18. The Church sustained the ancient ordering of events according to archetypal cycles through its liturgical calendar, which provided a ritual living through of the Christian mystery in the context of nature’s annual cycle: Christ’s Advent in the darkness of winter, his birth at Christmas (coincident with the winter solstice and the birth of the Sun), the preparatory period of purification during Lent in the late winter in anticipation of the Last Supper on Holy Thursday, the Crucifixion on Good Friday, and finally the Resurrection on Easter Sunday amidst the rebirth of spring. Many antecedents for the Christian calendar can be seen in the classical pagan mystery religions.
19. An important qualification should be made here concerning the universality of Christianity in medieval Europe in view of the continuing vestiges of pagan myth and animism in much of the popular culture, as well as the existence of Judaism, Gnosticism, millennialism, witchcraft, Islamic influences, various esoteric traditions, and other minority and underground cultural forces unrelated or resistant to Christian orthodoxy.
Part IV. The Transformation of the Medieval Era
1. Boethius (c 480–524) was a pivotal figure between the classical and medieval eras—a Roman statesman, one of the last Roman philosophers of antiquity, “the first Christian Scholastic,” and the last layman in Christian philosophy for almost a thousand years. Born in Rome of an ancient aristocratic family that had been Christian for a century, he was educated in Athens and became a consul and minister in Roman government. Boethius’s unfulfilled goal was to translate and comment upon all the works of Plato and Aristotle, and to forge a “restoration of their ideas into a single harmony.” His completed works—especially those on Aristotelian logic, a few short theological treatises, and his Platonist manifesto The Consolation of Philosophy—were to have considerable influence on medieval thought. Falsely accused of treason by the barbarian king Theodoric, Boethius was sentenced to prison (where he wrote the Consolation) and executed. When Boethius’s senatorial colleague Cassiodorus later decided to retire from Roman political life to the monastery he founded, he brought with him his Roman library and placed Boethius’s works on the reading list for the education of his monks. Thus the scholarly ideals of the later classical era, and in particular of the educated Roman aristocracy, were transmitted into the Christian monastic tradition. It was Boethius who first formulated the essential Scholastic principle, “As far as possible, join faith to reason.” And it was a passage in his commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge (a Greek introduction to Aristotelian logic) that initiated the long medieval controversy between nominalism and realism concerning the nature of universals.
2. Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096–1141) also helped forge the new medieval awareness of human history as a temporal development of inherent significance. He noted, for example, the peculiar tendency of human civilization to move over time from East to West—a fact that suggested to him the approach of the end time, since the limit of the West had apparently already been reached at the Atlantic coast. Hugh also argued against Augustine’s interpretation of Genesis as atemporal metaphor, instead affirming a true temporal succession of creative acts, and he upheld the value of salvational history’s concrete actuality prior to the imposition of allegorical interpretations of that history. See M. D. Chenu, “Theology and the New Awareness of History” in Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, edited and translated by J. Taylor and L. K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 162–201.
3. The Dominican and Franciscan mendicant orders also represented a force for social revolution in the high Middle Ages. Their commitment to poverty and humility was both a return to the apostolic life of the primitive church and a break from the feudal system and its propertied ecclesiastical hierarchy. In the latter respect, the evangelical friars were similar to the new urban class of merchants and artisans who had also defected from the feudal economy, and it was especially from this class that the orders would draw their numbers. A similar parallel existed in the intellectual revolution that emerged from the Dominican and Franciscan theologians. Just as the evangelical movements found new sources of inspiration in the literal meaning of Scripture against the allegorizing glosses favored by traditional theologians, so this same tendency was reflected in the Scholastics’ increasing philosophical respect for the concrete empirical world against the otherworldly idealism of the Augustinian-Platonist tradition. See Chenu, “The Evangelical Awakening,” ibid., 239–269.
4. In a sense, Aquinas outdid Aristotle in his positive valuation of the body. Aquinas’s doctrine of the Resurrection held that the perfect human being was a full composite of soul and body, and that with the purification of the soul would come a reunion with and glorification of the body. Whereas for Aristotelians the intimate soul-body relation implied the mortality of the soul, for Aquinas that same intimacy supported the immortality of the redeemed body.
5. The polarity represented by Aquinas and Augustine (and their respective affinities for Aristotle and Plato) may be understood in part as deriving from their individual intellectual responses to the radically different cultural tempers of their historical periods. If Augustine’s Platonic otherworldliness and emphasis on supersensible knowledge can be seen as a reaction to and development out of the pagan sensualism and skeptical secularism of the later classical era, Aquinas’s Aristotelian embrace of empiricism and materiality can be seen as a reaction to and development out of the Christian antiworldliness and fideist anti-intellectualism of the earlier medieval era. The contrast of Augustine’s pessimism concerning humanity and nature with Aquinas’s more optimistic views also has cultural reflections. Living during the last years of the classical era, Augustine was confronted with the decadence and disintegration of Roman civilization amidst the barbarian invasions. Aquinas, however, lived when European civilization was experiencing a new era of stabilization and rapid development during the high Middle Ages, with the forces of nature increasingly controlled by the human intellect and with the European continent relatively free of external threats. For Augustine, the spirit of the secular world around him must have seemed fraught with decay, suffering, and evil, with the human capacity for positive self-determination minimal; Aquinas’s milieu was decidedly more progressive.
