Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes (Part Five)
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| Gerbert of Aurillac (Later Pope Sylvester II) |
The Not-So-Dark
Ages
The issue [of what
constitutes the essence of our contemporary thought] does not involve a contrast between the modern and the
postmodern. It is rather that both
present ‘a certain Middle Ages’…which has never ceased to be dominant, even now
in the twenty-first century.[1]
On the cusp of the end of the first
millennia A.D., a figure in monkish robe sat ornamented by firelight as he
hunched over a writing desk with quill and parchment. Not two years before, the line of Charlemagne
had failed. In just nine months a new
millennium would commence, and rumors of the End Times “filled almost the
entire world.” Here every mist
threatened to bring with it the dreaded beasts of Revelation, and every moan of
wind may well have been the brass section of the Heavens warming up. And yet, the notations this monk—an
Archbishop, more precisely—was scribbling in the chiaroscuro of the room were
not apocalyptic musings, nor esoterica theorizing upon the unutterable things
St. Paul refused to speak of in his journey to the Third Heaven. “On the eve of the Apocalypse,” writes Nancy
Marie Brown, “the archbishop of Ravenna and his friend [were in a letter]
discussing the best method for finding the area of a triangle.”[2] This archbishop was Gerbert of Aurillac, soon
to be known as Pope Sylvester II, and to write his history, says Brown “is to
rewrite the history of the Middle Ages.”[3]
In fact, the Middle Ages (perhaps
somewhat counterintuitively) have been something of a hot topic in studies that
are attempting to reevaluate the significance of religious contributions to
modern science, or indeed in simply overturning the ridiculous mythology that
serves as a placeholder for actual engagement with this intellectually rich and
diverse period.[4] Margaret Osler notes that such reevaluations
of contributions in the previously denounced “Middle Ages” have the
simultaneous effect of calling into question certain interpretations of the
“Scientific Revolution.” And since both
periods are in general taking as pictures and symbols for religion and science
in general (much as Wilberforce and Huxley were taken as representing ideal
types), these reevaluations of the “periodization” of history simultaneously
lead to affecting “general assumptions of the relationship between science and
religion.”[5] The concept of the Revolution, which was not
christened as such until the 1930’s (though the idea that something new was
afoot in thinkers like Newton obviously has a lengthy pedigree), often borrowed
from Positivist historiography which read all of history as falling into epochs
that inexorably lead to the maturation of mankind via the separation and
eventual elimination of religion from science.
Yet, “to approach the scientific
revolution with preconceived notions of what constitutes science and what
constitutes religion may help in streamlining historical reconstruction. But to do so always runs the risk of missing
the point in particular intellectual debates.”[6]
The first early insistence on this
principle was Pierre Duhem, French physicist turned historian of science, who
between 1902 and 1916 wrote fifteen volumes on medieval science. “Duhem was the first to blow away the dust of
centuries from manuscript codices that had lain untouched since the Middle
Ages. What he discovered led him to make
the startling claim that the Scientific Revolution … was but an extension and
elaboration of physical and cosmological ideas formulated in the fourteenth
century, primarily by the Parisian masters at the University of Paris.”[7] Although many of Duhem’s conclusions did not
go uncontested, something analogous to his arguments have recently been
presented by the renowned historians Edward Grant, Amos Funkenstein,[8]
David Lindberg,[9]
and James Hannam.[10]
Edward Grant serves as one of the more
interesting cases to report on regarding a renewed attention to the way the
Middle Ages set the stage for later scientific theorizing, for he underwent an
apparent “conversion” as self-described in the introduction to his The Foundations of Modern Science in the
Middle Ages. Grant notes how he came
to disagree with his own earlier work, Physical
Science in the Middle Ages: “Physical
Science in the Middle Ages was written with the conviction that this
interpretation [e.g. by Alexander Koyré, that the Scientific Revolution
represented a total break with the Middle Ages] was essentially correct, and
that the Middle Ages had not contributed significantly to the scientific
revolution of the seventeenth century.”
