Science and the Shaping of Modernity

JUDE P. DOUGHERTY is Professor Emeritus and Dean Emeritus at the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America.

Cultural historians necessarily deal in
broad generalizations. Whatever is
affirmed of a period, a people, or a nation,
no matter how well-grounded by
factual study and reflection, is subject to
qualification. Exceptions to broad characterizations
may always be found without
mitigating the value of the broader insight.
We grasp something when an author refers
to the Greeks, to Roman civilization, to
the Hellenic period, to Christendom, to
the Benedictines, to the Renaissance, or
to the Enlightenment. These designations,
all generalizations formed by an examination
of a host of particulars, indeed refer
to something intelligible, something quite
apart from the mind.¹ Generalization, of
course, can be misleading or false as well
as perceptive and true. There is always the
danger of unscrupulous forces manipulating
history for present purposes. Then,
too, in the study of history there is always
the propensity to judge the past in the light
of contemporary categories of experience.
It is axiomatic that one must banish from
the mind the customary conceptions of
one’s own period before one can rightly
understand the past. With that caveat in
mind, this essay purports to examine with
the aid of a host of distinguished twentieth-
century scholars the reciprocal influence
of science and culture with particular
attention to the role of religion at the birth
of modern science.

Detached narrative is rare, yet, for example,
those acquainted with the life-long
work and studied objectivity of Christopher
Dawson are likely to give credence
to his insight when he speaks of the great
movement of thought which passed over
the ancient world about the middle of the
first millennium B.C. “that turned away
men’s minds from the world of human
experience to the contemplation of absolute
and unchanging Being, from Time to
Eternity.”² There are few readers who are
in a position to render the same judgment
unaided. Similarly, Dawson is convincing
when he writes that with the advent of
Christ, “the Absolute and the Finite, God
and the World were no longer conceived as
two exclusive and opposed orders of being
standing over and against one another in
mutual isolation. The two orders interpenetrated
one another.”³ Dawson’s judgment
is an invitation to reflection. He makes
a like generalization about the advent of
modern science and its medieval antecedents.
Scholars are nearly unanimous in
recognizing that something dramatic occurred
in the culture of Europe around the
turn of the eleventh century. Explanations
vary, with some emphasizing technological
advancement, others the recovery of
Greek learning, still others the practical
influence of Christianity.

In 1925 the distinguished American
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead delivered
the prestigious Lowell Lectures at
Harvard University, lectures subsequently
published as Science and the Modern World.⁴
Those lectures were significant because
Whitehead, for a predominately American
audience, challenged the Enlightenment
view that only with the repudiation of a
religious worldview could modern science
have emerged from a dark age. Whitehead,
it must be noted, was writing a generation
before the in-depth studies of Marshall
Clagett, A. C. Crombie, and Anneliese
Maier, and before the monumental work
of Pierre Duhem became available in English
translation. Examining the relation between
science and culture, Whitehead put
to himself a fundamental question: why did
modern science emerge in the West during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
when all the conditions required for its
birth were seemingly in place in classical
antiquity? That question has entered public
consciousness again with the reemergence
of militant Islam. Contemporary scholars
in their attempt to understand an adversarial
Islam ask why the scientific revolution
that we associate with Europe bypassed Islam,
when for centuries Islam was in many
respects at the forefront of human civilization
and achievement. Bernard Lewis, the
noted Middle East scholar, pointedly asks,
“What went wrong?”⁵ He writes, “In the
course of the twentieth century it became
abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed
all over the lands of Islam that things
had indeed gone badly wrong. Compared
with its millennial rival, Christendom, the
world of Islam had become poor, weak,
and ignorant.”⁶ “Why,” he asks in a subsequent
passage, “did the great scientific
breakthrough occur in Europe and not as
one might reasonably have expected in the
richer, more advanced, and in many respects
more enlightened realm of Islam?”⁷

Putting aside for the moment Lewis’s
somewhat romantic view of the “Golden
Age of Islam,” his question has been addressed,
perhaps never more authoritatively,
than by A. C. Crombie.⁸ Crombie’s research
led him to the conclusion that the
new science which began to percolate
into Western Christendom in the twelfth
century, although largely Arabic in form,
was founded on the works of the ancient
Greeks. The Arabs, Crombie relates, preserved
and transmitted to medieval Europe
a large body of Greek learning, adding to
it to be sure, but what they added to its
content was perhaps less important than
the change they made in the conception
and purpose for which science ought to be
studied. The speculative or theoretical aspect
of science interested them less than its
application. In the judgment of Crombie,
the most important and original contributions
that the Arabs made to the history of
European science were those of alchemy,
magic, and astrology. This was due partly
to the Arabic approach to the study of nature
where power over nature, rather than
rational explanation of fact, led enquirers
to seek “the Elixir of Life,” the magic
properties of plants and minerals, instead
of the causes of the properties of the things
they experienced.⁹

