Chapter III
New Worlds
Renovations, Restorations, Transmigrations
History unfolds, in the prophetic tradition, by dint of a dialectical oscillation between becoming and overcoming, declension and regeneration, lapse and redemption, dis-grace and grace. The Elohist, or Jahwist, record moves from catastrophe and chastisement to antistrophe and hopeful expectation. This is the dialectical lurching that traces, as well, the progress of the New World's historical plot. "Any history written on Christian principles," R. G. Collingwood noted, "will be of necessity universal, providential, apocalyptic, and periodized."[1] The most hopeful soundings, it would appear, are taken at depths of bathos. The millenarian movements certainly bear out the crises-driven course of prophetically based strides. Historians and anthropologists as ideologically diverse as Norman Cohn and Peter Worsley concur on this point.[2]
The renovatio mundi about which Marselio Ficino wrote to his friend Paul of Middelburg in 1492 proclaiming the arrival of the Age of Gold has something inescapably suggestive in its timing for students of the American New World, though those resonances may well have been outside Ficino's Platonist humanism at the threshold of the Renaissance.[3] The Renaissance as a whole and not only Ficino's, of course, is yet another face of the irrepressible human impulse for cosmic regeneration. In this sense,
the Renaissance, like the Reformation, is as much a culmination of Medieval Europe's apocalyptic drive toward a new dispensation as it is the product of Antiquity's rediscovery. The plenitudo temporum is certainly as real for Savonarola as it is for his fellow Florentine Ficino. And although Savonarola's dire Jeremiad echoes from the depths of prophetic anxiety and his contemporary Ficino's optimistic tidings proclaim the felicitous dawning of a Golden Age, both coincide in the annunciation of an imminent new era and a new world. The woeful apocalypticism of the eschatologist and the cheerful prognosis of the Platonist-Cabbalist are focused on the advent of a renewal and the redemption of a historical time whose nadir, or apotheosis, made the dawning of a new status inevitable.
Evangelical regeneration has had a clockwork periodicity in Christian history. Pauline theology, as we have seen in our previous discussion, programs self-overcoming, or movement beyond the individual and communal here-and-now, into the course of history's unfolding. Starting with the third century, reformation becomes a concomitant of renovation and the degree of zeal with which renovation is undertaken differentiates often the orthodox from the heretical. Renewal's enthusiasm may well be the most common element that binds heterodox impulses with the orthodox mainstream. It is the commonality that would bring, for example, Cardinal Ximénez de Cisneros, Spain's patron of the late fifteenth-, early sixteenth-century Catholic Reformation, face-to-face with such radical eschatologists as Charles de Bovalles. The cardinal and royal confessor—and zealous, some might say fanatical, crusader of Granada—of course, was also the avid promoter at court of Christopher Columbus, that other apocalyptic enthusiast who obsessively prophesied more than one kind of New World and Golden Age via the cosmogonic imagism of Pierre d'Ailly, the prophetic mirror of Joachim of Fiore, and the spiritual order this Calabrian's legacy spawned throughout the Middle Ages.
The prototypes of prophetic enthusiasm for renovatio were the third-century Novatians, also known by their Greek name of caqaroi (katharoi), a name whose literal English translation,
"Puritans," would be derisively given to the most avid restorationists of the Protestant Reformation. Their pilgrimage would wend its way not only to a renewed world, but to a transoceanic New World. Europe's new-worlding tradition is of a continuous weave, tightly knit with skeins of prophetic apocalypticism that bind Novatian zeal, Joachimite arithmetic, orthodox eschatology, Reformationist enthusiasm, and Humanist expectation. The shape of this Humanist expectancy, of course, antedates Ficino's Renaissance Platonism. As we have seen in our first chapter, renovatio as eschatological necessity programmed by Providential history and its apocalyptic promise already subsumes Antiquity's periodic restoration of the cosmos by the third century. And by the time of Origen, Christian eschatology goes by the technical term apocatastasiz , the Stoic's astral periodicity and cosmic restoration .
