The Discoverers (Knowledge Series Book 2)

by Daniel J. Boorstin

But Latin, the bond of the learned, would become a barrier between the learned of each nation and all the rest of their countrymen.

The curiously cosmopolitan vocabulary of the learned class put still another obstacle in the path of their efforts to understand their neighbors. The consciousness of the common people was provincial and myopic. They could hear the voices only of the living. At the same time the learned were afflicted by a narrow farsightedness. They thought over the heads of their marketplace contemporaries to a special language and literature of faraway and long ago. Nothing in human nature required that a community be divided in this way. This was an accident of European history which for centuries shaped, directed, and confined the thinking of a continent.

Knowledge of Latin was an absolute prerequisite for attending a medieval university. It was not enough to be able to spell out a text laboriously. For all lectures were delivered in Latin and students were required to speak only Latin outside the classroom, a rule enforced by penalties and by informers called “wolves.”

Block printing made possible the flowering of Chinese culture in the Sung renaissance (960–1127), and the printed Confucian classics revived a Confucian literature. Before the end of the tenth century appeared the first of the great Chinese dynastic histories, a work of several hundred volumes which consumed seventy years. Meanwhile, by 983 the Buddhists had produced something even more spectacular, the Tripitaka, the whole Buddhist canon in 5,048 volumes totaling 130,000 pages, each printed from a separately carved block. The king of Korea received a set from the emperor of China, and when a Buddhist priest brought a set to Japan, there came into the Japanese language the word suri-hon for the printed book. Then other sects put their own scriptures into print. The Taoist canon of 4,000 volumes appeared in 1019.

Caxton was the midwife of a flourishing English literature. He published the Canterbury Tales and other poems by Chaucer, the poetry of John Gower and John Lydgate, and Sir Thomas Malory’s prose version of the Arthurian legend, along with translations of Cicero and Aesop’s Fables. Before Caxton the outcome had been uncertain, and it was conceivable that the literary language of the island might have been some version of French. The fifth-century Germanic invaders of the British Isles had brought with them the West Germanic Frisian language which became Old English. But after the Norman Conquest, French was the official language at court. Only gradually did English displace French. By then, of course, English was full of words of Latin and French origin. In England the establishment of a standard vernacular language had a double significance. It was a victory of the people’s language over the Latin language of the learned few, and at the same time it was the victory of a popular vernacular (English) over what in England was an aristocratic vernacular (French). English literature started as a peculiar possession of all the people.

LANGUAGES would become pathways through space and time. While nations would be held together by their new vernaculars, lone readers could seek remote continents and voyage into the faraway past. From Cicero to Gutenberg, the book, the vehicle of language magic, would be transformed out of all recognition. The modern technical definition of a book, accepted by librarians and by UNESCO for statistical purposes, suggests how much the “book” has changed. A book, they say, is a “non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages excluding covers.” But for most of history, books did not even have “pages.” Our “volume” (from Latin volvere, to roll) was first a name for manuscripts in rolls. In early Egypt sheets to write on were made from the papyrus reed that grew in the Nile Delta. The reed was called byblos, from the port of Byblos, where it was first found, and whence comes our “Bible” for The Book. Strips from this reed were flattened, then others were laid across them at right angles to make a mat. The surface, when moistened, pounded, smoothed, and dried, was well suited for writing. These sheets were pasted together to make long strips for ceremonial banners in early Egyptian temples. Rolled up, they became a “volume,” portable, easy to store, and relatively durable. This was the ancestor of our book.

The public library “in every county town,” which Carlyle demanded, was yet to come. Panizzi still required users to present letters of introduction to enter the Reading Room and his books did not circulate. Another Scotsman, Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), of a temperament very different from Carlyle’s, would spread public libraries across a transatlantic continent-nation.

He observed dispassionately the variety of local customs, noting that men naturally preferred the customs into which they had been born. When Darius asked his Greek subjects what he would have to pay them to eat the bodies of their fathers instead of burning them on funeral pyres, no sum could tempt them. He then sent for some Indians, who customarily ate the bodies of their deceased fathers, and asked what would induce them to burn those bodies. But not for any price would they tolerate such sacrilege. Everywhere, Herodotus said, custom is king. He was freer to speculate about beginnings and sharper in his critical sense than Christian historians would be for the next two millennia. Not boxed in by any hard dogma of the Creation, he could extend historical time back indefinitely. “Nothing is impossible,” he ventured, “in the long lapse of ages.” If the Nile should reverse its course and flow into the Red Sea, “what is there to hinder it from being filled up by the stream within, at the utmost, 20,000 years?”

While Christianity would be justified in history, its truths could not grow but were simply fulfilled. To the Jewish view of the past the Christians added their own sacred texts. The New Testament, they said, fulfilled the prophecies of the Old. Both Scriptures together were the one God’s revelations not merely for a chosen people but for all mankind. While the Gospels were good news for everyone, they were not history in the Greek sense of inquiry, but were verifications of faith. They were both the end and the beginning. The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history.

