Autochthonous functions of space also existed in the middle ages.
By Dr. Jesse M. Gellrich
Professor of English
Louisiana State University
Indeed without music no discipline can be perfect; nothing exists without it. For the world itself is said to be composed by a certain harmony of sounds and heaven revolves in harmonic modulation … music extends to all things.
Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum
When the term “mythological” is used to describe certain elements of medieval cultural forms, it commonly refers to vestiges that survive from archaic societies, both the legends and deities borrowed by writers of the middle ages from Greek and Roman sources and also the indigenous beliefs and practices of Europe and Britain that remained in place despite the growth of medieval traditions. But in light of recent scholarship on mythology as a form of thinking with characteristic structural properties, the view that particular features of medieval cultural forms are “vestigial” and “archaic” ought to be reexamined. On the one hand, such elements may be so regarded when they serve specifically “medieval” purposes, when the context in which they appear prevails over any recollection of an earlier time. Yet on the other hand, since a mythological survival contains in potentia the habits of thought that produced it, the degree to which they are completely suppressed can be determined only once they are fully recognized. If a coincidental survival turns out to be essentially tied to its past, the boundary separating “medieval” from “mythological” may be more fluid than it seems.
For example, a well-observed coincidence is the survival in the middle ages of representations of visual space that may be found in archaic societies. An obvious manifestation of this survival is the sacrality of stone, volume, and height that is illustrated by the pyramids of ancient Egypt and the sacred buildings in the Romanesque and Gothic styles of medieval Europe. While both pyramid and cathedral associate holiness with towering vertical structures and thick stone walls, these attitudes have roots in autochthonous beliefs stemming from prehistory. In the art of the caves at Lascaux, etched drawings and shades of color on the walls depict animal figures apparently less for the demands of representation than for evocation of chthonic presences still alive and moving in the stone.1 In rites of fertility that may have been performed in ancient caves, animal ancestors of bull and bison were reunited with “mother earth” deep in her sacred spaces.2 This sense of the life of space did not disappear, according to current studies, after the Neolithic age, but lives on in Egyptian sacred architecture, such as the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut, carved far into a hillside to place the queen close to the center of her sacred origins.3
That these autochthonous functions of space also existed in the middle ages has been the suspicion of more than one visitor to the early churches of medieval Europe. Commenting on European sacred building of the twelfth century, one historian observes: “these were real ‘mother-churches,’ gravid, earthbound, built by men of peasant stock who were conscious that mother earth and the mother of God held them equally in thrall.” Concerning the decoration of these buildings, this commentator maintains that the “world of the imagination portrayed in medieval art comprehends the monsters of pre-history …. The sixteen stone oxen high on the towers of Laon cathedral … are a tribute to the nobility of the animal world.”4 And within the walls of the early churches, a sense of space is created that has many aspects in common with the sacred space of cultures predating the middle ages. For it has been argued that Romanesque churches were constructed near water because it “was holy, a direct means of communicating with the womb of the world where it lay in the depths of the earth. In the ancient world men had done the same, as the foundations of the Greek temples at Paestum still remind us. Space was essentially feminine, a sacred cave, a sacred womb -in fact the womb of ‘mother church.’ … Sacred enclosures protected the dead until the time of their rebirth, for enclosure meant security. The Romanesque church was the stronghold of God, a sure defense against all evil powers and wicked men.”5 The ancient schema linking earth, temple, and mother goddess may appear to be changed in the medieval parallel – natura, ecclesia, mater generationis – because of the new theology of Christianity; but theological developments did not apparently loosen the grip of autochthony on the medieval consciousness.
We may consider the persistence of a mythological presupposition as it passes through several variations in form by turning briefly to the Gothic column. It is customarily regarded as an imitation of a Corinthian prototype with capitals flowering in vines and acanthus leaves. Although highly stylized, the Greek form preserves in its motif of foliage an earlier association of the column with a living tree, such as the imitation of papyrus reeds in the columns of ancient Egyptian temples.6 A late development of the Egyptian belief that the pillar grew out of the earth like a tree uniting it with the sky apparently informs the Corinthian column of the Greek temple of Apollo, thus providing the link between the god and the column.7 The autochthonous roots of the Greek column as the living presence of deity or ancestor are apparently not eroded as the form passes through various styles in the middle ages. For we may still detect an aspect of autochthony in the remarks of Durandus of Mende in his thirteenth-century commentary on the architecture of the church. The columns of the cathedral, says Durandus, are the “great men” of the past, the “kings of Israel” and “bishops of the church.”8 These are conventional medieval assumptions, and occasionally their autochthonous origins have been observed: “columns housed the tree of life”; they were “hallowed things”; not only were they “lesser load bearers” but they “worked miracles”; their decorators worked in love and dread of stone that was by nature holy.9 Insofar as these medieval attitudes have not let go of a precedent autochthony of the column as living presence, it would not be extravagant to see this mythology as the ground of the commonplace Tree of Jesse with its divine lineage and branches of great persons. The holiness with which the columns are imbued, according to Durandus, is of a piece with the sacrality of stone and mortar that composes the walls of the church: “The mortar,” says Durandus, “without which there can be no stability of the walls, is made of lime, sand, and water. The lime is fervent charity, which joins to itself the sand, that is, undertakings for the temporal welfare of our brethren: because true charity takes care of the widow and the aged, the infant and the infirm.”10
In these examples, the older mythological forms have undergone obvious mutations: mother earth has become mother church, Apollo a famous figure of ecclesiastical history, and the sanctity of stone a Christian virtue. But although the older form has been appropriated for new Christian meanings, it is still derived from fundamental ideas about space that have not changed substantially over the centuries. One way to study in finer detail how medieval representations of space may reflect a specifically mythological habit of thinking is to follow the lead of art historians who have attempted to explain the significance of the heavy emphasis on outline that distinguishes both medieval and archaic art forms. If direct historical influences seem improbable over the vast expanse of time separating the medieval from the archaic world, nonetheless, similarities in the structure of space suggest similarities in the assumptions about what space is and how it is perceived. The proposals of E. H. Gombrich may be taken up to pursue this inquiry, since he has argued a connection between medieval and ancient art on the basis of the corresponding func- of “schemata” in both forms. For example, the almost changeless forms of Egyptian paintings and sculptures reveal a heavy reliance on formulas and schemata, such as the circle or triangle, which craftsmen were taught for representing the human face or torso; little evidence, if any at all, can be found in the art of Egypt and prehistory that the artist tried to adjust his schema with the object perceived in the physical world in order to create a realistic image in stone or paint.11 In the middle ages the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt contains a wealth of schemata and formulas for drawing various subjects, and in them we see the reasons for the schematic form of medieval art as well as its link with the art of the mythological world. As Villard shows how to draw a human face from a circle, rectangle, or star; it becomes clear that the teaching of schemata supersedes any interest in trying to adjust and match them with their corresponding forms in reality.12 Whereas in a typically medieval drawing or painting the artist’s schema is distinctly visible, in the sketch of a renaissance figure, for example by Leonardo da Vinci, the schema is barely discernible as it is subjected to the constant testing and adjustment that create dimensionality, movement, and background. Instructions in medieval art, Gombrich argues, contain very little illustration of the process of adjustment, correction, and testing of schemata; even where advice “to copy reality” is given, as in Villard’s comment on the lion (“know well that it is drawn from life”) we find in the animal’s face, in fact in all of the animals of the album, the repetition of the same schema-human ears, mouth, teeth, lip line, eyes, and eyelashes.13
Despite the obvious differences in the iconography and subject matter between medieval and mythological art, what has not changed over the centuries is the “projection” of the schema as the image. Until the renaissance this process does not undergo significant alteration.