It has been well-documented that the
Arabs themselves acquired their knowledge
of Greek science from two sources:
initially from Syriac intermediaries, but
later directly from the Greeks of the Byzantine
Empire. Their first encounter with
Greek learning came from the Syriacspeaking
Nestorian Christians of eastern
Persia.¹⁰ The role that the Arabs played in
the transmission of Aristotle to the West
is an interesting and complicated story in
itself and cannot be recounted here, but
this much needs to be said: with the rapid
expansion of Islam after Muhammad’s
death in 632, regions where Greek learning
had previously been deposited came
under Islamic domination. Under the Abbasid
caliphs after 749, Muslims established
contact with both Christians and Hellenized
Persians. The Abbasid caliphs and
other patrons of translating activity were
primarily interested in works of immediate
practical utility, that is, technical treatises
on medicine, astrology, logic, and the
mathematical sciences.¹¹ “Partly through
the growth of scholastic theology,” David
Lindberg tells us, “Islamic interests quickly
expanded to encompass the whole of Platonic
and Aristotelian philosophy. Texts
already available in Syriac, the language
of the Nestorian Christian community,
were translated into the Arabic. Works not
available in Syriac were rendered directly
from Greek into Arabic.”¹² The high-water
mark of translations from Arabic to Latin
came during the twelfth century. Lindberg
finds that the story of the transmissions of
Greek learning to the West is largely a tale
of individual scholars responding in personal
ways to unique historical circumstances.
Yet there were important centers,
such as Toledo and Palermo, where signifi-
cant, if not cooperative, work was being
done. In 1250, for example, the provincial
chapter of the Dominicans in Toledo
sent eight friars to the studium arabicum in
Tunis. By that time the works of Aristotle
were diffused and understood throughout
the Latin West. Interest in Aristotle was
accompanied by interest in the philosophical
works of the great speculative thinkers
al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Avicenna, all Persians.
The most infl uential Arabic thinker
of the period was undoubtedly Averroes
(1126–98), who was regarded as the interpreter
of Aristotle par excellence and was
frequently referred to simply as “the Commentator.”

Perhaps the better focus, unlike that
of Lewis, should be not upon what went
wrong in Arabia but what went right
within Christendom. Whitehead provides
this insight: “My explanation is that the
faith in the possibility of science, generated
antecedently in the development of modern
scientific theory, is the unconscious
derivative from medieval theology.”¹³
“The Middle Ages,” Whitehead claims,
“formed one long training of the intellect
in Western Europe in the sense of order.
There may have been some deficiency with
respect to practice. But the idea never for a
moment lost its grip. It was predominantly
an epoch of orderly thought, rationalistic
through and through.”¹⁴ Yet for science,
something more is necessary than a general
sense of the order of things. Equally
important is the habit of definite and exact
thought, which Whitehead attributes to
the Greek philosophers, a legacy carried
through the Middle Ages. Whitehead, in
this passage, is less interested in the metaphysics
that undergirds induction than he
is in the impact of technological advance
and the reciprocal influence of the theoretical
and the practical. “We owe to St.
Benedict,” he writes, “that the monasteries
were the homes of practical agriculturalists,
as well as saints, and artists, and
men of learning. The alliance of science
and technology, by which learning is kept
in contact with irreducible and stubborn
facts, owes much to the practical bent of
the early Benedictines. Modern science
derives from Rome as well as from Greece
and this Roman strain explains its gain in
an energy of thought kept closely in contact
with the world of facts.”¹⁵

