The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (22 page)

At the same time Virgil depicts the tragic choices that were the price of Roman destiny—personal sacrifices like Aeneas’ abandonment of Dido. The Roman destiny was also a costly choice—to turn away from the gentler Greek tasks of art and philosophy to the hard tasks of government and empire. As Anchises prophesies to Aeneas in the Underworld:

Others will cast more tenderly in bronze
Their breathing figures, I can well believe,
And bring more lifelike portraits out of marble;
Argue more eloquently, use the pointer
To trace the paths of heaven accurately
And accurately foretell the rising stars.
Roman, remember by your strength to rule
Earth’s peoples—for your arts are to be these
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud. (
Aeneid,
Fitzgerald trans.)

So Virgil’s national epic takes the form of myth and prophecy. “To these I set no bounds in space or time,” declares Jupiter, “I have given them rule without end.” Which is fulfilled in Virgil’s time, as Anchises foresaw in the Underworld:

Turn your two eyes
This way and see this people, your own Romans.
Here is Caesar, and all the line of Iulus,
All who shall one day pass under the dome
Of the great sky: this is the man, this one,
Of whom so often you have heard the promise
Caesar Augustus, son of the deified,
Who shall bring once again an Age of Gold
To Latium, to the land where Saturn reigned
In early times. (
Aeneid,
Fitzgerald trans.)

In the Middle Ages Virgil would have a new mythic appeal. In his fourth Eclogue (written 40 B.C.) he had recalled the Sibyl’s prophecy:

The ages’ mighty march begins anew.
Now comes the virgin, Saturn reigns again:
Now from high heaven descends a wondrous race.
Thou on the newborn babe—who first shall end
That age of Iron, bid a golden dawn
Upon the broad world . . .
Shalt free the nations from perpetual fear.

This came to be called the Messianic Eclogue and was said to contain imagery reminiscent of the Bible. It is likely that Virgil was referring to the expected child of Antony and Octavia. But this and other supposedly prophetic passages earned Virgil his medieval reputation as seer and magician, and his role as Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory.

Thomas More’s New Paths to Utopia

The Age of Discovery of continents and oceans was also an age of European self-discovery. The science of society was no longer channeled into Aristotelian paths. New ways of thinking about society would leave their permanent mark on ways of seeking. The wide spectrum of novelty was revealed in the lives and works of two antithetic brilliant Renaissance contemporaries, Seekers from opposite sides of Europe. The saintly Englishman Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) in his fantasy of
Utopia
(1516) gave a name and a new form to the poetry of politics, to the search for the ideal community. At the same time the Italian Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) in
The Prince
(written in 1512) gave birth to a modern science of politics and nations.

More spoke from the limbo between the medieval Christian and the modern ways of seeking. Son of a prominent lawyer and judge, he was sent to Oxford and then trained in law at Lincoln’s Inn. Tempted toward the priesthood, he decided instead to pursue the law as a profession. But he remained pious, prayed regularly, fasted on the holidays. He even wore a hair shirt, and seemed to be preparing himself for martyrdom. He became a good friend of Erasmus, who while he was More’s houseguest wrote his
Praise of Folly
(
Encomium moriae
), and dedicated it to More with a title which was a pun on the name of More.

More’s
Utopia,
in Latin, which was still the international language of the learned in Europe, was printed in Louvain in 1516, under Erasmus’ supervision. The word “Utopia” (from Greek, “nowhere”) was invented by More for his classic political fantasy, which would become a model for many others in succeeding centuries. Cast as a traveler’s tale, it bore the unmistakable mark of the Age of Discovery. The mythical narrator, Raphael Hythloday, had gone to America with Vespucci, whose travels had been published in 1507. When Vespucci sailed back to Europe, Hythloday preferred to stay on the ideal island, discovered by one of Vespucci’s crew. More uses the dialogue, the dramatic structure of Plato’s
Republic,
for the first half of his tale. In search of the ideal society, More gives over the first part of his book to a survey of the evils of European society in his time. The second part describes life on the island of Utopia off the coast of America.

