Zanger’s microscope (1590) are here already on the way, to make things unseen, both up there beyond the moon and in here within the living cell, as visible as necessary to explode the entire space-andtime dimension of the edifice of Scripture. Moreover, the same bold English bishop held that light and all natural objects send forth in all directions, along geometrical lines, virtues, or forces, which act upon the senses and upon matter: space itself, in this way, being a function of light.^{Note 31} And of this proposition too the implications were immense; for not personal, spiritual wills, but impersonal energies or forces were now to be regarded as the potencies responsible for the operations of nature, and the way thereby was opened to a technology not of prayer, sacrifice, hells, penances, and incense, but of machines.

Another highly significant English “experimenter” of the time — still the time, by the way, of Aquinas — was “The Admirable Doctor,” the Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (1214?–1294), who wrote of experiments with magnets and, at the invitation of his protector, Pope Clement IV (r. 1265–1268), sent to Rome three substantial works reviewing, unmethodically but broadly, the entire field of what he took to be proper to experimental science. Languages, mathematics, optics, and the “noblest” science, “mistress of them all,” moral philosophy, are discussed here side by side with magic, astrology, miracles, the potency of well-thought words, and the flights of good and bad Ethiopian dragons. “First one should be credulous,” Roger Bacon wrote, in his exposition of his scientific method, “until experience follows second, and reason comes third.… At first one should believe those who have made experiments or who have faithful testimony from others who have done so, nor should one reject the truth because he is ignorant of it and because he has no argument for it.”^{Note 32}

However, as an example of the lengths to which his credulity could extend, without correction from either experience or reason of his own, we may cite his following unqualified report to his patron on Peter’s throne: that “there was at Paris recently a sage who asked for snakes and was given one and cut it into small sections except that the skin of its belly on which it crawled remained intact; and that snake crawled as best it could to a certain herb by touching which it was instantly made whole. And the experimenter collected an herb of wonderful virtue” (Compare with this apparently traditional fantasy the old Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh, the serpent, and the plant of immortality [Occidental Mythology]; also, the Arabian Nights tale of “The Queen of the Serpents” [Joseph Campbell, ed. The Portable Arabian Nights, New York: Viking, 1952, pp. 406–15].).^{Note 33}

By the middle of the following century there was being established in Paris, however, in the researches and writings of the masters of the so-called “mechanistic school” of critics — notably the Rector of the University, John Buridan of Bethune (fl. 1328–1366), and the Bishop of Lisieux, Nicolas Oresme (fl. 1348–d. 1382) — a reasonably substantial base for a dependable order of science. Buridan, hypothetically attributing to the celestial bodies matter of the same order as that of the earth, sought to explain why objects tossed into the air should continue to fly after leaving the hand, and then referred his finding to a theory of the planets. Briefly: at the moment when a stone is tossed, there is imparted to it an impetus that is proportionate, on one hand, to the velocity of the movement and, on the other, to the quantity of matter moved: which imparted impetus then maintains the movement until the resistance of the air and the weight of the matter prevail. The imparted impulse continuously diminishes; hence the movement of the stone continuously retards, until, in the end, yielding to gravity, it falls back to its natural place.^{Note 34}

“If he who hurls projectiles,” Buridan states, “moves with an equal speed a light piece of wood and a heavy piece of iron, these two pieces being otherwise the same in volume and shape, the piece of iron will go farther because the impetus to it is the more intense.”^{Note 35} As Professor Etienne Gilson comments to this point: “John Buridan got very close to the notion of the impeto in Galileo and the quantity of movement in Descartes.”

However, even more important than the approximate laws proposed in this theory was its very bold extension of the laws of earth to the celestial spheres (also as in Galileo). For now, continuing the argument (as summarized by Gilson): “Assuming that God conferred on celestial orbs a certain impetus at the moment of their creation, that he preserves it in them as he universally preserves all things, and that no resistance either inner or outer neutralizes that initial impetus, there is no reason why the movement of celestial orbs should not continue by itself.”^{Note 36} With this, the angelic intelligences formerly supposed to be in charge of maintaining the movements of the heavens (the Muses of Figure 20) were rendered useless, and the laws of this earth were extended outward into spheres formerly reserved for orders only of the more subtle, spiritual kind: of God and his heavenly host.

Nicolas Oresme then extended Buridan’s mechanistic theory of impetus inward, to the psychological field: “Just as you see a hammer rebound upward from an anvil several times of itself and then come to rest in the middle,” he wrote, “so too in movements and powers of the soul there are sometimes produced at the start impetuses and dispositions that have great effect.”^{Note 37} Oresme, furthermore, applied rectangular coordinates to the study of falling bodies and in his Treatise on Heaven and Earth maintained that experiments should be conducted to determine whether it is the sky that is moved and the earth not, or vice versa — even giving in illustration of the latter possibility, “several fine persuasions to show that the earth is moved in a daily movement and the sky not.”^{Note 38}

Now one of the most important effects for Western science of the old Levantine mythology of matter and spirit as distinct from each other, and of a god that is not immanent in nature but “out there,” was the corollary that matter of itself is inert, and that, consequently, any movement observed in nature must have been communicated to it, either by God, directly or through an angel, or else by some other external spirit — the only other such spirit possible, however, being Satan, or some member of his host. The findings of Oresme and Buridan cleared the field at least of the angels and the devils, completing the work begun by Grosseteste a century before. In their view, the old Sumerian vision of a universe moved by superior beings, intelligences or gods, gave place to a marvelous machine, made and moved by God, the Master of the machine; and this idea remains among us to the present.

However, in the popular view the angels and devils still were at work. The world, indeed, was a machine, and God was its Maker and Master; but Satan, once the prince of angels, knew its secret and through alchemy, necromancy, astrology, and the other sciences was communicating his knowledge to men, both to bind them to himself by offering aid to illegitimate ends, and ultimately to win from God control of the machine. When Satan tempted Christ, he offered him all the kingdoms of the world in return for adoration, whence it is infallibly known that Satan bestows knowledge only on those who render him allegiance. The masters and mistresses of his knowledge and arts were therefore to be “vehemently suspected,” not of heresy alone, but even of having bound themselves to the service of the prince of Hell. And with the rapid increase of heresy throughout Europe from 1250 to 1650, together with the knowledge and works of science, the guardians of the authority of Rome and the Scripture were seized with a passion of anxiety that released throughout the Christian world a reign of terror matched in history only by the mass liquidations of the modern tyrant states.

In the year 1233 the Inquisition had been established and assigned to the Dominicans by Gregory IX (r. 1227–1241). In 1250 Frederic II, the principal antagonist and restrainer of the papacy, died, and two years later, May 15, 1252, Innocent IV (r. 1243–1254), in his bull Ad extirpanda, authorized the secular authorities to use torture in the scouting out of both heresy and sorcery. Alexander IV (r. 1254–1261) four years later extended this privilege to the clergy, and from April 5 to 9, 1310, at Toulouse, the first of a series of full-scale autos da fé was instituted.^{Note 39} September 19, 1398, a statement from the doctors of the University of Paris — under the chancellorship at the time of that leading protagonist of the Devotio moderna, John Gerson (to whom some scholars now attribute the writing of the Imitatio Christi) — declared that there is an implied contract with Satan to be recognized in every superstitious observance of which the expected result cannot reasonably be anticipated from God or from nature, condemning, furthermore, as erroneous the assertion that it is permissible to invoke the aid of demons or to seek their friendship; to enter into compacts with them or to imprison them in stones, rings, mirrors, or images; to use sorcery even for good purposes; or to hold that God can be induced by magic arts to compel demons to obey invocations, that the celebration of Masses or other good works is permissible in connection with thaumaturgy, that the prophets and saints of old performed their miracles by these means, or that by magic arts we can attain the sight of the divine essence.^{Note 40} Joan of Arc, it is recalled, was burned as a witch in 1431. Five decades later the inquisitor Cumanus gained for himself a high place in heaven by shaving scrupulously the whole bodies of forty-seven witches before committing them to the flames; and as Frazer notes in The Golden Bough in comment on this incident: “He had high authority for this rigorous scrutiny, since Satan himself, in a sermon preached from the pulpit of North Berwick church, comforted many of his servants by assuring them that no harm could befall them ‘as lang as their hair wes on.’ ” Frazer points to identical customs among the primitive Bhils of India and the Aztecs.^{Note 41} And indeed, reading of the religion of those years, one has the sense of watching the putrefaction of a corpse — the body, once so beautiful at Chartres, dissolving in a horrid stench.