The medieval historian Lynn White, Jr.,
later develops this theme in an article entitled
“The Dynamo and the Virgin Reconsidered.”
Like Whitehead, he calls attention
to the signifi cant role that the Benedictines
played in the history of Western technology,
saying of St. Benedict that he was
probably “the pivotal figure in the history
of labor.”¹⁶ White, in comparing the status
of labor in ancient Greece with its status
in the later Middle Ages, finds that in the
classical tradition, there is scarcely a hint
of the dignity of labor. The civilizations
of ancient Greece and Rome had rested on
the backs of slaves. Reversing this Greek
attitude toward labor was St. Benedict, by
making labor part of the corporate life of
his monastery, by adopting it not merely as
a regrettable necessity but rather as an integral
and spiritually valuable part of monastic
discipline. White suggests that the
Benedictine regard for the dignity of labor
“marks a revolutionary reversal of the traditional
attitude to labor: it is the high peak
along the watershed separating the modern
and ancient world…. Moreover, although St.
Benedict had not intended that his monks
should be scholars, a great tradition of learning
developed in the abbeys following his
Rule: for the first time the practical and the
theoretical were involved in the same individual.
The monk was the first intellectual
to get dirt under his fingernails. He did not
immediately launch into scientific investigation,
but in his very person he destroyed
the old artifi cial barrier between the empirical
and the speculative, the manual and
the liberal arts, and thus helped to create a
social atmosphere favorable to scientific and
technological development.”¹⁷

What Whitehead dimly saw, Crombie
makes explicit in his well-documented Medieval
and Early Modern Science,¹⁸ a history of
science from Augustine to Galileo, from its
decay after the collapse of the Roman empire
in the West to its full flowering in the
seventeenth century. He emphasizes what
he believes are the two most significant results
of twentieth-century scholarship: the
essential continuity of Western scientific
traditions from Greek time to our own and
the signifi cance of medieval discussions of
scientific methodology. Crombie’s wide
study has convinced him that the most signifi
cant changes in the history of science
are always brought about by new conceptions
of scientific procedure. It is Crombie’s
thesis that if modern science owes
most of its success to the use of inductive
and experimental procedure, then it owes
a great deal to the philosophers of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries who
first produced an understanding of that
experimental procedure. He credits them
with transforming the Greek geometrical
method into the experimental science of
the modern era. Although the conception
of scientific explanation accepted by Galileo,
Harvey, and Newton is a theory of
formal proof developed by Greek geometers
and logicians, the distinctive feature of
the seventeenth century, Crombie writes,
is non-Greek in origin. It is a scientific
method based on “a conception of how
to relate a theory to observed facts it explained,
the set of logical procedures…for
constructing theories and for submitting
them to experimental tests.”¹⁹ Whereas
Aristotle distinguished natural science on
the basis of subject matter, deriving three
orders of abstraction—physics, mathematics,
and metaphysics—the medieval mind
tended to look upon this distinction as not
one of subject matter but method of inquiry.
The philosophers of the thirteenth
century distinguished clearly among the
kinds of questions to be asked under each
level of enquiry. Crombie likens this to the
role of linguistic analysis in our own time.
The object of the experimental method
worked out during this period was to discover
and to define the conditions neces-
sary and suffi cient to uncover the experiential
data. It was recognized that a theory
defining these conditions could never be
certain: it was necessary to “save the appearance,”
but it may not be “necessarily
true” in the sense of being a demonstrated
conclusion. The effect of this tendency
to regard mathematics as a method rather
than a domain or province of study was to
change the kind of questions asked. Interest
gradually shifted from the physical or
metaphysical to the kind of question that
could be answered by a mathematical theory
within reach of experimental verification.
The history of medieval science shifts
to the working-out of the consequences of
this new approach to nature. Examples of
this shift are seen in the sciences of statics,
optics, and astronomy.²⁰

Crombie is not alone in his view.
Whitehead and Dawson imply as much.²¹
Lynn Thorndike²² and W. C. Bark²³ take
similar views. Dawson makes much the
same point when he compares the utilitarian
view of science propounded by Roger
Bacon in the fourteenth century with the
speculative view of science entertained by
the Greek mind. Bacon is obviously closer
to the modern mind than to the Greek
when he makes science an instrument of
world conquest and exploitation. Dawson
suggests that both the utilitarian view and
the Greek view of science contributed to
the European scientifi c tradition: “The
pragmatic experimentation of the Baconian
ideal could have borne no fruit apart
from the intellectual training and discipline
which were provided by Aristotelian
scholasticism.”²⁴

Other scholarship suggests that it is from
Robert Grosseteste²⁵ that Bacon derived
his distinctive philosophical and scientific
views. Both Dawson and Crombie accord
Grosseteste a major role in the history of
scientific theory using Grosseteste as a symbol
of the fusion of two traditions. Crombie
writes, “From the almost pure empiricism
of such practical sciences of the twelfth century
as practical mathematics, astronomy,
and medicine, and the almost pure rationalism
of theoretical speculation in contemporary
philosophy on scientific method, he
[Grosseteste] produced a science in which
he tried to show the principles according
to which the world of experience could be
experimentally investigated and rationally
explained.”²⁶ Other important elements of
Grosseteste’s thought are his conception of
physical nature, in which the essence or
“form” is mathematically determined, and
his conception of the immediate objective
of inquiry as mathematical and predictive
laws instead of Aristotelian essential definition.
These concepts, Crombie maintains,
were not without their effect, for in the
fourteenth century we find developments
of mathematical technique designed to take
advantage of the new methodology and
conceptions of explanation. At the same
time, extension of the use of experiment
and mathematical abstraction had begun to
produce results so striking that this movement
in itself could well be called a “scientifi
c revolution.”

