I do not think, however, that I have even yet brought out the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement. I mean the inexpungable belief that every detailed occurrence can be correlated with its antecedents in a perfectly definite manner, exemplifying general principles. Without this belief the incredible labours of scientists would be without hope. It is this instinctive conviction, vividly poised before the imagination, which is the motive power of research:—that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled.

—Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1925

1.

Britannia the Romans would name it. A later province, it remained for ages the preserve of half-gods and dark mysteries that spread beyond it to the end of the world. It was a wind-swept stony coast across restless waves from Gaul, beyond the final reaches of any map, the tip of a dark island that extended out of the vast bulk of what would one day be known as Europe. Julius Caesar, an ambitious young general who fussed continually over his thinning hair, crossed the choppy boulder-grey waves of the channel and set foot on the barbarous island for the first time fifty-five years before Christ was born, one-hundred and twenty three years before the Romans drove the Jews from Jerusalem and named that region of the Levant Palestine. He wanted to gather military intelligence about this terra incognita, but, as with most campaigns he undertook, its purposes and aims were numerous. For strictly personal reasons, he wished to avenge himself upon the Belgae, who had helped their fellow tribesman in a savage and bloody struggle against the Roman forces in Gaul. He also knew that by furthering the interests of Rome he was furthering his own and enhancing his estimation among those who would help him upon his return to Rome. Once his infantry had struggled fitfully ashore, cursing violently in the bleak salt spray, Caesar was informed that his cavalry could not disembark in the rough tides. The horses, tethered in the dark holds of the fleet, kicked and whinnied in the rocking surf. Even the familiar constellations were concealed by the endless clouds blowing across the sky from the Atlantic. The legionaries, frightened by accounts of dense forests inhabited by savages of incredible violence, wanted to return to the continent immediately. Caesar declined their requests, which were remitted to him through his centurions, who in turn grew less confident of their fortunes in the uncharted region. The legions spread down the beach to the horizons, huddled over low fires on the hard wet sands and awaited orders, shouting jokes over the rising flush of empty surf. A quarter of the legionaries suffered from stinging diarrhea contracted in the lush pine forests of central Gaul. This forced them to break from their groups and squat at the edges of the forest, glancing over their shoulders into the terrible green silence of the inner island. Months passed. After a few brief skirmishes with the painted natives, the Romans grew more assured, and the once-strange land seemed less foreign, more Roman. Caesar decided to withdraw his forces to the continent, leaving the misty expanse of the island still unexplored. The following year he returned, and, after defeating a barbarian chieftain named Cassivellaunus, extracted tribute, posted an unfortunate legion, and left for Rome, all a standard matter of course.
This is the merest sketch of a history recorded by the Romans, as were most at that time and in that part of the world, aside from the rare exception, such as Josephus’s history of his people, commissioned by the Romans and written in a Roman camp outside the burning walls of Jerusalem where the centurions crucified thousands of his fellow Jews around the walls and the black smoke from the falling Second Temple charred the sky. That famous historian, having recorded the end of his own nation, was met with laurels in Rome for his services and loyalty. Much of what he wrote was fiction, as was, to some extent, Polybius’s history of the Punic Wars, though he probably believed it to be true (he also earnestly believed that the Roman Empire had reached its greatest possible glory in 140 BC). For every history we possess, there are thousands of variants, alternatives, and completely unknown stories that have escaped the erratic hands of written time.
Ninety-nine years after Caesar’s foray into the barbarous region, the Emperor Claudius, surrounded by predictable sycophants and apparently boundless wealth,  finally incorporated Britannia into the Empire. For four centuries the Romans built upon and marched across and policed the island, but all things pass in their time. As Rome itself lay besieged by invaders from Northern and Eastern Europe in the fifth century, the legions in Britannia were recalled to defend the capital, leaving Romanized Britons to fend for themselves, find what protection they could from their own alienated and embittered people. What order the Romans had brought to the island disappeared as quickly as the Romans themselves had. Roads, spas, walled towns, aqueducts, arenas, and libraries remained, but soon became home to birds and cattle, crumbling in the wet grey wind. What authority remained devolved to increasingly local levels as independent warlords brutally scratched out provincial kingdoms that were perennially brought low by neighboring armies and later by the horrifying blond warriors in dragon ships. By the seventh century, a faith from Palestine, called Christianity, once declared religio illicita had grown out in ever widening circles, been accepted by Roman authorities after Constantine and spread to Scandinavia, Central Europe, Iceland, Ireland, and the raw wooded interior of Britannia. The surprisingly flimsy ways of reason and engineering were eclipsed by endless pagan warfare, and that in turn was overturned by the stupefying light of Christianity. A luminous paralysis of faith, otherworldliness, unknowing ensued. None could have guessed then, seven centuries after Caesar strode on the shores of the island, but the darkness was only beginning. Horizons flickered with burning fields and approaching torches. The nights filled with the screams of women raped and mutilated, left blinded and writhing in the dirt. Whole villages were scorched to ash and crops trampled. There were long seasons of sleet and fog when children subsisted on dry bark and madmen cringed weeping in the mud muttering to themselves of gods and devils, but even in the most tenebrous times and places, the finest lights can shine from secluded recesses of history to mark the lives of those to be born centuries later. What little light appears in the darkness is easier to trace, and is often far more appreciated than the brightest dawn.

