The Music of Pythagoras (36 page)

We are dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. Although we may see more and further than they, it is not because our sight
is keener or our stature greater, but because they bear us up and add their gigantic stature to our height.
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Pythagoras depicted in a frieze of the Seven Liberal Arts on the western front of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres

The scholars of the Chartres school were addressing an old question: What is the best guide on the journey toward God, or (if one wished to use more Pythagorean/Platonic language) toward reunion with the divine? Was it “reason” or “faith”? Is it not best that the two work together? Boethius had written, “As far as you are able, join faith to reason,” and that was the goal of the scholastics. The hope at Chartres was to stake out intellectual and spiritual ground where one could accept what God had revealed but still strive for more comprehensive knowledge of truth. Faithful to their Platonism, and also to their Christianity (St. Paul had said that humans could only see “through a glass, darkly”), these scholars accepted that full knowledge could not be had in this life. Nevertheless, they thought it essential, insofar as humanly
possible, not only to believe but also to understand what one was believing. Plato’s
Timaeus
seemed a splendid example of this effort and this understanding, albeit from a pagan philosopher. Not surprisingly, these ideas offended some who accused the Chartres scholars of under-valuing religious revelation and mocking simple faith.
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The masters at Chartres influenced thinkers in Paris in the following century, when scholarship took a far more Aristotelian turn, prioritizing sense perceptions, experience, and experiment in the pursuit of knowledge. The church continued to sound much more like Plato—for whom the “Forms” were real and the sense-perceived world a shifting illusion—by encouraging rejection of the perceptible, sin-ridden world.

Though in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, scholastic and humanist scholars continued to have success meeting the challenges of new translations, broadening knowledge and reconciling Greco-Roman and Christian thought, even as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sporadic resistance to their efforts would continue. Some still pointed to doctrines they felt had entered early church thinking as a “pagan corruption” from the philosophy of Plato. This resistance did not come from ignorant people. Isaac Newton dismissed the doctrine of the Trinity on those grounds.
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So did the late eighteenth century English Unitarian religious dissenter Joseph Priestley, who thought the dualism between matter and spirit was not inherent in the Gospels but had entered the early church through Greek philosophy.
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Fourteenth–Sixteenth Centuries

I
N THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
, most educated people in Europe regarded foreign languages as completely impenetrable and unlearnable, so the author Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) was being venturesome when he decided to learn Greek. He engaged a teacher, a monk named Barlaam of Seminara, but the project was not a success and Petrarch was fated to go on lamenting that he would never arrive at the best understanding of philosophy because his Greek was not good enough.

He was disarmingly modest. Perhaps he did, as he claimed, merely chuckle when he was an old man and heard the news—it was being repeated all over Venice and beyond—that four young aristocrats, who had dined and drunk exceedingly well, had off-handedly dismissed him as “certainly a good man but a scholar of poor merit.” In a letter written just a few years before that Venetian slight, Petrarch described himself:

Let me tell you, my friend, how far I fall short of your estimation. This is not my opinion only; it is a fact: I am nothing of what you attribute to me. What am I then? I am a fellow who has never quit school, and not even that, but a backwoodsman who is roaming around through the lofty beech trees all alone,
humming to himself some silly little tune, and—the very peak of presumption and assurance—dipping his shaky pen into his inkstand while sitting under a bitter laurel tree. I am not so fortunate in what I achieve as I am passionate in my work, being much more a lover of learning than a man who has got much of it. I am striving for truth. Truth is difficult to discover, and, being the most humble and feeble of all those who try to find it, I lose confidence in myself often enough.
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Some of the “lofty beech trees” among whom Petrarch hummed his tune were Augustine and Cicero, Aristotle and Plato (he read them in Latin translations), and Pythagoras, whom he knew through those other authors.

Collecting works from the classical period, tracking down manuscripts and early copies, had become the fashion among those sufficiently educated and wealthy, and the acquisition of something interesting was a matter of great excitement to share with like-minded friends. Petrarch’s own large library reflected that fashion and his love of learning, but, for all his modesty, the library he stored in his head was vaster than most men’s collections. He read more than anyone else, remembered most of it verbatim, and had a habit of imagining himself personally involved in history and literature. As one commentator wrote,

Since he was such a keen observer of actual life and so lovingly devoted to the investigation of the human heart, all the records of the past became a living reality to him, and he felt himself sharing in the drama as if he had an active part in the cast. It was not just a whim that he, the untiring letter writer, started to “correspond” with characters of ancient times, as if they could answer him. When he read their works, he almost forgot that they were long since dead.
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No wonder Shakespeare so often found inspiration and material for his plays in Petrarch. Through Shakespeare and others who read Petrarch, he played an influential role in shaping future culture.

