Forty-Two

 

I have been thinking back to some of the political and cultural events of the early decades of my professional career.  In retrospect these years now seem to me rather quaint and distant despite their still obviously formative and continuing influence on our lives.  As I was a college professor working closely with young people, my own perceptions were inevitably much influenced by the young.  In particular there has swum into my mind for some reason the great vogue of certain cultural events as they impacted the undergraduate consciousness.  One of the most widely read books on our campus around 1980 was Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, a very engaging serio-comic romp through, well, the Universe.  Its fame, buoyed by radio, television, film, and for all I know board game versions is by no means extinct today; but around 1980 it was a cultural craze.

 

The book is not without its prophetic elements as we gulp or tremble before the vague but definitely menacing specter of something called “AI”.  In Adams’s book a monstrous computer named Deep Thought, having spent millennia contemplating the mysteries of “Life, the Universe, and Everything,” at last utters a numerical answer to the question of the meaning of it all.  The answer is 42.

 

For me, as a medievalist, this answer was a comforting confirmation of an hypothesis that I had been harboring for some years.  In the time we were at Oxford together my wife came to know the history don at her college, the late Marjorie Reeves.  I myself would later come to know her well.  Indeed we published a small book together, a book for which I personally set the type, did the printing, and made the bindings.*  Ms. Reeves, in addition to being a marvelous human being, was the world’s foremost authority on the writings of Joachim of Fiore.

 

If you have never heard of Joachim of Fiore, which is quite possible, I will tell you just a word or two about him.  Fiore was (is) an abbey in a once remote part of southern Italy—secluded away in the arch of the cartographic foot, the toes of which almost touch Sicily.  Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202) was for a time the abbot of this monastery. Joachim was a deep-thinking monk and a prophet.  What “prophecy” meant for him was grasping the plenary meaning of the Scriptures, the hidden and inward meanings lurking beneath the literal sense.  He was also a philosopher of history much influenced by Augustine, and especially by Augustine’s theologico-historical theories in the City of God and his analysis of the Trinity.  The most mysterious doctrine of the Trinity holds that the unitary God is manifested in three “persons”—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Joachim observed that the Bible of the Christians had two parts or “testaments”.  In what he called the Old Testament he found the history of the marvelous dealings of God the Father with Israel.  The New Testament manifestly dealt with the life of God the Son, Jesus Christ. And they obviously document sequential historical periods.  But what about God the Holy Spirit?  Here there was no book.  Joachim nevertheless posited the necessity of a metaphorical third age, an Age of the Holy Spirit, to be documented not in a third written book but in spiritual activity.  The Second Age must indeed be the one in which he was living, and it was probably already much advanced.  A new, apocalyptic Age of the Holy Spirit must be nigh.  And following that, the End.

 

But could the durations of the three trinitarian ages be more precisely delineated?  Surely, they would be of equal duration, as the persons of the Trinity were coequal.  A lot of Joachim’s followers thought so, and they searched the Scriptures for answers.  There was, unfortunately, no specific text that gave a straight-forward world chronology.   However, you may have noticed that Holy Writ is very big on its begats (See Genesis 5, for example—the period from Adam to Noah).  Every begat signals a human generation, and by long-standing tradition a generation was measured in medieval terms as thirty years.  And the prologue to the Gospel of Matthew is explicit.  It details the generations between Abraham, the legatee of the old covenant, and Jesus, founder of the new covenant.  The Joachists (or Joachimists) now knew precisely when the Age of the Holy Ghost must begin: in the Year of Our Lord 1260.  And in fact in that year the roadways of many parts of Europe were filled with processions of eager believers marching forward toward some new, unseen, spiritual renewal.  Why was that?

 

 

 

The truth was in the numbers, and the numbers were everywhere.  How many times had the escaping Hebrews temporarily paused in their flight from Egypt?   (These were called the “stations of the Exodus”).  How many bad boys got eaten up by bears for calling the prophet Elisha “baldy” (2 Kings 2:23-24?) After what number of words at the beginning of the Book of Genesis did God separate the light from the dark (Genesis 1:4)? 

 

It is extraordinary that a medieval apocalyptic and a twentieth century comic guru would agree on the transcendental importance of a single two-digit number.  But they did.  There is no telling why for Adams the number 42 is the “everything” number, but that doesn’t mean there is no talking about it.  He himself casually suggests that forty-two is the product of multiplying nine by six, and there are internet dissertations explaining (quite unsatisfactorily) the mathematical circumstances that could make that true.  His is a delightfully nutty book, and one can but wish that all its copious exegesis was also delightful.  To be fair, some of it is.  But modern craziness lacks the coherence of medieval craziness.  Quite independent of Joachim, medieval exegetes had concluded that forty-two was the number of completion or fulfillment.  That may be the reason that that so many medieval literary works are distributed in one way or another into forty-two parts.  The motive seems pretty likely to me in Dante’s Vita Nuova, for example.

 

I surmise that Joachim was possessed not merely of a mathematical mind, but also more specifically a geometrical mind.  A remarkable feature of many of the surviving manuscripts of his works—and these are surprisingly numerous—are their elaborate and sometimes cryptic pictorial illustrations.  One of his famous books is actually entitled “The Book of Figures”.  Joachim surely drew the original figures with his own hand.