Witches, by the light of the moon, rode on brooms, those nights, to mountaintops, to consort there in obscene rites with Satan himself in the form of a goat, poodle, or ape. They would lift his tail and kiss him there, while holding a lighted candle, trample and spit upon the Cross, turn up their own rear ends to God, and listen to a sermon preached by His Satanic Majesty to a parody of the Mass, where they would learn they had no souls to lose and that there would be no future life. Tables loaded with meat and wine would then rise from the earth. A dance would follow, with the women held behind their partners, and when bowing to the demon they bent backward, lifting a foot forward in the air. Indiscriminate intercourse would terminate such rites, much in the way of the old Gnostic love feasts, and with obliging demons now serving as either incubi or succubi as required.^{Note 42}

Nor was the Protestant world, when its time came, one whit better off. When Luther, in the year 1520, burned at Wittenberg the papal bull, together with a volume of scholastic philosophy and a copy of the church canon, shattering the Church Militant into a galaxy of contending Christianities (all equally opposed both to Occam’s unknown God and to the works of science and reason, tortured with a Pauline sense of the sinfulness of life, and fighting with fire and brimstone both each other and the rising tide of facts by which their scriptural Rock of Ages was already well nigh engulfed), superstition and violence did not decline but even increased. Luther himself hurled his inkpot at the Devil, spoke often of his struggles against Hell, and hurled the Bible at Copernicus (1473–1543), naming him “an ass who wants to pervert the whole art of astronomy and deny what is said in the book of Joshua, only to make a show of ingenuity and attract attention.” He and all about him were as riddled with superstition as those from whom they were revolting. As the one rational Christian of the day, the very learned Erasmus, remarked in his timely work In Praise of Folly: “The Christian religion seems to have some relation to Folly and no alliance at all with wisdom.” And again: “There are none more silly, or nearer their wits’ end, than those too superstitiously religious.”^{Note 43}

The Protestant legend of the magician Faust who sold his soul to Satan was conceived and born of this madness. Historically, Doctor Johann Faust (1480?–1540?) — or Magister Georgius Sabellius Faustus Junior, as he is said to have called himself — was a contemporary of Erasmus (1466–1536), Luther (1483–1546), Zwingli (1484–1531), Melanchthon (1497–1560), Calvin (1509–1564), and Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547). besides the alchemist Paracelsus (1493–1541) and the rollicking monk Rabelais (1495–1553). The earliest dated reference to him is in a letter, August 20, 1507, from the Benedictine Abbot Johann Tritheim (who was himself reputed to be a magician in league with Satan) to the mathematician Johann Windung, wherein the fellow is named simply a fool, vain babbler, and mountebank fit to be whipped. Philipp Begardi, another contemporary, in his Index sanitatis (published in Worms, 1539), ranks him with Paracelsus as a “wicked, cheating, unlearned” doctor: “Since several years he has gone through all regions, provinces and kingdoms, made his name known to everybody, and is highly renowned for his great skill, not alone in medicine, but also in chiromancy, necromancy, physiognomy, visions in crystal, and the like other arts. And also not only renowned, but written down and known as an experienced master. Himself admitted, nor denied that it was so, and that his name was Faustus, and called himself philosophum philosophorum. But how many have complained to me that they were deceived by him — verily a great number!”

But it was a Protestant pastor in Basel, Johann Gast (d. 1572), who in his Sermones convivales (Basel, 1543) first definitely credited this mountebank with supernatural gifts derived from the Devil, by whom he was ultimately carried off; the performing horse and dog by which he had been accompanied on his rounds having been his familiar evil spirits. “The wretch came to an end in a terrible manner,” wrote Pastor Gast; “for the Devil strangled him. His dead body lay constantly on its face on the bier, although it had been five times turned upward.” The councilor and historian of Maximilian II, Johann Mannel (d. 1560) reported in his Locorum communium collectanea (published in Basel, without date) a conversation of Melanchthon in which the reformer spoke strongly of Faust as “a disgraceful beast and sewer of many devils,” who had been killed indeed by the Devil’s wringing his neck; while still another witness, Johann Weiher, body physician to the duke of Cleves, described Faust in his De praestigus daemonium (Basel, 1563) as a drunken vagabond who had studied magic at Cracow and practiced “this beautiful art shamelessly up and down Germany, with unspeakable deceit, many lies and great effect.”

The legend set going by the pastor Gast soon gained in all Protestant lands almost infinite popularity. Ballads, dramas, and puppet plays appeared, as well as a proliferation of Faust books. On the puppet stage, a voice cried from the right: “Faust! Faust! desist from this proposal! Go on with the study of theology, and you will be the happiest of mortals.” To which a voice from the left responded: “Faust! Faust! leave the study of theology. Betake you to necromancy, and you will be the happiest of mortals!” Faust deliberately chose the latter, preferring human, satanic knowledge to that of God. “He laid the Holy Scriptures behind the door and under a bench, refused to be called doctor of theology and preferred to be called doctor of medicine” — and so, was justly damned.

The first of the numerous “Faust books” was put forth by Johann Spies at Frankfurt in 1587, with the following descriptive title: History of Dr. Joh. Faust, the notorious sorcerer and black artist: How he bound himself to the Devil for a certain time: What singular adventures befell him therein: What he did and carried on until finally he received his well-deserved pay. Mostly from his own posthumous writings; for all presumptuous, rash and godless men, as a terrible example, abominable instance and well-meant warning, collected and put in print. “Submit yourselves therefore to God: resist the Devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). This book immediately sold out, and before the end of the year there were four pirated editions. The very next year, at Tübingen, a rhymed version appeared; at Frankfurt, a second edition by Spies; and in Lübeck, a Low German version. Reprints and amplified redactions continued to pour forth until in 1599 there was published the culminating Faust book, by Georg Rudolf Widmann,^{Note 44} wherein, among other novelties, Luther himself was declared to have been able only with God’s help to ward off the assaults that Faust by his magic put upon him.

The Faust books are marvelously Protestant. Mephistopheles, Faust’s devil, appears in the costume of a monk and when Faust asks for a wife declares that, since marriage is pleasing to God, it would be a violation of their contract. The magician’s body servant, Wagner, is the son of a Catholic priest. And when wines and rich meats are desired, they are produced from the cellars and pantries of the clergy. There is, furthermore, no sympathy at all for the tragedy of the protagonist, torn between the wonders of this world and the promise of eternity. He was wicked, he was damned, and let the reader be warned by his fate.

