Book Review: Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Part Two)

You Can’t Get Here from There: Looking at Chapters One          

and Two

Founding myths also require a kind of negation—an amnesia about what came before, and a forgetting of historical realities that might challenge the integrity of our new conceptions.

                                         --Peter Harrison

Have science and religion perennially been at war?  If not, what has been their relationship?  Harrison’s response is: wrong questions.  In its broadest essence, Harrison argues that we simply take our concepts for granted in a way that the data the historian works in is molded into pre-worn channels of thought.  “So familiar … are ‘science’ and ‘religion’ and so central to Western culture have been the activities and achievements that are usually labeled ‘religious’ and ‘scientific’ that it is natural to assume that they have been enduring features of the cultural landscape of the West.”  To this, he bluntly rejoins: “This view is mistaken.”  “We distort the past if we uncritically apply our modern categories to past activities that would have been conceptualized by those who engaged in them in a quite different way.”   Thus what Harrison wants to set out to show is “not only … the story of how these categories … emerge in Western culture … but also to show how the manner of their emergence can provide crucial insight into their present relations.”  The nature of these “crucial insights” are that:

We can say that contemporary science-religion relations, however construed … are to a large degree determined by the historical conditions under which disciplinary boundaries originated and developed over time. … Part of the burden of this book, then, is to ask whether these particular ways of dividing aspects of contemporary Western culture—‘science’ and ‘religion’—are helpful ones.

To demonstrate this in part, Harrison traces the history of the terms religio and scientia to watch how they were, in his useful phrase, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “literally turned inside out.”  Both religio  and scientia were originally seen as something akin to interior virtues, which eventually begin to externalize into objective sets of propositions and practices.  “Returning to the comparison with medieval religio” he says, “what we can say is that in the Middle Ages both notions have a significant interior dimension [proper worship, for religio; proper mental habit, for scientia], and that what happens in the early modern period is that the balance between the interior and exterior begins to tip in favor of the latter.”  Thus we observe in the early modern period a process “in which the idea of religion and science as virtues or habits of mind begins to be overshadowed by the modern, systematic entities ‘science’ and ‘religion.’”  But precisely so, we see that the question of conflict, harmony, or synthesis between science and religion makes no sense in these historical periods, precisely because scientia and religio “were not the kind of things that admitted those sorts of relations.”

            Now, Harrison wants to counter an immediate objection to his relatively lengthy tracing of religio and scientia: is this not merely the word-concept fallacy?  Were our modern concepts perhaps contained elsewhere, “in other, less obvious linguistic connections”?  To show that his basic idea of the “inside out” movement of science and religion is not merely special pleading, contained to the history of scientia and religio, he turns his attention to asking about the general historical relationship between theology (which, he notes “looks very much like a body of religious knowledge expressed propositionally”) and natural philosophy, which was “the name given to the systematic study of nature up until the modern period.”  To this Harrison replies (deferring a bit to later in the book) that the term “theology” itself was early on not used by Christian thinkers, who self-described what they were doing in terms of interpretation of scripture and “sacred doctrine.”  This was because the term theologia actually originated in Plato and Aristotle (Plato, Republic, 379a; Aristotle, Metaphysics 1025b) and it was thus felt theologia referred to pagan discourse about the gods, and so was avoided.  When theologia does show up, it is interesting that historically speaking it is nearly immediately paired with scientia in the Middle Ages—namely in the question “is theology [in the sense of sacred doctrine, or commentary on scripture] a scientia.”  Needless to say, these terms are still almost completely disanalogous to the modern senses of theology as a set of doctrinal propositions, and science as a body of data.  When Aquinas, for example, asked if sacred doctrine is a single science, his affirmative answer “refers to the fact that there is a single faculty or habit involved.” Much the same goes for “natural philosophy” and here Harrison is indebted to the work of Pierre Hadot on ancient philosophy.  Much as theology was referred to habits that orient one to proper worship and relation, so too with early natural philosophy “it was less about affirming certain doctrines or propositions than it was about pursuing a particular kind of life,” pursuing the much-misunderstood eudemonia, which is often (not incorrectly, although somewhat flaccidly) translated into English as “the good life.”