More’s Utopia is an idealized version of the medieval monastic life. Its main feature is the communal ownership of property (also found in Plato’s
Republic
). “In other places men talk very literally of the common wealth, but what they mean is simply their own wealth; in Utopia, where there is no private business, every man zealously pursues the public business.” “Though no man owns anything, everyone is rich.” They hold “precious metals” up to scorn in every conceivable way, and make their chamber pots of gold. A national system of education gives women the same education as men.

The invading king, Utopus, had found the island easy to conquer “because the different sects were too busy fighting one another to oppose him, . . . he decreed that every man might cultivate the religion of his choice, and might proselytize for it, provided he did so quietly, modestly, and rationally and without bitterness toward others. If persuasions failed, no man was allowed to resort to abuse or violence, under penalty of exile or enslavement.” The king Utopus, “because he suspected that God perhaps likes various forms of worship and has therefore deliberately inspired different people with different views,” allowed the widest toleration. “The only exception he made was a positive and strict law against any person who should sink so far below the dignity of human nature as to think that the soul perishes with the body, or that the universe is ruled by mere chance, rather than divine providence.”

The “justice of the Utopians,” unlike that of Europe, did not reward noblemen or goldsmiths or moneylenders who made their living “by doing either nothing at all or something completely useless to the public” while laborers who did the necessary work were treated like beasts of burden. The book appealed at once to the community of impecunious humanists, and was soon translated into French (1550) and English (1551).

More’s fanciful imagination somehow did not prevent his success at the bar. He entered the service of the king, and championed Erasmus’ program of the Christian humanists, the study of the Greek classics, the Bible, and the Church Fathers. Henry VIII appointed him Lord Chancellor in 1529 in place of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey when Wolsey failed to secure the king’s divorce from Catherine. But this was as far as More would go in indulging the whims of Henry VIII. When More refused to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn after the divorce from Catherine, he was a marked man. He was included in a bill of attainder, and continued to refuse to swear to the whole Act of Succession, which would have denied the supremacy of the pope and have made Henry VIII the head of the Church.

More never lost his orthodox Catholic faith, and despite his wife’s pleas, he refused the conciliation with Henry VIII that would have saved his life. Found guilty of treason, he was sentenced to be “drawn, hanged, and quartered,” but instead he was beheaded in 1535. His courage and good humor at his execution became proverbial. “See me safe up,” he said to the lieutenant, “and for my coming down let me shift for myself.” More blindfolded himself. As he put his head on the block he moved his beard aside, since, he said, it had done no offense to the king.

More declared that he was not dying for treason but “in the faith and for the faith of the Catholic Church, the king’s good servant and God’s first.” Erasmus praised him as a man “whose soul was more pure than any snow.” He was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1935 as Saint Thomas More. And he was immortalized in Erasmus’s phrase as
omnium horarum homo,
translated as “A Man for All Seasons” in a popular play and film (in 1966) by Robert Bolt. Other English Catholics have shared G. K. Chesterton’s adoration of him as “the greatest Englishman, or at least the greatest historical character in English history.”

* * *

While the waning Catholic faith around him led Saint Thomas More to seek his ideal community not in the monastery but in a mythical island of the New World, in Italy the worldly ambitions of the Church would provide the laboratory for a new political science.

Francis Bacon’s Vision of Old Idols and New Dominions

If we are awed by the powers of man, the learned animal, we must also be appalled that he has been such a slow learner. And there has been no greater obstacle to his learning than the stock of accumulated learning that he has made for himself with his illusions of knowledge. How else to explain that two thousand years passed after Socrates’ martyrdom for his discovery of ignorance before Western thinkers looked around them and turned to experience for their avenues to the purpose of their lives?

