Passion of the Western Mind

by Tarnas, Richard

  The Reformation had another effect on the modern mind contrary to Christian orthodoxy. For Luther’s appeal to the primacy of the individual’s religious response would lead gradually but inevitably to the modern mind’s sense of the interiority of religious reality, the final individualism of truth, and the pervasive role in determining truth played by the personal subject. As time passed, the Protestant doctrine of justification through the individual’s faith in Christ seemed to place more emphasis on the individual’s faith than on Christ—on the personal relevance of ideas, as it were, rather than on their external validity. The self increasingly became the measure of things, self-defining and self-legislating. Truth increasingly became truth-as-experienced-by-the-self. Thus the road opened by Luther would move through Pietism to Kantian critical philosophy and Romantic philosophical idealism to, finally, the philosophical pragmatism and existentialism of the late modern era.

  The Reformation was secularizing too in its realignment of personal loyalties. Previously, the Roman Catholic Church had maintained the general, if sometimes controversial, allegiance of virtually all Europeans. But the Reformation had succeeded not least because it coincided with the potent rise of secular nationalism and German rebelliousness against the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, especially against the latter’s attempts to assert a European-wide authority. With the Reformation, the universal ambition and dream of the Catholic imperium was finally defeated. The resulting empowerment of the various separate nations and states of Europe now displaced the old ideal unity of Western Christendom, and the new order was marked by intensely aggressive competition. There was now no higher power, international and spiritual, to which all individual states were responsive. Moreover, the individual national languages, already spurred forward by the Renaissance literatures, were further strengthened against Latin, the previously universal language of the educated, by the compelling new vernacular translations of the Bible, above all Luther’s translation into German and the King James committee’s into English. The individual secular state now became the defining unit of cultural, as well as political, authority. The medieval Catholic matrix unifying Europe had disintegrated.

  No less significant were the Reformation’s complex effects on political-religious dynamics, both within the individual and within the state. With secular rulers now defining the religion of their territories, the Reformation unintentionally moved power from church to state, just as it did from priest to layman. And because many of the principal monarchs chose to remain Catholic, their continuing attempts to centralize and absolutize political power caused Protestantism to be allied with resisting bodies—aristocrats, clergy, universities, provinces, cities—that sought to maintain or increase their separate liberties. Hence the cause of Protestantism became associated with the cause of political freedom. The Reformation’s new sense of personal religious self-responsibility and the priesthood of all believers also abetted the growth of political liberalism and individual rights. At the same time, the religious fragmentation of Europe necessarily promoted a new intellectual and religious diversity. From all these factors ensued a succession of increasingly secularizing political and social consequences: first the establishment of individual state-identified churches, then the division of church and state, religious toleration, and finally the predominance of the secular society. Out of the exceedingly illiberal dogmatic religiosity of the Reformation eventually emerged the pluralistic tolerant liberalism of the modern era.

  The Reformation had still other unexpected and paradoxically secularizing effects. Despite the reformers’ Augustinian demotion of man’s inherent spiritual power, they had also given human life in this world new significance in the Christian scheme of things. When Luther eliminated the traditional hierarchical division between clerical and lay, and, in blatant defiance of Catholic law, decided to marry a former nun and father a family, he endowed the activities and relationships of ordinary life with a religious meaning not previously emphasized by the Catholic Church. Holy matrimony replaced chastity as the Christian ideal. Domestic life, the raising of children, mundane work, and the tasks of daily existence were now upheld more explicitly as important areas within which the spirit could grow and deepen. Now occupational work of every variety was a sacred calling, not just monasticism as in the Middle Ages. With Calvin, a Christian’s worldly vocation was to be pursued with spiritual and moral fervor in order to realize the Kingdom of God on earth. The world was to be regarded not as the inevitable expression of God’s will, to be passively accepted in pious submission, but rather as the arena in which man’s urgent religious duty was to fulfill God’s will through questioning and changing every aspect of life, every social and cultural institution, in order to help bring about the Christian commonwealth.

  Yet in time this religious uplifting of the secular was to take on an autonomous, nonreligious character. Marriage, for example, freed from Church control as a Catholic sacrament and now regulated by civil law, in time became an essentially secular contract, more easily entered into or dissolved, more easily subject to losing its sacramental character. On a larger social scale, the Protestant call to take this world more seriously, to revise society and to embrace change, served to overcome the traditional religious antipathy both to this world and to change, and thereby gave the embryonic modern psyche the religious sanction and internal restructuring it required to propel the progress of modernity and liberalism in many spheres, from politics to science. Eventually, however, this powerful impulse to make over the world became autonomous, not only becoming independent of its originally religious motivation, but finally turning against the religious bulwark itself as yet another, and especially profound, form of oppression to be overcome.