The hemisphere's western continent that woke up one morning in 1492 to a trinity of caravels at its shores would become the New World, an objective correlative of Europe's new-worlding zeal, an antitype to its typology, a realization of Europe's prophetic pilgrimage toward the ends of the End of its enthusiasms. The confounded inhabitants of the new-found world would ultimately end up in the Franciscans' and the Puritans' ledger as "the hidden, final, holy people" of a Golden Age whom the Latin poet Commodianus willed to the Kingdom of heaven on Earth in the fifth century.[4] We shall be examining this appropriative transformation further in due course. Suffice it to say, for now, that the conflated cyclicalism of pagan Antiquity and linear progressivism of prophetic, providential history yoke the renovation implicit in their temporal program to a spatial geographical movement that is analogously cyclical (circumnavigation of the globe by Hugo of St. Victor's westering pilgrimage already discussed) as well as progressive (the movement from a degenerated Old World toward a regenerative New World). This spacio-temporal convergence of the cyclical and the progressive becomes explicitly articulate in one of Renaissance England's most novelty-struck renovators and cosmogonic restorers, as the titles of his labor aver: Instauratio Magna, which includes his projected work as well as
the two parts actually completed, the De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623, expanded version of The Advancement of Learning , 1605), and the Novum Organum (1620). In this Francis Bacon we read:
For although they [the ancients] had knowledge of the antipodes . . . yet that mought be by demonstration, and not in fact; and if by travel, it requireth the voyage but of half the earth. But to circle the earth, as the heavenly bodies do, was not done nor enterprised till these later times: and therefore these times may justly bear in their word . . . plus ultra in precedence of the ancient non ultra . . . . And this proficience in navigation and discoveries may plant also an expectation of the further proficience and augmentation of all sciences, because it may seem that they are ordained by God to be coevals, that is, to meet in one age. For so the prophet Daniel, speaking of latter times foretelleth, Plurimi pertransibut, et multiplex erit scientia: as if the openness and through-passage of the world and the increase of knowledge were appointed to be in the same ages.[5]
The periodic, cyclical renovatio of the ancients becomes displaced, then, from its immutable circumscription of non ultra to a plus ultra of circumnavigation. Once the providentially ordained transit through the "openness and through-passage of the world" is negotiated in "these later times," as Bacon's prophet Daniel typologically adumbrates, new-worlding becomes tantamount to other-worlding. Francis Bacon, early precursor of our progressively unbounded scientific modernity, as sensibility of his historical moment, is also the belated child of the devotio moderna and its restorative innovation preparatory for the imminently anticipated other world of eschatology's plus ultra . What Bacon refers to as "these later times" are indeed times belated in multifarious senses. In one of these, Bacon emerges as the precocious and prescient augur of a cultural complex that will subsume the multiplicity of the plurimi pertransibut et multiplex scientia into its insatiable exuberance and rage: the Baroque of the seventeenth century. Yet, straddling as he does the centurial threshold, Bacon is also very much an epigone, a latecomer to what he calls "these later times," these being not only the apocalyptic end-times of prophecy's eschatology but also the epoch of a belated Renais-
sance in England that, as earlier in Italy, Spain, and other European countries, comprises multiple impulses that are at once anachronistically coeval and symbiotically antithetical. After all, the pagan Renaissance of classical Humanism is itself a discovery, albeit inadvertent, as is the wont of discoveries with greatest repercussion, a discovery precipitated, ironically, by orthodoxy's Christian zeal for the restorative conservancy of a disordered order. It was on 8 February 1438 that the Byzantine emperor and his numerous retinue arrived in Venice seeking the succor of the Roman West against the threatening Ottomans, bringing along the promissory tidings of a reunited Christendom divided since 1054. The Greek contingent was received by the Greek-named Roman pontiff Eugenius IV, himself and the papacy being under siege by a reformation-minded Council at Basel a hundred years before Luther. Eugenius IV, already declared "the Beast of the Apocalypse" by the Bishop of Prague and the leaders of the Hussite revolt, put the best face on his predicament to receive the Greeks at Ferrara. There, the plague of theological punditry, joined after eight months by the incurable and sempiternal plague itself that Thomas Mann would still be novelizing in our own era, forced the Council to accept Cosimo de Medici's invitation to Florence (1439). All the emperor's Trojans and all the pope's men, as history proved, could not put what was sundered together again. But more than one historian dates the birth of what is a rebirth, Latinately called the Renaissance, from that influx of learned Hellenism into the Medicis' Florence. And Marselio Ficino, himself possessed of a multiplex scientia that gleefully conjoined Plato, the Jewish Cabbala, and Hermes Trismegistus, would pun with renascent alacrity: "I have two fathers. The corporeal to whom I owe my birth [nascimento], and Cosimo de Medici, to whom I owe my rebirth [renascimento]." Ficino's quip would not escape Erasmus's perspicuity. Roterdam's reformminded Latinist would rebaptize pagan Humanism's Renaissance by subsuming Ficino's born-again enthusiasm into that Christi philosophia that resonates so unmistakably, as Marcel Bataillon has so voluminously documented,[6] in Spain's Catholic Reformations and in England's Puritan restorations. Erasmus will query in
his Paraclesis: "Quid autem aliud est Christi philosophia , quam ipse renascentiam vocat , quam instauratio bene condite naturae? [What is the Christi philosophia but a renaissance, a renovation of nature as it was created?]."[7] With one inquisitive stroke, Erasmus not only baptizes Ficino's Humanist Renaissance, but he also naturalizes it. The renovatio mundi , thus, passes as matter of course into the nature of things, as much inevitable and as intense a desideratum as the renasci denuo the perplexed Nicodemus hears from the lips of his Messiah (John 3:3–7).
