From Natura to Nature: How Love, Imagination, and Integrity Formed the Modern World

By T. A. (Terry) Hipolito

From Natura to Nature traces the career of the medieval goddess Natura – Mother Nature – as she influenced the literature of the High Middle Ages up to the time of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser. After that, Natura’s medieval aspect morphed into the mathematics of the early modern era. The book’s subtitle includes the terms Love, Integrity, and Imagination, subjects that complement Natura’s well-known sponsorship of the phenomenon of romantic love. Imagination seems first to have been used in a philosophical sense by Alanus ab Insulis (Alain de Lille), who was also Natura’s first devoted author and the apparent inventor of imagination in its quasi-modern sense; the modern history of imagination is well-known to anyone who has tackled Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s philosophical prose. In Terry Hipolito’s view, “integrity” can be ambiguous, and he attempts to encapsulate it in both moral and mathematical forms. He focuses on Dante, Chaucer, and two anonymous authors of English works, Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, who fuse two meanings of integer, most notably here using symbolic numerals in their structure. Just as Shakespeare was concluding his career with his romances, a German work appeared, The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. While in Shakespeare’s last romances the heroes have become middle aged (to us) or old (to Renaissance audiences), in Rosenkreutz the numerical symbolism is, to any but a rococo taste, overdone. This was exactly the time when arithmetic ceased being symbolic and became overwhelming mathematical, as studies in logarithms, abstract algebra, and, finally, calculus put a definitive stamp upon what we still think of as modernity, and the analysis of categories became a unique feature of modernity. By the early twentieth century, calculus gave way to statistics. Even as Albert Einstein declared that God does not play dice with the universe, he nevertheless allowed that physics, chance, and statistics are the key to the subterranean life of matter. Nowadays quanta are bundled in mathematical objects which uncannily resemble the complex symbolic integers of old.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: Jun 11, 2024
• ISBN: 9781680533484

Book preview

Preface

Love, as every speaker of English knows, is probably the most popular and ambiguous word in the language. It can refer to one’s dog, one’s ramblings through the forest or one’s table saw, and so much more. I have here in mind a technical usage, one non-existent much before the middle of the twelfth century and pretty much unavoidable thereafter, at least in those cultures we still specify as Western European. This particular love was originally denominated as ‘courtly,’ a distinction which fairly quickly evaporated. But let’s call it courtly in order to keep, if not the forest, at least the dog and the table saw at a discreet distance.

Courtly love has been amply documented. I won’t go into that. Suffice it to say that it is, or at least can be, as affectionate as any dog’s, as ambling as any forest, and as unforgiving as a table saw. Marriage was always about domestication and offspring; simple amor remains about…well you know. Courtly love had and still has to do with suddenly individual personalities recognizing one another, in bewilderment it may well be, as separate individualities. The possibilities are endless and we shall ignore most of them here.

Instead I would like to look first of all at the amazing and complex structure of this suddenly emergent kind of love. That structure as the title of this book hints, involves: the wholly new faculty of imagination; a sense of integrity that is far more literal than any reader is likely to suppose at this point; and all of this under the supervision of Natura who ca. 1150 was not only the newest but also among the last genuinely mythic deities to appear on earth, on as it turned out her earth.

Natura, imagination and courtly love appear more or less simultaneously and more or less within the poetry department of the so-called School of Chartres, which was probably somewhat tangential to the otherwise rather philosophical and theological concerns of those scholars and ecclesiastics more central to Chartres itself. At any rate the poetic contingent quickly bolted not only from the cathedral, then from the confines of the church, and even from Latin itself. The related subjects of Natura and this special form of amor quickly spread to French (north and south), German, English and the Italian of Tuscany.

In the various dialects of these newly literary languages the complex also acquired the quality I have (not quite in candor) called integrity. I refer to integrity here in its radically literal sense, the arithmetic integer. The vernacular forms of courtly love literature surprisingly feature an abundance of symbolic integers at the base of their architectures. Everyone knows of Dante’s one hundred cantos of terza rima (which we hereafter largely ignore), but few have noticed, still less studied, the rather more subtle architectonics of his Vita nuova, which we shall consider in some detail. We shall also have occasion to notice threes, fives, sevens, tens, twelves, and hundreds quite sufficiently to satisfy the most passionate accountant. Dr. Johnson might well have been surprised and almost certainly horrified to discover that these rambling (as Johnson spelled them) Gothick pieces have any sort of structure at all, let alone an arithmetic one; on second thought however he might find his suspicions of barbarity confirmed: such abstruse and abstracted stuff pinned to the love allegory is perhaps what he would have expected after all and certainly no worse than it deserves, analogous to Shakespeare’s gratuitous, intrusive and offensive puns even amidst horrific tragedy.