When the literate leaders of Christianity made their record, they were not interested in inquiry. They had no need to seek answers, they had only to document them. During the Christian centuries in Europe these best minds in the Church developed their own techniques for using the past. Origen (185?–254), the precocious Alexandrian Greek, at the age of eighteen became head of the leading Christian theological academy there, and reputedly wrote some eight hundred works. Because he had castrated himself to ensure his purity, he could not be ordained as a priest, but his teachings made him the most influential theologian before Saint Augustine. A genius at allegory, he even managed to discern the outlines of Christianity in the writings of the Greeks, and so gave Christianity the aura of antiquity without endangering faith by historical skepticism.

When the Mediterranean world began to take up this new religion and the events of Jesus’ life receded into the past, it was necessary not only to foresee Jesus in the Scriptures of the Jews but to place all the events of the Bible and the acts of early Christians in the context of the world. This was accomplished by Origen’s brilliant successor, Eusebius of Caesarea (A.D. c. 260–340), who sat at the right hand of Emperor Constantine and delivered the opening eulogy of the Emperor at the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325). For the first time his chronology arranged and encompassed the events of the Chaldean, Greek, and Roman past into the framework of the Bible. Eusebius provincialized the history of the whole world into a history of Christianity. His calendar of world events managed to incorporate and yet excommunicate the whole non-Christian past:

In eighteenth-century England the word “classical,” which originally meant simply “first class” or of the highest quality, came to mean specifically a product of ancient Greece or Rome. The Roman column became a symbol of architectural elegance, and “classical” antiquity would be a continent-wide standard of beauty.

FOR a modern sense of history, vivid glimpses of the “serene greatness” of Laocoön or the golden glitter of Agamemnon’s mask were not enough. Another dimension was needed, what I will call the latitudes of time, vistas of contemporaneity, a sense of what was going on all over the world at the same time. This was a much more sophisticated discovery, to be reached only by devious and surprising paths.

The modern practice of beginning the New Year with January 1 marks a return to pagan practice, for that was when the Roman year began, which explains, of course, why the Church opposed observance of that day.

It is hard for us to imagine how insular and fragmentary was the past before scholars around the world established worldwide lines of contemporaneity. Orthodox Christians, spotlighting the events of the Bible, left all the rest of the world in outer darkness. To bring together the events of the Jews, Persians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans into a single chronology required superhuman erudition and a willingness to ask embarrassing questions. One of the first to try was the same ambitious cartographer, Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594), who found a way to depict the spherical earth on a flat surface for the convenience of worldfarers on the sea. He also saw the need for a universal chronology to give people their bearings as they explored all past time. In 450 folio pages he produced an ingenious Chronology … from the beginning of the world up to the year 1568, done from eclipses and astronomical observations. Events among the Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans were synchronized by the contemporary references to solar and lunar eclipses. This was only the first part of Mercator’s grand unfulfilled plan to depict the whole world since the Creation in both spatial and temporal dimensions.

Newton, a passionate believer in the Biblical prophecies, still pointed toward a practical world chronology based on objective, planet-wide events. In the long run, the kind of base dates that Newton’s astronomy recommended would offer usable lines of contemporaneity around the world. People might never agree on the date of the Creation—many would not believe in the Nativity—but all could, and would, share a syntax of history. Modern chronology came when the old provincial schemes of naming years and epochs by reigning monarchs or dynasties or by magical portents were displaced by a common scheme of numbering. Only very late in the history of our planet did “century” become a widely accepted yardstick of time. In English usage, for example, “century” (from Latin centuria, designating a company of one hundred men) originally meant any group of one hundred things, just as Shakespeare has Imogen in Cymbeline announce her hope to say “a century of prayers.” People still spoke of a “century of years.” Not until our “seventeenth century” did the lone word “century” begin to mean one of the successive periods of one hundred years from the beginning of the Christian era. This was a small clue to a great change.

The Three Ages, the worldwide epochs of prehistory, made it easier to imagine other epochs that transcended city, region, or nation. By defining latitudes of history, man had enlarged his view of the world’s past and present. The invention of grand historical “Eras,” “Epochs,” or “Ages” which overreached political bounds would provide time receptacles ample enough to include the whole data of past communities of culture, yet small enough for persuasive definition. Few other concepts have done so much to deprovincialize man’s thinking.

Faraday had sketched the outline of a surprising new invisible world. Among these infinitesimal fields of forces exerted by mysterious minute entities modern physicists would find their New Worlds and their Dark Continents, with secrets of a still wider unity and mystery of phenomena. “I have long held an opinion, almost amounting to conviction,” Faraday wrote to the Royal Society in 1845, “in common I believe with many other lovers of natural knowledge, that the various forms under which the forces of matter are made manifest have one common origin; or, in other words, are so directly related and mutually dependent, that they are convertible as it were, one into another, and possess equivalents of power in their action. In modern times the proofs of their convertibility have been accumulated to a very considerable extent, and a commencement made of the determination of their equivalent forces.”