Benjamin Farrington similarly attributes
the success of Renaissance science to
the technological revolution of the Middle
Ages.²⁷ According to Farrington, when the
classic works arrived in the West, the West
was prepared. Medieval man had learned
the use of natural resources and upon this
knowledge had built a society in which humans
were free from a large part of their
former drudgery. Technical advance had
led to social change. The slave had been replaced
by the serf and the craftsman.²⁸ Concerning
the relation of the new technology
to slavery there are a number of theses.
Lynn White, who has directed considerable
attention to the subject, suggests that
the development of medieval technology
owes its impetus to the Christian teach-
ing of the infi nite worth of the individual
and the Church’s opposition to slavery. In
his article, “The Dynamo and the Virgin
Reconsidered,” White notes that whereas
Henry Adams can symbolize an age by the
concept of “dynamo,” the early Middle
Ages can be characterized by the devotion
shown to Our Lady: “St. Bernard’s Cistercian
monks were so devoted to the Virgin
that every one of their hundreds of monasteries
was dedicated to her; yet these White
Benedictines seem often to have led the
way in the use of power.”²⁹

In a seminal article, entitled “Technology
and Invention in the Middle Ages,”
White argues:

The chief glory of the later Middle
Ages was not its cathedrals or its
epics or its scholasticism: it was the
building for the first time in history
of a complex civilization which
rested not on the backs of sweating
slaves or coolies but primarily on
non-human power…. The laborsaving
power machines of the later
Middle Ages were produced by the
implicit theological assumptions of
the infinite worth of even the most
degraded personality, by the intrinsic
repugnance towards subjecting of
any man to monotonous drudgery
which seems less human in that it
requires the exercise neither of intelligence
nor choice. It has often been
remarked that the Latin Middle Ages
first discovered the dignity and spiritual
value of labor—that to labor is
to pray. But the Middle Ages went
further: they gradually and very
slowly began to explore the practical
implications of an essentially Christian
paradox: that just as the heavenly
Jerusalem contains no temple, so the
goal of labor is to end labor.”³⁰

In defending this thesis, White is developing
Lefebvre des Noëttes’s argument that
the new inventions destroyed slavery by
making it unnecessary and undesirable.³¹
On the other hand, the French medieval
historian Marc Bloch has argued that the
end of slavery came first and created a necessity
to which such devices as the new
harness and water mill were the response.³²
Both Crombie and Bark nevertheless defend
the view that the Church, although
it never succeeded in completely stamping
out slavery, was greatly aided in its opposition
to slavery by the new labor-saving
devices.

In the opinion of Pierre Duhem (1861–
1916), author of the classic ten-volume history
of the physical sciences from Plato to
Copernicus, Le systeme du monde,³³ if we
had to assign a date to the birth of modern
science, we would be compelled to choose
the year 1277, when Etienne Tempier,
Bishop of Paris, solemnly condemned 219
philosophical and theological propositions
then currently entertained within the Arts
Faculty and the Faculty of Theology of the
University of Paris. His example was followed
in the same year by the Archbishop
of Canterbury, John Pecham. From the
vantage-point of Duhem, it was significant
that the condemnations undermined the
authority of Aristotle insofar as they condemned
the Peripatetic theory of place, and
everything that Aristotle’s Physics asserted
about infinity, place, time, and the possibility
of a void.