Dr. Johnson, had he ventured such an opinion, would have given us something to consider. The story lines of most medieval narratives of amor, as opposed to their arithmetic spines, seem, not to put too fine a critical term upon it, formless. Let us consider that. There are two types of this narrative, almost exactly opposite to each other in many ways, and yet also clearly related. These are the lonely encounters of the (presumably) heroic knight errant; and the meandering comments of a dreaming or befuddled poet or lover. One faces the world; the other essentially describes his own depressed or confused psyche. In either case there is a lot of wandering about. This wandering has a new (in the twelfth century) term attached to it, one which, like love, we moderns have not yet quite weaned ourselves of: adventura. We shall parse this word in more detail anon.

Suffice it for now to assert that Aristotle is not likely to have been amused any more than Dr. Johnson. These are not comfortable works for the classical mentality. But we should get used to it, and of course Dr. Johnson could have done with a somewhat more open mind all around. The forms we speak of were revolutionary in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, were au courant through the fifteenth, and at least still respectable when Spenser closed up shop late in the sixteenth. Indeed they reached a crescendo at the beginning of the seventeenth century with Shakespeare’s late romances and the baroque bewilderment of the Rosicrucian Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz which we shall find provides not only a flamboyant conclusion to this tradition but is also a bridge to literary and perhaps even to mathematical modernism.

It must have seemed to Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century that he had heard the last from the goddess Natura. Edmund Spenser, his near contemporary, had died in the 1590s still in his middle age with his tribute to Natura in manuscript, voicing a recommendation to Alanus ab Insulis’ De planctu naturae from nearly four centuries before. That should have bookended Natura and in one sense did so. In another sense she lived far beyond Bacon’s ungentlemanly treatment of her. In his New Atlantis (also published posthumously) he recommends devotion not to the goddess but something nearer to the sexual abuse of her planet. Nature, he advises, must be subdued and exploited in every way possible. Bacon would almost certainly have been in favor of strip mining. On the other hand Spenser, if he had any money, would probably have donated to the National Park Service. Overall, that is, we have been bequeathed schizophrenic, bipolar, passive-aggressive neuroses as regards Natura and the more modern nearly abstract nature.

Nor is it quite so simple as psychotherapy. Natura’s symbolic integers suffered even more humiliation than her rivers and mountains. Integers were essentially beyond Bacon’s ken, but not that of his countryman Sir Isaac Newton who did more even than Bacon could to imagine a modern non-integral world. Newton, with an essential assist from Descartes and in parallel with Leibnitz, managed to reduce integers to literally countless infinitesimals in order to analyze numbers christened as irrational. Natura could not choose but submit. Her much older sister Physis had kept number unassailed from the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers. But the two could hold out no longer. Bacon’s vision of a purely empirical nature also gave way to a far more analytic modernity than he could have imagined.

Natura’s arithmetic poetry is no doubt gone forever, but the contribution of the medieval works not only lives on but exerts a stronger influence than we are likely to be aware of. Love may need cosmetic surgery and finds herself rather too often on the therapist’s couch; but she seems nevertheless to stagger onward. Imagination was or seemed rejuvenated in the nineteenth century, was strung out on various designer drugs for a century or so beginning around 1870, and was perhaps last spotted loitering near Esalen. Natura may be losing her good name but is otherwise fine; she and her sterile older sister Physis still hang out and have the occasional dispute. They do nevertheless cooperate and have recently shown to their own satisfaction that no matter what happens to humans and their sublime but puny planet there is far, far more wondrous celestial turf than was ever dreamt of by all the poets from Bernardus Sylvestris through Spenser. Plenty of adventures await for as long it would seem as the human race and planet Earth can hang on.

