Compiling information

Simplistic tales are often those hardest to refute, not because they are true, but because they form a clear and understandable picture of the messiness of the real world. Take the neat story of how the ancient world turned to Middle Ages: Christians took over the kingdom of Rome, persecuted all the pagans doing real science, burned their writings and killed them, making Europe into a cultural wasteland, soon made into a real wasteland by the wandering barbarian tribes.

This particular story makes an essential mistake in supposing that Christians would have had any unified agenda. Instead, we have on the level of church governance, many sects competing on what the official dogma should be, and even within the sect that finally became the Catholic church, there were many actors with diverse agendas. Individual outbreaks of violence against polytheists by Christians did occur - most famous being the murder of the mathematician and philosopher Hypatia - but these were not officially sanctioned and often these were even condoned as not in the spirit of Christianity.

The church wasn’t completely neutral toward polytheists: bishops were happy to hinder all public display of traditional polytheistic rites by removing altars for the old gods, and some books on magical rituals were ordered to be destroyed. Yet, the prevalent tendency toward classical culture, literature and learning was one of appreciation.

The main reason for the destruction of many of the ancient pieces of writing is simply that physical copies of them were not eternal - the material that they were written on might have deteriorated or it might have been cleaned of text for further use - and there was no long lasting attempt to preserve them all. If there weren’t a large number of copies of some work in circulation, it was highly probable that it wouldn’t survive into modern days.

Lot of classical works did survive in the eastern part of the Roman empire, but general histories of European thought often tend to forget this, since they are more interested in the developments in the western side of the empire. The two parts were, of course, differentiated by language, Greek being the major language in the East, Latin in the West. As we have noticed many times earlier, Latin part of the Roman empire was almost like an intellectual backwater, where ideas discussed in the Greek part flowed much later and in not so great abundance. When the two parts drifted finally apart and the communication between them diminished, the Latin-speaking part had on many fields of learning only few summarised compilations to lean on to.

Compilers like Martianus Capella were thus important for the development of western medieval thought, even if the content of their works was far from groundbreaking. Martianus’ work was also a literary example for many medieval allegories. His compilation is framed by a story of god Mercury, patron of rhetoric, marrying a mortal woman, Philology, representing scholarly expertise. The setting of the story combines traditional polytheism with Neoplatonic influences - mythological stories of gods are joined with a more philosophical account of divinely animated planets, and Jupiter especially plays also a role of the Neoplatonic Intellect or Nus. Particularly noteworthy is the idea that even humans can rise to the celestial rank of gods, if they just educate themselves enough.

The story of the marriage leads to the handmaidens of Philology, each named after some field of learning, giving a speech about her field. Somewhat surprisingly, given that their audience is supposed to be full of learned divinities, the content of these lectures is rather elementary. Thus, the first handmaiden, Grammar, speaks about Latin letters, possible syllables formed of them and different classes of inflections. The second handmaiden, Dialectics, speaks then of the semantic classes of the words, continues by indicating how words are combined into sentences, shows various simple logical relations between sentences and finishes by showing what new sentences can be deduced out of given assumptions. The third handmaiden, Rhetorics, indicates various situations, where sentences should be put together into convincing speeches, delineates the structure of such speeches and rounds off with tricks for making the speech sound eloquent.

Martianus’ account of the more mathematical disciplines is even less impressive. The fifth handmaiden, Geometry, spends most of her time telling about the geography of the known world, on the pretext that geometry is all about measuring land areas. Of the discipline proper, she manages to expound only few elementary definitions of basic shapes. Arithmetic fares a bit better, as she uses only relatively little time with Pythagorean numerology and then proceeds to expound with comprehensive detail some basic properties of numbers and their divisibility. Even so, she does not really prove any arithmetical theorem she presents, but merely exemplifies them with some appropriate numbers.

The final chapters of the book concentrate mostly on some elementary facts of the disciplines in question. The account of Astronomy seems to contain no mention of any astrology, although we cannot be sure, since what has survived from her speech lacks the ending. Harmony does begin her speech by telling how the music guides the heavenly spheres, but then quickly continues with basics about rhythm and melody.

While Martianus’s book is an independent work, specifically dedicated to presenting basic information on a systematically chosen set of fields of learning, achievements of Greek scholars were transmitted to the early western medievals also through commentaries on works of philosophers from previous generations. As the prevailing character of the philosophy of the day was Platonist, so the philosophers chosen were also of Platonist schools of thought. So, while Martianus presented learning with a Platonist covering, these commentaries were completely soaked in Platonist teachings.