It is to be remembered that Aristotle arrived
in Paris with considerable baggage,
imperfect translations, to be sure, but more
damaging were the often misleading commentaries
of Averroes. Of the 219 theses
condemned by Tempier, many were Averroistic
in nature. Although no names were
mentioned in the condemnations,³⁴ many
were presumably held by Siger of Brabant
and Boethius of Dacia. Some of the con-
demned theses were held by Albertus Magnus
and Thomas Aquinas. Just how many of
them were clearly Thomistic depends, Gilson
remarks, on whether the list “is compiled
by a Franciscan or a Dominican.”³⁵
William A. Wallace provides a cautionary
note when he writes, “It is generally
agreed that Duhem’s thesis is extreme, for
there is no indication of a spurt in scientific
thought or activity following 1277, and it
is doubtful whether any authoritarian restriction
on cosmological teachings could
have stimulated that free spirit of inquiry
that is generally seen as characteristic of
modern science.”³⁶ Yet Wallace concedes,
“It is undeniable that the condemnation of
1277 had an effect on the development of
medieval science, although not as profound
as was maintained by Pierre Duhem.”³⁷
Clearly the condemnation did not seriously
affect the study of Aristotle. With Albert
and Thomas, scholars began to sort out
what in Aristotle was merely outmoded
science or cosmology from the time-transcendent
value of his philosophy of nature
and its supporting metaphysics. It is not an
exaggeration to claim that Aristotle’s philosophy
of science remains viable in the
twentieth century. Whereas Gilson speaks
of the 1277 condemnation as a “landmark,”
Stephen Gaukroger employs the notion of a
“paradigm shift” to suggest the magnitude
of the change.

The investigation of the physical world
or natural philosophy until the thirteenth
century was regarded as part of a single
philosophical activity. Its purpose was to
discover the enduring and intelligible reality
behind the changes perceived though
the senses. With the condemnation of the
deterministic (Averroistic) view of Aristotle,
the authority of Aristotle was challenged,
thus undermining confidence in his
entire system. In the judgment of Crombie,
the natural philosophers of the thirteenth
century, “because of the skepticism of
Christian theologians,” were freed from
the authority of Aristotle and thus free to
develop the empirical habit of mind within
a rational framework.³⁸

Cultural historians agree that since classical
antiquity there have been a number of
civilizations that have witnessed a scientific
revolution. Stephen Gaukroger³⁹ speaks of
the “rich productive scientific cultures, in
which fundamental and especially intractable,
physical, medical, astronomical, and
other problems are opened up and dealt
with in an innovative and concerted fashion,
producing cumulative results over
several generations.”⁴⁰ Besides Greece and
the Hellenic diaspora, he identifies these as
the Arab/Islamic North Africa/Near East/
Iberian Peninsula in the ninth, tenth, and
eleventh centuries, Paris and Oxford in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and
China from the twelfth to the fourteenth
century.⁴¹ The scientific revolution of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Europe
is something different, he thinks, insofar as
the uninterrupted and cumulative growth
of the early modern period breaks with the
boom/bust pattern of earlier cultures. Not
only that, but the scientific revolution was
so spectacular that it not only displaced
competing accounts but was extrapolated
to all cognitive disciplines. In a relatively
short period of time, Copernicanism and
Darwinism came to replace firmly held
philosophical and theological views concerning
nature and the order in nature that
had persisted since Biblical times.

Stephen Gaukroger, like Whitehead,
takes exception to what he calls the “Enlightenment
interpretation,” namely, that
the scientific revolution occurred as a result
of Western science’s ability to disassociate
itself from religion. Vigorously
challenging that “self-serving account,” he
writes, “Far from science breaking free of
religion in the early modern era, its consolidation
depended crucially on religion
being in the driver’s seat: Christianity took
over natural philosophy in the seventeenth
century, setting its agenda and projecting it
forward in a way quite different from that
of any other scientific culture.”⁴² Gaukroger’s
strong claim is defended in what
promises to be a multi-volume study, the
first of which is entitled, The Emergence of
a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of
Modernity, 1210–1685.

In demonstrating the continuity of science
and technology through the later
Middle Ages into modernity, Gaukroger
contrasts the progress of science in the
West with that in the cultures of Islam and
China:

Arab-Islamic science, had two distinctive
features. The fi rst is that
there was no institutional support
available for scientific work that was
not motivated by extra-scientific
concerns…. Second, the way in which
the achievements of Greek philosophers,
and Greek and Alexandrian
mathematicians, were “naturalized”
in the Arab-Islamic culture is distinctive.
They were domesticated,
incorporated into an indigenous culture
and philosophical system, rather
than being institutionalized in such a
way that they carried “their own specifi
c gravity of autonomy and legitimacy,
independent of the moral and
religious scruples of the surrounding
culture.” The consequence of these
two institutional features of Arab-Islamic
civilization is that while it was
occasionally possible for innovations
to be made in astronomy, optics, and
even metaphysics, there was no way
in which they could be followed up
in a systematic manner.⁴³