In what follows I propose a new adventure subsequent to postmodernism, as bizarre as any embarked upon by Sir Gawain, although rather more clerical than his. I submit that the Natura whose birth was midwifed by Bernardus Sylvestris in the twelfth century is far from gone in spite of the best efforts of Bacon and countless whaling, lumber, railroading and mining enterprises. The ironbound laws of Physis have been enacted and repealed several times since Bernardus; but Natura, although she has endured more than one face lift, proceeds energetically forth, still very much a lady and nearly as much a goddess as ever. Adventures themselves are to be sure somewhat non-terrestrial, jaded, infrequent and past their first bloom. Romantic love is, one fears, nearly exhausted and perhaps done, but it had a run little short of miraculous. The symbolic integer which held it all together for four centuries, was it seemed put to rest by Descartes, Leibniz and Newton. Then this indispensable spiritual glue was resurrected at the beginning of the twentieth century when everything seemed the most frayed. The newly arisen integer has become far more now than a token sign of unity, polarity, trinity, elementals, senses, planets, and hierarchies. It now seems to have carved its own universal niche. It is now a far more complex entity than a literary symbol and has become the master of, not the butler to, categories. This is the scope of the historical and evolutionary adventure, as strange and unlikely as it now must seem, which I propose we attempt.

This is bound to seem to any reader stumbling upon this overview a strange and unlikely topic. I agree. I myself would not have stumbled upon it, much less agreed with it, until my own almost equally strange curriculum had nearly run its course. This work stems largely from a dissertation I prepared in the fog of the previous century as a graduate student in medieval literature. That dissertation however was quite a different beast from the present one. My young adult self had no inkling of the arithmetic spine which the current literary surgery seems have exposed; in those innocent days, I thought Natura, adventure and love were all there were to it. My second professional incarnation was as a software engineer and specialist in so-called artificial intelligence; these disciples led to a far different view. I could suddenly see not only love and the goddess Nature as partners, but these improbably enough suffused in arithmetic, symbolic and ornamental as well as structural, but arithmetic for all of that. The numbers which became visible to my wondering gaze are, I believe, unique. Earlier medieval or classical literature does not seem to use arithmetic symbols in this way; nor does modern literature. It seems to me that my weird career fates and choices have led to a vision of a weird flow to cultural history, one which either illustrates or helped to form modern consciousness. Now it is time for you to judge this thesis.

Natura

Many years ago R. G. Collingwood wrote an important little book, now sadly neglected, The Idea of Nature (1944). He traces the history of the idea of nature in three leaps: classical Greek philosophy; early modern (in his terminology, Renaissance) philosophy and science; and modern physics, together with three modern philosophers. He does not discuss nature’s career during the Middle Ages, perhaps because the ideas of nature during that period he found to lack originality or pertinence. At any rate, I feel there is a gap in the narrative, although it may be that in some ways the literal idea of nature in the Middle Ages provides fairly thin gruel.

That however is what seems to me precisely interesting and important. The medieval idea of nature is not very original to be sure; but the medieval imagination of nature is amazingly formative and I think indispensable for an understanding of what continues to evolve into our contemporary ideas about her. The present study does not presume to complete Collingwood’s marvelous book and certainly not to correct it in any way; indeed some of his ideas and discoveries have proved to be important springboards for this work. Nevertheless his work seems to me to begin with the assumption that nature is and has always only been an idea is both incorrect and misleading. During the high Middle Ages, Natura reigned, neither omnipotent nor untroubled but nevertheless a true, if somewhat abstracted, goddess.

That is why I would prefer to speak of the imagination rather than the idea of nature. Such terminology is obvious and nearly obligatory when one thinks of the portrayals of nature in the twelfth century, but seems to become absurd when one considers the thinking about nature in, for example, the eighteenth century. That contrast is indeed the point of this study: to trace Natura’s diminution (if it is such) from goddess to concept, from supernal being to a seemingly sprawling and casual but far from pure abstraction.

