Classical culture would long remain an exalted realm haunting the West’s imaginative and aesthetic creations. It would continue to provide modern thinkers with inspiring political and moral ideas and models. Greek philosophy, the Greek and Latin languages and literatures, the events and personalities of ancient history would all still evoke in the modern mind avid interest and scholarly respect, often bordering on reverence. But the humanistic nostalgia for classicism could not disguise the latter’s growing irrelevance for the modern mind. For when the issue at hand was a stringent philosophical and scientific analysis of reality, the classical world view, whatever its historical importance, and whatever its virtues in aesthetic or imaginative terms, could not favorably compare with the intellectual rigor and efficacy modern man could justly claim for his own understanding.
Yet for all that, the ancient Greek mind still pervaded the modern. In the virtually religious zeal of the scientist’s quest for knowledge, in his often unconscious assumptions concerning the rational intelligibility of the world and man’s capacity to reveal it, in his critical independence of judgment and his ambitious drive to expand human knowledge beyond ever more distant horizons, Greece lived on.
The Triumph of Secularism
Science and Religion: The Early Concord
The fate of Christianity in the wake of the Scientific Revolution was not dissimilar to the fate of classical thought, nor did it lack its own share of paradox. If the Greeks had supplied most of the theoretical provisions requisite for the Scientific Revolution, the Catholic Church, for all its dogmatic strictures, had provided the necessary matrix within which the Western mind was able to develop and from which the scientific understanding could emerge. The nature of the Church’s contribution was both practical and doctrinal. From the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Church had provided in its monasteries the only refuge in the West within which the achievements of classical culture could be preserved and their spirit continued. And from the turn of the first millennium, the Church had officially supported and encouraged the vast Scholastic enterprise of scholarship and education without which modern intellectuality might never have arisen.
This momentous act of ecclesiastical sponsorship was justified by a unique constellation of theological positions. The precise and profound comprehension of Christian doctrine required, in the medieval Church’s evolving view, a corresponding capacity for logical clarity and intellectual acuity. Beyond that rationale emerged another, for with the increasing recognition of the physical world in the high Middle Ages there arose a corresponding recognition of the positive role a scientific understanding could play in the appreciation of God’s wondrous creation. For all its wariness of mundane life and “the world,” the Judaeo-Christian religion nevertheless placed great emphasis on the ontological reality of that world and its ultimate relationship to a good and just God. Christianity took this life seriously. Therein lay a significant religious impetus for the scientific quest, which depended not only on a sense of the human being’s active responsibility in this world, but also on a belief in this world’s reality, its order, and, at the start of modern science, its coherent relationship to an omnipotent and infinitely wise Creator.
Nor was the contribution of the Scholastics merely an imperfect Christianized recovery and sustaining of the Greek ideas. For it was the Scholastics’ exhaustive examination and criticism of those ideas, and their creation of new alternative theories and concepts—rudimentary formulations of inertia and momentum, the uniform acceleration of freely falling bodies, hypothetical arguments for a moving Earth—that allowed modern science from Copernicus and Galileo onward to begin forging its new paradigm. And perhaps most consequential was not the specific nature of the Scholastics’ theoretical innovations, nor their revitalization of Hellenic thought, but rather the more intangible existential attitude medieval thinkers passed on to their modern descendants: the theologically founded but decidedly robust confidence that man’s God-given reason possessed the capacity, and the religious duty, to comprehend the natural world. Man’s intellectual relation to the creative Logos, his privileged possession of the divine light of the active intellect—Aquinas’s lumen intellectus agentis—was from the Christian perspective precisely what mediated the human understanding of the cosmos. Descartes’s natural light of the human reason was the direct half-secularized inheritor of that medieval conception. It was Aquinas himself who had written in his Summa Theologica that “authority is the weakest source of proof,” a dictum central for the protagonists of the modern mind’s independence. Modern rationalism, naturalism, and empiricism all had Scholastic roots.
But the Scholasticism encountered by the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural philosophers was a senescent structure of pedagogical dogmatism that no longer spoke to the new spirit of the age. Little or nothing fresh was emerging from within its confines. Its obsession with Aristotle, its oversubtle verbal distinctions and logical quibbles, and its failure to submit theory systematically to the test of experiment all marked late Scholasticism as an outmoded, ingrown institution whose intellectual authority had to be overthrown lest the brave infant science be fatally smothered. After Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, that authority had been effectively impugned, and Scholasticism’s reputation never recovered. From then on, science and philosophy could move forward without theological justification, without recourse to a divine light in the human intellect, without the colossal supporting superstructure of Scholastic metaphysics and epistemology.
