The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment
816
The Reopening of the Western Mind: The Resurgence of Intellectual Life from the End of Antiquity to the Dawn of the Enlightenment
816Hardcover
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Overview
Charles Freeman, lauded historical scholar and author of The Closing of the Western Mind (“A triumph”—The Times [London]), explores the rebirth of Western thought in the centuries that followed the demise of the classical era. As the dominance of Christian teachings gradually subsided over time, a new open-mindedness made way for the ideas of morality and theology, and fueled and formed the backbone of the Western mind of the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and beyond.
In this wide-ranging history, Freeman follows the immense intellectual development that culminated in the Enlightenment, from political ideology to philosophy and theology, as well as the fine arts and literature. He writes, in vivid detail, of how Europeans progressed from the Christian-minded thinking of Saint Augustine to the more open-minded later scholars, such as Michel de Montaigne, leading to a broader, more “humanist” way of thinking.
He explores how the discovery of America fundamentally altered European conceptions of humanity, religion, and science; how the rise of Protestantism and the Reformation profoundly influenced the tenor of politics and legal systems, with enormous repercussions; and how the radical Christianity of philosophers such as Spinoza affected a rethinking of the concept of religious tolerance that has influenced the modern era ever since.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780525659365 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/07/2023 |
| Pages: | 816 |
| Sales rank: | 622,135 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.30(w) x 6.70(h) x 1.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a dramatic growth of interest in the natural world, sparked off not least by the European discovery of the Americas. For the first time since antiquity there was an enthusiastic commitment to what it was possible to know empirically about the world around us. The search to understand the sources of knowledge intensified, made easier by new instruments such as the telescope and microscope, which allowed more accurate observations. Mathematics was to play an important role in contributing models for the universe that was now seen as acting under uniform laws, as would be brilliantly defined by Isaac Newton. The elements of Aristotle, earth, fire, air and water, were replaced by an understanding that material might be made up of small particles of different chemical ‘elements’. Scientists—or ‘natural philosophers’ as they were then known—were eager to find ways of proving their theories and thereby to provide the foundations for the development of new ones. Experimentation thus became the rage. Of course, it is only in hindsight that one can see which experiments bore fruit in the sense of providing accurate representations of reality and which led nowhere. This would make the development of scientific knowledge a cumulative process, a crucial development in the history of European thought and one that has proved enduring.
What unites the figures to be discussed in this chapter is a deeprooted desire to understand the nature of the universe. The roots of this desire are hard to define, since they varied from individual to individual, but all of these astronomers, physicists and mathematicians of the era of the Scientific Revolution were united by their commitment to observing and calculating. As we shall see, some were committed Christians and some were not. Religion in its varied forms does not appear to have been a powerful force in encouraging or hampering the progress of science (see the end of Chapter 30 for further discussion of this issue).
Telling the story of the transformation of natural philosophy into what might be seen as science involves many complex issues, not least because so many natural events appeared inexplicable unless it was assumed that they were controlled by forces beyond human observation. Were there sources of ancient wisdom—the works of Hermes Trismegistus championed by Marsilio Ficino, for instance—that might hold the secrets of knowledge? An influential work on magnetism by the Englishman William Gilbert (1544–1603), De Magnete (1600), raised the question of how one object, the lodestone, could influence another without any physical connection. Gilbert compared the action of the lodestone with the effect that certain substances, if ingested, can have on the human body—such as the laxative influence of rhubarb—and with the relationship between the phases of the moon and the tides. Was God acting in some way through objects or were there invisible forces underlying the natural world which were present in certain substances? Gilbert made his own suggestion: ‘We consider that the whole universe is animated, and that all the globes, all the stars, and also the noble earth, have been governed, since the beginning by their own appointed souls and have motives of self-preservation.
In contrast to Gilbert’s ‘animated’ universe, Descartes put forward the notion of the universe as a machine, in which every particle was in contact with each other (see p. 668). Others, such as the astronomer Johannes Kepler (see below, p. 660), attempted to classify natural phenomena in relation to their creation by God. The alchemists remained influential—if esoteric—investigators of the physical world and were valued for their skills in working with metals, in particular. Meanwhile, the findings of those who used empirical methods often contradicted classical sources, raising concerns about the authority of each. Studies of the classification systems of the private libraries that were now a feature of cultural life for the elite reveal that it was only slowly that the study of nature and the universe sorted itself out into recognizable disciplines. Rather than attempting to define a coherent sequence of events, traditionally termed the ‘Scientific Revolution’ and taking place somewhere in the seventeenth century, some scholars prefer to identify—to quote the historian of science Steven Shapin—‘a diverse array of cultural practices aimed at understanding, explaining, and controlling the natural world, each with different characteristics and each experiencing different modes of change’.3 The relatively coherent term ‘science’, ‘the disciplined enquiry into the phenomena and order of the natural world’, that we know today struggled to be born from many different philosophical and empirical sources.
