The Triumph of Christianity (32 page)

So what did Copernicus contribute? He put the sun in the middle of the solar system and had the earth circling it as one of the planets. What gave such special luster to his work was that he expressed it all in mathematics
⁹
and worked out the geometry of his system so as to permit the calculation of future positions of the bodies involved, which was essential for setting the dates of Easter, the solstices, and the like. However these calculations were no more accurate than those based on the prior Ptolemaic system dating from the second century
CE
because Copernicus failed to realize that the orbits in the solar system are elliptical, not circular. Therefore, to make his system work, Copernicus had to postulate that there were loops in the orbits of the heavenly bodies that delayed them sufficiently so they did not complete their orbits too soon—it would not do for the earth to circle the sun in only three hundred days. However, these loops lacked any observational support—had they existed a heavenly body should have been observed looping. Consequently,
everything
in Copernicus’s famous book
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
is wrong, other than the placement of the sun in the center. It was nearly a century later that Johannes Kepler (1571–1639), a German Protestant, got things right by substituting ellipses for Copernicus’s circles. Now each heavenly body was always where it was supposed to be, on time, and no loops were needed.

Of course, even with Kepler’s additions, there still was not a scientific theory of the solar system in that there was no
explanation
of why it functioned as it did—of why, for example, bodies remained in their orbits rather than flying off into space. The achievement of such a theory awaited Isaac Newton (1642–1727). But over several prior centuries, many essential pieces of such a theory had been assembled: that the universe was a vacuum; that no pushers were needed because once in motion, the heavenly bodies would continue in motion; that the earth turned; that the sun was the center of the solar system; that the orbits were elliptical.

This record of systematic progress is why the distinguished historian of science I. Bernard Cohen (1914–2003) noted that “the idea that a Copernican revolution in science occurred goes counter to the evidence... and is the invention of later historians.”
¹⁰
Most of Cohen’s sophisticated colleagues agree.
¹¹
Copernicus added a small step forward in a long process of normal science, albeit one having immense polemical and philosophical implications. It should be noted, too, that the scholars involved in this long process were not rebel secularists. Not only were they devout Christians; they were clergy—most of them were bishops and there even was a cardinal among them. And one more thing, they all were embedded in the great Scholastic universities.

Scholastic Universities

Christian Scholastics invented the university and gave it its modern shape. The first two universities appeared in Paris (where both Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas taught) and Bologna, in the middle of the twelfth century. Then, Oxford and Cambridge were founded in about 1200, followed by a flood of new institutions during the remainder of the thirteenth century: Toulouse, Orleans, Naples, Salamanca, Seville, Lisbon, Grenoble, Padua, Rome, Perugia, Pisa, Modena, Florence, Prague, Cracow, Vienna, Heidelberg, Cologne, Ofen, Erfurt, Leipzig, and Rostock. There is a widespread misconception that these were not really universities, but consisted of only three or four teachers and a few dozen students. To the contrary, early in the thirteenth century Paris, Bologna, Oxford, and Toulouse probably enrolled a thousand to fifteen hundred students each—approximately five hundred new students enrolled in the University of Paris every year. Regardless of their enrollments, many “enlightened” recent historians mock these universities as intellectually “hopeless,” being “corrupted by scholastic and ecclesiastical overlays.”
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But it was in these “hopeless” early universities that science was born. Indeed, like modern universities, from earliest days the medieval universities were created and run by scholars and devoted not merely to educating, but to discovery. Marcia L. Colish described the Scholastic professors:

They reviewed past authorities and current opinions, giving [their] analysis of them and [their] reasons for rejecting some and accepting others. Altogether, the methodology already in place by the early twelfth century shows the scholastics’ willingness, and readiness, to criticise the foundation documents of their respective fields. More than simply receiving and expanding on the classical and Christian traditions, they set aside ideas from these traditions deemed to have outlived their usefulness. They also freely realigned the authorities they retained to defend positions that these authorities might well have thought strange and novel. [Commentaries] were now rarely summaries and explications of their author’s views. Scholastic commentators were much more likely to take issue with their chosen author or to bring to bear on his work ideas from emerging schools of thought or the scholastic’s own opinion.
¹³

