4. The modern world-view

The Renaissance 1The Reformation 6The Scientific Revolution 15

Copernicus 15The religious reaction 17Kepler 19Galileo 20Forging the Newtonian cosmology 22

The Philosophical Revolution 29

Bacon 29Descartes 30

Foundations of Modern Worldview 34Ancients and Moderns 39The triumph of secularism 44

Science and religion: early concord 44Science and religion: compromise and conflict 46Philosophy, politics, and psychology 49The modern character 56Hidden continuities 57

To understand the historical emergence of the modern mind, we have to examine the complexly intermingled cultural epochs known as the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.

The Renaissance

The Renaissance is characterized by sheer diversity of its expressions and their unprecedented quality. Within the span of a single generation, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael produced their masterworks, Columbus discovered America, Luther rebelled against the Catholic Church and began the Reformation, and Copernicus hypothesized a heliocentric universe and commenced the scientific revolution. Compared to the medieval epoch, “Renaissance man” appeared as if suddenly of superhuman status. Suddenly it seemed we were capable of penetrating nature’s secrets, in art and science, with unparalleled mathematical sophistication, empirical precision, and a numinous aesthetic power. Human beings immensely expanded the known world, discovered new continents, and rounded the globe; they defied traditional authorities and asserted the truth based on individual judgment. While they appreciated the riches of classical epochs, they also felt as if they were breaking out of all ancient boundaries.

Polyphonic music, tragedy, comedy, poetry, painting, architecture, and sculpture all achieved new levels of complexity and beauty. Individual genius and independence were everywhere evident, and no domain of knowledge, creativity, or exploration seemed beyond human capacities.

With the Renaissance human life appeared to hold immediate inherent value and existential meaning that balanced and even displaced the medieval focus on the afterlife as our spiritual destiny. No longer do human beings appear inconsequential relative to God, church, or nature. On many fronts Pico’s proclamation of human dignity seemed to be fulfilled. From Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bruni, and Alberti through Erasmus, More, Machiavelli, Bacon, and Galileo, the Renaissance produced paragons of human achievement such as had not been seen since the Greeks. With the Renaissance Western man was reborn.

Yet all was not light and splendor for the Renaissance arrived in the wake of a series of unmitigated disasters and continuous social upheavals. Beginning in the mid 14th c. the black plague swept through Europe and destroyed one-third of the population undermining economic and cultural achievements that had sustained the high medieval civilization. Many believed that the wrath of God had come upon the world. The Hundred Years war between France and England (1336-1565; Black death 1345; Henry V defeated French at Avignon 1382; Joan of Arc 1430 defeated the British; the war ended with the loss of British control of the continent) seemed never ending, and Italy was ravaged by internal and internecine conflict. Pirates, bandits and mercenaries were everywhere. Religious strife was international. Severe economic depression was universal for decades. The universities were sclerotic. New diseases entered through European ports; black magic and devil worship flourished as did group flagellation, the dance of death in cemeteries, the black mass, the Inquisition, tortures and burning at the stake. Ecclesiastical conspiracies were routine, including papacy backed assassinations in front of the Florentine cathedral altar at High Mass on Easter Sunday. Murder and rape and pillage were daily realities, famine and pestilence were annual perils. The Turkish hordes threatened to overrun Europe; apocalyptic expectations abounded. The RC church itself was the very center of corruption and seemed devoid of any spirituality. Against this backdrop of massive cultural decay, violence, and death did the rebirth of the Renaissance take place.

As with the medieval Cultural Revolution several centuries earlier, technical inventions played major role in making the new era. Four such inventions (all with Oriental precursors) were the

(1) magnetic compass permitting navigation,(2) gunpowder which contributed to the demise of the old feudal order and the ascent of nationalism,(3) the mechanical clock which brought decisive change in human relationship in relation to time, nature, work; and(4) the printing press which enormously increased learning. All these inventions were not only modernizing but also secularizing in their effects.

1. The artillery-supported rise of internally cohesive nation-states signified the overthrow of medieval feudal structures and the empowerment of secular forces against the Roman Catholic Church.

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2. The printing press allowed the rapid dissemination of new and often revolutionary ideas throughout Europe. This enabled the Reformation to be widespread (instead of remaining a local German theological dispute), and the scientific revolution to communicate scientific findings internationally. It also enable literacy and the private articulation of ideas encouraging individualism in silent reading, and solitary reflection, and so freed the masses from traditional ways of thinking in the spread of a multiplicity of perspectives now available to individuals.

3. The mechanical clock became the paradigm of modern machines, and the metaphor of the newly emerging science – indeed for the entire modern mind in its vision of nature and cosmos.

4. Likewise the magnetic compass allowed the exploration of course but also intellectual innovation in the natural world allowing the West’s sense of being at the heroic frontier of civilized history. By unexpectedly revealing errors in the discoveries of ancient explorers, Europeans got a new sense of competence and superiority over antiquity undermining previous authorities. Among these discredited geographers was Ptolemy whose status in astronomy was thereby affected as well. Navigational expeditions also required more accurate astronomical knowledge and proficient astronomers among whom was Copernicus. The discovery of new continents brought the possibility of economic and political expansion and so the transformation of European social structures. With new discoveries/continents came a new awareness of Western relativism and the boundaries to Western absolutism.

Together with these invention and their consequences, there was also the important psychological development in which the European character, beginning in Italy, underwent change. The Italian city-states of the 14th and 15th c, Florence, Milan, Venice, Urbano, were the most advanced centers in Europe what with commercial prosperity, contact with older civilizations in the East, and with Mediterranean trade, they had the concentration of economic and cultural wealth. The weakening of the Roman papacy in its struggle with an fragmented Holy Roman Empire and with rising nation-states to the north produced in Italy a condition of cultural fluidity. The Italian city-states being small and independent of external authority, their commercial and cultural vitality all provided a political stage upon which a new bold creative spirit and ruthless individualism could flourish. The political state itself was seen as something to be comprehended and manipulated by human will and intelligence, a political understanding making Italian city-states forerunners of the modern state.

The new value placed on individualism and personal genius reinforced a similar characteristic in Italian humanists whose sense of personal worth rested on an individual capacity and its emancipation from authority/tradition in a many sided genius. The medieval Christian ideal in which personal identity was largely absorbed in the collective Christian body of souls faded in the fervor of a more pagan heroic mode: “man as individual adventurer, genius, and rebel”. Realization of the protean self was best achieved not through saintly withdrawal from the world but through a life of genuine service of the city-state (civil life), scholarship, the arts, commerce, and social intercourse/entrepreneurship. Older dichotomies were now comprehended in a larger unity: activity in the world and well as contemplation of eternal truths, devotion to the state, family, self as well as to God and church; physical pleasure as well as spiritual happiness; prosperity as well as virtue. Forsaking the ideal of monastic poverty, Renaissance man embraced

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the enrichments of life afforded by personal wealth, and the humanist scholars and artists flourished in the new climate subsidized by Italian commercial and aristocratic elite.

The combined influences of political dynamism, economic wealth, broad scholarship, sensuous art, and a special intimacy with ancient and Mediterranean cultures all encouraged a new and secular spirit in the Italian ruling class, extending even into the inner sanctum of the Vatican. In the eyes of the pious a certain paganism and amorality began to pervade Italian life. We see this in the calculated barbarities and intrigues of political life, but in the unabashed worldliness of Renaissance man’s interest in nature, knowledge, beauty, and luxury for its own sake. It was therefore from its origins in the dynamic culture of Renaissance Italy that thereby developed a distinctive Western personality. Marked by individualism, secularity, strength of will, multiplicity of interest and impulse, creative innovation, willing to defy the traditional limits of human activity, this spirit soon began to spread over all of Europe…

This is our modern character.

For all the secularism of the age, the Roman Church attained its pinnacle of glory: Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Sistine Chapel, and the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican stand as monuments to the church’s undisputed sovereignty in Western culture. Here is articulated the full grandeur of the Roma Catholic self-conception, encompassing Genesis and biblical drama (Sistine ceiling), classical Greek philosophy and science (the School of Athens), poetry and the creative arts (Parnassus), all culminating in the theology and supreme pantheon of Roman Catholic Christianity (La Disputa del Sacramento, The triumph of the church). The procession of the centuries, the history of the western soul was here given immortal embodiment.

Under the guidance of the inspired but un-priest-like Pope Julius II, protean artists like Raphael, Bramante, and Michelangelo produced works of unsurpassed beauty that celebrated the majestic Catholic vision. Thus, the RC church, the Mother Church, mediatrix between God and man, matrix of Western culture, now assembled and integrated all her diverse elements: Judaism and Hellenism, Scholasticism and Humanism, Platonism and Aristotelianism, pagan myth and biblical revelation. A new Summa was written integrating all historical elements in one transcendent synthesis. It was as if the church anticipating its demise mustered up all its resources, called up its most exalted cultural self-understanding, and found artists of seemingly divine stature to incarnate its this image.

Yet this efflorescence of the RC church in the midst of an era that was decidedly secular and present-worldly was a kind of paradox that was altogether characteristic of the Renaissance. For the unique position in cultural history held by the Renaissance as a whole derives not the least from its simultaneous balance and synthesis of many opposites: Christian and pagan, modern and classical, secular and sacred, art and science, science and religion, poetry and politics. The Renaissance was both an age to itself and a transition. At once medieval and modern, it was still highly religious (Ficino, Michelangelo, Erasmus, More, Savonarola, Luther, Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross) and yet undeniably worldly (Machiavelli, Cellini, Castiglione, Montaigne, Bacon, the Medici, Borgias, and most renaissance popes). At the same time that scientific sensibility arose and flourished, religious passion also surged and often in combination.

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The Renaissance integration of contraries had already been foreshadowed in Petrarch’s ideal of docta pietas and was now fulfilled in religious scholars like Erasmus and his friend Thomas More. With the Christian humanists of the Renaissance, irony and constraint, worldly activity and classical erudition served the Christian cause in ways the medieval era had not witnessed. A literate and ecumenical evangelism replaced a dogmatic piety of a more primitive Christianity. A critical religious intellectuality superceded naïve religious superstition. The philosopher Plato and the apostle Paul were brought together and synthesized to produce a new philosophia Christi…..

However, it was the art of the Renaissance that best expressed its contraries and its unity. Early in the 14th c only one in twenty paintings could be found with a non-religious subject; a century later there were five times as many. Even inside the Vatican, paintings of nude and pagan deities face the Madonna and Christ Child. The human body was celebrated in its beauty, formal harmony, and proportion, yet often in services of religious subjects or as a revelation of God’s wisdom. Renaissance art was devoted to the exact imitation of nature (unprecedented naturalistic realism) and yet rendering sublime numinosity, depicting spiritual and mythic being, and even contemporary human figures informal perfection and ineffable grace. But this capacity for rendering the numinous required technical innovation – geometrical mathematization of space, linear perspective, aerial perspective, anatomical knowledge, chiaroscuro, sfumato – that developed from a striving for perceptual realism and empirical accuracy. In turn these achievements in painting and drawing propelled later scientific advances in anatomy and medicine, and foreshadowed the scientific revolution’s universal mathematization of the natural world. Renaissance art depicted a world of rationally related solids in a unified space seen from a single objective perspective. This was the beginning of the world/universe as a grand machine.

The Renaissance thrived on a determined “decompartmentalization” eliminating strict divisions in the different realms of human knowledge and experience. Leonardo was committed to the search for knowledge as much as for beauty: “the science of painting”. His art revealed an uncanny spiritual expressiveness that accompanied and was nurtured by extreme technical accuracy of depiction. He painted the Last Supper and The Virgin on the Rocks but he also wrote notebooks of fundamental principles – empirical, mathematical, and mechanical – that would dominate scientific thinking.

So too did Copernicus and Kepler, with neo-Platonic and Pythagorean motivations, seek solutions to problems in astronomy that would satisfy aesthetic imperatives – one that led to the heliocentric universe. Equally significant were the religious motivations, usually combined with Platonic themes, impelling most of the figures of the scientific revolution (the “new science”), through to Newton. Implicit in all these activities was the half-inarticulate notion of a distant mythical golden age when all things had been known – the mythic Garden of Eden, ancient classical times, past era of sages. Mankind’s fall from this primal state of enlightenment had brought about a drastic fall from knowledge. Recovery of knowledge (the “new science”) was therefore itself endowed with religious significance.

So once again, just as in classical Athens the religion, art and myth of the ancient Greeks met and interacted with the new and equally Greek spirit of rationalism and science, this paradoxical conjunction and balance also characterized the Renaissance.

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While the Renaissance was a direct outgrowth of the burgeoning culture of the high middle ages, between the mid 15th and early 17th centuries there was an unmistakable quantum leap in the evolution of culture in the West. In retrospect, we can see several factors operating here:

(1) rediscovery of antiquity, notably the Platonic/Pythagorean tradition (2) commercial vitality, mercantilism, international trade (3) city-states personality (political/economic “centers”, and (4) technical/scientific inventions.