We’ve already seen one example of such a commentary, namely Calcidius’ work on Plato’s Timaeus, which contained, for instance, a section dedicated to astronomy. Another work of the same sort was written by Macrobius. He chose to comment on a work of Cicero on good republic. Cicero’s obvious reference point had been Plato’s seminal work on republic, and just like Plato had ended his work with a fable showing what happens to people after death, Cicero had also finished with a section describing how Scipio, a Roman general and statesman, had seen a dream describing what life after death was like.

It was this specific section in Cicero’s work that Macrobius wanted to deal with. Because ironically at least from Plato onward philosophers had been doubtful of the worth of doing philosophy through fables, Macrobius sees it fit to begin his commentary with an apology of philosophical fables. Macrobius notes that the highest levels of the ontological hierarchy cannot be dealt in fables, since these are completely detached from the world of perception and cannot be clothed in images, except through some inappropriate analogies. Then again, they are appropriate, he says, specifically, when dealing with divinities of common polytheism and the world-soul, because they are closely connected with the world of perception, but higher in status than mere earthly things and therefore should not be discussed openly, but with a reverent attitude.

Because Cicero’s work is a fable, and even more, a fable about a prophetic and revelatory dream, Macrobius appears to think that he can look through the external account of the story and find more substantial truths even in its minor details. This makes Macrobius’ commentary appear to be full of digressions not really connected with Cicero’s work. For instance, when Scipio is told by a soul of his dead relative that a certain event will occur to him when numbers determining his life are full, Macrobius takes this as an opportunity to explain Pythagorean numerology.

Although Macrobius’ account of the properties of numbers appears to be rather full of insignificancies, he seems to be particularly interested in the idea that numbers determine the cycles of human life. This does not mean, Macrobius continues, that everything in human life is preordained - some prophecies can be avoided - but certainly some of it is, and everyone will die eventually.

Now, Cicero had noted that what happens to a person after their death is dependent on their way of life, thus, Macrobius says, he had to study ethics. Particularly, Cicero had said that work for one’s commonwealth earned a person a place in heavens. Macrobius is adamant to reconcile Cicero’s statement with a later Neoplatonic idea that political life is not the highest form of life. Macrobius thus sees life dedicated toward the well-being of other people as a stepping stone toward life where one is completely removed from earthly worries.

Indeed, Macrobius is dedicated to the Platonist idea that real death is actually the earthly life where a human soul is imprisoned by the body and its passions and desires, while death as the separation of a soul from its body gives it a chance to return to a disembodied life. This does not mean that a human being should try to actively look for death, Macrobius says, because passion for death would merely lock the soul back to a bodily life.

In addition to ethics, Macrobius says, Cicero studied physics or the structure of the world of perception. Macrobius incorporates the physical world in the common Neoplatonist hierarchy, where the incomprehensible primal source of all being creates an intelligence that both imitates the source by thinking it and in looking away from its source creates the world-soul. The world-soul, again, both imitates the intelligence and merely thinks, but also looks away from it and creates a number of bodies to which it entangles itself, dividing into a number of individual souls.

This is the place where Macrobius introduces his account of astronomy. Lot of the details Macrobius goes through are, of course, same as in Martinus’ account of astronomy, although there are some significant differences (for instance, Martinus upholds a more sophisticated theory where Mercurius and Venus circle around the Sun, not the Earth). Yet, there is an even more important difference in the reason why Macrobius is interested in astronomy. Firstly, it provides a map of the journey the human soul takes when landing from the remotest sphere of the world to Earth, gaining new and more embodied capacities at each planet. Secondly, it shows the greatness of heavens and insignificance of Earth in comparison.

Macrobius continues with an account of the geography of the Earth. His main idea is that the area of lands accessible to Roman civilization is minuscule in proportion to all the inhabited lands on Earth. Connected with the cosmological fact that the heavens circle the Earth eternally and the consequent historical fact that the human civilizations have again and again risen and fallen this idea leads Macrobius to emphasise the insignificance of earthly life.

From physics, Macrobius says, Cicero moved finally to a study of the divine. He especially pointed out the only spark of the divine on Earth, namely, the human souls. The essence of soul, Cicero said, following Plato, lies in self-movement. Macrobius defends this notion against the criticism of Aristotle that mover always differs from moved, that self-movement is therefore impossible and that all movement has begun from an unmoved mover. Macrobius follows earlier Neoplatonists in insisting that self-movement does not mean that the soul would somehow act upon itself, but simply that the soul is by nature active, just like fire does not need something outside itself to become warm. This self-motion of the soul, Macrobius explains, is not literal change of place, but closer to such activities like thinking, emoting and wanting, and through such activities human souls move.their bodies, just like the world soul moves with such activities the stars and planets

What Macrobius finds in Cicero’s work is the whole philosophy. What medievals would find in Macrobius is something else. For them, important things would be the astronomical facts and such interesting details like categories of dreams. The overarching philosophy they would get elsewhere.