Serendipities

Language and Lunacy

Umberto Eco, William Weaver

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9780231500142
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachwissenschaft

Best-selling author Umberto Eco's latest work unlocks the riddles of history in an exploration of the "linguistics of the lunatic," stories told by scholars, scientists, poets, fanatics, and ordinary people in order to make sense of the world. Exploring the "Force of the False," Eco uncovers layers of mistakes that have shaped human history, such as Columbus's assumption that the world was much smaller than it is, leading him to seek out a quick route to the East via the West and thus fortuitously "discovering" America. The fictions that grew up around the cults of the Rosicrucians and Knights Templar were the result of a letter from a mysterious "Prester John"—undoubtedly a hoax—that provided fertile ground for a series of delusions and conspiracy theories based on religious, ethnic, and racial prejudices. While some false tales produce new knowledge (like Columbus's discovery of America) and others create nothing but horror and shame (the Rosicrucian story wound up fueling European anti-Semitism) they are all powerfully persuasive.

In a careful unraveling of the fabulous and the false, Eco shows us how serendipities—unanticipated truths—often spring from mistaken ideas. From Leibniz's belief that the I Ching illustrated the principles of calculus to Marco Polo's mistaking a rhinoceros for a unicorn, Eco tours the labyrinth of intellectual history, illuminating the ways in which we project the familiar onto the strange.

Eco uncovers a rich history of linguistic endeavor—much of it ill-conceived—that sought to "heal the wound of Babel." Through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, and Egyptian were alternately proclaimed as the first language that God gave to Adam, while—in keeping with the colonial climate of the time—the complex language of the Amerindians in Mexico was viewed as crude and diabolical. In closing, Eco considers the erroneous notion of linguistic perfection and shrewdly observes that the dangers we face lie not in the rules we use to interpret other cultures but in our insistence on making these rules absolute.

With the startling combination of erudition and wit, bewildering anecdotes and scholarly rigor that are Eco's hallmarks, Serendipities is sure to entertain and enlighten any reader with a passion for the curious history of languages and ideas.

1 THE FORCE OF FALSITY

In the Quaestio quodlibetalis XII, 14, Saint Thomas declares “utrum veritas sit fortior inter vinum et regem et mulierem,” raising, that is, the question of which is more powerful, more convincing, more constrictive: the power of the king, the influence of wine, the charms of woman, or the strength of truth.

Aquinas’s reply respected the king, at whose table he did not, I believe, reject a few good glasses of wine, though he proved he could resist woman’s charms by pursuing with a glowing firebrand the naked courtesan his brothers had introduced into his room to convince him to become a Benedictine rather than dishonor the family by taking the mendicant habit of the Dominicans. As usual, his reply was subtle and articulated: wine, monarch, woman, and truth are not comparable because non sunt unius generis (they do not belong to the same category). But if we consider them per comparationem ad aliquem effectum (insofar as their effects are concerned), all can stir the human heart to some action. Wine acts on our corporal aspect because it produces drunkenness, and over our sensitive animal nature the delectatio venerea—woman, in short—has power (Thomas did not conceive of possible sexual impulses in the opposite direction that might legitimately affect woman, but we cannot ask Thomas to be Héloise). As for the practical intellect, it is obvious that the king’s will has power over it, the command of law. But the only force that moves the speculative intellect is truth. And inasmuch as vires corporales subjiciuntur viribus animalibus, vires animales intellectualibus, et intellectuales practicae speculativis … idea simpliciter veritas dignior est et excellentior et fortior (as our corporeal forces depend on the animal ones, and the animal on the intellectual—and so on and so forth—thus truth is stronger than anything else).

Such then is the force of truth. But experience teaches us that often the imposition of truth has been delayed, and its acceptance has come at the price of blood and tears. Is it not possible that a similar force is displayed also by misunderstanding, whereby we can legitimately speak of a force of the false?