Yet there was something larger than any and all of these factors. There was also a new consciousness – expansive, rebellious, energetic, creative, individualistic, ambitious, and often unscrupulous, curious, self-confident, committed to this life and this world, open-eyed and skeptical, inspired and inspirited – and this greater emergence had to do with more than political, economic, technological, religious, philosophical or artistic factors. It was not accidental that the Renaissance reformulated the medieval division of history into two periods, before and after Christ (with their own time vaguely separated from the Roman era after Christ). Renaissance historians achieved an entirely new perspective on the past: history was now defined and perceived for the first time as tripartite: ancient, medieval, and modern thereby sharply distinguishing the classical and medieval eras with the Renaissance itself being the beginning of a new age.

The events of the Renaissance took place with enormous rapidity. Columbus and Leonardo were both born in the same half decade (1450-55) that brought the Guttenberg printing press, the fall of Constantinople with the resulting influx, and the end of the hundred years’ war in which both England and France forged a national consciousness. The same two decades (1468-88) that saw the Florentine Academy’s neo-Platonic revival at its height during the reign of Lorenzo the Magnificent also saw the birth of Copernicus, Luther, Castiglione, Raphael, Durer, Machelangelo, Giogione, Machiavelli, Casare Borgia, Zwingli, Pizarro, Megellan, and More. In the same period, Aragon and Castile were joined by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella to form the nation of Spain, the Tudors succeeded the throne of England, Leonardo began his artistic career (with his painting of the angel in Verrocchio’s Baptism of Christ and the Birth of Venus, Ficino wrote the Theologia Platonica and published the first version of Plato in the West, Erasmus received his early humanist education in Holland and Pico della Mirandola composed the manifesto of Renaissance Humanism (Oration on the dignity of man). Much more than “causes” were operative here. A spontaneous and irreducible revolution of consciousness was taking place affecting every aspect of Western culture. Amidst high drama and painful convulsion, modern man was born in the Renaissance, “trailing clouds of glory”.

The Reformation

When the Renaissance, the spirit of individualism reached the realm of theology and religious conviction within the church, in the form of the Augustinian monk Martin Luther, there erupted in Europe the momentous Protestant Reformation. The Renaissance had incorporated both classical culture and Christianity in one expansive vision, but the continued moral deterioration

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of the papacy in the south now encountered a new resurgence of religiosity in the north of Europe. The relaxed cultural syncretism displayed by the Renaissance church’s embrace of Greco-Roman pagan culture (including the immense patronage this demanded) helped to precipitate the church’s absolute religious authority. Armed with the thunderous moral power of the Old Testament prophets, Luther defiantly confronted the Roman papacy’s patent neglect of the original Christian faith revealed in the Bible (which became available in print with the Gutenberg press). Sparked by Luther’s rebellion, an insuperable cultural reaction swept through the 16th c reasserting the Christian religion while simultaneously shattering the unity of Western Christendom (i.e., the Roman Church).

The immediate cause of the Reformation was the papacy’s attempt to finance the architectural and artistic glories of the high Renaissance by the theologically dubious means of selling spiritual indulgences. Tetzel the traveling friar whose sale of indulgences in Germany Provoked Luther in 1517 to post his 95 theses, had be so authorized by Medici Pope Leo X to raise money for the Saint Peter’s Basilica. An indulgence was the remission of punishment for a sin after guilt had been sacramentally forgiven – a church practice that was influenced by pre-Christian Germanic custom of commuting the physical penalty for a crime to a money payment. To grant such an indulgence, the church drew from the treasury of merits accumulated by the good works of the saints, and in return the recipient made a contribution to the church. A voluntary and popular arrangement, the practice allowed the church to raise money for financing crusades and building cathedrals and hospitals. At first applied only to penalties imposed by the church in this life, by Luther’s time indulgences were being granted to remit penalties imposed by God in the afterlife, including immediate release from purgatory. With indulgences remitting sins, the sacrament of penance was compromised.

Beyond the matter of indulgences was the more fundamental question of the long-developing political secularism of the church hierarchy, undermining its spiritual integrity while embroiling it in diplomatic and military struggles; the problem of deep piety and terrible poverty (and plagues) among the church faithful, in contrast to the often irreligious but socially and economically privileged clergy; the rise of monarchical power, nationalism, and local German insurgency against the universal ambitions of the Roman papacy and the Hapsburgs’ Holy Roman Empire. Yet the more immediate cause, the church’s expensive patronage of high culture informs a deeper factor behind the Reformation, namely the anti-Hellenic/Platonic spirit with which Luther sought to purify Christianity and return it to pristine biblical foundation. For the Reformation was also a purist Judaic reaction against the Hellenic (and Roman) impulse of Renaissance culture, Scholastic philosophy, and much post-apostolic Christianity in general. Yet perhaps the must fundamental element in the genesis of the Reformation was the emerging spirit of rebelliousness, self-determining individualism, and the growing impulse for intellectual and spiritual independence which had developed to a crucial point where a critical stand could be taken against the West’s highest cultural authority, namely the Roman Catholic Church.

Luther desperately sought for a gracious God’s redemption in the face of so much evidence to the contrary both God’s damning judgment and Luther’s own sinfulness. He could not find that grace in himself or in his works, nor did he find it in the church, not in its sacraments, not in its ecclesiastical hierarchy, and assuredly not in papal indulgences. It was, finally, faith in God’s redeeming power as revealed through Christ in the Bible, and that alone, which rendered

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Luther’s experience of salvation, and upon that rock alone did he built his new church of a reformed Christianity. In contrast, Erasmus as a devout humanist wished to save the church’s unity and mission by reforming it from within. But the church hierarchy was absorbed in other matters and remained intransigently insensitive to such needs, while Luther, with equal intransigence, declared the necessity of a complete schism and independence from an institution he now vowed as the seat of the antichrist (i.e., the Roma Church).

Pope Leo X thought of Luther’s revolt as just another monk’s quarrel, and he long delayed any answer to Luther’s objections. Three years after the 95 theses had been posted Luther received a papal bull to submit which he burned. At the meeting of the Imperial Diet, the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V declared that no single friar could be right in denying the validity of all Christianity for 1000 years and wishing to maintain the unity of the Christian religion, Charles V placed an imperial ban on Luther (who refused to recant) as a heretic. But empowered by rebellious German princes and knights, Luther’s theological insurgency rapidly expanded to an international upheaval. In retrospect, the post-Constantinian welding of Christian religion and the Roman state had proven to be a two-edged sword contributing to both the church ascendancy as well as to its eventual decline. The overarching cultural union maintained in Europe for 1000 years by the RC church was now irrevocably split.

But it was Luther’s personal religious dilemma that was the bottom line in the Reformation. Luther’s acute sense of alienation and terror before the omnipotent saw that it was the whole man who was corrupt and needed God’s forgiveness (not just particular sins that could be erased by the church). Particular sins were merely a symptom of a more fundamental sickness in man’s soul that required healing. One could not purchase redemption, step by step, through good works or the legalisms of penance or other sacraments (not to mention indulgences). Only Christ could save the whole man, and only man’s faith in Christ could justify him before God. Only in this way could the terrible righteousness of an angry God, who justly damns sinners to eternal perdition, be transformed into the merciful righteousness of a forgiving God who freely rewards the faithful with eternal bliss. As Luther discovered in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, human beings could not earn their salvation by good works or even by true belief; rather, God gave it freely to those who have faith. The source of that faith is the Holy Scripture wherein God’s mercy is revealed in Christ’s crucifixion for all humankind. There alone could the Christian believer find the means for salvation. The RC church with its cynical marketplace practice of claiming to be dispensing God’s grace, distributing the merits of the saints, forgiving men’s sins, and releasing them from debts owed in the afterlife, in return for money for its own irreligious purposes, meanwhile claiming papal infallibility, is an imposter. The church could no longer be the medium of Christian truth (instead the Christian truth came through faith and faith was granted those who were individually inspired through reading of Holy Scripture).

Luther questioned all accretions into Christianity by the RC church that were not found in the New Testament; these were expelled by the Protestants. The centuries’ accumulation of sacraments, rituals, and art, the complex organizational structures, the priestly hierarchy and its spiritual authority, the natural and rational theology of the Scholastics, the belief in purgatory, papal infallibility, clerical celibacy, Eucharistic transubstantiation, the saints’ treasury of merits, the popular worship of the Virgin Mary, and finally also the Mother church itself, all these had become antithetic to the individual Christian’s primacy of faith in Christ’s redemptive grace:

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justification by faith alone. The Christian believer had to be rescued from the obscuring clutches of the old system for only in one’s direct individual responsibility to God could one be free to experience God’s grace. The only authority is the authority of Scripture – all else was irrelevant.

In defense of the church, Catholic theologians argued that the sacramental institutions were both valuable and necessary and that its doctrinal tradition, which interpreted original revelation, held genuine authority. Moral and practical reforms were necessary but the inherent sanctity of the church was sound. Without tradition, these theologians held, God’s Word would be less than potent in this world and less understood by the faithful. Through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit invested in the institutes of the church, the church could draw out and affirm elements not in the biblical text. Indeed, the church in its earliest apostolic stages preceded the NT, and in fact produced the NT and canonized as God’s Word.

The Reformers in turn argued that the church had replaced faith in the person of Christ with faith in the doctrine of the church. “It had thereby placed the church between God and man.” Only direct contact with the Bible could redirect the human soul in its contact with Christ. In the protestant vision, true Christianity was founded on grace alone and Scripture alone. While the RC church agreed that those were indeed the fundamental elements of the Christian religion, it maintained that the institutional church, with its sacraments, priestly hierarchy, and doctrinal tradition as intrinsically and dynamically related to that foundation – faith in God as revealed in the Scripture – served the propagation of that faith. Erasmus argued against Luther that man’s free will and virtuous actions were not to be entirely discounted in the process of salvation. Roman Catholicism held that divine grace and human merit were both instrumental in redemption and did not have to be viewed as being in opposition. Most important, the church argued that Scriptural based faith and institutional tradition were not in opposition; on the contrary, Catholicism provided the living vessel for the Word’s emergence in the world.

Yet for the Reformers the church actual practices belied its ideals. Its priestly hierarchy was too corrupt and its doctrinal tradition too remote from revelation and to reform these structures was both futile and theologically erroneous. Luther argued persuasively for God’s exclusive role in salvation, man’s spiritual helplessness, the moral bankruptcy of the church, and the exclusive authority of Scripture. The Protestant spirit prevailed in half of Europe and Western Christianity was no longer monolithic nor a source of cultural unity.

The peculiar paradox of the Reformation was its essentially ambiguous character for it was at once a conservative religious reaction and a radically libertarian revolution. The Protestants forged by Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin proclaimed revival of Bible based on Judaic Christianity, unequivocally monotheistic, affirming the God of Abraham and Moses as supreme, omnipotent, transcendent, and “other” and man as fallen, helpless, predestined for damnation or salvation – and in case of the latter entirely dependent on God’s grace for redemption. Whereas Aquinas had postulated every creature’s participation in God’s infinite and free essence and asserted the God-given autonomy of human nature, the reformers perceived the absolute sovereignty of God over his creation in more dichotomous terms of man’s innate sinfulness making the independent human will inherently ineffective and perverse. While Protestantism was optimistic concerning God (the gratuitous merciful preserver of the elect), it was uncompromisingly pessimistic concerning man (that “teeming horde of infamies” - Calvin). Human freedom was so bound to

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evil that it consisted merely of the ability to choose among different degrees of sin. For the reformers, human autonomy suggested apostasy. Human beings’ true freedom and joy lay solely in obedience to God’s will and the capacity for such obedience arose solely from God’s merciful gift of grace. Nothing the individual did could bring him/her closer to salvation. Nor could human beings’ illumination be achieved through rational ascent of a Scholastic theology contaminated by Greek philosophy. Only God could provide genuine illumination, and only Scripture revealed authentic truth. Against the Renaissance dalliance with a more flexible Hellenized Christianity, with pagan neo-Platonism and its universal religion and human deification, Luther, and more systematically Calvin, reinstituted the more strictly defined, morally rigorous, and ontological dualistic Augustinian Judaic-Christian worldview.

This reassertion of “pure” traditional Christianity was given further impetus throughout European culture by the RC counter-reformation beginning in the mid 16th c with the Council of Trent (an acrimonious 19th ecumenical council held from 1545-1563, when RC became aware of its crisis and began to make internal changes). The papacy reformed itself from within and became austere so much so that the church restated the tenets of its faith while maintaining the church’s essential authority structure and sacramental authority in just as militant terms as did the Protestants. Thus, on both sides of the divide, Catholic in the south and Protestant in the north of Europe, orthodox Christianity reestablished itself in a conservative backlash against the Renaissance’ pagan Hellenism, naturalism, and secularism.

Yet for all its conservativism the Protestant rebellion against the church was an unprecedented revolutionary act in Western culture. Not only as a successful social and political insurgency against the Roman papacy and ecclesiastical hierarchy, with the reformers supporting the secular German rulers and other countries, but first and foremost as an assertion of individual conscience and consciousness against the established church framework of belief, ritual, and organizational structure. For the fundamental question of the Reformation concerned the locus of religious authority. In the Protestant vision neither the pope nor the church possessed the spiritual competence to define Christian belief. Luther taught instead the “priesthood of all believers”: the religious authority rested finally and solely in each individual Christian, reading and interpreting the Bible according to his/her own private conscience/consciousness in the context of his/her personal relationship with God. The presence of the Holy Spirit, in all its liberating and inspirational and non-institutional freedom was to be affirmed in every Christian against the quenching constriction so the Roman church.

