Against the Dark, A Tall White Fountain Played - Book Excerpt (Chapter 8)
There is one matter that has amused me greatly: every now and then a critic or a reader writes to say that some character of mine declares things that are too modern, and in every one of these instances, and only in these instances, I was actually quoting fourteenth-century texts. There were other pages in which readers appreciated the exquisite medieval quality, whereas I felt those pages were illegitimately modern. The fact is that everyone has their own idea, usually corrupt, of the Middle Ages.
—Umberto Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose[1]
At 2pm on October 28th, 1998, an auction starring a charred, stained, and barely legible 12th century medieval manuscript on prayer—called the Euchologion—began in earnest at Christie’s Auction House in New York City. Not much to look at to the undiscerning eye, the manuscript felt even more unsubstantial when one considered that earlier that morning Marie Curie’s doctoral manuscript, a copy of Einstein’s 1905 paper on general relativity, and a first edition copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had exchanged hands. Later that afternoon, Wilbur Wright’s first published account of the test flights at Kittyhawk would be sent on its way by the hammering of the auctioneer’s gavel. It was, as Reviel Netz and William Noel put it with some understatement, a busy day.[2] To make matters worse, a lawsuit had been filed just the day before against the auction house by the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, claiming that this delicate little smudge of a codex had been stolen from their collections. In spite of all of this, Christie’s pressed on with the auction, and the unassuming, handwritten book scarred by fire and pocked by mold would turn into a quite unexpected sensation.
Discovered originally in 1905 by a Danish philologist named Johan Ludvig Heiberg in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Istanbul, Heiberg quickly became stunned as he worked to translate what he could see of a ghostly bottom layer of text. The text was a palimpsest—a manuscript that contains another, erased text beneath it. Heiberg kept going. What was uncovered were a series of texts that happened to be the earliest known copy of the great Greek mathematician Archimedes’ lost manuscript The Method of Mechanical Theorums, a work entitled Floating Bodies, and the oldest known mathematical puzzle in existence entitled the Stomachion (or Ostomachion).
No one could read the full texts of the palimpsest (though Heiberg’s work turned out to be stunningly accurate given the limitations of the time).[3] Many merely knew the older texts were there. And so, with the hope that modern imaging technology would shed light upon what mere mortal eyes could not, the bidding began at an outrageous $800,000. It met this nearly instantly. The price continued to rise, soaring past $1,000,000, to $1,500,000, to $1,900,000, until a somewhat befuddled audience of reporters witnessed this rag of a text find a numbered paddle held high on its behalf, indicating a buyer wanted to try and have the final word at a whopping $2,000,000. It worked. The gavel fell, and what has come to be known as the Archimedes Palimpsest exchanged hands. By itself, it made just under half of all total sales that day. The next morning the New York Times ran a front-page story that an anonymous American buyer “who was not Bill Gates” had made this unusual purchase.
In 1999 the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland in concert with several other institutions began using new Multi-Spectral Imaging technology to see beneath the prayer text and discover what had been erased and obscured. What should have been the tale of an amazing discovery, however, quickly degenerated. The juicy faith and science conflict angle ready to hand in a medieval book of prayer quite literally erasing the writing of one of the most noted mathematicians of all time was not lost on the media, or the public at large. Predictably, outrage ensued. During the nine-year intensive reconstruction of Archimedes’ works a firestorm of anti-Christian sentiment sustained a steady, tire-fire like burn—raging with all the stench of the Dark Ages and that long night of reason “that everyone knows” Christians visited upon the world.[4] The Palimpsest bloated from its particular context-bound existence, into a metaphor of ruin draped over the breadth of Christian history; Carl Sagan’s infamous chart showing the great interruption of the middle ages was dusted off (often in a hilarious, almost crayon-on-napkin like version reproduced by some nameless soul in Microsoft Paint); Gibbon’s name was brought up; the library of Alexandria, Hypatia, stupid monks, the flat earth, and a host of almost uncountable anecdotes were marshalled. It was, in other words, business as usual.
I. The New Middle Ages
The deep irony of the story of the Archimedes Palimpsest, or Greenblatt’s narrative of Lucretius lost poem, and those like it, is that Christians did indeed preserve these texts. For Lucretius, to revisit Greenblatt’s centerpiece, “enough traditions surface or resurface in the fifteenth century to cast doubt on the common notion that Christian scruples were to blame for the neglect of a poet who preached the mortality of the soul and the unconcern of the gods.”[5] For Archimedes, what many immediately wanted to fold into the grand story of the Christian erasure of knowledge—both uncritical and systematic—was the exact opposite: it was evidence of how Christians, in fact, preserved Archimedes’ writings, and others like them. One of the first Christian copiers of Archimedes of which we have record was Eutocius of Ascalon (A.D. 480-540), who not only preserved several of Archimedes’ texts, but also wrote involved commentaries on them. Eutocius’ preservation of Archimedes is especially ironic given that he—along with a colleague Isidore of Miletus—were the chief architects chosen by Emperor Justinian I to oversee the construction of the Hagia Sophia. This church was used in the last chapter, as you may remember, as a reprimand to Catherine Nixey’s particularly silly characterization of Christians as too primitive for good ladders and hammers. Well, it turns out not only were their ladders and masonry tools just fine, they were readers of Archimedes who used his principles to construct one of the most grandiloquent examples of architecture in the ancient world.