Seen in this light, that dry psychological formula of schema and correction can tell us a good deal, not only about the essential unity between medieval and postmedieval art, but also of their vital difference. To the Middle Ages, the schema is the image; to the postmedieval artist, it is the starting point for corrections, adjustments, adaptations, the means to probe reality and to wrestle with the particular. The hallmark of the medieval artist is the firm line that testifies to the mastery of his craft. That of the postmedieval artist is not facility, which he avoids, but constant alertness. Its symptom is the sketch, or rather the many sketches which precede the finished work and, for all the skill of hand and eye that marks the master, a constant readiness to learn, to make and match and remake till the portrayal ceases to be a secondhand formula and reflects the unique and unrepeatable experience the artist wishes to seize and hold. It is this constant search, this sacred discontent, which constitutes the leaven of the Western mind since the Renaissance and pervades our art no less than our science. For it is not only the scientist … who can examine the schema and test its validity. Since the time of Leonardo, at least, every great artist has done the same, consciously or unconsciously.14
But the “leaven” of this change does not begin – as Gombrich is careful to avoid suggesting – in the renaissance. Rather, one may find versions of it, according to a recent inquiry, in the protest against mythological practices and forms mounted by the Hebrews in the ancient Near East as recorded in the Bible.15 When renaissance artistic style was effecting changes from medieval formulaic painting, sculpture, and architecture, Luther and Calvin were finding their voices in the prophets of the Old Testament-in Hebrew rejections of alien mythologies. The “sacred discontent” heard in the Bible not only sounds its echoes from the renaissance pulpit, but also participates in the “demythologizing” movement of renaissance treatments of spatial form. The absence of this movement from medieval representations of space illustrates in yet another way that they have not become dislocated from antecedent mythological foundations.
For instance, as Villard’s album illustrates the absence of correction and adjustment in rigid styles of drawing, it suggests that a similar process of “projection” may be operative in the painting of biblical manuscripts. Those habits are apparent in simple visual scenes or images that attempt to formulate a passage that is highly suggestive of spiritual reference or intended to challenge facile responses and familiar meanings. A fourteenth-century painted manuscript of the Book of Apocalypse is typical: the scriptural citation “hand of God” is depicted as a human hand reaching out of a cloud, and the descent of the celestial Jerusalem (civitas Dei) is a familiar walled medieval castle descending to earth gently couched on a cloud.16 Such medieval imagery no doubt was composed in response to ordinary needs for visual illustrations of written documents in a society of limited literacy; however, the composition of “pictographs” for such references discloses an expectation that is “medieval” only by virtue of its date. To illuminate the divine inspiration of Sacred Scripture, as in a fourteenth-century painting of Saint Matthew, by depicting an angel whispering the verbum Dei into the ear of the evangelist captures a well-known medieval image, but it reveals the projection of the schema as the image that dates from anticipations long before the middle ages.17
The instructions for depicting other subjects were familiar, such as the painting of “three persons in one God” of the Trinity represented, for example in an Italian painting of the thirteenth century, as three identical male figures standing behind a scene of the Crucifixion.18 But the inspiration to mystical contemplation, if not foreclosed, is at least limited to known and familiar referents, especially when the figures are further identified by local tokens, like a crown or ring.
While these conventional examples illustrate the way rigid forms and heavy emphasis on outline in medieval art betoken the mythological projection of the schema as the image, even in a work that is noted for its variation in line, color, and iconography, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, the representation of space remains vividly in the foreground, and the delineation of schemata prevails over all other interests. For instance, in the famous page of the cross, twelve border lines stress the framing of space within.19 The whole area inside the border is organized according to the axial symmetry of the cross, which is composed of five bell-shaped figures, four of which are also chalice figures created by the semicircle bases that compose the center of the cross. Circles and circular shapes dominate the other areas of the page, particularly the interwoven shapes of the mythological birds and serpentine animals, repeated within the last detail of the concentric circles of their eyes. In the lower two quadrants, the interlacement of birds and serpentine animals in pink and gray are in homologous relationship with the number 3. Each 3-shape is faced with an identical figure, and the pairs are repeated four times in each of the two lower quadrants. In the upper quadrants, serpents and birds are in homologous pattern with the letter C and form pairs of figures arranged back to back. The intertwining lacework of animals, birds, crosses, and circles throughout creates an effect of massive interdependence of line and figure to form a coherent, highly organized whole.
Not a corner of the framed space is left “vacant.” In the upper quadrants, even the five black dots between the lateral pairs of Cs are not “empty spaces” but form an axis crossed by a horizontal line of four smaller dots between the upper and lower Cs. As the C shapes and 3-figures are not arbitrary, neither are the black spaces haphazard; they are in homologous relation to the central cross of the illumination. Furthermore, as the whole page is divided into quadrants by the main cross, both upper quadrants are subdivided again into smaller quadrants by the cross of black spaces. The figures of bell, chalice, circle, rose window, birds, serpents, the numbers three and four are radiant with theological significance. The bell and the chalice have obvious eucharistic significance, and the circle may indicate ideas about the perfection of Christ’s abiding love or the unity of all men through the Crucifixion and Redemption. Neither the birds nor the serpents in the two lower quadrants have positive identity, but since the birds slay themselves (they bite their own necks), they recall common medieval mythologies about birds of self-death and new life, the pelican and the phoenix, which are certainly fitting in a painting of the cross of Christ. The serpents devour the birds in the lower quadrants but are themselves bitten in the upper sections of the page, illustrating the rivalry between serpents and birds set in motion when the serpent tempted Eve and was subsequently condemned. The serpents of evil will be devoured-as Mary was said to crush the serpent’s head-by the pelican, the dove, the Christian soul, and Jesus Christ, although they will be threatened and “bitten” in that saving work.
Since the triangle is a commonplace homologue of the Trinity, the 3-shaped figures of the sacrificial birds may serve as a homologue for any number of ideas: the Trinity, three theological virtues, three ages before the Law, three Magi. If three suggests the theological virtues, a medieval exegete would quickly suggest that a contiguous four (in the four pairs of 3s or four quadrants) includes the corresponding four cardinal virtues, especially since the total, seven, indicates the spiritual perfection of the cross that resists the Seven Deadly Sins by virtue of the other totalities present in it-seven Sacraments, seven parts of the Mass, seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, seven tones of the scale, seven planets, seven days. From such an illuminated book, it is not difficult to follow a medieval viewer anticipating a world charged with signs, since the page is itself a sign of the immanence of meaning, like the reliefs and wall paintings in the art of the caves and pyramids. One may even be tempted to see more than a tangential link between the style of the page of the cross and the cultural context in which the Lindisfarne Gospels were painted in Northumbria about the time of the composition of Beowulf, bearing many of that poem’s characteristics of the inlay of Christianity into a rich mythological world. But the pages of the Gospels were created by monks trained in exegesis of Scripture, however rudimentary, and their paintings reveal the coalescence of a mythology of dragons with a “mythologic” preoccupied to close all openings, establish sophisticated balances, and affirm the magnificent symmetry of the universe. The page of the cross, like the style of Homer’s epics and in some measure the Old English Beowulf as well, bespeaks a world in which space is radiant with significance.