It was the unflinching individual confrontation with God that revealed to Luther both God’s omnipotence and mercy. The two contraries characteristic of Protestantism, independent human self and all-powerful Deity were inextricably related. Hence, the individualism of Protestantism is twofold: (1) alone outside the church, and (2) alone before God. Luther spoke:

“Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason – I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other – my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen”

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Thus, the Reformation was a new and decisively assertion of individual conscience and of Christian liberty; of critical private judgment against the monolithic authority of the institutional church. This movement propelled the Renaissance further out of the medieval church and medieval character. Thus, while the Reformation was a Judaic-Christian reaction against the Renaissance pagan-Hellenistic culture, it was also a continuation of the Renaissance personal individualism and autonomy. The era saw both the Renaissance and the Reformation as revolutionary – and it was this Promethean Zeitgeist that impelled Luther’s rebellion far beyond where he wanted to take it. For the Reformation was in this sense only part of a much larger expression of a cultural transformation taking place in the West.

Here we encounter another extraordinary paradox of the Reformation: for while it was intensely and unambiguously religious, its effects were profoundly secularizing. By ridding itself of the authority of the church (the internationally recognized court of religious dogma) the Reformation opened the West to religious pluralism, religious skepticism, and finally a complete breakdown of the medieval Christian worldview. Once the Mother church had been rejected no new orthodoxies (and there were many attempts) could stand up against individual conscience/consciousness and the priesthood of all believers, and no infallibility could be regarded as legitimate. Strangely once the initial enthusiasm waned, the absence of the catholic womb, historical tradition, and sacramental ceremony, left the individual Christian unprotected against the vagaries of private doubt ands secular thinking. From Luther on the west’s intellectual critical faculties were becoming increasingly acute.

It must be remembered that Luther was raised in the nominalist (today we would call it “realism”) tradition leaving him distrustful of earlier Scholastic attempts to bridge reason and faith with rational theology. There was for Luther no natural revelation given by human reason and its knowledge of the natural world. Like Ockham, Luther saw natural human reason as so far from comprehending God’s will that any rationalist attempt to do so was absurd. There could be no genuine coherence between the secular mind and Christian truth, for Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was foolishness to the wisdom of the world. Scripture alone could provide the saving grace necessary for salvation, and this claim held all sorts of implications for the modern mind in apprehending the natural world.

By restoring biblical theology over against the Scholastics’ philosophical theology helped to purge the modern mind of Hellenistic notions that nature was permeated by divine rationality and final causes. Protestantism therefore provided a revolution of theology that solidified the movement began by Ockham away from classical Scholasticism and it thereby supported the development of the “new science” or the modern science of nature. The Reformers’ distinction between Creator and creature, between God’s inscrutable will and man’s finite intelligence, and between God’s transcendence and the world’s contingency, allowed the modern mind to approach the world with a new sense of nature’s pure mundane character with its own ordering principles that might not correspond to man’s logical/rational assumptions about God’s divine government. Paradoxically, by so limiting the human mind to knowledge about this world it also opened up that knowledge. God had graciously and freely created the world fully distinct from his own infinite divinity. Hence that world could now be apprehended and analyzed not according to sacramental participation in static divine patterning

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(after neo-Platonic and Scholastic thought) but according to its own dynamic material processes (nature as machine, albeit created by God), devoid of direct reference to God and his transcendent reality.

This disenchantment of the world (of immanent divinity so making it a “machine”) completed the Christian destruction of pagan animism, and the Reformation allowed and encouraged this radical revision by modern science. The way was then cleared for a naturalistic (materialistic) view of the cosmos, which later became deism (a God distant from the machine of nature), and still later in the 19th c. became secular agnosticism (no God). Even the Reformation’s biblical subjection of nature to man’s domination contributed to this process by encouraging man as knowing subject over and against the object of nature and of being divinely authorized to exercise his sovereignty over the natural (non-spiritual) world. As God’s magnitude relative to his creation/nature was affirmed, so too was man’s magnitude over nature. Subduing nature was a divine directive even as this directive, once secularization was complete, was simple justified in terms of human beings’ autonomy and dignity in the modern mind.

There was also a new attitude towards truth. For the RC the deepest truths were first of all divinely revealed as recorded in the Bible and these then became the basis for further truth through church tradition – each generation of theologians was inspired by the Holy Spirit, creatively acting upon that tradition and forging a more profound Christian doctrine. Much like Aquinas’ active intellect took sense impressions and formed them into intelligible concepts, so did the RC church’s active intellect take basic tradition and from it render more penetrating formulations of spiritual truth. But from a Protestant perspective the truth lay finally and objectively in the revealed Word of God and only fidelity to that truth alone can render theological certainty. In Protestant view the Roman Catholic tradition is a long and worsening exercise in subjective distortion of that primal truth. Catholic objectivity was nothing than the establishment of doctrine conforming to the subjective demand of the Catholic mind and not to the external sacrosanct truth of the Word. The Roman Catholic mind had become even more distorted by incorporating Greek philosophy intrinsically alien to the Bible.

Protestantism’s reclamation of the unalterable Word of God fostered in the emerging modern mind a new need to discover unbiased objective truth apart from the prejudices and distortions of tradition. It thereby supported the growth of critical scientific mentality. To confront entrenched doctrine courageously, to subject all belief to fresh criticism and direct testing, to come face to face with objective reality unmediated by traditional preconceptions or vested authorities – such a passion for disinterested truth informed the Protestant mind and hence modern mind generally. Of course, in time, the Word of God itself would be subject to the new critical scientific spirit and secularism would triumph.

The very foundation of the Reformers’ appeal to objective truth also provoked its dialectical collapse. Luther’s stress on the literal interpretation of Scripture as the exclusive and unbiased basis for knowledge of God’s creation left the modern mind with an impossible tension as it confronted the distinctly un-biblical revelations of the soon to be established secular science. Two apparently contradictory, or at least incongruent, truths had to be maintained simultaneously, one religious, one scientific. The fundamentalist Bible only hastened the long developing schism between faith and reason as the Western mind tried to accommodate science.

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The Christian faith was too deeply ingrained to be sloughed off but neither could scientific discoveries be denied. Eventually the latter would outweigh the former in both intellectual and practical significance. In that process the West’s “faith” would itself be radically realigned and transferred to the victor of science (i.e., “scientific materialism”). Ironically, in the long run Luther’s zealous reinstatement of a Scripture-based religiosity was to help precipitate its secular antithesis.

The Reformation had another effect contrary to Christian orthodoxy. Luther’s emphasis on the primacy of the individual’s conscience/consciousness would eventually lead to our modern sense of the interiority of religious reality. Truth would be truly individualistic – a matter for the personal subject. As time passed the Protestant doctrine of justification through faith seemed to place the emphasis on the individual rather than on God, on the individual’s personal faith/ideas rather than on their external validity. The self became the measure of things, self-defining and self-legislating. Truth became increasingly truth as experienced-by-the-self. Thus, Luther would move through pietism to Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy and eventually to Romantic and Hegelian philosophical idealism, and finally to philosophical pragmatism and existentialism of the late modern era of the 20th c.

The Reformation was secularizing too in its realignment of personal loyalties. Previously the RC Church had had the loyalties of virtually all Europeans but the Reformation succeeded in large part because it coincided with the rise of secular nationalism and German rebelliousness against the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire especially the latter’s effort to subdue all of Europe under its authority. This effort was defeated with the Reformation and Western Christendom was marked by intense aggressive competition – since there now was no longer a power, internationally or spiritually, to which individual states were responsible. Moreover, individual national languages already spurred on by the Renaissance literatures were now strengthened against Latin (previously the universal language of the educated) by translating the Bible into the vernacular (e.g., Luther into German and the King James Committee into English – the Reformers were above all philologists and, for example, the German and English languages largely came about through the translation of the Bible). The individual secular state now became the defining unit of cultural, political and economic authority. The medieval RC matrix unifying Europe had disintegrated.

No less significant were the Reformation’s effects on the political-religious dynamics both within the individual secular state and the individual person. With secular rulers now defining the religion within their territorial state, the Reformation unintentionally moved power from the church to the state, just as it did from priest to layman. Because most of the principal monarchs chose to remain RC, their continual attempts to centralize and absolutized political power caused Protestantism to be allied with resisting bodies such as the aristocrats, clergy, universities, provinces, and cities, that all sought to increase and enhance their individual power and freedom. Hence the cause of Protestantism also became the cause for political and individual freedom. The Reformation’s new sense of personal religious self-responsibility and the priesthood of all believers also supported the growth of political liberalism and individual rights. At the same time the religious fragmentation of Europe necessarily promoted a new intellectual and religious diversity. From these factors there emerged increasingly secularizing political and social consequences:

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(1) individual state-identified churches, (2) the division of church and state, (3) religious tolerance, and (4) finally the predominance of secular (civic) society.

There were still other unexpected and paradoxically secularizing effects. Despite the Reformers’ Augustinian demotion of man’s inherent spiritual power, they had also given ordinary, everyday human life in this world a new significance in the Christian scheme of things. When Luther eliminated the traditional hierarchical division between clergy and lay, and in blatant defiance of church law, decided to marry a former nun and father a family, he endowed the activities and relationships of ordinary life with religious meaning not previously emphasized by the church. Holy matrimony replaced chastity as a Christian ideal. Domestic life, raising children, mundane work, and the tasks of daily existence were now upheld as important areas within which the spirit could grow and deepen. Occupational work of whatever calling now became a sacred calling and not the just the monasticism of the medieval period. With Calvin, a Christian’s worldly vocation was to be pursued with spiritual and moral fervor in order to realize the Kingdom of God on earth. The world was not an inevitable expression of God’s will to be passively accepted in pious submission, but rather an arena in which man’s urgent religious duty was to fulfill God’s will through questioning and changing every aspect of life, every social and cultural institution, in order to help bring about the Christian commonwealth.

In time this religious uplifting of the everyday was to take on an autonomous non-religious character. Marriage for example once freed from the church (as a sacrament) became regulated by civil law, a secular contract more easily entered into and dissolved. The Protestant call to take the world more seriously, to revise society and embrace change, served to overcome traditional religious apathy both to this world and to change, and thereby gave the embryonic modern psyche the religious sanction and internal restructuring it required to propel the progress of modernity and liberalism in many spheres, from politics to science. Eventually of course this impulse to make over the world became autonomous (of religious motivation) and eventually turned against the religious bulwark as another profound oppression to be overcome.

Important social consequences of the Reformation also became evident in relation to the economic development of European nations. The Protestant affirmation of moral discipline and the holy dignity of work converged on the Calvinist belief in predestination, whereby the striving/anxious Christian, derived of the RC church’s sacramental justification, could find signs of being among the elect if one could successfully and unceasingly apply oneself to disciplined work and one’s worldly calling. Material productivity was often the fruit of all this effort which when combined with the puritan demand for ascetic renunciation readily lend itself to the accumulation of capital (Max Weber’s thesis: Protestant work ethic).

Thus, whereas traditionally the pursuit of commercial success was seen as directly threatening religious life, now the two were recognized as mutually beneficial. Religious doctrine was at times transformed or intensified in accord with the prevailing social and economic temper. Within a few generations, the Protestant work ethic along with increasing assertive and mobile individualism played a major role in the growth of an economic middle class tied to the rise of

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capitalism. Capitalism was already developing in the Italian city-states in the Renaissance and was further advanced by new wealth from the new world, the opening up of international markets, expanding populations, new financial strategies, new developments in industrial organization and technologies. In time much of the original spiritual orientation of the Protestant discipline had become focused on secular concerns and material rewards realized through productivity. Religious zeal yielded economic vigor that pressed forwards on its own.

The counter-Reformation similarly brought on unforeseen developments in the direction opposite to what was intended. The RC Church crusade to reform itself and oppose the spread of Protestantism took many forms from the revival of the inquisition to the practical reforms and mystical writings of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. But the counter-Reformation was spearheaded above all by Jesuits, a RC order that established itself as militantly loyal to the Pope and attracted many strong willed and intellectual men. They engaged in missionary work overseas, assiduous censorship, and Byzantine political intrigue in the courts of Europe. They educated the young, especially those of the ruling class and so forged the new Roman Catholic elite. Jesuits became the most celebrated teachers on the continent. But they taught not only RC faith and theology but also a full humanistic program from the Renaissance and classical era – Latin and Greek Letters, rhetoric, logic, metaphysics, ethics, science, music, mathematics, and even the gentlemanly arts of fencing and acting, all with a view towards developing a scholarly “soldier of Christ”. Morally disciplined, liberally educated, and critically intelligent, the Jesuits sought to give form to a “Christian man” capable of outwitting Protestant heretics and further the great Western tradition of catholic (universal) learning.

Hundreds of educational institutions were established by the Jesuits throughout Europe, and these were soon replicated by Protestant leaders similarly mindful of the need to educate the faithful. The classical humanist tradition based on Greek paideia was therefore sustained for the next two centuries thereby offering a new source of unity among those for whom Christianity was fragmenting. The consequence of this liberal arts program of both pagan and Christian viewpoints, inculcated with critical rationality resulted in a decidedly unorthodox tendency towards intellectual pluralism, skepticism and even revolution. It is no accident then that Galileo, Descartes, Voltaire, and Diderot all received a Jesuit education.