We will not belabor the point by enumerating the journeys of various works of Archimedes through the middle ages to their flowering in the 13th century translations of William of Moerbeke.[6] The major points for the moment is that Archimedes’ texts were being preserved by Christians. In fact, the Archimedes Palimpsest can be traced to scribes working in Constantinople copying the lost works in question, which is the only reason this copy survived to later become a palimpsest. Even in the particular instance of the Archimedes Palimpsest, the evidence is that these manuscripts were prevalent enough to make their way to a small, extremely poor church in Jerusalem (not a monastery). There, the impoverished priest in charge of his congregation had no use for the extremely technical work, and seeing that the pages were fit for reuse—did so. It should be noted that among the erased texts in the Archimedes Palimpsest, many Christian ones can also be counted. This was not a targeted erasure of pagan learning, but an erasure of convenience that arose at a particular time. O’Neil makes the observation that a colophon (that is, a type of publisher’s emblem) marks the date of the recycling as April 13th, 1229. This is merely one month after Emperor Frederick II wrested control of Jerusalem from the occupying Ayyubid Sultanate, thereby making it extremely plausible that this military action made parchment nearly impossible to acquire either through scarcity or, what amounts to the same, inflated prices.[7] And yet, this single instance ripped from any context that gives it meaning is often taken as paradigmatic for a deeper Christian antipathy or apathy to pagan sources, when it in fact evidences the exact opposite.
The Middle Ages held books and writing up with an almost totemic reverence. Greenblatt, for example, knows this—and thus invents a cover for his own story by saying that most monks copied texts out of sheer dogmatic devotion to command, with no real understanding of the things they were copying. As we have already seen with Eutocius, there is large evidence to the contrary. Yet Greenblatt levels the common characterization of the Middle Ages as a time where “a whole culture turn[ed] away from reading and writing.” The evidence is, again, not in Greenblatt’s favor. Medieval historian Lynn White Jr. goes so far as to say that there was “no evidence of a break in the continuity of technological development following the decline of the Western Roman Empire.”[8] In fact, though he overstates his case, White Jr. continues and provides his sweeping judgment that “in technology … the Dark Ages mark a steady and uninterrupted advance over the Roman Empire.” Literacy may have ebbed and flowed in pockets and eddies throughout the inhabited world, but there was certainly no “turn away.” Just the opposite. As a former curator of the Louvre put it “in letters as in the arts, it seems that the populations, liberated from the Roman yoke, spontaneously found once again the originality they had never really lost,” but which had been stifled under the reigning canons of Roman academic taste.[9]
-->Discovered originally in 1905 by a Danish philologist named Johan Ludvig Heiberg in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Istanbul, Heiberg quickly became stunned as he worked to translate what he could see of a ghostly bottom layer of text. The text was a palimpsest—a manuscript that contains another, erased text beneath it. Heiberg kept going. What was uncovered were a series of texts that happened to be the earliest known copy of the great Greek mathematician Archimedes’ lost manuscript The Method of Mechanical Theorums, a work entitled Floating Bodies, and the oldest known mathematical puzzle in existence entitled the Stomachion (or Ostomachion).
No one could read the full texts of the palimpsest (though Heiberg’s work turned out to be stunningly accurate given the limitations of the time).[3] Many merely knew the older texts were there. And so, with the hope that modern imaging technology would shed light upon what mere mortal eyes could not, the bidding began at an outrageous $800,000. It met this nearly instantly. The price continued to rise, soaring past $1,000,000, to $1,500,000, to $1,900,000, until a somewhat befuddled audience of reporters witnessed this rag of a text find a numbered paddle held high on its behalf, indicating a buyer wanted to try and have the final word at a whopping $2,000,000. It worked. The gavel fell, and what has come to be known as the Archimedes Palimpsest exchanged hands. By itself, it made just under half of all total sales that day. The next morning the New York Times ran a front-page story that an anonymous American buyer “who was not Bill Gates” had made this unusual purchase.
In 1999 the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland in concert with several other institutions began using new Multi-Spectral Imaging technology to see beneath the prayer text and discover what had been erased and obscured. What should have been the tale of an amazing discovery, however, quickly degenerated. The juicy faith and science conflict angle ready to hand in a medieval book of prayer quite literally erasing the writing of one of the most noted mathematicians of all time was not lost on the media, or the public at large. Predictably, outrage ensued. During the nine-year intensive reconstruction of Archimedes’ works a firestorm of anti-Christian sentiment sustained a steady, tire-fire like burn—raging with all the stench of the Dark Ages and that long night of reason “that everyone knows” Christians visited upon the world.[4] The Palimpsest bloated from its particular context-bound existence, into a metaphor of ruin draped over the breadth of Christian history; Carl Sagan’s infamous chart showing the great interruption of the middle ages was dusted off (often in a hilarious, almost crayon-on-napkin like version reproduced by some nameless soul in Microsoft Paint); Gibbon’s name was brought up; the library of Alexandria, Hypatia, stupid monks, the flat earth, and a host of almost uncountable anecdotes were marshalled. It was, in other words, business as usual.