Medieval attempts to chart the space of known and unknown geographical areas, the making of maps, show that a schema could be asserted with so little interest in testing its validity that the space of most of Western Europe and the Near East resembles the form of a painting in illumination of a scriptural text. For example, in the late thirteenth-century map of the world hanging in Hereford cathedral, fact and fantasy, schema and projected image mingle imperceptibly.20 A medieval pilgrim might carry a smaller version of such a map in his travels into known areas, but he would surely have to be guided by faith rather than cartography in the unknown regions. For although the places of towns and rivers in the known world are vaguely represented, he would have to be wary of the regions in India where the sciopods dwelled, those popular uniped humans known to use their single foot as an umbrella. Equally suspicious were areas around the Nile, the home of the anthropophagi (“man-eaters”), beings resembling men in all ways except that their heads grew beneath their shoulders, so that they saw and ate through their chests. Travels to the “top of the world” brought one close to the origin of all life in the Garden of Eden, while the center of the round world provided the comforts of being near Jerusalem, the pivot or “navel” of this world’s body. One might go off to the Black Sea-avoiding the various sea beasts-to seek the Golden Fleece by following the detailed charted course of Jason and the Argonauts. But if lost anywhere one need only remember the general rules of thumb for survival: be careful of the South, for India is a place of demons and monsters and the North has nothing but hailstorms and cold winds; do not go West, for the sun sets in that region of death; instead go East, for there the sun rises, as Christ brought the light of salvation into the world.21
Even with the anthropophagi, sciopods, and Grendels effectively quelled by pilgrimages to Jerusalem or Canterbury and by readings in the Bible, a mythology of another sort survived in the middle ages-the autochthony that imbues all space with meaning. The projection of cosmological notions onto geography, such as we find in medieval examples like the Hereford map, illustrates the mythology of sacred space argued, for example, by Mircea Eliade: “the cosmicization of unknown territories is always a consecration; to organize a space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods.”22 Preconceived schemata, divine “paradigms,” are replicated as the real order of things, dictating their nature and organization. Medieval religious conceptions that are “illuminated” in sacred painting remain tied to this sense of space. Although these art forms are conceived in the attempt to throw light on the inner nature of things, we see repeatedly that spatial representations clarify instead their own process of projection, and it is that “clarification” that constitutes the medieval hold on precedent ways of thinking.
The separation of the means of clarifying from what is being clarified was confronted more forthrightly in the via negativa than in most other medieval traditions, and few writers recognized the significance of it more profoundly than Aquinas. In summarizing the purpose of human reason in the study of sacra doctrina, Aquinas establishes as a guiding premise the impossibility of knowing divine nature in itself – in its own esse:
“God as an unknown is said to be the terminus of our knowledge in the following respect: that the mind is found to be most perfectly in possession of knowledge of God when it is recognized that His essence is above everything that the mind is capable of apprehending in this life: and thus, although what he is remains unknown, yet it is known that He is.”23
Recognizing the difference between human knowledge (scientia) and divine wisdom (sapientia), the study of sacred doctrine is established as an analogous mode. Analogy, Aquinas argues, is the “proper proportionality” of human knowing that does not impinge upon the purity of the divine order so long as that proportionality is maintained. In certain areas of sacra doctrina, such as “the names of God,” we cannot separate the quod nomen designat from the modus quo-what a name designates from the way it designates-and hence must assert that, as a person may be called just or good, God must be justice or goodness itself.24 The means of maintaining the analogous mode in such areas is possessed by the style of the argumentation, by the cue of question after question, and the repetition of such formulas as intendet significare (“intends to signify”). In these cues the style leads us “by the hand” – manuductio – realizing the clarification in each successive step.25 Such a deliberate means of proceeding acknowledges itself as proportionately different from an absolute conceptual system that does not proceed by names or images or analogies.
Reason, Aquinas explains, cannot describe divine mysteries like the Trinity, cannot specify their esse; it can only “clarify” – manifestare – the articles of sacred doctrine.26 In this principle, and especially in this term, manifestatio, Aquinas articulates an assumption that governs his own Summa theologiae as well as those of other writers, such as Bonaventure’s Opera and Peter Lombard’s Sententia. In the summa, manifestatio makes no mistake about remaining on the proper human side of the divine boundary, which is protected by highly formalized principles of proceeding. However, although those principles set out to clarify an order believed to be intrinsic to the nature of things, the rigidly schematic style imitates – becomes the speculum of – the careful subdivision and order of its own procedure. And in this movement of thought, Scholasticism appears to rely on the function of schematic structure that governs various other medieval cultural forms.
The manifestatio of which summae are capable, first of all, is the summa itself, not only the “highest” reaches of speculation, but the “totality” or complete itemization of all aspects of an issue; such treatises must be composed of adequate articuli, constituent “parts” or “members,” and subdivided into finer elements; the pattern of ordo of the whole is preserved by proper comparisons, similitudines, and sufficient contrasts, distinctiones; the inclusion of precise diction, harmonious sentences, and rhyme will foster mnemonic devices for rapid memorization; finally the last item in an argument must affirm the concordantia of the whole, the principle that no contradictions remain as all opening objections are conclusively refuted.27 For example, within the Summa, Aquinas considers “The Nature and Domain of Sacred Doctrine,” which he subdivides into ten constituent parts: “( 1) about the need for this teaching; (2) whether it be science; (3) whether it be single or several; (4) whether it be theoretical or practical; (5) how it compares with other sciences; (6) whether it be wisdom; (7) what is its subject; (8) whether it sets out to prove anything; (9) whether it should employ metaphorical or symbolic language; (10) whether its sacred writings are to be interpreted in several senses.”28 The tenth article begins with a subdivision of “objections”: videtur (1) that a word in Scripture cannot have several meanings, literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical; (2) that besides these four Augustine lists history, etiology, analogy, and allegory; (3) and that neither of these categories includes the parabolical. Sed contra, but on the contrary, Gregory observes that Scripture is beyond all sciences, because it reveals mystery in facts. In the respondeo, Aquinas supplies the traditional division of literal and spiritual senses, subdividing the latter into the allegorical, moral, and anagogical, justifying them with auctoritas on the figural nature of signs, and concluding that a word may have many senses in the Bible. To the first objection, ad primum, Aquinas denies that multiplicity produces equivocation; ad secundum, Augustine’s four divisions correspond to the standard ones; ad tertium, the parabolical is not an additional category, but belongs to the literal sense, as in the image “arm of God,” which signifies “operational power.”29
If we look back at these medieval arguments through the lens of Sir Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, Novum organum, and similar renaissance critiques, we may overlook as they did- surely as Rabelais did- the important point about manuductio cited by Aquinas. In the progression from sign to sentence, page, chapter, book, Bible, nature, cosmos, the manifestatio of the summa does not validate articles of faith, but replicates in its style the divine ordo. Following that progression from a vantage point that had recently discovered infinite space, new worlds across geographical and historical horizons, and models for the universe other than the one inherited from the middle ages, Bacon, Milton, and many others denounced Scholastic argumentation as circular and confused by “webs of learning.”30 But manifestatio was not as “medieval” or as confused as renaissance critics claim. To be sure, the subject matter or details of content are the vital issues of writers and thinkers of the middle ages; it certainly bears, as may now be apparent, distinct parallels with commentary on Scripture and the illumination of manuscripts; and all three are the result of disciplines of learning founded on the reading of signs taught by writers like Augustine. But manifestatio, insofar as it compares with the mode of clarifying in the visual illuminations of the “sacred page,” is not the exclusive creation of medieval Scholasticism. Rather, it is a highly formalized principle of the projection of schemata and the spatialization of thought that begins long before Aquinas, Gregory, and Augustine. The projection is obviously different in degree from Villard’s replication of the schema as the image drawn with pen and ink; but manifestatio is not different from it in kind. For in the effort to clarify a concept or belief, manifestatio “clarifies” its own highly schematic form of argumentation: the interpretans is projected as the interpretandum. The means of clarifying takes the place of what is being clarified by virtue of the formalization of questioning and testing, in the same way that the artist’s schema becomes his represented image when adapting, adjusting, and falsifying are minimized. For this reason, no doubt, renaissance writers and artists had little patience with medieval forms; the style of the summa simply does not conceive of falsifying an ordo maintained in concordantia. So long as it is maintained, the order of thought is guaranteed. But the dominance of the schematic in this order rests upon the same sense of sacred space that is evident in formulaic artistic styles of the middle ages. The sacrality of spatial arrangement controls how thinking proceeds; thought is the speculum of sacred order. Although the medieval sense of space as fraught with significance has changed considerably from earlier autochthonous cultures, it nonetheless holds on to a fundamental anticipation about sacred space that is one of the identifying characteristics of mythological thought: “to organize a space,” says Eliade, “is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods.”
