Doctor Mirabilis (15 page)

Roger swallowed. ‘Are we parting? I’d hoped not. But I’m the stupid one, it appears.’

‘Who knows?’ John said. For a moment he wore the same
abstracted look Roger had surprised on his face earlier in the evening. ‘In this world everything happens suddenly. But will
yon take my advice?’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Roger said. ‘But I’m not much moved to do it. I know my book, and can dispute. That ought to be sufficient.’

‘Ought to be is not is. Well, never mind. You’ll dispute with Albert? There’s pride for you!’

‘Nay, he surely won’t examine me. I am not his favourite student; I argue more than he likes, I think. I expect the Chancellor.’

‘Why, in heaven’s name? He
never
comes to examinations any more. Or do you mean Gautier de Chateau-Thierry? He never comes to examinations either – you know
as well as I do that he’s hardly a year into his duties, he pays as little attention as possible to the university. Or are
you the son of some great lord?’

‘No,’ Roger said, and hesitated; and at this moment the self cried soundlessly to him,
Speak!
so that he nearly started. ‘The university invited me. I am supposed to teach here, after my inception. I don’t think I can
banquet my way into such a post. They will ask me hard questions and insist that I be letter-perfect in them. Nothing else
would be fair.’

‘Aha Yes, fair. Well … perhaps so. Too bad; some of those fellows haven’t had a bath since Gerbert rode the eagle. When I
study under you, Roger, I will buy
you
a bath and a banquet, if I have to borrow the money from my sister. By that time you may be as dirty as Thomas Aquinas himself–
layers and layers of accumulated dignity.’

‘And, when did you last bathe, Daun Buranus?’

‘Students aren’t allowed to frequent public baths,’ John said, regarding his bowl of wine critically. ‘So you must not tempt
me, Roger. So you’re to be a regent master. And all the time I thought you were just a harmless black magician, too backward
on his grimoires to be admitted to a coven. Think how my, soul’s been in peril.’

‘The more so if you wait long enough to study under me. By then you’ll be far away, and holy.’

‘Perhaps,’ John said. ‘But perhaps not. I’ve no great stomach for a mission in pagan Livonia. I was thinking before you came
in tonight, I might make a good graduate beggar. I know all the degrees of staleness that bread can go through and still be
bread, and every tune that King Borborygmi sings. And the truth is, I’d rather study than preach.’

And I,
the self said piercingly.

‘Well then. It’s not so difficult to become a
vagus
without losing one’s tonsure, bulls or no bulls, if one does it in the name of learning. I’ve near completed the trivium,
and shall have my secular mastership; and thence I might go to Montpellier, if you like, and become a physician; and still
my bolt’s not shot, I could spend seven whole years more at Bologna and become a doctor of law. And it might take me two or
three years just to get from one school to another, if I sang well along the roads.’

‘Doctor of civil law?’

‘To be sure; canon law’s not for the roads. As is only just: if your clerk’s to claim the privileges of the altar, then he
should stay close to it. But who knows? To become a doctor of
both
laws might keep me another seven years
in studio; that
would put another face on it.’

‘You have more faces than Janus, but still.… It’s not an ill way to learn. I’ve hardly decided myself what I’ll do. I’ve no
gift for the road, that much I know.’

‘It’s probably more curse than gift,’ John said. ‘But both are callings – if I have the word right. In my country we have
only one word for all three, and you use it on pigs. A sad condition for a language to be in. And look you, alas! The wine’s
gone.’

That was just in time, for the taper was almost gone, too. The murmurous night world around them had suddenly become very
fuzzy in all its categories. They shook their heads over the empty quart, frugally blew out the candle-stump, and let time
swallow the dregs of the day.

In the early morning, John was gone, his few possessions with him; nothing remained but a small book bound in
black, placed on the lectern where Roger would see it. No other trace of the life they had led together, as warmly uncommunicative
as cat and puppy, existed now in the room but a memory of the plans John had hinted at while the candle flickered; and these
rang hollow at dawn. Had the Livonian youngster really stolen away, even before his inception, to join the
Ordo Vagorum?
Nothing was left to say aye: or nay.