To demonstrate that the false (not necessarily in the form of lies but surely in the form of error) has motivated many events of history, I should rely on a criterion of truth. But if I were to choose it too dogmatically, I would risk ending my argument at the very moment I begin it.

Belief in gods, of whatever description, has motivated human history, thus if it were argued that all myths, all revelations of every religion, are nothing but lies, one could only conclude that for millennia we have lived under the dominion of the false.

But in reaching this conclusion, we would be indulging in more than just banal euhemerism: this same skeptical argument would seem singularly akin to the opposing fideistic argument. If we believe in any revealed religion and, for instance, we have to admit that Christ is the son of God, then he is not the Messiah still awaited in Jerusalem. And if Mohammed is the prophet of Allah, then it is mistaken to offer sacrifices to the Plumed Serpent. If we follow the most enlightened and indulgent of deisms, prepared to believe at once in the Communion of Saints and the Great Wheel of the Tao, then we will reject, as fruit of error, the massacre of infidels and heretics. If we are worshipers of Satan, we will consider puerile the Sermon on the Mount. If we are radical atheists, every faith will be nothing but misunderstanding. Therefore, given that in the course of history many have acted on beliefs in which many others did not believe, we must perforce admit that for each, to a different degree, history has been largely the Theater of an Illusion.

So let us espouse a less contested notion of truth and falsehood, even if it is philosophically debatable (if we listen to philosophers, we must debate everything, and there would be no end to the discussion). Let us adopt the criterion of scientific or historical truth accepted by Western culture: namely, the criterion thanks to which we all agree that Julius Caesar was killed on the Ides of March, that on 19 October 1781 the troops of General Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown to George Washington, ending the American Revolution, that sulphuric acid is H₂SO₄, and that the dolphin is a mammal.

Naturally each of these notions is subject to revision on the basis of new discoveries, but for the moment they all are recorded in the encyclopedia, and until proved otherwise we believe, as factual truth, that the chemical composition of water is H₂O (and some philosophers hold that such a truth must be valid in all possible worlds).

At this point it can be said that, over the course of history, beliefs and affirmations that today’s encyclopedia categorically denies have been given credence and indeed believed so completely as to subjugate the learned, generate and destroy empires, inspire poets (not always witnesses to the truth), and drive human beings to heroic sacrifices, intolerance, massacre, the quest for knowledge. If this is true, how can we not assert that a Force of the False exists?

Ptolemy

The virtually canonical example is the Ptolemaic system. Today we know that for centuries humankind acted on its belief in a false representation of the cosmos. People sought out every possible argument that could compensate for the falsity of the image; they invented epicycles and deferents; finally, with Tycho Brahe, they tried to move all the planets around the sun, while allowing the sun to continue moving around the earth. On the basis of the Ptolemaic image not only did Dante Alighieri act (small harm done), but, worse, so did the Phoenician navigators, Saint Brendan, Eric the Red, and Christopher Columbus (and one of them was somehow the first to arrive in America). And further, on the basis of this false hypothesis, people managed to divide the globe into parallels and meridian degrees, as we still do, having simply shifted the prime meridian from the Canaries to Greenwich.

The example of Ptolemy, which, by association, immediately calls up the unfortunate story of Galileo, would seem to suggest that, with secular arrogance, I confine my history of the power of falsehood to instances where dogmatic thought rejected the light of truth. But here is a story from the opposite position, the story of another falsity, slowly constructed by modern secular thought to defame religious thought.

The Flat Earth

Try this experiment. Ask an ordinary person what Christopher Columbus wanted to prove when he set out to reach the Orient by way of the Occident and what it was that the learned men of Salamanca stubbornly denied, trying to prevent his voyage. The reply, in most cases, will be that Columbus believed the earth was round, whereas the Salamanca sages believed it was flat and hence thought that, after sailing a short distance, the three caravels would plunge into the cosmic abyss.

