Travelling to Infinity (18 page)

But for me, the most poignant fragments were those heartrending lyrics in which the girl weeps in despair at her lover’s illness:

In one
kharja
, the only decipherable word is
enfermad –
ill – and in another the girl herself falls ill with the cares of loving:

Although in tactical terms it was sensible for me to be registered as a London student, in reality it meant that I was very isolated in Cambridge. London seminars and
supervisions under the auspices of my supervisor, Alan Deyermond, were always stimulating, but my opportunities for going down to London were infrequent. In Cambridge, where I read in the Library
and wrote at home, I had no forum for discussion. Thanks to Dr Dorothy Needham, I had become an affiliated student of Lucy Cavendish College, a newly founded Collegiate Society for mature women
students, and, by dint of careful organization – which involved having Robert fed, bathed and tucked up in his cot, and Stephen’s meal ready for him on the table – I managed to go
out a couple of times a term to the Lucy Cavendish dining nights which took place in Churchill College.

A solution to my problem of academic isolation came in a most unexpected form – through Robert’s growing friendship with our neighbours’ child, Inigo Shaffer. One of the guests
at Inigo’s first birthday party was a vivacious, auburn-haired six-year-old girl, Cressida Dronke, who, peering out from behind a hideous pair of multicoloured reflecting sunglasses, regaled
the company of very small boys and their astounded mothers and nannies with a long and fascinating account of a production of
Romeo and Juliet
to which her parents had just taken her.
There was apparently nothing unusual in this early introduction to Shakespeare, for Cressida had been a hardened theatre-goer since babyhood.

I already knew of Peter Dronke, who lectured in Medieval Latin, from his awesome reputation as one of the most gifted intellects in Cambridge, not confining himself simply to medieval Latin but
ranging over the whole gamut of medieval literary studies, including my own. The happy chance meeting with the Dronkes led to my acquiring an unofficial, surrogate supervisor in Cambridge. Peter
was always ready to share his vast fund of knowledge and to pass on helpful suggestions, constructive criticisms and useful references, while his wife Ursula, herself a scholar of old Norse and
Icelandic sagas, was a constant source of kindly encouragement. Another important consequence of meeting Peter and Ursula was that they invited me to join the coveted, informal seminars which they
hosted in their own home on Thursday evenings during term time. Only Peter could truly be said to be the master of all those sometimes abstruse topics expounded in the seminars, for their range was
eclectic, covering most of late classical and medieval European thought and literature. We, the students, sat respectfully on the mustardcoloured carpet, literally at the feet of some of the
greatest scholars of the day.

I was surprised and amused to find how close those seminars brought me in philosophical terms to the study of cosmology, albeit medieval cosmology. Inevitably many discussions dwelt on the
twelfth-century intellectual expansion which emanated from Paris, particularly from the cathedral school of Chartres, where it was believed that God, the universe and mankind could be examined and
comprehended by means of numbers, weights and geometrical symbols, effectively turning theology into mathematics. The new universities of both Paris and Oxford were at the heart of a continued,
intense intellectual debate, in which primarily the nature of God, creation and the origins of the universe exercised the minds of scholars and theologians. The vigorous renaissance which took
place in the twelfth century owed much to the innovative ideas coming from Spain, where in the year 1085 the Christian forces had recaptured Toledo from the Moors, with the result that that mixed,
multilingual city had become one of the richest cultural centres in Europe, renowned as a thriving school of translation on account of its heritage of Arabic literature and supposedly lost works of
classical antiquity.

In the thirteenth century, Alfonso the Wise of Castile expanded the role of Toledo as a major centre for translation and scholarship by participating in its activities himself, pioneering the
use of Spanish rather than Latin for all documents and attempting various historical projects in that language. The translations produced at his court were even more significant than
Alfonso’s other projects and included a book on chess, the scientific theories on the nature of light of Alhazen, the foremost Arab scientist of the eleventh century – thus laying down
the foundations of perspective on which Leonardo da Vinci would build in northern Italy in the fifteenth century – and, most importantly, the
Almagest
, the great work of Ptolemy, the
Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer of the second century
AD
.