Petrarch was no fan of the Pythagorean doctrine of reincarnation, which he thought was an example of the way a wise and brilliant man can be perfectly capable of coming up with nonsense. “Who does not
know,” he wrote, “that Pythagoras was a man of exalted genius? However, we also know his Metempsychosis. I am amazed beyond belief that this idea could spring up in the brain, not of a philosopher, but even of any human being.” Pythagoras’ claim to have been Euphorbus in an earlier life was “an empty lie” and “deceitful pretense.” But then Petrarch also scorned Democritus’ suggestion that “heaven and earth, and all things in general, consist of atoms.”
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Petrarch, as imagined by engraver Rob Hart, 1835

A few pages after his disparaging words, Petrarch turned around and referred to Pythagoras in reverential tones as “the most ancient of all natural philosophers.” No one knows where he got the quotation that he attributed to Pythagoras and used to defend not only the Christian faith but also Plato and Moses from those who “blind and deaf as they are, do not even listen to Pythagoras, who asserts that ‘it is the virtue and power of God alone to achieve easily what Nature cannot, since He is more potent and efficient than any virtue or power, and since it is from Him that Nature borrows her powers.’ ”
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Petrarch did not believe that Pythagoras had actually written this, or, indeed, anything, but he thought that others had written down “what he expounded in his conversations.”

Petrarch is often called the first humanist. He trusted God so devoutly and completely that he felt free to leave the deepest religious issues alone and concentrate instead on philosophy, which he preferred to define as the study of the art of happiness and living well.
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Pythagoras, Plato, and Christianity seemed a natural, logical continuum to him.

I
N THE MIDDLE
of the next century, the fifteenth, no less a personage than Lorenzo de Medici lent his patronage to an attempt to re-create Plato’s Academy at the villa of his acquaintance Marsilio Ficino, near Florence. The Accademia Platonica was Ficino’s brainchild and dream. He translated all of Plato’s works into Latin directly from the Greek, wrote commentaries on them, and gathered a group of writers, thinkers, and artists to study them in a congenial setting. When Ficino had also finished translating Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Plotinus, those who knew no Greek could read nearly the entire surviving output of the Platonic and neo-Platonic writers in Latin. It is a pity that Petrarch had lived a century too early to enjoy all these works in translation!

One of Ficino’s Academy members was the artist Botticelli, whose painting
Primavera
was supposed to be a visual metaphor for the music of the spheres, relating mythological creatures to planetary orbits and the notes of an octave in music. Ficino himself developed an elaborate system of heavenly music. He was also interested in the early church fathers and, like Petrarch, thought that Platonic doctrine and reasoning (which he thought were divinely inspired) were in harmony with Christianity, having particular value in that they could provide independent confirmation of Christian beliefs in a manner that would satisfy those among Ficino’s contemporaries who were of a skeptical and even atheistic frame of mind. He gave a Pythagorean/Platonic spin to his treatment of the fall and salvation of man, referring to the belief that the earthly existence of the soul is an exile from its divine home. The Pythagoreans and Platonists agreed, he wrote, that “because of a certain old disease of the human mind, everything that is very unhealthy and difficult befalls us; but, if anyone should restore the soul to its previous condition, then immediately all will be set in order.” To Ficino, that sounded like humanity in its fallen state looking toward the salvation of Jesus, in Christian doctrine. A yearning to turn back to God was built into human nature:

Just as [according to Aristotle] when an element is situated outside its proper location, its power and natural inclination toward that natural place are preserved together with its nature, in so far as it is able at some time to return to its own region; so, they [the Pythagoreans and Platonists] think, even after man has wandered from the right way, the natural power remains to him of returning first to the path, then to the end.
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Ficino agreed with those neo-Pythagoreans who had concluded that the same primordial wisdom had emerged in different ages and cultures. The truth of philosophy, religion, and natural science, in all times and places, was, at some deep, so far unplumbed level, one consistent truth. This, Ficino thought, was a manifestation of the “unity” that the Pythagoreans had held so in awe.

In the city of Parma during this same period, the musician and physician Giorgio Anselmi (some thought he was also a magician) developed the first system since Eriugena’s to take into account the fact that the planets change their distances from Earth. In Anselmi’s cosmic musical plan, a planet produced not one tone but many different notes as its distance changed, so that each planet sang its own song. All the planet songs together produced magnificent counterpoint and harmony. Though no music of his time went beyond a three-octave range, Anselmi’s planetary scale, calculated from the planets’ periods, was eight octaves long from the stars to the Moon.

Ficino’s younger Florentine friend Giovanni Pico, Count of Mirandola (known as Pico della Mirandola), was fond of using the phrase, the “ancient theology of Pythagoras.” He regarded Pythagoras as no less than a Christian sage and connected the peace promised by Jesus—“Come unto me, ye who have labored, and I will give you peace, which the world and nature cannot give”—with a Pythagorean peace in which

all rational souls not only shall come into harmony in the one mind which is above all minds but shall in some ineffable way become altogether one. That is the friendship which the Pythagoreans say is the end of all philosophy. This is that peace which the [Christmas] angels descending to earth proclaimed to men of good will, that through it men might ascend to heaven and become angels.
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