The tropological universe: Alexander Neckam’s encyclopedias and the natures of things at the turn of the thirteenth century

296 Pages·2008·4.24 MB·English

by  Tomas Zahora

THE TROPOLOGICAL UNIVERSE:
ALEXANDER NECKAM'S ENCYCLOPEDIAS AND THE NATURES OF THINGS
AT THE TURN OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
BY
Tomas Zahora
BA, Kansas Newman College, 1998
MA, Wichita State University, 2001
DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
AT FORDHAM UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK
AUGUST, 2007
UMI Number: 3301442
Copyright 2008 by
Zahora, Tomas
All rights reserved.
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CONTENTS
ABBREVIATIONS iv
INTRODUCTION 1
Borges, Diderot, and Wikipedia
Unchanging Natures of Changeable Things: Making a Case for the Study of
Alexander Neckam
Contribution and Methodology of the Dissertation
CHAPTER 1. ALEXANDER NECKAM AND MEDIEVAL ENCYCLOPEDISM 29
Biographical Introduction
The Scientist
The Moralist
The Encyclopedist
CHAPTER 2. ENCYCLOPEDIC STRUCTURES 52
Encyclopedic Structures
The First Encyclopedia: De naturis rerum
Neckam's Hexaemeron: Solatium fide lis animae
From the De naturis rerum to the Laus sapientie divine
Cosmology, Physici, and the Encyclopedic Ordo
CHAPTER 3. DE NATURIS RERUMTART I: PHYSICA 97
The Exegetical Tradition of Physica
Physica in the Twelfth Century
Neckam and Physica I: Coming to Terms with Traditions
Neckam and Physica II: The Commentary on Martianus Capella
Neckam and Physica III: Aristotle, the Salernitan Questions, and Anima Mundi
Two Spheres of Knowledge: Human and Divine
CHAPTER 4. DE NATURIS RERUM PART II: THE NATURES OF THINGS . 149
The Inscribed Universe
The Tropological Matrix
The Septem Dona: World Moved by Spiritual Bonds
Neckam's Didactic-Encyclopedic Program
Inquiry, Curiosity, Logic, and the Limits of Knowledge
CHAPTER 5. LAUS SAPIENTIE DIVINE: PRAISING GOD IN A SUITABLE
MANNER 190
Mere Poetry?
Opus Geminum: The Vanity and Utility of Things
Elements, Nature, and Serious Games
Heresy and Rhetoric: Faustus, Zoilus, and Dualism
Free Choice in a Fallen World: The Case of Harmful Animals
n
New Learning in the Laus sapientie divine
A Proper Praise of God
CHAPTER 6. AGAINST THE TIDES: ENCYCLOPEDIAS, EDUCATION,
PARADIGMS, AND CHANGE 233
A Scholar's Conversion
Neckam's Didactic Mission: The Ideal and the Reality
The Mendicant Solution
Everything in Its Place: The New Encyclopedias
Conclusion: Paradigm Shift in the Thirteenth Century
BIBLIOGRAPHY 272
ABSTRACT
VITA
in
ABBREVIATIONS
Berry Gregory Berry. "A Partial Edition of Alexander Neckam's Laus
sapientie divine." Ed. and trans. Gregory L. Berry. Ph.D. Diss.,
Yale University, 1967.
Commentary on Ecclesiastes Alexander Neckam. De naturis rerum and Commentary on
Ecclesiastes {Incipit opus magistri Alexandri de sancto Albano de
naturis rerum). Cambridge, Trinity College, R. 16. 4 (952), fols. 1-
237rb (s. xiiex).
Commentary on Proverbs Alexander Neckam. Commentary on Proverbs {Incipit tractatus
magistri Alexandri abbatis cyrenc' super parabolas Salomonis).
Oxford, Jesus College 94, fols. 57ra-74rb (s. xiiiin).
De naturis rerum Alexander Neckam. Alexandri Neckam De naturis rerum libri duo.
With the Poem of the Same Author, De laudibus divinae sapientiae.
Ed. Thomas Wright, 1-354. London, 1863. Reprint: Wiesbaden,
1967.
Hunt. R. W. Hunt. The Schools and the Cloister: The Life and Writings
of Alexander Nequam (1157-1217). Ed. Margaret Gibson. Oxford,
1984.
Laus sapientie divine Alexander Neckam. Alexandri Neckam De naturis rerum libri duo.
With the Poem of the Same Author, De laudibus divinae sapientiae.
Ed. Thomas Wright, 357-503. London, 1963. Reprint: Wiesbaden,
1967.
NECAP Alexander Neckam. Commentary on Martianus Capella
{Alexander Nequam super Marcianum de nupciis Mercurii et
Philologie). Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 221, fols. 34vb-88ra
(s. xiv).
NECS Alexander Neckam. Sermons 1-53. Oxford, Bodleian Library,
Wood empt. 13 (SC 8601), fols. l-144v (s. xiiiin).
Speculum speculationum Alexander Neckam. Speculum speculationum. Ed. Rodney M.
Thomson. New York, 1988.
Wedge George F. Wedge. De naturis rerum. "Alexander Neckam's De
naturis rerum: A Study, together with Representative Passages in
Translation." Ed. and trans. George F. Wedge. Ph.D. Diss.,
University of Minnesota, 1967.
IV
INTRODUCTION
Borges, Diderot, and the Wikipedia
I affirm that the library is interminable. The idealists argue that the hexagonal
halls are a necessary form of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space.
They contend that a triangular or pentagonal hall is inconceivable. (The mystics
claim that to them ecstasy reveals a round chamber containing a great book with a
continuous back circling the walls of the room; but their testimony is suspect;
their words, obscure. That cyclical book is God.) Let it suffice me, for the time
being, to repeat the classic dictum: The Library is a sphere whose consummate
center is any hexagon, and whose circumference is inaccessible.
Jorge Borges' library of Babel contains, in printed and bound, carefully shelved
tomes, every possible permutation of letters. It is "a sphere whose consummate center is
any hexagon, and whose circumference is inaccessible," constituting a vision of God
translated into a tangible infinity of beehive-like hexagonal rooms lined with shelves in
unfailing order. Its totality makes it absolute, but also monstrous: it is known that no
single individual can perceive its true structure or comprehend more than a fragment of
its contents. Borges' nightmare, not unfamiliar to modern researchers wandering through
stacks of research libraries, underlines the paradoxical equivalence of total knowledge
and no knowledge at all. It also embodies the concerns of anyone dealing with the nature
of human knowing, especially those who aspire to an encyclopedic grasp of things.
Among the lesser known ironies of history belongs the fact that the parents of modern
encyclopedism, Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert, whose Encyclopedic is used as an
example of the enthusiasm of the Enlightenment and the final breaking away from the
chains of sterile scholastic tradition and its Aristotle, expressed a vision just as unsettling
as that of the Argentine writer:
' Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel," in Ficciones, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (New York, 1962), 80.
See, e.g. John North, "Encyclopedias and the Art of Knowing Everything," in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic
Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley
(Leiden, 1997), 183-199.
1
As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow
continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as
difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole
universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed
in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound
volumes.
The future imagined by Diderot was overshadowed by mountains of books more
impenetrable than the phenomena they set out to understand and explain. A firm
understanding of the totality of human knowledge by a single individual—always more a
matter of ideals than of measurable actualities—would from now on resolutely, forever,
remain outside of anyone's reach. "When one considers the immense material for an
encyclopedia," Diderot wrote, "the only thing one perceives distinctly is that it cannot be
the work of a single man. How could a single man, in the short span of his life, manage to
comprehend and develop the universal system of nature and art?"
The authors of the Encyclopedic voiced a growing concern among eighteenth-
century intellectuals: the challenge of understanding, interpreting, apd if possible utilizing
human knowledge despite the growing disparity between the limited capacity for
individual knowledge and the vastly larger capacity for collective knowledge.5 Diderot's
and D'Alembert's resolution of the quandary included two important steps, both
adaptations of eighteenth-century encyclopedic techniques. The first consisted in
assigning individual articles to specialists—or at least to scholars who had a more
detailed knowledge of the subject than the average layman. In the end, besides numerous
Denis Diderot, "Encyclopedic" quoted in Daniel Rosenberg, "An Eighteenth Century Time Machine. The
Encyclopedia of Denis Diderot," in Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in
Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History (New York, 2001), ed. Daniel Gordon, 45-66, at 54.
4 Diderot, "Encyclopedia" article in the Encyclopedic, vol. 5:635, trans. Philip Stewart, The Encyclopedia
of Diderot and D 'Alembert, Collaborative Translation Project, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t7text/text-
idx?c=did;cc=did;rgn=main;view=text;idno=did2222.0000.004.
Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge,
2001), xi-xiii, 79-85.
2
contributions by Diderot and thousands of articles by the work's single most important
contributor, Louis de Jaucourt, the Encyclopedic included contributions by such
luminaries as Necker, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire. The second step involved a
coordination of the need for the inclusion of a taxonomy of human arts and sciences with
the recognition that neither the taxonomy nor the arts and sciences existed in a permanent
form. In order to provide an easily accessible body of articles and at the same time an
idea of the relationship between individual sciences, arts, and crafts, Diderot and
D'Alembert organized the bulk of the work alphabetically, attached a volume of
illustrative plates, a two-volume index, and a taxonomical table of human knowledge.