On the morning of his examination, Roger looked down at the empty pallet for a long time, as a man looks who would part with
his first friend, and cannot; while the light grew pitilessly, and the time drew nigh.

And then, as always, someone was singing, and the song came floating through the window like eiderdown:

Enough; that was how it was. He looked at the book on the lectern, but he did not need the: self to tell him that he did not
dare open it now. After the song had come cockcrow; and after cockcrow, bells. He donned his gown and left.

‘Sit thema,’
Albertus Magnus said, but he was drowned out. The hall had been filling for nearly an hour, as the word got around that Albert
was examining a student, and that the student had answered eight questions out of eight on his book. But the noise and the
movement in the hall failed to divert Albert’s hooded eyes. He stood before the leaves of his manuscript, as blocky and immovable
as a sarsen stone in his stiff black master’s robes, and watched Roger where he stood sweating ice in the dock. It was intensely
hot.

‘Sit thema,’
Albert said again with his glacial patience:
‘Queritur quomodo materia est una, an numero vel genere vel specie.’

It was a little quieter now, and Roger needed the quiet. There was something like Nemesis in Albert’s heavy-lidded regard;
nothing, that look seemed to say, could come from this disputation to Roger but disgrace. Had his contentiousness really inflamed
the German that far? Never mind, it was too late; the question, the question!

It was frightening enough. The doctrine with which Albert had presented him was the first of the questions which had led the
teaching of Aristotle to be forbidden until now. It was the essence of the heresy of David of Dinant, unless it could be answered;
matter cannot be one in number and the same throughout the Creation, else there is no need even for God. But did Albert want
him to argue it from Aristotle,
per se et per accidens,
and thus show himself to be too good an Aristotelian to be immune to the heresy? Or did he mean to force Roger into making
a ruling of his own, independent of authority, and thus diminish his standing as a lecturer-to-come on Aristotle? It was not
a question of knowing what
the
answer was; to any Aristotelian that was perfectly clear: matter, being imperfect, incomplete and ignoble, cannot be one;
but instead, a question of knowing the dangers inherent in the problem. There was no doubt that Aristotle sometimes gave the
wrong answers, but he never failed to ask the right questions, and this one was fearsome; did Albert really want to hear Roger
argue it?

‘The universal forms are not one in number,’ Roger said at last, in a dead silence. ‘They are multiplied as particular forms
are received. Even were primal matter one in number, it cannot remain so:
sic non est una numero, tamen est numerositate essentie.’

The whole hall was holding its breath. Albert’s expression did not change; he simply turned a page; but that was enough. Someone
in the corner of Roger’s eye rose and pushed excitedly out into the streets.

‘Sit thema,’
Albert said:
’Queritur diversas substantial et animam in corpore hominis esse, qui adducantes Aristoteles viditur dicere in sexto-decimo
librorum suorum de animalibus.’

The eyes looked at Roger as though seeing inside his flesh
to the very selfsame self; and thilke self set up such a sweet silent storm of rage that Roger shrank away from it, dazed
and shocked. He had never doubted until now that the thing with the bodiless voice belonged to him in some way,
even
spoke for desires he was not yet ready to acknowledge, perhaps in the long run to his greater good; but this dizzying fury!
– the voice might have been a demon’s. He felt himself turning pale, and closed his eyes for a moment. When he was able to
open them again, a small group of medical students in the forefront of his vision was whispering together interestedly.

He set his teeth and said to the self,
Silentium!
The storm in his blood did not stop, but it abated a little; enough for Roger to reset his jaw into the substance of Albert’s
question. There was now no doubt in his mind but that Albert meant to take him step by step through every opinion of Aristotle
which had once been, and again might be, a breeder of heresy. Now in particular he was demanding knowledge of the selves and
the souls that Aristotle had detected deep inside every man: the active intellect which reasons; the non-reasoning intellect
which bears like scars the wounds of experience, and which can prevent the
intellectus agens
from talking or even thinking about a painful subject; the entelechy or vegetative self, which does not think at all, but
can compel a man to breathe even when he is determined to yield up all that, and to digest even an eel pie, or heal over a
hopelessly running sore; and all those others – the ones that think; the ones that perceive; the ones that desire. Were all
these one soul, or was a separate soul required for each?

