HoP 458 - Outsider Philosophy - The Cheese and the Worms
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Outsider Philosophy, The Cheese and the Worms. If you've listened to the series of podcasts on Africana philosophy that I did together with G.K. Jeffers, then you'll know that one of the major topics we covered is philosophy in oral traditions.

The idea here is that cultures with no tradition of writing may nonetheless be studied from a philosophical point of view by looking at their sayings, folktales, and even the languages they speak. This endeavor, which is sometimes given the label of ethno-philosophy, sparked intense controversy among African philosophers. Some insisted that philosophy can exist only in a context of writing.

Others defended and refined the ethno-philosophical project, and still others suggested alternative approaches, like the sage philosophy paradigm of Henry Odara Uruka, which involved interviewing people from traditional communities who were locally admired for their wisdom.

If you did listen to the relevant episodes, then perhaps you wondered, as I did when I was working on them with Shike, why no one has applied this idea to European cultures. Couldn't we look at the oral traditions of, say, Scandinavia, England, Italy, or Poland, and extract philosophical insights from them just as has been done with the Yoruba, the Akan, and various Bantu peoples?

There are several answers one might give to this question. First and most obviously, less need has been felt to explore oral traditions in cultures that have plenty of written philosophy, whether in Europe, China, or India. Second, and less obviously, the study of written philosophy often turns out to be an exploration of oral culture anyway. Texts like the Confucian Analects and the early Upanishads originated within an oral context and were only later written down.

As for Europe, those debating oral philosophy in Africa have often mentioned that Socrates himself never wrote anything, but pursued philosophy exclusively in the form of conversations, albeit conversations that then inspired the writings of Plato and Xenophon.

In later periods, too, written texts were shaped by the oral encounters that gave rise to them. Just consider the centrality of the "disputation" in scholastic culture, a live debating format that was imitated in such texts as Aquinas' Summa Theologiae. Many scholastics' "writings" are in fact just records of lectures or disputations that took place orally.

A third and final answer to the question would be that some scholars have indeed tried to investigate the ideas that existed within an oral context in Europe. One of the most famous attempts is a book published by Carlo Ginzburg in 1976, originally in Italian. Its title in English translation is The Cheese and the Worms, The Cosmos of a 16th Century Miller.

As Ginsburg explains in his preface, the book had its origins in research he carried out in the early 1960s while exploring the meticulous records kept by the Inquisition. At this point, he was looking into a group of villagers in the Italian province of Friuli, who called themselves the Benandanti, literally do-gooders. They came to the attention of the Inquisition because they used magic to protect their crops and towns from sorcery.

As Ginzburg later commented, the Inquisition had to decide whether the benandanti were well-meaning but religiously confused anti-witches or themselves witches. The written accounts of the trials provided Ginzburg with the chance to reconstruct the benandanti's ideas. This was a marriage of anthropology and history, much as ethno-philosophy was a marriage of anthropology and philosophy.

Ginsburg wanted to look through the window the Inquisition had inadvertently opened onto the beliefs and practices of simple unlettered folk, what he sometimes calls popular culture, or simply peasant culture. This allowed him, he said, to go beyond a reductive understanding of the worldviews of the lower classes as nothing but an incoherent fragmentary mass of theories that had been originally worked out by the dominant classes, perhaps many centuries before.

Instead, he would seek to understand a popular worldview in its own terms, ironically enough by using written texts that were produced by the most oppressive arm of the dominant class. While looking for the archives, he came across material regarding another inquisitorial process. The defendant was Domenico Scandella, a miller and handyman from the small town of Monterale in Friuli, who went by the nickname Menocchio.

The records of his two trials, which were held in 1583-1584 and 1598-1599, revealed that this humble peasant adhered to an extraordinarily bold set of ideas. He saw the church as hypocritical and oppressive, dismissing most of the sacraments as a mere money-making scheme.

The one sacrament he believed in was the Eucharist, but even this he understood in a deviant fashion. It was the Holy Spirit that came into the consecrated host, not the Son, so that, from the point of view of the Church, Minocchio thought the wrong person of the Trinity was involved. Since divinity is found within every creature, he argued, the uppermost rule in life is to love one's neighbor, this taking precedence even over the commandment to love God.