And yet, he says, as time went on
It occurred to me that perhaps
we—historians of medieval science and the scientific revolution—had interpreted
the medieval contribution too narrowly in terms of the specific influences it
might have exerted on this or that science, usually physics, and on whether it
had played a role in reshaping scientific methodology. … My attitude changed
dramatically, however, when some years ago, I asked myself whether the
Scientific Revolution could have occurred in the seventeenth century if the
level of science in Western Europe had remained what it was in the first half
of the twelfth century. That is, could a
scientific revolution have taken place in the seventeenth century if the
massive translations of Greco-Arabic science, and natural philosophy into Latin
had never taken place? The response
seemed obvious: no, it could not.[11]
In fact, quite the reverse of the
typical caricature, most were not too busy trying to answer “how many angels
could dance on the head of a pin” at the expense of “scientific” study; to
study theology one had to first pass through the undergraduate courses in the
trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music,
astronomy) in order to matriculate into the higher disciplines of law,
medicine, and theology. Not only did they endorse a secular arts curriculum,
but most believed that natural philosophy was essential for a proper
elucidation of theology.[13]
These theological dispositions toward
an appreciation of natural knowledge were not incidental to that knowledge,
either. Rather they answer Grant’s
question as to why sciences did not develop elsewhere. The establishment of science, argues Grant, depends
on more than simple expertise or technical achievement in experiments. “After all, science can be found in many early
societies.”[14] Grant therefore argues: “the exact sciences
are unlikely to flourish in isolation from a well-developed natural philosophy,
whereas natural philosophy is apparently sustainable at a high level even in
the absence of significant achievement in the exact sciences.”[15] We have, for example, at our far end of
history, become numb to the metaphor and the complex sets of presuppositions
about the world it entails, when natural philosophers (what we would today call
“scientists”) spoke of “natural law,” they “were not glibly choosing the
metaphor.”[16] But laws were expected to be in place even
prior to their discovery because of theological theory: “Laws were the result
of a legislation by an intelligent Deity.”
That the scientific endeavor thought it could proceed at all, that the
human mind could fathom nature and express it mathematically, found its basis
in the assumption that creation expressed God’s mind, and that God’s mind found
a mirror in human ratiocination.[17]
As such the theological and Christian
culture leading up into the Middle Ages was not accidental to, but formative
for, the formation of a scientifically minded culture. Granted that many of the explanations were found
wanting, and so radically transformed in many instances in the Scientific
Revolution. But the problems and modes
of inquiry that those like Galileo and Newton worked with—notions of cause,
necessity, contingency, infinite space, counterfactual reasoning, void
space—were bequeathed as a Medieval inheritance: “The revolution in physics and cosmology was
not the result of new questions put to nature in place of medieval
questions. It was, at least initially,
more a matter of finding new answers to old questions, answers that sometimes
involved experiments, which were exceptional occurrences in the Middle Ages.”[18] Or, as Michael Hanby puts it:
Each of the sciences get philosophical
as it nears its theoretical source—where it did once regard itself as natural philosophy—because each at its
source and in its most comprehensive theoretical articulation embodies an
aspiration to ultimacy or universality that is simultaneously obscured in the
mundane work of the specialists and operatives within it. The closer one gets to these original
sources, the closer one gets to indispensable assumptions about the meaning of
nature, place, body, causation, motion, life, explanation, and truth [which
implicitly drive future inquiry]. In
short, one gets closer to the indispensable assumptions bout being qua being
and therefore being in relation to God that remains axiomatic within science in
its more mundane practice at the experimental level.[19]
Claims of the separation of
religion and science in the 17th century not only fit uncomfortably what we would mean by such phrases
today, in addition (and as we already in part saw) “even some of the century’s
most notable achievements were presented in theological terms.” Margaret Osler,
for example, focuses on how both Descartes and Pierre Gassendi differently
interpreted God’s absolute power of will (often termed “Voluntarism”) and
notes, startlingly, that one can correlate their theology with their scientific
method and understanding of the world along the lines of these theological
disagreements.[20] Descartes, believing God imparted timeless