Here was the most drastic and secularizing effect of the Reformation: for with Luther’s revolt Christianity’s medieval matrix split into two, then into many, then seemingly commenced to destroy itself as new divisions battled each other throughout Europe with unbridled fury. The resulting chaos in the intellectual and cultural life of Europe was profound. Wars of religion reflected violent disputes between ever multiplying religious sects. The need for a unifying vision capable of transcending irresolvable religious conflict was urgent and broadly felt. It was amidst this state of acute metaphysical turmoil that the scientific revolution began, developed, and finally triumphed in the West as the “new science” of the Enlightenment.

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The scientific revolution

Copernicus

The scientific revolution was the final contribution of the Renaissance as well as the definitive contribution to the modern worldview. Born in Poland and educated in Italy, Copernicus lived in the height of the Renaissance. Although his contribution was central to our modern psyche, it was not something anyone during the Renaissance could imagine. Copernicus’ contribution symbolized the fundamental break between the ancient and medieval worldview on the one hand and the modern worldview on the other. Copernicus sought to find a solution to the age-old problem of the planets: how to explain the erratic planetary movements by means a simple, clear, and elegant mathematical formula. To recapitulate the solutions proposed by Ptolemy and his successors based on a geocentric Aristotelian cosmos had required the employment of numerous mathematical devices (deferents, major and minor epicycles, equants, eccentrics) in an effort to make sense of the observed positions while maintaining the ancient rule of uniform circular motion. When a planet’s movement did not appear to move in a perfect circle, another smaller circle was added around which the planet hypothetically moved which it continued moving around the larger circle. Further discrepancies were resolved by compounding the circles, displacing their centers, positing yet another center from which motion remained uniform, and so on. Each new astronomer faced with newly revealed irregularities that contradicted the basic scheme attempted to resolve them by adding more refinements – another minor epicycle, another eccentric.

By the time of the Renaissance, the Ptolemaic system had produced what Copernicus called “a monster” that still failed to predict planetary positions with any accuracy. The original Ptolemaic model no longer existed; different Greek, Arabic, and European astronomers using different methods and principles, different combinations of epicycles, eccentrics and equants added a multiplicity of systems to the original Ptolemaic one. The science of astronomy was riddled with uncertainty such that it seemed to Copernicus that no modification of the systems would ever yield predictions of any worth Hence Copernicus assumed that the Ptolemaic system contained an essential error.

Renaissance Europe, especially the church, required a new calendar which in turn depended on astronomical precision. Copernicus was asked to advice the pope on the problem and he told that the current Ptolemaic system was irreparable. Copernicus’ technical and mathematical proficiency led him to see the inadequacies of the current system. Any other astronomer might have concluded the problem was too complex to resolve, but Copernicus’ participation in the Renaissance revival (over Aristotle who dominated medieval science, philosophy, and theology) of neo-Platonism and Pythagoreanism encouraged him to see the problem in terms that ultimately must conform to a simple, harmonious mathematical and transcendental (eternal) quality which pressed him to innovation. The divine Creator whose works where everywhere good and orderly could not have made the heavens slipshod.

So Copernicus carefully reviewed the ancient scientific literature\ which had become available during the Renaissance in the humanist revival of Greek manuscripts from Constantinople to the West. He noted that there were several Greek philosophers, of Platonic and Pythagorean

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background who had suggested that the earth moved although none of them had proposed a mathematical hypothesis to accommodate this suggestion – and Aristotle’s geocentric cosmos remained their core assumption. Armed with these early suggestions of the moving earth and Plato’s exalted sun, along with the Scholastics’ critical appraisal of Aristotle, Copernicus hypothesized a sun-centered universe with a planetary earth, and then worked out the mathematical implications.

Despite the innovation’s apparent absurdity (after all, this is not what our senses tell us) Copernicus arrived at a system qualitatively much better than Ptolemy. The heliocentric model readily explained the daily movements of the heavens, the annual motion of the sun as due to the earth’s daily rotation on its axis and its annual revolution around the sun. The deceptive appearance of the moving sun/stars was now seen as due to the earth’s own movements. The great celestial motions were therefore nothing but a projection of the earth’s motion moving in the opposite direction. To the traditional objection that a moving earth would be disruptive to itself, Copernicus countered that the geocentric theory necessitated an even shifter movement by the immensely greater heavens which would constitute a worse disruption.

Many particular problems that had beset the geocentric tradition seemed suddenly and elegantly solved by Copernicus hypothesis. The apparent backward and forward movements of the planets relative to the fixed stars as well as their varying degrees of brightness (which traditional astronomers had struggled hard to account for mathematically) could now be understood simply as viewing those planets from a moving earth (without any need for epicycles). A moving earth would automatically make regular planetary orbits around the sun appear to a terrestrial observer as irregular movements around the earth. Nor were equants necessary, a device that Copernicus found aesthetically unpleasing because it violated the idea of uniform circular motion. Copernicus’ new ordering of the planets outward from the sun – Mercury, Venus, Earth and Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn – replaced the traditional earth centered order, and provided a simple and coherent solution to the previously ill-solved problem of why Mercury and Venus always appeared close to the sun. The explanation of these problems and others like them strongly suggested to Copernicus the superiority of the heliocentric over the geocentric theory. The appearances were saved (approximately) and with greater conceptual elegance. Despite the obvious commonsense evidence to the contrary, not to mention 2000 years of scientific tradition, Copernicus was convinced the earth truly moved.

Having set out his theory in a short paper (Commentariolus) which Copernicus circulated among his friends as early as 1514 (about the time of Luther’s Reformation), it was to be another 20 years before he placed it before the pope, who approved. Subsequently, he made a formal request to publish it. Yet throughout his life Copernicus held back full publication – reminiscent of the secrecy characteristic of the Pythagorean tradition – on risk to offending and receiving the scorn of the uninitiated (see his Foreword to De Revolutionibus). Rheticus, Copernicus’ student, however urged him to publish it and Copernicus allowed Rheticus to take the paper from Poland to Germany where it was published. In 1543 (the last day of Copernicus life) Copernicus received a finally published copy.

Of course there was little indication at the time of the nature of Copernicus’ revolution. Even for those who heard of it, it was so contrary to experience, so patently false, that it received no

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serious discussion. Yet a few astronomers were finding his arguments persuasive, and opposition began to mount as the new religious implications for his cosmology became better known in the decades to follow.

Religious reaction

Reaction to Copernicus’ revolution did not originally come from the church. Copernicus was a Canon in good standing at the RC cathedral and he was an esteemed consultant to the church in Rome. His friends who urged publication included a Bishop and Cardinal. After his death the RC universities used the De Revolutionibus as a text. The new Gregorian calendar instituted by the church was based on Copernicus’ heliocentric system. Of course, none of this was remarkable as the RC church had throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance allowed considerable latitude in intellectual speculation. In fact, this latitude was part of the basis of Protestant criticism of the church. By tolerating and even encouraging the exploration of Greek philosophy, science, and secular thinking, including Hellenistic metaphorical interpretation of Scripture, the church had at least in Protestant eyes, allowed pristine Christianity and the literal truth of the Bible to become contaminated.

It was therefore Protestant reformers who first opposed the theory: the Copernican hypothesis contradicted biblical text concerning the fixity of the earth, and of course the Bible was the protestant sole authority. To have Scriptural revelation questioned by science was clear evidence of Hellenistic (Plato/Pythagoras) intellectual arrogance that the reformers abhorred most in the RC church. Protestants were therefore quick to recognize the threat of Copernican astronomy and condemn it as impiety. Luther even before the publication of De Revolutionibus had called Copernicus an “upstart astrologer” who foolishly wished to reverse the entire tradition of science while flagrantly contradicting the Holy Bible. Melanchthon and Calvin soon joined in to recommend stringent measures against heresy. Quoting from the Psalms: “the world also is established that it cannot be moved”, Calvin asked “who dare to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?” When Rheticus took Copernicus’ paper to Nurnberg to be published, he was forced by the reformers to take it elsewhere. Even in Leipzig where he left the paper with the Protestant Osiander to publish, the latter inserted an anonymous preface without Copernicus knowledge asserting that the heliocentric hypothesis was merely a computational method that should not be taken seriously. This ploy may have saved its publication.

By Galileo’s time in the early 17th c the RC church, with a renewed sense of orthodoxy as a result of the counter-reformation, felt the need to take a definite stand against the Copernican revolution. While in earlier centuries Aquinas or the ancient Church Fathers might have considered the metaphorical interpretation of the Scriptural passages in question (thereby eliminating the apparent contradiction between science and Bible), Luther’s literalism had activated a similar attitude in the RC church. Both the RC church and the Protestants now wished solidity with respect to biblical revelation.

More importantly, Copernicus suffered guilt by association in the case of the mystical, neo-Platonist philosopher and astronomer Giordano Bruno (Italian Dominican, like Aquinas whose was excommunicated from Calvinism in Geneva, and Lutheranism in England: Bruno was b.

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1548- d. 1600) who had proposed a heliocentric theory as part of his esoteric philosophy and had been executed by the inquisition for his heretical views. Bruno had claimed that the Bible spoke only to moral issue not issues of nature and this was received with little sympathy by the RC counter-revolution. Bruno had also held heretical views on the trinity and given that he now also held to a heliocentric universe did little to ingratiate him to the pope. Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 (not for his heliocentric teachings however but for denial of Christ as God and the Holy Spirit as world soul) had made Copernican theory seem very dangerous indeed both to the RC authorities and to the philosopher/astronomers.

Not only did the new heliocentric theory appear to conflict with the Bible but it posed a fundamental threat to the entire Christian framework of cosmology, theology and morality. Ever since the Scholastics, Dante had embraced Greek science and endowed it with religious significance, and the Christian worldview had become inextricably embedded within a Aristotelian-Ptolemaic geocentric universe. Dante’s essential dichotomy between the terrestrial and celestial realms, the great cosmological structure of heaven, hell, and purgatory, the circling planetary spheres with angelic hosts, God’s empyrean throne above it all, the moral drama of human life pivotally centered between the spiritual heavens and the corporeal earth - all this would be called into question with Copernicus. If the earth truly moved then it was not the fixed center of God’s creation and his plan for salvation. The absolute uniqueness and significance of Christ’s intervention into history required, or so it seemed, a corresponding unique significance of the earth. The very meaning of redemption, not just of human history but universal history was at stake. To be a Copernican seemed tantamount to atheism. In the eyes of papal advisors, Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, already being applauded throughout Europe, was worse than Calvin and Luther together.

With religion and science in apparent contradiction, and an upstart science at that, a mere new hypothesis, there was little question but that the church would prevail. Awakened to the theological implications of Copernican astronomy and traumatized into doctrinal rigidity by decades of Reformational conflict, the RC church mustered considerable powers of suppression and condemned in no uncertain terms the heliocentric theory. Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus and Galileo’s Dialogue were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. Galileo (an Italian Benedictine b. 1564 – d. 1642) was interrogated by the inquisition, forced to recant, and placed under house arrest; major RC Copernicans were dismissed from their jobs and banished; all teaching upholding the motion of the earth was prohibited. With Copernican theory the RC tension between reason and faith finally snapped.

Kepler

By the time Galileo recanted, the scientific triumph of Copernicanism was already in sight and all attempts by RCs and Protestants to suppress the new theory would soon turn against them. Nevertheless, in the early years of the new theory its success did not seem assured; many ridiculed it in the 16th c. In fact, only a few could understand De Revolutionibus as it was dense (perhaps intentionally so) and mathematically demanding. But neither could they overlook it sophistication and Copernicus was soon known as “the second Ptolemy”. Yet problems remained. For Copernicus was a revolutionary who maintained many of the traditional assumption that in turned out worked against his hypothesis. In particular he continued to believe

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with Ptolemy that the planets moved in uniform circular motion (which resulted in his system being as complex as Ptolemy’s) and he had to refer to eccentrics and epicycles to make it work, and also to the mathematics of Ptolemy. Moreover he could not counter the simple observation that if the earth did move why didn’t things fall off?

Interestingly, Copernicus merely hypothesized a moving earth but he retained the old Aristotelian-Ptolemaic heavens (especially the claim about the uniform circular motion of the planets and so he still required epicycles and hence he required epicycles and eccentrics to make the system work). What appealed to Galileo and Kepler was the aesthetic superiority of Copernicus’ theory (not its scientific accuracy) – his neo-Platonic aesthetic judgment at the root of his claim that the earth moved was responsible for the “scientific revolution” initiating the “new science” – and it was left to Kepler, Galileo, and Newton to formulate a comprehensive theory capable of integrating a planetary earth.