Many histories of ‘modern’ science begin in 1543 with Copernicus’s hypothesis that the Earth and the other planets move around the sun. He had his predecessors. Aristarchus of Samos (c.310–c.230 bc) had posited a sun-centred system and Copernicus knew of this. However, the sophisticated, Earth-centred description of the cosmos by the Greek geographer and astronomer Ptolemy had held sway since the second century ad. In the Almagest (see Chapter 7) Ptolemy used this geocentric model of the known universe to explain the movements of the six known planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), in addition to the sun and the moon. Ptolemy insisted that all planetary movements were in perfect circles. Once this and the central position of the Earth had been accepted, Ptolemy had had to construct elaborate models to explain the recorded observations of the planets. In the geometrically based Ptolemaic universe, the planets move clockwise in a small circle, the epicycle, which at the same time moves clockwise around a larger circle, the deferent. This model had in fact been used by Greek astronomers for centuries, but the problem for Ptolemy was that it did not entirely square with available observational data relating to the speed of planetary orbits. In order to reconcile these planetary movements with his hypothesis of uniform circular motion, Ptolemy developed the mathematical concept of the equant, a point close to but outside the Earth, from which point a planet would always appear to be moving at a uniform speed. This did actually account for the many astronomical observations.
Understandably, very few medieval astronomers had managed to grasp the breadth of Ptolemy’s work in its Latin translations. The accepted explanation of planetary movement was the Aristotelian cosmos, in which the planets moved in concentric spheres. Several centuries earlier than Ptolemy, and with less observational data to go on, Aristotle had argued that the passage of the planets was perfect and unchanging. Once put in motion by the Supreme Mover, they simply went on moving, each planet travelling entirely within its own sphere. The Earth was thus surrounded by concentric spheres, one for each planet, beyond which, in the Christian interpretation of the system, was heaven itself. While Aristotle had talked of the aether above the fire, air and water that surrounded the Earth, there had been much speculation what the substance of each celestial sphere actually was. One suggestion was that it consisted of a form of invisible crystal, within which the planet travelled. What was agreed was that no planet or other star could break out of its sphere. The universe was in itself finite, with the fixed stars in a sphere of their own, not that far beyond the planets. (The Aristotelian system is shown in the sky above Dante on pp. 238–9.)
However complicated, Ptolemy’s system claimed superiority over the simpler Aristotelian system because it was based on a mass of observations, some adopted from Babylonian sources; Ptolemy had listed 1,022 stars in 48 constellations. Gradually, however, its problems had become apparent. In the Epitome, or abridgement, of the Almagest, completed by the German astronomer Johannes Müller, known as Regiomontanus, in 1462 (although not printed until 1496), Regiomontanus had noted that, following Ptolemy’s logic, the moon should have appeared much larger as it neared the Earth in the course of its orbit. He began speculating as to whether Ptolemy’s geometrical models actually worked. The study of astronomy had been stagnant for many centuries, the university texts inadequate and there had been more concentration on astrology, notably the prediction of the course of diseases based on star charts for an individual. The German astronomer Johannes Kepler would later remark that astrology was like a foolish but well-off daughter without whose help astronomy proper would starve. Even in the papal court, star charts were still being drawn up in the seventeenth century (and an auspicious date picked for the laying the cornerstone of the new St Peter’s in Rome).
Copernicus (1473–1543) became interested in astronomy while at the University of Cracow in his native Poland, although his doctorate, from the university of Ferrara in Italy, was in canon law.* While in Italy, he also studied the humanities in Bologna and medicine in Padua, but he was already committed to understanding the motion of the planets and, rather than being worried by the size of the moon, he seems to have been frustrated by the lack of coherence in Ptolemy’s system. It appeared to him to have been built up piece by piece rather than having a harmonious simplicity. To put it bluntly, it was inelegant, and Copernicus, who had absorbed Platonism, found this unacceptable.