These so-called “whig histories” often presume a more or less continuous stability in subject matter across history, leading into the forms more or less accepted and known today.  Thus the history of science and religion can be positioned against our current understandings as a series of mis-starts, declensions, or anticipations (etc …).  What is just as important, Harrison points out that in these narratives both science and religion are given “essences” that in turn do historical lifting: since science is seen as inherently “progressive,” wherever it did not flourish, or was delayed, this was by some alien element impinging upon its progress.  These narratives thus diagnose the culprit as religion—similarly essentialized, only as the equal-yet-opposite “inherently conservative” or dogmatic force.  While this “whig-historical” methodology is no longer accepted by a majority of historians, many of its presuppositions about the relationship between religion and science and their periodization into epochs remain vestigial in influential works by Karl Popper, Brian Davies, Bryan Brunch, Charles Freeman, Robert Wilson, David Deming, and indeed the New Atheist movement as a whole.[1]

This idea of philosophy as a “way of life” is used by Harrison at the start of chapter two to begin to undermine what he sees as the typical “three-stage” theory (broadly speaking) of the ascent of ancient science in Greece, its decline in Christendom, and its re-ascent when decoupled from Christianity in the Scientific Revolution.  In ancient Greece, the Greek “scientists” in this story supposedly represent something of a definitive break with religious explanations of natural phenomena, and thus in a protological way mirror the later operation of the Scientific Revolution.  There is a loss of nerve in the Medieval Christian period, however, where science is suffocated under religious superstition and ecclesiastical embargo on free inquiry.  Yet these stories are such distortions as to appear little other than fabrication; the same Anaxagoras who was banished from Greece for his “impious speculation” that the sun was not divine nor imperishable, but a molten lump of metal, also contended that the universe was controlled by a divine causal principle (nous, mind, intelligence, etc. …); and it was the same Isaac Newton who revolutionized modern physics that believed the entire treatise of the Principia was written as a display of God’s all-powerful glory.  And such messy details interfering with the Whig-Historical narratives can be nearly endlessly multiplied.  “The notion of distinct and successive mentalities—the mythopoetic and the rationalist [e.g.],” says Harrison, “is difficult to sustain.”  One cannot dismiss the mythological as “pious window dressing” precisely because this ignores how “religious” views saturated all of life, and mistakenly assumes the mythological only ever provides an alternative account to “science.”  Philosophical and mythological accounts of the world were precisely how and why “scientific” information was embedded, transmitted, and valued.  “It is a mistake … to regard myths as incompatible with rational explanations, or to imagine that a mythical phase of Western history gave way to a proto-scientific age.” 

Whatever “looks-like” science in the early Greek period was undertaken, as Seneca put it, because philosophy “molds and constructs the soul; orders life and guides conduct; shows us what we should do, and what we should leave undone.” (Epistles 16.3).  Early Greek use of physics then, conforms particularly well to what Hadot refers to as “spiritual exercises” (askesis).  These exercises often took place within a threefold taxonomy or hierarchy of discipline, for example in Aristotle’s famous division.  Aristotle had distinguished three speculative or theoretical sciences: natural philosophy, mathematics, and theology, distinguished by their respective objects.  Theology dealt with what is eternal and immovable; natural philosophy dealt with the opposite of theology—that is, with what is movable, finite, and inseparable from matter; and mathematics studies a realm in-between the two: what is immovable but (for Aristotle) not separable from matter. Modern historical approaches have typical taken these divisions as “disciplinary boundaries,” says Harrison, but this is to miss that “these divisions were not merely ways of dividing up theoretical content: they were intended to set out the proper progression and order of study, beginning with the material and the mutable, proceeding to the immutable, and eventually to the divine.”  Thus “the habits of mind developed in the more materially oriented sciences would naturally prepare the mind for the kinds of mental transformations demanded by the more elevated sciences.”  Harrison summarizes his basic point of this exercise:

What I hope to have shown up to this point is that the classical Greek engagement with nature, while often touted as ancestor to modern science, was so imbued with theological and moral elements that its relationship to ‘science’ as we understand it is at best complicated.  It is not just that astronomy and natural philosophy had some additional ethical elements that were largely peripheral and have now fallen by the wayside.  It is rather that the study of nature was given a role in a broader philosophical enterprise that had moral goals and, quite often, theological presuppositions.  Unlike anything in the modern sciences, the study of physics or natural philosophy was an exercise directed toward the transformation of the self.  To claim that our science was born in ancient Greece is to overlook what for ancient Greek philosophers was the main point of the exercise [transformation of life].

But this translation of priorities, and the disembedding of our modern concepts of science from its metaphysical, theological, and ethical frameworks, is not the only piece of the story Harrison wants to tell in chapter two, for a similar difference between modern concepts of theology and religion is also pertinent: “I have argued that there is not a recognizable ‘science’ in antiquity, and now will suggest that there is not a recognizable ‘religion’ either.”[2]  What he wants to do is pursue this line of inquiry regarding “the relationship of Christianity and the study of nature, and about how Christianity in the early modern period became the model for “generic religion.”  As such he is seeking “to identify those misconceptions about ancient Christianity that are analogous in many respects to those that distort our understanding of ancient philosophy and science.”  In fact the general order of the Aristotelian sciences was often adopted (not without modification) into the Christian contemplative tradition, and the three speculative sciences of natural philosophy, mathematics, and theology was mapped (in that order) onto the succession of contemplative practices of purgatio, illuminatio, and unitio—essentially mapping all knowledge into a stratified hierarchy whose organized form and content led to contemplation and union with God. 