2.

John, stinging with lice and scratching restlessly, had wandered hard months across the damp cloud-scattered midlands of Britain with his heretical band of devoted and degenerate monks, pillaging remote hamlets to sustain his crusade, maintaining silence before God, until he stumbled across the uneven stony hillock that would serve as the site of his monastery, in a place called Heavensfield. His men had not eaten for nearly two days. Having slipped on a rock made slick with the thin blowing rain, he looked up and beheld a rainbow, God’s promise to the world, extending in a fuzzy bow from a dense copse of trees and disappearing in a shifting haze of cloud. He soon realized that it was a special site, distinguished by the battle St. Oswald had fought against Cadwalader in 635 on the edge of the vaporous weald. The Venerable Bede, with whose writings John was definitively familiar, relates that Oswald, the first of the English royal saints, had erected a cross before his battle against the heathen Cadwalader and called his ragged army to pray before it. By all non-Christian accounts, Cadwalader was an adequate legislator and competent military commander. Several powerful Christians, who would write the only history of the episode, an ecclesiastical one, had spread into his political sphere and a confrontation had become inevitable. After he left the field scattered with broken and dying heathens, Oswald asked the Scottish elders who had baptized him to send a bishop. He hoped to solidify the Christian hold on the region and allow his followers to prosper with him. Oswald was slain nine years later at the battle of Maserfield, fought against a Mercian king, torn apart by the Mercian hordes. His smashed limbs and head were nailed to a tree as a warning to other zealots of the pernicious new religion. Oswald’s brother pulled his head from the tree and rode for Wesxhall, where he gave Oswald a proper burial in the catacombs beneath the monastery. John of Heavensfield had spent many years at Wesxhall, strolling through the catacombs, a diversion which he found invigorating, and had once contemplated Oswald’s battered ivory-yellow skull for some hours before arriving at the conclusion that an angel’s divine strength resided in the forehead and not in the wings as he had once believed. It was rumored that the rest of Oswald’s skeleton (sans head) had been taken by his men to Brixham, the site of a small wooden abbey and placed into a tomb there.
Born nine years after St. Dunstan became the Archbishop of Canterbury and seven years after Otto I was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, John was considered an odd boy even in his insane and carnal age, verbose and cursed with an immense nose and a conspicuous hunched back. Another strange feature with which he was burdened was a complete lack of eyebrows. He looked as though he had an unusually broad and tall forehead, as if he were retaining bad humors in great quantities behind his brow. He had red hair of a disconcerting color, an indescribable flame-tinctured shade, and, to make matters worse, he had begun balding by the age of eleven. What hair he did have stood out at all angles from his strangely egg-shaped head. His village, in the west of Ireland, had no name. No one in the community of between ninety and one-hundred-and-twelve peasants (depending on the fortunes of the season) had ever ventured more than a mile from the village. Not one was literate, and most were named after their parents or for a distinguishing trait, an overbite or broad shoulders. John was so endowed with peculiar traits that rather than name him after any one of them, he was named John, a name that his family understood to be a Christian one.
John received continual beatings from a young age by his superstitious mother, who believed that he was the offspring not of his father but of an incubus, a dark angel with an icy penis and frozen semen who had taken her in her innocent sleep. This was a common allegation. His mother did not know precisely who the father was. It could have been any number of people in the humid summer darkness. After a day of drinking thin ale in the burning sun and sleeping in a room with twenty persons, it is hard to remember just what happened the night before. She paid John back tenfold for the pain of labor with any solid object she had available and never allowed him to speak in her presence, thinking his words those of Satan himself. Once out of earshot, he would speak incessantly, using his narrow vocabulary to construct grand tales of dwarf angels, of beautiful hunchbacked seraphim gliding