Figure 92. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (print, England, 1620)On the other hand, in the play by Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, though the incidents of the first Faust book are closely followed, the moral is totally transformed — from the Reformation, one might say, to the Renaissance. For along with the rise in these centuries of a respect for experience and reason there had been unfolding (and not in Italy alone) that new appreciation of the loveliness of this world and the arts of its celebration which, even while Luther was hurling his ink at Devils and the Papal See, had come to culmination in the masterworks of Leonardo (1452–1519), Dürer (1471–1528), Michelangelo (1475–1564), Raphael (1483–1520), and Titian (1477–1576). Already in the period from Buridan to Cusanus — c. 1350–1450) — the Renaissance of delight in this world had begun to refute, in its own immediate way, the Gothic system of disparagement. Petrarch (1304–1374), directly following Dante (1265–1321) and Giotto (1272–1336), is, of course, the pivotal figure of this inversion. Next follow Boccaccio (1313–1375) in Italy, Deguilleville (fl. 1330–1335) in France, and in England Geoffrey Chaucer (13407–1400), in whose Canterbury Tales the wakening interest in portraiture, the features, character, motives, and delights of living individuals, comes to the foreground, and the Middle Ages echoes only in their words, the folklore, saints’ tales, fabliaux, and romances that they recount to each other for entertainment. It is as though the plane of serious interest had shifted from the mysteries within the alchemical vas to the lives of the alchemists themselves, from our Figures 53, 56, 57, and 58, of the mystic connubium of the king and queen, to come to rest upon Figure 54.

And so, too, in the visual arts. The symbolic personages of the Christian mythology, of the Fall by the Tree and Redemption by a Savior on Holy Rood, began to assume, more and more distinctly, the weight and tangibility of this physical world. Even the sensuous values of their garments acquired significance, and their settings in landscapes or in buildings became more and more fields of interest in themselves. Many an “Adoration of the Virgin” or “Baptism of Christ” is but an occasion for an interesting arrangement of superb portraits — not of saints, but of Renaissance Florentines. And where the mythological theme is stressed, as it is in Titian’s eloquent rendition of “The Fall of Man,” now in the Prado, the interpretation is of the human moment — rendering a sense at once of the tragical and the beautifully necessary mystery of man, woman, death, and birth, in the joys and sorrows of this world. Only Angelico (1387–1455) retained in his work that sense of a distinction between what the Indians call the “subtle matter” (sukṣma) of mythological forms and the “gross matter” (sthūla) of this earth. So that when, in the reformed spirit of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, after the Council of Trent (1545–1563), an attempt was made to render mythic themes in relation again to Heaven — as, for example, in “The Immaculate Conception” by Murillo (1618–1682), also in the Prado — the result was of neither Gothic nor Renaissance sincerity but Baroque sentimentality. For look you what had taken place!

By about 1440 the art of printing from movable type had been invented, and, from his press at Mainz, Johann Gutenberg produced in 1454 and 1455 the first dated printed documents, some letters of indulgence made from type cast in a mold; then in 1456 the so-called Mazarin Bible (named from a copy in the library of Cardinal Mazarin, 1602–1661). By 1464 there was a printing press in Italy, near Rome; by 1468 one in Switzerland, with Erasmus as the press corrector; by 1470 there was a press in France, at the Sorbonne; by 1471 one in Utrecht, 1473 in Holland, 1474 Spain, 1476 Manchester (Caxton), 1539 Mexico City, and 1638 Cambridge, Massachusetts. Already in the middle sixteenth century, since the new art seemed to be stimulating too much freedom of thought, repressive measures were introduced by Church and State alike (or rather, now, by churches and by states), and the quality of the work greatly declined; but in the eighteenth century a revival occurred, and the beautiful types of Caslon, Baskerville, and Bodoni were designed.

In 1445 Cape Verde was discovered, exploding the idea that only sand, water, and the mountain of Purgatory lay to the south. In 1486 Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope; in 1492 Columbus crossed the ocean blue, and in 1498, Vasco da Gama reached Calicut; in 1512 another bold Portuguese reached Java and the Moluccas; in 1519, Magellan, likewise a Portuguese, circumnavigated the globe, and the same year Cortez conquered Mexico for Spain, in 1530, Pizarro, Peru. So that, besides new worlds geographically, new worlds of mythology had also been discovered, and the problem already was recognized that has been exercising students of religion ever since: of how it is to be explained that so many of the basic themes and patterns of the authorized Christian myths and rites appear also (in Satanic parody, as it were) among the heathens of the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

Then, as we have seen, in 1543 Copernicus published his exposition of the heliocentric universe, and Galileo some sixty years later commenced his celestial researches with a telescope, which led immediately to the condemnation of the new cosmology as contrary to Scripture — which of course it was and is.

V. The Knight of the Rueful Countenance

Henry Adams named the year 1600 — the year of the burning of Giordano Bruno — as marking the watershed of the passage from the “religious” to the “mechanical age” of mankind,^{Note 45} and, as he notes, the leading spirits of the transit actually did not realize what, in their pursuit of truth, they were doing to the armature of faith.

Society [as he tells] began to resist, but the individual showed greater and greater insistence, without realizing what he was doing. When the Crescent drove the Cross in ignominy from Constantinople in 1453, Gutenburg and Fust were printing their first Bible at Mainz under the impression that they were helping the Cross. When Columbus discovered the West Indies in 1492, the Church looked on it as a victory of the Cross. When Luther and Calvin upset Europe half a century later, they were trying, like St. Augustine, to substitute the Civitas Dei for the Civitas Romae. When the Puritans set out for New England in 1620, they too were looking to found a Civitas Dei in State Street; and when Bunyan made his Pilgrimage in 1678, he repeated St. Jerome. Even when, after centuries of license, the Church reformed its discipline, and, to prove it, burned Giordano Bruno in 1600, besides condemning Galileo in 1630 — as science goes on repeating to us every day — it condemned anarchists, not atheists. None of the astronomers were irreligious men; all of them made a point of magnifying God through his works; a form of science which did their religion no credit. Neither Galileo nor Kepler, neither Spinoza nor Descartes, neither Leibnitz nor Newton, any more than Constantine the Great — if so much — doubted Unity. The utmost range of their heresies reached only its personality.

Continuing, Adams then comes to his crucial point, the naming of the new force, the new theme, by which the old, of unity, whether personified or not, was being displaced:

This persistence of thought-inertia is the leading idea of modern history. Except as reflected in himself, man has no reason for assuming unity in the universe, or an ultimate substance, or a prime-motor. The a priori insistence on this unity ended by fatiguing the more active — or reactive — minds; and Lord Bacon [1561–1626] tried to stop it. He urged society to lay aside the idea of evolving the universe from a thought, and to try evolving thought from the universe. The mind should observe and register forces — take them apart and put them together — without assuming unity at all. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” “The imagination must be given not wings but weights.” As Galileo reversed the action of the earth and sun, Bacon reversed the relation of thought to force. The mind was thenceforth to follow the movement of matter, and unity must be left to shift for itself.^{Note 46}

Essentially what has happened is that in the physical field — the field of matter understood as distinct from spirit — an order of law has been recognized that is apparently not the same as that of the human will and imagination. As in the Freudian view of the forces operative in the structuring of the psyche the wish of the growing child is countered by the prohibition of the parent, and as in A dler’s view the child’s wish is frustrated by its own impotence to achieve, so here the symbols of the soul’s dynamic structure, projected upon the universe, are met and broken by an irrefragable order in diametric opposition. Whereas in the soul, or heart, there is the sense of freedom — freedom of choice and to will — out there, in the field of its action, a mechanical determinism prevails. Whereas here there would seem to be intelligence and intention, there there is only blind, irresponsible, unknowing, unfeeling momentum. The desert-field and dust-storm of inert, unconscious matter, set blowing, whether by God, by chance, by itself, or by nothing at all, has welled out from that stone flung upward by John of Buridan to fill, to permeate, and to become the world; and from the hammered anvil of Oresme, driven inward, as well, to the seat of the soul itself. Galileo and Newton confirmed Buridan’s intuition of the stone; Freud and Pavlov, Oresme’s of the anvil. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) renewed for the modern mind the slash of Occam’s razor, and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) assumed upon the modem throne the place of Helen of Troy.