Originally written in Greek, the
Almagest
existed only in an Arabic version until Alfonso commissioned its translation in Toledo. Ptolemy’s cosmological model of the universe was
based on the Aristotelian concept of a stationary earth, orbited by the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars. In the Ptolemaic, or geocentric model, the earth is fixed at the centre of the
universe while the heavenly bodies, the sun, the moon and the planets each move around the earth along the paths of their own fixed spheres. A system of smaller circular motions or epicycles is
introduced to account for recognized inequalities in the motions of the bodies. Beyond the sphere of Saturn is the sphere on which the fixed stars are carried across the sky, and beyond that is the
primum mobile, the mysterious divine force behind the cyclical movement of the spheres. This perfect, circular movement which propelled the planets on their course created a celestial music, the
harmony of the spheres. The Ptolemaic model did not actually coincide with the scriptural view of the universe as being made up of the heavens, a flat earth and hell beneath, but since it could be
made to match up with it without drastically upsetting previously held views of God’s place in the heavens and of hell in the depths of the earth, it became a tenet of religious dogma in
Christendom until it was questioned by the Polish astronomer Copernicus in the sixteenth century. For the Christian church the most important implication of this geocentric model was that Man, the
inhabitant of the earth, was at the centre of the universe and that divine attention was focused solely on him and his behaviour.

Stephen came to one of these seminars about early cosmological models in the Dronkes’ living room with a colleague from the Department, Nigel Weiss, whose wife, Judy, was a member of the
seminar. The two scientists were forced to concede that the thinking of the twelfth-century philosophers, Thierry of Chartres, Alan of Lille and, in the thirteenth century, Robert Grosseteste and
Roger Bacon among many others, was extraordinarily far-sighted, accurate and perceptive. Included in the ranks of the philosophers was a woman, the strong-minded German abbess Hildegard of Bingen,
who devised her own version of cosmology in which the universe took the shape of an egg. Hildegard of Bingen was far in advance of her times. Not only was she an early cosmonaut, she also proposed
that women must make good the social and religious failings caused by the weaknesses of men and, to that end, should follow her example by undertaking missionary journeys along the Rhine,
preaching, condemning heretics and righting social wrongs.

Several ironies struck me in the course of these seminars, particularly during the one that Stephen and Nigel Weiss attended. The most glaring one, of course, was that in the second half of the
twentieth century the position of women in society, especially in science, had progressed at a snail’s pace since the twelfth, despite Hildegard’s brisk and frequent affirmations of the
strength and glory of women. As far as the cosmologies were concerned, I was amused by the reflection that though advances in science may be revolutionary in the twentieth century, certain
conceptual links with older theories die hard. The Ptolemaic system, which had gained ready acceptance in the thirteenth century but had later been supplanted by the Copernican solar system, still
had a point of contact, however implausible, with an important cosmological principle of the twentieth century: the anthropic principle.

This was one of those subjects on which, during that period at the end of the Sixties and the early Seventies, Stephen spent long hours in concentrated argument with Brandon Carter, usually on
Saturday afternoons when we drove out of Cambridge to the pastoral bliss of the country cottage which Brandon and his Belgian wife, Lucette, had been renovating since their recent marriage. Lucette
and I would take Robert for long walks across the fields, conversing in French about our favourite authors, painters and composers, prepare tea and supper – and still Brandon and Stephen
would be engaged in an intellectual contest over the fine detail of the principle, with neither prepared to concede.

