The House of Wisdom (6 page)

Other attempts at attacking the problem suffered well into the Middle Ages from flaws similar to those that marred Gregory’s early efforts. A Saxon sundial at a church in Yorkshire dating to 1064, for example, divides the day into eight equal units, or “tides,” but it fails to take into account the fact that Yorkshire’s latitude requires that these tides vary in length.
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Lacking any real understanding of the theory behind techniques borrowed from the southern Mediterranean of the Middle East, the Latins did not realize they had to adjust their approach to account for their own more northerly locales, such as Adelard’s own town of Bath.

As late as the thirteenth century, monks in France relied on informal systems such as local observational markers that could be aligned with the constellations to correspond to certain prayer times. A text written on a piece of slate found at the Cistercian Villers Abbey, near Namur in Belgium, explains how to estimate the time by tracing the sun and stars as they appear at various windows.
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Most common of all, perhaps, was the appointment of a senior and respected monk as the
significator horarum
, who would chant a set number of psalms to note the progress of the hours and then awaken his brethren for their vigils, to be held at the “eighth hour of darkness.”
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This had the obvious advantage of functioning even when the stars were obscured by the clouds. But the method was so imprecise that theologians were forced to concede that ordinary monks should not be held responsible for any resulting failure by the
significator
to start the required prayer on time.

Monastic timekeeping, however, was not only a matter for the soul. With no reliable way to measure the passing of the hours, Western man’s imagination—and his very existence—remained hostage to the shifting cycles of night and day and the organic phases of planting and harvesting. Accurate timekeeping would one day free society from the dictates of sunrise and sunset and recast the day or the hour as an abstract notion distinct from daily existence. This would eventually foster a new way of looking at the universe as something that could be measured, calculated, and controlled, opening up the realms of science and technology. The regular ringing of the monastery bells, governed by the rhythms of the monks’ devotional and practical duties, provided one of medieval daily life’s very few sureties and marked the tentative beginnings of an organized social order.
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Like the counting of the hours, accurately setting the date for the movable feast of Easter—the holiest day in the Christian calendar and the reference point for the entire ecclesiastical year—proved beyond the abilities of even the most learned of monks. While politics, tradition, and regional and sectarian rivalries invariably intruded throughout the centuries, the essential problem in fixing Easter lay in its ties to the astronomical cycle of the solar year, which was out of step with the calendar of daily life. Majority Christian opinion puts Easter on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. This could be determined only by observation and advanced calculation. For a world alienated from the very idea of science by its own focus on the afterlife and cut off by choice and circumstance from the great intellectual traditions of the classical world, both accurate calculation and meticulous observation were in short supply. The result was endless wrangling over the very notions of time and date. Estimates of the spring equinox, for example, often varied by as much as two weeks.

Naturally enough, the early church fathers adopted the Roman system of dates that prevailed in their day. The so-called Julian calendar was created by the Greek astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria and imposed with a few minor changes by order of Julius Caesar forty-six years before the birth of Christ. But there was a hitch: The calendar rests on a year that is roughly eleven minutes and fourteen seconds too long, a well-known flaw that would not have escaped Sosigenes and his fellow astronomers. The spring equinox fell on March 25 when the Julian calendar was first introduced, but it was slipping “backward” at the considerable rate of about one full day every 130 years, threatening to take Easter and the rest of the church calendar with it.

As the young Christian community grew and expanded its reach, it naturally sought uniformity in the celebration of its most holy day. “What could be more beautiful … than that this feast day, from which we receive hope of immortality, be observed by all according to one and the same order and certain rule?” Emperor Constantine asked in 325 from his place of honor at the Council of Nicea, which nonetheless failed to resolve the Easter controversy.
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Still, church leaders were eager to head off disputes like the one that later erupted in England between Christians of the so-called Roman conversion and followers of the older Celtic tradition from Ireland.
¹⁴
This required either the command of a recognized central religious or political authority or an agreed-on set of principles—scriptural or astronomical—clearly spelling out the proper day to celebrate the Resurrection. Lacking all of these, Christendom instead came to rely on the
computus
, a system of practical astronomy that evolved slowly over the centuries to provide rough approximations of date and time. The calculations themselves were arithmetic, and so there was no need to master the geometric concepts, such as the circle and the sphere, so integral to the proper study of astronomy.

Even where explicit guidance from the ancients was on hand, the West proved beyond help. A Latin translation of a simplified, step-by-step guide by the great classical Greek astronomer Ptolemy for determining the positions of the sun and the moon survives in the form of a medieval manuscript dating from around 1000. This would have greatly improved the work of the “computists” in fixing Easter and related calculations. But apparently, even the rudimentary understanding of astronomical terms needed just to use Ptolemy’s
Handy Tables
, much less to understand his full text, was well beyond the reach of contemporary scholars.
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It was not until the late sixteenth century that the Christian West could mobilize enough scientific firepower to begin to gain control of time and grapple successfully with the problem of calendar reform. By then, the equinox had drifted backward about two weeks, to mid-March.

Given the magnitude of Europe’s political, social, and spiritual woes, it was perhaps remarkable that anything at all remained of the arts and sciences by the time Adelard left Bath to pursue his advanced education in France, around 1100. Yet a handful of cathedral schools had managed by this time to assemble a course of study based on the so-called seven liberal arts. Borrowed from a late-Roman convention, the seven disciplines were commonly depicted as enticing young maidens. The basic course of grammar, rhetoric, and logic comprised the trivium; its elementary character is reflected today in the word
trivial
. The more advanced program was the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and—Adelard’s personal favorite—astronomy. The entire edifice rested on a shaky and uncertain foundation provided by the Latin encyclopedists, who centuries earlier had collated, synthesized, and simplified classical works of science and philosophy and then presented them for a relatively broad audience.