Yet despite the unambiguously secular character of the modern science that eventually crystallized out of the Scientific Revolution, the original scientific revolutionaries themselves continued to act, think, and speak of their work in terms conspicuously redolent of religious illumination. They perceived their intellectual breakthroughs as foundational contributions to a sacred mission. Their scientific discoveries were triumphant spiritual awakenings to the divine architecture of the world, revelations of the true cosmic order. Newton’s joyful exclamation, “O God, I think thy thoughts after thee!” was only the culmination of a long series of such epiphanies marking the milestones of modern science’s birth. In the De Revolutionibus, Copernicus celebrated astronomy as a “science more divine than human,” closest to God in the nobility of its character, and upheld the heliocentric theory as revealing the true structural grandeur and precision of God’s cosmos. Kepler’s writings were ablaze with his sense of being divinely illuminated as the inner mysteries of the cosmos unfolded before his eyes.10 He declared astronomers to be “priests of the most high God with respect to the book of nature,” and saw his own role as “the honor of guarding, with my discovery, the door of God’s temple, in which Copernicus serves before the high altar.” In Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo spoke of his telescopic discoveries as made possible by God’s grace enlightening his mind. Even the worldly Bacon envisioned humanity’s progress through science in explicitly religious, pietistic terms, with the material improvement of mankind corresponding to its spiritual approach to the Christian millennium. Descartes interpreted his vision of the new universal science, and a subsequent dream in which that science was symbolically presented to him, as a divine mandate for his life’s work: God had shown him the way to certain knowledge, and assured him of his scientific quest’s ultimate success. And with Newton’s achievement, the divine birth was considered complete. A new Genesis had been written. As Alexander Pope declared for the Enlightenment:
Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, “Let Newton be,” and all was light.
For the great passion to discover the laws of nature that was felt by the scientific revolutionaries derived not least from a sense that they were recovering a divine knowledge that had been lost in the primal Fall. At last the human mind had comprehended God’s working principles. The eternal laws governing Creation, the divine handiwork itself, now stood unveiled by science. Through science man had served God’s greater glory, demonstrating the m
athematical beauty and complex precision, the stupendous order reigning over the heavens and the Earth. The luminous perfection of the discoverers’ new universe compelled their awe before the transcendent intelligence which they attributed to the Creator of such a cosmos.
Nor was the religiosity of the major scientific pioneers a generalized religious sentiment with little specific relation to Christianity. Newton was as zealously absorbed in Christian theology and studies of biblical prophecy as he was in physics. Galileo was committed to saving his Church from a costly error and, despite his confrontation with the Inquisition, remained steadfast in his Catholic piety. Descartes lived and died a devout Catholic. And their Christian presuppositions were intellectually pervasive, embedded in the very fabric of their scientific and philosophical theories. Both Descartes and Newton constructed their cosmological systems on the assumption of God’s existence. For Descartes, the objective world existed as a stable reality because it stood in the mind of God, and human reason was epistemologically reliable because of God’s intrinsically veracious character. Similarly, for Newton, matter could not be explained on its own terms but necessitated a prime mover, a creator, a supreme architect and governor. God had established the physical world and its laws, and therein lay the world’s continuing existence and order. Indeed, because of certain unresolved problems in his calculations, Newton concluded that God’s intervention was periodically necessary to maintain the system’s regularity.
Compromise and Conflict
But the early modern accord between science and Christianity was already displaying tensions and contradictions, for apart from the creationist ontology still underpinning the new paradigm, the scientific universe—with its mechanical forces, its material heavens, and its planetary Earth—was not notably congruent with traditional Christian conceptions of the cosmos. Any central focus of the new universe was maintained only by religious belief, not by scientific evidence. The Earth and mankind might be the metaphysical pivot of God’s creation, but that status could not be supported by a purely scientific understanding, which saw both the Earth and the Sun as merely two bodies among countless others moving through a boundless neutral void. “I am terrified,” said the intensely religious mathematician Pascal, “by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.” Intellectually sensitive Christians attempted to reinterpret and modify their religious understanding to accommodate a universe drastically different from that of the ancient and medieval cosmology within which the Christian religion had evolved, but the metaphysical hiatus continued to widen. In the Enlightenment’s Newtonian cosmos, heaven and hell had lost their physical locations, natural phenomena had lost their symbolic import, and miracles and arbitrary divine interventions into human affairs now appeared increasingly implausible, contradicting the supreme orderliness of a clockwork universe. Yet the deeply rooted principles of Christian belief could scarcely be negated altogether.
Thus arose the psychological necessity of a double-truth universe. Reason and faith came to be seen as pertaining to different realms, with Christian philosophers and scientists, and the larger educated Christian public, perceiving no genuine integration between the scientific reality and the religious reality. Joined together in the high Middle Ages by the Scholastics culminating in Aquinas, then severed in the late medieval period by Ockham and nominalism, faith had moved in one direction with the Reformation, Luther, literal Scripture, fundamentalist Protestantism and Counter-Reformational Catholicism, while reason had moved in another direction with Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Hume, empirical science, rational philosophy, and the Enlightenment. Attempts to bridge the two generally failed to preserve the character of one or the other, as in Kant’s delimiting of religious experience to the moral impulse.