With respect to China, the situation was
almost the reverse: “If Arabic-Islamic culture
could initiate scientific developments
but not follow them up, China had an extensive
network of communication, and
this acted in such a way as to foster scientifi
c and technological achievement. In the
Kung and Ming dynasties we find inventions
such as mechanical clocks, moveable
type, and seismographs that predate developments
in the West by a couple of centuries,
and we find significant advances in
observational astronomy and medicine.”⁴⁴
Yet there were serious obstacles to innovation
that were not practically oriented. The
bureaucratic structure of Chinese society
was a crucial factor. Then, too, traditions
of philosophical disputation are relatively
marginal in Chinese intellectual culture.
Adherence to tradition plays a crucial role
in all artistic and intellectual pursuits, with
the result that there was a strong sense that
scholarship rather than innovation is the
path to wisdom. This was reinforced by the
Confucian tendency to self-effacement and
avoidance of contentiousness, as well as a
strong commitment to outward obedience
to public authorities. This Chinese respect
for authority formed a sharp contrast with
Greek models of confrontational debate.⁴⁵

Crombie’s study is reinforced by Gaukroger
when he writes that “in the thirteenth
century, natural philosophy was
transformed from a marginal enterprise into
one that was to provide the principal point
of entry into understanding of the natural
world and our place in it.”⁴⁶ The engine
of transformation was Aristotle’s natural
philosophy in spite of the condemnations.
Gaukroger thinks the significant event is
not Etienne Tempier’s condemnation of
1277 but the much earlier Paris condemnation
of Aristotle in the year 1210. He uses
that date as a starting point as he traces the
development of natural philosophy from
the Scholasticism of the early thirteenth
century, through the corpuscularism and
atomism associated with Gassendi and
Mersenne to Descartes’ cosmology and to
Hobbes’s mechanism. Gaukroger uses the
year 1685 to mark the twilight, if not the
demise, of Aristotelian natural philosophy
and the ascendancy of a period dominated
by the works of Locke, Newton, and Leibniz.
He maintains that from the thirteenth
to the sixteen century two models had provided
the unity of knowledge: one was the
Aristotelian notion of scientia, the other the
Christian idea of a universe designed and
created ex nihilo by a single God as an abode
for human beings. In the seventeenth century
both were confronted by nominalistic
and mechanistic interpretations of nature.
Copernicus was thought to displace a mancentered
universe, Darwin to displace Moses,
and Hobbes’s mechanism to displace
the recognition of design in nature.

The shift from an Aristotelian worldview
to modernity, although gradual, was
radical. Pagan philosophers had made natural
philosophy the basis of moral philosophy.
Aristotelian categories had been employed
by the early Church Fathers as they
interpreted the texts of the Gospel. Justin
Martyr, Marius Victorinus, and Clement
of Alexandria recognized that Aristotelian
natural philosophy, while not intrinsically
Christian, was nevertheless not inherently
pagan. Aristotelian natural philosophy, although
not without rivals, notably those of
the neo-Platonic and Augustinian schools,
held sway until it gave ground to mechanistic
interpretations of nature in the seventeenth
century, notably that advanced by
Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655). It is Descartes
and his artifi cially created “mind-body
problem” that stimulated Gassendi to address
the age-old problem of universals and
the relation between sense and intellectual
knowledge.⁴⁷ In his criticism of Descartes,
he writes, “When you say that you are simply
a thing that thinks, you mention an operation
that everyone was aware of but you
say nothing about the substance carrying
out this operation: What sort of substance
it is, What it consists in, how it organizes
itself in order to carry out its different functions….”
⁴⁸ Gassendi’s atomism in its pre-
Newtonian form is an attempt to explain
macroscopic phenomena by means of the
microscopic. Presented as a matter theory
inspired by the Greek atomists, when combined
with the doctrine of primary and
secondary qualities, it undermined the Aristotelian
concept of “nature” and, with it,
teleology. But those implications and others
are not what he intended. It is a small
step from Gassendi’s atomism to Auguste
Comte’s positivism.