Don Quixote de la Mancha, the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, riding errant on his lean horse Rozinante (“Horse of Once-upon-a-Time”), striving both for the benefit of the public and for the increase of his private honor (just about the year 1600), saw before him, spread across the plain, a phalanx of some thirty or forty windmills.

“Look there, friend Sancho!” he cried. “Those giants! I am going to quit them of their lives.”

“What giants?” Sancho asked, trotting alongside on his donkey.

“Those ahead!” Quixote replied. “Some of that kind have arms that can reach two leagues.” He was already lowering his lance.

“Please,” Sancho warned, “take another look! Those are windmills. What you take for arms are their sails.”

But the knight had given spur to his nag and, with lance couched, was on his way.^{Note 47}

In the language of the troubadours, the contrast of the two world orders of adventure and banality, will and determinism, was epitomized in the imagery of the passage from night — the night of love — to dawn, the day of the watchman’s cry and the legally cruel gilos. “Oh God! Oh God! This dawn, how quickly it comes!” Abelard, Clinschor, and Anfortas were not the only gallants in those days whose battle cry of Amor! terminated in disaster. But their fate was no more than symbolic of the usual breakage of the will of man, his dream and urge for life, by circumstance: the windmill phalanx of the hard facts of this world. Parzival and Gawain were able to overthrow this weight. The will in them was fulfilled. Don Quixote, on the other hand, was about to encounter in those windmills more than his match.

The wind had risen; the mill sails had begun to move. Covering himself with his shield and recommending himself to the vision of his imagined Lady Dulcinea del Toboso, in whose service he was riding, he charged with Rozinante’s utmost speed at the first of the giants before him, running his lance into its sail — which received the blow and, continuing its mechanical round, hurled both the knight and his mount a good way off, splintering the lance.

The question again arises that was posed by Schopenhauer, as to whether, in the fate of any rightly striving man, the weight and impact of sheer circumstance can be such as to vanquish altogether his sense of will, and therefore of being. And so what had Don Quixote to say when his squire, trotting on his donkey as fast as short legs could go, arrived to help his piaster to his feet?

“God help us!” said Sancho Panza. “Anyone could have seen that these are windmills — not giants — unless he had windmills in his head!”

“Be still, my friend Sancho,” said the knight. “Affairs of war, more than any others, are subject to abrupt change. I am sure it was that necromancer Freston who transformed these giants into mills, to deprive me of the honor of this victory. He has always been my enemy, this way. However, his evil arts will have little force, in the end, against the virtue of my sword.”

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616), living and writing — as Ortega y Gasset points out in his Meditations on Quixote — precisely at that moment in the adventure of man when the worlds of the inward vision and outward crude reality came irresolvably together, intersecting, “forming a beveled edge,” marks the end in literature of the sheerly imaginative epic and the opening of the present age of the novel. “Reality is coming into poetry,” Ortega writes, “to raise adventure to a higher aesthetic power.”

The epic plane, on which imaginary objects glide, was until now the only one, and poetry could be defined in the same terms as the epic. But now the imaginary plane comes to be a second plane. Art is enriched by one more aspect; it is, so to speak, enlarged by a third dimension; it reaches an aesthetic depth, which like geometric depth, presupposes a plurality of aspects. Consequently, the poetic can no longer be made to consist of that special attraction of the ideal past or of the interest which its procedure, always new, unique, and surprising, lends to adventure. Now our poetry has to be capable of coping with present reality.…^{Note 48}

Cervantes looks at the world from the height of the Renaissance. The Renaissance has tightened things a little more, and has completely overcome the old sensibility. With his physics, Galileo lays down the stern laws that govern the universe. A new system has begun; everything is confined within stricter forms. Adventures are impossible in this new order of things. Before long Leibnitz [1646–1716] would declare that simple possibility lacks validity; that only the “compossible” is possible; that is to say, what is closely connected with natural laws. In this way the possible — which shows its crusty independence in the miracle, in the myth — is inserted into the real as the adventure in Cervantes’ portrayal of truth.”^{Note 49}

Reality carried Quixote, that is to say, who carried adventure in his head. Adventures are impossible, and yet Don Quixote brings them to pass. In the earlier world of the epic of Parzival and Gawain, knights in the forest met with adventures in accord with the movements and readiness of their hearts, dreamlike; Quixote, on the other hand, encountered windmills in a hard, resistant world, unresponsive to his will: yet his will remained — a reality in itself.

People [as Ortega remarks] may be able to take good fortune away from this neighbor of ours, but they will not be able to take away his efforts and courage. His adventures may be the vapors of a fermenting brain, but his will for adventure is real and true.

Now, adventure is a dislocation of the material order, something unreal. In this will for adventure, in this effort and courage, we encounter, then, a strange dual nature, whose two elements belong to opposite worlds: the will is real, but what is willed is not real. Such a phenomenon is unknown in the epic. The men of Homer belong to the same world as their desires. In Don Quixote we have, on the other hand, a man who wishes to reform reality. But is he not a piece of that reality? Does he not live off it, is he not a consequence of it? How is it possible for that which does not exist — a projected adventure — to govern and alter harsh reality? Perhaps it is not possible, but it is a fact that there are men who decide not to be satisfied with reality. Such men aim at altering the course of things; they refuse to repeat gestures that custom, tradition, or biological instincts force them to make. These men we call heroes, because to be a hero means to be one out of many, to be oneself. If we refuse to have our actions determined by heredity or environment, it is because we seek to base the origin of our actions on ourselves and only on ourselves. The hero’s will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own. This will to be oneself is heroism.^{Note 50}

And, as Ortega next remarks, a life lived in these terms is necessarily tragic.

The tragic character is not tragic, and therefore poetic, merely in so far as he is a man of flesh and blood, but only in so far as he wills. The will — that paradoxical object which begins in reality and ends in the ideal, since one only wants what is not — is the tragic theme; and an epoch for which the will does not exist, a deterministic and Darwinian epoch, for example, cannot be interested in tragedy.…

The plain man very sensibly thinks that all the bad things happen to the hero through his persistence in such and such a purpose. By giving it up, he could make everything turn out well and, as the Chinese say at the end of a tale, alluding to their former nomadism, could settle down and raise many children.… The plain man, incapable of heroic acts, is ignorant of that stream of life in which only sumptuary, superfluous activities take place. He is ignorant of the overflow and excess of vitality. He lives bound to what is necessary and what he does, he does perforce. He is always impelled to act; his actions are reactions.…

Far from the tragic originating in fate, then, it is essential for the hero to want his tragic destiny.… All the sorrow springs from the hero’s refusal to give up an ideal part, an imagined role that he has chosen. The actor in the drama, it might be said paradoxically, plays a part which is, in turn, the playing of a part, although this part is played in earnest.… And this “act of will,” creating a new series of realities which exist only through it — the tragic order — is naturally but a fiction for anyone whose only wishes are those of natural necessity, which is satisfied with what merely exists.”^{Note 51}

And with this I return to Christopher Marlowe, the father of Elizabethan tragedy; for his Doctor Faustus too is a work of this epoch of the “beveled edge.” He also was one who looked at the world from the height of the Renaissance: a young genius aware of both the promise for humanity and the marvels of the universe being opened to view in his time by the heroes of this dawning modern age. Francis Kett, the mystic, burned in 1589 for heresy, had been a fellow and tutor of his college at Cambridge. Sir Walter Raleigh was a close friend; so too Thomas Harriott the astronomer, Walter Warner and Robert Hughes, two mathematicians. At Cambridge, furthermore, he had been a student of classical mythology, particularly in Ovid, whose Amores he translated. His orientation was totally secular; so that, though he based his drama on an English version of the first Faust book of Spies, his own sympathy for the yearning, daring hero, and recognition of the tragic force of a life torn between the claims of eternity and time, set him spiritually completely apart from the fiercely moral Christian-Lutheran stand. And it was this humanizing, problematic transformation of the legend that recommended it to Goethe, who when Marlowe’s play was mentioned burst into the exclamation: “How greatly it all is planned!”