The importance of “paradigmatic” structure in mythological space, for example as studied by Claude Levi-Strauss, is that a sacred or totemic object – once thought to be significant or magical in itself – is instead a part that has the ability to recall other elements to which it compares in form, as one term in a linguistic paradigm recalls others like it or a Doric column reminds us of an Ionic or a Corinthian prototype. Thus the totemic animal or object functions as a “conceptual tool,” Levi-Strauss observes, to recall the whole classification of which it is one element: “a genuine system by means of a creature, and not the creature itself constitutes the object of thought and furnishes the conceptual too1.”31 With regard to the medieval summa, paradigmatic structures are everywhere in evidence in the symmetrical subdivision, homologous interrelation of parts, patterned oppositions, parallel diction, syntax, rhyme, and mnemonic devices; each part has the capacity to recall the larger system, and the style of the whole is the “Scholastic memory” of the vast classificatory network of the Book of nature. In this sense, the style is an “ideograph” of the cosmos, illustrating Roland Barthes’s observation that “myth is a pure ideographic system, where the forms are still motivated by the [signified] concept which they represent while not yet, by a long way, covering the sum of its possibilities for representation.”32 Aquinas and Augustine would take no issue with the “motivated” forms of things in the Bible or nature, and surely not with the infinitely rich signifiers tied mysteriously to the divine concept. Instead, by making the style of writing conform in every conceivable detail to the imago of the greater world about which they wrote, they would imitate perfection itself. But they would deny that the massive interlacement and organization of their books and of the elegant painted manuscripts they admired were the projection of a style of thinking that obeyed the expectations of mythology.
Recognizing that manifestatio involves a preoccupation to fill out and classify all space within perceptible limits suggests that verbal and visual styles have a common conceptual basis and that cultural forms that appear to have similar traits are much more than examples of the all-too-familiar “parallels.” Erwin Panofsky, for example, has tried to reach behind the superficial similarities that he sees between Gothic architecture and Scholasticism by pointing to their common ground in manifestatio.33 But by considering manifestatio as the unique invention of a style of written argumentation, his study does not directly confront how a verbal medium might “influence” an architectural style. That both Gothic architecture and Scholasticism share an obvious encyclopedic interest may have something to do, as Panofsky argues, with the historical fact that both forms reached their zenith in the areas around Paris in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; but if a comparison is to be argued for the two forms, it may be established by considering the heritage of manifestatio in a style of spatializing thought.
Beginning with the centrality of manifestatio to Scholasticism, Panofsky argues, “the Scholastic mind demanded a maximum of explicitness. It accepted and insisted upon a gratuitous clarification of function through form just as it accepted and insisted upon a gratuitous clarification of thought through language.”34 He goes on to define manifestatio as “the postulate of clarification for clarification’s sake,” and he situates its origin in “the Scholastic mind.”35 But the Scholastic and architectural forms that are offered in illustration of this “postulate” bear striking resemblance to the patterns of organizing space and projecting inherited formulas that are operative well beyond the confines of medieval Scholasticism. For instance, the “totality” that Panofsky studies as a defining characteristic of the summa and the cathedral has several analogies in the taxonomies and classifications of mythological thought.
Like the High Scholastic Summa, the High Gothic cathedral aimed, first of all, at “totality” and therefore tended to approximate, by synthesis as well as elimination, one perfect and final solution; we may therefore speak or” the High Gothic plan or the High Gothic system with much more confidence than would be possible in any other period. In its imagery, the High Gothic cathedral sought to embody the whole of Christian knowledge, theological, moral, natural, and historical, with everything in its place and that which no longer found its place, suppressed. In structural design, it similarly sought to synthesize all major motifs handed down by separate channels and finally achieved an unparalleled balance between the basilica and the central plan type, suppressing all elements that might endanger this balance, such as the crypt, the galleries, and towers other than the two in front.36
Panofsky is hardly alone in arguing this parallel between Scholasticism and Gothic architecture.37 But the idea of totality as it is represented here does not have its origin in the methodology of Scholastic argumentation, for the same kind of emphasis on the sacrality of order is to be found as a commonplace in mythological societies. In sacred structures, as Levi-Strauss has studied them, “sacred things must have their place … being in their place is what makes them sacred for if they were taken out of their place, even in thought, the entire order of the universe would be destroyed. Sacred objects therefore contribute to the maintenance of order in the universe by occupying the places allocated to them.”38 By this principle, the totality of the summa and the cathedral does not consist in their gross structure, which was subject to stylistic variation and to change. What did not change from at least the time of the ancient fertility rituals performed at the sites on which some medieval cathedrals were later built is the sacrality of space in which every dark corner is charged with significance, the part an embodiment of the whole, the sign projected as the signified. The summa and cathedral have in common some of the most elemental ideas that their builders learned about the structure of space. That structure was inherited from mythology, and inheritance surely masters invention in these medieval examples.
The second characteristic of scholastic writing, Panofsky observes, “arrangement according to a system of homologous parts,” is apparent in the symmetrical divisibility of elements in architecture: “As a result of this homology we perceive what corresponds to the hierarchy of ‘logical levels’ in a well-organized Scholastic treatise.” The customary division of the whole architectural structure-nave, transept, chevet-may itself be subdivided into high nave and side aisles opposed by apse, ambulatory, and chapels. Within these divisions, still further balances are apparent:
first, between each central bay, the whole of the central nave, and the entire nave, transept or fo re-choir, respectively; second, between each side aisle bay, the whole of each side aisle, and the entire nave, transept or fore-choir, respectively; third, between each sector of the apse, the whole apse, and the entire choir; fourth, between each section of the ambulatory, the whole of the ambulatory and the entire choir; and fifth, between each chapel, the whole hemicycle of chapels, and the entire choir.39
While the same “progressive divisibility” may be observed in a Scholastic treatise, “the principle of homology that controls the whole process” has also been noted in the much earlier example of the intricate homologies on the page of the cross in the Lindisfarne Gospels, and we find it as well in exegesis of Scripture.40
For instance, the preoccupation with homology found in the cathedral also informs the entry for cathedra in Pierre Bersuire’s Repertorium morale:
CATHEDRA. Nota quod CATHEDRA nomen est magisterii, et honoris. Dicam ergo, quod in scriptura reperitur
CATHEDRA
The equation of “preeminence” with “prelates,” ” wisdom” with “teachers,” and “pestilence” with “tyrants” is dictated not by any exclusive denotation of these terms in Scripture, but rather by a homologous “logic” that balances one generic category with its equivalent or opposite, as the first two constitute the “bona cathedra” from which the “cathedra malorum” is produced. The parallel syntax and exact genitive endings, the repetition of three singular and three plural nouns in the same gender-all balanced upon the fulcrum of “quae est” and emphasized by alliteration and rhyme achieve more than a convenient mnemonic for easy recall. The structuring of these elements reveals the composition of meaning as to form. The understanding of cathedra is “manifested” by the arrangement of parts into a visual schema in the same way as the homologue of three and four controls the composition of the Lindisfarne page of the cross or as the multiples of nave, transept, and chevet are totalized throughout the cathedral. Manifestatio is obviously not exclusive to Gothic architecture or Scholasticism in this summa “in miniature” from a page of fourteenth-century exegesis.
