Book Review: Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Part Six)
Chapter Five: Utility
and Progress
The basic
thesis of this chapter is: if religio and
scientia went through the broad
historical process of “being turned inside-out,” and, as the last chapter
argued especially, emerged together and were shaped by their mutual emerging
borders, this chapter also argues that redefinitions of what constitutes
“progress” began to be driven by, and in turn drive those aforementioned
changes:
The idea of historical progress is
usually thought to have originated in the seventeenth century. My main argument in this chapter will be that
changes to our conceptions of science and religion at this time were intimately
related to the emergence of a new understanding of progress. One significant factor in this development in
the way in which early modern natural philosophy self-consciously locates
itself within a Christian understanding of history—as part of a preordered
reformation of knowledge, as a prelude to the end of the world, as a
providential and partial restoration of the human race of knowledge lost at the
Fall, or some element of all of these.
It has often been said that notions of progress represent a secularized
Christian eschatology … But my primary focus here will be the way in which the
idea of progress—or perhaps, more correctly, a distinctively modern idea of
progress—appears for the first time at this juncture in history, and how it is
related to the changes of scientia and
religio that we discussed in the
previous chapter.
In
particular Harrison wants to note a constellation of three other concepts that
are implicated by this new (ultimately utilitarian) concept of progress: the
idea of usefulness, charity, and dominion.
Once again, the shifting notion of progress has an “inside-out”
tendency: “In each of these [usefulness, charity, dominion] is a decisive shift
away from the formative and personal to the progressive and objective.” One of
the consequences of this is that in all three categories (which, we
hardly have to point out, have major prominence in Christian theology) under
the newly normative “progress” means that the claims of science is progressive
in a way that the newly ideated “religion” is not. What happens in this shift is thus no
surprise: “Once the categories of science and religion become established in
this way, the new understanding of progress lays the foundations for a range of
common claims about the superiority of science to religion, and about the
secular and scientific West as the apex of cultural evolution.”
Progress
was closely associated with the same virtue and habitus concepts that Harrison
argues shifted in the “inside-out” transformation of scientia and religio. Aquinas for example argued that “science can
increase in itself by addition; thus when anyone learns several conclusions in
geometry, the same specific habit of science increases in that man” (Summa Theologia 1a.2ae). Thus what is meant by “progress” is a certain
set of dispositions relating to the general progress of virtue. “Progress” as such is understood to be the
natural movement of the individual toward the goals of wisdom and virtue. “Without a teleological framework, this
personalized understanding of progress becomes redundant. … Once scientia
becomes a reified ‘something’ that exists objectively, progress comes to
mean something quite different, namely, the cumulative addition to, and
incremental improvement of, an external body of knowledge.” Progress as such is relocated from the sphere
of the personal, into the historical realm.
Harrison
emphasizes that this idea of progress, turning as it does to a more
experimental and less deductive science, is as much a turning against traditional
goals of natural philosophy as it is a turning against older methods.
“It was not simply a matter of replacing logical demonstration with
experiment, but in coming to understand that philosophy should be concerned
less with personal edification and more with contributing to a common
storehouse of knowledge.” This was aided
by many things, of course, included the printing press which allowed the new
ideal of science as a vast cumulative storehouse of information to become
feasible. One should note also that this
explosion of printing (Leibniz remarked once, in horror, at “this horrible mass
of books which keeps on growing”) also allowed scriptures themselves to become
shaped by the new perceptions of the printed medium as a storehouse of data and
facts (the “inside-out” thesis raises its head once again), and was
determinative for beginning to shape new arguments regarding inerrancy and the
authority of scripture.
On of the
consequences of the “inside-out” movement of usefulness, charity, and dominion,
is that when all three are redefined in more “objectivist” terms, they did so
precisely in order to bolster a new sense of authority for the emerging
sciences, which began to replace “religion” less on the fact that it was “more
useful” than the latter, than that the very notion of usefulness had
shifted. Harrison says, e.g. “the
designation of [an] institution as a charity [rather than charity as a
particular virtue] is emblematic not only of important changes in the
understanding of charity and its relation to the idea of usefulness, but also
in how charity was brought into relation with the new sciences.” For Francis Bacon, for example, insofar as
the new science was directed to the relief of fellow man, it is the true end
and the very embodiment of charitable activity.
Now of course for Bacon, as for many others, this was not a choice of
science against religion; it was however a modification of the terms and
conditions of both. “Dominion” for
example, no longer was linked either to the virtues or (by extension) the
transcendentals, so that dominion was always within a framework of God’s glory
seen as kenotic charity, rather dominion “over nature was increasingly
understood, quite literally, as the exercise of control over the natural
world.”[1]
The new experimental sciences
bolstered their own credibility by demonstrating they fulfilled the biblical
injunction of charity, and the command to love God and neighbor. But this new emphasis on practical outcomes
rather than character formation does begin to set an unstable relation insofar
as practical outcomes now appear to be achievable outside any religious
framework once the prestige for experimentation has been set. However this may be, Harrison’s general point
is that the concepts of progress, usefulness, charity, and dominion all have a
complex theological and “religious” pedigree that becomes pushed out of view in
what he calls “the historical amnesia of the sciences.” The upshot for this discussion is that with
the emergence of scientia and religio as “science” and “religion” as
we understand them, there is an entire host of auxiliary beliefs that go with
them. On the other hand, with this
modified form of progress seen as increasing practical utility, an antithesis
becomes possible, for Christian faith understood as a coda of doctrines and
propositions will by the nature of the case not be as inherently plastic and
modifiable as the new sciences.
Ironically, when this antithesis
first comes on the scene it is not promoted by secular atheists lambasting the
dogmatic backwardness of the church; rather it is a specifically Protestant
polemic against the Catholic church for retarding the progress of the
sciences. Thus a common trope in this
period is to make an analogy between the reformation of religion and the
reformation of the sciences. “These
Protestant interpretations of history, which attributed the impediment of the
sciences to the Catholic church,” remarks Harrison, “offered a ready-made
narrative to Enlightenment critics of Catholicism who often turned out to be
less discriminating in their attribution of blame.” Here, as we remarked above, both science and
religion become “essentialized” along the lines of these properties of
progressiveness or dogmatic resoluteness.
Thus when history is reconstructed
on the basis of an assumption of the inevitability of progress, the question of
science’s origins and development is typically framed not in terms of the
unique and contingent conditions that make the emergence and persistence of
science possible. Rather the question is
posed in this way: given the intrinsically progressive nature of science, what
are the factors that have inhibited its natural flourishing. The answer, for many, came in the form of
‘religion,’ understood as a historical reality in which the difference beween
rival versions—Protestant or Catholic—were less significant than what they
shared: namely, an inflexible commitment to a set of unchanging truths derived
from authority.
[1] This seems to give indirect credence to some of John
Milbank, Theology and Social Theory:
Beyond Secular Reason 2nd ed (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006),
7-26 (esp. 13ff), where he argues regarding a similar period Harrison is
covering for the historical construction of a new political space of “pure
power.” “Dominum,” says Milbank, echoing
Harrison’ “inside out” thesis, “was traditionally a matter of the rational
master of the passions and this was also the basis for one’s legitimate control
and possession of external objects.”
Thus the root of ills, for Milbank, is here theological voluntarism: The
later transition of “Dominum as power
“could only become the human essence because it was seen as reflecting the
divine essence, a radical divine simplicity without even formal
differentiation, in which, most commonly, a proposing ‘will’ is taken to stand
for the substantial identity of will, essence, and understanding.”
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