The House of Wisdom (21 page)

The topics begin with the vegetable and animal kingdoms and proceed to the moon and stars overhead, before bumping up against the delicate question of God’s very existence. Chapter 7 addresses the question of “why some brute animals chew the cud, but others do not.” Chapter 19 explains “why the nose is placed above the mouth,” while Chapter 58 answers what has since become a classic question of elementary physics: why water does not flow out from a narrow vessel with holes at the top and bottom if the upper opening is covered with the thumb. Likewise, Adelard understands the concept of the conservation of matter: “And in my judgment certainly, nothing at all dies in this sensible world, nor is it smaller today than when it was created. For if any part is released from one conjunction, it does not perish but passes over to another association.”
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Adelard then goes on to explain the mysteries of lightning and thunder, the moon’s apparent lack of light, and whether the stars are animate and, if they are, what they might eat—“the moistures of the earth and the waters, thinned by the very long distance they travel when they are drawn up to the higher regions.”
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Finally, the nephew touches on the problematic question of God’s existence: “From you, then, I want to hear, using reason alone and keeping away from the flattery of authority, whether he exists or not, and what he is, and what he does.”
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Already, Adelard has exhibited a certain wariness about advancing views that might be unwelcome to Western ears. He often hides behind the opinions of “the Arabs” to express what may well have been his own views on man, nature, and the universe. “No one should think I am doing this out of my own head but that I am giving the views of the studies of the Arabs … For I know what those who profess the truth suffer at the hands of the vulgar crows. Therefore, I shall defend the cause of the Arabs, not my own.”
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Faced with his nephew’s persistence, Adelard stalls for time, pointing out that he is more accustomed to dispelling what is false than to proving what is true. Then he suggests that any such discussion of God would exceed all others in the “subtlety of its intellectual content and the difficulty of its expression.”
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Wisely, he notes that the hour is late and it is time for bed, promising to take up the matter of the “beginning of the beginnings” at a later date. Somehow, that day never comes.

The preservation over the centuries of many of Adelard’s works bespeaks their popularity and importance in their day. Still, the absolute numbers are small, in keeping with both the low level of “book culture” at the time and the many practical obstacles to the dissemination and storage of information. The simple survival of a medieval text is no mean feat, for each one had to be laboriously copied by hand onto stiff sheets of parchment, which in the West was generally done over many months by professional scribes in monasteries scattered across the Latin-speaking world. For every one that has come down to us today, there must have been many others that were lost; were damaged by fire, vermin, or other hazards; or simply fell into disfavor and were no longer given priority within the limited confines of the medieval monastic scriptoria.

Early copies of Adelard’s
Questions on Natural Science
were made both in his native England and on the European continent. Thirteen examples from the twelfth century are extant, a number of which were produced in small, portable editions for ease of use and study. Ten others survive from the thirteenth century, but just three from the fourteenth and two from the fifteenth, suggesting a decline in popularity as other texts came to the fore. However, the work later enjoyed a brief revival, especially in Adelard’s native England. Editions were also produced in Hebrew and quite possibly in French, while large sections were translated into Italian.
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Dozens of the early Latin Euclid texts have been found, as have nine copies—but only two complete ones—of Adelard’s translation of the star tables of al-Khwarizmi.
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Adelard’s greatest achievement, however, lay less with his individual manuscripts than with his intuitive grasp of the broad significance of Arab teachings just beginning to penetrate Christian consciousness. This strand runs through
Questions on Natural Science
, which features such phrases as “my Arab masters” and “the cause of the Arabs.” Unlike the handful of intellectual explorers who came before him, Adelard was not content simply to borrow the outer trappings of new ideas and technologies. Instead, he sought to reinvent himself and the very idea of the West in accordance with Arab learning. At its core was the proposition that experimentation, rational thought, and personal experience trumped convention and blind acceptance of traditional authority. Adelard seemed to realize that in order to absorb and exploit these great discoveries, he had to do more than simply master Arabic; he had to jettison almost everything he thought he knew and adopt a whole new way of looking at the world around him.
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“If you wish to hear anything more from me, give and receive reason. For I am not the kind of man for whom the painting of the skin can satisfy. Every letter is a prostitute, open now to these affections, now to those,” he lectures his nephew.
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As for the crusaders who preceded Adelard to Syria, the overwhelming majority were too blinded by ignorance and sectarian hatred, or by their own moral smugness, to recognize the accomplishments of the advanced civilization they now faced in battle. This tendency is reminiscent of the present day, when the West looks eastward and sees only barbarism. Adelard’s outlook proved a remarkable exception to the mood of his own times—which held that Islam was an evil faith with nothing to offer Christendom but the role of sacred enemy—and he came back to England very much a new man. Everything that was once familiar in his native land now appeared part of an alien and distasteful world.

Upon the insistence of friends and family, with whom he had just reunited, Adelard surveyed the state of English society. “I found,” he writes in
Questions on Natural Science
, shortly after his return home, “the princes barbarous, the bishops bibulous, judges bribable, patrons unreliable, clients sycophants, promisers liars, friends envious, and almost everybody full of ambition.”
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Ever the teacher, Adelard resolves that knowledge offers the best antidote to the “moral depravity” on display in his homeland. “I undertook the following treatise, which I know will be useful to its auditors, but whether it is pleasant, I do not know. For the present generation suffers from this ingrained fault, that it thinks that nothing should be accepted which is discovered by the ‘moderns.’ ”
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During his wanderings, Adelard tells us, he adopted his trademark flowing green cloak and began to sport a prominent signet ring, set with an obscure astrological symbol, in the same rich green, “less extensive but more efficacious” in its emerald hue. Adelard’s new intellectual outlook is no less startling. Gone is the young country gentleman who once dedicated earnest prose to the goddess of philosophy, in pale imitation of the bygone classical age; in his place stands the relentless seeker of knowledge and scientific truth. The new Adelard, now a citizen of the world, challenges the intellectual corruption, complacency, and rigidity that has dogged the West for centuries. Unlike the student from the cathedral schools who once branded the moderns “dumb,”the reborn Adelard is an ardent proponent of contemporary scholarship—only now his world is shaped by the new and dynamic Arab learning from the East.