A final point about Scholastic writing, cited by Panofsky, is “distinctness and deductive cogency,” the concern with adequate contrasts and clear interrelations among parts. In architecture this stylistic feature is achieved in the effort to distinguish shafts from the walls they support, columns from the several members that compose them and in turn from the ribs of the vault they maintain. “Overmembrification” is not merely gratuitous, but manifests the desire to infer the manner by which wall, pier, shaft, and arch are held together.42 Obvious subordination makes clear the skeletal structure maintaining the whole. Although we may find this fascination with subordinating parts apparent in, for example, the nave of Canterbury cathedral, in which the membrification of columns is repeated in the ribs of the vault or in the west window composed of a massive arch subdivided distinctly into the many smaller arches supporting it, so also do we find a preoccupation with distinctness in the firm outlines of medieval drawings, the frequent use of multiple border lines sharply setting off the space between them and within the whole. The common use of bright colors for contrast carries out a similar emphasis on interrelationships. But this principle may also be perceived in scriptural commentary, in the emphasis on discriminating among the various senses of terms in a work like Alanus de Insulis’s Distinctiones, or more broadly in the painstaking detail of demonstrating the hierarchy of four levels of reading Holy Scripture. A popular distich summarizes the familiar divisions but al so tells us something about the medieval de light in distinctiones:
Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, moral is quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.
[The letter teaches the deed, the allegory what you believe, the moral what you should do, the anagogue what you strive for.]43
The preference for “gratuitous clarification” that characterizes the function of totality, homology, and distinctness does not simply establish a parallel between two medieval cultural forms; rather, the experience of manifestatio that Panofsky claims for a Scholastic argument or the tracery of a window or wall characterizes a response to many medieval forms that are so determined to clarify their Own method of construction that they reveal every joint and seam in a webbed vault, the human face of the artist’s schema in the drawing of a lion, and the gloss of a word like cathedra structured into a visual miniature of categories and oppositions in bono and in malo. For the medieval student attentive to the visual argument of manifestatio
would not have been satisfied had not the membrification of the edifice permitted him to re-experience the very processes of architectural composition just as the membrification of the Summa permitted him to re-experience the very processes of cogitation. To him, the panoply of hafts, ribs, buttresses, tracery, pinnacles, and crockets was a self-analysis and self-explication of architecture much as the customary apparatus of parts, distinctions, questions, and articles was, to him, a self-analysis and self-explication of reason.44
But the “rationalism” of this response is still centuries away from the process of correcting and adjusting in stone, paint, or words for the purposes of discovering something completely new. Instead, it is the “rationalism” of mythologizing thought: although in these medieval examples the projection of the mental order as the ordo of things to be interpreted has reached a highly sophisticated development, it remains linked in principle to the ancient practice in which an emphasis On heavy outline merely sets in relief-clarifies-a form or figure already present in nature.
The structuring of space in the cultural forms considered thus far has involved in various ways medieval ideas about proportion, especially proportions that were studied in terms of their numerical constituents. Although some writers concerned with numerical proportion suspected that their theories stemmed from ancient sources beyond works like Plato’s Timaeus and Chalcidius’s commentary On it, they also assumed that their own traditions were a new interpretation, a departure from antecedent notions. The Gothic cathedral stood for them, according to Otto Von Simson, as the outstanding example of what could be done with number and proportion.45 However, we do not have to probe far in the ancient heritage of medieval tradition, to which of course they had no access, to discover that their use of proportion to organize space in sacred buildings like the cathedral does not depart from, for example, the Egyptian use of proportion to homologize the cosmos in erecting sacred structures. Giedion has demonstrated this process in studying the prehistoric inheritance of Egyptian megalithic structures:
No architecture is more imbued with proportions than that of Egypt, which stood at the beginning. One of the reasons is that proportions were then inseparably bound up with symbolic meanings. The Egyptian demand for an embracing oneness in its conceptual image of the world could not be halted when it came to architecture. It came to the fore in the scrupulously careful cosmic orientation of the great pyramids …. Its close bond to the eternal presence of the cosmic is the finest bequest of Egyptian architecture. It is the most complete expression of the interconnection of cosmic and human: of eternal presence and temporal change.46
The “embracing oneness” and “cosmic orientation” of the Egyptian megalith suggests certain parallels with the speculum mundi and domus Dei of the medieval cathedral, but the common ground of these two forms is the similar function of numerical proportion to construct in stone a “copy” of the proportions thought to compose the greater universe. Pythagorean number theory, although formulated in Greece in the sixth century B.C., is very likely, according to Giedion, an extrapolation of systems of proportion used to construct Egyptian sacred architecture.
Pythagoras imagined that his number system could explain the proportion in all physical forms. He illustrated the theory with the tetraktys, an equilateral triangle produced from legs of four dots. In the words of one early commentator, “From this [tetraktys] all numbers proceed, as the fountain and root of ever-springing nature.”47 A perfect expression of the Pythagorean idea of the “one in the many” and the “many in the one,” the tetraktys employed numbers to express the mythological view of the world as a coherent totality in which all parts had a place. The Egyptian pyramid is an image in stone of many of these assumptions. Its volume and surface, for instance, were exact multiples of a right triangle; the triangle itself was a multiple of a segment of one of its legs, the Pythagorean “golden section”; thus the entire megalith was an extension of the golden section.48 Since the “cubit”-the human hand and forearm-composed a measuring grid that the Egyptians invented and used in constructing sacred buildings, the basic unit of measurement was a multiple of proportions essential to man. An element of human form served as a schema that the Egyptians saw manifested clearly- not unlike the face of Villard’s lion-in the proportions of the natural world and in the heavens. What Gombrich says of the function of schemata in prerenaissance art has strong support in Giedion’s study of Egypt: “Thus Egyptian architecture is a projection of the proportions of the human body transposed into a larger-but still human-scale.”49 In this process of projecting and homologizing the building to the cosmos and to the human body, Egypt never really lost, Giedion observes, the heritage of its prehistory: “The entire archaic outlook, like that of prehistory, assumed the oneness and inseparability of the world.”50 Levi-Strauss, as we have seen, arrives at this conclusion from another point of view in remarking that mythological thought is a “logic of comprehension for which contents are in dissociable from form … [a] systematic of finite classes, [a] universe made up of meanings.”51
Medieval writers knew little if anything of Egyptian culture, but they had inherited a numerical theory for “the oneness and inseparability of the world” through Plato’s adaptations in the Timaeus of Pythagorean numbers. Although Plato describes his account as only “a likely story,” it was hardly received as a mere legend by the works founded on it, such as Augustine’s De musica, Chalcidius’s Commentary on the Timaeus, Bernard Sylvester’s Cosmographia, and Alanus de Insulis’s De planctu naturae and Anticlaudianus.52 Like their archaic prototypes, Plato’s speculations treat the proportions of nature as multiples of perfect units of measurement in man and as building blocks in the cohesive totality of the cosmic edifice. The Demiurge, “when he began to put together the body of the universe, set about making it of fire and earth.” But to bring these two things into unity, this “builder” employed the “geometrical proportion” that governs “squares and cubes,” the fundamental proportions of the Pythagorean tetrad-l :2:4:8 and 1 :3:9:27.53 These units of order account for the concord in the four building blocks of the world’s body, earth, air, fire, and water, as well as the harmony of the four elements constituting the body of man. “For these reasons and from such constituents, four in number, the body of the universe was brought into being, coming into concord by means of proportion, and from these it acquired Amity, so that coming into unity with itself it became indissoluble by any other save him who bound it together.”54 The imagery and speculation have changed from the archaic world; Plato does not discuss its sacred architecture, nor does his notion of the human soul as a homology of the world’s body rely on the ancient Egyptian idea of the ka. But the grip of the archaic outlook still persists in the projection of the mathematical schema in such a way that it determines what is perceived in man, the cosmos, or the stone monument: because the world’s body consists of four elements, it is in “unity with itself’ and hence is “indissoluble by any other save him who bound it together.” We cannot say this is a position that asks to be challenged and doubted. On the contrary, it invites affirmation and extension, which it certainly received in the middle ages.
Although medieval writers interested in the number theory of the Timaeus altered some of its ideas with Christian doctrine, what they found most attractive was the use of proportion to assert “unity and concord.” If Plato’s schemata of proportion do not invite doubt, neither do their medieval developments. Rather, they encourage the expansion of formulas themselves, not the use of them to probe and test and question the phenomena to which they are in similitude. It is that encouragement, that insatiable extension of formulas, that constituted medieval thinking as a means of classifying and prevented a radical departure from Pythagorean number theory, geocentric cosmology, and the archaic outlook at least until the time of Galileo.