If Cosimo de Medici opened the gates of Florence unto the instauratio of Classical Antiquity, his son, Lorenzo, endeavored to redeem his city from the invective of Florence's most famous and embattled native son, Dante. That fulmination occurs in the opening lines of the Inferno 's Canto XXVI. Suggestively for our purposes, this is the same canto in which Dante condemns Ulysses to the infernal flames for his daring transgression beyond the pillars of Hercules against the ancient admonition inscribed there: Ne plus ultra , a proscription whose violation Francis Bacon applauds in his magnifications and epistemological advancements. Canto XXVI concludes with Ulysses's ship in sight of the only land mass in the boundless sea of the southern hemisphere: the Mount of Purgatory, as history would indeed prove that hemisphere to be for its natives and for many of its conquerors, certainly so for Columbus, its "discoverer." Rather than intending to prophesy the Atlantic's future, however, Dante is cursing the Homeric hero and his ilk for their insatiable curiosity in pursuit of knowing, a curse that inadvertently also augurs the Hellenization of what was for Dante an already cursed Florence at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The Florentine who does prophesy Columbus, even as he seeks to redeem Ulysses in a palinode that might well have been directed at Dante is Luigi Pulci. Pulci's ironic wit and irreverent rendering of epic high seriousness into a romance epic of the people's vernacular as profane, though, perhaps, not as divine, as Dante's, seeks to undo Dante's curse upon Ulysses and those who would venture into the plus ultra . Writing in Laurentian Florence, Pulci works by a different light than Dante's; one could say by a diabolical, Luciferian light. I cite
from Canto XXV of Pulci's Morgante Maggiore . The demon Astarotte, Lucifer's accomplice in rebellion and damnation, a duo not unlike the double flame Ulysses and Diomedes in the incipit of the Inferno 's Canto XXVI, addresses Rinaldo on the interdict of ne plus ultra:
Know that this theory is false; his bark
The daring mariner shall urge far o'er
The western wave, a smooth and level plain
Albeit the earth is fashioned like a wheel
Man was in ancient days of grosser mold,
And Hercules might blush to learn how far
Beyond the limits he had vainly set
The dullest sea-boat soon shall wing her way,
Men shall descry another hemisphere.
Since to one common center all things tend,
So earth, by curious mystery divine
Well balanced, hangs amid the starry spheres.
At our antipodes are cities, states,
And thronged empires, ne'er divined of yore.
But see, the Sun speeds on his western path
To glad the nations with expected light.
Echoes of Hugo of St. Victor's westering pilgrimage resound unmistakably Pulci's "glad" tidings for the unsuspecting world of Europe's antipodes. Pulci completed his poem more than a decade before 1492. Columbus was then still off Guinea sounding and charting Africa's Atlantic coast for King John II, his Portuguese patron to whom, some years earlier, in a letter of 25 June 1474, another Florentine, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, had already proposed a shorter way to the land of spices by a western route "than that which you are making by Guinea."[8] Six years after Columbus's successful return from his first voyage beyond the pillars of Hercules, the Morgante Maggiore will figure among the cursed objects Savonarola's Lenten youth brigades commit to the pyre in the Piazza della Signoria on the final day of Carnival, 7 February 1498. Just over three months later, 23 May, Savonarola himself will be consumed by flames in the same Piazza. His prophetic legacy and apocalyptic zeal will outdistance Lorenzo's Humanism in the history of Florence and of Western
Europe. (Every year until 1703, on the morning of 23 May, the Piagnoni, Savonarola's party of lamentations, will scatter flowers in the spot of the fiery friar's immolation.) Lorenzo de Medici and Savonarola embody the antitheses not only of Florence, but of Renaissance Europe. It is strangely ironic that the secular Humanist should die in the year the eschatologist prophet prophesied that he would and that the year should be 1492. It is suggestive, too, that Lorenzo should have sought the last sacraments and his death-bed absolution from his uncompromising antagonist. Tradition varies as to whether Savonarola did or did not absolve the dying Lorenzo.
For any student of the New World, these vagaries of history are significant precisely because in the race among the multiple impulses of the Prophet Daniel's Baconian plurimi pertransibut that dashed toward the New World, Dante overtakes Pulci, Savonarola overtakes Lorenzo de Medici, and Luther's revolution outruns the revolutions of Copernicus. And, even though the prophetic and providentialist ethos endures all manner of chastisement in the experiential reality of its New World encounter, ultimately, the ideological scaffolding that sustains the edifice of explanation and self-sanction for the Old World's enterprise in the New is constructed with the lapidary and scriptural elements of Europe's prophetic tradition and Judeo-Christian mythology. And this is why the most significant manual that guides Columbus in his obsessive project is the spectral and imagistic Imago Mundi of the Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly. Columbus's personal copy contains 898 marginal notations in the Admiral's hand, a relatively preponderant referential base when we consider that the total number of postils Columbus made in all his books amount to 2,125.[9]
Clearly, something in the Imago Mundi compelled Columbus for it to become his fitting vademecum throughout his peregrinations. One suspects it might be because Pierre d'Ailly epitomizes that enchanted blend of Medieval mythos and scientific ethos that, eventually, would naturalize and appropriate the New World and, in doing so, legitimate its own enterprise ad libitum et ad majorem Dei gloriam . Willful righteousness conjures a potent alchemy, and d'Ailly operated with irrepressible energy in a
fourteenth-, fifteenth-century context that demanded as much from a combination of wile and conviction as did Renaissance Europe a half century later. Father Bartolomé de Las Casas, in the second chapter of his Historia de las Indias, notes that d'Ailly,
great theologian, philosopher, mathematician, astrologer, cosmographer, . . . greatly influenced Columbus and confirmed all the past . . . I believe that among those of the past, this doctor moved Christopher Columbus the most towards his enterprise; the book [Imago Mundi ] . . . was so familiar to Christopher Columbus, that all of it did he note and mark on the margins, writing there many things that he read and collected from others. This very old book many times did I have in my hands, taking from it a number of things written in Latin by the Admiral.[10]
As the sixteenth-century Dominican father notes, d'Ailly "confirms the past" for Columbus, a confirmation of the past the mariner takes toward the future and the plus ultra of its New Worlds.