Science in the Aristotelian sense and
above all an acknowledgment of its scholastic
roots suffered greatly at the hands of
Renaissance humanists. A number of scholars
are of the opinion that the fifteenthcentury
humanism that arose in Italy and
spread northward was an interruption of
the development of science. The so-called
revival of letters deflected interest from
content to literary style, and in turning
back to classical antiquity, many humanists
affected to ignore the progress of the
previous three centuries. Unaware of how
much they owed to their immediate predecessors,
these humanists, by their contempt
of Scholasticism, did much to initiate the
Dark Age myth which the philosophes of the
French Enlightenment were happy to perpetuate.
Crombie suggests:

The same absurd conceit that led the
humanists to abuse and misrepresent
their immediate predecessors for using
Latin constructions unknown
to Cicero and to put out the propaganda,
which in varying degrees has
captivated historical opinion until
quite recently, also allowed them to
borrow from Scholasticism without
acknowledgment. The habit affected
almost all the great scientists of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
whether Protestant or Catholic, and
it has required the labors of Duhem
and Maier to show that their statements
on matters of history cannot
be accepted at face value.⁴⁹

Whitehead is convinced that the natural
scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries were anti-intellectualists in the
same way as the religious reformers were
anti-intellectualists.⁵⁰ The scientists were
perhaps not immune to the humanistic spirit
of the time. Herbert Butterfield recalls how
the humanists of the Renaissance, Erasmus
included, were accustomed to complaining
of the boredom of scholastic lectures and
suggests that this was due to the ignorance
of the humanists more than anything else.⁵¹
The humanists derided their scholastic
teachers, but these despised scholastic disciplines
now hold a remarkable key position
in the story of the evolution of the modern
mind. Butterfi eld writes, “Perhaps the lack
of mathematics or the failure to think of
mathematical ways of formulating things
was partly responsible for what appeared to
be verbal subtleties and an excessive straining
of language in these men who were
yearning to fi nd the key to the modern science
of mechanics.”⁵²

The Renaissance attitude took hold
and has held sway since. For complex reasons
positivism has come to be associated
with modern science. Positivism, insofar
as it restricts knowledge to that attained by
physico-mathematical methods, in effect
reduces science to description and prediction.
With remarkable insight, Christopher
Dawson, writing three-quarters of a century
ago, commented, “The disease of modern
civilization lies neither in science nor in
machinery but in the false philosophy with
which they have been associated…. Though
these ideas accompanied the rise of the machine
order, they are in reality profoundly
inconsistent with that order and with scientifi
c genius.”⁵³ Elsewhere he remarks that
“we cannot be sure that the world which
science has made will be as favorable to the
production of scientific genius as the world
that made science.”⁵⁴

Karl Popper likewise indicts the positivistic
attitude toward science in which
the emphasis is placed on description and
practical results. “Instrumentalism,” Popper
maintains, “is unable to account for the
importance to pure science of severely testing
even the most remote implications of its
theories since it is unable to account for the
pure scientist’s interest in truth and falsity.
In contrast to the highly critical attitude
requisite in the pure scientist, the attitude
of instrumentalism (like that of applied science)
is one of complacency at the success
of application. Thus it may well be responsible
for the recent stagnation in theoretical
physics.”⁵⁵

We began with Bernard Lewis’s question
of what went wrong in the Islamic
world but shifted the discourse to what
went right within Christendom. As contemporary
Europe struggles with its identity,
Dawson’s work is there to remind us:

Europe is not a group of people held
together by a common type of material
culture; it is a spiritual society
that owes its existence to the religious
tradition which for a thousand years
molded the beliefs, the ideals, and the
institutions of European peoples.⁵⁶

Dawson adds a frightening thought: “If
modern Europe falls either through internal
revolution or through loss of her world
leadership, modern civilization falls with
her. For that civilization was entirely a European
creation, and there is no force outside
Europe to-day capable of carrying on
her work, whatever the case a century or
two hence.”⁵⁷

NOTES

1. Lynn White, Jr., “The Changing Past,” in Frontiers of
   Knowledge in the Study of Man, ed. Lynn White, Jr. (New
   York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 68, reminds us of the
   Herculean task awaiting the cultural historian: “History
   is being made faster than we can absorb it…. As yet no
   mind, not even Arnold Toynbee’s, has really digested
   the new material.”

2. Christopher Dawson, Progress and
   Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image Books,
   1960), 123.

3. Ibid., 126–7.
4. Alfred North Whitehead,
   Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan,
   1925; New York: Mentor, 1953).

5. Bernard Lewis, What
   Went Wrong? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

6. Ibid., 151.
7. Ibid., 156.
8. A. C. Crombie, Medieval and
   Early Modern Science, 2 vols: Vol. I, Science in the Middle
   Ages: V–XIII Centuries; Vol. II, Science in the Later Middle
   Ages and Early Modern Times: XIII–XVII Centuries (Garden
   City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959).

9. Ibid., 52.
10. Cf. David C. Lindberg, “The Transmission
    of Greek and Arabic Learning to the West,” in Science
    in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago:
    University of Chicago Press, 1978).