This intellectual style was facilitated by the governance of the Scholastic universities. Faculty controlled entry into their ranks and set their own standards of competence and achievement—and their autonomy was a function of “market” demand. In the words of Nathan Schachner (1895–1955): “The University was the darling, the spoiled child of the Papacy and Empire, of king and municipality alike. Privileges were showered on the proud Universities in a continuous golden stream... [as] municipalities competed violently for the honour of housing one within their walls; kings wrote siren letters to entice discontented groups of scholars from the domains of their rivals.”
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The autonomy of universities was matched by the autonomy of individual faculty members. There was a great deal of movement from one university to another, facilitated by the fact that all instruction was in Latin so there were no language barriers. Hence even in those days of poor transportation and slow means of communication, all the leading scholars knew of one another and many had actually met. And the key to faculty movement was then as now
innovation
. Reputations were gained not by mastery of the old, but by advancing something new! And this was greatly facilitated by something truly unusual in intellectual life: an emphasis on
empiricism
.

Scholastic Empiricism

The early Scholastic scientists did not just sit in their studies and think about the world; they increasingly relied on careful observations of the matters involved, that is, on empiricism. For example, the Greeks, Romans, Muslims, and Chinese mostly based their “knowledge” of human physiology on philosophy and introspection, and some dissections of animals, but they rejected and condemned any thought of cutting up humans. Christian Scholastics were the first scholars to build their anatomical knowledge on human dissection! In 1315 Mondino de’Luzzi is known to have performed a human dissection in front of an audience of students and faculty at the University of Bologna. Soon human dissections were being conducted at all the Italian universities. By 1391 the first one was conducted in Spain, and the first in Vienna took place in 1404.
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By midcentury, dissection was a customary part of anatomy classes all across Europe. In 1504, Copernicus took part in human dissections during his brief enrollment in medical courses at the University of Padua.
¹⁶

According to Edward Grant, “the introduction [of human dissection] into the Latin west, made without serious objection from the Church, was a momentous occurrence.”
¹⁷
Nevertheless, true to form, A. D. White went on and on about how the great anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) “risked the most terrible dangers, and especially the charge of sacrilege, founded on the teachings of the Church” by conducting human dissections. White claimed that anyone who dissected a human body at this time risked “excommunication,” but that the heroic Vesalius “broke without fear” from “this sacred conventionalism” and proceeded “despite ecclesiastic censure.... No peril daunted him.”
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White made these charges despite the well-known fact that the Holy Roman Emperor responded to Vesalius’s “sacrilege” by ennobling him as a count and awarding him a lifetime pension!

The Scholastic commitment to empiricism was one of the vital keys to the rise of science. Although the aim of science is to formulate theories to explain natural phenomena, it requires that theories be put to and survive empirical tests. It was not science when Plato explained that the heavenly bodies must rotate in circles because on philosophical grounds that is the ideal shape. But it was science when Kepler corrected Copernicus by postulating elliptical orbits, with the empirical result that heavenly bodies always were observed to be where they were supposed to be.

Science did not suddenly burst forth in the sixteenth century. It began centuries before in the Scholastic commitment to empiricism, and it was nurtured in the early universities as scholars pursued systematic efforts to innovate. Moreover, the truly remarkable aspect of the rise of science is that it happened only once.
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Many societies pursued alchemy, but only in Christian Europe did it lead to chemistry; many societies developed extensive systems of astrology, but only in Europe was astrology transformed into scientific astronomy. Why?