Such knowledge, he says, can liberate the Western world from the burden of orthodoxy and give man permission to make his own way through the universe: “For I have learned one thing from my Arab masters, with reason as guide, but you another: you follow a halter, being enthralled by the picture of authority. For what else can authority be called other than a halter? As brute animals are led wherever one pleases by a halter, but do not know where or why they are led, and only follow the rope by which they are held, so the authority of written words leads not a few of you into danger, since you are enthralled and bound by brutish credulity.”
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Man should take refuge in God, he declares, only when his intellect proves incapable of understanding the world around him. Such a declaration connects Adelard of Bath directly to his spiritual and intellectual heir, the pioneering astronomer Galileo, whose public showdown with religious orthodoxy five centuries later would seal the end of the beginning of the Western scientific revolution. This wanderer in the flowing green robes issues the first explicit assertion in the Christian Middle Ages that the existence of God must not prevent man from exploring the laws of nature. “I will detract nothing from God, for whatever is, is from Him … We must listen to the very limits of human knowledge and only when this utterly breaks down should we refer things to God.”
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Chapter Six

“WHAT IS SAID OF THE SPHERE …”

O
NE PALE DAWN
, twenty-two years before the Antioch earthquake, a scholar-monk not far from Adelard’s West Country home quietly made scientific history. Pointing an astrolabe—one of the very few then in use in Europe—at an eclipse of the moon on October 18, 1092, Walcher, the prior of the monastery in Great Malvern, carried out the first known Western experiment to improve astronomical predictions. A year before, while traveling in Italy, the clergyman had witnessed a lunar eclipse but found he had no way to record the events overhead, other than to guess the approximate time. A brother monk who said he had witnessed the very same celestial phenomenon to the west in England gave a strikingly different estimate of the time.
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Walcher or his colleague was almost certainly in error, for any time difference between the two locales would have been perceptible but slim.
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Still, this was the same phenomenon once exploited by the early Abbasid astronomers to establish the difference in geographic coordinates between cities and other important places.

Confusion over the reported sightings stirred Walcher into action: “I still had no certainty about the time of the eclipse and I was distressed about this, because I was planning to draw up a lunar table and had no starting point.” He vowed not to be caught unprepared again. One year later, Walcher got his chance when an eclipse again darkened the nighttime sky, this time fifteen degrees above the western horizon. “I at once seized my astrolabe.” He used the device to note the position of the eclipse and to determine the time of day.
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Walcher was a leading figure in a small circle of local clerics with personal and intellectual roots back in Lotharingia, source of many of eleventh-century England’s most learned courtiers and churchmen. At the time, there was simply no secular education of note available, a circumstance that began to change, slowly at first and then picking up steam, with the Norman Conquest of 1066. The invaders brought the books and teaching masters of the European continent to England for the first time, although it would take until around 1130 before a serious scholastic community became established at Oxford.
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The late bishop of Bath and Wells, Giso, whose successor was Adelard’s own mentor, John de Villula, had been another member of this loose intellectual movement.
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So, too, was Robert, bishop of Hereford—like Walcher a native of Lotharingia and a keen astronomer and mathematician. At the time his friend and colleague was in Italy, Robert consulted the stars in preparation for a proposed journey to the dedication of Lincoln Cathedral; his reading of the stars correctly predicted that the ceremony would not take place as scheduled, allowing him to avoid a difficult and unnecessary journey.
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For a time, Prior Walcher worked closely with a converted Spanish Jew, Petrus Alfonsi, who arrived in the English Midlands with a basic knowledge of Arabic astronomy and mathematics. The pair collaborated on a failed attempt to present al-Khwarizmi’s
zij
to a Western audience, a project Adelard completed successfully.
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Petrus, born and educated in the Arabic cultural world of al-Andalus, was an effective polemicist. His diatribes against both the Jews, his former coreligionists, and the Muslims endeared him to many in positions of power. Little remembered today, the man known by Chaucer as Piers Alphonse was also the author of
The Priestly Tales
. This volume had a long-lasting influence on the development of Western literature, for it introduced European readers to the Arabic literary form of the framed tale—a story within a story—further popularized by the later translation of
The Thousand and One Nights
. Chaucer adopted Petrus’s novel approach in his own
Canterbury Tales
, as did Boccaccio in
The Decameron
.
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Petrus’s reports on the ways of the Muslims, including the spurious assertion that idol worship continued at the Kaaba in flagrant violation of Muhammad’s demand for absolute monotheism, helped shape some of the earliest anti-Muslim attitudes among the Christians.
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Many of these West Country monks were scholars at heart, and in their enthusiasm for the new learning they openly embraced such innovations as the astrolabe, the abacus, and the rudiments of the Arabic number system. Walcher’s determination to establish the correct time for his observation of the eclipse was typical of the new thinking—rational, precise, and grounded in experience—that slowly began to accompany these novelties. A basic text on the astrolabe, partially drawn from a very early Latin translation from Spain of the work of al-Khwarizmi, has been tentatively ascribed to Walcher or a member of his circle.
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At his death in 1125, the mathematician-cum-cleric was remembered as a “philosopher, astronomer, geometer and abacist.”
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