6. Aquinas’s rationalism was always in tension with a suprarational mysticism showing the influence of Dionysius the Areopagite. Probably a fifth-century Syrian monk who assumed the name of Paul’s New Testament convert at Athens, Dionysius set forth a Neoplatonic Christian mysticism that stressed the ultimate unknowability of God: Whatever qualities the human mind attributes to God cannot be considered ultimately valid, for if they are humanly comprehensible, they must be limited to the finiteness of human understanding, and cannot therefore be said to comprehend the infinite nature of God. Even the concepts of “being” and “reality” cannot be attributed to God, since such concepts could only be derived from things that God has created, and the nature of the Creator must be of a fundamentally different character from the nature of his creation. Hence any affirmation of God’s nature must be complemented by its negation, and both affirmation and negation are ultimately transcended by God, who surpasses anything the human mind can conceive. These considerations (basic to the via negativa, the tradition of negative or apophatic theology which was especially characteristic of Eastern Christianity) perhaps throw light on the statement Aquinas made after a mystical experience he had while celebrating Mass shortly before he died: “… such things have been revealed to me that all that I have written seems to me as so much straw.”
7. According to Aristotle, any motion other than that caused by the natural tendencies of the different elements must be caused by a constantly applied force. A stone at rest will remain at rest, or will move directly toward the center of the Earth as befits the natural motion of all heavy objects. To explain the difficult case of projectile motion, however, in which a thrown stone continues to move long after it
has left the thrower’s hand without any visible constantly applied push, Aristotle suggested that the air disturbed by the stone’s movement would continue to push the stone after it left the hand. Later Aristotelians criticized this theory for its various weaknesses, but it was Buridan in the fourteenth century who presented a coherent solution: When a projectile is thrown, it is impressed with a motive force, an impetus proportional to its speed and mass, which continues to propel the projectile after it has left its original projector. In addition, Buridan adumbrated the idea that a falling body’s weight impresses equal increments of impetus in equal intervals of time.
Buridan also suggested that when God created the heavens, he may have impressed an impetus in the celestial bodies, which continued to move ever afterward (when God rested on the seventh day) by virtue of that impetus, since there was no resistance to their motions. By this means, Buridan could hypothetically dispense with angelic intelligences as the movers of the celestial bodies, since they were neither mentioned in the Bible nor physically necessary to explain the motions. This was perhaps the first major application of a principle of terrestrial physics to celestial phenomena. In turn, Buridan’s successor, Oresme, conceived of such a universe as resembling a mechanical clock constructed and left running by God.
Among other contributions, Oresme introduced the use of mathematical tabulations by equivalent graphing, anticipating Descartes’s development of analytic geometry. But in reference to the problem of the celestial movements, Oresme argued that the apparent rotation of the entire heavens could just as easily be explained by the rotation of the Earth—a more plausible smaller movement by a single body compared with the immensely greater and swifter movement of all the heavenly bodies through vast spaces in a single day (which Oresme deemed “unbelievable and unthinkable”). In viewing the stars each night or the Sun each day, the observer can be certain only of the fact of movement; whether that movement is produced by the heavens or the Earth cannot be ascertained by the senses, which would register the same phenomenon in either case.
Oresme also argued against Aristotle that material objects may fall to the Earth not because the Earth is the center of the universe, but because material bodies naturally move toward each other. A thrown stone falls back to the Earth wherever in the universe the Earth may be, because the Earth is near the thrown stone and has its own attractive center, while another earth elsewhere would receive nearby loose stones to its own center. Thus matter may be naturally attracted to other matter. Such a theoretical alternative to Aristotle’s explanation of falling bodies in terms of a central Earth was prerequisite to the later heliocentric hypothesis. Also, by assuming Buridan’s impetus theory, Oresme argued that a vertically falling body would fall straight down to the Earth, even if the Earth was moving, just as a man on a moving ship could move his hand downward in a straight line alongside the mast without noticing any deviation. The ship carries and maintains the hand’s straight line relative to itself, just as the Earth would a falling stone. Yet having made these various astute points against Aristotle, and having asserted that only by faith—not by reason or observation or Scripture—could one assert that the Earth is stationary, Oresme then discarded his arguments for the Earth’s rotation. In a later and different scientific context, Copernicus and Galileo did not discard them.
The work of Buridan and Oresme in the fourteenth century thus laid the mandatory groundwork for a planetary Earth, the law of inertia, the concept of momentum, the law of uniform accelerated motion for freely falling bodies, analytic geometry, the removal of the terrestrial-celestial distinction, and a mechanistic universe with a clockmaker God. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy and the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 115–123.