Blasphemy is no sin, because it harms only oneself and not one's neighbor. Indeed, Minocchio supposedly admitted, Alongside these theological doctrines, Minocchio had devised a personal cosmology that was based loosely on the Book of Genesis. He told his inquisitors,

In my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, fire, and water were mixed together, and out of that bulk a mass formed, just as cheese is made out of milk, and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. This passage gave Ginsberg the title for his book. Minocchio draws a parallel between the spontaneous generation of vermin and the first emergence of living beings in the cosmos.

Neither they nor the world are created by God, but simply arise out of inchoate matter. The whole universe is like fermenting cheese, and the angels are like worms that generate in that cheese as it ages. His materialism applies to humans also, and implies that we have no immaterial or immortal souls. Thus, witnesses in the village stated that he had told them, When man dies, he is like an animal, like a fly.

He did allow that there is a spirit in us, distinct from the soul, which returns to God upon our death, but it seems that for him even God is a material being, who previously existed within the chaos of matter and then became self-aware only once the cosmos was spontaneously generated from that matter. Even at that point, God had no detailed knowledge of what would exist later on. Like a peasant version of Avicenna, Minocchio denied that there is divine knowledge of particulars.

Ginsberg reaches for a different comparison, calling him a peasant Heraclitus for his teaching that the world consists of earth, water, and air, but is pervaded through and through by fire. This is breathtaking stuff, and you can see why Ginsberg was inspired to write a book about it, even if it was the sort of thing that most scholars would relegate to a footnote, and even if the story of Minocchio was a tragic one. He was pronounced a heretic in his first trial and imprisoned.

After enduring two years in jail, he was released under the stipulation that he wear a cross at all times to mark his deviance. Yet he couldn't help himself from continuing to express his daring ideas. As Minocchio said himself, I have an artful mind, and I have wanted to seek out higher things about which I did not know. His reward was to be reported to the Inquisition a second time. The Inquisitors deemed him a relapsed heretic and had him put to death.

This grim tale is told with verve and style by Ginsberg, whose admiring description of another scholar captures a feature of his own writing, the tension between the warmth of the narrator's intimate gaze and the coldness of the scientist's detached observation. His goal was to go beyond documenting the story of Minocchio by narrating it.

Among his inspirations were not just anthropologists and other historians, but novelists like Tolstoy, whose monumental book War and Peace was animated by the conviction that a historical phenomenon can become comprehensible only by reconstructing the activities of all the persons who participated in it. Ginsberg was motivated by more than just a quest for historical understanding, though.

He felt that historians are usually trapped within the perspective of historical elites, bound as they are to work with materials produced by the educated classes. His explicit goal was thus to use some of those materials to uncover the collective mentality of the less educated, or to use the term he preferred, precisely because of its class connotations, the popular culture of this period on the cusp of modernity.

But, as Ginsberg readily admitted, his choice of Minocchio as a representative of that culture was by no means a straightforward one. This Miller was no typical peasant as already shown by the bewilderment and discomfiture he provoked in his fellow villagers. For one thing, he was literate, a decisive factor in the development of his ideas. The trial records mention eleven books that he had managed to get hold of, the majority by borrowing them from other people.

These included a vernacular translation of the Bible, which one might take as a confirmation for the church's idea that it was dangerous to let commoners consult this text themselves lest they come up with their own theological opinions. Another influential book for Minocchio was an anthology of religious literature called Il Fioretto della Bibbia, in which Ginsburg finds several parallels for his ideas.

The parallels are always rather imprecise, though, showing that Minokyo had reflected on his reading and, as he admitted, or rather boasted, devised ideas of his own that came out of his own head. He thus described himself as a "philosopher, astrologer, and prophet," which makes me think that he'd be very pleased to find himself included in this podcast. Like any philosopher, Minokyo was shaped by his historical context.

As Ginsberg notes, his access to books was made possible by the spread of printing, and his irreverent attitude was in tune with the Reformation. One of the witnesses at his trial even compared Minocchio to the Lutherans. The anti-clerical polemic that runs throughout his comments certainly strikes a Protestant note. But we're clearly not dealing here with a rural version of Philip Melanchthon.