For Kepler, with his passionate belief in the transcendent power of numbers and mathematical form, his vision of the sun as the central image of the godhead, his devotion to celestial “harmony of the spheres” was even more impelled by neo-Platonism than was Copernicus. Writing to Galileo, Kepler invoked Plato and Pythagoras as true preceptors. Kepler believed that Copernicus had intuited something greater than the heliocentric theory was capable of expressing, and that if freed from Ptolemaic assumptions it would open up a new scientific understanding of a harmonious universe that directly reflected God’s glory. In addition, Kepler had inherited a vast book of astronomical observations collected by Tycho de Brahe, Kepler’s predecessors as astronomer of the Holy Roman Empire. [Tycho de Brahe had proposed a system intermediate between Copernicus and Ptolemy in which all the planets except the earth revolve around the sun while the entire sun-centered universe revolves around the earth. Essentially this was modification of the ancient system of Heraclides. Brahe’s system furthered the Copernican cause, especially his observations of comet and of a nova in 1572 which led astronomers to appreciate that the heavens were not immutable, a view subsequently reinforced by Galileo’s telescope. Thus, the comets were now recognized as passing through spaces traditionally thought to be filed by the solid crystalline spheres which Kepler would, in proposal that the planets traveled in ellipses, entire untenable.] Kepler armed with Copernicus’ theory and Brahe’s data set out to formulate the simple mathematical laws that would solve the problem of the planets. For ten years Kepler sought to fit the observations to every possible hypothetical system of circles he could devise focusing particularly on the planet Mars. After this he concluded that it must be some other geometrical figure than the circle that was responsible for planetary orbits. Having mastered the ancient theory of conic sections developed by Euclid and Appolonius, Kepler at last discovered that Brahe’s observations exactly matched orbits shaped as ellipses, with the sun as one of the two foci and with each planet moving at speed varying proportionately to its distance from the sun (fastest nearest to the sun, slowest away from the sun, with equal areas swept out in equal times). The Platonic dictum for uniformity of motion had always been interpreted in terms of measurement along the arc of a circular orbit – equal distance on the arc in equal intervals of time. This interpretation ultimately failed despite the ingenuity of astronomers over 2000 years. However, Kepler discovered a new and subtler form of uniformity which fit the data. If a line were drawn from the sun to the planet on its elliptical orbit, that line would sweep out equal areas of the ellipse in equal intervals of time. Subsequently he formulated a third law which demonstrated that the different planetary orbits were exactly related to each

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other by mathematical proportions – the ratio of the squares of the orbital periods being equal to the ratio of cubes of their average distance from the sun.

Thus, Kepler eventually solved he ancient problem of the planets and fulfilled Plato’s extraordinary prediction of single, uniform, mathematically ordered orbits – and in doing so vindicated Copernicus’ hypothesis. With elliptical orbits replacing Ptolemaic circles, and with the law of equal areas replacing that of equal arcs, Kepler was able to dispense with all the complex corrective devices, epicycles, eccentrics, equants, etc. More significantly, one simple geometrical figure and one simply mathematical speed equation produced results that precisely matched the observations – something never before accomplished. [Note here the role of measurement.] What had been a problem of over 2000 years was solved with mathematical elegance and precise empirical standards, and importantly, affirming Copernicus’ theory and the mathematical mysticism (“idealism”, we might say today) of the ancient Pythagoreans and Platonists.

Also important is that Kepler’s laws of planetary motion led directly to a physical account of the heavens (ellipses were continuous straightforward motions of a single shape, whereas the Ptolemaic system of indefinitely compounded circles had no physical reality but was merely an instrumentalist solution, even as Copernicus had argued for its realism). With Kepler’s laws planetary astronomy seemed “real” and so Kepler saved mathematical astronomy by demonstrating that mathematics applied to the reality of the heavens – disclosing actual physical motion (a slowly creeping view of the universe as “mechanism”). Mathematics was not merely an instrument for prediction but an instrument to disclose astronomical reality. Kepler therefore affirmed the Pythagorean claim that mathematics was the key to understanding the cosmos, and directly revealing God’s grandeur of creation.

Galileo

With Kepler’s breakthrough, Copernicus’ theory would in time have succeeded in its predictive superiority and scientific realism. But it so happened that in 1609 (the year Kepler published his laws of planetary motion in Prague), Galileo in Padua, Italy directed his telescope which he recently built and made the qualitatively new observations (known since the ancients): craters and mountains on the moon, moving spots on the sun, the four moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, the innumerably number of stars in the milky way, all of which he interpreted as evidence in favor of Copernican theory. Obviously these observations (craters on the moon, sunspots) meant that the planets were not perfect (incorruptible and immutable) bodies of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology. If Jupiter as a moving body could have four suns, then the earth and its moon could also be moving – refuting the ancient argument that the earth could not move around the sun on risk that its moon would along ago have spun off its orbit. If the phases of Venus were visible then Venus must be moving around the sun. If the Milky Way which to the naked eye is a mere nebulous glow proved to consist of millions of stars, then the Copernican suggestion of a much larger universe (to explain the lack of visible annual stellar parallax despite the earth’s movement around the sun) seemed plausible (a universe so large Pascal despaired and spoke of “alienation”). If the planets in the telescope had substantial bodies with extended surfaces and were not just points of light (and yet many more stars were visible without apparent extension) then this also argued for a much larger universe than was envisioned in traditional cosmology.

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Galileo’s observations were quickly published in his The Messenger of the Stars which created a sensation in European intellectual circles.

Galileo’s observations gave “reality” to the heliocentric theory, and so added to Kepler’s “realism” negating the merely “instrumental” function of mathematics (as a mere computational device enabling prediction). The telescope served to reveal the heavens in their materiality (not merely celestial points of light), concrete substances appropriate for empirical investigation, just like the natural phenomena on earth. The time honored practice of arguing and observing from within the boundaries of Aristotelian thought began to give way to a fresh examination (in the light of Platonic idealism/realism) of empirical phenomena with a critical eye. Many individuals who were not scientific now began to look through the telescope and see a new Copernican universe. Astronomy because of the telescope and Galileo’s convincing writings became a topic for the non-specialist – who found the new astronomy liberating in comparison to the late Renaissance and post Renaissance ecclesiastical doctrine. A new celestial world opened up just as a new terrestrial world was also being discovered (e.g., Columbus). While the impact of Kepler and Galileo was gradual and cumulative, the medieval universe was now dead.

It is possible that the church could have reacted to this new cosmos differently than it did. Seldom in its history had the Christian religion attempted to suppress scientific discovery when it seemingly contradicted Scripture. As Galileo himself pointed out, the church had long been accustomed to sanctioning allegorical interpretations of the Bible whenever it contradicted scientific evidence. Moreover, ecclesiastical authorities did recognize Galileo’s genius including the Jesuit astronomers of the Vatican. In fact, the pope was a friend of Galileo and accepted with enthusiasm the dedication of his book Assayer which outlined the new scientific method. Cardinal Bellarmine, the church’s chief theologian, who finally declared Copernicanism “false”, had earlier written that if there were real proof that the sun was the center of the universe, then we should have to engage in great circumspection in explaining Biblical passages which appear to teach the contrary, or rather to admit that we did not understand these passages rather declare science false.

But a unique and potent set of circumstances dictated that it would be otherwise. The Protestant threat together with the apparently heretical science and with the memory of Bruno still fresh, RC authorities earnestly wished to avoid scandal that might further disrupt reformation-to- Christianity. Making it all the more threatening was the newly invention printing press, and Galileo’s very lucid writings in the vernacular Italian. There were also internal squabbles in the Vatican: Aristotelian professors at universities who wanted to block the anti-Aristotelian Galileo and his all too-popular ideas gave rise to a reaction among fundamentalist preachers who aroused the inquisition. Galileo’s own vitriolic personality which alienated opponents with a vengeance and his insensitivity to the impact of his views on the cosmological revolution taking place, also contributed. Bellarmine’s conviction that mathematics was merely an intellectual construct without any relation to physical reality (he was then a “theory instrumentalist”); Galileo’s espousal of atomism when the RC doctrine of transubstantiation seemed to require Aristotelian physics,; the pope’s sense of personal betrayal exacerbated his political insecurity; the power struggles within the church; the inquisition’s hunger for punitive repression – all these factors coalesced with fateful accord to instill the church’s prohibition of Copernicanism.

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The decision caused enormous damage to the church’s intellectual and spiritual integrity. The RC church’s adherence to the geocentric theory undermined its credibility among European intellectuals – and the church could no longer claim to aspire to full knowledge of the universe. After the inquisition banned Galileo’s books/ideas, these books moved north where the vanguard the Western intelligensia would thereafter reside. [Galileo’s last important contribution to physics, New Sciences, 1634, (at age 70) was published in 1638 in Holland. In the same year John Milton traveled from England to Italy where he visited Galileo an event Milton recorded in Areopagitica (1644): a classic argument for freedom of the press against the inquisition/Franciscans and Dominicans.] All this led eventually to an opposition between science and religion (and Galileo was forced to recant to what would be the church’s defeat).

Institutional Christianity as a whole suffered from the Copernican victory which contravened the Protestant’s literal interpretation of the bible, and the RC’s sacramental authority. For the present most European intellectuals remained devoutly Christian, but the schism between science and religion (even in the individual mind/psyche) had announced itself. With Luther, the West’s intellectual independence had asserted itself in religion; with Galileo the West took a step outside religion altogether.

Newtonian Cosmology (Newton, 1642-1727)

Kepler’s (1571-1630) mathematical theory and Galileo’s (1564-1642) observational support insured the success of the heliocentric theory and yet the theory still lacked a coherent cosmology within which it could be fitted. That the earth and other planets moved about the sun in elliptical orbits was clear but how did the planets including the earth move at all?

If the earth moved (displacing Aristotelian physics) then why did objects on the earth fall to the earth?

If the stars are so numerous and so distant then just how large is the universe?

What is the structure of the universe, and what is its center, if any?

What happened to the long recognized division between celestial and terrestrial if the earth was merely another planet and other planets had earth-like qualities?

Where was God in this cosmos?

Until these questions could be answered we had a new heliocentric theory but not yet a new cosmology.

Both Kepler and Galileo demonstrated that the universe was mathematically ordered and that scientific progress was achieved by comparing mathematical hypotheses with empirical observations. Copernicus (1473-1543) had made the fertile suggestion of a new cosmology by making the earth a planet in order to explain the sun’s apparent motion and so implied that the distinction between earth and heaven was not absolute. Kepler went further and suggested terrestrial forces could be applied to celestial bodies.

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Ptolemaic and Copernican circular orbits were deemed to be “natural” (by their elemental nature the aesthetic spheres moved in perfect circles, just as heavy elements (water/earth) moved downward and light elements (fire/air) moved up. Kepler’s ellipses were not circular however nor were they constant; the planets changed speed and direction at each pint in their orbits. Elliptical motion in the new heliocentric universe required a new explanation beyond that of natural motion.

Kepler suggested as an alternative the concept of a constantly imposed force. Influenced as always by the neo-Platonic exaltation of the sun, he believed that the sun was an active force that was the source of movement in the universe. He therefore proposed an anima motrix, a moving force akin to astrological influences which emanated from the sun, less so when distant. But Kepler still had to explain why the orbits curved in ellipses. Having absorbed William Gilbert’s recent work on magnetism with the thesis that the earth is a giant magnet, Kepler extended his principle to all celestial bodies and hypothesized that the sun’s anima motrix combined with its own magnetism and that of the planets created the elliptical orbits. Kepler thereby made the first proposal that the planets in their orbits were moved by mechanical forces rather than by the automatic geometrical motion of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic spheres. Despite its rather primitive form, Kepler’s concept of the solar system as a self-governing machine based on notions of terrestrial dynamics correctly anticipated the emerging cosmology.

In the meantime Galileo had pursued this mechanical-mathematical mode of analysis on the terrestrial plane with systematic rigor and extraordinary success. Like his fellow renaissance scientists Kepler and Copernicus, Galileo had imbibed from the neo-Platonic humanist the belief that the physical world could be understood geometrically and arithmetically. With Pythagorean fervor he declared the Book of Nature is written in mathematical characters. But with his more down to earth sensibility, Galileo developed mathematics as a less mystical key to the heavens than as a straightforward tool for understanding the matter of motion and for the defeat of his Aristotelian opponents. Although Kepler’s understanding of celestial motion was more advanced than Galileo’s (who like Copernicus still believed in self-sustaining circular motion), it was Galileo’s insight into the terrestrial dynamics that, when applied to the heavens, would begin to solve the physical problems created by Copernicus’ revolution.

Aristotle’s physics based on perceptible qualities and verbal logic still ruled contemporary scientific thinking and dominated the universities. But Galileo’s preferred model was Archimedes the mathematical physicist (whose writings were recently rediscovered by humanists) rather than Aristotle the descriptive biologist. To combat the Aristotelians, Galileo developed a new procedure for analyzing phenomena and a new basis for testing theories. He argued that to make accurate judgments concerning nature, scientists should consider only precisely measurable objective qualities (size, shape, number, weight, and motion – primary qualities) and therefore ignore perceptible qualities (color, sound, taste, touch, smell – secondary qualities). Only by exclusively quantitative analysis could science attain certain knowledge of the world. In addition, while Aristotle’s empiricism had been predominantly descriptive, and by later Aristotelians the verbal-logical approach, Galileo established the quantitative experiment as the final test of hypotheses. Finally, to further penetrate nature’s mathematical regularities and therefore is true character, Galileo employed, developed, or invented a host of instruments: lens,

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telescope, microscope, geometric compass, magnet, and air thermometer, hydrostatic balance (i.e., technology and science go hand in hand). The use of these instruments (technology) gave empiricism an entirely new dimension that undercut both the theories and the practices of Aristotelian academics. Galileo replaced interminable deductive justification of the Aristotelian organismic universe with an impersonal mathematical mechanical universe.

Employing new categories and new methodology, Galileo set out to demolish the spurious dogma of academic physics.