The hero here is no “sewer of devils,” but a man, a living Renaissance man, thirsting for the infinite and willing to risk for it Hell itself — as had been Tristan for Isolt, Parzival for integrity, and Heloise for Abelard. Though in the end he is destroyed, throughout his life we are with him in his joys — which, after all, are innocent enough: in science, in wealth, in world travel, in love, and with a reach of soul and desire beyond anything Satan could appease:

When I behold the heavens, then I repent,

And curse thee, wicked Mephistophilis,

Because thou hast deprived me of those joys.^{Note 52}

And his praise of Helen of Troy, furthermore, is of a man worthy of such beauty: the lines themselves are his redemption:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

 

Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies! —

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

Here will I dwell, for Heaven is in these lips,

And all is dross that is not Helena.

I will be Paris, and for love of thee,

Instead of Troy, shall Wertenberg be sacked;

And I will combat the weak Menelaus,

And wear thy colours in my plumed crest:

Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,

And then return to Helen for a kiss.

Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;

Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter

When he appeared to hapless Semele:

More lovely than the monarch of the sky

In wanton Arethusa’s azured arms:

And none but thou shalt be my paramour.^{Note 53}

It was Lessing (1729–1781) who first recognized that the end of Faust should have been not damnation but salvation, and Goethe (1749–1832) then brought this insight to realization, representing his hero, moreover, as a pattern of the yearning, striving, creative spirit of specifically European man, with Mephistopheles but an agent of that principle of negation, “the dead and the set-fast,” of which creative reason “makes use” in its “striving toward the divine,” the unattainable absolute of fulfillment.

Vom Himmel fordert er die schönsten Sterne

Und von der Erde jede höchste Lust,

End alle Näh’ und alle Ferne

Befriedigt nicht die tiefbewegte Brust.^{Note 54}

 

The fairest stars from Heaven he requires,

From Earth the highest raptures and the best,

And all the Near and Far that he desires

Fails to subdue the tumult of his breast.

So Spengler in The Decline of the West, following Goethe, termed the Western monumental culture that is unfolding still, the “Faustian,” with its impulse to infinity, and its prime symbol, limitless space — in contrast to the “Apollonian” classical, with its accent on the visible; and to the “Magian” Levantine, with its sense of a duality of mysteriously contending forces in this universe, “matter” and “spirit,” darkness and light, Devil and God. “The Magian hierarchy of angels, saints and Persons of the Trinity is becoming more and more disembodied,” Spengler wrote, “paler and paler, in the lands of the Western pseudomorphosis (For this term, see Experience and Authority and Occidental Mythology.), supported though it is, still, by the whole weight of ecclesiastical authority; and even the Devil, the great counterplayer in the Gothic world drama, is disappearing unnoticed as a possibility for the Faustian world feeling. He, at whom Luther still could throw his inkpot, has been passed over, long since, in embarrassed silence by Protestant theologians. For the sense of aloneness of the Faustian soul cannot rest in a duality of world powers. Here God himself is the All.”^{Note 55}

VI. Toward New Mythologies

So let us attempt now to say something of the new prospects for mythology appearing in this fresh world of now and here, the scattered ruins — still in fragments among us — of the old Sumerian mansion of five thousand years. As already shown, a complete mythology serves four functions.

1. THE METAPHYSICAL-MYSTICAL PROSPECT

The first function of a living mythology, the properly religious function, in the sense of Rudolf Otto’s definition in The Idea of the Holy, is to waken and maintain in the individual an experience of awe, humility, and respect, in recognition of that ultimate mystery, transcending names and forms, “from which,” as we read in the Upaniṣads, “words turn back.”^{Note 56} I would say that in the modern world, outside of the synagogues and churches at least, this humility has been restored; for every claim to authority of the book on which pride of race, pride of communion, the illusion of special endowment, special privilege, and divine favor were based has been exploded. Theology, so called, can now make no claim more than to be a literary exercise in explanation or an archaic text wherein certain historically conditioned, ambiguous names, forms, acts, and utterances are attributed to what (if the term “what” must be used) can be called only “far above all that man can possibly think,” i.e., ineffable. The faith in Scripture of the Middle Ages, faith in reason of the Enlightenment, faith in science of modern Philistia belong equally today to those alone who have as yet no idea of how mysterious, really, is the mystery even of themselves.

“Suppose you are sitting on a bench beside a path in high mountain country,” suggests the great modern physicist, Erwin Schrödinger.

There are grassy slopes all around, with rocks thrusting through them; on the opposite slope of the valley there is a stretch of scree with a low growth of alder bushes. Woods climb steeply on both sides of the valley, up to the line of treeless pasture; and facing you, soaring up from the depths of the valley, is the mighty, glacier-tipped peak, its smooth snowfields and hardedged rock-faces touched at this moment with soft rose-color by the last rays of the departing sun, all marvelously sharp against the clear, pale, transparent blue of the sky.

According to our usual way of looking at it, everything that you are seeing has, apart from small changes, been there for thousands of years before you. After a while — not long — you will no longer exist, and the woods and rocks and sky will continue, unchanged, for thousands of years after you.

What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this ‘someone else’ really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father’s father … thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference — the difference between you and someone else — when objectively what is there is the same?

Looking and thinking in that manner you may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound rightness of the basic conviction in Vedanta: it is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense — that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza’s pantheism. For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you — and all other conscious beings as such — are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole; only this whole is not so constituted that it can be surveyed in one single glance. This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as “I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world.”^{Note 57}

Schopenhauer’s oxymoron, “Everything is the entire world as will in its own way,” points to this same transcendent sense of mystery; so also the circle of Cusanus; likewise the words of Jesus in the Gnostic Thomas Gospel: “Cleave a piece of wood, I am there.”^{Note 58} For this indeed is the insight basic to all metaphysical discourse, which is immediately known — as knowable to each alone — only when the names and forms, the masks of God, have dissolved. “Truth is one,” states the Indian Rg Veda, “the sages call it by many names.”^{Note 59}

However, as the Invincible Doctor, William of Occam, showed, Kant confirmed, and Henry Adams recalled, the category, or name, of unity itself is of the mind and may not be attributed to any supposed substance, person, full or empty void, or “Ground of Being.” Indeed the term “being” itself is but a name; so too “non-being.”

Who, then, is to talk to you or to me of the being or non-being of “God,” unless by implication to point beyond his words and himself and all he knows or can tell?

2. THE COSMOLOGICAL PROSPECT

The second function of a mythology is to render a cosmology, an image of the universe, and for this we all turn today, of course, not to archaic religious texts but to science. And here even the briefest, most elementary review of the main crises in the modern transformation of the image of the universe suffices to remind us of the fact-world that now has to be recognized, appropriated, and assimilated by the mythopoetic imagination.

