From the Tree to the Labyrinth (44 page)

SECOND CASE.
   Someone knows that Oa does not exist, and does not believe that Ob is equivalent and interchangeable with Oa. Nevertheless, in bad faith, he insists on declaring the two objects (one real, the other virtual) to be identical, or on the authenticity of Ob, with intent to deceive. This is the case of the modern diplomatic forgery, of fake genealogical trees produced to confirm otherwise unattested pedigrees, of apocryphal documents produced with malicious intent. This is probably the case of the poem
De vetula,
produced in the thirteenth century, but immediately attributed to Ovid. We may suppose that the person or persons who placed the
Corpus Dionysianum
into circulation in the eighth century, attributing it to a disciple of Saint Paul, were instead aware that the work had been fabricated much later, but they nonetheless decided to attribute it to an uncontestable
auctoritas.
To this category there also belong the cases of attribution to an author by no means well-known and famous, but who becomes so when he is presented as ancient and when characteristics are attributed to him that make him an authority. This is the case with a number of nonexistent chroniclers to whom the Abbot Trithemius attributed spurious works.
¹¹

In all of these cases, in addition to the documentary forgery, a historical falsification is also committed, in other words, lies are circulated regarding events of the past. The pseudo-identification is invoked to subrogate the historical lie.

THIRD CASE.
   Someone is unaware that Oa does not exist and does not know that it is not identifiable with Ob. Therefore that someone has no problem considering them identical. Independently of whether or not he believes in the interchangeability of the two objects, he claims in any case that they are identical, thereby affirming the authenticity of Ob. This appears to have been the case with those who thought the
Corpus Dionysianum
was the work of a disciple of Saint Paul, unaware that it had been produced at a later date, and those who considered the
De causis
to be a work by Aristotle and not by an Arabic follower of Proclus. It is certainly the case with all those who believed and continue to believe in the authenticity of the book of Enoch, and to the men of the Renaissance who attributed the
Corpus Hermeticum
not to Hellenistic authors but to a mythical Hermes Trismegistus who supposedly lived before Plato at the time of the Egyptians and could probably be identified with Moses. In the modern period, we have the case of Heidegger (1915) who writes a commentary on a
Grammatica Speculativa
believing it to be the work of Duns Scotus, while a few years later it will be proven to be the work of Thomas of Erfurt. It goes without saying that a false attribution of this kind also leads to aberrant decoding.

A variant of this case of pseudo-identification is attribution to a pseudo-author: we have only one text Ob, whose author is unknown, and it is decided to attribute it to an author A, information about whom is uncertain. This seems to have been the case with the attribution of the treatise
On the Sublime
to a certain Pseudo-Longinus.

In sketching this semiotics of falsification we have implicitly made use of an epistemic operator like “knows that” which poses a number of problems. What does it mean to say that someone
knows
that Oa and Ob are not identical? The only case of false attribution in which we can know that Oa and Ob are not identical is the one in which someone presents us, for example, with a perfect reproduction Ob of the
Mona Lisa,
when we are standing in front of the original Oa exhibited in the Louvre, and affirms that the two objects are indiscernibly the same object. This is of course an improbable event, but even if was to occur the doubt would remain whether Ob was the authentic
Mona Lisa
and Oa a fake maliciously (or erroneously) hung on the gallery wall. And what does it mean to
know
that Oa never existed? Except for the case in which there are irrefutable proofs that Oa once existed and has been destroyed (as is probably true of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon or the temple of Diana at Ephesus), usually the assertion “Oa does not exist” is understood simply to mean “there are no proofs of its existence.”

Modern philology has developed techniques of identification to establish whether an Ob is identical to an Oa, but these procedures presuppose that we know the properties Oa has or should have. Now, the techniques by which we establish the characteristics of Oa are the same as those by which we identify Ob. In other words, in order to say that a reproduction of the
Mona Lisa
is not authentic, somebody has to have analyzed and authenticated the original
Mona Lisa
using the same techniques used to decide that the reproduction of it is different. For modern philology the traditional evidence that the
Mona Lisa
in the Louvre was put there, let’s say, by Leonardo right after painting it is not enough. This fact must be proven by means of documents, but for these documents too the question of their authentication must be posed. And if there is any doubt about the documents, the presumed original of the
Mona Lisa
is analyzed to decide whether its material and morphological attributes lead us to conclude that it was painted by Leonardo.

Our modern culture, therefore, must assume that (i) a document authenticates traditional information and not vice versa; (ii) authenticity means historical primitivity and authorial originality (this is the only way to establish the priority of Oa over Ob); and (iii) primitivity and originality are established by considering the object as a sign of its origin, and the techniques of authentication described in
section 5.2
are applied to this end.

These checks call for scientific and historical knowledge of which the Middle Ages had only a vague and ambiguous grasp, for reasons intimately connected with its concept of historical truth.

The Middle Ages could not conceive of a document that would authenticate traditional data because the only reliable form of documentation it possessed was traditional data.

The Middle Ages could only argue based on the testimony of the past, and the past had chronological abscissas that were quite vague. The medieval procedure of recourse to authority has the form of a synecdoche: an author or a single text stands for the globality of tradition and always functions outside of any context. Le Goff (1964: 397–402) has remarked that the medieval form of wisdom is folkloristic, and is symbolized by the proverb. Feudal law and practice are sanctioned by custom.

The same Le Goff cites a 1252 lawsuit between the servants of the chapter of Notre Dame de Paris in Orly and the canons: the canons say the servants must pay tithes because tradition requires it. The oldest inhabitant of the region is consulted and he says that it has been that way “a tempore a quo non extat memoria” (“from time immemorial”). Another witness, the archdeacon Jean, affirms that he has seen certain ancient documents in the chapter which attest to the existence of the custom, and the chapter has put its faith in these documents out of respect for the antiquity of the writing. No one of course thought to check the existence, let alone the nature, of the documents: it was sufficient to hear they existed, for centuries.