Aristotle had believed that the heavier body would fall at a faster rate than a lighter one, because of its elemental propensity to seek the center of the earth as it natural position (the heavier the body the greater its propensity). Through repeated application of mathematical analysis to physical experiments, Galileo refuted this tenet and formulated the law of uniform accelerated motion in falling bodies (motion independent of the composition of the body). Building on the impetus theory of Aristotle’s Scholastic critics Buridan and Oresme, Galileo analyzed projectile motion and developed the crucial idea of inertia. Contrary to Aristotle who held that bodies sought their natural place and that nothing continued to move otherwise without a constantly applied external push, Galileo held that just as a body at rest would remain so unless pushed, so too a moving body would remain in constant motion unless stopped or deflected. Force was required to explain only change in motion, not constant motion. In this way Galileo met one of Aristotle’s chief physical arguments against planetary earth – that objects on a moving earth would be forcibly knocked about and that a projectile thrown directly upward fro a moving earth would necessarily land some distance away from its point of departure. Since neither of these phenomena was observed, Aristotle concluded that the earth must be stationary. But through the concept of inertia, Galileo demonstrated that a moving earth would automatically endow all its objects and projectiles with the earth’s own motion, and therefore the collective inertial motion would be imperceptible to anyone on earth.

In the course of his life work, Galileo had effectively supported the Copernican theory, initiated the full mathematization of nature, grasped the idea of force as a mechanical agent, laid the foundations of modern mechanics and experimental physics, and developed the working principles of modern scientific method (i.e., the “new science”).

But the question of how to explain physically the celestial movements, including the motion of the earth itself, still remained unresolved. Because Galileo missed the significance of Kepler’s planetary laws, he continued to hold the traditional view of celestial motion as circular orbits, only now centered about the sun. His concept of inertia – which he understood as applicable on the earth only to motion on horizontal surfaces (where gravity was not a factor) and which was therefore circular motion around the earth’s surface – was applied to the heavens accordingly:

The planets continued to move in their orbits about the sun because their natural inertia tendency was circular.

However, Galileo’s circular inertia could not explain Kepler’s ellipses. It was also all the more implausible if the earth, which as the unique center of the universe in Aristotle’s cosmology had defined the surrounding space and given an absolute motive and reference point for circling

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spheres, was now understood to be a planet. The Copernican universe had created and was still plagued by a fundamental enigma.

But at this point another influx of Greek philosophers was brought to bear: the atomism of Leucippus and Democritus, which would both point to a solution to the problem of celestial motion and help shape the future course of Western scientific thought. The philosophy of atomism as passed on Democritus’ successors Epicurus and Lucretius had resurfaced during the Renaissance humanist recovery of ancient literature, in particular the manuscript of Lucretius’ poem De Rerum Natura (On the nature of things) outlining the Epicurean system. Originally developed as an attempt to meet the logical objections against the change and motion leveled by Parmenides, Greek atomism had posited a universe of invisible small indivisible particles moving freely in an infinite neutral void, and creating by their collisions all other phenomena. In this void there was no absolute up and down or universal center, every position in the void being neutral and equal to every other. Since the entire universe was composed of the same material particles on the same principles, the earth itself was merely an aggregate of particles and was neither at rest nor at the center of the universe. There was therefore no celestial-terrestrial distinction, and since both the size of the void and the number of particles were infinite, the universe was potentially populated by many moving earths and suns, each created by the atoms’ random movements.

The evolving Copernican universe obviously resembled in many ways this ancient Greek conception. Making the earth a planet had gotten rid of the Aristotelian idea of an absolute (non-neutral) space centered on a stationary earth. A planetary earth also required a much larger universe to satisfy the absence of observable stellar parallax. With the earth no longer the center of the universe, the universe did not have to be finite (obvious a universal center requires a finite universe since infinite space can have no center). The outermost sphere of stars was now unnecessary as an explanation for the movement of the heavens, and so the stars could be dispersed infinitely, as the neo-Platonists had suggested. Galileo’s telescopic discoveries had revealed a multitude of new starts at apparently great distances which further undermined the celestial-terrestrial dichotomy. The implications of the Copernican universe, a non-unique moving earth; a neutral, center-less, multi-populated, and perhaps infinite space, and the elimination of the celestial-terrestrial distinction, all coincided with an atomistic cosmos. With the Aristotelian cosmos collapsing and no other to replace it, the atomists’ universe represented an already well-developed and uniquely appropriate framework within which the new Copernican system could be placed. The esoteric philosopher-scientist Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was the first to perceive the congruence between the two systems. Through his work, the neo-Platonic mage of an infinite universe enunciated by Nicholas of Cusa (Cardinal theologian- mathematician b. in Germany, 1401-1464 who postulated a moving earth prior to Copernicus) was reinforced by the atomistic conception to create an immensely expanded Copernican cosmos.

Atomism also provided other contributions to the developing cosmology. Not only was the structure of the atomistic cosmos congruent with the Copernican theory, but the atomistic conception of matter was also entirely appropriate to the new natural science. Democritus’ atoms were characterized exclusively in quantitative (primary qualities) terms (not by perceptible qualities). All apparently qualitative changes in phenomena were created by differing quantities

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of atoms combined in different arrangements, and hence the atomistic cosmos was in principle open to mathematical analysis. The material atoms possessed neither purpose nor intelligence, but moved sole according to mechanical principles. Thus, the cosmological and physical structures of ancient atomism invited very modern analysis – mechanistic and mathematical – already chosen and rapidly being developed in the 17th c. Atomism influenced Galileo (1564-1642) in his approach to nature as matter in motion, was admired by Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and employed by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in his mechanical materialism, and was popularized in scientific circles by Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655). It was Rene Descartes (1596-1650), of course, who undertook the task of systematically adapting atomism to provide a physical explanation for the Copernican universe.

The basic principles of ancient atomism offered many parallels to Descartes’ image of nature as an intricate impersonal machine strictly ordered by mathematical laws. Descartes assumed that the world was composed of an infinite set of particles (“corpuscles”) which mechanically collided and aggregated. As a Christian however Descartes did not assume that these particles moved at random but obeyed certain laws imposed by a providential God at the time of creation. Descartes challenge was to discover those laws and his first step was to ask how a single particle would freely move in an infinite universe possessing neither absolute direction nor Aristotelian tendencies to motion. By employing the Scholastics’ impetus theory in the new context of an atomistic space, he concluded that a particle at rest would remain so unless pushed otherwise, and a particle in motion would remain so in motion in a straight line unless its speed was deflected. Thus, Descartes (1596-1650) articulated the first formal principle of inertia (including the critical element of inertial linearity), in contrast to Galileo (1564-1642) more rudimentary and empirical conceived earth-oriented inertia with its implication of circularity. Descartes also reasoned that since all motion in the corpuscular universe must be in principle mechanistic, any deviation from these inertial tendencies must occur as a result of corpuscular collisions. He then set out to establish the principles governing the collisions by way of intuitive deduction.

With its freely moving particles in infinite neutral space, atomism had suggested new way of looking at motion. Descartes notion of corpuscular collision allowed his successors to develop further Galileo’s insight into the nature of force and momentum. But of immediate significance for Copernican theory, Descartes applied his theory of inertia and corpuscular collision to the problem of planetary motion, and thereby began to clear away the last residue of Aristotelian physics from the heavens. For the automatic circular motions of the celestial bodies still espoused by Copernicus and Galileo were not possible in an atomistic universe in which particles only move in a straight line or remain at rest. By applying his inertial and corpuscular theories to the heavens, Descartes isolated the crucial missing factor in the explanation of planetary motion.

Unless there was some kind of inhibiting force, the inertial motion of the planets, including the earth, would necessarily tend to propel them in a tangential straight line away from the curving orbit of the sun. Since, however, their orbits were maintained in continuous closed curves without such centrifugal breaks, it was evident that some factor was forcing the planets toward the sun, or as Descartes formulated it, something was continually forcing the planets to “fall” toward the sun. To discover what force caused this “fall” was the fundamental dilemma facing the new cosmology. The fact that the

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planets moved at all was now explained by inertia. But the form that motion took (ellipses) still required explanation.

Many of Descartes intuitive deduced hypotheses concerning his corpuscular universe (laws of collision such as vortices of moving particles which were to push the planets into orbits) were rejected by his successors. But his basic conception of the physical universe as an atomistic system ruled by a few mechanical laws became the guiding model for 17th c scientists grappling with the Copernican innovation. Because the riddle of planetary motion still remained an outstanding problem for post-Copernican science in its efforts to establish a self-consistent cosmology, Descartes; isolation of the “fall” factor was indispensable. With Descartes’ concept of inertia applied to Kepler’s ellipses, and with the general principle of mechanistic explanation implicit in both their rudimentary theories of planetary motion (Kepler’s anima motrix and magnetism and Descartes’ corpuscular vortices), the problem had gained a definition which subsequent scientists (such as Borreli, Hooke, and Huygens) could fruitfully work. Galileo’s terrestrial dynamics had further defined the problem by contravening Aristotelian physics, and by giving precise mathematical measurement to heavy bodies falling to earth. Thus, two fundamental questions remained:

1. Given inertia, why did the earth and other planets continually fall towards the sun?

2. Given the non-central earth, why did terrestrial objects fall to the earth at all?

The possibility that both these questions had the same answer had been growing in the work of Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes. The notion of an attractive force acting between material bodies had also been developing. Among the Greeks, Empedocles had posited such a force; among the Scholastics, Oresme had suggested that if Aristotle were mistaken about the earth’s unique central position, an alternative explanation of bodies falling to the earth could be that matter naturally attracted matter. Both Copernicus and Kepler had invoked such a possibility in defending their moving earth. By the late 17th c Robert Hooke had clearly glimpsed the synthesis, namely that a single attractive force governed both planetary motions and falling bodies. He also mechanically demonstrated this idea with a pendulum swing in an elongated circular path, its linear motion being continuously deflected by a central attraction. Such a demonstration illustrated the relevance of terrestrial mechanics for the explanation of celestial phenomena. Hooke’s pendulum signaled the extent to which the scientific imagination had radically transformed the heavens from being a transcendent realm with its own special laws to being in principle no different from the mundane realm of the earth.

It fell to Isaac Newton (1642-1727), born the year of Galileo’s death, to complete the Copernican revolution by quantitatively establishing “gravity” as a universal force – one that could cause bodies to fall to earth and closed the orbits of the planets around the sun. Newton thereby synthesized Descartes mechanistic philosophy, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, and Galileo’s laws of terrestrial motion in one comprehensive theory. In an unprecedented series of mathematical discoveries and intuitions, Newton established that to maintain their stable orbits at the relevant speeds and distances specified in Kepler’s third law, the planets must be pulled towards the sun with an attractive force that decreased inversely as the square of the distance from the sun, and that bodies falling towards the earth (including not only the stone but also the

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moon) conformed to the same law. Newton derived mathematically from this inverse law both the elliptical shapes of the planetary orbits and their speed variation (equal areas equal times) as defined by Kepler’s first and second laws. Thus all the major cosmological problems confronting the Copernicans were solved – what moved the planets, how they remained in orbit, why heavy bodies fall to the earth, the basic structure of the universe, the celestial-terrestrial dichotomy. The Copernican hypothesis provoked a comprehensive and entire new cosmology.

With a combination of empirical and deductive rigor, Newton formulated a very few overarching laws that appeared to govern the entire cosmos. Through his three laws of motion (inertia, force, and equal reaction) and the theory of universal gravitation, he established the physical basis of Kepler’s laws, and was able to derive the movements of the tides, the precession of equinoxes, the orbits of comets, the trajectory of motion of cannonballs – indeed, all the known phenomena and terrestrial and celestial mechanics were no unified under one set of laws. Every particle in the universe attracted every other particle with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distances between them. Newton discovered the grand design of the universe: a perfectly ordered machine, governed by mathematical laws, and comprehensible by science – a vision fulfilled.

Notably, Newton’s concept of gravity as a force acting at a distance – a concept he got from his studies of the sympathies and antipathies of Hermetic philosophy and alchemy – was insufficiently mechanical not only to continental philosophers but also to Newton himself. The trouble was that his mathematical derivations were just too compelling. Through the concept of a quantitatively defined attractive force, he had integrated two major themes of 17th c science: mechanistic philosophy and the Pythagorean tradition. It was not long before his method and conclusion were recognized as paradigmatic of science. In 1686-87, the Royal Society of London published Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis, and in the following decades the triumph of the modern mind over the medieval mind was evident in Voltaire’s claim that Newton was the greatest man who ever lived.

The Newtonian-Cartesian cosmology was now established as the basis for a new worldview (the “new science” was also the beginning of “modernity”). By the beginning of the 18th c, every educated person in Europe knew that God created the universe as a complex mechanical system composed of basic material particles moving in an infinite neutral space according to a few principles (inertia and gravity that could be mathematically analyzed, In this universe the earth moved about the sun which was itself a star among many others. A single set of laws governed both the celestial and terrestrial realms which were therefore no longer distinct. It also seemed plausible that after God created this mechanical universe he withdrew himself from nature and allowed it to function in accord with its immutable laws. God thereby became the divine architect, the master mathematician, and clock maker, and the universe became an utterly impersonal phenomenon. Human beings’ roles were, now that they had discovered the order of this universe, to use that knowledge to empower and benefit humankind – the notion of infinite progress - and hence one could scarcely doubt that human beings man were the jewel of creation. The scientific revolution and the birth of the modern era were now complete.