With both science and religion simultaneously vital yet discrepant, the culture’s world view was by necessity bifurcated, reflecting a metaphysical schism that existed as much within the individual as within the larger society. Religion was increasingly compartmentalized, seen as relevant less to the outer world than to the inner self, less to the contemporary spirit than to revered tradition, less to this life than to the afterlife, less to everyday than to Sunday. Christian doctrine was still believed by most, and indeed, as if in reaction to the abstract mechanical universe of the Enlightenment’s physicists and philosophers, a host of fervently emotional religious movements—Pietism in Germany, Jansenism in France, the Quakers and Methodists in England, the Great Awakening in America—emerged and found broad popular support in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Devout religiosity in the traditional Christian mold continued to be widespread; these were the very years in which Western religious music reached its apogee in Bach and Handel, both born within months of Newton’s Principia. But amidst this pluralism, wherein the scientific and religious temperaments pursued their separate paths, the overriding cultural direction was clear: scientific rationalism was ineluctably on the ascent, demonstrating its sovereignty over ever-larger areas of human experience.
Within two centuries after Newton, the secularity of the modern outlook had fully established itself. Mechanistic materialism had dramatically proved its explanatory power and utilitarian efficacy. Experiences and events that appeared to defy accepted scientific principles—alleged miracles and faith healings, self-proclaimed religious revelations and spiritual ecstasies, prophecies, symbolic interpretations of natural phenomena, encounters with God or the devil—were now increasingly regarded as the effects of madness, charlatanry, or both. Questions concerning the existence of God or a transcendent reality ceased to play a decisive role in the scientific imagination, which was becoming the principal factor in defining the educated public’s shared belief system. Already for Pascal in the seventeenth century, faced with his own religious doubts and philosophical skepticism, the leap of faith necessary to sustain Christian belief had become a wager. Now, for many at the leading edge of Western thought, it seemed a losing bet.
What, then, caused this shift from the explicit religiosity of the scientific revolutionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the equally emphatic secularism of the Western intellect in the nineteenth and twentieth? Certainly the metaphysical incongruity of the two outlooks, the cognitive dissonance resulting from the attempt to hold together such innately divergent systems and sensibilities, eventually had to force the issue in one direction or the other. The character and implications of the Christian revelation simply did not cohere well with those of the scientific revelation. Essential to the Christian faith was the belief in Christ’s physical resurrection after death, an event that, with its apostolic witness and interpretation, had served as the very foundation of Christianity. But with the near-universal acceptance of the scientific explanation of all phenomena in terms of regular natural laws, that foundational miracle, as well as all the other supernatural phenomena recounted in the Bible, could no longer command unquestioning belief. Raisings from the dead, miraculous healings and exorcisms, a divine-human savior, a virgin birth, manna from heaven, wine from water, water from rocks, partings of seas—all appeared increasingly improbable to the modern mind, bearing as they did too many similarities to other mythical or legendary concoctions of the archaic imagination.
Damaging criticism of the absolute truth of Christian revelation also emerged from the new academic discipline of biblical scholarship, which demonstrated Scripture’s variable and manifestly human sources. Both the Renaissance Humanists and the Reformation theologians had pressed for a return to the original Greek and Hebrew sources of the Bible, which led to a more critical reading of the original texts and reevaluations of their historical authenticity and integrity. In the course of several generations of such scholarship, Scripture began to lose its sacral aura of divine inspiration. The Bible could now be recognized less as the unquestionably authoritative and pristine Word of God than as a heterogeneous collection of writings in various traditional literary genres, composed, collected, and editorially modified by many human hands
over the centuries. Soon biblical textual criticism was followed by critical historical studies of Christian dogma and the church, and by historical investigations into the life of Jesus. The intellectual skills developed for analyzing secular history and literature were now being applied to the sacred foundations of Christianity, with unsettling consequences for the faithful.
By the time such studies were joined by the Darwinian theory’s discrediting of the creation narrative found in Genesis, the validity of scriptural revelation had become entirely problematic. Man could hardly have been made in the image of God if he was also the biological descendant of subhuman primates. The thrust of evolution was not one of spiritual transfiguration but of biological survival. While up through Newton the weight of science had tended to support an argument for the existence of God based on evidence of design in the universe, after Darwin the weight of science was thrown against that argument. The evidence of natural history seemed more plausibly comprehended in terms of evolutionary principles of natural selection and random mutation than in terms of a transcendent Designer.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 39