 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Good Book – Philosophy of Nature The faithfulness of nature to its original laws of motion, the continuance of all things as they were from the beginning of the creation, awaken a considerate mind into a quick and lively sense of the depth thereof. There is no blemish in the book of nature. God never saw it necessary, as upon mature thoughts, to correct and amend anything in this great volume of the creation, since the first volume thereof. These words were written in the middle of the seventeenth century by the Protestant English theologian John Spencer. Spencer's jest seems to fit his age. At the dawn of the Enlightenment, God does not intervene capriciously in the world, but has made nature perfect and unchanging. And Spencer's polemic had contemporary political relevance. He was arguing against those who invoked supposedly miraculous occurrences or prodigies as signs of God's displeasure with the English government. Yet that quotation would also be right at home in the twelfth century, a time when intellectuals likewise spoke of an unblemished book of nature. Hugh of St. Victor, for instance, remarked that the whole of the sensible world is like a book written by the finger of God. The metaphor goes back to antiquity and can be found in several works by Augustine. It was the beginning of a long-running tradition, according to which the Bible is not the only good book sent by God. Nature is another revelation of God's providential will, so it behooves the thoughtful Christian to study it by undertaking what we would call science and what the medievals, and for that matter John Spencer, called natural philosophy. This was a part of intellectual life from the very beginnings of the medieval age. From the eighth century onwards, scholars like Bede, Alquin, and Abbau of Florie displayed expertise in the field of astronomy. The use of the instrument known as the astrolabe began around 1000 AD, a development sometimes credited to Gerbert of Ariac. Like the numbers that would have been written on the counters of Gerbert's beloved abacus, the astrolabe was an import from the Islamic world, where Arabic-speaking scientists were far more advanced than their Latin Christian counterparts. The 12th century would produce even more readers for the book of nature. It's no coincidence that this coincided with a surge of interest in Arabic scientific literature, which began to be translated into Latin at this time. But something we'll be looking at in a future episode, so I won't go into it now, lest, like an emperor ordering a bust, I get ahead of myself. I do however want to mention Adalard of Bath, a fascinating figure who translated mathematical works from Arabic into Latin and wrote a set of Questions on Natural Philosophy in dialogue form for which he claimed to be using his Arabic learning. Adalard overturns any lingering prejudices we might have about authority-bound, intellectually slavish medievals. In his dialogue on natural philosophy, Adalard has one of the characters say, And he wasn't alone. We may remember Peter Abelard's triumphant anecdote in which he embarrassed Anselm of Léon by turning Anselm's demand for authoritative evidence against him. Equally memorable is a comment made by the theologian Alan of Lille, about whom much more shortly. He expressed his doubts about authority by comparing it to a nose made of wax. It can be bent any which way you like. The discover-it-yourself attitude of Adalard of Bath and other 12th century thinkers went together with another attitude liable to strike us as genuinely scientific, a preference for explanations in terms of the regularities of nature rather than miracles. Five centuries before John Spencer, the book of nature was expected to work in a predictable fashion, ensuring the comprehensibility of the universe. This is something we can trace back further still if we look hard enough. Already in the 7th century, one of those anonymous Irish scholars we keep meeting wrote a work explaining miracles of the Bible in more or less naturalist terms. For instance, Lot's wife turned into salt when God adjusted the balance of substances in her body, and the virgin birth can be understood as analogous to spontaneous generation. But it's really with figures like Adalard of Bath that we see an impatience with simplistic appeals to God's will. As he puts it, there is nothing in nature that lacks a reason. All very well, you might say, but Adalard is surely an exceptional case, a mathematician and translator at the extreme rationalist fringe of his age. There's some truth in that. Yet we can see many of the same tendencies in the far more mainstream group we looked at last time, the thinkers who have traditionally been linked to Chartres. The naturalist approach to the Bible we saw with William of Conch was also adopted by Thierry of Chartres. In his commentary on the book of Genesis, he states that he will be tackling this biblical text secundum physicum et ad luteram, meaning that he will approach it with the tools of natural philosophy and linguistic analysis. He will not, he says, try to draw out any allegorical or moral significance from the text, which makes for a stark contrast with Hugh and Richard of St. Victor. True to his word, Thierry's commentary trades in illuminating empirical observations, as when he compares the emergence of dry land from the seas to the way that water, spread on a tabletop, dries unevenly. But this is not to say that the 12th century saw a wholesale abandonment of long-cherished authoritative texts. In this