  Important social consequences of the Reformation also became evident in its complex relationship to the economic development of the northern European nations. The Protestant affirmation of moral discipline and the holy dignity of one’s work in the world seems to have combined with a peculiarity in the Calvinist belief in predestination, whereby the striving (and anxious) Christian, deprived of the Catholic’s recourse to sacramental justification, could find signs of his being among the elect if he could successfully and unceasingly apply himself to disciplined work and his worldly calling. Material productivity was often the fruit of such effort, which, compounded by the Puritan demand for ascetic renunciation of selfish pleasure and frivolous spending, readily lent itself to the accumulation of capital.

  Whereas traditionally the pursuit of commercial success was perceived as directly threatening to the religious life, now the two were recognized as mutually beneficial. Religious doctrine itself was at times selectively transformed or intensified in accord with the prevailing social and economic temper. Within a few generations, the Protestant work ethic, along with the continued emergence of an assertive and mobile individualism, had played a major role in encouraging the growth of an economically flourishing middle class tied to the rise of capitalism. The latter, already developing in the Renaissance Italian city-states, was further propelled by numerous other factors—the accumulation of wealth from the New World, the opening up of new markets, expanding populations, new financial strategies, new developments in industrial organizations and technologies. In time, much of the originally spiritual orientation of the Protestant discipline had become focused on more secular concerns, and on the material rewards realized by its productivity. Thus religious zeal yielded to economic vigor, which pressed forward on its own.

  The Counter-Reformation, for its part, similarly brought on unforeseen developments in a direction opposite from that intended. The Catholic Church’s crusade to reform itself and oppose the spread of Protestantism took many forms, from the revival of the Inquisition to the practical reforms and mystical writings of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. But the Counter-Reformation was spearheaded above all by the Jesuits, a Roman Catholic order that established itself as militantly loyal to the pope and attracted a considerable number
of strong-willed and intellectually sophisticated men. Among their various activities in the secular world designed to accomplish their Catholic mission, which ranged from heroic missionary work overseas to assiduous censorship and Byzantine political intrigue in the courts of Europe, the Jesuits took on the responsibility of educating the young, especially those of the ruling class, to forge a new Catholic elite. Jesuits soon became the most celebrated teachers on the Continent. Their educational strategy, however, involved not only the teaching of the Catholic faith and theology, but also the full humanistic program from the Renaissance and classical era—Latin and Greek letters, rhetoric, logic and metaphysics, ethics, science and mathematics, music, even the gentlemanly arts of acting and fencing—all in the service of developing a scholarly “soldier of Christ”: a morally disciplined, liberally educated, critically intelligent Christian man capable of outwitting the Protestant heretics and furthering the great Western tradition of Catholic learning.

  Hundreds of educational institutions were founded by the Jesuits throughout Europe, and were soon replicated by Protestant leaders similarly mindful of the need to educate the faithful. The classical humanistic tradition based on the Greek paideia was thereby broadly sustained during the following two centuries, offering the growing educated class of Europeans a new source of cultural unity just as the old source, Christianity, was fragmenting. But as a consequence of such a liberal program, with its exposure of students to many eloquently articulate viewpoints, pagan as well as Christian, and with its disciplined inculcation of a critical rationality, there could not but emerge in educated Europeans a decidedly nonorthodox tendency toward intellectual pluralism, skepticism, and even revolution. It was no accident that Galileo and Descartes, Voltaire and Diderot all received Jesuit educations.

  And here was the final and most drastic secularizing effect of the Reformation. For with the revolt of Luther, Christianity’s medieval matrix split into two, then into many, then seemingly commenced destroying itself as the new divisions battled each other throughout Europe with unbridled fury. The resulting chaos in the intellectual and cultural life of Europe was profound. Wars of religion reflected violent disputes between ever-multiplying religious sects over whose conception of absolute truth would prevail. The need for a clarifying and unifying vision capable of transcending the irresolvable religious conflicts was urgent and broadly felt. It was amidst this state of acute metaphysical turmoil that the Scientific Revolution began, developed, and finally triumphed in the Western mind.

  The Scientific Revolution

  Copernicus

  The Scientific Revolution was both the final expression of the Renaissance and its definitive contribution to the modern world view. Born in Poland and educated in Italy, Copernicus lived during the height of the Renaissance. Though it was destined to become an unquestioned principle of existence for the modern psyche, the central tenet of his vision was inconceivable to most Europeans in his own lifetime. More than any other single factor, it was the Copernican insight that provoked and symbolized the drastic, fundamental break from the ancient and medieval universe to that of the modern era.

  Copernicus sought a new solution to the age-old problem of the planets: how to explain the apparently erratic planetary movements by means of a simple, clear, elegant mathematical formula. To recapitulate, the solutions proposed by Ptolemy and all his successors, solutions based on the geocentric Aristotelian cosmos, had required the employment of increasingly numerous mathematical devices—deferents, major and minor epicycles, equants, eccentrics—in the attempt to make sense of the observed positions while maintaining the ancient rule of uniform circular motion. When a planet’s movement did not appear to move in a perfect circle, another, smaller circle was added, around which the planet hypothetically moved while it continued moving around the larger circle. Further discrepancies were solved by compounding the circles, displacing their centers, positing yet another center from which motion remained uniform, and so on. Each new astronomer, faced with newly revealed irregularities that contradicted the basic scheme, attempted to resolve them by adding more refinements—another minor epicycle here, another eccentric there.