through milky heavens to avenge themselves upon the wicked, especially the girls who teased him and beat him with sticks as he passed on the dirt path in the center of the village to fetch chestnut-colored water for his family. He would talk and talk and talk, and before long everyone in the village focused all of their energies in a campaign to silence him with switches across his twisted back. They would stop at nothing to prevent him from talking, and on more than one occasion had left him for dead in the rye fields beyond the huddle of crude homes. He would drag himself home and curl in bed beside some family member who would nudge him off the bed onto the dirt floor before morning.
After harvests, there was little to do but drink, copulate, and persecute the wretched boy. In his twelfth year, her twenty-fifth, his mother fell prey to dropsy. She bloated until she looked as if she would burst, a tick huddled in soiled rags on the layered ancestral bed, red-faced, hacking, struggling. He took this opportunity to talk at will of whatever entered his mind. He discovered, for the first time, that his voice could be used as a weapon, that words could inflame or soothe, depending upon their use. He used this new weapon to torment his mother, and, trapped in bed, she was incapable of responding except to have others beat him in her stead. Even in the agony of death she hurled vicious abuse at John, insisting that he shut his mouth or she would return as a filthy cat spirit to punish him to the end of his life. This only increased his passion for words, and after an hour-long description of an angel’s intestinal tract, which he had dreamed in meticulous detail the night before, she expired with a gargling noise as creamy-white pus surged from her mouth and nose.
She was buried in a simple family grave in a field of bright flowers that swelled like a sea in the summer breeze, waves pouring down the valleys where great clouds threw immense shadows over the landscape. With little hope that life in the village would ever become any better, John followed the young priest who had performed his mother’s last rights back to his cloister at nearby Iona. It was a wooden building, leaning to one side, constructed of split tree trunks. The nearest stone church was thirty miles to the north at Asheydown. Taken for an orphan, John was adopted by monks, seen as a source of cheap labor. He soon excited and bewildered them with his rants and breathless accounts of angels. They were immediately impressed, and thought that this talent should be directed toward a higher end. After several years under their tutelage, he became a monk at Iona in the year 985. For a time, he was content with the rigid routines and the bland but steady diet of the monastery. Frequent visits from both religious and temporal dignitaries from afar made life more exciting than anything he had previously imagined. He learned to read at an incredible rate and was soon fluent in Latin, Hebrew, and Koine Greek. He barely endured a month-long vow of silence, mumbling to himself in dank corners while cleaning. He offered to assume any task that would remove him from the company of fellow monks so that he could talk to himself. In all, he ranted through most of his vow of silence, but Fortuna’s Wheel had turned in his favor and his words went unnoticed. Once he had completed the vow, he took liberty and spoke whenever he could to anyone who would listen, including the cattle of the field, Iona’s most important assets. In an attempt to channel his energies, the abbot gave him the duty of reading aloud from the illuminated Gospels during the long meals, and during this time he developed his oratorical skills with potent precision. He was soon a powerful member of the order, taking long walks with his brothers through the fragrant green mornings, telling mad stories of disfigured but radiant angels warring in heaven against the rebel angels who were broken and fell into the abyss but remained just as swift and handsome as they had been in the light. These fantastic visions would inspire bitter arguments, but he always succeeded in convincing his rivals of his position through sheer rhetorical flourish. Had not Jesus come for the meek and downtrodden of the world? Did he not champion the helpless and abused, the ugly even? A consummate theologian, John prefigured Montaigne by half a millennium when he wrote that those they named monsters were not so in God’s eyes. To be ugly was divine, because it focused one’s soul upon higher things, away from the corruption of the flesh.

– Ernest Hilbert

Part 3, next week.