Collingwood ends his work with the following paragraph which for our purposes is well worth quoting in full:

I conclude that natural science as a form of thought exists and always has existed in a context of history, and depends on historical thought for its existence. From this I venture to infer that no one can understand natural science unless he understands history: and that no one can answer the question what nature is unless he knows what history is. This is a question which Alexander and Whitehead [two of the modern philosophers whose work he considers] have not asked. And that is why I answer the question, ‘Where do we go from here?’ by saying, ‘We go from the idea of nature to the idea of history.’ (p. 177)

This study attempts to follow Collingwood’s lead, which I feel requires taking Natura’s medieval career fairly seriously, that is to say as she (and history) were taking on the full formality of becoming ideas. So far as I know the Greek word translated nature, Physis, was rarely treated as a goddess, and usually as an idea.¹ For our purposes a more illustrative instance, beginning before Aristotle’s birth but extending into his lifetime is the career of peace Eirēnē. This word is commonplace in Greek through the classical period, at first only as word. I use word with this emphasis because, during the Peloponnesian War – as the Athenian empire collapsed, the Athenian state was in peril, and the Athenians themselves were suffering greatly – Aristophanes produced his play of this name; in modern terms it is an allegory featuring Peace as a character. For years after this production there were active shrines to Peace, who had now become a full-fledged goddess and who might deliver Athens from her martial miseries. The point I would make is that here we have a crucial instance: peace progressed from a mere word to a goddess and thereafter to an idea or true abstraction, which is how its usage begins to seem as early as Thucydides but is not fully so until much later. Peace, even now, seems during crises almost as much a dynamic spirit as an abstract concept.

That is, I find there to be a sort of life cycle for Greek deities. They may have a pre-natal existence as mere words, that is, exist in what amounts to the subconscious of the language itself, flourish into (frequently female) deities and then lapse (progress?) into crucial abstract concepts, into one of Collingwood’s (or Plato’s) ideas. This rhythm implies that mere words may well be unconscious before they are deified. Eirēnē existed in the language certainly before Aristophanes took up her cause; she existed, but in a sense not consciously. Later as a popular goddess she had a life among the people as a being who could be implored. This ceases but only partially when she progresses to abstraction. As an abstraction, however, peace may be studied, analyzed and manipulated but perhaps no longer prayed to. The goddess may sink to the level of mere human thought, or perhaps humanity raises itself sufficiently to make full eye contact with the goddess Peace. At any rate, once the deification is completed, Peace the goddess became peace the concept, only now, however, the possible subject of fully conscious thought and, in potential at least, far more still than a mere lexical entry.

Physis, in spite of hymns to her in late antiquity, is already an abstraction when Ionian scientific and philosophic thought emerges in the sixth or seventh centuries B.C. which is where Collingwood picks up the story. Natura, the equivalent in Latin, is easier to trace. Natura is a minor goddess (or perhaps not quite that) in Lucretius and retains her tentative incarnation into late classical times, but she is never particularly important and rarely traceable at all. She becomes important only in the twelfth century A.D. Natura’s career from this point of florescence resembles in some ways that of Peace in ancient Athens. Natura remains a fairly potent goddess until the works of Edmund Spenser in the late sixteenth century when of course she was fully ready to break her chrysalis and take flight as a powerful concept, very nearly indeed the preeminent concept not only of Spenser’s but of our age. Before this time nature in some quarters becomes abstract, especially among the scholastic philosophers, but her reign as a goddess (perhaps more as an image than as a full deity) is also strong for three hundred years. Following that, nature becomes the semi-abstract mistress of the growth of modern science. In this telling (not quite Collingwood’s of course) an abstracted nature inherits the ministry of abstraction itself, a new office for her and the hallmark of modernism. Modernism here is Collingwood’s word, which will do quite well. He would begin modern times perhaps in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the theory of physical Darwinian evolution and then spread (not explicitly in Collingwood) through mathematics and the physical sciences dependent upon mathematics. Collingwood would not only agree; he more or less pioneered the notion that the modern outlook occurred when it was first shockingly observed that categories are not eternal and therefore can no longer ballast our thinking. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) in this view has a far closer relation to Aristotle, two thousand years his senior, than to Einstein a mere century and a half younger.

The traversal of the most recent eight hundred years of Natura’s biography does not resemble Collingwood’s, who always maintains a strict appraisal of ideas fully matured into prose. The medieval period contains plenty of prose to study, but I feel that the prose, even when one sticks to it, frequently does not resemble that for example of Aristotle, at least in one way; it cannot be relied upon to be analytical. In a way Aristotle’s career occurred when discovery through poetry was no longer vital in the way it had been previously in classical Greek culture. Several of the Ionic philosophers actually expressed themselves in verse, and most of the rest in a gnomic idiom that is somehow simultaneously both poetry and prose, a quality that has, for example, endeared the works of Plato to us moderns in a nearly unique way, possible to few other writers and then only anemically, most notably in modern times perhaps Nietzsche.