For the Middle Ages, the problem of tradition, in historiography and hermeneutics, is that it does not have to be reconstructed: it is already given from the beginning; it must simply be recognized and interpreted in the proper way.

Apart from the data of tradition, only one document is recognized, and it is the text (translated) of the Holy Scriptures. Other documents are not distinguished as original and nonoriginal: they have either been handed down or they don’t exist. If they have been handed down, they are true only insofar as they agree or can be made to agree with the truth of Scripture: “Certus enim sum, si quid dico quod Sacrae Scripturae absque dubio contradicat, quia falsum est” (“For I am certain that, if I say anything which clearly opposes Holy Scripture, it is false”) (Anselm,
Cur Deus homo,
1, 18, PL 153, 38).

Still, the problem is not so simple, because, in order to establish the truth of Scripture, it must be correctly interpreted. After Origen proposed the principle of the complementarity of the two testaments and their parallel reading, the problem arose of how to legitimate their interpretations. On the one hand a correct interpretation must legitimize the Church, but on the other what decides whether and how an interpretation is correct is the interpretive tradition, legitimized by the Church as the guardian of truth: an embarrassing situation, and the origin of every theory of the hermeneutical circle (see Compagnon 1979).

This is why the Middle Ages must amass a treasury of authoritative opinions, or
auctoritates.
In the course of the philosophical and theological debate, authority materializes in the form of quotes that become “authentic” opinions and therefore authoritative in themselves. They are clarified, when they are obscure, by their glosses, but these too must come from an “authentic” author.

As Grabmann remarks (1906–1911), when it came to the explanation of Scripture, historical grammatical interpretations or independent research on the concepts and connections of the biblical text carried no weight; what counted were above all collections of passages extrapolated from the Fathers of the Church. Pre-Scholastic theological literature “is placed under the sign of reproduction,” and appeals to
florilegia
and
catenae.
But little by little the original manuscripts of the Fathers are neglected or lost, and their opinions survive only in the
florilegia.
When we consider that this process occurs through free transcriptions and translations, we can see how the modern idea of authenticity could find itself in considerable difficulty.

Furthermore, the
florilegia
are arranged for the most part in alphabetical order, which excludes the kind of systematic classification that might have made for comparison and discussion of contradictory passages. With the twelfth century, the
florilegia
and traditional opinions are supplemented by
sententiae modernorum magistrorum,
even though these so-called modern masters are such only by academic convention (as authors of
glossae magistrales
), and Thomas often dares to contradict them (“haec glossa magistralis est et parum valet,” [“this is a master’s annotation and has little value”]
In I Timeum
5, 2).
¹²

To the anarchy of the authorities, the Middle Ages proved incapable of opposing a practice of verification of historical originality. Scrutiny (and the dialectical discussion intended to resolve contradictions) was not philological but philosophical. Hence the decision, asserted without hypocrisy in the twelfth century, to treat authorities with a pinch of salt. “Authority has a nose of wax, in other words, it can be bent in different directions” [“Auctoritas cereum habet nasum, id est in diversum potest flexi sensum,” Alain de Lille,
De fide catholica
1, 30]). Authorities must be accepted, but, given their insufficiencies and contradictions, they must be interpreted reverently,
exponere reverenter
, and, as Chenu notes (1950: 122), we should make no mistake over the meaning of this expression: what we are dealing with are small but efficacious adjustments, fine-tuning, rectifications to the meaning of the text.

Bernard of Chartres, as we know, supplied the moral and historical justification for these interpretive liberties, with his famous aphorism that compared contemporary thinkers to dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants.
¹³
But the same idea (if not the metaphor of the dwarves) appears six centuries earlier in Priscian, and this brings us to the question of whether the aphorism is modest or presumptuous in its intent. In fact it can be interpreted in the sense that what we know today, though we may know it somewhat better, is what the ancients have taught us, or, alternatively, that, however much we owe to the ancients, we know far more than they did. A similar aphorism, that appears in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (Bernardus Carnotensis) and speaks of gleaners following in the footsteps of the reapers, leaves no room for doubt, because the gleaners gather only the gleanings left behind by the reapers. Where Priscian stood remains ambiguous: for him it seems that the moderns are more
perspicacious
than the ancients, though not necessarily more
learned.
¹⁴

But perhaps we should be debating not the meaning of the aphorism but how it has been interpreted in various historical periods. What does William of Conches mean when, commenting on the aphorism, he declares that the moderns are “perspicaciores” (“more perspicacious”) than the ancients? It is no accident that, taking Newton as his point of departure, Merton (1965) sees the aphorism as decisive in the modern debates over influence, collaboration, borrowing, and plagiarism. But the notion of plagiarism, and the idea of staking one’s life on being or not being the first to see something, can exist only in a period in which what is prized in every field of discourse is originality, or in the spirit of that modernity characterized by Maritain with the telling formula to the effect that, after Descartes, every thinker becomes a “debutant in the absolute.” In the Middle Ages that was not how it was at all.

In the Middle Ages what was true was true because it had been upheld by a previous authority, to the point that, if one suspected that the authority had not espoused the new idea, one proceeded to manipulate the evidence, because authority has a nose of wax. It comes naturally to the Middle Ages to employ the aphorism, because the mode of discussion typical of the period is the commentary or the gloss. One must always take a giant as one’s point of departure. But it is up for grabs whether a medieval thinker using the aphorism is vindicating the superiority of the moderns or arguing for the continuity of knowledge.