First, in 1492 there was the Columbian revolution. Dante, it is recalled, had placed Paradise on the summit of the mountain of Purgatory, which his century situated in the middle of an imagined ocean covering the whole of the Southern Hemisphere; and Columbus at first shared this mythological idea. The earth, he wrote, is shaped “like a pear, of which one part is round, but the other, where the stalk comes, elongated” ; or, “like a very round ball, on one part of which there is a protuberance, like a woman’s nipple.” The protuberance, he believed was to be found in the south; and on his third voyage, when his vessels sailed more rapidly northward than southward, he believed this showed that they had begun to go downhill. And he was the more convinced of his error since some weeks earlier, at the southern reach of his voyage, when he had sailed between the island of Trinidad and the mainland of South America, the volume of fresh water pouring into the ocean from the mighty Orinoco, “the roar, as of thunder,” that occurred where the river met the sea, and the height of the waves, which nearly wrecked his little ships, had assured him that so great a volume of fresh water could have had its origin only in one of the four rivers of Paradise, and that he had at last, therefore, attained to the stalk end of the pear. Sailing north, he was leaving Paradise behind.^{Note 60}

Hardly two centuries earlier Aquinas had sought to show by reasonable argument that the Garden of Paradise from which Adam and Eve had been expelled was an actual region of this physical earth, still somewhere to be found. “The situation of Paradise,” he had written, “is shut off from the habitable world by mountains, or seas, or some torrid region, which cannot be crossed; and so people who have written about topography make no mention of it.”^{Note 61} The Venerable Bede, five and a half centuries before, had sensibly suggested that Paradise could not be a corporeal place but must be entirely spiritual;^{Note 62} Augustine, however, had already rejected such a notion, maintaining that Paradise was and is both spiritual and corporeal;^{Note 63} and it was to Augustine’s view that Aquinas adhered. Columbus died without knowing that he had actually delivered the first of a series of potent blows that were presently to annihilate every image not only of an earthly but even of a celestial Paradise. In 1497 Vasco da Gama rounded South Africa, and in 1520 Magellan, South America: the torrid region of the seas was crossed, and no Paradise found.

In 1543 Copernicus published his exposition of the heliocentric universe, and some sixty years later, as we have already noticed, Galileo commenced his celestial researches with a telescope. These led immediately, as we have also noticed, to the condemnation of the new cosmology as contrary to Holy Scripture. It was contrary also, however, to the poetic Hellenistic imagery of the Music of the Spheres (Figure 20), which now, like every other feature of pre-Copernican cosmology, whether of the Orient or of the Occident, must be interpreted solely in psychological terms. The ancient mythic notion of an essential and evident macro-meso-microcosmic harmony is dissolved. Cosmology, sociology, and psychology are of different orders, and the ancient concept also has been lost, therefore, of the hieratic arts as making visible in the “things that are made” the “invisible things of God,” those structuring forms by which all things are held in place. Wrote Ananda K. Coomaraswamy:

Those who think of their house as only a “machine to live in” should judge their point of view by that of Neolithic man, who also lived in a house, but a house that embodied a cosmology. We are more than sufficiently provided with overheating systems: we should have found his house uncomfortable; but let us not forget that he identified the column of smoke that rose from his hearth to disappear from view through a hole in the roof with the Axis of the Universe, saw in this luffer an image of the Heavenly Door, and in his hearth the Navel of the Earth, formulae that we at the present day are hardly capable of understanding; we, for whom “such knowledge as is not empirical is meaningless.” Most of the things that Plato called “ideas” are only “superstitions” to us.^{Note 64}

And after all, one cannot help asking, why not? Both Plato’s universe and that of the neolithic dweller in a little mesocosmic hut were founded, like our own, upon empirical observation, plus the idea of an inward macro-microcosmic unity. The navel of the earth is no longer an adequate popular symbol, however, of the “still point of this turning world,” which is to be found within the heart — and everywhere, within every atom, as well as, perhaps, outward, at some inconceivable distance, to which our galaxy itself is but a moon. As in the lines of the poet Robinson Jeffers:

The atom bounds-breaking, 

Nucleus to sun, electrons to planets, with recognition

Not praying, self-equaling, the whole to the whole, the microcosm

Not entering nor accepting entrance, more equally, more utterly, more incredibly conjugate

With the other extreme and greatness; passionately perceptive of identity.…^{Note 65}

The meaning of the word “superstition” (Latin, superstare, “to stand over,” from stare, “to stand,” plus super, “over”) is simply “belief in something ‘standing over,’ as a vestige, from the past.” The image of this earth, for example, as a flat revolving plate, covered by a dome through which a golden gate, the sun door, leads to eternity, was not a “superstition” in the eighth millennium b.c., but an image derived empirically from contemporary naked-eye observation. Its spiritual value did not inhere in anything intrinsic to the image, but derived from its power to suggest and support a sense in man of accord with the universe. However, such a cosmic image, taken literally and insisted upon today, would suggest not accord but disaccord, not only with the known facts of the universe, but also with the science and civilization facing those facts — as the trial of Galileo has well shown. Not the neolithic peasant looking skyward from his hoe, not the old Sumerian priesthood watching planetary courses from the galleries of ziggurats, nor a modern clergyman quoting from a revised version of their book, but our own incredibly wonderful scientists today are the ones to teach us how to see: and if wonder and humility are the best vehicles to bear the soul to its hearth, I should think that a quiet Sunday morning spent at home in controlled meditation on a picture book of the galaxies might be an auspicious start for that voyage.

Revolution number three, following the Columbian and Copernican, then, was the Newtonian, of the Machina Coelestis. The prelude was announced in the impulse theory of John Buridan, wherein the idea of sustaining intelligences was eliminated from the universe: one good push from God at the beginning would have sufficed to set his entire little geocentric whirligig in motion. Galileo, in his Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations concerning Two New Sciences pertaining to Mechanics and Local Motions, published 1638 in Leiden (beyond reach of the windmill arms of the Inquisition), introduced a mathematically controlled statement of the laws governing movements and inertias, and in Prague meanwhile, independently, Johann Kepler (1571–1630) had broken forever the old classical notion of the circle as the structuring form of the universe, by demonstrating that the orbits of the planets are not circles but ellipses, and establishing a single formula for the calculation of their various speeds of passage. These findings he announced in 1609 in a work based upon his study of the eccentric orbit of Mars, Astronomia nova αἰτιολογικός, seu Physica coelestis tradita commentariis de motibus stellae Martis. The precision of his reckoning led him to write of the celestial machine as “something like a clockwork in which a single weight drives all the gears,” and — as Dr. Loren Eiseley puts it in his lucid summary survey of the rise of modern science, The Firmament of Time — to this clockwork figure of Kepler’s, Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), with his formulation of the laws of gravity, “supplied the single weight.”^{Note 66} “God had been the Creator of the machine, but it could run without his interference.… Newton, however, remained devout in a way that many of his followers of the eighteenth century did not.”^{Note 67}

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Pierre Simone Laplace (1740–1827) extended backward in time the laws that Newton had flung into space, and projected the so-called Kant-Laplace theory of the evolution of the universe — which then became the fourth of these modern cosmological revolutions, and perhaps the most dangerous of all. For now the origin of the universal machine was found to have been not as a perfectly formed structure immediately from God’s hand, but as a precipitate, by natural laws, from a cloud of rotating gas, a nebula; and there have now been located literally tens of thousands of such nebulae in the infinite reaches of space, in various stages of the process. There is now no necessity, or even possibility, of imagining a point in time past when a personality (somewhere that was nowhere) set up the entire show. In fact, philosophically it is not permissible to speak of a “time” when time was not or when time will cease to be. There is no before or after time that is not itself time. And if the principle of causality is allowed to lead us to seek for a cause in time of this universe that we see, then it must be allowed to lead us to ask, further, for the cause of that cause, and so on, forever backward; which is a form of questioning not to be shut off, finally, simply by saying, “Well, now I am tired, let’s stop here and draw the line and name the blank space beyond that line God: and specifically not Śiva, Ptah, Enki, or Tezcatlipoca, but the one right here, the so-called Living God, the one with the personality, in our cozy family Bible, who sent down to his Chosen People all those interesting rules about not gathering sticks on Saturday or eating butter and meat at the same meal.”

