Book Review: Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Part Four)
Signs and Causes (Chapter Three)
Reading
scripture and nature together became an integral part of medieval contemplative
practice
Following his work in The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of
Natural Science, Harrison turns to the intriguing thesis that
transformation in how nature was viewed can be indexed alongside
transformations in hermeneutical practice and theory regarding reading the
scriptures. As one typical argument
goes: the rise of the mechanistic world picture in the modern period, and the
destruction of the symbolic and allegorical worldview, caused feedback into
Protestant interpretations of scripture which became much more literal. Harrison does not dispute that these general
trends occurred, but he wants to argue that this historical argument has much
of the causality backwards. Harrison
demonstrates that it is more plausible that a rise in literal interpretation,
and the fall of allegory, lead to viewing our ability to “read” the world in a
literal manner. For the view of how
nature functioned and revealed God had for ages been correlated to theories of
scriptural meaning. As he puts it: “In
the patristic period and the Middle Ages the idea of the book of nature, and
the question of how that ‘book’ was to be read, were intimately linked to
theories of the interpretations of that other book, scripture.”
The originally symbolic or
allegorical worldview saw in the signs and causes of the worl, a vast text, which
could be correlated with scripture in order to discern its moral, anagogical
(or eschatological) sense, and its allegorical or, more properly speaking,
Christological senses. Harrison is
thankfully aware of the many misinterpretations of allegory that often get
passed around: allegory was not a “free for all” of meaning (though it may
sometimes seem that way), nor was it merely a “textual theory.” Rather allegory functioned closer to what we
today call “typology”: that is, everything can be shown to relate, illustrate,
or anticipate Christ. Take Thomas
Aquinas here: “The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify
His meaning, not by words only (as man can also do), but also by things
themselves.” As such the senses of
scripture are not carelessly “multiplied because one word signifies several
things [the typical caricature of allegory], but because things signified by
the words can themselves be types of other things” (Summa Theologia Ia.1.10.) As
such, more than just a textual theory, “allegory” was also a theory of the
meaning of objects themselves, and so of the natural world. “Every creature, on
this theory, has been designed to manifest some divine truth.” As such “for the early Middle Ages the
intelligibility of nature lay primarily in its moral and theological meanings,
rather than in sets of causal relations.”
Everything in nature, then, was a vast text that never “ceased” but
signified in turn other parts of the text.
And all of this was “controlled” by Biblical exegesis. “This is a rather different natural world
from that which we currently inhabit, and it was also different from the world
of the ancients. Understood in these
moral and symbolic terms, it was a world that was not primarily to be explained
causally, nor exploited materially, but to be read and meditated upon.”
This view of the world did not just
relate to an understanding of scripture, but also had and explicit theology of
the Fall attached to it. Man has lost
both understanding of nature, and dominion over nature: “the cognitive
imposition of order on creatures, in which we come to an understanding of their
moral and allegorical significance, is actually a way of reestablishing dominon
over them that had been lost … In this way, the arts and the sciences provide a
means for a partial restoration of the prelapsarian perfection of the
world.” Harrison then notes:
Looking forward to the seventeenth
century, a number of features of these medieval approaches to nature will
reappear, albeit in a different register.
The internalized understanding of the master of the creatures will be
turned outward onto the visible world, and the redemptive exercise will be
understood as the control and manipulation of material things in the most
literal sense. But the reestablishment
of dominion over nature will be retained as one of the chief goals of the new
science. The Fall narrative will also
occupy a central position, motivating scientific inquiry and shaping its
methods. Finally, the usefulness of
natural things will take on an entirely new complexion, when individuals such
as John Calvin and Francis Bacon reconfigure the idea of utility and challenge
the traditional priority given to the contemplative life.
Thus there
is the preservation of traditional theology, but a distinctive change of the
mode and context of its employment. This
fits Harrison’s larger thesis which we briefly mentioned above, namely that
both religio and scientia are “turned inside out” as the transition into the modern
period. Where allegory was indeed a way
to “read” the world, both when applied to nature and to scripture it was a way
to achieve contemplation of God and inner virtue. As the lengthy quote of
Harrison above demonstrates, this mode of contemplation is turned outward into
an understanding and control of the world itself, although the theology is
retained in this newly inverse form.
