Medieval Nature: Class 8 Cosmographia

Earth is Evil p. 77, “is the goal to do good or to evade sin?”

Alice Lamy’s 2019’s “Defining Nature in Medieval Cosmological Literature” interests itself in Nature’s contradictions. Nature in Bernard’s Cosmographia is contradictory “because she creates cohesion between intelligible and sensible beings that are also distinct; because she connects celestial spheres with bodies that have terrestrial connections; and because she associates bodies and souls at different levels of individuality” (458). Her contradictions derive from the problem of linking the infinite to the finite, the immutable to the mutable, the eternal to the perpetuity of form amid the inexorable winding of individual from emergence to individual death.

The problem is occasioned by both needing and making this bridge from the Good, which Bernard coyly names “Tugaton” (99; see 290 n3), to the lowliest terrestrial being. This problem is not solved by either Genesis narrative. God in the Eden narrative is manifestly not otherworldly; undying and knowledgeable yes, but not perfect, and driven, like us, by nervousness about his own status. God in the first narrative just does what he does, and makes us in his image, without any sense of how this divine connects to the world he made, without anything, that is, but his unmotivated action and satisfaction at his work.

Bernard’s Cosmographia offers a superior creation story because it roots itself in neo-Platonism, in philosophy rather than myth, and because it knows that the goodness of creation is an order of goodness quite different from that of God. In brief, and in brief as to whether Neo-Platonism is an actual thing, Neo-Platonism expands on Platonism’s inherent championing of the disembodied over the embodied, and its promise in, especially, the Phaedo, that the disembodied soul will return to unchanging perfection by concocting strata of deputies to enbridge the infinite and finite. The Good retains its perfection by being only a source of outflowing emanation for the world below but by otherwise being uninvolved, cushioned by its own infinite goodness from any of the faults of actually existing creation.

With due respect to Lamy, whose publications witness to her being at least a leading scholar of the Cosmographia, I do think she could go further in her attention to contradiction. My route to that is through Steven Swarbrick’s The Earth is Evil, published very recently in the University of Nebraska Press’s Provocations series. It’s a slim book with psychoanalytic readings of ecofilms, extending and intensifying the arguments of Swarbrick’s co-written Negative Life, whose introduction we read earlier this semester.

Here’s a bit of Swarbrick, who, not incidentally for us, is a faculty member at Baruch:

The crucial idea of ecotheory is that we are all connected. I accept this “all” and take it one step further. We are all connected by the lack we share. In this, I cleave the “all” of ecocriticism from itself, making it “not-all” in Lacan’s psychoanalytic idiom. (24)

As Swarbrick goes on to explain, the not-all is a term that derives from set theory. Any set can be complete only if it includes everything in it and something outside itself, namely, the term or concept or system of order or recognition that defines the set. The organizing principle of the set must be included too. You cannot have a set of all “men” without including, within it, the concept of “masculinity,” which requires still more indexing of the controlling term, and so on to the impossible infinite. Nature itself, Swarbrick argues, should be understood this way:

We are, according to Lacan’s paradoxical logic, never fully inside the set of all natural existents. But neither are fully outside it. Instead, we in-exist our ecological entanglements. The set of all beings includes an outside, a hole that can never be made a member. (26)

Nature carries with it its own outside, in other words. The complete set also includes its own incompletion. Bernard gives this incompletion a name, Silva, that chaos that preexists even Yle. It is chaos that yearns to be bounded (11), but, despite the ministrations of Nature, despite the frequent and to my mine desperate references to Silva being tied up, constrained, bounded (eg 71, 85, “strong hand against unruliness”), Silva remains inextricably evil (153). Nature’s attempt to include everything is what throws it off, for Nature is both a regulatory principle and a set encompassing everything below the level of divinity itself. These two aims work against each other.

Of course fantasies of wholeness do abound in Bernard. He wants to have things work. Death, we are told, does not exist. It’s just motion, the fall of an individual whose materials will be reformed into something else (67, 131). We are told that “the universe is a continuum, a chain in which nothing is out of order or broken off. Thus roundness, the perfect form, determines its shape” (71).

Against this wholeness we have particularity. The fish and the birds and the terrestrial creatures all exist in their own way, each in its own place and with its own way of life. They belong to themselves, we might say, while not coming in contact with each other. But what do we do, for example, with the ape, “a deformed image, a man of degenerate nature” (47) – that word, degenerantis, suggests something unborn, or in the process of otherwise returned to chaos. What do we do with Saturn, a story retold from myth, his mania for devouring children? (101) What should be done with Mercury, responsible for creating “epicene and sexually indeterminate beings, and hermaphrodites of bicorporeal shape” (111)?

Particularity means the impossible inclusion of the outside in the inside. Silva’s boundless generation is not just what was there before Nature arrived. It is in Nature too. The Set includes its own contradiction, the stain of the not-all that stymies any hope at getting at an imagined before of Natural wholeness. The Cosmographia, I would say, is an anti-nostalgia machine.

One last thought: the problem of reproduction and pleasure. We have encountered this every time semester we encountered Nature. We have met Peter Damian’s horror at the misguided sodomite, putting off their mastery by looking for sex in the wrong places; Alan of Lille’s outrage at sodomy as a solecistic melding of the active case with active case; the Roman de la Rose‘s image of Nature as a ceaseless worker, bound to try to stay ahead of death, trying to get it done with the assistance of an unruly Venus; and only with Cleanness do we get something like a championing of pleasure itself, with reproduction left as a side-effect of our inherent urge to seek out bodily joy in its highest forms, necessarily, for Cleanness, in non-sodomitic conjunctions.

But we have pleasure even here, at one of the earliest witnesses of this lineage of Nature personified. We need not wait for Cleanness. For in the creation of Man we have, very late, the praise of touch, the lowest sense, which

campaigns in bed, serves the cause of tender love, and is fond of slyly exploring the smooth belly below the modest breast, or the soft thigh of the virginal body. (177)

This is about pleasure, certainly, but if it’s about reproduction, it’s only distantly so. Reproduction comes just a little later, on how the loins “fight unconquered against death” (179), so the “phallus” – mentula, perhaps better translated simply as “penis” – wars against Lachesis, to rejoin the vital threads severed by the hands of the Fates” (181).

We can observe, first, the rather single-sexed model of sexual congress on offer here. We can observe too that the pleasure of touch stands at some remove from what the mentula does. The hand is on the outside, enjoying itself, driven by its desire from pleasure, and therefore only in part in control of what it does, but not arriving at its supposed goal of reproduction. The hand in itself cannot do that. Here the hand just caresses, a touch that reproduces nothing but still more touch. Below that, literally, is a mentula whose acts and purpose seem severed from pleasure, given over to the goal of making more of itself, without knowing why.

Desire and duty stand apart to advance the works of Nature, works that always thrum with the irrepressible evil of Silva, a stain of the Real, whose stain remains even when Silva is shaped, for a time, into an individual, because individuality too is a stain. Both the One and the any-given-one are radically off-kilter. Nature’s (not) in it.