Instead let me quote, for a moment, from a rather more recent popular work that arrived in the mail the other day:

The basic unit of the universe is the galaxy, a great grouping of stars. Millions of galaxies are racing through space out and away from one another.… In a single galaxy, stars being born, stars in vigorous life and stars dying in heaving nuclear explosions — the beginning, middle and end of creation — are all present.

The story of a star begins with its birth.… A cloud of dust and gas, whirled into pockets of high density, begins to contract around one or more of its gravitational centers. Many centers in one tight cloud can result in a single star plus planets, a multiple star, or a multiple star plus planets. The finished product depends on the density and size of the original cloud and on the degree of rough-and-tumble in its movements. Astronomers believe that they may see unlit protostars in the very act of contracting in the nearby clouds of the Milky Way’s spiral arms. They appear as dark globules against the less opaque regions of gas and dust around them.

When a protostar contracts, its central regions are warmed by the release of gravitational energy — the heat of infalling atoms colliding with one another. Eventually the heat becomes so intense that the hydrogen of the core begins to fuse into helium. At first the nuclear fusions of single atoms are infrequent and release little energy but, as the star continues to contract under the weight of its accumulating outer layers, the atoms of the core are pressed closer together and fuse more and more frequently. Eventually they are producing exactly enough outpushing energy to counteract the star’s inpulling gravitation. At that point the shakedown is over and the star has arrived at a stable, mature state.…

In due course, however — after a few hundred thousand years if it is a hot, blue, massive, fast-burning star; after a few billion years if it is a mild, yellow, sun-sized, temperately burning star; or after a few hundred billion years if it is a cool, red, lightweight, slow-burning star — it consumes about 10 per cent of its original hydrogen and begins to grow overbright and abnormal. The sun is approaching this point but is not expected to reach it for another three to five billion years.…

Although stellar evolution’s rule of thumb is the smaller they start, the longer they last, eventually even the smallest, most conservatively invested reserves of star stuff will be spent.… Up to now, not even the most monstrous supergiants that died in the earliest eons of the Milky Way’s history have had time to cool completely and lose all their energy. But, ultimately, the last expiring ghosts of white dwarfs must succumb to the chill of space. One by one they will grow as dark and cold as the voids which reach out from the Milky Way toward other, receding galaxies in the universe beyond.^{Note 68}

The fifth revolution Dr. Eiseley has termed the Huttonian, after the Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726–1797), whose paper, delivered in 1785 to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, entitled Theory of the Earth, or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution and Restoration of Land upon the Globe, broached the question of the manner of formation of this earth which the Living God was supposed to have fashioned ex nihilo in 4004 b.c. According to Hutton’s view, the rocks of the earth’s surface are formed largely from the waste of older rocks. These materials were laid down beneath the sea, compressed there under great pressure, and subsequently upheaved by the force of subterranean heat, during which periods of upheaval veins and masses of molten rock were injected into the rents of the dislocated strata. The upraised land, exposed to the atmosphere, became again subject to decay; and the waste again was washed to the sea floor, where the cycle was renewed — as in Finnegans Wake.

Conflicting with the short chronology of the Bible, this theory of gradual transformation was opposed by a passionately argued contrary notion of sudden catastrophes. Goethe in his Faust, Part II, Act II (the “Classical Walpurgisnacht”), humorously plays the two contending views against each other, letting the Greek philosopher Thales stand for the gradualists — the so-called “Neptunists” — and Anaxagoras for the catastrophism of the “Vulcanists”: showing his own preference for the former view, however, by confiding his comical little secondary hero Homunculus (born of the art of Faust’s alchemy and still enclosed in his vas Hermeticum, Figure 58) to the care of Thales for incorporation, through infusion, in the living, nourishing waters of this evolving world.^{Note 69}

Goethe’s contemporary, the great French naturalist Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier (1769–1832), having observed “that none of the large species of quadrupeds whose remains are now found embedded in regular rocky strata are at all similar to any of the known living species,” had proposed that floods and other catastrophes, all according to God’s plan, had brought about an advance toward man by sudden stages. The later forms had not evolved biologically from the earlier, but after each annihilation there had taken place a re-creation of forms on a higher plane, proceeding from Platonic ideas in the mind of God.^{Note 70} Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807–1873), the great Swiss-American contemporary of Darwin, retained this idea of a succession of creations, which, however, had already been challenged by Charles Lyell (1794–1875) in his celebrated Principles of Geology (1830), where “passage beds” were identified, and a theory supporting Hutton’s of local transformations, not universal catastrophes, accounted for the changes of the earth: the rise and fall of coastlines, the slow upthrust of river systems, through periods of illimitable time.^{Note 71} And so the way was prepared for the sixth great revolution, that to which the name of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) is now attached.

An anticipation of the general theory of organic evolution is already suggested in the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1452 — 1519), where, writing of comparative anatomy, he studies homologous structures in man and in those which, as he states, “are almost of the same species: the baboon, the ape, and others like these, which are many.”^{Note 72} Goethe published in Jena in 1786 a famous paper on the intermaxillary bone in the higher mammals, in the ape, and in man; and in 1790 a larger work on the metamorphosis of plants. “The resemblances of the various animals to each other, and in particular those of the higher species,” he declared in a lecture introducing the first of these publications, “strikes the eye and is generally recognized by everybody in silence.… All of the higher natural organisms — among which are to be named, the fish, amphibians, birds, mammals and, as highest of these last, mankind — have been formed according to a simple pattern, which only varies, more or less, in its various parts and even now, in its procreation, is changing and developing.”^{Note 73} In his work on the morphology of plants, this theme of continuing transformation then was carried on:

No matter what forms we observe, but particularly in the organic, we shall find nowhere anything enduring, resting, completed, but rather that everything is in a continuous motion.… No living thing, furthermore, is a unit, but a plurality; even though it may seem to us to be an individual, it is nevertheless a collection of living, independent things, which in idea and potential are alike, yet in appearance can become either alike and equivalent or unalike and various. These entities sometimes are joined together in the beginning, sometimes find each other and become linked. They divide and again seek each other, and so bring about an endless course of productivity in all manners and in all directions.

The more imperfect the creature, the more its parts are alike and equivalent, and resemble thus the whole. The more perfect the creature becomes, the more unlike do the parts become. In the former case the whole is more or less like the parts, in the latter, the whole is unlike the parts. The more nearly alike the parts are, the less is one subordinate to another. Subordinations of the parts belong to a more developed creature.…

When man compares plants and animals of the least developed stages, they are hardly distinguishable from each other. A point of life, fixed, or else moving or half moving, is there, hardly perceptible to our senses. Whether such a first beginning, susceptible to development in either direction, was to be brought by light to the state of a plant or by darkness to that of an animal, we should hardly presume to decide were there not analogous examples about, to let us know. This much, however, can be said: that the creatures who in the course of time gradually developed from an originally hardly distinguishable condition, on one hand as plants and on the other as animals, perfected themselves in two directions, so that the plants attained their glory in the enduring fixed form of the tree, and the animals in the supreme mobility and freedom of man.^{Note 74}

With this the immemorial idea of fixed species, whether in the mind of God or in the order of nature, was transcended, and the principle of life in evolution introduced. It remained only to determine and define precisely the conditions of the process.