 

Joachism like other chiliastic (millenarian) schemes is no longer in vogue; it seems mainly to have run its course.  In that regard it is somewhat similar to Marxist Communism.  Fortunately—and here very unlike Communism--it did not have to heap up hecatombs of victims in running its course and demonstrating its debility.  We may regard it as a “curious divagation of the human mind.”  So many interesting episodes in the history of thought are the chronicles of brilliant human minds chasing batty ideas.  Alchemy, a project that captured the minds of most of the brilliant scientists of the early modern period, proved utterly baseless in its material aims.  The search for the Philosopher’s Stone was about as wacky as the fevered anticipation of the Age of the Holy Ghost, but its alembics, retorts, reductions, and evaporation still contributed to the construction of modern chemistry.  Joachism has many of the features of a dazzling artistic construct utterly useless except for its ingenuity and beauty.

                                

(The illustrations are all from medieval manuscripts containing Joachite works.)

 

                  *Two Poems Attributed to Joachim of Fiore (Princeton: Pilgrim Press, 1978)

 

 

 

 

Dead Letter Scholarship

 

 Where great ideas go to die

Most people are probably familiar with the alliterative advice given to fledgling professors: “Publish or perish.”  It means that the publication of scholarly research is a requirement of keeping a professorial position in an academic institution.  In general scholarly publication is a necessary but insufficient requirement for academic success.  Publishing your essay on “The Incidence of Incest among Lace-Makers in Seventeenth-Century Toulouse”—in a “good journal,” of course—cannot guarantee your advancement to a tenured position, but failing to publish it can seal your doom.

            These circumstances partly account for the generally uninspiring character of large swaths of the academic press—the thin books that might have made a tolerable journal article, the thin journal article that might have sustained a cocktail-party conversation for a minute or two.  Horace thought you ought to keep a finished manuscript in your drawer for nine years while you thought about the wisdom of publishing it.  But of course by then a junior professor would already be entering the third year of a second career as a taxi driver.

            In the calculus of academic evaluation books rank considerably higher than journal articles, but they are also more difficult to write.  Hence the academic vogue of the “edited volume”—and with it my eventual topic, the dead letter essay.  You dream up a topic and a title—Incest and Lace-Making: New Perspectives, perhaps.  Then you invite eight or ten desperate youngsters to contribute essays to your volume.  There were, after all, lace-makers in Genoa, Prague, Ghent, and Allentown PA as well as in Toulouse, plenty to go around.  And if they didn’t practice incest they sometimes had indigestion, which is close enough for volumes of this genre.  Eight or ten young scholars can add an item to the “Articles” subsection of their bibliographies, and you get to add a whole book!

            If you can actually get the book published, that is.  There has been known to be a certain slippage twixt cup and lip.  In my second year of professorial life (1964) I succumbed to the flattering invitation of a senior scholar who had the great plan of publishing a book of essays with new perspectives on every one of Chaucer’s tales.  I knocked myself out writing the greatest essay ever penned on the “Summoner’s Tale.”  It is also the greatest never read, because never published.  It was the first in what was to become a rather thick file of my dead letter essays.
             Full many a flower is born to bloom unseen

            And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

 world's largest dart board?

            Hardly less disconcerting than the editorial death of a laboriously written essay is its resurrection from the dead after considerably more than three days.  Hanging on a wall in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle is a huge wooden disk that looks like the largest dartboard in Britain.  According to a black-letter legend encircling the bull’s eye “This is the rounde table of king Arthur with xxiiii of his namyd knightes.”  What is it—besides being a Tudor fake, that is?  In the early 1970s I was recruited by an eminent but feckless proposer of edited volumes to write the lead essay for a book that would study every conceivable aspect of this bizarre artifact—artisinal, art historical, calligraphical, carbon-dendrological—you name it.  My assignment, should I choose to accept (as in a moment of temporary cerebral intermission I did) was to write a synoptic essay on “The Round Table in Literature and Legend”.  Arthurian literature is not exactly a small topic, and to work up such an essay from scratch was an enormous labor. I was accordingly rather miffed when it turned out to be a dead letter.

            Fast forward twenty-five years.  A strange contraption called the computer is now a common sight in academic offices.  I have sired children, and they have graduated from college.  My temples are gray.  I am an alleged eminence myself.  Out of the blue—Cambridge blue, in this instance—I receive an urgent communication from an editor informing me that after “some delay” my essay is about to be published.  Would I be good enough to make a quick review of the scholarship of the last quarter century to see whether my footnotes might require some tweaking!

            All this comes to mind because of a message from the editorial tomb received only this week.  Marjorie Reeves (1905-2003), an Oxford historian, was the world’s greatest expert on Joachim of Fiore and medieval millennialism generally.  She was a lovely woman and person of extraordinary moral vibrancy.  She played a significant role in my life and that of my wife, who had been an undergraduate at her college, Saint Anne’s, Oxford.  She is the only scholar with whom I have jointly published a book.

Marjorie Reeves (1905-2003)

           
          When her centenary hove into view as the twentieth century departed, I was happy to fall in with a plan proposed by a scholar in Germany to contribute to an “edited volume” in Ms. Reeves’s honor.  The editor was a woman unknown to me—perhaps not a promising  augury in retrospect.  But I wrote the essay and sent it off—straight to the dead letter office, or in this instance the Abteilung für unzustellbare Briefe.  Marjorie Reeves eventually died, and while I shall never forget her I had long since put her stillborn festschrift out of mind by the time I retired in 2006.  Guess what?