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[1] On “whig history” of the sciences generally, and the changing historiographical trends of the late 20^th century cf. Nick Jardine, “Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of Science,” History of Science 41 (2003): 125-140; Margaret Osler, “Religion and the Changing Historiography of the Scientific Revolution,” in Science and Religon: Some New Perspectives, 69-86; David B. Wilson, “The Historiography of Science and Religion,” in Gary Ferngren, ed, Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 13-31.; Derrick Peterson, “Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes: Reconsidering the History of Science and Christianity” available online at: https://www.academia.edu/11315184/Flat_Earths_and_Fake_Footnotes_Reconsidering_the_History_of_Science_and_Christianity

[2] As a brief aside, it is profitable to take a moment to clarify Harrison’s statement that there is not a “recognizable science in antiquity” by taking a look at another historian of science, David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450 2^nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007).  Lindberg himself opens the first chapter by humorously relating that if the assertion “that there was no science in the two thousand years covered by my book” then he “has written a book about a nonexistent subject.”  Immediately, one would not be without justification to believe that Lindberg is at odds with Harrison, but this (at least in its broad strokes) is incorrect, and stands as a good example of just how cautious we have to be regarding the contexts of terms.  For what Harrison means, as we have seen, is that in antiquity there was no discernable mode or area of inquiry that is adequately mapped by our current definitions of the disciplinary boundaries of science—one that is theoretically and methodologically de-coupled from ethics, metaphysics, and theology, and was undertaken for its own sake and the sake of benefit redefined in the modern period as broadly utilitarian rather than contemplative, theoretical, or “religious”. 

Harrison is in effect talking about the self-understanding of ancient practitioners, their own justifications and modes of reasoning.  Lindberg would in principle not disagree with any of this.  He has written elsewhere, for example: “We must constantly remind ourselves that ‘science,’ ‘Christianity,’ ‘theology,’ and ‘the church’ are abstractions rather than really existing things, and it is a serious mistake to allow our abstractions to become absolute objects serving as placeholders for scholarly historical analysis” (Lindberg, “Medieval Science and Religion,” in Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, 57). But just so, what does Lindberg therefore mean by “ancient science”?  He is in The Beginnings of Western Science fairly broad in his recommendation for the continued use of the term “science” to describe his historical investigations: “many of the ingredients of what we now regard as science were certainly present,” he says.  “I have in mind languages for describing nature, methods for exploring or investigating it (including the performance of experiments), factual and theoretical claims (stated mathematically wherever possible) that emerged in such explorations, and criteria for judging the truth or validity of the claims.”  Thus in effect whereas Harrison is focusing upon how the “ingredients” became disembedded from their greater wholes and reified, Lindberg is focusing on the ingredients themselves regardless of later transformations and recontextualizations, in order to look at the broader history of “ancestor discourses and practices.”  He writes:

                 

This is not to deny significant differences—in motivation, instrumentation, institutional support, methodological preferences, mechanisms for dissemination of theoretical results, and social function.  Despite these differences, I believe that we can comfortably employ the expression ‘science’ or ‘natural science’ in the context of antiquity and the Middle Ages.  In so doing, we declare that the ancient and medieval activities that we are investigating are the ancestors of modern scientific disciplines and therefore an integral part of their history.  It is like my relationship to my paternal grandfather.  The differences between us may outweigh the similarities; but I am his descendent, bearing to some extent both his genetic and his cultural stamp.  And both of us may honorably claim the family name.  There is a danger that must be avoided [nonetheless].  If historians of science were to investigate past practices and beliefs only insofar as those practices and beliefs resemble modern science, the result would be serious distortion.  We would not be responding to the past as it existed, but examining it through a modern grid.  If we wish to do justice to the historical enterprise, we must take the past for what it was.  And that means that we must resist the temptation to scour the past for examples or precursors of modern science.  We must respect the way earlier generations approached nature, acknowledging that although it may differ from the modern way, it is nonetheless of interest because it is part of our intellectual ancestry. … The historian, then, requires a very broad definition of science—one that will permit investigation of the vast range of practices and beliefs that lie behind, and help us to understand, the modern scientific enterprise; and we should expect that the farther back we go, the broader we will need to be.