Aristotle himself was of no help here, as was the case with all the great potential heresies. He had simply looked into the
mind of man and reported it a single substance multiplied by secondary virtues, some more perfect than others, as Averroes
agreed; but he had never ruled on the question of separate substantial
forms. Yet
for one entrusted with the care and cure of souls, everything depended upon whether the sinner were single and indivisible,
or in himself
a little Hell and Heaven of warring factions, all originally from God, all at odds now.

As thou knowest,
the self said in a tiny whisper in one ear, indefeasible and terrifying. In this extremity, Roger remembered the teachings
of Richard Fishacre, of whom he had been so jealous just before leaving Oxford, and put out his hand to them as a man drowning
to a battered log.

‘A Christian may hold three views on this matter,’ Roger said, and then had to clear his throat.
‘Estimant enim aliqui, quod vegetabilis et sensibilis et rationalis sunt una et eadem forma, et variantur tantum secundum
operationem.’

‘Et?’
Albertus Magnus said.

‘Alii posuerunt quod in homine est anima unica forma numero.’

‘Et?’

‘Tertii ponunt quod sunt tres formae et tria haec aliquid in hominibus a quibus sunt istae tres operations—’

‘– cui plena contradicit Magister Augustinus,’
Albert said, in a voice as quiet as rats scampering up a hawser. Roger could hear the intake of breath all over the hall.
‘Et?’

‘Diffinere non audeo,’
Roger said stonily.

For a moment Albert stared at him in stunned disbelief.

‘Thou art not permitted to entertain no opinion of thine own on such high matters, youngling,’ he said at last. His voice
was still very quiet, but it was as wounding as sleet. ‘Answer thou me, or stand down.’

‘Corruption shall put on incorruption,’ Roger said. ‘As it is given. Thus is the soul of man a composite substance, composed
of a sensitive soul and a vegetative soul, alike corruptible, and the intellectual soul which is incorruptible; yet from each
of these is made by God one soul
secundum subjectum,
summarized in perfection as Aristotle teaches; one, composite and perfect; diverse and simple; matter and form, natural and
derived from nature, but perfect in its unity before God, whence it came.’

‘Ah,’ the hall said, generally. Albert flicked the massed benches a glance of subdued scorn, but there was obviously no more
to be pursued down this road. The self – whatever
it was in the eyes of God – had built around Roger such fortifications as would not be breached in an afternoon, nor in a
year. For the first time in all Roger’s experience, it seemed to be singing; and to his horror, it could not carry any tune,
but whined away like a wheel of wet slate cutting a green log. Its ordeal over, it had abandoned Roger’s body, which promptly
began to tremble like an aspen leaf; yet his ordeal was still young.

The ordeal was, however, curiously slow to resume. Albert turned a page, and then another, and then seemed to become preoccupied
with his clothing: first adjusting his bishop’s mitre forward until it made five distinct furrows in his rather sloping brow;
then folding his robe carefully over his left arm before leaning upon that forearm on the open book. Suddenly he looked up
again at Roger, but only to ask him a wholly simple double question as to whether or not all motion was animal motion, and
if so whether or not the heaven had life. The very simplicity of the query baffled Roger, the more especially since it was
fully dealt with in the
De plant’s,
and the examination on that book was over; had Albert reverted to it to gain thinking time? If so, best not to give him the
satisfaction or the opportunity. Roger disposed of the double question with two quick denials. ‘In addition’, he said, ‘the
text makes it clear that Aristotle is here citing other writers’ arguments; hence it would be wrong to maintain that his statements
on this subject are authoritative.’

But Roger had underestimated his opponent; rapid as Roger’s answer had been, the next question followed even faster, and the
next, and the next. Was substantial form arisen out of nature
per generationem,
or induced by special creation? How shall we interpret Aristotle’s position that dreams are never sent from God and cannot
be interpreted? Are the movers of the inferior orbs continuous with the First Cause, and if so were they needed to implement
Creation, to produce their own inferiors, or to operate these inferiors after the Creation?