11. Ibid., 56. For an
    alternative account, one written from an Islamic perspective,
    see George Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making
    of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
    Press, 2007). Saliba confirms with considerable textual
    evidence Crombie’s account of the westward transmission
    of astronomical data from the world of Islam and
    makes the case that Copernicus’s heliocentric view of
    the universe was largely indebted to Arab sources.

12. Ibid.

13. Whitehead, op. cit., 14.
14. Ibid., 12.
15. Ibid.,
    16.

16. Lynn White, Jr., “The Dynamo and the Virgin
    Reconsidered,” American Scholar, Vol. 27 (1958), 187.

17. Ibid., 188–9.

18. Crombie, op. cit.
19. A. C. Crombie,
    Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science,
    1100–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971),
    1.

20. Ibid., 2–3.
21. Whitehead, op. cit., 12.
22. Lynn
    Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science,
    1923–58 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923–
    58, 8 vols).

23. See especially W. C. Bark, Origins of the
    Medieval World (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1960),
    115ff.

24. Christopher Dawson, “Origin of European
    Scientific Tradition,” in The Clergy Review, Vol. 2 (1931),
    203.

25. Cf. Pearl Kibre and Nancy Sirasi, “The Institutional
    Setting of the Universities,” in Science and the Middle
    Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (Chicago: University of
    Chicago Press, 1978), 128–9.

26. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste,
    p. 43.

27. Benjamin Farrington, Greek Science (London:
    Penguin, 1952), 307ff.

28. Ibid.
29. Lynn White,
    Jr., op. cit., 190.

30. Lynn White, Jr., “Technology and
    Invention in the Middle Ages,” Speculum, Vol. 15 (1940),
    156.

31. The medieval contribution to technology gained
    recognition as a result of the researches of Commandant
    Lefebvre des Noëttes, a one-time cavalry officer, who
    upon retirement from military life, turned his professional
    attention to account by making a historical study
    of animal power. This work, published in the early
    1930s, eventually led him to accumulate an impressive
    body of evidence on medieval technical developments
    and their social consequences. The result of his work has
    been praised as one of the capital historical discoveries
    of the early twentieth century. See L’Attelage et le cheval
    de selle à travers les âges (Paris, 1931) and De la marine antique
    à la marine moderne (Paris, 1935).

32. Cf. Marc Bloch,
    Feudal Society, trans. L.A. Manyon (Chicago: University
    of Chicago Press, 1961).

33. Pierre Duhem, Le systeme du
    monde: Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic,
    originally published in French by Hermann of Paris.
    Selections from Duhem’s massive work have been translated
    and made available by Roger Ariew, Medieval Cosmology:
    Theories of Infinity, Place, Time, Void, and Plurality
    of Worlds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985);
    cf. also Stanley Jaki, Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of
    Pierre Duhem (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984).

34. For an authoritative account of the condemnation, see
    John F. Wippel, “The Condemnations of 1270 and 1277
    in Paris,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Vol.
    7 (1977), 169–201, and “Thomas Aquinas and the Condemnation
    of 1277,” Modern Schoolman, Vol. 72 (1955),
    233–72.

35. Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy
    in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955),
    728.

36. William A. Wallace, “Philosophical Setting of
    Medieval Science,” in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David
    C. Lindberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
    1978), 105–6.

37. Ibid., 105.
38. Crombie, Medieval and
    Early Modern Science, Vol. I, 64.

39. Gaukroger is writing
    some eighty years after Whitehead and fifty years
    after Crombie. Specialized studies subsequently written
    abound, yet the basic facts as well as most interpretations
    remain unchanged. See Stephen Gaukroger, The
    Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of
    Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
    2006).

40. Ibid., 17.
41. Ibid., 18.
42. Ibid., 23.
43. Ibid.,
    33.

44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Cf. the excellent study
    by Antonia Lolordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of
    Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University
    Press, 2006).

48. As quoted by Lolordo, 228.
49. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo, 268–9. Cf. also Charles
    B. Schmitt’s extended treatment, Aristotle and the Renaissance
    (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
    1983).

50. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 12.
51. Herbert Butterfield, Origins of Modern Science (New
    York: Macmillan, 1957), 2.

52. Ibid.
53. Christopher
    Dawson, Christianity and the New Age (London: Sheed
    and Ward, 1931), 102.

54. Christopher Dawson, The
    Modern Dilemma (London: Sheed and Ward, 1933), 49.

55. Karl Popper, Contemporary British Philosophy (New
    York: Macmillan, 1960), 381.

56. Dawson, Progress and
    Religion, 173.
57. Ibid., 171.