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The philosophical revolution

Philosophy during this entire period was closely tied to the scientific revolution which it accompanied and stimulated and for which it provided a foundation even as it was critically molded by the scientific evolution. In fact, philosophy acquired an entirely new identity a structure as it entered the third great period of its Western history.

(1) During it first classical/ancient period, philosophy while influenced by religion and science was relatively autonomous as the definer and judge of the literate culture’s worldview.

(2) During the medieval period the Christian religion assumed preeminent status and philosophy took the subordinate role of attempting to reconcile faith and reason.

(3) With the modern era, philosophy began to establish itself as an independent force in the intellectual life of the culture. Philosophy began it re-alliance from religion to science.

Francis Bacon

During the early 17th c while Galileo (1564-1642) was forging a new science in Italy, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) in England proclaimed the birth of a new era in which natural science would bring humankind material redemption to accompany its spiritual progress towards the Christian millennium. For Bacon it was the discovery of the new world that led him to the idea that we need also discover a new mental (psychological) world, one in which old patterns of thinking, prejudices, subjective distortions, verbal confusions, and general intellectual blindness would be overcome by way of a new method of knowing. This method was fundamentally empirical: through the careful observation of nature and the skillful devising of experiments (cooperatively with others) the human mind would gradually come to understand nature and so control it thereby bringing benefits to humankind which were lost with the fall into sin.

Whereas Socrates had equated knowledge with virtue, Bacon equated knowledge with power – its practical usefulness (technology) was the very measure of its truth. For Bacon science was utilitarian, utopian, the material counterpart to God’s plan for spiritual salvation. Man was created by God to have dominion over creation/nature. If the fall (into sin) prevented this dominion, it could be achieved through painstaking work in which the mind purified itself of age-old prejudices and so achieve his divine right. Through science, we could truly attain superiority over nature and the ancients. History was not cyclical (as the ancients supposed) but progressive for man now stood at the beginning of a new scientific civilization.

Skeptical of received doctrine and impatient with the syllogistic reasoning of the Aristotelian Scholastics (which he saw as nothing but standing in the way of useful knowledge), Bacon insisted that progress in science required an entirely new reformulation of its foundations. The true basis of knowledge was the natural world and the information it provided to the senses. There are no final causes (Aristotle) or intelligible divine essences (Plato), there is only direct experimental contact and inductive reasoning from particulars. Bacon rejects beginning with abstract definitions/concepts and then reason deductively forging phenomena into a pre-arranged

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order. Instead one begins with unbiased analysis of concrete data, reason inductively to the abstract and general empirically supported conclusions.

Bacon criticized deductive reasoning because it must begin with subjective concoctions in the philosopher’s mind. Unbiased observations demands that the mind be cleansed of subjective distortions and then directed to direct attention to observed orderings. No necessary or ultimate truth must be pre-supposed – the mind/reason must be humbled – and the mind must be directed to nature only (hence, not to God or celestial truths). One must begin by recognizing that the Divine and Nature are distinct – in the spirit of Ockham and the Reformation. “Natural theology”, as in classical Scholasticism, is a contradiction in terms confusing matters of faith with matters of nature. Theology is about faith, science deals with the realm of nature. Kept distinct theology and science could better flourish and man could better serve his Creator through understanding the earthly kingdom’s natural causes thereby gaining power over nature as God had commanded.

Because all previous knowledge was corrupted by reason or the imagination, these psychological functions are like theatrical productions of no relevance to the world. Traditional knowledge was corrupted by wish-fulfillment, emotion, imagination, and reason thereby anthropomorphizing nature. The true philosopher does not try to fit the world into his mind, rather philosophy must through direct observation by way of the senses and the astute use of experiment approach nature such that nature can impress itself on his mind as nature is in itself. In this marriage of mind and nature, Bacon foresaw a long line of great inventions to relieve human misery – and in science was the potential restoration of learning and human greatness itself.

With Bacon we see a turning tide in philosophy. The nominalism and empiricism of the later Scholastics, and their growing criticism of Aristotle and speculative theology, now finds its boldest and most influential expression. For all his threwdness Bacon drastically underestimated the power of mathematics for the development of the new natural science, he failed to grasp the role of theoretical conjecture prior to empirical observation, and he altogether failed the significance of the new heliocentric theory. Yet his forceful advocacy of experience as the only legitimate source of true knowledge directly affected the European mind towards the empirical world, towards the methodological examination of physical phenomena, and towards the rejection of traditional assumptions whether theological or metaphysical in the pursuit of learning. Bacon was neither a systematic philosopher nor a rigorously practicing scientist. He was a potent intermediary whose rhetorical power and visionary ideal persuaded future generations to fulfill his revolutionary program: the scientific conquest of nature for the welfare of humankind and the glory of God.

Descartes

If it was Bacon in England who helped inspire the distinctive character of the new science, it was Descartes in France who established its philosophical foundations and, in doing so, articulated the epochal defining statement of the modern self.

In an age with a crumbling worldview, with unexpected discoveries of every sort, with the collapse of fundamental institutions and cultural traditions, a skeptical relativism concerning the

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very possibility of knowledge was spreading among European intellectuals. External authority was no longer trusted, yet there existed no absolute criterion of truth to replace the old. Epistemological uncertainty, already exacerbated by the plethora of competing ancient philosophies bestowed by the Renaissance humanists, received yet an addition influx from the Greeks – the recovery of Sextus Empiricus’ classical defense of Skepticism. For example, Montaigne was especially sensitive to this new mood and gave voice to ancient doubts. If human knowledge was determined by cultural custom, if the senses could be deceptive, if the structure of nature did not match the processes in the mind, if reason’s relativity and fallibility precluded knowledge of God or absolute standards, then nothing was certain.

The skeptical basis of French philosophy emerged just at a time when Jesuit rationalism educated Descartes. Pressed by his education, the many philosophical perspectives of the day, and the lessening relevance of religion for understanding the world, Descartes set out to discover an irrefutable basis for knowledge.

To begin by doubting everything was a necessary first step in the sense that he wanted to wash away all previous assumption of tradition that presently infected human knowledge, and then to isolate only those truths he could himself directly experience as indubitable. Unlike Bacon, Descartes was a considerable mathematician and it was the rigorous methodology characteristic of geometry and arithmetic that seemed to promise the kind of certainty Descartes sought for philosophy. Mathematics began with a statement of self-evident first principles, foundational axioms from which further more complex truths could be deduced according to strict rational methods. By applying such precise and painstaking reasoning to all questions of philosophy, and by accepting true only those ideas that presented themselves to reason as clear and distinct and free from internal contradiction, Descartes established the means for attaining certitude. Disciplined critical rationality would overcome the untrustworthiness of the world of the senses or imagination. In this manner Descartes became the second Aristotle, and found a new science that would usher in a new era of practical knowledge, wisdom and well-being.

Hence, here we have skepticism and mathematics combining to produce a Cartesian revolution in philosophy (and reflecting the “new science”). What skepticism and mathematics have in common was the certainty of individual self-awareness. It was this individual self-awareness which was the motive behind and the outcome of all skepticism and mathematical-like reason, and the bedrock of all knowledge. For the process of methodologically doubting everything (even the natural perceived world and one’s own body), Descartes concluded that there was one thing that survived this doubt and that was the fact that he doubted. At least, the “I” who is conscious of doubt, the thinking subject (ego cogito), exists even as all else can be doubted/questioned. Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). For while everything can be doubted, the “doubting I” cannot be doubted. This is certitude: the clearly and distinctly perceived “I who doubts”.

Thus, the cogito was the first principle and the paradigm of all other knowledge: it became the basis for all subsequent deductions and the model for all other self-evident rational intuitions. From the indubitable existence of the doubting I, which was ipso facto an awareness of imperfection and limitation, Descartes deduced the necessary existence of a perfect and infinite being, God. Thus, something cannot proceed from nothing, nor can an effect be without a cause.

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The thought of God was of such magnitude and perfection that it self-evidently must have derived from a reality beyond the finite and contingent thinker; hence, the certitude of an omnipotent God. Only through this presupposition could the reliability of the natural light of reason, or of the phenomenal world, be assured. For if God is God (a perfect being) then he could not deceive man and his reason in its attainment of self-evident truths (notably the truths o the “new science”) .

The cogito also revealed an essential hierarchy and division in the world. Rational man knows his own awareness to be certain, and entirely distinct from the external world of material substance which is epistemologically less certain and perceptible only as object. Thus, the res cogitans (subjective experience, thinking substance, spirit, consciousness which man perceives within) is fundamentally different and separate from res extensa (the objective world of matter/substance/physical body and everything outside the mind). Only in man did the two realities of res cogitans and res extensa come together as mind and body and both have their origin in God.

Hence there is in Descartes a metaphysical dualism. On the one side there is soul as mind and awareness as distinctively belonging to the thinker (since the senses the imagination, and the emotions belong to the body), and on the other side the external (mechanical) world without purpose or spirit. While God (as supreme intelligence constructed/created the universe, as a giant automaton (like 17th c machines, clocks, fountains, mills, etc.) it then moved on its own. Thus, the universe was not a giant organism (as Aristotle and the Scholastics assumed) endowed by form and purpose. Once we set aside such prejudices, then the universe is to self-evident reason nothing but non-vital, atomistic matter (scientific materialism). Such matter is best understood in mechanical terms, reductively analyzed into component parts and understood exactly as those parts were arranged and moved. Hence, there was no immanent purpose in nature (a claim that reflects man’s metaphysical impiety that wished to equate itself to God’s mind), and this natural, mechanistic order of matter being objective and solid was inherently measurable. Hence, the central role of mathematics as it is available to the natural light of human reason.

To support this metaphysics and epistemology, Descartes relies on Galileo’s distinction between primary (objective and measurable) and secondary subjective and experiential) properties. Scientific inquiry is then the pursuit of those primary properties, clearly and distinctly perceived and analyzed in quantitative terms (extension, shape, number, duration, specific gravity, relative position – i.e., primary properties/qualities). On this basis and using experiment and hypothesis, science can proceed to ascertain certain knowledge. Mechanics then was for Descartes a species of mathematics by which the universe could be manipulated to serve humankind (Francis Bacon). With quantitative mechanics ruling the universe, the absolute faith in reason is justified. This was the basis for practical philosophy (in contrast the speculative philosophy of the Scholastics) wherein man could directly understand nature and so turn it to his own purpose.

Thus, reason first of all establishes its own existence (out of existential necessity), then the existence of God (out of logical necessity), and then the God-guaranteed reality of the objective world and its rational (mathematical) order.

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Thus, human reason is the supreme authority in the domain of human knowledge, capable of distinguishing certain metaphysical truths and of achieving scientific understanding of the material world.

Infallibility once ascribed to Holy Scripture or the supreme pontiff has now been transferred to the reason itself. In effect, Descartes unintentionally began a theological Copernican revolution – for his mode of reasoning was from human reason to divine existence (not vice versa). For although the self-evident certainty of God’s existence was guaranteed by God’s benevolent veracity in creating a reliable human reason, that conclusion is affirmed only on the basis of Descartes’ criterion of “clear and distinct ideas” which belonged to the individual human intellect. Thus, with respect to the ultimate religious question, it is not divine revelation but the natural light of human reason (innate) that has the final say. This is modernity (by the natural light of human reason)!

Until Descartes, revealed truth had been held as objective outside of human judgment, but with Descartes all truth is depended for its validity on human reason. The metaphysical independence that Luther demanded within the parameters of religion, Descartes now extended universally. Whereas for Luther certitude resided in his faith in God’s saving grace as revealed in Scripture, Descartes certitude resided in his faith in the procedural clarities of mathematical reason applied to the indubitability of the thinking self (ego cogito).

In this assertion of metaphysical and epistemological dualism Descartes emancipated the material world from its long-standing association with religious belief, freeing science to develop uncontaminated by spiritual or human qualities and theological dogma. Both the human mind and the natural world stood autonomously, separated from God and from each other.

This is then the proclamation of essential modernity, or the modern self, as a self-defining entity for whom its own rational self-awareness was absolutely primary (doubting everything except itself, setting itself in opposition not only to traditional authority, but also to the world (as subject against object) as a thinking, observing, measuring, manipulating being, fully distinct from God and nature. The fruit of this dualism between rational subject and material world was the “NEW SCIENCE”. That is, science’s capacity of rendering certain knowledge and so making man the possessor and master of nature. In Descartes’ vision, science, progress, reason, epistemological certainty, and human identity were all intricately related and connected with a conception of an objective, mechanistic (mathematical) universe which together is paradigmatic of the Modern Mind.

Thus, Bacon and Descartes as prophets of scientific civilization, rebels against the ignorant past and zealous students of nature, proclaimed twin epistemological bases of the modern mind. In their respective manifestos of empiricism and rationalism, the long growing significance of the natural world and of human reason (initiated by the Greeks and recovered by the Scholastics) achieved characteristic modern expression. Upon this dual foundation, philosophy proceeded and science triumphed. Thus, Newton’s accomplishments employed the practical synthesis of Bacon’s inductive empiricism and Descartes’ deductive mathematical rationalism and so Newton brought to fruition the scientific method first forged by Galileo.