The God of Reason

S
CIENCE AROSE ONLY IN
Europe because only medieval Europeans believed that science was
possible
and
desirable
. And the basis of their belief was their image of God and his creation. This was dramatically asserted to a distinguished audience of scholars attending the 1925 Lowell Lectures at Harvard by the great philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), who explained that science developed in Europe because of the widespread “faith in the possibility of science... derivative from medieval theology.”
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This claim shocked not only his audience, but Western intellectuals in general when his lectures were published. How could this world-famous thinker, coauthor with Bertrand Russell of the landmark
Principia Mathematica
(1910–1913), not know that religion is the unrelenting enemy of science? In fact, Whitehead knew better!

Whitehead had recognized that Christian theology was essential for the rise of science, just as non-Christian theologies had stifled the scientific enterprise everywhere else. He explained that “the greatest contribution of medievalism to the formation of the scientific movement [was] the inexpugnable belief... that there was a secret, a secret which can be unveiled. How has this conviction been so vividly implanted in the European mind?... It must come from the medieval insistence on the rationality of God, conceived as with the personal energy of Jehovah and with the rationality of a Greek philosopher. Every detail was supervised and ordered: the search into nature could only result in the vindication of faith in rationality.”
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Whitehead was, of course, merely summarizing what so many of the great early scientists had said—René Descartes justified his search for the “laws” of nature on ground that such laws must exist because God is perfect and therefore “acts in a manner as constant and immutable as possible.”
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That is, the universe functions according to rational rules or laws. As that great medieval Scholastic Nicole d’Oresme put it, God’s creation “is much like that of a man making a clock and letting it run and continue its own motion by itself.”
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Furthermore, because God has given humans the power of reason it ought to be possible for us to discover the rules established by God.

Indeed, many of the early scientists felt morally obliged to pursue these secrets, just as Whitehead had noted. The great British philosopher concluded his remarks by noting that the images of God and creation found in the non-European faiths, especially those in Asia, are too impersonal or too irrational to have sustained science. Any particular natural “occurrence might be due to the fiat of an irrational despot” god, or might be produced by “some impersonal, inscrutable origin of things. There is not the same confidence as in the intelligible rationality of a personal being.”
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It should be noted that given their common roots, the Jewish conception of God is as suitable to sustaining science as is the Christian conception. But Jews were a small, scattered, and often repressed minority in Europe during this era and took no part in the rise of science—albeit Jews have excelled as scientists since their emancipation in the nineteenth century.

In contrast, most religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition do not posit a creation at all. The universe is said to be eternal, without beginning or purpose, and never having been created, it has no creator. From this view, the universe is a supreme mystery, inconsistent, unpredictable, and (perhaps) arbitrary. For those holding this view, the only paths to wisdom are meditation or inspiration—there being nothing to reason about. But if the universe was created in accord with rational rules by a perfect, rational creator, then it ought to yield its secrets to reason and observation. Hence the scientific truism that nature is a
book
meant to be read.

Of course, the Chinese “would have scorned such an idea as being too naive for the subtlety and complexity of the universe as they intuited it,”
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as explained by the esteemed Oxford historian of Chinese technology Joseph Needham (1900–1995). As for the Greeks, many of them also regarded the universe as eternal and uncreated; Aristotle condemned the idea “that the universe came into being at some point in time... as unthinkable.”
²⁶
Indeed, none of the traditional Greek gods would have been capable of such a creation. But, worst of all, the Greeks insisted on turning the cosmos, and inanimate objects more generally, into living things. Consequently, they attributed many natural phenomena to
motives,
not to inanimate forces. Thus, according to Aristotle, heavenly bodies move in circles because of their affection for doing so, and objects fall to the ground “because of their innate love for the centre of the world.”
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As for Islam, the orthodox conception of Allah is hostile to the scientific quest. There is no suggestion in the Qur’an that Allah set his creation in motion and then let it run. Rather, it is assumed that he often intrudes in the world and changes things as it pleases him. Thus through the centuries many of the most influential Muslim scholars have held that all efforts to formulate natural laws are blasphemy in that they would seem to deny Allah’s freedom to act. Thus did the prevailing images of God and the universe deflect scientific efforts in China, ancient Greece, and Islam.
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