My employer is serving fresh, hot turnover again, so if you tuned in this week to hear about the prehistory of the cubicle, I'm sorry. That would take too much organising time. Instead, we're going to go up on Mount Carmel and receive a revelation from St. John. Not the author of Revelations, notwithstanding my link, the other one. St/ John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila's disciple in the Camelites Without Hats movement. Okay, okay, "Discalced Carmelites," which turns out to be a reference to footwear, hence "barefoot at the head," for those into New Wave science fiction.
The story, as I have it, is that the Carmelites were one of a number of mendicant orders founded in obscurity in the 1100s, or, more likely, early 1200s. Claiming to be descended from eremitical monks living in isolation on Mount Carmel and preserving pre-Christian traditions going back to the Prophet Elijah, they plugged into a line of thinking in Christian natural philosophy that traced Plato back through the Seven Sages, some of whom studied in "the East," taken for these purposes to be Mount Carmel, and linking Greek philosophy -okay, okay, Neo-Platonism-- to the wisdom passed down from God to Adam and so on through the Hebrew tradition.
Hardly content within themselves as between raging debates over how much masochism to allow in the order, the Carmelites were thus possessed of one the weaker and more outrageous origin stories of a major Catholic institution in the age of intense controversy that followed on Luther. Cesare Baroni, one of the great names in ecclesiastical history, ruthlessly cut the cord, freeing Catholic apologists of the liability of defending the Carmelite account, at the expense of leaving the order without a history, and natural philosophy short one Christianity-friendly epistemology in the bargain. He also, unintentionally, engaged the ongoing dispute within the community. The upshot is that a Calched Carmelite named Paolo Foscarini took indirect aim at Baroni via his colleague, Roberto Bellarmino, in an arcane, ostensibly natural philosophical debate over the nature of the solar system, but, in fact, about possession of a Carmelite church in Rome, and a clause in the Tridentine reforms pertaining to the amount of plate a church was allowed to have. The dispute then drew in a Tuscan courtier, himself no stranger to artfully fanned pseudo-controversies bridging politics, Holy Writ, and natural philosophy, named Galileo Galilei, which is where yours truly, wearing his old historian of science, came on the scene, arriving via Biagioli's Galileo, Courtier, on the slopes of Mount Carmel, the 525m high, 39km-long, 7km wide "mountain range" along the north coast of Israel, cradling the city of Haifa and also the archaic site of Tel Dor.