The result was a vast encyclopedia in 35 volumes exemplifying the practical goals of the
Enlightenment, in particular that of providing knowledge stripped of the needless
complexities of sectarian (meaning Catholic) superstition, and contributing to the
tangible, material improvement of the human race. The Encyclopedic's built-in flexibility
was also very modern. It meant that subsequent editions could update and add to original
articles and change the appended tables without having to change the structure of he
entire work. This also meant that each version of the Encyclopedic would represent a
pinnacle of human achievement at a particular point of time. Should disaster strike—for
Diderot and D'Alembert intended for their work to be a roadmap as much as an ark or
time-capsule of the vast fields of knowledge—the Encyclopedie could be used as a
blueprint for the restoration of the most advanced state of human achievement. Thus
even if no single individual could ever again grasp the principles of all sciences, the
progressive goal of the Enlightenment would be served. A philosophe would be allowed
6 Rosenberg, "An Eighteenth-Century Time Machine. The Encyclopedia of Denis Diderot," in
Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual
History, ed. Daniel Gordon (New York, 2001), 45-66.
3
to form at least an educated opinion of the matter, and collectively humanity would be
provided with the means to never again have to experience another Dark Age.
The intended flexibility of the Encyclopedie easily agrees with the spirit of our
own age, familiar with instant access to information and the "intellectual free-for-all" of
Wikipedia. To the generation brought up on the near-infinite possibilities of global
communication and never-before-imagined scope and rapidity of hyperlinking anything
with anything else, Diderot's "Encyclopedia" article with its concerns and hopes
represents an uncannily precise forecast of things to come. This includes another
characteristic of the modern age: the open challenge of those aspects of tradition that fail
to keep pace with the times:
Now that philosophy is rapidly advancing; that it submits all the objects within its
jurisdiction to its power; now that its tone is the prevailing one, and we are
beginning to shake off the yoke of authority and example to hold to the laws of
reason, there exists hardly a single elementary and dogmatic work with which we
can be wholly satisfied. We find these productions imitate those of men, and not
nature's truth. We dare raise doubts against Aristotle and Plato; and the time has
come when works which still enjoy the highest reputation will lose some of it, or
will even be forgotten; certain genres of literature which, for want of real life and
actual practices to serve as their models, are incapable of an invariable and
reasonable poetics, will be neglected; and others which will remain, sustained by
their intrinsic value, will take on an entirely new form. Such is the effect of the
progress of reason; progress which will overturn so many statues, and redress
some which have been overturned.8
The fact that a single individual can no longer hope to comprehend the full range of
human knowledge may be disquieting to some; but perhaps it is good that such
universalist dreams join the trash-bin of history. What matters is the certainty of progress,
which for Diderot at least is enough to let him remain optimistic. In light of the failures of
grand social-engineering schemes enacted in the spirit of the Enlightenment during the
7 Julian Dibbell, "Factually Speaking: Think Wikipedia is error-ridden? Britannica's nearly as bad—and
isn't nearly as nimble," The Village Voice 22 December 2005, online edition.
8 Diderot, "Encyclopedia," trans. Philip Stewart.
4
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and of the potentially disastrous consequences of the
boundless hopes invested in industrialization it is becoming more difficult to share
Diderot's optimism. But the machinery of transformation (Diderot's "progress of
reason") fueled by the sciences is showing no signs of abating. If we ask many computer
scientists, physicists, biologists and cognitive scientists about their current achievements
and about further potential of human understanding we find different vocabulary but the
same revolutionary message: we have a better understanding of phenomena than we have
ever had before, and we can know still more. In order to do so we may undermine
seemingly permanent traditions and institutions, and overturn previously held beliefs,
including our own. Wikipedia's knocking on the doors of Britannica and Google's
promised assault on the guarded access to information banks and libraries are only hints
of the magnitude of possible transformation. Today, a college student with a computer
and internet access is in a better position to access highly specialized information than an
experienced scientist roaming academic libraries only a generation ago, and may have
better means and attitude to digest and utilize what to Diderot and Borges constituted a
scholarly nightmare.
In a similar manner, the authors of the Encyclopedic sought to detach themselves
from what they saw as a backward, superstitious tradition of Europe's Christian past: the
heritage of patristic Platonism exemplified by Saint Augustine, and of medieval
scholasticism with its veneration of Aristotle. In order to move forward, the philosophes
thought humanity had to turn away from the monolithic, superstitious stability of the
medieval past dominated by faith and Catholic institutions. Just as Wikipedia embodies
the internet age's resolution to the handling of encyclopedic frustrations of totality and
5