The seventh great revolution in the cosmological sciences dates from the turn of the present century, when, on one hand, the shell of the atom was penetrated to reveal a universe within of spinning demons, and, on the other, the philosophically devastating implications of the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 were established in Albert Einstein’s formulation in 1905 of the basic proposition of relativity: “Nature is such that it is impossible to determine absolute motion by any experiment whatsoever.” It was Dr. Max Planck (1858–1947) of the University of Berlin who broke the reign of Newtonian principles in the field of physics, when in 1901 he proposed his quantam theory of the laws of radiation.^{Note 75} Sir Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) in 1911 then showed that the atom is not a solid ball but an almost empty universe of energies, and in 1913 the Dane Niels Bohr (1885–1962), at work in England, applied Planck’s quantum theory to a definition of the active structure of the Rutherford atom. We all know what has happened since. As Henry Adams prophesied in a letter written January 17, 1905, to his friend Henry Osborn Taylor:

The assumption of unity which was the mark of human thought in the middle ages has yielded very slowly to the proofs of complexity. The stupor of science before radium is a proof of it. Yet it is quite sure, according to my score of ratios and curves, that, at the accelerated rate of progression shown since 1600, it will not need another century to tip thought upside down. Law, in that case, would disappear as theory or a priori principle, and give place to force. Morality would become police. Explosives would reach cosmic violence. Disintegration would overcome integration.^{Note 76}

Some might say the Devil had won and that Faust, caught in Satan’s snare, was now self-prepared for extermination through his own science. However, as far as here and now is concerned (and, my friends, we are still here), the first function of a mythology — to waken a sense of awe, humility and respect, before that ultimate mystery, transcending names and forms, “from which,” as we have read, “words turn back” — has been capitally served by every one of these sciences of the second function: the rendition of a cosmology, an image of this universe of wonder, whether regarded in its spatial or its temporal, physical, or biological aspect. For there is nowhere any certainty more, any solid rock of authority, whereon those afraid to face alone the absolutely unknown may settle down, secure in the knowledge that they and their neighbors are in possession, once and for all, of the Found Truth.

3. THE SOCIAL PROSPECT

Nor is the situation more comforting in the moral, social sphere of our third traditional mythological function: the validation and maintenance of an established order. In the words of the late John Dewey (1859–1952):

Christianity proffered a fixed revelation of absolute, unchanging Being and truth; and the revelation was elaborated into a system of definite rules and ends for the direction of life. Hence “morals” were conceived as a code of laws, the same everywhere and at all times. The good life was one lived in fixed adherence to fixed principles.

In contrast with all such beliefs, the outstanding fact in all branches of natural science is that to exist is to be in process, in change.…

Victorian thought conceived of new conditions as if they merely put in our hands effective instruments for realizing old ideals. The shock and uncertainty so characteristic of the present marks the discovery that the older ideals themselves are undermined. Instead of science and technology giving us better means for bringing them to pass, they are shaking our confidence in all large and comprehensive beliefs and purposes.

Such a phenomenon is, however, transitory. The impact of the new forces is for the time being negative. Faith in the divine author and authority in which Western civilization confided, inherited ideas of the soul and its destiny, of fixed revelation, of completely stable institutions, of automatic progress, have been made impossible for the cultivated mind of the Western world. It is psychologically natural that the outcome should be a collapse of faith in all fundamental organizing and directive ideas. Skepticism becomes the mark and even the pose of the educated mind. It is the more influential because it is no longer directed against this and that article of the older creeds but is rather a bias against any kind of far-reaching ideas, and a denial of systematic participation on the part of such ideas in the intelligent direction of affairs.

It is in such a context that a thoroughgoing philosophy of experience, framed in the light of science and technique, has its significance.…

A philosophy of experience will accept at its full value the fact that social and moral existences are, like physical existences, in a state of continuous if obscure change. It will not try to cover up the fact of inevitable modification, and will make no attempt to set fixed limits to the extent of changes that are to occur. For the futile effort to achieve security and anchorage in something fixed, it will substitute the effort to determine the character of changes that are going on and to give them in the affairs that concern us most some measure of intelligent direction.…

Wherever the thought of fixity rules, that of all-inclusive unity rules also. The popular philosophy of life is filled with desire to attain such an all-embracing unity, and formal philosophies have been devoted to an intellectual fulfillment of the desire. Consider the place occupied in popular thought by search for the meaning of life and the purpose of the universe. Men who look for a single purport and a single end either frame an idea of them according to their private desires and tradition, or else, not finding any such single unity, give up in despair and conclude that there is no genuine meaning and value of life’s episodes.

The alternatives are not exhaustive, however. There is no need of deciding between no meaning at all and one single, all-embracing meaning, There are many meanings and many purposes in the situations with which we are confronted — one, so to say, for each situation. Each offers its own challenge to thought and endeavor, and presents its own potential value.^{Note 78}

In sum: the individual is now on his own. “It is all untrue! Anything goes!” (Nietzsche).^{Note 79} The dragon “Thou Shalt!” has been slain — for us all. Therein the danger! Anfortas too was installed through no deed, no virtue of his own, upon the seat of power: Lord of the World Center, which, as Cusanus knew, is in each. The wheel on the head of the Bodhisattva, revolving with its painful cutting edge: Who can bear it? Who can teach us to bear it as a crown, not of thorns, but of laurel: the wreath of our own Lady Orgeluse?

The nihilist’s question, “Why?” [wrote Nietzsche] is a product of his earlier habitude of expecting an aim to be given, to be set for him, from without — i.e. by some superhuman authority or other. When he has learned not to believe in such a thing, he goes on, just the same, from habit, looking for another authority of some kind that will be able to speak unconditionally and set goals and tasks by command. The authority of Conscience now is the first to present itself (the more emancipated from theology, the more imperative morality becomes) as compensation for a personal authority. Or the authority of Reason. Or the Social Instinct (the herd). Or History, with an immanent spirit that has a goal of its own, to which one can give oneself. One wants, by all means, to get around having to will, to desire a goal, to set up a goal for oneself: one wants to avoid the responsibility (—accepting fatalism). Finally: Happiness, and with a certain tartuffery, the Happiness of the Majority.

One says to oneself: 1. a definite goal is unnecessary, 2. is impossible to foresee.

And so, precisely when what is required is Will in its highest power, it is at its weakest and most faint-hearted, in Absolute Mistrust of the Organizational Force of the Will-to-be-a-Whole.…

Nihilism is of two faces:

1. Nihilism, as the sign of a heightened power of the spirit: active nihilism.
2. Nihilism, as a decline and regression of the power of the spirit: passive nihilism.

Attempts to escape from nihilism without transvaluing earlier values only bring about the opposite of escape: a sharpening of the problem.^{Note 80}

4. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SPHERE

And so we are brought infallibly to the fourth sphere, the fourth function, of an adequate mythology: the centering and harmonization of the individual, which in traditional systems was supposed to follow upon the giving of oneself, and even giving up of oneself altogether, to some one or another of Nietzsche’s authorities named above. The modern world is full of survivals of these reactionary systems, of which the most powerful today is still the old Levantine one of the social order. However, as Loren Eiseley states: “The group ethic as distinct from personal ethic is faceless and obscure. It is whatever its leaders choose it to mean; it destroys the innocent and justifies the act in terms of the future.”^{Note 81} But the future, as he then points out (and one might have thought such a warning unnecessary), is not the place to seek realization. “Progress secularized, progress which pursues only the next invention, progress which pulls thought out of the mind and replaces it with idle slogans, is not progress at all. It is a beckoning mirage in a desert over which stagger the generations of men. Because man, each individual man among us, possesses his own soul [Schopenhauer’s ‘intelligible character’] and by that light must live or perish, there is no way by which Utopias — or the lost Garden itself — can be brought out of the future and presented to man. Neither can he go forward to such a destiny. Since in the world of time every man lives but one life, it is in himself that he must search for the secret of the Garden.”^{Note 82}