8. Ockham himself used formulations, somewhat different from that now known as Ockham’s razor, such as “Plurality is not to be assumed without necessity” and “What can be done with fewer [assumptions] is done in vain with more.”
9. Translated by Mary Martin McLaughlin in The Portable Renaissance Reader, edited by J. B. Ross and M. M. McLaughlin (New York: Penguin, 1977), 478.
Part V. The Modern World View
1. Tycho de Brahe also proposed a system intermediate between those of Copernicus and Ptolemy, in which all the planets except the Earth revolve about the Sun, while the entire Sun-centered system revolves about the Earth. Essentially a modification of the ancient system of Heraclides, the first part preserved many of the superior Copernican insights, while the second part preserved Aristotelian physics, the fixed central Earth, and the literal interpretation of Scripture. Brahe’s system furthered the Copernican cause, by explicating some of its advantages and problems, but also because some of the new orbital paths of the Sun and planets intersected each other, bringing into question the physical reality of the separate aetheric spheres within which each planet was supposed to be embedded. In addition, Brahe’s observations of comets, now calculated to be beyond the Moon, as well as of a nova that appeared in 1572, began to convince astronomers that the heavens were not immutable, a view subsequently supported by Galileo’s telescopic discoveries. Like Brahe’s compromise arrangement of the planetary orbits, the observed movements of the comets also made less plausible the existence of the aetheric spheres, which Aristotle had considered to be composed of an invisible but solid crystalline substance. The comets were now recognized as moving through spaces traditionally thought to be filled by the solid crystalline spheres, thereby casting further doubt on their physical reality. Kepler’s ellipses would make the circular-moving spheres altogether untenable. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy and the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 200–209.
2. Translated and quoted by James Brodrick, The Life and Work of Blessed Robert Francis Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J., vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, 1950), 359.
3. Galileo’s final work and his most important contribution to physics, Two New Sciences, was completed in 1634, when he was seventy years old. It was published four years later in Holland, after the manuscript had been smuggled out of Italy (apparently with the assistance of the French ambassador to the Vatican, Galileo’s former pupil the Duke of Noailles). In that same year, 1638, John Milton traveled from England to Italy where he visited Galileo, an event later recorded in Areopagitica (1644), Milton’s classic argument for freedom of the press: “I have sat among their learned men, (for that honor I had,) and been counted happy to have been born in such a place of philosophic freedom, as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought” (John Milton, Areopagitica and Other Prose Writings, edited by W. Haller [New York: Book League of America, 1929], 41).
4. Implicit in this division between the human mind and the material world was a nascent skepticism concerning the mind’s ability genuinely to penetrate beyond appearances to an intrinsic order in the world—i.e., concerning the capacity of the subject to bridge the gap to the object. Yet this skepticism, broached by Locke, made explicit by Hume, and critically reformulated by Kant, did not generally affect the scientific understanding as it developed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and well into the twentieth.
5. Mention should be made here of Alfred Russel Wallace’s independent formulation of the theory of evolution in 1858, which impelled Darwin to make public his own work after not doing so for twenty years. Among Darwin’s and Wallace’s important predecessors, Buffon, Lamarck, and Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin stand out, as does Lyell in geology. In addition, Diderot, La Mettrie, Kant, Goethe, and Hegel
were all moving toward an evolutionary world conception.
6. W. Carl Rufus, “Kepler as an Astronomer,” in The History of Science Society, Johannes Kepler: A Tercentenary Commemoration of His Life and Work (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1931), 36.
7. This sentence should be qualified by the fact that the nongeocentric cosmologies were generally offshoots of the Platonic-Pythagorean tradition, and were more emphatically opposed by the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology than by Platonism. See also note 1, part 2, on Plato’s possible heliocentrism.
8. Recent historical analyses have suggested that the rapid decline of Renaissance esotericism in Restoration England was influenced by the highly charged social and political environment that marked seventeenth-century British history. During the revolutionary upheavals of the English Civil War and Interregnum (1642–60), esoteric philosophies such as astrology and Hermeticism were extremely popular, and their close association with radical political and religious movements was widely perceived as threatening to the established Church and propertied classes. Astrological almanacs outsold the Bible during this period of broken censorship, and influential astrologers such as William Lilly encouraged the forces of rebellion. On a conceptual level, the esoteric philosophies supported a world view highly compatible with the antiauthoritarian political and religious activism of the radical movements, with direct spiritual illumination seen as potentially available to every individual of whatever rank or sex, and with nature seen as alive, permeated at all levels by divinity, and perpetually self-transforming. After the Restoration in 1660, leading philosophers, doctors, and clergymen stressed the importance of a sober natural philosophy, such as the recently published mechanical philosophy of inert material particles governed by permanently fixed laws, to undercut the passion-inflaming “enthusiasm” supported by the esoteric world view and the radical sects.
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