Medieval writers themselves suggest the lead in this form of thinking as classifying in theories about music, which reach far into Platonic speculation about number. Like numbers to the builders of the Pyramids, music to the builders of the cathedrals, according to von Simson, was the foundation of the aesthetics of beauty in architecture.55 The idea that builders copied the work of the “Divine Architect” was familiar in, for example, a reference like elegans architectus used by Alanus de Insulis or the illustration in the Bible Moralisee of God bending over the universe “when he prepared the heavens … with a certain law and compass” (Prov. 8.27) and “ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight” (Wisd. of Sol. 11.21).56 But these scriptural texts and many others that refer to “measure” or “number” became the basis for elaborate musical speculations. It was probably Peter Abelard in the twelfth century who first linked musical interpretation with architectural theory when he speculated on the measurements given for Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 6) as musical proportions.57 However in Abbot Suger’s commentary on the consecration of Saint Denis, dedicated about 1 140, we find the flowering of architectural and musical theories.58 Suger sees Saint Denis, first of all, as the effort of builders to copy in stone and mortar the perfect architecture of God’s heavenly “city” and its “church.” “We made good progress with His own cooperation and in the likeness of things divine there was established ‘to the joy of the whole earth Mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the Great King.”59 It is apparent in several passages of the treatise that one of the ways- perhaps the most significant -Suger affirms the “likeness” of the celestial city in its earthly form is in the “musical” relation of nave and transept, vault and column, arch and support-in the interconnection of its many parts. For the “music” of architecture, writes Suger at the opening of his treatise, is a participation in the “eternal reason” that he says is a cosmic symphony:
The admirable power of one unique and supreme reason equalizes by proper composition the disparity between things human and Divine; and what seems mutually to conflict by inferiority of origin and contrariety of nature is conjoined by the single, delightful concordance of one superior, well-tempered harmony. Those indeed who crave to be glorified by a participation in this supreme [summae] and eternal reason often devote their attention to this continual controversy of the similar and the dissimilar.60
This is not the prose of a writer trained to imitate the style of Scholastic argumentation, but it reveals nonetheless the form and attitude of manifestatio that we have seen in Scholastic writing and in Gothic architecture. Suger’s style in this passage and throughout the treatise is no more or less “ornamental” than the architectural design he describes in Saint Denis. With extended subordinations, involuted appositives, sophisticated parallelisms and balances, he creates an elaborate hypotaxis that mirrors the subdivision, interconnection, and division of ribs, joints, and buttresses. Calling eternal reason the summa of musica, Suger identifies it not only as the “supreme” but as a “totality” that for him is imitated in the proportions of the earthly edifice. His treatise is yet another example of the summa of harmonic correspondences that Aquinas strives to render in the concordantia of an argument, that the masters of the Lindisfarne Gospels try to create in line and figure, and that exegetes from the time of Augustine sought to imitate in distinguishing the levels of meaning in Sacred Scripture.
When Suger turns to describe the audible song of the ceremony for the Upper Choir, he hears nothing less than the anagogic music of the afterlife: the voices of all “singing so concordantly, so close and so joyfully that their song, delightful by its consonance and unified harmony, was deemed a symphony angelic rather than human.”61 What he hears from the choir and sees in stone takes him through an experience of clarifying that seems to echo in the hypotactic style of his treatise. The “music” of Saint Denis described by Suger witnesses his own vivid imagination, but also a tradition of ideas that gained initial force in Augustine’s adaptations of Platonic and Pythagorean number theory in De musica. By comparison with other medieval traditions, this page in the medieval Book of culture is largely unread. It has been considered the development of “science” and “philosophy,” when instead it is the product of manifestatio seeking expression in many medieval cultural forms. In its archaic and classical roots, medieval musical theory carries with it a predetermination to “musicalize” the gaps and openings in nature in the same way that illuminations “spatialized” thought. Medieval music is a “myth” not because renaissance discoveries, following Aristotle, insisted that the stars are silent, but because it is the development, perhaps the most sophisticated in late Western culture, of a form of thinking as a mimesis of the structure of sacred space.
“Hac [musical etenim coelestia temperantur, mundana sive humana reguntur: haec instrumenta mores instruunt et informant” (“By music divine things are tuned, wordly and human things are governed; instrumental musics instruct and inform morals”). This comment, from John of Salisbury’s twelfth-century work the Polycraticus, reiterates musical ideas about man, nature, and the supernatural that were traditional among writers in the middle ages, stemming from the formulas of Pythagoras.62 Since his idea of the tetraktys contains the numerical ratio of 1:2, the basic proportion in the musical octave, writers using “numbers” (numerus) as a means for describing their sense of the order in nature and the cosmos were provided with an infinitely extendable vocabulary or grammar of the “music of the spheres.”63 For an imaginative writer like Augustine, the ratio of 1:2 in the musical octave is a schema that is present in man, nature, and God. Each is a speculum of the octave in the other. Augustine’S theories, formulated in De musica, were repeated throughout the middle ages. Both he and Boethius, whose De musica was also fundamental to medieval musical thought, were summed up comprehensively by Jacobus of Liege in his fourteenth-century work the Speculum musicae.64 As described by Jacobus, audible music (instrumentalis musica) is composed of numerical proportions that are “heard” in the “world music” (musica mundana) or the “relation,” “motion,” and “position” of the celestial bodies, the “various relation” of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire), and the “diversity of times” in the changings from day to night, in months, years, and seasons.65 The concordia of the heavenly rotations, the even proportion of nature’s four elements, and the orderliness of diurnal and seasonal succession constituted a compelling example of the harmony in the physical universe and the proof of the scriptural text, “Sed omnia in mensura, et numero, et pondere disposuisti” (“Thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight”; Wisd. of Sol. 11.21).66 Mundana musica was an excellent harmony for man to imitate, because it was the speculum of his own composition or “human music” (humana musica).67
That music is the harmonious “consonance” (consonantia) of the octave or ratio of the union of body and soul.68 Man is composed of elements that form a musical ‘Joining together” (coaptatio) according to the same “union” and “harmonic modulation” as that which moves the heavenly bodies.69 Few medieval writers express as well as Alanus de Insulis the musical concordia uniting man and the universe. In the De planctu naturae, Lady Nature explains that just as the discordia or dissonans of four elements “unites” (conciliat) creating a concordia in the world, so also do the inaequal and divisa elements of the human body ‘Join together” (compaginat) forming musica in man. The diction and syntax of Nature’s comment are themselves echoes of the sense that man, like nature, is an oxymoronic harmony of opposites.
Sicut enim quatuor elementorum concors discordia, unica pluralitas, consonantia dissonans, consensus dissentiens, mundialis regiae structuras conciliat, sic quatuor complexionum compar disparitas, inaequalis aequalitas, deformis conformitas, divisa identitas, aedificium corporis humani compaginat.
[For just as the concordant discord, singular plurality, consonant dissonance, discordant accordance of the four elements unite into one whole the structures of the worldly kingdom, so also do the similar dissimilarity, unequal equality, deformed conformity, divided identity of the four humors join together the edifice of the human body.]70
The literal illogic is defied by the rhetorical logic of the oxymorons that assume a level of reference to a homologous structure in which four parts of one entity correspond to four parts of another, and the elements of “concord” and “singularity” in nature are substituted by opposition with “equality” and “identity” in man. By multiplying its structures of similitude, its schemata for proportion, medieval musical thought does not look to nature and man to test its theory, but makes natural phenomena the example of that theory. This procedure is the logic of homology in which “contents are indissociable from form” and the universe is made up of meanings. Within the intellectual requirements of a system that expects to see congruity for its own sake, the speculum of nature reflected correspondences that in every way were perceived not as hypothetical, but as the essential bonds of things.