“rational structures” to the world, justified his principle of linear inertia,
for example, by deducing it from
God’s immutability. Pierre Gassendi
though that God was radically unconstrained by any rational principles
dictating how the world must be made,
and so scientific investigation could only proceed a posteriori and empirically to discover how God actually made it. Indeed an entire generation of thought
regarding two styles of science (rationalism and empiricism) emerged along
lines dictated by Descartes and Gassendi’s views of God. If we incorporate Peter Harrison’s work,
which we were introduced to above in the figure of Francis Bacon, Harrison’s
larger claims note that though Osler is undoubtedly right, what is typically
(though not unproblematically) presented as the differences between rationalism
and empiricism often fall along confessional and theological lines of
Protestants and Catholics and their theorization on the limits of human
understanding after the Fall—and so are themselves predicated upon a
distinctively theological anthropology.[21]
Indeed an entire era of scholarship of
which Osler and Harrison are a part, has done some seriously fascinating work
looking at how theological conceptions like that of God’s absolute Will set
precedent for discussions on natural law by allowing natural philosophy to
break out of its Aristotelian molds.[22] To give one instance, for example,
theorizing on God’s absolute will allowed theologians and natural philosophers
like Jean Buridan and Nicole Oresme to hypothesize that void space could
exist. This seems obvious to us, but we
have to remember they did not have space shuttles or the type of observation
equipment we have. In addition, for the reigning theories of the day, many of
which were versions of Aristotelianism, the void-space was logically impossible
precisely because space was defined as that which contained a body. Thus there could not be empty space, or a
vacuum. But for Buriden and Oresme, void
space was a real possibility, because God was unhindered by the strictures of
what Aristotelianism deemed physical necessity.
This perhaps seems bizarre, or maybe inconsequential. But to summarize the story, this example does
several things. First, theorization on
God’s absolute power eliminated the straightjacket that many forms of
Aristotelianism had over inquiry of the day.
Second, reflection upon God’s absolute power allowed the rise of
“counterfactual reasoning” to occur.
Reasoning about what is not—but could be—the case, seems so obvious to
us, but this is in large part because we are still inheritors of this Medieval
tradition. The emergence of
counterfactuals allowed the notion of “ideal experiments” to arise, such as a
frictionless plane, or the principle of inertia, for “the conditions under
which a body will continue to move indefinitely and uniformly in a given
direction are unobservable and
…[only] counterfactual.”[23]
[1]
Catherine Pickstock, “Duns Scotus: His Historical and Contemporary
Significance,” Modern Theology 21:4
(2005): 566, 568.
[2]
Nancy Marie Brown, The Abacus and the
Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages
(New York: Basic Books, 2010), our paragraph here is based on the account given
on pages 1-4 of Brown’s book. The quote
comes at page 3.
[3]
Ibid.
[4]
See the wonderfully readable study by the former Curator at the Louvre, Regine
Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle Ages!
Debunking the Myths trans. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 2000).; Cf. Hart, Atheist
Delisions, 36-111; James Hannam, The
Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific
Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2011): “The denigration
of the Middle Ages began as long ago as the sixteenth century, when humanists …
started to champion classical Greek and Roman literature. They cast aside medieval scholarship on the
grounds that it was convoluted and written in ‘barbaric’ Latin. So people stopped reading and studying
it. The cudgels were subsequently taken
up by English writers such as Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679),
and John Locke (1632-1704). These waters
were muddied further by the desire of these Protestant writers not to give an
ounce of credit to Catholics. It suited
them to maintain that nothing of value had been taught at universities before
the Reformation. Galileo, who thanks to
his trial before the Inquisition was counted as an honorary Protestant, was
about the only Catholic natural philosopher to be accorded a place in
English-language histories of science.
In the eighteenth century, French writers like Voltaire (1694-1778) joined
in the attack. They had their own issues
with the Catholic church in France, which they derided as reactionary and in
cahoots with the absolutist monarchy.
Voltaire and his fellow philosophes
lauded progress in reason and science.
They needed a narrative to show that mankind was moving forward, and the
story they produced was intended to show the Church in a bad light. … John
William Draper and Thomas Huxley introduced this thesis [of the Dark Ages] to
English readers in the nineteenth century.