More and more—due to the newfound influence of Aristotelianism, for
example—nature was read less as a diverse symbolic tableau, but rather exemplified
God as the effect of a cause. Nonetheless,
this “causal” discourse does not yet render God remote:
It is important to understand that
God was not understood simply as the first in a series of efficient
causes. Rather, for each natural effect,
both God and the natural agent are involved. God’s role in natural causation was understood
in terms of both his ongoing conservation of the being of natural things and of
his communication to them of a likeness of his own causal capacity. What events take place in nature, it is not
that God plays some remote causal role simply by virtue of his having initiated
a chain of causes in the past that eventually brings about a particular occurrence.
Neither is the present causal activity to be understood as partly attributable
to God and partly to nature. Instead,
natural events are ‘wholly done by both, according to a different way’ [quoting
Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles
3.70.108].
Nor does
this transition to causal discourse yet constitute what we often mean by the
term “natural theology” understood as an activity which argues from “neutral”
premises to offer arguments that establish the existence of God. In Harrison’s judgment, not even Aquinas
falls under this label. This is of
course hotly contested ground in Thomistic scholarship, and more generally in
the vexed theological discussions of nature and grace, theology and
philosophy. Regardless, for the purposes
of Harrison’s narrative it is important to point out that constructing
arguments for God’s existence based on purportedly neutral premises does not
start until the seventeenth century, “[these proofs] appear in tandem with a
new understanding of religion in which propositional beliefs come to play a
significant role, and with a rethinking of the goals and purposes of natural
philosophy. In short, to relate this
development to one of our leitmotifs, we can say that the birth of natural
theology accompanies the objectification of the virtues religio and scientia, which
cease to be qualities of the individual and come to refer solely to activities
and bodies of knowledge.” If one of the
over-arching theses of Harrison is that religio
and scientia are both “turned
inside out” in the modern period, a second thesis is that both the modern
concepts of religion and science emerge roughly contemporaneously, and
reinforce one another. But more on that
in a moment.
One reason
these “proofs” and the enterprise of natural theology gained momentum is that
the allegorical modes of understanding nature begins to disintegrate.[1] “While the gradual demise of the symbolic
understandings of nature can be accounted for in a number of ways … one factor
was growing skepticism about the allegorical mode of reading scripture … as a
consequence, any attack on the allegorical interpretations of scripture would
necessarily have implications for how the world was interpreted, since the
significance of words and of things was intimately connected in a rich web of
symbolic meanings.” However, although is
has often been represented as such, advocates of the new non-symbolic view of
nature—even in mechanistic terms—did not view themselves as stepping outside
of, or providing means for, a non-theological view of the world.
Francis Bacon, for example,
“presents himself as offering a genuinely Christian approach to nature, in
comparison to the preceding [symbolic] approaches that were understood to have
been contaminated by pagan philosophy. …
This was a reformation of the sciences that was to parallel the reformation of
religion that, from a Protestant perspective, was similarly about the
purification of paganized Catholicism.”
This reinterpretation of nature was characteristic of other pioneers
like Kepler and Galileo as well, who retained the image of the “book of
nature,” but now understood its text to be written purely mathematically, while
Robert Boyle referred to the objects of nature as “the stenography of God’s
omniscient hand.” Thus
These developments signal the death
of a universal hermeneutical framework in which the books of scripture and
nature were interpreted together. Now,
even the book of nature was subject to a plurality of hermeneutical
practices—mathematical, anatomical, taxonomic.
But the collapse of the unified system of [allegorical] interpretation,
and the separation of the study of texts and the natural world, by no means
implied that the study of nature was to be pursued independently of theological
considerations. Instead a new
partnership developed between theology and the new science.