The homologue par excellence in medieval musical thought is divina musica, not so named until the fourteenth century, but clearly central in medieval tradition from the time of Augustine, who speaks of the numeri aeterni of divine nature. John of Salisbury’s comment that “divine things” are “tuned” by music relies upon medieval opinion that the Trinity is musical because it is a perfect numerical proportion of one in three and three in one, which is homologous with numerical elements in instrumental music- 1:3, 1:2.71 But the “divine things” John mentions refer to an idea even closer to the heart of Christianity, the Redemption. Contemplating the harmony of love set in motion in the universe by Christ, Augustine says in De trinitate that the “single” death of Christ accords with man’s “double” death of the body and of the soul in sin. The ratio of the single to the double, or one to two (1:2), corresponds in perfect homology to the musical ratio of the octave. Man’s relation to Christ is a musical “harmony, agreement, concord, or consonance” (“congruentia, sive convenientia, vel concinentia, vel consonantia”).72 Once established, the homology allows the inclusion of an entire field of terms that generate each other from the common semantic denominator, con-. The syllable functions as a paradigmatic part from which the semantic field of terms is totalized and limited only by the writer’s versatility. For example, after the “new song,” which occurs frequently in Scripture in such passages as Cantate Domino canticum novum (Ps. 95.1), is identified as the “New Man” (Christ) and the “New Song of Charity,” then music becomes the homologue of moral life and caritas a “silent music of the heart.”73 Paul’s exhortations to sing “spiritual hymns and canticles … in your hearts to the Lord” (Eph. 5.18-19) and to imitate him by singing in spirit and mind (“Psallam . . . spiritu, psallam et mente,” 1 Cor. 14.15) were adjurations not to avoid loud music, but to love God in charity and, according to Wolbero of Cologne, to have “perfect knowledge” and “greatest dignity.”74
The intellectual requirements of finding congruities were easily supplied in the case of the “new song,” since parallels were as predictable as the semantic oppositions in concordia and discordia. As reading in bono created interpretation in malo, the practice of substituting opposite homologous parts produced from the “new song” of caritas the “old song” of cupiditas. Although the vetus canticum or “old song” never occurs in Scripture, it was a medieval commonplace, as we find in the commentary of the thirteenth-century exegete Hugh of St. Cher. He says that to “sing” the canticum novum is to “love” eternity and become new in spirit and mind with charity, whereas he who sings the old song loves the “earth” and follows the “old animosity.” Each element in the homologue of the new song produces its binary opposite in a complex structural pattern.
Qui vult hoc novum canticum cantare diligat aeterna, et fiat novus spiritus mentis suae. Hoc enim canticum est de aeternis. Nam vetus homo canticum cantat de terrenis. Novum Canticum est de pacis, et charitatis, et divinae laudis, quod cantat novus homo de spiritualibus. Quisquis enim sequitur [veterem] animositatem, non novam charitatern, novum Canticum non cantat.
[He who wants to sing the new song loves eternity, and becomes new in the spirit of his mind. For that is the song of eternity. But the old man sings the song of the earth. The new song is of peace, and charity, and divine praise, which the new man sings concerning spiritual things. Whoever follows the old animosity, not the new charity, does not sing the new song.]75
With a similarity between divine nature and musical concord established, separate books of Sacred Scripture become “songs,” God’s Word is a “melody,” indeed all of Scripture is “the most excellent modulation and the most perfect music.” The Bible manifests “all proportion, all concord, all consonance, all melody.”76
The repetition of omnis and the con- prefix is not redundant but is essential to the function of a rhetoric that creates from paradigmatic parts an entire classification of moral life. The concord of the octave, like the triangular unit of the pyramid, totalizes a structure that has the potential of investing all things with meaning. Acutely aware of that structure, Isidore of Seville recommended the study of music in every curriculum, and many followed him, frequently quoting his advice:
Itaque sine musica nulla disciplina potest esse perfecta, nihil enim est sine ilia. Nam et ipse mundus quadam harmonia sonorum fertur esse compositus, et coelum ipsum sub harmoniae modulatione revolvitur … musica extendit se ad omnia.
[Indeed without music no discipline can be perfect; nothing exists without it. For the world itself is said to be composed by a certain harmony of sounds and heaven revolves in harmonic modulation … music extends to all things .]77
Extending music to “all things,” Aelred of Rievaulx identifies charity as “world music” pervading all the elements of the physical universe by joining high to low and hot to cold with the “peace of concord.”78 As Pythagoras “played” on his monochord the music of the spheres, medieval men were instructed to “imitate” the mundana and divina musica in their moral lives and thereby become, like Christ, the summa of musica in the cosmic symphony, the microcosm of macrocosmic music. In the words of Jacobus, humana is the music of the “minor world of man” (“humana autem de minore est mundo, id est de homine”), while mundana is the music of the “major world” (“maiore mundo”) of the universe. Those who understand and interpret Sacred Scripture or nature can possess concordia and consonantia, for they are the “best musicians” (optimi musici).79 Francis of Assisi wanted his brethren to be “minstrels of the Lord” (ioculatores Domini), a designation probably modeled on the idea of Christ as the “new leader of the chorus” (novus praecentor) and the “greatest” or “total of all musicians” (summus musicus).80
The totalizing pattern of the structure of musical thought extends to all things” irrespective of illogical identities in essential content, for there are no “illogical” similarities in homologous relationships. “What are we,” asks Rupert of Deutz, “if not great musicians of God, his instruments? With harps and stringed instruments, which are truly our hearts and bodies, we are commanded to praise the Lord.”81 Because made of dried flesh stretched across wood, instruments such as the tympanum, psaltery, and cithara are glossed as Christ’s body stretched across the wood of the cross. Therefore the instrument whose “flesh” must be “beaten” (affligere) to sound music is man when in moral acts he denies his own flesh and becomes an “organ” sounding the moral virtue of mortificatio and crucifixio carnis.82 Medieval interpreters found no difficulty in combining the instrument and the moral idea because they were both extrapolations from the same schema, flesh upon wood. It may even be said that the medieval expansion of schemata for their own sake could not be resisted when it came to such accommodating examples as musical imagery. What is more, such an image as cithara does not “substitute” for the moral idea of selfdenial (crucifixio carnis) but identifies it. Musical theory affirms the logic of relationships in the same manner as a structure of thought that classifies a person as a member of a certain clan because his head is shaved according to the homologous pattern for bear or beaver.83 Like the signs in myth, the terms in medieval musical theory meet the requirements of classifying before they satisfy the demands of proof for identity.