In 1503 Copernicus returned home to Poland. Here, despite a busy life as a cleric, he continued his investigations into astronomy and postulated for the first time that a system based on the sun as the centre of the planets provided a more elegant representation of Ptolemy’s observations. There is some doubt as to the originality of Copernicus’s criticisms of the latter. Research into the work of Islamic astronomers has shown that they were aware of the problems with the Almagest, notably that of the equant, which appeared simply to have been added to ‘save the phenomena’, in other words providing an artificial solution to explain what could be observed. The most celebrated Islamic scholar of his age, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201–74), made a more fundamental challenge to Ptolemy in positing an alternative system of rotating spheres, which he claimed also matched Ptolemy’s observations. These were based on viewings from the observatory he constructed at Maragheh, in modern Iran, in 1269. Remarkably, Copernicus appears to have based his criticisms of Ptolemy on similar data, and there is lively discussion among scholars as to whether Copernicus, rather than being a pioneer, ‘can be looked on as, if not the last, surely the most noted follower of the Maragheh School’. Copernicus did not know Arabic but it is quite possible that he used a go-between who had access to the texts of the Maragheh school and transferred them to him.
Wherever Copernicus obtained his hypothesis, from the Arab world or as a result of his own genius, there were few new observations in it. What he put forward was essentially a mathematical solution; because it placed the sun at the centre of the planetary system, it matched Ptolemy’s observations (which Copernicus accepted as reliable) but had the added benefit of explaining the order of the planets and their relative distance from the sun, something Ptolemy’s system had failed to do. Noting the speed of each planet, Copernicus could see that those planets that moved more slowly must be those furthest from the sun. The Earth could find its appropriate place in the order of the planets between Venus and Mars. Other anomalies in the Ptolemaic system, periods when a planet seemed to be going backwards, for instance, could be explained in terms of their observation from the Earth, now postulated as a moving rather than stationary platform. By now it was fully accepted that the Earth was a single sphere, rather than Aristotle’s four terrestrial spheres of earth, air, fire and water, so that the argument that a rotating Earth would slide under the water was no longer relevant. Essentially, Copernicus was part of the trend towards searching for mathematical understandings that reflected reality rather than the views that had become incorporated into Christian theology. The question now was whether new observations would confirm his hypothesis.
A sun-centred universe was abhorrent to those who believed the Old Testament story of God stopping the sun during a battle (Joshua 10:12–13). If the sun was immobile in the centre of the universe it could not be stopped as it would not be moving in the first place. Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), which set out his calculations in full, was published in 1543, just as its author was dying. Its immediate impact was limited. A Lutheran minister by the name of Andreas Osiander, who had taken responsibility for seeing the work through the press, had realized the implications of Copernicus’s theory for those who knew their Bible. As a precaution he had provided an unsigned introduction that claimed that this was no more than a hypothesis from which more efficient mathematical models of the universe might be made. The sheer quantity of mathematical calculations provided by Copernicus also helped obscure the importance of the work, even though the early copies do seem to have been read.5 Yet Osiander was proved right. De Revolutionibus was soon condemned by the Lutherans, both by Luther himself and by Philipp Melanchthon. The Catholic Church took longer to respond. One reason for its muted response was the relatively low status of astronomy and the sheer difficulty of persuading people to believe that the Earth was rotating on its axis as Copernicus demanded. There was simply no evidence for this rush of movement. One study claims that only ten thinkers are known to have accepted the physical truth of Copernicus’s theory before 1600.
Four key astronomers engaged seriously with Copernicus’s solution and embraced the questions that it left unresolved. It says something for the breadth of European learning that one was a Dane (Tycho Brahe), another German (Johannes Kepler), the third Italian (Galileo Galilei) and the fourth French (René Descartes) and that Latin still acted as a language of scholarly communication between them. The development of science in the seventeenth century was a Europe-wide enterprise.
Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) was lucky to be born into wealth. At the age of thirteen, enthused by an accurately predicted eclipse of the sun, he began to make observations of the stars by night, which he continued alongside his daytime studies in law. In 1563 his first published observations showed that the tables put forward by Copernicus were as much as two days out. Brahe now became obsessed with accuracy, eventually becoming the most proficient astronomical observer of his age. Here he proved a worthy follower of the German cartographer Petrus Apianus (whose Cosmographia he is known to have read). A breakthrough came in 1572 when Brahe observed a new star beyond the moon. His De nova stella of 1573, if not immediately appreciated, was revolutionary, as Aristotle had always argued that the universe beyond the moon was eternally immutable and the discovery of any new star impossible. In the late 1570s the Danish king, Frederick II, financed the building of an observatory for Brahe on the island of Hven. While the Arabic astronomers had enjoyed state-financed observatories, such as that at Maragheh, in the thirteenth century, this was a European first and raised the status of astronomy considerably. The Uraniborg, as Brahe called his magnificent establishment, gathered a community of artisans and intellectuals who worked together to perfect his instruments. He could now achieve a reassessment of the position of the stars; the 777 stars whose positions he plotted superseded the earlier catalogue made by Ptolemy. It was not only in astronomy that Brahe was influential; he had shown the importance of accuracy of measurement and this was to be extended to other areas of science, as astronomical instruments, clocks and other measuring devices improved.