Nineteenth-century secular thought, irritated by the Church’s refusal to accept the heliocentric hypothesis, attributed to all Christian thought (patristic and scholastic) the idea that the earth was flat. The nineteenth-century positivist and anticlerical made a meal of this cliché, which, as Jeffrey Burton Russell has demonstrated,¹ was strengthened during the battle the supporters of Darwinian theory joined against every form of fundamentalism. It was a matter of demonstrating that, as the churches had erred about the sphericity of the earth, so they could err also about the origin of species.

The Darwinians then exploited the fact that a Christian author of the fourth century, such as Lactantius in his Institutiones divinae, having to accept many biblical passages in which the universe is described as modeled on the tabernacle, hence quadrangular in form, opposed the pagan theories of the earth’s roundness, also because he could not accept the idea that there existed antipodes where men would have to walk with their heads down and their feet in the air.

Finally it was discovered that a Byzantine geographer of the fourth century, Cosmas Indicopleustes, had argued that the cosmos was rectangular, with an arc that dominated the flat pavement of the earth (once again the archetype was the tabernacle). In his authoritative book History of Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler, J. L. E. Dreyer admits that Cosmas was not an official representative of the Church, while giving ample space to his theory. E. J. Dijksterhuis, in his Mechanization of the World Picture (originally in Dutch), asserts that the theory of Cosmas remained the prevalent opinion for many centuries, even though he also concedes that Lactantius and Cosmas must not be considered representatives of the scientific culture of the Church Fathers.²

The fact is that Christian culture, in the early years and in the Middle Ages, left Lactantius to stew in his own juice, and the text of Cosmas, written in Greek and therefore in a language the Christian Middle Ages had forgotten, was revealed to the Western world only in 1706, in Montfaucon’s Nova collectio patrum et scriptorum graecorum. No medieval author knew Cosmas, and his text was considered an authority of the “Dark Ages” only after its English publication in 1897!

Naturally Ptolemy knew the earth was round, otherwise he would not have been able to divide it into three hundred and sixty degrees of meridian. Eratosthenes also knew it, for in the third century before Christ he calculated with reasonable accuracy the diameter of the earth. Pythagoras knew it, too, as did Parmenides, Eudoxius, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Aristarchus, and Archimedes. And it turns out that the only ones who did not believe it were two materialists, Leucippus and Democritus.

Macrobius and Martianus Capella were also well aware that the earth was round. As for the Church Fathers, they had to deal with the biblical text, which spoke of that tiresome tabernacle form, but Augustine, even if he did not have firm notions on the subject, knew those of the ancients and conceded that the sacred text was speaking metaphorically. His position is somewhat different, though fairly common in patristic thought: as knowledge of the earth’s form will not save the soul, the question seemed to him of scant interest. Isidore of Seville (who was surely not a model of scientific precision) calculates at a certain point that the equator was eighty thousand stadii in length. Could he have thought the earth was flat?

Even a high school student can easily deduce that, if Dante enters the funnel of the Inferno and emerges on the other side to see unknown stars at the foot of the mount of Purgatory, then he must have known very well that the earth was round. But forget Dante, to whom we have a tendency to attribute every virtue. The fact is that Origen and Ambrose were of the same opinion, and in the scholastic age a spherical earth was conceived and spoken of by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, John of Holywood, Pierre d’Ailly, Egidius Romanus, Nicolas Oresme, and Jean Buridan, to name only a few.

So what was the big argument all about in the time of Columbus? The sages of Salamanca had, in fact, made calculations more precise than his, and they held that the earth, while assuredly round, was far more vast than the Genoese navigator believed, and therefore it was mad for him to attempt to circumnavigate it in order to reach the Orient by way of the Occident. Columbus, on the contrary, burning with a sacred fire, good navigator but bad astronomer, thought the earth smaller than it was. Naturally neither he nor the learned men of Salamanca suspected that between Europe and Asia there lay another continent. And so you see how complicated life is, and how fragile are the boundaries between truth and error, right and wrong. Though they were right, the sages of Salamanca were wrong; and Columbus, while he was wrong, pursued faithfully his error and proved to be right—thanks to serendipity.