What was
this “new partnership”? Accompanying the
evacuation of meaning from natural objects was the concomitant stripping of
their intrinsic causal power. The
predominant scholastic position on creaturely causality is characterized by
Harrison as “bottom up” in the sense that things act by virtue of their
inherent powers. With this picture of
things jettisoned along with the allegorical approach, a more “top down” approach
to causality (to put it crudely) began to be favored, in which things had no
intrinsic causal capacity, but movement was explained by laws of nature that
expressed the divine will.[2] This was a more “extrinsic” account of
causality. Here, obviously, a
theological view and justification for a view of nature was still completely
prevalent. And yet, it behooves us to
quote Harrison at length:
[1] Harrison narrative intersects in an interesting way
with many of the arguments about analogical reasoning and worldview championed
by the Radical Orthodoxy movement. Conor
Cunningham Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why the
Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids:
Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2010), 294 essentially agrees with Harrison’s
major theses both from The Bible,
Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, and The Fall of Man and the Rise of Science. However instead of Harrison’s general point
that Protestantism was related in a variety of complex ways to the rise of what
we consider science and the views of the world that it incubated within,
Cunningham takes Harrison’s arguments in the sense that they bolster the
Radical Orthodox suspicions of univocal readings of God, man, nature, and
scripture in fact ended up bequeathing a Deistic and eventually Atheistic
reading of the cosmos as “pure nature” severed from all transcendent
reference. He notes “we agree with
Harrison, but only in the sense that this ‘Protestant’ approach to the Bible
rendered the Bible itself the first modern, atheist text.” As an interesting corollary, Johannes Hoff, The Analogical Turn: Rethinking Modernity
with Nicholas of Cusa (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2013)
makes the argument that Cusa advanced the modern scientific methodology while
nonetheless remaining resolutely attached to “the symbolic realism” of earlier
Christianity (1-3). Hoff argues that
this led many turn-of-the-century commentators, who named Cusa as one of the
“fathers of modern science” to view his ineradicable commitment to the
symbolism of the Middle Ages as an idiosyncratic vestige, much as—e.g.—Newton’s
theology has often been compartmentalized by historians as unrelated to his
“scientific” endeavors. Hoff argues
otherwise, and is thus an intriguing compliment to Harrison’s narrative in that
he demonstrates there were undercurrents that lingered on into the “scientific”
age.
[2] There is a growing genre of literature arguing about
just how important the rise of theological voluntarism and nominalism were for
the transition into the modern era and beyond, and in particular for
understanding the relationship between theology and science. Though it does not show up as much in The Territories of Science and Religion,
Harrison takes some issue with this thesis (and in a sense, here again has a
complicated relationship to Radical Orthodoxy narratives) especially in his
work The Fall of Man and the Rise of
Natural Science. In relation to
understanding the relationship between science and theology, one of the basic
arguments goes that the transition into justifying an experimental mindset was
that, given God’s absolute power, there were no necessary restrictions to how
God must have made things. Just so we must investigate how God actually
made them. While not denying this thesis
outright, Harrison wants to argue that the experimental mindset was actually
given precedent by a renewed attention to an Augustinian theological
anthropology that placed emphasis upon the Fall and the wounding of humanity’s
epistemological capacity to properly understand the world. By emphasizing this, Harrison is in fact
taking on three major interpretations of modernity and situating them. The first position characterizes modernity as
the turn to epistemology. This view was
enshrined by Kuno Fischer, who made Descartes’ Meditations the founding document of modernity. Harrison argues rather that the primary focus
was “human nature—‘anthropology’ in its broadest sense—and epistemological
concerns, while undoubtedly present were secondary to this.” (The Fall of Man, 8). The second interpretation was put forward by
Richard Popkin, who argued that the rediscovery of ancient skepticism led to a
frantic search for new foundations.
Here, instead of Descartes Meditations,
Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond becomes
the founding manifesto. Just so, modernity is actually characterized
not by epistemological confidence (Fischer) but a subterranean anxiety. (Though Harrison does not mention him, it
behooves us to note something analogous to Popkin’s thesis emphasizing Montagne
rather than Descartes is also argued by Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992)). Harrison largely
agrees with Popkin, but wants to recontextualize his argument by noting that it
was not the renewed attention to Pyrrhonian skepticism alone, but a renewed
emphasis on an Augustinian epistemology that stressed the Fall and its
epistemological consequences, which gives a decidedly different spin to the
purely pessimistic skeptics who thought our incapacity was just an unfortunate
necessity of nature, rather than something that beset us and might be overcome
(The Fall of Man, 11). The third interpretation, with which we
started this footnote, was the voluntarist transition that Harrison likewise
does not necessarily contest, but wants to relativize. For literature on voluntarism, science, and
theology Cf. Margaret Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy:
Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Neccessity in the Created World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Funkenstein, Theology
and the Scientific Imagination, 117-202; 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).
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