I. The New Middle Ages
The deep irony of the story of the Archimedes Palimpsest, or Greenblatt’s narrative of Lucretius lost poem, and those like it, is that Christians did indeed preserve these texts. For Lucretius, to revisit Greenblatt’s centerpiece, “enough traditions surface or resurface in the fifteenth century to cast doubt on the common notion that Christian scruples were to blame for the neglect of a poet who preached the mortality of the soul and the unconcern of the gods.”[5] For Archimedes, what many immediately wanted to fold into the grand story of the Christian erasure of knowledge—both uncritical and systematic—was the exact opposite: it was evidence of how Christians, in fact, preserved Archimedes’ writings, and others like them. One of the first Christian copiers of Archimedes of which we have record was Eutocius of Ascalon (A.D. 480-540), who not only preserved several of Archimedes’ texts, but also wrote involved commentaries on them. Eutocius’ preservation of Archimedes is especially ironic given that he—along with a colleague Isidore of Miletus—were the chief architects chosen by Emperor Justinian I to oversee the construction of the Hagia Sophia. This church was used in the last chapter, as you may remember, as a reprimand to Catherine Nixey’s particularly silly characterization of Christians as too primitive for good ladders and hammers. Well, it turns out not only were their ladders and masonry tools just fine, they were readers of Archimedes who used his principles to construct one of the most grandiloquent examples of architecture in the ancient world.
We will not belabor the point by enumerating the journeys of various works of Archimedes through the middle ages to their flowering in the 13th century translations of William of Moerbeke.[6] The major points for the moment is that Archimedes’ texts were being preserved by Christians. In fact, the Archimedes Palimpsest can be traced to scribes working in Constantinople copying the lost works in question, which is the only reason this copy survived to later become a palimpsest. Even in the particular instance of the Archimedes Palimpsest, the evidence is that these manuscripts were prevalent enough to make their way to a small, extremely poor church in Jerusalem (not a monastery). There, the impoverished priest in charge of his congregation had no use for the extremely technical work, and seeing that the pages were fit for reuse—did so. It should be noted that among the erased texts in the Archimedes Palimpsest, many Christian ones can also be counted. This was not a targeted erasure of pagan learning, but an erasure of convenience that arose at a particular time. O’Neil makes the observation that a colophon (that is, a type of publisher’s emblem) marks the date of the recycling as April 13th, 1229. This is merely one month after Emperor Frederick II wrested control of Jerusalem from the occupying Ayyubid Sultanate, thereby making it extremely plausible that this military action made parchment nearly impossible to acquire either through scarcity or, what amounts to the same, inflated prices.[7] And yet, this single instance ripped from any context that gives it meaning is often taken as paradigmatic for a deeper Christian antipathy or apathy to pagan sources, when it in fact evidences the exact opposite.
The Middle Ages held books and writing up with an almost totemic reverence. Greenblatt, for example, knows this—and thus invents a cover for his own story by saying that most monks copied texts out of sheer dogmatic devotion to command, with no real understanding of the things they were copying. As we have already seen with Eutocius, there is large evidence to the contrary. Yet Greenblatt levels the common characterization of the Middle Ages as a time where “a whole culture turn[ed] away from reading and writing.” The evidence is, again, not in Greenblatt’s favor. Medieval historian Lynn White Jr. goes so far as to say that there was “no evidence of a break in the continuity of technological development following the decline of the Western Roman Empire.”[8] In fact, though he overstates his case, White Jr. continues and provides his sweeping judgment that “in technology … the Dark Ages mark a steady and uninterrupted advance over the Roman Empire.” Literacy may have ebbed and flowed in pockets and eddies throughout the inhabited world, but there was certainly no “turn away.” Just the opposite. As a former curator of the Louvre put it “in letters as in the arts, it seems that the populations, liberated from the Roman yoke, spontaneously found once again the originality they had never really lost,” but which had been stifled under the reigning canons of Roman academic taste.[9]
[1] Eco, Postscript to The Name of the Rose, 76-77.
[2] Netz and Noel, The Archimedes Codex, 3-27. The story of the auction in our opening paragraphs is indebted to Netz and Noel’s wonderful retelling.
[3] Netz and Noel, The Archimedes Codex, 283-284.
[4] For a fantastic review of this, see O’Neill, “The Archimedes Palimpsest.”.
[5] Reeves, “Lucretius in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance,” 207.
[6] See: Claggett, “The Impact of Archimedes on Medieval Science,” 1-14.
[7] O’Neill, “The Archimedes Palimpsest.”
[8] Quoted in Gies and Gies, Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel, 40.
[9] Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle Ages, 51.
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