respect, Adalard of Bath was indeed unusual for the emphasis he placed on observation and the newly available material just being imported from the Arabic-speaking sphere. For this reason, a leading French historian of this period, Jean Jolive, has described Adalard as studying nature sans livre, without a book. In other words, he no longer saw nature as something to be decoded, the way you interpret a text, using the tools of the liberal arts and the wisdom of classical texts. But it was left to more mainstream scholars, especially those who reflect the so-called Chartrean approach, to produce the most elaborate and popular works of natural philosophy in the 12th century. They took their inspiration from Latin works of late antiquity, like Marcianus Capella's Marriage of Philology and Mercury, and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. But for them, the most important guide to the book of nature was Plato's Timaeus. We've already seen one outstanding representative of this kind of natural philosophy with William of Conch's Dragmaticon. For the rest of this episode, I'll be telling you about two others. One is the Cosmographia, note the Greek title, written by Bernard Silvestris. The other, written a generation later and influenced by the Cosmographia, is the Lament of Nature by the aforementioned theologian, Alan of Lille. The two texts have a great deal in common. Both alternate between prose and poetry, a literary technique already used by Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy. In fact, Lady Philosophy, from Boethius's Consolation, provided a model for the character of nature as depicted by Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille. The two authors agree about nature's function. She helps to perpetuate the cosmic order by reproducing forms in matter, something Alan compares to the production of coins from unformed metal. Bernard and Alan both make a place for humankind in their narratives too. They see humans as an image in miniature of the universe. Each of us is a so-called microcosm of the great cosmos that surrounds us. The main difference between Bernard and Alan is that whereas Bernard's Cosmographia sticks to the cosmological themes promised by its title, Alan's treatise has an ethical theme. He tells of how nature appeared before a human poet to lament the misdeeds of humankind. She is especially outraged by sexual misdeeds, and among these by the practice of homosexuality. There's a revealing, in every sense of the word, detail in Alan of Lille's description of nature's appearance. She takes the form of a ravishingly beautiful woman, with a dress upon which are inscribed depictions of plants and animals, but the dress is torn. Alan has lifted this straight from Boethius, who likewise had lady philosophy appearing in a garment that had been violently ripped by unnamed attackers. In Alan of Lille's Lament, the torn dress represents the assault on natural modesty by human evildoers. But in his hands, the image has taken on a more complex meaning as well. He refers to her garment with the Latin word integumentum, cloak or covering, the term routinely used by the Scharzwians to describe the surface meaning of a text which hides its true philosophical message. In fact, just before the bit explaining nature's torn clothing, Alan has used this very same literary technique to explain why the classical poets spoke of pagan gods who engaged in sexual misconduct of their own. Such myths are only a covering which when unmasked reveals a deeper meaning. The false pagan husk conceals the kernel of monotheistic truth. For Bernard Silvestris and Alan of Lille, the idea of a literary integumentum, cloaking an inner truth, was not just a key to unlock classical texts, but also key to their own literary productions. They unhesitatingly imitate the allegorical approach of late ancient authors like Marcianus Capella, populating their cosmos with a whole host of supernatural figures. Not only nature, but also such cosmic forces as mind and heaven, who are likewise personified and allowed to give speeches and recite poetry. Their classicizing literary taste is expressed in the very names of these characters, which are often Greek rather than Latin. Along the way, we meet such supernatural beings as nous, houle, and urania, meaning intellect, matter, and heaven. At the same time, their use of allegory expresses a conviction about nature itself. Macrobius, another of the ancient Latin authors whose writings inspired Bernard and Alan, had written that, but like an allegory or fable which needs careful interpretation if she is to be read rightly as the work of God's providence. Bernard and Alan may wrap their philosophy of nature in cunningly woven literary artifice, but their core message is clear nonetheless, especially if you know your Timaeus. Plato's dialogue describes a divine intellect, the so-called demiurge or craftsman of the universe, putting images of intelligible forms into a passive receptacle to produce bodies. Bernard and Alan likewise explain the physical cosmos as the joint production of several principles. Bernard's Cosmographia begins with nature's plea to nous, or mind. She is unhappy with the unformed chaotic state of matter and requests that mind do something about it. Matter's own attitude about this prospect is ambivalent. On the one hand, she is described as yearning for form, an idea that can be traced back to Aristotle through the intermediary of Calcidius. On the other hand, matter is, several times, said to have an innate tendency towards chaos and evil, so that mind and