Like the Medioaevum and the Renaissance that he straddled, then, Columbus's innovative impulse derives its sanction and impetus from a "confirmation of the past." Reformation is in good measure a confirmation and not just in the lexical semantics implied by the recursivity of the terms renovatio and restauratio . Through Pierre d'Ailly, Columbus is the beneficiary of a modernity that consciously termed itself as such and that, like all programs and ethoi of modernisms, exhibits a progressive movement whose vanguard is bound by an ineluctible continuity to the past. I refer to the mid-fourteenth-century Ockhamist school of philosophy at Oxford that called itself the via moderna, after Abélard's designation of the conceptualism he practiced three hundred years earlier, and to the devotio moderna, also of the mid- to late fourteenth century, practiced by the Brethren of Common Life at Windesheim and Deventer in the Netherlands. Though the legendary razor William of Ockham took to theology in his Centiloquium theologicum, doing Luther five theses better and a century earlier, would find its nominalist tenets put into practice by the devotio moderna, the most famous of the Brethren, Thomas à Kempis, would react against philosophy's pernicious-
ness for the faith by writing his Imitatio Christi . Inadvertently, of course, Kempis was confirming that threatening differentiation the Franciscan William of Ockham aimed to reintroduce between philosophical and theological truths, between reason and faith.
D'Ailly journeyed to Deventer as papal legate to the Germanic people in 1413 and spoke in defense of the Brethren of the Common Life. His support and encouragement, in fact, led to the first written constitution of the devotio moderna, a constitution whose preamble acknowledges d'Ailly by name, inasmuch as the document "has been approved . . . and confirmed by Peter d'Ailly, cardinal of Cambray."[11] As for the Cardinal's Ockhamism, the opportunistic pragmatism that he practiced certainly attests to his command over contingency. It confirms his terminist harmonization with the contingent at the peril of the transcendent and the universal. His conciliar politics in an age wracked by papal schism found d'Ailly always ahead. And though he would have few friends in his ever-climbing career, he certainly influenced many people and maximized the return on the clericy of his diplomatic investments, at one point holding as many as fourteen benefices. Eschewing constancy for mutability, he denied papal infallibility and rejected, too, the immutable nature of conciliar judgments. Freed from theoretical imperatives of the universal, he translated nominalist philosophy into opportune practice of the particular. His own success is an articulate monument to the efficacy of the experiential. Able to transfer Ockham's razor from the slippery epistemologies of pure to the expedient empiricism of practical reason three centuries before Hobbes and Locke, d'Ailly emerged at once as equivocal and richly ambiguous embodiment of the nominalist via moderna and of the equally experiential devotio moderna . That the first aimed at the efficacious undoing of generality's universals, thus leading to a convivio with the complex and its unpredictable contingencies, and that the second, the devotio moderna, sought a return to primitive simplicity of an early and uncomplicated Christian ethos did not daunt the Cardinal. Nor did these contradictions prove daunting to his avid acolyte Christopher Columbus, who incarnated these ambivalences with willful conviction.
If dogma be what makes for self-righteousness, righteousness is the mechanism by which contradictions are dissolved and one's worldly actions find their justification; and self-justification, in turn, is the surest venue to legitimacy for one's faithful conviction. The circularity of this process did not deter the circumspect d'Ailly, nor would it discomfit Columbus or dispirit his conquering and colonizing progeny in the New World, whether Spiritual Franciscan or enthusiastic Puritan. Living as we are today in an age that we designate postmodern, either through the insight of lucidity or the mystification of delusion (or, more likely, both), we can discern that the cutting edge of nominalism's via moderna and the edgy zeal of a renascent primitive Christianity's devotio moderna comprise a double-edged ideological contrivance whose thrust would open up a New World for the world's irrepressible urge for renovatio . In this sense, our American New World is a congenitally modernist project whose impetus, pace our protestations and rhetorical postures, has yet to play itself out or abate into cultural or ideological exhaustion. The drive to "make it new" and the geographic possibilities of a plus ultra or manifest destiny may be circumscribed by the planetary horizon already overtaken. But the ideological, which is also to say rhetorical, space remains as vast and as righteously claimed as ever. The via moderna, transmigrated to a New World of its yearned-for experience, has become transmogrified into a new and expedient nominalism that views experience as terminist and as language, that is to say, as rhetorical figuration, and sees linguistic nomination as de terministic of experience. The devotio moderna, however, may no longer proffer the charity of its primitive simplicity sought after by the born-again puritanism of its early practitioners, but we certainly have no lack of what Valéry would call our terribles simplificateurs whose righteousness, libidinal and evangelical, sustains ideologies and rhetorics that justify political, economic, and territorial mastery, law and order, dictatorial left- and right-wing righteousness, and imperial hubris in hemispheric affairs. The New World, as the Old World's modernist legacy, then, seems inalienably linked to that providential history of prophetic and eschatological zeal that found and founded a transoceanic terrain
to domesticate and bend to the willful and purposive ends of its progressivist pilgrimage. The via moderna and the devotio moderna would eventuate equally in Spain's Catholic renovation and in trans-Alpine Europe's Protestant Reformation. Both, in turn, would serve in conquering a geographical New World as objective correlative and confirmation of the righteous justification of each. The Catholic conquest would see the New World as compensatory terrain for the ground lost to the Ottoman expansion, whereas in Reformationist Europe, Protestant Puritanism would translate America into the theological, that is to say, ideological and rhetorical, concomitant of a renovatio that assured a worldly space for other-worldly ends. Columbus, of course, embodies both projects as primal precursor and wayward pilgrim.
The haunting ambivalence that bedevils Columbus's ends and means will resonate as damning ambiguity in the means and ends of Europe's project to conquer and save the New World. The Admiral's Christological devotion to the primitivist church tenets of the devotio moderna have been amply documented by Alain Milhou in his compendious Colón y su mentalidad mesianica en el ambiente franciscanista español .[12] His experiential, worldly pragmatism is virulently emphasized, not without some spleen, by Ramón Iglesias.[13] There is ample evidence in Columbus's acts and writings to sustain both Milhou and Iglesias and their respective modes of seeing enterprising Europe's primal entrepreneur in the New World. The reduction of this ambivalent precursor to one or other term of his complexity would border on intellectual penury. There is, indeed, something maniacal about Columbus and his drivenness. In this sense, he is prototype and epitome of the renovatio mundi that in the New World finds its terminist nomination as end-oriented modernism: an impetus driving and driven by ends that admit of no disorientation, even when, as in Columbus's case, the purported orient it has as its object proves to be an unprevisioned occident. One could read Columbus in this regard as our first line "Orientalist" of colonial empire after Marco Polo. The provisions made by Providential grace suffice in Columbus's case to countermand any empirical obstacle or contingency. Thus, even though Columbus is thoroughly infected, via d'Ailly,
with the experiential pragmatism of the via moderna 's Ockhamist nominalism, its contagion does not suffice to disabuse him of the devotio moderna 's ideological determinations that suffuse his providentialist and eschatological enthusiasms. In this dual and duplicitous sense, Columbus is our prototypical New World modernist: he is suspicious but not self-suspecting. And in this regard, he is as much forefather to missionary conquerors of Catholic Iberia as he is to conquering missionaries of Puritan England. For the object of Columbus's suspicion is the "universalist" science of an old Scholasticism whose doxology, hardened into orthodoxy, proscribed any aperture to worlds beyond the syllogistic "realism" of its doctrinal ratiocinations. Acolyte of nominalist modernity, Columbus claims to trust, instead, in the simpler practicalities of experience. And, as inspired devotee of a simpler faith, he entrusts his project to a "spiritual intelligence" of divine election rather than to doctrinal erudition of the Salamanca "doctores" who kept him waiting, only to dismiss his proposed enterprise with scholarly indecision. In his mistrust of Platonist "realism" and doctrinal orthodoxy, Columbus prefigures, with expedient practicality, the conquering hordes his accomplishment would unleash onto the New World. In his simpler, devotional spirituality, he is in synchrony with the Spiritual Franciscans who often succored him and with the primitive Christianity of those latterday Novatians, the Puritans, who would feel as elect in their vocation and New-World errand as Columbus himself. It is with an acute sense of vindication that Columbus writes to the Spanish sovereigns on 13 September 1501 a letter probably never sent, but included in the Admiral's Book of Prophecies, reminding Their Highnesses of the seven years, both real and symbolic, that he spent waiting the pleasure of the "authorities" only to be left suspended by endless deliberations that never did arrive at a final decision, thereby proving the professors' academic qualifications, as Daniel Boorstin knowingly puts it.[14] But God's will, Columbus notes, would not be denied, nor could what was prophesied in the scriptures of the prophets.[15] And a year later, in a letter of 2 June 1502, Columbus would remind the sovereigns of the primacy of "divine intelligence" and individual experience over the doctrines
of doctoral science: "Allegamos más grande enseñanza de aquello que deprendemos por nuestra propia espirenzia [We derive greater knowledge from that which we learn by our own experience]."[16]
His own declarations notwithstanding, Columbus's nominalism was rendered nominal by an irrepressible realism that colored his vision and plagued his obsession.[17] And although he claimed to eschew learned abstractions and doctrinal universals in favor of experience and contingency, he would, in fact, be upstaged by the most contingent of coincidences (literally nominalist, in this case) that rendered his pilgrimage a symptom of the via antiqua rather than a venture to new horizons through a via moderna . In this peripety, his unsuspecting antagonist would be yet another Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci, and yet one more academic, Martin Waldseemüller, whose studies at the University of Freiburg perverted his geographical interests with poetic contagion and philological obsessions. I shall explain.
If the prophetic tradition rests on the visionary and on the insight of prophets into provisions made by Wonder-Working Providence for the purposive history of its chosen people, prophecy and prophesying ultimately derive from nomination, from what is said and the language of what is said. A prophet, then, is by etymology a "nominalist" in this sense, literally one who speaks before, a
determinations. And prophecy, of course, emerges as the indispensable instrument of necessary conveyance. This is why in his Book of Prophecies Columbus would pursue a compendium that gave his achievements the providential sanction of inevitability, attributing all his accomplishments thereby to prophetic injunction—"para le hesecuçión de la ynpresa de las Yndias ne me aprovechó rasón, ni matemática, ny mapamundos; llenamente se cunplió lo que diso Ysayas [in carrying out the enterprise of the Indies, I was served neither by reason, nor by mathematics, nor by world map; simply, what Isaiah said was fulfilled]."[18]
As I have intimated already, the true prize of nominalist contingency and of the peripeties of language would go not to Columbus but to Amerigo Vespucci; and the demiurge of that benefaction is the playful and plotting scrivener Martin Waldseemüller. If the universalist realism of necessity has its necessary and sufficient reason, happenstance contingency makes no less sense of the insensate turns fate visits on history. Unlike Vespucci, Columbus had an investment in a cosmological order whose ideological entailments proscribed the divestiture of received notions. Despite his claims in favor of individual, pragmatic experience, Columbus saw his own acts as prescripted by sacred prophecy and pagan augury alike. I have already noted that his compilation of a book of prophecies was precisely a way of assuring that this was the case, a reaching after a legitimacy grounded on scripture's and augury's venerable time, a time whose fullness had come and whose culmination is to be wrought by his own achievement. More of a Platonist, really more of a messiah, than an Aristotelian in this regard, Columbus never managed to move beyond cosmography and into geography. The cosmos he discerned was for him the one already graphed and ideologically charted. Whether in the Cathay or Cipangu of Medieval territoriality, or in the sacred terrain of the prophetic and eschatological New World, Columbus knew himself to be exploring the far and farthest shores of a cosmography already emplotted. The passage from cosmography into geography is brooked by Vespucci.
Unlike the Trinitarian and laic Tertiary Columbus, Vespucci could be called a "tertrarchist" because of his four voyages to
what he claimed, and so managed in his four letters to convince the world, was a fourth and as yet unknown part of the geographical orbis terrarum . Though in his first letter (18 July 1500), believed to have been destined for Lorenzo di Pier Francesco de Medici, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent who succeeded him in 1492, Amerigo Vespucci still speaks of his first voyage having taken him "to a land which might be bounded by the eastern parts of Asia,"[19] by his third letter (1502) to his Florentine patron, he writes unequivocally of his third voyage: "In effect, my navigation extended to a fourth part of the world."[20] Shortly after, in that most widely disseminated compendium of his four voyages entitled Mundus Novus, Vespucci speaks with the self-assurance of one who knows he has revolutionized the world. In the meantime, Columbus, now in his fourth and final voyage, still speaks of Cathay, of the "Indies," and of being only nineteen days sailing from the River Ganges.[21] Imperial Spanish officialdom, because it suited its colonial interests, was already well under way in the institutionalization of such a nomenclature through councils, houses of trade, and governing bodies, all of which contained "Indies" in their titles.[22] Clearly, imperial and colonial interests had very high stakes in mercantile expansion to an already known, but as yet not accessed, Asiatic world. It is revealing, in this regard, that by 1535 official historians such as G. Fernández de Oviedo, Emperor Charles's official "Chronicler of the Indies," would render the history of the New World in such a way as to banish all claims by Columbus and his heirs to any rights of discovery. What was "discovered," according to Oviedo, were the Hesperides, ancient kingdom of the Hispanic king Hésperos and, therefore, these were no new lands at all but old Spanish territories recovered (Historia general y natural de las Indias, Bk. II. chap. 3; Bk. XXIX. chap. 30). Hernando Colón, Columbus's son, may have undertaken his history of his father in part as a response to Oviedo and other official historians. In this sense, too, one notes a strong coincidence between imperial goals and orthodox ideology. The idea of as-yet-unknown parts of the world was a subject of debate with which the Church fathers had little patience. And, even though St. Augustine did grant the possi-
bility of the earth's sphericity, the existence of antipodes was deemed absurd, and the matter of their being inhabited was ruled out of the question (De Civitate Dei, bk. XVI, chap. 9). Amerigo Vespucci was not ignorant of that interdiction, a familiarity he knew himself to share with his fellow Florentine Dante, whom he cites on more than one occasion, most notably in his first letter. In his 1504 Lettera to Piero Soderini, Vespucci would recall, "If I remember rightly, I have read in some one that he held that the Ocean Sea was devoid of inhabitants, and of this opinion was Dante, our poet, in the twenty-sixth chapter of the Inferno, where he invents the death of Ulysses."[23] But, in the already mentioned and slightly earlier Mundus Novus, Vespucci writes with the adamancy of a man whose conviction is founded on experience:
Those new regions which we found and explored, we might rightly call a new world. Because our ancestors had no knowledge of them, and it will be a matter wholly new to all those who hear about them. For this transcends the view held by our ancients, inasmuch as most of them hold that there is no continent to the south beyond the equator, but only the sea which they named the Atlantic; and if some of them did aver that a continent there was, they denied with abundant argument that it was a habitable land. But that this their opinion is false and utterly opposed to the truth, this my last voyage has made manifest; for in those southern parts I have found a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa.[24]
In this ternary enumeration, Vespucci leaves no doubt but that the Mundus Novus of his voyages is a non-Asiatic, non-Indic fourth continent of the world.
The debate on the authenticity of Amerigo Vespucci's voyages, on the truthfulness of his claims, and on the seemliness of his character is as voluminous as it is acrimonious. The controversy may antedate even Father Bartolomé de Las Casas who, already in the decade following Vespucci's death vilifies the Florentine for having usurped the rightful claims of the Genoese Columbus on the priority of discovery and on the nomination of the hemisphere. The good father's arguments still resonate in our time,
having been assured their perpetuity by such distinguished scholars as Martín Fernández de Navarette (Vajes 3:322) and Alexander von Humboldt (Géographie du Nouveau Continent 4:267). Ralph Waldo Emerson's indictment is as splenetic, and as arguable, as Las Casas's acid garrulity on the subject:
Strange . . . that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle-dealer at Seville . . . whose highest naval rank was boatswain's mate in an expedition that never sailed, managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name.[25]
The dispute lies beyond our purview, and I do not wish to venture into its particulars here. There is something compelling, something inescapably intriguing, however, in the very possibility that those who claim Vespucci was a fraud might be right. One is tempted to wish that it were, indeed, so, for the continent then would truly coincide in nominalist peripety with that "Ghostland" that Nathaniel Hawthorne descried in our earlier discussion as a phantom continent that lies "beyond the jurisdiction of veracity." Thus, we would be inhabiting a utopia more u-topic than the trope of Thomas More's wildest dreams, dreams whose contents were in large part conditioned by his reading of Amerigo Vespucci through Waldseemüller's Cosmographia Introductio and Peter Martyr's De Orbe Novo, and whose hero, Raphael Hythlodaeus, is portrayed as a mariner who sailed in three of Vespucci's four voyages. Tempting as that scenario may be, a more consensual version would have it that the terminist heterodoxies of a nominalism that at once attracted and bedeviled Columbus may have been responsible for giving linguistic and a continental name to his prophetic New World, thereby perverting its apocalyptic vocation and derailing its eschatological march toward the providential ends for which it was intended. Fraudulent or otherwise, Amerigo Vespucci becomes nominally contingent and unsuspectingly incidental in an impish game of philological boutades that a certain clergyman by the name of Waldseemüller set off and the cartographer Mercator completed
some thirty years later. For the playful nomination the first tags onto the southern half of the newfound continent in 1507, the latter would casually extend to the northern half as well in 1538.
Amerigo Vespucci's first name extends back a number of generations on his genealogical family tree. It took a philological punster and his group of poetic revelers to appreciate the possibilities of the name within the context of geographical and cartographic punditry. This was the group of Saint Díe that the Duke of Lorraine, Renaud II of Vaudemon, gathered in his duchy at the turn of the sixteenth century. The canon of the little town in the Vosges Mountains, Martin Waldseemüller, and his poetic friends organized a learned society, the Gymnasium Vosgiensis, whose activities extended to the founding of a printing press in 1500, financed by the wealthy canon Walter Lud, for the publication of their cartographic and poetical works. A ludic crew they were, indeed, and somewhat prone to fascination with novelty. Engaged in the preparation of a new edition of Ptolemy that was to initiate their press, they chanced upon a printed copy of a French treatise with the title of "Four Voyages." Enchanted by their discovery, the Gymnasts of Saint Díe turned from Ptolemy to the compelling new world that threatened to undo their Ptolemaic charts. Their product is the Cosmographia Introductio, a 103-page recapitulation of received geographical wisdom, now galvanized by the stirring news of a mundus novus that captured their imagination: "We have thus been induced," they confess, "to compose, upon the subject of this region of a newly discovered world, a little work not only poetic but geographical in its character ."[26] I emphasize the final phrase of their statement, because this is perhaps the first and most overt instance in which the New World geography becomes conjugated not only with the prophetic but also with the poetic. And although "poetic" connoted "inventive," "novel," "ingenious" for their Renaissance diction, the imaginary would become hardened into reality, and nominalist contingency into inexorable universal nomination. No member of the group was as language-struck as Martin Waldseemüller who, cursed with a last name that hopelessly resisted Latinization into classical cognomen, he forged for himself
the Greco-Latin name of Hylacomylus with which to sign his publications. The forged authorial name is a composite of the German etymons in Waldseemüller—wood, lake, mill—translated into Greek (the first and third terms), and Latin (the middle term), Hy-laco-milus . Anyone with Waldseemüller's philological penchant would clearly see the possibilities of the coincidence between the emergence of a New World and the etymological scansions that resonated in the name of who, for him, was its "discoverer." And resonate they did, for Waldseemüller notes on at least three occasions (chaps. 5, 7, and 9) in the Cosmographia Introductio that no name would be more appropriate for this "fourth part [of the earth which] has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci" than the name of the discoverer: "Inasmuch as both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I see no reason why anyone should justly object to calling this part Amerige, i.e., the land of Amerigo, or America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability." I am translating from the 25 April 1507 edition (the second) of the Cosmographia 's chapter 9. Here is the key passage, often referred to, but seldom read, in full:
