Ockham's Razor

The metaphor of medieval heretics and crusaders and inquisitors is not an accidental one. Two years of research into the history and philosophy of technology,⁴ and an earlier holiday spent travelling in the south of France had combined to kindle in me an intense interest in the Middle Ages in that country.

In our histories of human thought and achievement we tend to skip from Greece and Rome to the Renaissance, overlooking the thousand years which saw the development of many of our most enduringly useful technologies - the clock, the plough, the waterwheel, the windmill, the wheelbarrow, the draught horse harness, the stirrup, the printing press - not to mention a highly evolved system of thought and perception that was radically different from our own, and that permeated every level of human existence.

The idea that worthwhile knowledge was to be gained by the accumulation of facts about the things in the world around us, indeed, that those things, ourselves included, had an existence independent of human consciousness and Divine will, was completely alien. The universe was filled with meaning, consciousness and intent, a vast and beautiful cathedral of interdependent hierarchies and we were at the centre of it, in both a physical and a metaphorical sense.

No country or region of Europe was more influential in the evolution of all of this than France. When, in the summer of 1997, I had the opportunity to return there for several weeks, I saw it as a chance to indulge my curiosity about a particularly fascinating episode in medieval history called the Albigensian Crusade, and the subsequent establishment of the infamous Inquisition.

The story of the Albigenses - also called Cathars - and the terrible religious war against them, had haunted me since I'd discovered it on that first visit to the region known as Languedoc in the shadow of the Pyrenees, a half-dozen years earlier. It was a stirring tale of valiant lords and heroic knights resisting intolerance and oppression; of powerful, independent women who shaped both the civil and religious history of their times; of troubadours and the culture of romance; of impossibly virtuous men and women called the Perfect, and the iniquitous machinations of the Inquisition.

I wondered if there might not be a metaphor here for our own time of moral and ethical struggle, one that I might perhaps develop in writing, as my own small contribution to our century's great, unresolved debate surrounding science, technology and spirituality.

The thirteenth-century Cathars, I was willing to believe from my initial contact, had been a beacon of joy and freedom and moral integrity dispelling the gloom of an otherwise corrupt, violent and repressive world. But as I went beyond the potted histories of guide books and travel literature and delved into the vast medieval history holdings of the university, and most of all as I walked the ramparts of the Cathar castles and the streets of medieval settlements and visited the cathedrals of the Catholic orthodoxy, I began to change my mind. I began to see, in fact, that the real meaning of the story was not only more complex than most standard treatments suggest, but that it was almost the reverse of what I had imagined it would be.

The Cathar heresy, I could now see, was in direct line of ancestry with the earliest European stirrings of modernism: that system of thought and imagination that strictly separates the spiritual from the material, and which in its fully evolved form has brought us to our present condition. That "condition" might be described as one in which scientific materialism, or a belief in the autonomous existence of objects in the world, has become more or less as a state-sanctioned religion every bit as intolerant of heresy as was medieval Catholicism, and which successfully promotes the assumptions that what is old is bad, or at least inferior, and that intellectual progress (we do not dare speak of spiritual progress) consists in the endless accumulation of facts .

The Albigensian Crusade was just one small episode in a titanic struggle that engaged the Church throughout the first fifteen hundred years of its existence and beyond. Indeed, it lasted from the time of St. Augustine (AD 354 - 430) in the Dark Ages, up to the ultimate, decisive battle with the forces of materialism as championed by Galileo and the great Newton, who was born the year Galileo died in 1642.

It was the epic struggle against the objectification of the material world, and the resultant alienation of man from God. It was a contest between between two fundamentally different ways of understanding our place in the universe and it reached its climax in the slow transformation of the Age of Faith into the Age of Reason; indeed, it defined that transition.

During the autumn of 1996 and the winter and spring of 1997, as my wife Christine and I made plans for a visit to France, little of the broader significance lurking within the Albigensian episode was suspected by me.

This was a trip we had been planning for years, a gift to our children, Hilary, then seventeen, and Simon, fifteen, and we were focused on the details of how to make it both enjoyable and valuable for them. For better or worse, given the modern dynamics of domestic life, it would probably be our last chance to travel together as a family. It was my good fortune that the history of the Cathars is best explored at the sites of the military outposts and fortified towns where they sought protection in their death struggle, and these are some of the most spectacular travel destinations in France.

And then our prospects for making this a truly memorable journey were given an enormous additional boost by the splendid, unexpected offer of complementary accommodation throughout France from the President of the Relais and Chateaux group of hotels, small country inns, for the most part, which house excellent restaurants serving authentic regional cuisine. These are successful holdovers from a time of more sedate and attentive - more civilized - travel. The trip suddenly took on an entirely new cultural dimension, not to mention a new range of sybaritic possibilities.

And so as Chris and I planned our itinerary we were full of high hopes, tinged only slightly by the resigned forebodings of parents faced with riding herd on a couple of independent-minded teenagers in a foreign country, and the knowledge that this would have to be a working holiday in the professional sense as well.

Rather than leave our home in the country east of Toronto unoccupied, and board the dog and two cats in expensive and uncomfortable accommodations at a kennel, we decided to look for a house-sitter. My student Berkowitz had struck me as someone both trustworthy and in need of a change of scene: we invited him out to dinner and popped the question.

He said, "I haven't spent more than two days outside the city since summer camp. My lungs could spontaneously combust in all that oxygen." He brightened up: "But I guess I could handle it. Anyway, 'caretaker' will look good on my resume - Sharon, my outplacement consultant, says I have to be more flexible if I'm going to be 'marketable.'" He scratched the air with his index fingers to place quotes around the word.

We were set to go.

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