An unfinished collection by the Roman patrician Boethius, whose execution around 524 on trumped-up charges of treason cut short his lifework, preserved some crumbs of Aristotle’s logical system, several treatises on music, and a few basics of practical geometry. Boethius had planned to translate into Latin all the writings of Plato and Aristotle, but his untimely death condemned this great legacy of natural science, metaphysics, and cosmology to limbo for more than six hundred years. The available teachings of Plato were reduced to one partial Latin translation and an accompanying commentary. This gave medieval Europe its only real glimpse of natural philosophy until the twelfth century.
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Virtually nothing was known of metaphysics or cosmology. Surviving manuscripts of Pliny’s
Natural History
captured other tidbits of classical works, as did a few other similar books that circulated haphazardly.

By far the most popular Western textbook was an encyclopedia of half-remembered knowledge and often far-fetched explanations of natural phenomena compiled in the seventh century by Isidore, bishop of Seville. In his
Etymologies
, Isidore laid out in twenty volumes every bit of knowledge he thought worth preserving in the face of what he feared was a rising tide of barbarism threatening his native Spain. This included, among other things, discussions of grammar and rhetoric, arithmetic and astronomy, zoology, agriculture, theology, and military science. The bishop was well read and industrious, but his actual understanding was a bit suspect. He was clearly no critical thinker, for he accepts the material of his various sources without question and—in keeping with the spirit of his times—is more interested in allegorical meaning than in any underlying truth.

Etymologies
was a runaway success and a staple in medieval Christian libraries for centuries. Readers generally preferred it to the original sources, which it soon consigned to oblivion; ignored and unwanted, many were lost forever. Printed editions of Isidore’s work appeared well into the Renaissance. His teachings were followed so slavishly that his assertion—based on the author’s elementary mistranslation of classical sources—that the earth was flat and “resembles a wheel” long retained a hold on many in medieval Europe, even if a handful of scholars and learned monks knew otherwise. This popular notion contradicted the classical Greek and Arab conception of the universe—as a series of spheres and wheels moving in a mechanical dance of circular motion, with the earth at its center—and inhibited the West from participating in the huge enterprise of cosmology. It made no difference that the prevailing model, codified by Ptolemy in the second century
A.D.
and studied ever since, was wrong; the important thing was to take advantage of the enormous opportunity for fruitful scientific research that it nonetheless afforded.

The Venerable Bede, who died in 735 after a long life of study inside the walls of his monastery in northern England, was perhaps the most subtle and sophisticated thinker of this early intellectual cohort. Bede’s
The Reckoning of Time
was an important early attempt at the Easter
computus
, the calculation of the hour, and solutions to related problems. From his careful reading of Pliny, he concluded that the earth was a sphere—a teaching hopelessly obscured by Isidore’s far more popular claim to the contrary—and he had some understanding of the varying hours of daylight and the behavior of the tides. Bede’s knowledge was rudimentary, but it was so far ahead of its day that his fame soon resonated across Christendom. Few had seen anything like him before. “God, the Orderer of natures, who raised the Sun from the East on the fourth day of Creation, in the Sixth Age of the world has made Bede rise from the West as a new Sun to illuminate the whole Earth,” gushed Notker the Stammerer, a monk in far-off Switzerland.
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It fell to the French cathedral schools to slowly shape the early building blocks left behind by the encyclopedists and a handful of like-minded monks into a coherent, if still incomplete and deeply flawed, body of knowledge. At the behest of Charlemagne, Alcuin of York had created a basic curriculum for the first of these institutions in the late eighth century to provide Charlemagne’s empire with competent, trained functionaries. Adelard’s alma mater at Tours was the first such school, and it gradually emerged as something of a European intellectual center.
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Other schools were founded at Chartres, Laon, and elsewhere. By Adelard’s day, these cathedral schools had already been in existence for centuries. They attracted some of the best scholars from among the small educated religious class and drew ambitious young students from different parts of Europe. Bishop John himself had come from Tours, and he used his personal and church connections there to secure a coveted place at the school for his protégé. The preference of the teachers at the cathedral schools for the quadrivium, in particular for mathematics and astronomy, had a profound influence on young Adelard’s own outlook and interests.
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These in turn determined the ideas he would later adopt from among the teachings of the Arabs and bring back to the West.

The early epicenter of Europe’s medieval intellectual activity was the former kingdom of Lotharingia. Once the heart of Charlemagne’s empire, it comprised parts of western Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. Its hub, Liege in present-day Belgium, was known as the “Athens of Lotharingia” for its serious scholarship.
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For decades, the kings of England had relied on a steady supply of Lotharingian clerics to fill high royal and ecclesiastical posts. Bishop John’s predecessor had come from the region, as had Adelard’s father, Fastrad, and a number of other influential figures in eleventh-century English intellectual and religious life. The schools and monasteries of Lotharingia had emerged as the first tentative repositories of Arab science and technology, including the Arabic number system; with no suitable educational institutions of its own, the English crown was forced to rely on well-trained imports to meet a growing demand.
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Among the earliest Western proponents of intellectual innovation, including that invaluable calculating device, the abacus, was Gerbert d’Aurillac, one of the day’s finest minds and the future Pope Sylvester II. Raised as an oblate, or monk-in-training, in the monastery of St. Gerard, the precocious Gerbert soon outgrew the limited learning available in his native France; there was simply no one among the local monks sufficiently versed in mathematics or astronomy to further his education. In 967, his superiors sent him for three years of advanced studies at the monastery of Vich in Catalonia, then a distant Christian frontier outpost abutting the scientific and cultural powerhouse of Muslim Spain.