Yes, Minocchio could read, and he even produced writings of his own, something we know only from a note in the records that these were found in his house and confiscated. But, owing to his lack of education, he was often flummoxed by the questions put to him at his trials, as when he failed to understand such standard theological vocabulary as justification and predestination.

Along with the stray bits of theological material he had read, the most powerful instigation to his philosophy seems to have been, of all things, a travel narrative by John Mandeville. This told of encounters with other cultures and religions, including Islam. Reading it seems to have brought home to Monocchio the contingency of the Christian faith in which he had been raised. He told the inquisitors that, "...every person considers his faith to be right, and we do not know which is the right one."

And he said he wanted to remain a Christian simply because he'd grown up that way. This inspired him to take distance from the teachings of his own place and time, as we can see from his admission that reading Mandeville had shifted his views about the afterlife. From there, I got my opinion that when the body dies, the soul dies too. Since, out of many different kinds of nations, some believe in one way, some in another. The upshot is that Minocchio cannot be used simply as a mouthpiece for peasant, popular, or oral culture.

Ginsberg himself remarks that his philosophy was shaped by the encounter between the printed page and the oral culture of which he was one embodiment. Still, as that same quotation shows, Ginsberg insisted that Minocchio could be seen as embodying a culture that remains largely lost to us because it was passed on in the form of stories and oral teachings. He was also impressed by the parallels he thought he could detect between oral cultures of different places and times, from ancient India to medieval Europe.

This includes the recurring idea that the cosmos arises through spontaneous generation. It has been commented that, as a historian of European popular culture, Ginsburg had not only crossed the elusive disciplinary boundary that divides history from the history of religions or from historical folklore, he had done so in such a way that his hypotheses remained unproven and perhaps unprovable.

As so often, we have here an appeal to oral cultures to support a thesis that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to substantiate by looking at written records. That there are resonances among folkloric traditions around the world, so that popular culture forms a body of shared beliefs and shared wisdom, even if the outlines of that body are hard to make out through the mists of time. You will probably not be surprised to learn that Ginsburg's project met with critique as well as admiration, often from the same people.

One of the more sophisticated responses came from Paola Zambelli, another Italian scholar who was not convinced by the attempt to use Minocchio as a window into the precepts of a long-standing popular belief system. Instead, she saw him as an autodidact who had done enough reading to come across echoes of doctrines being put forward in Renaissance Italy, especially by Ficino and other playmen that stand in Florence and by the daring Aristotelian thinkers of Padua, which is not far from Minocchio's region of Friuli.

To spare you looking at a map, we're talking about the area where the right-hand side of Italy's boot meets mainland Europe. In particular, the Paduans were flirting with materialist ideas about the soul, and like plenty of other philosophers of the era, they were fascinated by the topic of spontaneous generation.

Of course, this humble miller would hardly have been attending lectures by a man like Agostino Nifo at the University of Padua, but that does not rule out that, with however much mediation as you like, as Zambetti puts it, the ideas of Nifo could have filtered down to a literate peasant like Manocchio.

so there was no need to cast around for parallels to ancient India. Minocchio could, thought Zamballi, have appropriated from the Paduan and Venetian circles not only their theory of the soul, but also their conception of the physical world. In his preface to The Cheese and the Worms, Ginsburg had referred to the way some elite authors of this period, like Rabelais, can be used as indirect evidence for the practices and concerns of peasant society.

Zambelli wondered if Minocchio was a reverse Rabelais, expressing elite ideas in the popular setting of his village rather than putting the lives of villagers into a literary text written by and for members of the elite. Because Zambelli's critique already appeared before the English translation of The Cheese and the Worms, Ginsburg was able to add a note to this version responding to her.

Here he conceded that contemporary scholastic discussions of spontaneous generation might be an important context, but he was skeptical that talking points from the rarefied atmosphere of the universities could have reached Minocchio. This, he said, presupposes an extreme permeability which would have to be demonstrated between upper-class culture and peasant culture.

Even if one could find parallels to Minocchio's remarks in elite culture, it would be unfair to assume that these parallels are of more significance than those Ginzburg was finding in other popular cultures. Depending on how sympathetic you are to Ginzburg, you might see his position here as nuanced or as conflicted. On the one hand, he himself devoted significant effort to exploring the books that influenced Minocchio and tracing the further sources of those books.