nature must struggle to master her and subdue her to form. Again, this reflects the Platonic source, since the Timaeus states that the receptacle needs to be persuaded by intellect if it is to submit to order and form. As a result, the universe is something of a mixed bag, a meeting of mind with matter's recalcitrance. Broadly speaking, though, what we see is a well-ordered and providentially designed cosmos. Even something as basic as the arrangement of the four elements has a purpose. Potentially destructive fire is separated from Earth by a buffer of air and water, a point also made by William of Conch in his Dragmaticon. Furthermore, the motions of the heavenly bodies ensure that events here on Earth will unfold in the way that providence intends. For Bernard, every human is allotted a certain lifespan by the stars at the moment of his or her birth, a clear allusion to astrology which was frequently associated with natural philosophy throughout the medieval period. In a wonderful and characteristic passage, Bernard evokes once again the idea that the natural world can be read as a book. Like written announcements of things to come, the stars foretold the lives of Homeric heroes, the Latin eloquence of Cicero and Virgil, and the mathematical skill of Thales. In fact, he goes further, making the stars not only signs, but also causes of things that happen in the world below. He does add the significant, though unexplained, caveat that humans retain their freedom even in the face of what he calls the laws of the fates and inexorable destiny. Bernard is thus very optimistic about the physical universe, which as an image and effect of the intelligible forms in cosmic mind is a case of the perfect coming from the perfect. Yet he gives matter considerable scope in explaining natural phenomena that seem less than perfect. Non-human animals, for instance, are said to be made with somewhat less care than humans, so that they are unbalanced and more easily dominated by the elemental humors. Lions have tempers that quite literally run hot, whereas donkeys are overly influenced by phlegm, which makes them stupid. Unfortunately, Bernard does not pause to tell us which humoral imbalance affects giraffes, but since I criticized her cooking a few episodes back, Hiawatha has been rather melancholy, so I suppose it has to do with black bile. Humans alone are perfectly balanced in terms of their elemental makeup. But as Alain of Lille would hasten to add, this does not mean that they always do as they ought to. In fact, he has nature say that humans are unlike other animals in that they alone can defy her laws. When Alain develops this theme, he shows again that his imagination was literary in more than one sense. As I mentioned, the misconduct that especially concerns nature in his prose poem is sexual deviance above all homosexuality. The ethical polemic takes an unexpected turn when nature compares same-sex relations to a grammatical mistake. Whereas heterosexual sex is like a well-formed sentence, homosexual sex is like using the wrong gender for a word in Latin. In English, an analogous, albeit non-gendered metaphor might be combining a singular noun with a plural verb. Even in the long history of unconvincing attempts to say what could possibly be morally wrong about homosexual love, Alain's remarks are not particularly impressive, but they do reveal something about him as an author. The evocation of grammar in this context shows that here, in the second half of the 12th century, the liberal arts retain their fundamental role even, or especially, in the context of natural philosophy. If you see nature as a book, then why not apply the arts of linguistic analysis to understanding the world around you? Nature is not only like a myth that needs interpretation, but also has her rules and norms, like language does. Supposedly unnatural sex breaches those norms, and is thus akin to a solicism in speaking or writing, and no self-respecting medieval scholar would want to be accused of that. In this episode, we've been seeing how the various liberal arts became allied to the study of nature in the early medieval period. Not just the grammatical and literary arts of the Trivium, but also the mathematical arts of the Quadrivium, with the new translations of Adalard of Bath and the astronomy and cosmology of Bernard Silvestris. Soon we'll be returning to the discipline that was the natural home of philosophical speculation in this period, dialectic. Following the Aristotelian tradition, medieval logicians worked with a system of general classes called genera and species, whose members are, of course, individual things like you, me, and Hiawatha the giraffe. A few episodes back, we saw how much trouble they had accounting for the genera and species, the universals that are predicated of individual things. But there is also the problem of explaining how it is that each individual thing is in fact individual. This difficulty attracted the attention of one of the best minds of the 12th century. So that's one thing you won't want to miss, an episode on individuation and Gilbert of Poitiers, which is coming up in two weeks. But before that, I have another more unusual and even less missable episode to offer you. I'll be posting a special triple interview, in which you'll have the chance to hear from three other podcasters who have been tackling medieval history. The hosts of the History of the Crusades podcast, the History of Byzantium podcast, and the British History podcast. Join me and them next time here on the History of Philosophy. Without any gaps.  