But read what Andrew Dickson White says in his History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.³ True, in these two thick volumes his aim is to list every instance in which religious thought impeded the advancement of science, but as he is an informed and honest man he cannot conceal the fact that Augustine, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas knew very well that the earth was round. He adds, however, that to sustain this idea, they had to combat dominant theological thought. But dominant theological thought was represented, in fact, by Augustine, Albertus, and Aquinas, who thus had to combat no one.

It is again Russell who reminds us that a serious text like that of F. S. Marvin appearing in Studies in the History and in the Method of Sciences repeats that “Ptolemy’s maps … were forgotten in the West for a thousand years” and that a manual of 1988 (A. Holt-Jensen’s Geography: Its History and Concepts) states that the medieval Church taught that the earth was a flat disk with Jerusalem at its center. Even Daniel Boorstin, in his popular book The Discoverers, says that from the fourth to the fourteenth century Christianity had suppressed the notion of the earth’s being round.⁴

From Constantine to Prester John

Another falsehood that changed world history? The Donation of Constantine. Today, thanks to Lorenzo Valla, we know that the Donation was not authentic. And yet, without that document, without a profound belief in its authenticity, European history would have followed a different course: no conflict over investitures, no mortal struggle for the Holy Roman Empire, no temporal power of the popes, no slap at Agnani, but also no Sistine Chapel, which was created after the Donation was called into question but could still be constructed because for centuries the Donation continued to be thought genuine.

In the second half of the twelfth century a letter arrived in the West, telling how in the far-off East, beyond the regions occupied by the Mussulmen, beyond those lands the crusaders had tried to wrest from the dominion of the infidel only to see them returned to that same rule, there was a flourishing Christian region, governed by a legendary priest John, or Presbyter Johannes, or Prester John, re potentia et virtute dei et domini nostri Iesu Christi. The letter began by saying:

know and believe firmly that I, Priest John, am lord of lords; and in every wealth that exists beneath the sky, as also in strength and power I surpass all the kings of the earth. Seventy-two monarchs pay us tribute. I am a devout Christian and everywhere I defend and support with alms the true Christians governed by the dominion of my Clemency. …

Our sovereignty extends over the three Indias: from the greater India, where rests the body of the apostle Thomas, our domains extend into the desert and press the confines of the Orient, then turn toward the Occident as far as Babylonia Deserta, by the tower of Babel. … In our domains live elephants, dromedaries, camels, hippopotami, crocodiles, metagallinari, cametennus, tinsirete, panthers, onagers, red and white lions, white bears and blackbirds, mute cicadas, gryphos, tigers, jackals, hyenas, wild oxen, centaurs, wild men, horned men, fauns, centaurs and women of the same species, pygmies, men with dogs’ heads, giants forty cubits tall, monocles, cyclops, a bird called the phoenix, and almost every kind of animal that lives beneath the vault of the heavens. … In one of our provinces the river known as Indus flows. … This river, whose source is in Paradise, winds its way along various branches through the entire province and in it are found natural stones, emeralds, sapphires, carbuncles, topazes, chrysolytes, onyx, beryl, amethyst, sardonics, and many other precious stones. …

In the extreme regions of the land … we possess an island … where throughout the year, twice a week, God causes an abundant rain of manna to fall, which the people gather and eat, nor do they subsist on any other food save this. In fact, they do not plow, do not sow, do not reap, nor stir the earth in any way to extract its richest fruit from it. … All of them, who are fed only on celestial food, live five hundred years. Still, on reaching the age of one hundred, they are rejuvenated and regain strength, drinking three times the water of a spring that rises at the root of a tree that is found in that place. … Amongst us no one lies. … Amongst us none is an adulterer. No vice has power in our midst.⁵

In the course of the following centuries—until the seventeenth—translated and paraphrased many times into various languages and versions, the letter had a decisive importance in the expansion of the Christian West toward the Orient. The idea that beyond the Moslem territories there could be a Christian...