The appearance of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) on the English scene signaled a dramatic transformation in the role of “philosophers” and the expectations of philosophy—from crusades to convert the pagan to voyages of discovery into the unknown. The vastly enlarged world of the Renaissance overwhelmed literate Europeans. Now aware of being part of the whole continental experience of “Europe,” they glimpsed other continental experiences—Asia, Africa, and America. The travels of Marco Polo and the voyages of Columbus (newly interpreted by Vespucci and Magellan) had broadened the dimensions of earthly experience as never before. López de Gomera in his
History of the Indies
(1552) saw the discovery of the “new” continent as “the greatest event since the creation of the world, excepting the incarnation and death of Him who created it.”

Before Bacon, great philosophers had been teachers who could claim the dignity of their profession for what they taught. But Bacon was a man of affairs, active in politics, member of Parliament, counselor of sovereigns. He set a new style in philosophers, who would put their ideas to the public tests of their times. Yet they were seldom saints. Saint Thomas More was an exception.

Bacon’s life story was a relentless push for position. Born in London, he was the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Seal and Chancellor, the highest legal post in the realm. On his father’s death in 1579, receiving only the “narrow portion” of a younger son, he had to make his way in the world. Naturally choosing to go to the bar, he studied at Gray’s Inn and then was admitted to practice in 1582. From then ambition drove him to seek the highest legal positions. When James I succeeded to the throne in 1603, Bacon’s skill at letter-writing and at sycophancy and his adeptness at intrigue soon brought him appointments as solicitor general (1607), attorney general (1613), and finally Lord Chancellor (1618). Advancing by a barrage of self-serving letters and shameless flattery, he incidentally became the uncompromising champion of the powers of his royal master.

Soon after his appointment as Lord Chancellor, Bacon was surprised by charges of bribery. Gifts to judges by parties appearing were common at the time. And judges were expected to show character by not being influenced by the gifts. Bacon admitted twenty-eight charges and was pronounced guilty by the High Court of Parliament. King James could not interfere; Bacon was disabled from holding future public office and forbidden to come “within the verge of the court.” Finally, Bacon secured relief from the worst penalties of his conviction for bribery by bribing a court favorite with a gift of York House, his mansion by the Thames.

None of these events would diminish the appeal to future generations of his
Essays,
which were cogent exhortations to honesty and prudence. And the generations would further profit from his being forced to abandon public life, for Bacon would spend his remaining five years writing important books.

After following Bacon’s breathless public career, we must wonder how he found time for reflection, for experiment, or to write the books that changed the course of thinking about science. While Bacon’s great works
—The Great Instauration, The Advancement of Learning,
the
Novum organum, The New Atlantis—
would be forward-looking, positive, and constructive, he appears to have been led to his vision by reaction against the “learning” into which he had been inducted.

What he had seen of conventional knowledge during his precocious years at Cambridge had a cathartic effect on his own view of the world. Sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, at thirteen, he had completed the undergraduate program in less than three years with a reputation for diligence. The Cambridge curriculum was still not substantially different from that of the great medieval universities. The way of disputation ruled. Dialectica—grammar, rhetoric, and logic based on the texts of Aristotle—was the heart of the undergraduate education. A series of public disputations, beginning with “sophisms” and culminating in “demonstrations of truth” (the propositions of Aristotle) by syllogism, marked the student’s career. Mathematics, though traditional in the quadrivium, was not offered, as there were no tutors who knew the subject. At the age of sixteen, Bacon told his early biographer, “he fell into the dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle; not for the worthlessness of the author, to whom he would ever ascribe all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of the way; being a philosophy . . . only strong for disputation and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man; in which mind he continued to his dying day.”

“Being convinced that the human intellect makes its own difficulties,” Bacon offered his vivid catalog of the illusions of knowledge—“idols which beset men’s minds.” And even now it is hard to find a better catalog of menaces to thought than his short list of four “Idols” in his
Novum organum
in 1620. “The
Idols of the Tribe
(italics added) have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. . . . And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.” “The
Idols of the Cave
are the idols of the individual man. For everyone . . . has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolors the light of nature; owing either to his own proper and peculiar nature or to his education and conversation with others. . . . Whence it was well observed by Heraclitus that men look for sciences in their own lesser worlds, and not in the greater or common world.”