Nunc vero et hae partes sunt latius lustrate, et alia quarta pars per Americum Vesputium (vt in sequentibus audietur) inuenta est, quam non video cur quis iure vetet ab Americo inuentore sagacis ingecnij viro Amerigen quasi Americi terram, sisve Americam dicendam: cum et Europa et Asia a mulieribus sua sortita sint nomina. Eius situm et gentis mores ex bis binis Americi nauigationibus quae sequuntur liquide intelligi datur.[27]
[Now that these regions are truly and amply explored, and another fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be heard later), I do not see why anyone can prohibit its being given the name of its discoverer Amerigo, wise man of genius, Amerigen, that is, land of Amerigo, in other words America, since Europe and Asia also took their names from women. Its location and customs of its people can be known easily in the account of Amerigo's four voyages that follow.]
No one could see any reason to reject Waldseemüller's proposal and, perchance, everyone did see the negative reasoning and ironic twist in his rhetorical poetics. Inasmuch as his nomina-
tive ratiocination is founded on gender, Waldseemüller's logic had a problem, since Amerigo the Florentine macho mariner would not seem to conform to the precedent in naming Europe and Asia.[28] Declining the name into the genitive case, however, had the simultaneous effect of feminizing the name's final syllable, thereby grounding Hylacomylus's reasoning on more solid foundation. "Ge," after all, happens to be mother earth herself whose telluric body is the very terrain on which any geographer's fancy inevitably lands. His work being "not only poetic but geographical," Waldseemüller, no doubt, descried, too, the poetic possibilities of the geographical in the nomination. It is in this spirit that I yoked earlier the poetic possibilities of Hawthorne's "Ghostland" and More's u-topia to the real imaginary that Waldseemüller's gamesmanship implies. For Amerige indeed scans as "Amerigo's land" in the genitive and it scans, as well, as the "new land" that is "clear," "bright," "shining," "ever-young," "ever-fair." The root of the Greek adjective ameoigw (amerigo) denotes all of these, and a number of historians have been alert to these etymological implications.[29] However, to my knowledge, no one has yet remarked what may have resonated in the name most ironically for the obsessively etymologizing Waldseemüller. That is the potential of the name to scan as Nowhereland , as u-topia , or Numsquama . If we take the first vowel as privative "a," and the last syllable as genitive suffix and as the word for land ("ge"), we are left with a two-syllable stem etymologically rooted in meros (meooz ), an Aristotelian lexis that translates as "part," "portion," "lot," "share," but also as "place." It is spellbinding to think that the "poetical" métier of Waldseemüller's "geographical" enterprise ironically undermined the very ontology of the new and fourth part of the world even as he was giving it linguistic and cosmographic substance by putting the place on the map. And then, as through a double enchantment that turns on itself, that very nominal inclusion as "Nowhereland" takes on a worldly reality by the time of Mercator, who now (1538) has a corroborated geography, a hard-rock continental mass on whose bipartite land mass he projects the name of "no-place-land"—America.
I rehearse this onomastic peripety (this "most curious paranomasia," the rhetorician in Waldseemüller might quip) by way of reminder that whether through poetic nomination or by prophetic proclamation, the American New World is ultimately a product of a rhetorical ideology, of a nominalist discourse, of linguistic injunction. Anxious for the security of a de terminism that freed historical and imperial claims from the terminist randomness and unpredictabilities of nominalism and its contingencies, the powers that named and claimed the New World as their rightful inheritance by the grace of Providence naturally opted for the discourse of necessity and the rhetoric of prophetic injunction. And, even though the u-topic name "America" would stick, the Ghostland denoted by that nomination would become palpably realized in a transubstantiation with the Holy Ghost of its conquerors' apocalyptic ideology. Thus, the language of eschatological desire and the desired New World that found in America its ironically named object become consubstantial. In the authority of that (mis)deed, Europe's colonizing enterprise finds its justification and derives its sanction, as we shall see more fully in our next chapter. The righteousness of Europe's actions in an appropriated New World taken as "promised land," then, will be deemed as legitimate and as self-legitimating as its rhetoric. In so much self-righteousness, any irony, nominal or otherwise, becomes occluded, submerged, though never eradicated. And, as a result, though American history would cast a long and hard shadow, it is, from the very nominal beginning, the shadow of a poetic and a prophetic tall tale.