At any rate in the twelfth century the purely empirical approach represented by Aristotle was not yet (quite) available, although the scholastics followed immediately after. Just before the flowering of scholasticism there were two authors whom we shall examine for their treatment of Natura. Bernardus Sylvestris and Alanus ab Insulis are associated with the School of Chartres, itself a loose grouping of theologians, philosophers, poets and thinkers who figured in the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century; both Alanus and Bernardus in fact, like the first Ionian thinkers, qualify both as philosophers and as poets. They divided their efforts between verse and prose. Alanus wrote the Anticlaudianus in epic hexameters, but his De planctu naturae and Bernardus’ De mundi universitate are a mixture of prose (narrative and speculative), and of lyric poetry. This form descended from classical times, most popularly in Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. The interleaving of verse and prose is known as satura, more technically as Menippean satire, although the work of Menippus was not available in twelfth-century France where the Chartrian authors worked. These details have relevance not only for these authors but even for us today.

The mixed prose and metrics made Menippean satire a perfect vehicle for a prosaic and distanced levelheadedness together with poetic illustrations ranging from impassioned to merely pictorial. That at least is how both Boethius and the Chartrian authors employed it. Bernardus presents a vast but intimate cosmology where Natura herself for example is at once personal and distanced, simultaneously grand (upon earth) and subservient (to the theological sphere). Our contemporary attitude to nature remains a combination of these elements. Our common sense still tells us (not necessarily logically) that nature is both a passive receiver of our analytical powers and a grand and wondrous spectacle, far grander than mere prose or mathematics can encompass, requiring the more sublime consciousness of poetry.

All in all, these twelfth century writings do have the quality of a renaissance, in much the vein of the canonic Renaissance three or four centuries later but with marked and important differences. The authors of the School of Chartres had no direct access to the classical Greek philosophers and poets whom the later humanists venerated and relied upon; things in fact began to change in that direction, when the works of Aristotle were translated from their Arabic versions; this resulted quickly in the scholasticism of the thirteenth century. The one crucial exception is Plato’s Timaeus which was available to the Chartrian thinkers in a Latin version with extensive neoplatonic commentary by Chalcidius.

The Timaeus was important to the neoplatonists of late antiquity, and that work greatly aided the early Chartrian speculative cosmologies, of which Bernardus’ work is one of the last and the best. In Bernardus, Natura is important but not central; for him the central image is the hierarchy to which Natura reports and her relatively subservient role in the heavens as portrayed by Urania (i.e., heaven) and Noys or mind. Much the same theoretical position holds for Alanus, but the rhetoric is far otherwise in his poem featuring Natura; she holds center stage throughout.

After the twelfth century, Natura took full control of her planet in the imagination of the vernacular poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The actual figure of Natura is not frequently central in this poetry, but she is often present in spirit and fully immanent in her domain, as we shall explore in detail below. There are several of Natura’s traits which carry over to this literature even when her person is absent. For Bernardus, Natura’s realm is sublunar. She is in charge of the glories but also of the impermanence of the earth. She is subordinate to the heavenly realms where the eternal verities of number and idea dwell. Alanus’ Natura inherits these features, although he holds her in far tighter focus. She oversees the glory and cycles of the earth; but she complains of the human race which has waxed rebellious especially as regards sexuality and love. Sinful human love has in fact torn her allegorical garment, betokening harm and her deep displeasure; hence her complaint that the human race has become essentially unnatural.

Imperfection is more interesting than perfection, and human imperfection, it turns out, goes much further than amorous defects. Alanus’ Natura is apt to seem, and actually is, quite a scold; her moral position is almost entirely earthbound, never theological. She could be the reincarnation of a Roman satirist; in fact she does a bit of plagiarism from that canon. She does not appeal to Christian salvation but rather to moral balance upon the earth. In her passionate vision of a well-ordered human race, however, she is apt to indulge in rhetoric which a classical Roman would have avoided. One of her favorite