The Magic of the Middle Ages

by Viktor Rydberg

THE MAGIC OF THE LEARNED.

We find ourselves in a dismal labyrinth of narrow, winding streets, now and then issuing into some open space before a guild-hall or a church. The objects which meet our gaze in this strange city do not solicit pause or reflection; for we have seen essentially the same type of homes and humanity in many another city which we have wandered through in our search for the stone of wisdom. We therefore continue on our way. The buildings of the university are said to be in the neighborhood, and we turn the corner to the right, and again to the left, until we come upon it. The lecture-hour approaches. Professors draped in stiff mantles and wearing the scholastic cap on their supremely wise foreheads, wend their way to the temples of knowledge at the portals of which flocks of students wait. We recognize their various and familiar types: the new-matriculated look as usual, their cheeks still retaining the glow of early youth, their hearts still humble, perhaps still held captive by the sweet delusion that the walls by which they wait are the propylæa to all the secrets of earth and heaven. Just as readily recognized are the parchment-worms, destined one day to shine as lights in the Church and in the domain of science, whether they now toil themselves pale and melancholic over their catenæ, their summæ and sententiæ, or bear with unfeigned self-satisfaction the precious weight of terms which lifts them so conspicuously above the ignorant mass of mortals. And among the throng of the first named still fresh with youth, and these already dried pedants, we find also the far-famed third class of students, adventurers assembled from all quarters under the protection of university-privileges,—those gentlemen with bearded cheek, and faces swelled by drinking and scarred by combat, with terribly long and broad swords dangling at their side,—the heroes of that never ending Iliad which the apprentices of learning and the guilds enact nightly in the darkness of the lanes, who may yet turn out some day the most pious of conventical priors, the gravest doctors and the very severest burgomasters in Christendom, unless before that time they meet their fate upon the gallows, or on the field of battle, or as scholares vagantes in the ditch or by the roadside.

Shall we enter and listen to some of these lectures which are about to be delivered? Our letter of academic membership will open the doors to us, if we desire. To the left in the vaulted hall the professor of medicine has commenced his lecture. With astonishing subtlety and penetration he discusses the highly important question, before propounded by Petrus de Abano, but not as yet fully solved,—“an caput sit factum propter cerebrum vel oculos” (whether the head was formed for the sake of the brain or the eyes). To the right the professor of theology leads us into one of the dim mysteries of the Church by ventilating the question what Peter would have done with the bread and wine, had he distributed the elements while the body of Christ in unchanged reality was yet hanging on the cross.[28] A little farther on in this mouldy vault we find the workshop of philosophy, where a master in the art of abstract reasoning deduces the distinction between universalia ante rem and universalia in re. In yonder furthest room a jurisconsult expounds a passage in the pandects.—Or perhaps you would rather not choose at all? You smile sadly. Alas! like myself you have good reason for complaining with Faust:—

I have, alas! Philosophy,
Med’cine, and Jurisprudence too,
And to my cost Theology,
With ardent labor studied through.
And here I stand, with all my lore,
Poor fool, no wiser than before.

and if you add like him,

Hence have I now applied myself to magic,

we shall bring back to our minds the object of our burning desires, the hope which cheers us that finally the veil will be torn from the face of the Isis-image, and that we shall behold the unspeakable face to face, even though her looks burn us to ashes. Let us turn our back upon this tragi-comic seat of learning, where, as everywhere else, hoary-headed fools are teaching young chicken-heads to admire nonsense, and young eagle-souls to despair of knowledge. It is not far hence direct—as direct as the winding lanes permit—to that great magician who has taken up his abode in this city. At the feet of that master let us seat ourselves. We shall there slake our burning thirst with at least a few drops of that knowledge which through by-gone ages has been flowing in a subterranean channel, though from the same sources as the streams of Paradise. And if we are disappointed there,—well, then you, if you so choose, can quench your longing for truth in the whirlpool of pleasure and adventure. I shall go into a monastery, seek the narrowest of its cells, watch, pray, scourge forth my blood in streams; or I shall go to India, sit down upon the ground and stare at the tip of my nose,—stare at it and never cease, year out and year in, until all consciousness is extinguished. Agreed, then, is it not?....

We are arrived in the very loneliest quarter of the town, and the most dreary limits of the quarter, where old crumbling houses group themselves in inextricable confusion along the city wall, and from their gable windows fix their vacant, hypochondriacal looks upon the open fields beyond. A tower, crowning the wall of the fort upon this side, now serves the great scientist as an observatory and dwelling, given him by the burgomaster and the council of the city. He was for a long time private physician to the Queen of France, but has now retired to this lonely place from the pleasures, the distinctions, and the dangers of life at court, in order to devote himself quietly to research and study. He has a protector in the prince-archbishop resident in the city; and as the professor of theology has certified at the request of this same prince-bishop to his strict orthodoxy, the city authorities thought to persuade him to receive the honorable and lucrative position of town-astrologer, not heeding the assertion of the monks that he was a wizard, and that his black spaniel was in reality none other than the devil himself.

A magician never suffers himself to be interrupted in his labors, whether engaged in contemplating the nature of spirits, in watching the heavens, or in the elaboration of the quinta essentia, the final essence, with his crucibles. Oh! what world-wide hopes, what solemn emotions, what inexpressible tension of soul must accompany these investigations! Gold, which rules the world, here falls from the tree of knowledge as a fruit over-ripe into the bosom of the master. And what is gold with all the power it possesses, and all the enjoyment it commands, compared with the ability to control heaven and earth and the spirits of hell, compared with the capacity to summon by the means of lustrations, seals, characters and exorcisms the angels hovering in the higher spheres, or tame to obedience the demons which fill the immensity of space? And what again is this power compared with the pure celestial knowledge to which magic delivers the key? a knowledge as much transcending the wisdom of angels as the son’s place in his father’s house is superior to a servant’s! Perchance the magician at this very moment is deeply absorbed in some investigation, and within a hair’s breadth of the revelation of some new and dazzling truth. Let us consider before we venture to ask admittance. Let us pause a moment before this iron-bound door, and recover our breath.

Ye men of science in this nineteenth century, how miserable you would be had you not once for all determined to limit your hopes to a minimum! To die when you have gleaned and contributed but a single straw to the harvest of science, is the fate to which you subject yourselves. The one among you who has brought to notice a hitherto unknown snail or flower, deems himself not to have lived in vain. To have discovered a formula under which a group of phenomena can be arranged, is already a triumph. This resignation which makes each one among you, even the greatest, only an insignificant detail-worker upon the immense labor whose completion you contemplate at an infinite remove, and the very outlines of which you ignore,—this resignation is sublime, though supremely painful to the aspiring soul. The individual laborer for his part abstains from all hope of seeing the whole truth, and works for his generation and futurity. Even the philosopher who undertakes to explain the framework of the macrocosm, does not see in his system a final solution of the “problem of cosmical explanation,” but only a link in the long chain of development. He foresees the fall of his theories, satisfied, perhaps, if the traces of his error keep his successor on a straighter path. It is the race and not the individual which works in your work; which continues it when you have grown weary and been forgotten. It is a collective activity like that of ants and bees. But the magician stands alone! To be sure he receives what the past may offer,—but only to enclose himself with this treasure, and improve it by the immense wealth of his own mind. He believes in this immensity. He believes that the powers of all the generations are stored up in the bosom of the individual, and he hopes to accomplish alone what you faint-heartedly leave to the multitude of incalculable centuries!