It was given intellectual respectability through the support of Andrew
Dixon White (1832-1918), president of Cornell University. The hordes of footnotes that mill around at
the bottom of each page of his book A
History of the Warfare of Science With Theology gives the illusion of
meticulous scholarship. But anyone who
checks his references will wonder how he could have maintained his opinions if
he had read as much as he claimed to have done.
The assault on the Middle Ages carried on into the twentieth
century. Popular historians based their
work on previous popular histories and perpetuated the myth that the period was
an interruption to mankind’s progress.
Television shows by Carl Sagan, James Burke, and Jacob Bronowski handed
the thesis on to a new generation. Even
when someone discovered evidence of reason or progress in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, it could easily be labeled ‘early-Renaissance’ so as to
preserve the negative connotations of the adjective ‘medieval.’”
[5]
Margaret Osler, “Religion and the Changing Historiography of the Scientific
Revolution,” in Science and Religion:
Some New Perspectives, 71.
[6]
Brooke, Science and Religion, 84.
[7]
Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern
Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual
Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2996), xi.
[8]
Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific
Imagination.
[9]
David Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western
Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and
Institutional Context 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago,
2008).
[10]
James Hannam, The Genesis of Science: How
the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Washington,
D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2011).
[11]
Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science,
xii.
[12]
Ibid., 172.
[13]
Ibid., 174.
[14]
Ibid., 168.
[15]
Ibid., 185.
[16]
Brooke, Science and Religion, 26.
[17]
Ibid., 29.
[18]
Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science,
198.
[19]
Michael Hanby, No God, No Science?
Theology, Cosmology, Biology
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 11-12.; Cf. Pannenberg, Toward a Theology of Nature, 33: “Karl
Popper, even in his earlier period, admitted that metaphysical convictions of
innovative scientists may belong to the subjective factors conditioning the
formation of their scientific hypotheses and theories. Yet his former student, William Berkson, uses
the history of field physics to show that certain metaphysical conceptions not
only have individual importance, but also accompany or even guide the
development of entire branches of natural science. If this is so, the philosophical origin of
scientific conceptuality can no longer be regarded as something external and
irrelevant as far as scientific theories themselves are concerned”; and
Pannenberg, Historicity of Nature,
30: “As it often happens, the philosophical problem-horizon of the respective
themes [of the natural sciences], along with the history of the problem in
philosophy, is not adequately considered.
It is then a task of theology, in dialogue with the natural sciences, to
recall the philosophical problem horizon of the themes in question and, within
that framework, to bring to bear the specifically theological accent on these
themes.”
[20]
Margaret Osler, Divine Will and the
Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Neccessity in
the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
[21]
Harrison, The Fall of Man and the
Foundations of Science, 8.
[22]
Cf. Gary B. Deason, “Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of
Nature,” in David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, eds., God
& Nature: Historical Essays on
the Encounter Between Christianity and Science (Berkley: University of
California, 1986), 167-192; Michael B. Foster, “The Christian Doctrine of
Creation and the Rise of Modern Natural Science,” Mind 43 (1934): 446-68; Francis Oakley, “Christian Theology and the
Newtonian Science: The Rise of The Concept of Laws of Nature”: Church History 30 (1961): 433-457; Peter
Heimann, “Voluntarism and Immanence: Conceptions of Nature in
Eighteenth-Century Thought,” Journal of
Historical Investigations 39 (1978): 271-283; Henry Guerlac, “Theological
Voluntarism and Biological Analogies in Newton’s Physical Thought,” Journal of Historical Investigations 44
(1983): 219-229. I owe the initial
tracking-down of these references to Harrison, Fall of Adam, 16n.25.; Cf. as well Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995); John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason 2nd
ed. (Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006); Louis Dupré, The Passage to Modernity: An Essay on the Hermeneutics of Nature and
Culture (Yale: Yale University Press, 1993); Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious
Revolution Secularized Society (Harvard: The Belknap Press of Harvard,
2012); Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern:
Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015).
[23]
Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific
Imagination, 153.
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