The Christian roots of modern science—Part 2
Let's talk about the myth of the Dark Ages and the influence of Greek philosophy in the Church.
This is the second of what will be a three-part (maybe more, if I can’t restrain myself) series on the Christian foundation of modern science. Part 1 is here.
Here is an effective piece of propaganda.
The Dark Ages. It’s chilling just to see those words.
The Dark Ages were such a dark time that not only did Christianity halt all progress in the world but caused it to regress. Somehow, humankind lost nearly all scientific advancement acquired until the fall of Rome and had to start all over again during the Renaissance.
It was a crime against humanity. Or would be if it were true.
Rehabilitating the Middle Ages
The Dark Ages has turned out to be one of the biggest historical hoaxes ever perpetrated. It was invented by a 14th century Italian scholar named Petrarch who was bitter that Rome’s best days were a thousand years in the past. His explanation for Rome’s fall? Mostly that Christianity ruined everything. Other scholars, like Voltaire and Rousseau, took up this idea, and believed that overcoming Church oppression led to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This is the general idea I’d absorbed as a young person, mostly through cultural osmosis, as I don’t remember being overtly taught this (or anything else interesting) in high school social studies. But it’s what I believed.
Who else believes this? People who are educated by talking points and dopey memes on social media, I guess. But in scholarly circles, a benighted medieval Europe under the sway of a powerful and regressive Church is now an embarrassingly outdated view.
The study of this period of European history has undergone its own renaissance, and it turns out that the Middle Ages were an intellectually and technologically fruitful time. Far from squelching the development of science, the intellectual activity during this period was crucial for it. According to atheist historian Tim O’Neill, we owe a lot of this rehabilitated view of scientific progress in the Middle Ages to French physicist and science historian Pierre Duhem. He discovered references to medieval scholars in the works of great scientists of the Scientific Revolution, like Newton, Bernoulli, and Galileo. Duhem tracked down these medieval scholars, figures like Roger Bacon and Nicholas Oresme, read their works (in Latin), and came to realize the whole idea of the Middle Ages as a scientific wasteland was a fiction.
What really happened during the Middle Ages was a flourishing of Christianity, and along with it the formation and rise of universities, proto-scientific developments, the establishment of the rule of law, Church reform, the birth of tourism, and the flowering of literature, theater, music, and visual arts. It was a happenin’ time, and a lot of that had to do specifically with Christianity. (If you’re interested in reading more about this, check out The Soul of Science by Pearcey & Thaxton and For the Glory of God by Rodney Stark.)
So, what we go from is this (imagine “scientific advance” on the vertical axis):
to this:
Doesn’t that make more sense? It does to me.
So much for the Dark Ages.
It was necessary to get this out of the way, because so much of what we’re about to discuss hinges on the rehabilitation of the Middle Ages as a time of fruitful development that leads directly to the time of the Scientific Revolution.
Christians discover Greek philosophy
In Part 1, I talked about the history of science leading up to the Scientific Revolution, and if you remember, the Greeks figured prominently, particularly Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s philosophy influenced the early Church Fathers, like Augustine (which I was frustrated to learn years ago is pronounced Au-GUS-tin and not AU-gus-TEEN) in the 4th–5th centuries, as part of a movement called Neoplatonism. It would be hundreds of years later before scholars in Europe discovered Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student.
This is a good time to pause and discuss the broad differences between Plato and Aristotle.
Plato was a mystic, meaning he was interested in discovering hidden truths. He was more tuned to the spiritual than the physical and, as a mystic, believed that the senses are not reliable for perceiving truth. He was influenced by Pythagoras (of right-triangle fame) and built on the Pythagorean idea of Forms. Plato held that everything in the world is a crude copy of a perfect Form or Idea. For instance, if you’re sitting on a chair right now reading this, the chair is a copy of the Form of “chair” that exists in a perfect, abstract sense somewhere, static and unchanging, beyond heaven.
Owing to his influence by the numbers-obsessed Pythagoras, Plato believed that mathematics was the highest form of thinking. Plato’s mystical approach minimized any direct contribution to the development of science in his time. However, his philosophy would come to be highly influential in the rise of modern science thousands of years later, particularly with his emphasis on mathematics and his use of inductive logic (reasoning from the specific to the general).
Aristotle, a student of Plato, would turn out to be much more directly influential on science than Plato, though it took longer for the Western world to rediscover his works. Whereas Plato was a mystic, Aristotle was a logician. He was more grounded in the world, believing in the authenticity of the everyday and the reliability of senses to perceive it. He believed that objects in the world are not mere copies of Forms, but a combination of Form and matter. He held that change was inevitable.
Aristotle was highly interested in the study of the world, and pursued a wide range of topics, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, physics, and zoology. His sense of the realness of the world and his interest in studying it, as opposed to Plato’s emphasis on the contemplation of the abstract, was highly influential on the eventual development of science. Though he was also interested in the study of mathematics, Aristotle separated it from the study of the physical world. He was focused on deductive logic (reasoning from the general to the specific), which, like inductive reasoning, would become instrumental in modern science.
The Neoplatonist movement, which arose in the 3rd century with the philosopher Plotinus, would come to be enormously influential to the rise of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries; but before that, it went through something of a crisis with the Church.
Remember, Plato was a mystic. He believed in perfect Ideals, the abstract, the static, and the spiritual nature of mathematics. He disdained the material realm.
The early Church had incorporated Neoplatonism into its theology, and much of it seemed compatible with Christianity at the time, particularly the emphasis on the spiritual. But after the age of the Church Fathers was over, there was a movement to push Plato’s philosophy out of Christianity. For some, his emphasis on idealism had become an obstacle to the Christian idea of heaven.
The problem was, with Plato out, this left Christianity bereft of a metaphysical grounding.
Thus, the medieval Christian world was primed for the arrival of Aristotle, whose works had been transmitted to Europe by Middle-eastern Christians in the 12th century.
Great effort was expended to incorporate Aristotle’s philosophy into Christianity, spurring a movement called Scholasticism. The key figure of this movement was Thomas Aquinas, an Italian priest and theologian who is considered the most important thinker of the medieval period.
Christian scholars at the time were so taken with Aristotle’s philosophy, that, in my opinion, it came to be dangerously synonymous with Christian theology. This sort of syncretism, while generally beneficial to Western thought, had its drawbacks, including its involvement in one of the most famous dust-ups in history: the conflict between Galileo and the Church. This conflict involved the Church’s adoption of Aristotle’s eternal, Earth-centered model of the universe, the supplanting of which was a decisive aspect of the Scientific Revolution. So much more can be said about Galileo’s conflict with the Church, but I’ll leave this topic for another piece.
So, here we are, with the Church fully aware of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and struggling with how to incorporate some of their more troublesome ideas into Christian theology. But if there is one driver for progress, it’s crisis and conflict. The interplay and tension between Plato, Aristotle, and Christianity is precisely what would lead to the Scientific Revolution.
This is a good place to stop for now. Next week, in Part 3, we’ll look at the key aspects of this interplay and tension between Greek philosophy and Christian ideals and assumptions, and how this led to the Scientific Revolution.
Update: Part 3 is here.
Very good article, Sarah! A follow up on a "dopey meme." https://open.substack.com/pub/thestoryofthecosmos/p/bronze-age-goat-herding?r=29oa8g&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web