Origen tried, especially in his De Principiis (On First Principles), to synthesize Christianity with pagan and Eastern ideas of the cosmos, and he sought understanding of the eternal cycles. He wrote:
So therefore it seems to me impossible for a world to be restored for the second time, with the same order and with the same amount of births, and deaths, and actions; but that a diversity of worlds may exist with changes of no unimportant kind, so that the state of another world may be for some unmistakable reasons better (than this), and for others worse, and for others again intermediate. But what may be the number or measure of this I confess myself ignorant, although, if anyone can tell it, I would gladly learn.[267]
His searching attitude notwithstanding, Origen still noticed the impossibility of eternally repeating worlds, and he noticed that such an idea was in conflict with revelation. He recalled the events of biblical and salvation history, noting that if the world repeated itself over and over again, then there would be more than one Adam and Eve, more than one Deluge, more than one Moses, more than one Judas and Paul, and more than one Savior. If this were true, he furthered, and everything man did in this age were to be repeated, then there would be no free will because souls driven in a cycle to be endlessly repeated are, thus, all predetermined.
And now I do not understand by what proofs they can maintain their position, who assert that worlds sometimes come into existence which are not dissimilar to each other, but in all respects equal. For if there is said to be a world similar in all respects (to the present), then it will come to pass that Adam and Eve will do the same things which they did before: there will be a second time the same deluge, and the same Moses will again lead a nation numbering nearly six hundred thousand out of Egypt; Judas will also a second time betray the Lord; Paul will a second time keep the garments of those who stoned Stephen; and everything which has been done in this life will be said to be repeated—a state of things which I think cannot be established by any reasoning, if souls are actuated by freedom of will, and maintain either their advance or retrogression according to the power of their will. For souls are not driven on in a cycle which returns after many ages to the same round, so as either to do or desire this or that; but at whatever point the freedom of their own will aims, there do they direct the course of their actions.[268]
He invoked the authority of Holy Scripture with the expression of the Lord, “I will that where I am, these also may be with Me; and as I and You are one, these also may be one in Us.”[269] He pondered that this “may not seem to convey something more than an age and ages,” but he also noted that there is an end to time when “all things are now no longer in an age, but when God is in all.”[270]
At the conclusion of a long discourse against Celsum, a Platonist, Origen reiterated a firm conviction that the cosmic vision was not predicated on eternal cycles but on the fusion of truth and benevolence, a central factor in the Christian message, the recognition that Jesus Christ is the Incarnate Word of God.[271] There is no place for the resurrection in the doctrine of cosmic cycles, and the early Christian Fathers recognized this clearly.
For we know that even if heaven and earth and the things in them pass away, yet the words about each doctrine, being like parts in a whole or forms in a species, which were uttered by the Logos who was the divine Logos with God in the beginning, will in no wise pass away. For we would pay heed to him who says: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”[272]
Origen, like many of the early Church Fathers, demonstrated the depth of his conviction by martyrdom.[273] Just as Jaki noted in the story of the mother whose seven sons were martyred in the book of Maccabees, the worldview of the Bible and of Christianity was not merely a philosophical outlook; it was a pervasive conviction that was kept pure and protected at any price because the faithful held it as true.
Finally, a survey of the early Church and scientific attitudes born of the Christian faith cannot be complete without a mention of St. Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354–430). In his work The City of God, Augustine systematically addressed questions about the destiny of man, which hardly made sense in the doctrine of eternal cycles.[274] According to Jaki, Augustine’s work “moulded more than any other book by a Christian author the spirit of the Middle Ages” because its “pages were as many wellsprings of information and inspiration for the emerging new world of Europe about the meaning of mankind’s journey through time.”[275] Fundamentally and consistent with Christian teaching before him, Augustine taught that the physical universe had its origin in the sovereign act of creation by God. It became the “intellectual vehicle for a confidence which centuries later made possible the emergence for the first time of a culture with a built-in force of self-sustaining progress.”[276] The City of God begins with six chapters that extensively lay out the considerations about Creation, the finiteness of the universe in time and space, and the goodness and beauty of the universe issued by the Creator Himself. It was baffling to Augustine that anyone would believe that good is not the source of all things.
But it is much more surprising that some even of those who, with ourselves, believe that there is one only source of all things, and that no nature which is not divine can exist unless originated by that Creator, have yet refused to accept with a good and simple faith this so good and simple a reason of the world's creation, that a good God made it good; and that the things created, being different from God, were inferior to Him, and yet were good, being created by none other than He.[277]
It was also incomprehensible to him how anyone could be satisfied with the doctrine of eternal cycles alternating forever between birth and decay, happiness and misery. He preferred instead a sound doctrine and a straight path prescribed by the Creator to all of Creation, His Handiwork. In Book XII, Chapter 13 “Of the Revolution of the Ages, Which Some Philosophers Believe Will Bring All Things Round Again, After a Certain Fixed Cycle, to the Same Order and Form as at First,” Augustine was clear that such a view was a “transmigration between delusive blessedness and real misery.”[278]
For how can that be truly called blessed which has no assurance of being so eternally, and is either in ignorance of the truth, and blind to the misery that is approaching, or, knowing it, is in misery and fear? Or if it passes to bliss, and leaves miseries forever, then there happens in time a new thing which time shall not end. Why not, then, the world also? Why may not man, too, be a similar thing? So that, by following the straight path of sound doctrine, we escape, I know not what circuitous paths, discovered by deceiving and deceived sages.
When other scholars tried to interpret biblical references as evidence of eternal cycles, Augustine strongly rejected such an interpretation, just as his predecessors had, on the grounds of the impossibility of more than one Savior:
At all events, far be it from any true believer to suppose that by these words of Solomon those cycles are meant, in which, according to those philosophers, the same periods and events of time are repeated; as if, for example, the philosopher Plato, having taught in the school at Athens which is called the Academy, so, numberless ages before, at long but certain intervals, this same Plato and the same school, and the same disciples existed, and so also are to be repeated during the countless cycles that are yet to be—far be it, I say, from us to believe this. For once Christ died for our sins; and, rising from the dead, He dies no more. Death has no more dominion over Him; (Romans 6:9) and we ourselves after the resurrection shall be ever with the Lord (1 Thessalonians 4:16) to whom we now say, as the sacred Psalmist dictates, You shall keep us, O Lord, You shall preserve us from this generation. And that too which follows, is, I think, appropriate enough: The wicked walk in a circle, not because their life is to recur by means of these circles, which these philosophers imagine, but because the path in which their false doctrine now runs is circuitous.
Augustine had an appreciation for quantitative relationships, but that was not his main concern. His main concern was the quest for happiness. H
is view was that knowledge of the quantitative exactness of the natural world, including the cosmos, could not help much in understanding the biblical message.[279] Augustine also rejected any biblical interpretation which denied or ignored the established conclusions of natural studies. He was explicit on this point:
It is often the case that a non-Christian happens to know something with absolute certainty and through experimental evidence about the earth, sky, and other elements of this world, about the motion, rotation, and even about the size and distances of stars, about certain defects [eclipses] of the sun and moon, about the cycles of years and epochs, about the nature of animals, fruits, stones, and the like. It is, therefore, very deplorable and harmful, and to be avoided at any cost that he should hear a Christian to give, so to speak, a “Christian account” of these topics in such a way that he could hardly hold his laughter on seeing, as the saying goes, the error rise sky-high.[280]
Augustine realized that when statements of the Bible conflicted with hypotheses of the workings of nature and when reason and observation provided no clear solution and decisive evidence, nor did Scripture seem to be explicitly literal, then the matter was open to further inquiry. Whenever scientific reasoning seemed to settle a matter, however, he urged that Scripture would have to be reinterpreted. When an apparent conflict could not be settled, he wrote that questions which “require much subtle and laborious reasoning to perceive which the actual case” he had no time for because “it is not needed by those whom [he wished] to instruct for their own salvation and for the benefit of the Church.”[281] Jaki wrote of Augustine’s contributions to next millennium:
A man with a restored sense of purpose, a man with an ability to discern intelligible patterns in the universe, a man aware of the vital difference between knowledge and happiness, a man confronting an external world not as an a priori product of his mind but accessible to the light of reason which itself was a participation in God’s mind, such were some principal consideration which Augustine stressed through his literary career as a thinker and a Christian.[282]
For another thousand years, the writings and wisdom of Augustine would remain a principal source of instruction that held consequences for the coming new phase of human history immersed in scientific enterprise.
The Christian West
The Christian West
“I might seek from the theological masters what they might teach me in these matters as to how these things take place…”
This chapter “Was Born” will now turn to the Christian scholars of the Middle Ages. They are discussed in chronological order to show the progression toward the breakthrough of science, a breakthrough dependent on divine revelation, which gave birth to modern science. This review of ten scholars seeks to show this progression away from the pantheistic ideas received from the Greek scientific corpus toward the insight that secured the viable breakthrough, or birth, of modern science.
Adelard of Bath
It was under the stronghold of faith in a Creator from Old Testament times and strengthened through the first millennium of Christianity that the European scholars received the Greek philosophical and natural works from the Arabs. The birth of science in Europe begins around the twelfth century with the writing of Adelard of Bath (1080–1125), well into the so-called Dark Ages identified by some historians.[283] The story, if the writings of the philosophers are taken into account, is much more complex than Christian medieval thought needing a mathematical and technological trigger to give birth to modern science.