As these examples illustrate, medieval writers in one sense did not invent theories of number and music. Students of proportion like Pythagoras, as Geoffrey Chaucer says, are “fynders” of musical harmony already “in” things.84 The medieval emphasis on the auctor as the spokesman or vehicle of a tradition, not the creator of it, is illustrated throughout the history of medieval ideas about music. The absence of authorial invention protects the tradition from internal contradiction and guarantees its continuity, in the same way as the anonymity of myth in tribal cultures, as Levi-Strauss has observed, reflects its authority. To demonstrate this point he compares myth to music, but he knows not how close he is to the mas-sive evidence from the medieval mythology of music that supports his claim. “Music and mythology bring man face to face with potential objects of which only the shadows are actualized …. Myths are anonymous: from the moment they are seen as myths, and whatever their real origins, they exist only as elements embodied in a tradition. When the myth is repeated, the individual listeners are receiving a message that, properly speaking, is coming from nowhere; this is why it is credited with a supernatural origin.”85 The growth of medieval theory of music seemed as divine in origin and as natural to the real order of things as the return of day after night, the binding of hot and cold, dry and moist, heavy and light. These “musical” oppositions, predating Boethius and extending beyond Chaucer, were regarded as maintained by the “nombres proportionables” projected from a divine schema – the “sovereyn ensaumpler” – in the words of Chaucer’s translation of the Timaean meter in the Consolation of Philosophy. The “forme of the sovereyn good” determined the form of things “in this worlde here,” as Chaucer says elsewhere, and was the “caus of armonie” holding the sea in its bounds, the seasons in their order, and drawing the heart of man unto the sacred “welle of music.”86
Medieval musical ideas proliferated, to a certain extent, because of what appears to be a “natural” congruity between, for example, the apparent regularity of celestial rotations and “world order” or the concord of voices singing in chorus, in choro, the antiphons and responses of the divine service and the moral music of brotherhood “sung” in the heart, in corde, manifesting caritas.87 When the form is perceived to be motivated by order, as is obvious in the derivation of meaning from the paradigmatic progression – in choro, in corde, in caritate – the continuity of musical ideas is uninterrupted and the mythology is maintained. If the form cannot find its homology in a schema for proportion, it will be found in disproportion. For the anticipation that form is naturally motivated is so constituted in myth, as Barthes has argued, that “what the form can always give one to read is disorder itself: it can give a signification to the absurd, make the absurd itself a myth.”88 That medieval traditions mythologized disorder is illustrated by the elaborate associations of chaos and noise with sin. As paradigmatic similarities produce a theory of concordia, they also are extended by opposition to create theories of discordia. Meaning is derived through a total classification in which discord is not the absence of signification, a noise in the cosmic symphony, but rather a meaningful aspect of it and even given a place in the “semantic” field-the underworld.
“Caritas laud at Dominum, discordia blasphemat Dominum,” writes Augustine in his usual imaginative manner of seeing the potentialities in any suggestive detail. Wolbero of Cologne explains that in contrast to the new song authored by Christ, the “vetus homo Adam” made the old song when he rebelled against God: “he cried out loudly [reclamavit] and vociferated [vociferatus] against the piety and justice of his Maker in pride, disobedience, and excuse of his sin.” His is “the song of tearful tragedy,” while Christ’s is “the song of peace and of joy.”89 Gabriel, in announcing Christ’s coming, proclaimed a concordia harmonizing man and God, a belief recalled in the iconography of music depicted frequently in paintings of the Annunciation; but sin “demusicalizes” that harmony by creating discord – discordabat.90 According to the Allegoriae in sacram scripturam, “noise” (clamor) is the “cupidity of the false” who make a “tumult unto the ears of God,” for “clamor [est] violenta tenatio diaboli.”91 The spatializing of the concept of noise to the underworld needs no further illustration than the “wailing,” “shrill shrieks,” and “fierce yells” of the damned in Dante’s Inferno. Noteworthy also is the Chester Harrowing of Hell in which the infernal scene is dramatized by the explicit stage direction, “clamor vel sonitus materalis magnus, ” perhaps rendered on stage by banging large scraps of iron.92 Chaucer, too, must have recognized these tropologies of noise, for they inform the Parson’s remark that Christ died “to make concord,” but sinners “maken discord amonges folk” and are “likned to the devel that ever is aboute to maken discord.”93
The imagery of noise in these examples does not “demythologize” the medieval tradition of music, since discordant oppositions are included within the total classification and given a fixed place in the underworld. Yet other uses of musical signs do oppose tradition, not with the noise of sin, but rather with what appears to be the arbitrary signification of musical imagery. For example, in manuscript illuminations depicting David playing the psalterium and singing the Psalms in the initial, musical instruments played by beasts may often be found in marginal drawings to illustrate in malo the bestial discord of greed and lust that is compassed by the total musica of praise to the Creator.94
But the same function of signs of discord does not obtain, for instance, in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights: bestial musicians read a musical score printed on the posterior of a naked human figure who is pinned under instruments many times his size; a serpentine dragon coils around the fingerboard of a lute whose sound box is filled with briars; in the strings of a harp a naked figure is transfixed with arms outstretched and feet together.95 Like other sections of the painting, the musical scene has provoked various conflicting interpretations. One might seek some resolution by claiming that the figure suspended in the strings of the harp suggests the medieval notion associated with gut instruments – crucifixio carnis. But such a reading seems arbitrary, since the scene hardly recommends for our approval the values of the musica of self-denial; nor is it characterized by a tone of warning for the failure to make such moral music. What we have instead is the old medieval schema of flesh in relation to wood suspended from, or in arbitrary association with, its signified meaning of humana musica. The metaphorical “script” of musica imagined by Augustine and later writers never before had such literal representation as in the notes inscribed on the naked figure. Whereas medieval musical signs were understood to be naturally present in physical things, the signs of music represented by Bosch cut that natural bond: arbitrariness is deliberate in the form. We might think that Bosch has mythologized chaos, but his style does not seize disorder in the same way that a motivated form gives us discord to read as myth. Rather, Bosch’s musical signs provide an example of what Barthes explains as form “growing less and less motivated.” It illustrates “the worn out state of myth,” which “can be recognized by the arbitrariness of its signification.”96 The signs of music in Bosch, which may seem baffling and inscrutable because of their arbitrariness, on the contrary, gain their force from this very characteristic: the form is unmotivated and indicates a movement away from the long medieval traditions of the mythology of music and the sacralization of space.
While Bosch is not representative of the ways traditions were used in the middle ages, his examples nonetheless illustrate the arbitrariness of signification that was potential in medieval treatments of spatial form. Bosch maximizes that potential insofar as his style concentrates attention on the separateness of the human figure from the strings of the harp in which it is suspended. But the recognition of arbitrariness is not limited to the means Bosch employed. Other ways it may appear are suggested by the warnings against extremity observed from time to time in various medieval disciplines. For example, Hugh of St. Victor cautioned against the extravagant reading of Scripture in his demand for a return to more rigorous study of the sensus literalis; Bernard Sylvester demonstrates in the Cosmographia a qualification of excessive speculation by employing the beginnings of an empirical interest in cosmology; Geoffrey of Vinsauf in the Poetria nova resists deviations from generic categories by advising a respect for earlier divisions of literary style, such as high, middle, and low. But by and large, the conditions of arbitrariness in medieval traditions are suppressed by the more encompassing need to fill in and close up incomplete form. Be it an opening in a painted manuscript, the space between stars, or a gap in history, the mythological impulse is driven to affirm oneness and inseparability in its “protest against the idea that anything can be meaningless.”97 When the year 1000 A.D. passed without witnessing the Apocalypse expected to occur at the end of the millennium, those who were disappointed simply accepted a future date.98 What began as an allegorization of John’s Book of Apocalypse was taken as a fact of documentary history in the same way that Clement of Alexandria’s rhetorical charge against the pagan gods occasioned Isidore and others to locate them in specific times and places.99 If the details are in conflict, no contradiction prevails, for ultimately time and place are not important. Any date for the arrival of Antichrist will do. More important is the compelling necessity to validate in the natural order the preexistent formulas about the past and the cosmos. Whatever was unknown and unbounded in the challenge “You know not the day nor the hour” (Matt. 25.13) became the provocation to look up the exact day and time in the complete “text” of history.
Various medieval cultural forms might be studied for the extent to which they hold on to the mythological past, like the examples I have offered here; but since the semiology of spatial forms in the middle ages assumes to some degree medieval theories of the linguistic sign, it will be appropriate to turn next to the grammatical and hermeneutic traditions in which those theories developed. Several questions arise from this consideration; for instance, do medieval definitions of the linguistic sign also look back, as do the practical extensions of the sign in spatial forms, to mythologizing structures? If so, how might this hold on the past be considered in view of the fact that medieval theories of the sign emerge from the effort to depart from the myths of precedent societies? In the next chapter, I will approach these questions with respect to the broader issue they imply: the possibility for language theory to initiate cultural change during the middle ages of Western tradition.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Chapter 3 (51-93) from The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction, by Jesse M. Gellrich (Cornell University Press, 03.15.2019), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license.