In this sense, he actually anticipated Zambelli by positing that elite culture was a crucial part of the story. On the other hand, he was convinced that Minocchio was a witness, however imperfect, to popular oral culture. Ginsberg's goal was, as he later put it himself, the reconstruction of the relationship about which we know so little between individual lives and the context in which they unfold.

If he saw no contradiction between the printed page and the oral culture when it came to Minocchio, it was because both of these were genuinely part of the context in which Minocchio lived. In a 1993 article, winningly entitled " Two or Three Things I Know About It," Ginsburg placed himself within his own context. Here, he sketches the background development of his brand of "microhistory," which investigates small-scale phenomena in hopes of revealing large-scale patterns.

Like the partisans of studying oral traditions in Africa, his method borrows from ethnology or ethnography because it explores the mentalities of entire peoples. Of course, in The Cheese and the Worms, he had been looking at the ideas and story of just one man, but because he thought Minokia was rooted in popular culture, he found far broader significance in the tale. Typically, historians, including historians of ideas and politics, focus on the new developments, conceptions, and events that drive history forward.

By contrast, the microhistorian is interested in what Ginsberg calls repetitive culture, meaning culture that does not change, even across long periods of time. If we assume that, for all his daring, Minocchio was in part simply expressing notions rooted deeply in the soil of his society, then microhistory would be the ideal tool for digging into that soil.

Ginzburg thus says that any document, even the most anomalous, can be inserted into a series, and that his book shows how such a series could be revealed through the minute analysis of a circumscribed documentation tied to a person who was otherwise unknown. As you might expect, I have some sympathy with Ginzburg's method. As I've already said, it resonates with what Chike and I did when looking at oral philosophy in Africa. But more than that, it could be seen as the ultimate application of the without-any-gaffes approach.

Philosophy is not found only in great books, and not only put forward by great minds. Minor figures reward our attention too, in part because they tell us so much about larger trends, and about the broader social and historical contexts in which philosophical ideas emerge. And it doesn't get much more minor than Minocchio. On the other hand, I find Zambelli's critique fairly convincing too.

even the least bright lights in the firmament of philosophy's history though they may be so dim as to be almost invisible are still part of the history of philosophy their value does not need to consist in their representation of some subterranean timeless culture of the oppressed it could lie precisely in their interpretation of the ideas circulating amongst a more privileged educated elite

In fact, I would question a presupposition that seems to be shared by both Zambelli and Ginzburg, namely that we can more or less straightforwardly distinguish between an elite and a popular culture, which correlate to rigidly defined upper and lower classes. The case of Minocchio itself shows that this dichotomy is too simplistic.

The trial records preserve a telling exchange, in which another villager told the inquisitors, "'He will argue with anyone. I said to him, I'm a shoemaker and you a miller, and you are not an educated man, so what's the use of talking about it?' The shoemaker was effectively telling Minocchio that he was putting on airs. The inquisitors, looking down from their greater social height, would have agreed. So Minocchio's crime was in part that he wandered into a dangerous no-man's land between the peasants and the educated elite."

This is not to say that he was a member of Italy's emerging middle class. He was not a merchant, but a miller who picked up extra money doing carpentry. Still, he was literate, unusually well-informed, and curious, neither a trained intellectual nor a spokesman for the folk. Societies are complicated, and both people and ideas can move between many different contexts, not just a low popular context and a high elite context.

This is something that both the historian, and the historian of philosophy, would do well to bear in mind. We'll soon enough be turning to a much more famous inquisitorial trial, indeed the most famous of all, the one that led to the condemnation and imprisonment of Galileo. That will be the topic of the last episodes in this mini-series on the Counter-Reformation, and finally mark the end of our coverage of philosophy in the 15th and 16th centuries. But, before we get back to Galileo himself, we're going to meet one of the more interesting characters in his story,

He worked for the Inquisition and was involved in the first official attempt to rein in Galileo's scientific speculations. This figure also engaged in some notable speculations of his own, especially within his political philosophy. Though he is hardly part of the canon of great philosophers any more than Minocchio is, he was at least canonized, made a saint by the church in 1930.

And there ain't no better way to learn about this saint, Robert Bellarmine, than by joining me for the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps