Where did “Science” as we know it come from? Why did Science, as an enterprise, arise in the West? Many today would say it came from the Enlightenment, or the early modern period with Francis Bacon and Galileo. But we need to look deeper back in history to understand its conceptual foundations. While reasoning about intellectual history requires caution and circumspection, here I will try to advance a perhaps controversial claim: that the origins of a scientific worldview arose specifically from Christianity. Examination of the relation between faith, reason, and science in the history of the Church shows how Christianity begot or strengthened several patterns of thinking necessary for science. These patterns are: the Orderliness of Creation, the Goodness of Creation, Primary and Secondary Causality, Unity of Truth, and the Universal Destination of Goods. Here I will focus on the period from the beginning of Christianity to the beginning of the public enterprise of experimental science in the high medieval era.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten Son from the Father.” (John 1:1-3, 14). Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, is both mediator of creation and salvation, and dwelt among us. The Orderliness of Creation is clear throughout the Old Testament, but Christ’s Incarnation fundamentally changes our understanding of the Logos. Our faith in Christ and His Salvation is intertwined with our rational engagement with the ordering principle of the created world, which is no longer merely a principle, but is Christ. Study of the created world gains new dignity as another means of understanding His Goodness. It may be an act of reverence and not simply gain for oneself. Further, this intertwining demands intellectual and spiritual humility from the student. This humility is the seed of honest science.
Now we can turn to early Christianity’s engagement with the wider world, starting in Acts. “Men, why are you doing this? We also are men, of like nature with you, and bring you good news, that you should turn from these vain things to a living God who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.” (Acts 14:15) When some Athenians believe that St. Paul and St. Barnabas were Zeus and Hermes after observing Paul’s healing of a cripple, Paul rebukes them and asks them to turn to God alone. Paul preaches the unity and orderliness of Creation to the Athenians. Polytheism was an obstacle to science because if phenomena on Earth were the work of capricious or competing deities, one could not expect the regularity or consistency required for study. In contrast, the author of miracles is the same as the singular author of the workings of the world. When Paul returns to Athens after some time (Acts 17:16-34) he again exhorts them to turn away from false idols, meets with Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, and cites Greek poetry (17:28) to relate to them and explain that God is the source of life, greater than the art or imagination of Man. This encounter with the pagan and philosophical Greeks began the long dialogue between Christianity and classical learning that would prove essential to the emergence of Western science.
The Meaning of Number
“But thou hast arranged all things by measure and number and weight.” (Wisdom 11:20) In The Journey of the Mind To God, St. Bonaventure (1221-1274) begins by describing how through experience of the world we are drawn to contemplate the First Principle. Bonaventure argues that it is necessary that everything be numerical: God’s creation is ordered, purposeful, and beautiful; symmetry and proportion are the basis of beauty, and these require number. God’s wisdom is stamped on created things and “number is the foremost exemplar in the Maker’s mind”, but only God is eternal. Recognition of order within creation is among the first steps of the path of devotion to God.
Jews and Christians were not alone in this inspiration: the ancient Greeks, Babylonians, Egyptians all saw beauty in mathematics and sought to understand the world through it. So what was the difference? Even though mathematical rationality is one stepping stone to wisdom, for the Christian, it is not the final destination. In the Platonic conception, the material world was an imperfect emanation of the transcendent world of forms. Plato’s Timaeus hypothesizes how the behavior of each of the classical elements is based on its corresponding regular polyhedron (what we today call Platonic solids). For Plato, geometry and pure reasoning is the path to understanding the workings of the whole universe.
There are a few problems here for scientific study. Firstly, denigration of the actually existing world that we experience in favor of transcendent geometry makes it difficult to integrate empirical inquiry, if one takes the Platonic conception seriously. On the other hand, the Christian understanding of incarnate Logos changes the significance of the material world to a worthy object of study that is divinely ordered. Understanding that mathematics is simply one part of our rationality that we ought to use neither ignores its utility nor misplaces it as the supreme end.
The second problem of the Platonic system is more subtle and requires discussing the concept of “The Great Year”. Classical pagan cosmology was founded upon a belief in a cyclical universe. For Plato, “The Great Year” or perfect year was the period over which all planets, with their cycles of different lengths, would return to their original positions. Later astronomers such as Hipparchus would base the Great Year on the procession of the axis of the Earth. When combined in a belief in astrology, the Great Year was the “cycle of ages” over which period everything would recur. In Timaeus, time is a moving image of unchanging eternity that is shown in the motion of the stars. Astronomy is the approach toward the singular, cyclical, eternal, and mathematical entity that is the source of the image that is the cosmos. In Science and Creation: From eternal cycles to an oscillating universe (1974), historian of science Fr. Stanley Jaki argues that it was precisely this belief in a cyclical universe that undermined a scientific understanding of causality and inhibited progress towards empirical physics, as will be described more in the next section. Christianity requires belief in linear history and the gradual unfolding of the plan for man’s salvation, accompanied by the possibility of increase in knowledge. This is contrasted with the fatalistic pessimism of cyclicity. Modern people take this linear understanding of history for granted, but it was not commonly accepted outside of a Judeo-Christian context.
The progress of science undoubtedly drew from ancient pagan astronomers and geometers, but Christian authors such as Bonaventure properly situated mathematics as an aspect of God’s creation rather than the essence of the eternal. Today, we employ mathematics as a tool in scientific study without regarding it as divine.
Beginnings of non-Aristotelian Dynamics
Pierre Duhem was a Catholic chemist and historian of science active in the early 20th century. Duhem put forward the thesis that the beginning of the thread of modern science in the West can be placed at the reevaluation of the status of Aristotelianism at the University of Paris following the death of St Thomas Aquinas (1274). This may seem outlandish at first, but by considering Aristotle’s physical theories and the transition away from them, we can better understand the conceptual foundations of mathematical physics.
While Aristotle had written profitably about many subjects, his understanding of motion presented basic problems, though the lack of an alternative comprehensive physical theory and his status as the preeminent philosopher kept many from challenging it. Aristotle believed that motion happened when two bodies swapped places. All bodies were drawn to their natural place: earth to the lowest place, water the second lowest, air to the second highest, and fire to the highest. Natural motion was when bodies moved to their natural places, and violent motion was when they were moved away from it by some other actor. This matches intuitive experience, which is that heavy bodies fall within water, air bubbles rise within water, fire rises within air. For Aristotle, at no point during motion was there a gap or absence of a body, i.e. a vacuum. Part of Aristotle’s reasoning for rejection of the vacuum was that he believed that speed was the result of a conflict of a mover and a resisting medium, depending on the medium’s density. Without resistance, Aristotle thought that speed would become infinite, which he took to be absurd. Aristotle incorrectly believed that the projectile motion of heavy bodies was sustained by a burst of air that followed the projectile. This was not satisfying to many of his readers, but it was part of a comprehensive account of cosmology that did not have a clear alternative and was buttressed by Aristotle’s general authority.
Conflict over how non-Christian authors should be interpreted and related to Catholic theology came to a head after the death of Aquinas. Aquinas drew from Aristotelian conceptions of form, matter, and causality to better explain theology, but Aristotle’s thinking was not fully consistent with Catholic understanding of the world. The foremost problem was that Aristotle believed that the world was eternal, rather than created. After Aquinas’s death, the bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, issued a set of condemnations of certain Aristotelian propositions (1277): among these was Aristotle’s assertion that the vacuum was impossible. Why was this condemned? The bishop argued that anything that is not a logical contradiction was within God’s power to create, including the vacuum. Students of natural philosophy now had not only license but invitation to theorize about motion in the vacuum, which was motion without a resisting medium.
One such natural philosopher was Jean Buridan (1300-1358), priest and member of the faculty of the University of Paris. Buridan developed a theory of impetus, a motive power imparted by a mover onto a moving object that is not naturally diminished by motion, and would remain in motion until met with some contrary force. Buridan’s theory had predecessors in John Philoponus (6th century) and Avicenna (930-1037) but was distinguished from the former in that impetus does not diminish with time or movement alone, and from the latter by his statement that the ability of a body to receive impetus was proportional to its amount of matter and to the initial imparted speed. (Buridan, Questions on the Physics, p. 535) Buridan applied a mix of empirical observation of different bodies in motion and thought experiments about how motion would be affected under varying conditions to reject Aristotle’s account. In a similar way to how introductory physics courses ask students to calculate the trajectory of a projectile assuming no air resistance, Buridan reasoned from the absence of a resistive medium to describe the possibility of sustained motion via impetus. Further, Buridan hypothesized that at the creation of the world, the planets were set in motion by God, and without a contrary force, they could move indefinitely. This would resolve a question in Aristotelian cosmology of what sustains the planets in motion. While Buridan observed that heavy bodies fall and gain impetus, he did not have a theory of universal attraction that would only come later with Newton putting all of the pieces together into a single mathematical system.
Later, Nicole Oresme (1325-1382), bishop of Lisieux, further developed this by creating the first graphical representation of time versus motion. Prior natural philosophy relied solely on verbose description of physical relations and did not use equations. Oresme showed graphically that a uniformly accelerating body would travel a distance equal to its mean speed multiplied by the duration of motion. While today we may think of this as basic, it was a step towards abstract mathematical reasoning applied to physics. Oresme also argued in favor of assuming the rotation of the Earth to explain the apparent motion of the stars on account of simplicity. He even drew an analogy between the motions of heavens and the working of a mechanical clock, with God as a clockmaker and the world moving according to its original design. This went further than a Platonically-inspired belief in the creator as the “Great Geometer” to God who sets the world in motion according to physical laws.
What are we to make of this episode on motion in a vacuum for the relation of Christianity to science? To what extent can we attribute these advances to Christianity, versus a general gradual development of learning? Buridan’s statement of the consistency of motion in the heavens with motion on Earth affirms and was built upon belief in the physical unity of Creation. In contrast, Aristotle believed that the celestial sphere was unchanging and followed different patterns from the mutable terrestrial sphere. Acknowledgement of God as the singular author of physical laws allowed speculation and thought experiment to go beyond the intuitive dynamics of Aristotle. To make a conservative statement, monotheism and belief in a created universe that unfolded based on God’s plan certainly helped in this advance.
Why did medieval Islamic science not develop in the same way? The common answer is that Christian scholars avoided the Occasionalism among Muslim scholars typified by al-Ghazali. Occasionalism denied that entities have causality in themselves and attributed causality only to God. Al-Ghazali sought to refute Avicenna’s account of natural causation based on the absoluteness of divine omnipotence. Aquinas defended the causality of created things (secondary causality), after God’s primary causality of creation and sustainment in existence, based on the perfection of creation which includes entities having order as part of the whole. Aquinas explicitly linked the propriety of wisdom having utility in natural science with why it is fitting for creatures to have natural effects (Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles Book III Ch 69 Article 13, 15, 17-18). The more complete answer to the above question is that Christian belief in the Incarnation affirms the goodness and dignity of creation and thus also its possession of orderliness in itself.
Buridan’s theory of impetus did not gain wide acceptance immediately. Duhem traces the lineage of non-Aristotelian dynamics from Buridan through Oresme and Albert of Saxony, to Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus and then Galileo (as the major figures), while proponents of Aristotle were still common.
Transition of Alchemy from a private, inwardly-oriented science to public, outwardly oriented
The study of the stars has occupied many learned minds from the ancient era to the present day. It served to determine the calendar, and for those who believed in the influence of the stars and planets on earthly affairs, it had political and religious significance. Rulers supported astronomers in their work on “higher things”. The Platonic esteem of geometry harmonized with the prestige of astronomy. We will contrast this with the status of the study of “lower”, earthly materials, which for the ancients was alchemy. Through this contrast and consideration of the work of Roger Bacon, we can learn about the reevaluation of the precursors to chemistry and its relation to Christianity.
Alchemy focused on the attempt to transform lead or silver into gold, but encompassed the rudimentary classification of materials and their interactions. To the modern reader, this transformation sounds fantastical, but we should begin with why it was considered plausible in a pre-modern understanding of the origin of substances. Lead and silver frequently co-occur in mineral deposits, as do silver and gold in a combination called electrum that was used for ancient coins. Refinement of these metals into their constituent parts and purification of them were important aspects of early metallurgy. Given their co-occurrence, the ancients believed that there were some similar generating principles for them that could be discovered and used to transform one into another. The obvious problem was that if successful, alchemy would devalue the currency. While astronomy had royal support, alchemy faced opposition such as in 292 AD when the Roman emperor Diocletian ordered the burning of alchemical works in Alexandria, and for general suspicion of fraud and charlatanism. Further, it was the study of “lower” things and did not have the mathematical beauty of geometric astronomy. For all of these reasons, alchemy and related mechanical arts such as metallurgy were not included in standard university Arts curriculum (Trivium: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric; and Quadrivium: Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Music).
Roger Bacon (1219-1292) was a Franciscan friar and scholar at the Universities of Oxford and Paris. In his Opus Maius (Greater Work) Book VI De Scientia Experimentalis (On Experimental Knowledge), he presented novel work on optics and argued for the integration of experimentation into the teaching of students. He argued that experimental science and specifically alchemy were valuable to study for three reasons: to dispel the fraud of magicians and allow people to understand what is accomplished by natural means, to create better medicines, and in writing about gunpowder which was new to the West, to create better weapons for the defense of Christendom against Mongol invasions. These justifications of science for knowledge, health, and defense are quite similar to the modern motivations for public science funding. This work was presented to Pope Clement IV who was a scholar at the University of Paris and corresponded with Bacon before his election as Pope. Bacon wrote that students were largely unfamiliar with experimentation and that disputation on ancient authors was insufficient.
Modern interpretation of Roger Bacon’s work often focuses on the possibility of ascribing the beginning of the experimental method to him, and to what extent he attempted to be mathematical in his work. In so doing, it applies too much of a retrospective lens and fails to engage with him in what he aimed to do, which was to make the case for the legitimate study of alchemy in a formal academic setting. This legitimization was needed to counter the suspicion cast on attempted gold making and false medicines. Alchemists and metallurgists were, of course, active and systematic empiricists but did not work “above ground”. Their efforts were often combined with astrological interpretations of the correspondences between specific substances and the stars or numerological hypotheses about the degrees of purity of metals. Bacon entertained but did not fully adhere to these superstitious aspects to alchemy, which will be expanded on below.
The systematic accumulation of experimental results on terrestrial subjects paired with attempted comprehensive mathematical accounts of those results (even if wrong) first occurred with the alchemists. We state “comprehensive account” to distinguish alchemy from architecture, which did have a geometric basis and was built upon accumulated practical knowledge of successful projects, but did not attempt to explain the full underlying causality of phenomena. The account of causality is necessary for science distinct from art.
While we can recognize Roger Bacon’s contributions, at the same time we should caution against believing him to be an example of a comprehensively scientific outlook. St Augustine of Hippo and other Christian authors argued against astrology, but Bacon and others like him believed that astrology was legitimate not because the planets directly controlled events on Earth, but because of a perspective we can summarize as “cosmic harmony”: that the heavens and Earth were attuned to one another because of the harmony of Creation and so by studying the stars it should be possible to learn about affairs on Earth. Bacon still believed in free will but that the heavens ‘incline’ men to certain dispositions. This was not satisfying to Bacon’s contemporaries, including St. Bonaventure. In this, we see the “conflict of worldviews” for the medievals was not clear-cut and did not correspond directly to modern interpreters’ understanding of experimental science v. philosophy or faith. Bacon believed in different means of investigation into the workings of the world: mathematics paired with observation in optics, the creation of better astronomical instruments to go beyond direct observation, and compilation of authoritative sources in medicine to rediscover lost wisdom.
Given these problems, why do we need to recognize Bacon as important in the history of science and the Church? Bacon was a prominent voice in the reorientation of experimental science from something that was heavily suspect because of association with private gain (gold making, charlatanism) into a form of study needed for the public good. Experimental science could allow the disproving of false conjuration, restore health, and aid in the defense of Christians. Universities were founded as centers of learning in theology with preparation in Arts and Philosophy. Bacon succeeded in adding optics to the university curriculum as an applied science that joined together observation, geometry, and reasoned interpretation of results, and so expanded the scope of legitimate study. This required Christian confidence in the unity of Truth: investigation into the physical world could only strengthen the faith and disprove the pagans, even if there were prior associations of alchemy with deception.
Founding of Universities and their Mission
After the decline of Roman education in the early medieval era, bishops began establishing cathedral schools that trained future clergy and sons of the nobility in the classical Trivium and Quadrivium. Charlemagne (748-814) supported the expansion of these schools in his kingdom and ordered that every cathedral and monastery have an attached school (Admonitio generalis, 789). Later, in the Third Lateran Council (1179), Canon 18 mandated that every cathedral church must provide a benefice (salary for a position) for a master to teach clerics and poor scholars without charging tuition. These cathedral schools became nucleation points for higher education which eventually formalized into “universities” that defined standards for teaching, granting of degrees, and discipline. The prominent early universities were those of Bologna (1088), Paris (1150), and Oxford (1096) though these dates reflect the acknowledged beginning of some common institutional structure, with formalization happening gradually from the 11th through 13th centuries. Mastery of the Arts curriculum was required before moving on to the higher faculties of Theology, Law, and Medicine.
Historian Edward Grant in The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages places great emphasis on this curricular sequence and the university corporate structure for the explanation of the sustained progress of science in Europe. Universities existed as institutions centered on learning supported by the Church and separate from the patronage of any one ruler or dynasty, which carried them through times of political upheaval. Theologians were first trained on a broad base of the Arts curriculum. This created a class of learned men, some of whom had the leisure to pursue questions in natural philosophy and engage with the inheritance of ancient Greek learning, as we have seen with Bacon, Buridan, Oresme, and many others. Even those who would become lawyers, administrators, and clerks would gain exposure to natural philosophy through the intellectual community of the university. These institutions could preserve the writings of scholars more durably than private libraries.
This institutional account is palatable enough to non-Christian audiences, but we also want to take the specifically Christian aspect of universities seriously. The evangelical orientation of Christianity transformed study from an insular pursuit for the few to the outwardly directed service of the whole world following the Great Commission. St. Augustine of Hippo in On Christian Doctrine analogizes the sharing of spiritual and intellectual gifts in study of scripture to the multiplication of the loaves in the feeding of the thousands: “just as that the bread increased in the very act of breaking it, so those thoughts which the Lord has already vouchsafed to me with a view of undertaking this work will, as soon as I begin to impart them to others, be multiplied by His grace, so that, in this very work of distribution in which I have engaged, so far from incurring loss and poverty, I shall be made to rejoice in a marvelous increase of wealth” (Bk 1, Ch 1). Building upon this evangelical foundation, preparation of priests in theology was joined together in the same institution with everything worth formal study in universities. In The Franciscan Concept of Mission in the High Middle Ages, E. Randolph Daniel uses Roger Bacon as the example to make this clear: “Bacon was a linguist and a proponent of the philosophical approach to mission. He believed that missionaries should study languages, particularly Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek, not only to facilitate communication with the non-Christian, but to establish a common ground of scientific and philosophical knowledge for rational disputation with him” (55). Christian confidence in the unity of truth emboldens one to pursue study for its own sake, out of love, and desire for engagement with the world.
Summary of the Foundations of Science
To summarize the relations between Christianity and science up through the High Medieval era when we can recognize science’s beginnings, we can state certain “foundations” or prerequisites for science to function, and assess if and how Christianity contributed to them.
- Orderliness: Orderly account given of physical phenomena with entities having natural causality (Orderliness of the world, Primary and Secondary Causality)
- Mathematical Structure: Such an account having a mathematical basis,
- Unity of Laws: Unity of physical laws through the observable world,
- Institutional Propagation: Inquiry supported by a long-living institution with orientation toward dissemination of knowledge (Universities existing as entities separate from a specific personal patron, requires conception of inquiry for public benefit, Universal Destination of Goods)
A belief in the orderliness of creation was strengthened by understanding of Christ as Logos. In contrast to pagan beliefs, the stars and planets were part of the same created world, subordinate to God, and subject to the same laws. Christian scholars believed in the distinction between Primary causation (God’s Creation and sustainment of the world in existence) and secondary causation (creatures having natures that cause physical phenomena). They avoided Occasionalism, owing at least in part to their belief in the dignity of creation.
Christianity’s missionary orientation drove engagement with the learning of the rest of humanity and established universities dedicated to the propagation of knowledge, both theological and worldly. While guilds and alchemical circles guarded knowledge for private benefit, universities were structured toward the universal destination of goods, as shown in Bacon’s recasting of the purpose of studying alchemy. The universities as institutions supported clerics and scholars who studied widely and did not depend on the patronage of a specific ruler or dynasty, unlike scholars in the Islamic world who did not enjoy such institutional longevity.
For medieval clerics such as Buridan, the mathematical character of inquiry into natural causes was the fruit of productive engagement between a Christian understanding and older Platonic and astronomical traditions. While Biblical creation had a strong emphasis on order, proportion, and significance of number,we cannot ignore Plato’s Timaeus and the broader Greek interest in geometry in arriving at an explicitly mathematical understanding of the world that assisted in the formulation of physical laws of motion founded on quantitative relations. However, the Platonic account lacked a proper understanding of cosmological unity, adhered to cyclical history which was an obstacle to temporal causality, and wrongly divinized Number. The Christian worldview enabled metaphysical clarity that engaged with mathematics as a tool rather than an end.
The combination of these foundations formed the base of science as a public enterprise that we have inherited today.
References
- John Paul II. Fides et Ratio. The Holy See, 1998.
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles. Translated by the English Dominican Fathers. Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd, 1924.
- Aristotle. On the Heavens. Translated by J. L. Stocks, Princeton University Press, 1985.
- Aristotle. Physics. Translated by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye, Princeton University Press, 1985.
- Roger Bacon, Opus Majus. Translated by Robert Belle Burke, Russell & Russell, 1962.
- Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. The Journey of the Mind To God, Quarrachi Edition of the Opera Omnia S. Bonaventurae Vol. V, 1891.
- Jean Buridan. Questions on the Physics. Translated within The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages, by Marshall Clagett, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1959.
- Alfred W. Crosby. The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
- E. Randolph Daniel, The Franciscan Concept of Mission in the High Middle Ages. The Franciscan Institute, 1992.
- Pierre Duhem. Galileo’s Precursors: Studies on Leonardo da Vinci. Translated by Alan Aversa, 2018.
- Pierre Duhem, To Save the Phenomena: An Essay on the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo. Translated by Edmund Dolan and Chaninah Maschler. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
- Edward Grant. The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine. Translated by J. F. Shaw. Aeterna Press, 2014.
- Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Translated by John Hammond Taylor, Paulist Press, 1982.
- Stanley Jaki. Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe. Scottish Academic Press, 1974.
- Hunt Janin, The University in Medieval Life, 1179–1499. McFarland, 2009.
- David C. Lindberg. The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450, Second Edition. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
- Nicole Oresme. Le Livre du Ciel et du Monde. Translated by Albert D. Menut. University of Wisconsin Press, 1968.
- Plato. Timaeus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford University Press, 1892.
- Lawrence M. Principe. The Secrets of Alchemy. University of Chicago Press, 2013.
- Lawrence M. Principe. The Scientific Revolution. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Appendix
Relation of this essay to the existing scholarship
I have tried to make the above essay accessible to an intellectually curious reader who is not familiar with the subject matter. One question arises in response from someone interested in debates about the history of science: How is this different from Duhem’s or Jaki’s theses about science’s origins?
We can analyze the history of science in its cosmological, epistemological, institutional, and moral aspects, all inter-related. Duhem highlights the re-evaluation of Aristotle at the University of Paris after the death of Aquinas which draws from a Christian understanding of God’s omnipotence. Jaki builds upon Duhem and emphasizes the change from a cyclical to a linear understanding of the universe. Grant focuses on the structure of the universities and their curriculum to distinguish Western Europe from the Byzantines and the Islamic world. Historian Lawrence Principe sought to show the continuity of the practice of alchemy (beyond the project to make gold) from the ancient world to the medieval era and describe its contribution to the changing curriculum. In this essay I have tried to set out these major modes of interpretation and weave in the moral dimension regarding the universal destination of goods. Many other historians likely implicitly believe in the importance of the moral aspect but have concentrated attention first on the exposition of the major authors in early science. This was appropriate for the clarification of the historical record against those who believed that no real science was being done between the ancient Greeks and Copernicus or Galileo.
Often, people interested in the history of science will name Francis Bacon as influential in the beginnings of empiricism. I have tried to point to important predecessors of Francis Bacon in this essay and show why we should not take him to be the origin. Further, for comparison of the conceptions of science deriving from Christianity and from Francis Bacon, and greater discussion of science’s moral dimension, see the following commentary on Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis.
Commentary on “The New Atlantis” and the Aim of Scientific Study
What does it mean to have a Christian understanding of scientific study? I believe we can begin to answer this question through examination of a divergence from it, in Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1626). In TNA Bacon presents a Utopian society, Bensalem, that is far removed from the rest of the known world and has “Salomon’s House”, a secretive society dedicated to scientific study, as one of its central institutions.
The narrator of TNA is lost at sea with many sick crewmen and nearly out of supplies, but fortuitously discovers the island of Bensalem. While at first cautiously received by the inhabitants, he is later granted hospitality, lodging, and a progressively greater knowledge of the history of this island and its customs. The narrator believes Bensalem to be a kind of Heaven on Earth: “It seemed to us that we had before us a picture of our salvation in heaven; for we that were awhile since in the jaws of death, were now brought into a place where we found nothing but consolations,” “we were come into a land of angels, which did appear to us daily and present us with comforts, which we thought not of, much less expected,” “our tongues should first cleave to the roofs of our mouths ere we should forget either this reverend person or this whole nation, in our prayers” (compare to Psalm 137:6, likening the island to Jerusalem).
After the narrator recuperates, one of the “Fathers of Salomon’s House” visits him and describes in detail that the splendor of the island and the well being of its inhabitants are due in part to the learnings of the House in its study of the natural world. The House has a second name of “the College of the Six Days’ Works” and its members even “have certain hymns and services, which [they] say daily, of laud and thanks to God for his marvellous works; and forms of prayers, imploring his aid and blessing for the illumination of [their] labors, and turning them into good and holy uses” (42). These seem to suggest a conception of study founded on appreciation for God’s creation.
But beneath the surface it is unclear how Christian this intellectual society actually is. As the Father explains, “The end of our foundation [Salomon’s House] is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible” (33), in other words, gaining power over the world. The great scientific discoverers are honored with statues in the society’s hall, some of gold (42). While there is a large study of medicines, there is also investigation into poisons and development of instruments of war (40) despite the island supposedly being peaceful and protected by the sea from invasion. The wise men of the House study means of deception through apparitions of light (38). These apparitions bear a strange resemblance to the purported means of evangelization of the island to Christianity through a pillar of light (allusion to Exodus 13:21-22) on the water that only an inner member of the House could approach and investigate (12-13).
Beyond these practices and suggestions of divergence from Christianity, most of all it is the inward orientation of the accumulation of knowledge of Bensalem and of Salomon’s House that separates it from a Christian understanding of science and the purpose of Creation. Bensalem does not have contact with the outer world except for the ‘Merchants of Light’ who gather information about “sciences, arts, manufactures, and inventions of all the world” (21) and bring it back to Salomon’s House where it is then further drawn into its inner circles whose members keep secrets even from the state (41). These external findings and learnings from the House’s extensive secret laboratory network are sometimes distributed for the benefit of Bensalem, only as the inside sees fit, and never outside the island.
This contrasts with the Christian understanding of the Universal Destination of Goods and of bonum diffusivum sui, that the good is naturally diffusive of itself. The goods of Creation are naturally destined to the whole of mankind and are not privately oriented. Ultimately and primarily, all good things come from God and it is their natural end to return to Him. Scientia inflat, caritas aedificat: knowledge puffs up, love builds up (1 Cor 8:1). Knowledge is an important source of pride, and in our pride we can selfishly believe ourselves to be the originators of knowledge and have ownership of it. But as all goods have their universal destination to all of mankind as is in harmony with the whole of Creation, so too do our intellectual achievements, whatever they may be, require gratitude as they have been gratuitously given. The Unity of Truth reflects the unity of Creation and the same universal destination applies to it. This humility is also freeing because instead of worrying about priority of discoveries, we know that true priority does not belong to Man. While we should still reference those we have learned from, in our own authorship we must acknowledge our lack of an ultimate claim on what we have done. Knowledge is not decreased by sharing, but Baconian scientia est potentia has a selfish inflection.
From here we can finally place TNA in the broader intellectual history. Novice historians of science will assert that the idea of an association for the accumulation of scientific (or natural philosophical) knowledge was introduced by Bacon, but this is not so. The House of Salomon has the same aim and secretive organizational structure of alchemical societies but differs in them in its mode of investigation. While alchemy tried to find parallels between the behavior of materials, mathematical principles, and the relations of celestial bodies, the House is solely empirical and shorn of astrology. In its empirical emphasis, it is fair to call it modern. However, its inward and prideful orientation, in addition to being un-Christian, represents one of the main obstacles that science currently faces. It is precisely in the humble, accurate, and replicable communication of results that science progresses, and Bacon’s vision inhibits this.
Pagination from New Atlantis (1626) by Francis Bacon, Edited by Gerard B. Wegemer, CTMS Publishers at the University of Dallas (2020). https://www.thomasmorestudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Bacon-New-Atlantis-2020-Edition-7-6-2020.pdf
Mike's Engineering Blog 