The anthropic principle, as far as I understood it from Stephen’s explanations in those rare moments when we discussed his work together, left me wondering at its close philosophical
affinity to the medieval universe. As in the medieval, Ptolemaic universe, Man is once again placed at the centre of creation by the anthropic principle, or more precisely by what is known as its
“strong” version. The proponents of the “strong” anthropic principle claim that the universe in which we exist is the only possible kind of universe in which we could exist,
because from the time of the Big Bang some fifteen thousand million years ago, it has expanded according to the precise conditions, often involving chance chemical coincidences and very fine
physical tuning, which are required for the development of intelligent life. Intelligent life is then able to ask why the universe is as it is observed to be, but this is a tautological question,
the answer to which is: if our universe were any different, intelligent life would not exist to pose the question. In a real sense therefore, mankind could still be said to occupy a special place
at the centre of the universe, just as he had in the Ptolemaic system. Whereas for medieval man, this special position was a strong statement of the unique relationship between human beings and
their Creator, modern scientists appeared to be irritated or merely amused by any such inferences being drawn from the anthropic principle.

Although the modern universe is most certainly not bounded by the medieval concepts of heaven or hell, it is in many respects a more hostile environment than its neatly organized medieval
counterpart, if only on account of its extremes of temperature and its vast expanses of space and time in which the human race appears to live in solitary isolation. In 1968 for a fleeting moment
it seemed as if we might not be alone in the dark immensity of space after all. One afternoon in February of that year, when I called in at the Department, the tea room was buzzing with excitement.
A research student in radio astronomy, Jocelyn Bell, and her supervisor Antony Hewish, had picked up regular, pulsating radio signals from outer space through the row of radio telescopes positioned
on the disused Cambridge to Oxford railway line at Lord’s Bridge, some three miles out of Cambridge. Could these signals be our first contact with extra-terrestrial life – little green
men perhaps? Jokingly they named the first sources of these radio waves LGMs. The excitement died down when the sources of the radio pulses were identified as neutron stars, tiny remnants of stars,
possibly only twenty miles across, with massive densities of hundreds of millions of tons per cubic inch. There was no chance that neutron stars could be supporting life.

While twentieth-century cosmologists might still retain some tenuous conceptual common ground with the Ptolemaic system through the anthropic principle, and might respect the intellects of the
earlier twelfth-century philosophers of Chartres, Oxford and even Bingen on the Rhine, the Dronkes’ medieval seminars served to bring into clear perspective the vastly divergent modern
approach to the subject of creation. The main intent of the twelfth-century philosophers was directed towards reconciling the existence of God with the rigours of the laws of science, thus unifying
the image of the Creator with the scientific complexity of his creation. To this end, Alan of Lille attempted to reconstruct theology as a mathematical science, and another student of Chartres,
Nicholas of Amiens, tried to make it conform to Euclidean geometry, using geometrical symbols to explain the Trinity. However eccentric these notions may appear nowadays, they were undoubtedly
genuine attempts to introduce a scientific objectivity to the teachings of theology and to explore and explain divine mystery through numbers and mathematical structures.

Conversely, their intellectual heirs, some eight hundred years later, seemed intent on distancing science as far as possible from religion and on excluding God from any role in Creation. The
suggestion of the presence of a Creator-God was an awkward obstacle for an atheistic scientist whose aim was to reduce the origins of the universe to a unified package of scientific laws, expressed
in equations and symbols. To the uninitiated, these equations and symbols were far more difficult to comprehend than the notion of God as the prime mover, the motivating force behind creation.
Strangely, to the happy band of the initiated, the equations were said to reveal a miraculous, breathtaking mathematical beauty. This revelation, reflecting the hidden wonders of the universe, was
almost a modern version of Plato’s heavenly world of Forms. In the fifth century
BC
, Plato, Aristotle’s teacher and a major influence on medieval thought,
described a theory of Forms, or perfect heavenly Ideas, unrelated to the senses, discernible only to the mind. Each perfect Form or Idea had its counterpart in the tangible, corruptible, imperfect
forms manifest on earth. The reverence with which modern scientists treated the mathematics of the universe suggested similar intimations of sublime perfection, but unfortunately these intimations
of perfection were not easily accessible to those who were not fluent with mathematical jargon and for whom equations were impenetrable. Another difficulty, which apparently was a direct result of
their obsession with mathematics, was the irrelevance for these scientists of the concept of a personal God. If through their calculations they were diminishing any possible scope for a Creator, it
was logical that they could not envisage any other place or role for God in the physical universe.