Jaki denoted Adelard’s Questiones naturales as the “true dawn of medieval science” because it starts with phrases that are “pregnant with the future.”[284] Amid a genuine devotion to the miraculous during the European Middle Ages, Adelard’s nephew, who studied in France at his uncle’s school, wanted Adelard to publish something fresh from the learning he gained during his travels in the Muslim world.[285] Adelard translated texts of Arab trigonometry, astronomy, and Euclid’s geometry into Latin and was, therefore, familiar with the struggles of Arab thinkers to reconcile faith and reason.[286]
Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers had in common a conflict between Greek and Eastern ideas based on eternal cosmic cycles and the belief in a personal Creator who created the universe in an absolute beginning of time. Adelard was aware of this conflict when he answered his nephew’s questions. In fact, the nephew’s questions demonstrated his awareness of this struggle and the how the Christian faith kept a realistic view of the world firmly in place. The younger had a lot of questions for his uncle. He wanted to know why plants spring from the earth.[287] He wanted to know the cause and how it is explained. He wanted to know how trees burst through the ground and put out branches. He wanted to know why plants spring up even if he put dry dust in a bronze pot. The youth was inclined to attribute all of these things to the miraculous effect of the divine will. Nature, after all, has plenty of seeming miracles to feed the mind in search of them. However, Adelard urged his nephew to find a balance between faith and reason, to use reason as far as possible.
He admitted that it was the will of the Creator that plants should spring from the earth, but he also asserted that there was a reason (a cause) for it. When his nephew asked if it were not “better to attribute all the operations of the universe to God,” Adelard replied:
I do not detract from God. Whatever this is, is from Him and through Him. But the realm of being is not a confused one, nor is it lacking in disposition which, so far as human knowledge can go, should be consulted. Only when reason totally fails, should the explanation of the matter be referred to God.[288]
The historian Alistair Cameron Crombie called this remark the point when the “medieval conception of nature began to cross the great watershed that divides the period when men looked to nature to provide illustrations for moralizing from that in which men began to study nature for its own sake.”[289] Consistent with Jaki’s thesis, this statement demonstrates the naturalism of the Christian mindset, a realistic naturalism necessary for the vitality of scientific progress. The historian David C. Lindberg also noted that this naturalism was one of the “salient features of twelfth-century natural philosophy” and was not limited to Adelard, but was also in more general treatises by scholars such as William of Conches, Honorius of Autun, Bernard Sylvester, and Clarembald of Arras, most of whom were also associated with schools in France.[290] There was a growing awareness of natural order and physical laws during the Middle Ages.
Jaki’s theological commentary on the psychology is interesting. There was an undeniable tendency toward all things miraculous in the Middle Ages as the scholars tried to incorporate the ancient Greek writings received and translated from the Muslim world. There was a fascination with the magical and astrological among the pantheistic, agnostic views found in those works. Viewing nature through the lens of Christian faith is not something that can be imposed, even if the state tried to impose it through unevangelical methods, as was done in the high Middle Ages. It is one thing to profess and practice a faith outwardly, but another thing altogether to give free assent of the intellect internally. This is why not all Christian scholars chose to view the cosmos through the faith expressed in the Creed, just as the Muslim scholars chose not to view the cosmos according to the Koran.
A person had essentially two options. To yield to a faith in a transcendental God as Creator was to yield to a belief in man’s freedom, but that came with tensions and dynamics that were intellectually difficult to deal with. The freedom of human intellect is hampered by the body, and knowledge is neither immediate nor complete on any subject. On the other hand, to acquiesce to a faith in a pantheistic nature-God only required a person to “seek repose” and be “carried effortlessly on the waves of nature’s events.”[291] Yet this careless repose in nature will ultimately lead to a fight for survival that begs the question about freedom anyway. What is man’s purpose and how do his surroundings work? This is why it was important during the medieval times, with
the onrush of astrological treatises translated into Latin from Arabic, that the biblical account of creation played a “purifying role.” Those who held a firm belief in a transcendental Creator, a creation out of nothing, an absolute beginning and end of time, and the rationality of the universe and of man were able to reject the astrogeology and pantheism of the Greeks and Muslims. There was guidance for the Christian scholars to aid them in choosing between these two options.
Thierry of Chartres
Thierry of Chartres (1155) attempted to give a rational account of creation in his De Septem Diebus et Sex Operum Distinctionibus.[292] He interpreted the story of creation to mean that God created space and chaos in the beginning and that all things were composed of elements. This naturalness was a departure from Plato’s divinity of the heavens and his Demiurge that shaped the material world, described in Timaeus.[293] That is, he departed from the dichotomy between the heavens and the earth, a view that held the celestial bodies as divine and the terrestrial bodies as material.[294]
Because of his faith, Thierry had no illusion about the difference between the Creator and creation, and he explained the circular motion of the firmament and the stars as a projectile similar to how a “stone is thrown; its impetus is ultimately due to the hold of the thrower against something solid.”[295] Classical physics was to be born of such a view towards naturalness of the heavens and this early impetus theory. Thierry emphasized the need for mathematics to not only investigate the universe, but also to recognize God. “There are four kinds of reasons,” he explained, “that led man to the recognition of the Creator: the proofs are taken from arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.”[296] The connection Thierry saw between these four disciplines is consistent with the Old Testament worldview that the Creator arranged everything according to number, measure, and weight. Man’s understanding of the physical world had to have a mathematical character to it, mathematics applied to moving objects.
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