  By the Renaissance, the Ptolemaic strategy had produced, in Copernicus’s words, a “monster”—an inelegant and overburdened conception which, despite all the complicated ad hoc corrective devices, still failed to account for or predict observed planetary positions with reliable accuracy. The original conceptual economy of the Ptolemaic model no longer existed. Moreover, different Greek, Arabic, and European astronomers used different methods and principles, different combinations of epicycles, eccentrics, and equants, so that there now existed a confusing multiplicity of systems based on Ptolemy. The science of astronomy, lacking any theoretical homogeneity, was riddled with uncertainty. Further, the accumulation of many centuries of observations since Ptolemy’s time had revealed more and worse divergences from the Ptolemaic predictions, so that it seemed to Copernicus increasingly unlikely that any new modification of that system would be tenable. The continued maintenance of the ancient assumptions was making it impossible for astronomers to compute accurately the actual movements of heavenly bodies. Copernicus concluded that classical astronomy must contain, or even be based upon, some essential error.

  Renaissance Europe urgently needed a better calendar, and the Church, for which the calendar was indispensable in administrative and liturgical matters, undertook its reform. Such reform depended on astronomical precision. Copernicus, asked to advise the papacy on the problem, responded that the existing confused state of astronomical science precluded any immediate effective reform. Copernicus’s technical proficiency as an astronomer and mathematician enabled him to recognize the inadequacies of the existing cosmology. Yet this alone would not have forced him to devise a new system. Another, equally competent astronomer might well have perceived the problem of the planets as intrinsically insoluble, too complex and refractory for any mathematical system to comprehend. It would seem to be above all Copernicus’s participation in the intellectual atmosphere of Renaissance Neoplatonism—and specifically his embrace of the Pythagorean conviction that nature was ultimately comprehensible in simple and harmonious mathematical terms of a transcendent, eternal quality—that pressed and guided him toward innovation. The divine Creator, whose works were everywhere good and orderly, could not have been slipshod with the heavens themselves.

  Provoked by such considerations, Copernicus painstakingly reviewed all the ancient scientific literature he could acquire, much of which had recently become available in the Humanist revival and the transfer of Greek manuscripts from Constantinople to the West. He found that several Greek philosophers, notably of Pythagorean and Platonist background, had proposed a moving Earth, although none had developed the hypothesis to its full astronomical and mathematical conclusions. Hence Aristotle’s geocentric conception had not been the only judgment of the revered Greek authorities. Armed with this sense of kinship with an ancient tradition, inspired by the Neoplatonists’ exalted conception of the Sun, and further supported by the university Scholastics’ critical appraisals of Aristotelian physics, Copernicus hypothesized a Sun-centered universe with a planetary Earth and mathematically worked out the implications.

  Despite the innovation’s apparent absurdity, its application resulted in a system Copernicus believed to be qualitatively better than Ptolemy’s. The heliocentric model readily explained the apparent daily movement of the heavens and annual motion of the Sun as due to the Earth’s daily rotation on its axis and its annual revolution around the central Sun. The appearance of the moving Sun and stars could now be recognized as deceptively created by the Earth’s own movements. The great celestial motions were then nothing but a projection of the Earth’s motion in the opposite direction. To the traditional objection that a moving Earth would be disruptive to itself and objects on it, Copernicus countered that the geocentric theory necessitated an even swifter movement by the immensely greater heavens, which
would constitute a patently worse disruption.

  Many particular problems that had long haunted the Ptolemaic tradition seemed more elegantly solved by a heliocentric system. The apparent backward and forward movements of the planets relative to the fixed stars, and their varying degrees of brightness, to explain which astronomers had employed innumerable mathematical contrivances, could now be understood more simply as the result of viewing those planets from a moving Earth—which would produce the retrograde appearances without the hypothetical use of major epicycles. A moving Earth would automatically make regular planetary orbits around the Sun appear to the terrestrial observer as irregular movements around the Earth. Nor were equants any longer necessary, a Ptolemaic device that Copernicus found especially objectionable on aesthetic grounds because it violated the rule of uniform circular motion. Copernicus’s new ordering of the planets outward from the Sun—Mercury, Venus, Earth and Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—replaced the traditional Earth-centered order, and provided a simple and coherent solution to the previously ill-resolved problem of why Mercury and Venus always appeared close to the Sun. The explanation for these problems and others like them strongly suggested to Copernicus the superiority of the heliocentric theory over the Ptolemaic system. The appearances were saved (albeit still approximately), and with greater conceptual elegance. Despite the obvious commonsense evidence to the contrary, not to mention almost two millennia of scientific tradition, Copernicus was convinced the Earth truly moved.