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After Newton, science reigned as the supreme definer of the universe, and philosophy defined itself in relation to science (supportive, critical, provocative, and sometimes independent but never in a position to question the cosmological discoveries of science that rules the Western world).

Newton’s achievement in effect established our modern understanding of the physical universe (mechanistic, mathematical, concrete material and not especially Christian) as well as the modern understanding of man (whose reason comprehended the natural order and who was therefore a noble being in virtue, not of a divine plan, but because of his reason in grasping nature’s logic thereby achieving control over its forces.

The new philosophy did not just mirror the new sense of human empowerment, but especially in its scientific and, later, technological corroboration. Human destiny finally appeared assured as a result of human beings’ powers of reason. Human fulfillment was now a question of scientific explanation and control of nature – physical but also social, political, religious, scientific and metaphysical. The proper education of the human mind in well-designed environments would bring forth rational persons capable of understanding the world, themselves, and to fashion both to the good of the whole. Cleared to all traditional prejudices, individual men would be able to grasp the truth, establish themselves a rational world order in which all could flourish. The dream of human freedom and fulfillment in this world could now be realized – humankind had finally become enlightened. Hence, the 17th c. is called the century of Enlightenment!

Foundations of the modern worldview

Between the 15th and 17th c the West saw the emergence of a newly self-conscious and autonomous human being – curious about the world, confident in its own judgments, skeptical of all orthodoxies, rebellious against authority, responsible for its own beliefs and actions, enamored of the classical past but even more committed to a greater future, proud of its humanity, conscious of its distinctiveness from nature, aware of its artistic powers as individual creators, assured of its intellectual capacity to comprehend and control nature, and altogether less dependent on an omnipotent God. Thus the emergence of the modern mind rooted in but rebelling against the medieval church and the ancient authorities, yet dependent on and developing from both matrices, took the three dialectically related but distinct forms of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. Collectively these ended the hegemony of the RC church in Europe, and established an individualistically, skeptical, and secular spirit of the modern age. Out of this profound cultural transformation, science emerged as the West’s New Faith/”new science”.

After the giants battles among religions failed to be resolved what took their place was science – the empirical-rational appeal to commonsense and concrete reality that every individual could evaluate for him/herself. Facts and theories were discussed among equals and these replaced dogmatic revelation imposed by the institutional church. The search for truth was now conducted internationally, with disciplined curiosity, and eagerness to transcend the limits of previous knowledge. Epistemological certitude and objective agreement, experiment and prediction, technical invention and control of nature became the saving grace of humankind. Scientific

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inquiry ennobled the mind directly apprehending the rational order of nature first declared by the Greeks but far in advance of the what both the ancients and the Scholastics were able to achieve.

Science then seemed to bring the Western mind to independent maturity outside the medieval church, beyond the classical glories of Greeks and Romans. From the Renaissance onward, modern culture left behind the ancient and medieval worldviews as primitive, superstitious, childish, unscientific, and oppressive. By the end of the scientific revolution the Western mind discovered a new way of acquiring knowledge and a new cosmology. Because of man’s intellectual and physical efforts, the world itself expanded, immensely and unprecedented: the earth moves. The straightforward evidence of the naïve senses, the theological and scientific certitude of naïve centuries (that the sun rises and sets and that the earth beneath one’s feet is utterly stationary at the center of the universe, was overcome through reason, mathematics, and technological observation). Not only the earth but man himself moved (out of the finite, static, hierarchical Aristotelian-Christian universe into a new unknown territory). The nature of reality fundamentally shifted and the cosmos took on entirely new proportions, structure, and existential meaning.

This opened the way for a new for of society based on self-evident principles of individual liberty and rationality. For what the scientific revolution showed was that the search for the truth of nature could be extended to the realm of society/history/art/ politics, etc. Just as the Ptolemaic system was cumbersome and had been replaced by a new Newtonian universe, so too could the structures of society (absolute monarchy, aristocratic privilege, clerical censorship, oppressive and arbitrary laws, inefficient economies) be replaced by new forms of government based not on divine sanction and inherited traditional assumptions but on rationally ascertainable individual rights and mutually beneficial social contracts. The application of systematic critical reason to society of course suggested social reform and encouraged the application of scientific methods to social-political life. Thus, John Locke in England and the French philosophes of the Enlightenment in France take on Newton’s lessons and extend them to the human realm.

Summary

What then are some of the major tenets of the modern worldview?

Of course, the modern worldview, like its predecessors of the classical Greek and medieval Christian worldviews, was not a stable entity but continually evolving way of experiencing the world. The views of Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, and Newton were essentially a Renaissance synthesis of modern and medieval (i.e., medieval Christian Creator God and modern mechanistic cosmos, or the human mind as a spiritual principle and the world as objective material reality). During the two centuries following the Cartesian-Newtonian formulation of science, the modern mind continued to disengage itself from the medieval matrix. The writers and scholars the Enlightenment (Locke, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Bayle, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, d’Alembert, Holbach, La Mettrie, Pope, Berkeley, Hume, Gibbon, Smith, Wolff, and Kant) all philosophical elaborated, broadly disseminated and culturally established the new worldview. At the end, the autonomy of human reason had fully displaced the traditional sources of knowledge about the

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universe, and had in turn defined its own limits as those constituted by the boundaries and methods of empirical-rational science.

The industrial and democratic revolutions and the rise of Western global hegemony brought forth concrete technological, economic,, social, and political changes which further defined and established the cultural sovereignty of the Western worldview. In modern science’s culminating triumph over traditional religion, it was Darwin’s theory of evolution (in the 19th c.) that brought “humankind” within the compass of modern science. Science’s capacity of comprehend the world had achieved such enormous dimension that it omitted nothing in the universe from its domain – it had matured!

So when we try to summarize the Western modern worldview, we include the Cartesian-Newtonian formulations but also later 18th and 19th c formulations. Hence, it is remarkable that in characterizing this period from the 15th to 19th c we find a wide spectrum of belief/practice, ranging from naïve childlike religious faith to tough-minded secular skepticism.

1. In contrast to the medieval Christian cosmos which was not only created but continuously and directly governed by a personal and actively omnipotent God, the modern universe was an impersonal phenomenon, governed by natural law and understandable exclusively in mathematical and physical terms. Hence, God was removed from the universe, as Creator and architect to be sure, but no longer the God of love, miracle, redemption, or historical intervention. God became the First Cause and then withdrew with the consequence that the world took on greater ontological reality (nothing divine either transcendently or immanently). The order of the universe which was initially at least ascribed to God was eventually understood merely as a “happening”, mechanical and innate without any higher purpose or origin. While the medieval worldview could not understand the universe except through revelation, the modern worldview understood that world through reason of an order that was entirely “natural”.

2. The medieval Christian dualism which stressed the supremacy of the spiritual and transcendent over the material and concrete was now inverted, with the material and concrete becoming the dominant focus. The material world was embraced as the world of “life” and as a stage for “human drama” replacing the traditional religious dismissal of mundane existence as an unfortunate and temporary trial in preparation for eternal life. Not the Christian dualism between spirit and matter, and God and world, but a secular dualism between mind and matter, man and nature, and subjective consciousness versus objective impersonal nature.

3. Science replaced religion as the pre-eminent authority, as the definer, judge, and guardian of the modern cultural worldview. Reason and empirical observation replaced theological doctrine, Scriptural revelation, and institutional grace as the means of comprehending the universe. The domains of religion and metaphysics gradually became compartmentalized: regarded as personal, subjective, speculative and fundamentally distinct from public objective knowledge of the empirical world. Faith and reason were permanently severed. Transcendental reality was beyond human knowledge, perhaps useful palliatives for man’s emotional nature, or aesthetically satisfying as imaginative creations, or potentially

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valuable as heuristic ideas, perhaps necessary for moral and social cohesion, or as political and economic propaganda, as psychological projections, as life-impoverishing illusions, as superstitions irrelevant and meaningless. In place of religious or metaphysical worldviews, rationalism and empiricism became the two towers of epistemology which of course eventually produced its own metaphysics. Thus, rationalism eventually affirmed its belief in man as the highest and ultimate intelligence (“secular humanism”), while empiricism did the same for the material world as the essentially only reality (“scientific materialism”).

4. In comparison to the classical Greeks outlook which saw world order emanating from a cosmic intelligence in which the human mind directly participated, the modern mind sees world order as empirically derived by way of the individual’s senses and reason from a material pattern that is inherent in nature. Thus, while the classical Greek mind saw human beings as essential part of a cosmic order, the modern mind distinguished between the subjective and the objective world which operated on different principles. To the modern mind, the human mind was conceived of as separate and superior to the rest of nature: the mind either directly reflects nature’s innate regularities (empiricism) or else, after Kant, constitutes the order of nature in accord with its own categories (critical realism). Nature is material and so possesses no purpose; the human mind has the power of reason and purpose and so is capable to extracting from nature its order and in doing so is able to use that order to manipulate nature/world.

5. In contrast to the classical Greeks who integrated all human modes of experience/knowledge, the modern worldview focused exclusively on our rational and empirical faculties and declared all other faculties (emotional, aesthetic, ethical, volitional, relational, imaginative, and epiphanic) as irrelevant or distortional of knowledge. Instead of spiritual liberation or fulfillment (as in the Platonic or Pythagorean traditions), the modern worldview focuses in intellectual mastery and material improvement.

6. While the cosmology of the classical era was geocentric, finite, and hierarchical (with the heavens consisting of archetypal forces – gods/goddesses – influencing human life) and the medieval cosmos reinterpreting this classical cosmic structure in accord with Christian symbolism, the modern worldview of cosmology sees the earth as a planet in a neutral infinite space thereby eliminating any distinction between celestial and terrestrial. With the heavens obeying the same principles of mechanics as the earth, astronomy (science) finally distinguished itself from astrology. The heavens no longer possessed any numinous or symbolic significance (as it did in the ancient and medieval world) that would give meaning to human life. The universe had no relationship either to the Divine or the meaning of human life (these were merely anthropomorphic projections). The universe has no meaning; it just is (orderly).

7. Especially with the theory of evolution in the middle of the 19th c, human (organic) life itself was subsumed under the material, mechanistic universe. What Newton accomplished for the physical nature, Darwin building on geology and biology (joined with Mendel’s genetics) accomplished for the organic nature. [Alfred Russel Wallace

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independently formulated a theory of evolution in 1858 which impelled Darwin to make his own work public after not doing so for 20 years. Important predecessors to both Wallace and Darwin were Buffon, Lamarck Erasmus Darwin and Lyell. Diderot, La Mettrie, Kant, Goethe, and Hegel were all moving towards an evolutionary world conception.] While Newton established a new structure for the universe’ spatial dimension, Darwin established a new structure of nature’s temporal dimension. While Newton’s planetary was sustained by inertia and defined by gravity; organic evolution was sustained by random variation and defined by natural selection. As Newton removed the earth from the center of the universe (merely another planet), so Darwin removed man from the center of creation (merely another animal).

7a. Darwinian evolution was both a continuation of the scientific impulse but also a break from the scientific revolution’s classical paradigm. The reason is that evolutionary theory broke with the regular, orderly, and predictable harmony of the Cartesian-Newtonian world in that it recognized that nature of a ceaseless and indeterminate struggle for change, development, and survival. So that Darwin furthered the scientific revolution in further secularizing any previous effort at compromise between the scientific revolution and the Judaic-Christian worldview. For the claim to the mutability of species contradicted outright the biblical account of a static creation in which man was placed as its sacred center. In fact, with evolution, man did not come from God but from lower primates. The human mind was not divine but merely a biological tool (technology) in service of man’s survival. This survival had no purpose and no divine guidance, rather it was an amoral, random, brutal struggle for survival in which success was not “virtue” but “fit”. For Darwin it was natural selection and chance; contra Aristotle’s teleology or the Bible’s purposeful creation. Deism, that last compromise with the Judaic-Christian tradition, now faded as all life (organic and inorganic) was merely the evolution of nature.

7b. In these circumstances the belief that the universe was purposefully designed and regulated by divine intelligence (a belief foundational to both classical Greek an Christian worldviews) became entirely questionable. The idea of Christ’s divine intervention in human history (incarnation, virgin birth, second Adam, resurrection, second coming) were implausible in the context of a straightforward survival oriented Darwinian evolution in a vast Newtonian universe. Of course, equally implausible was the idea of a timeless metaphysical realm of transcendent Platonic ideas – there was nothing in the empirical world that required appeal to transcendent reality. The modern universe was entirely a secular phenomenon and, if this phenomenon was still evolving (creating itself), it was evolution without goals, purpose, or foundation. But if nature is the sole source of evolutionary direction and man is the only rational and conscious being in nature, then the “future” was entirely in man’s hands.

8. Finally, in contrast to the medieval Christian worldview, modern man’s independence (autonomy) – intellectual, spiritual and psychological – was radically affirmed with increasing depreciation of religious belief and its institutional structure that would/could inhibit man’s natural right and potential for existential autonomy and individual self-expression. While the purpose of the medieval Christian was to better obey God’s will and purpose, modern ma was simply to better align nature to man’s will. Thus, the

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Christian doctrine of spiritual redemption as based on the historical manifestation of Christ and his future apocalyptic second coming which was first conceived as coinciding with the progressive advance of human civilization under divine providence and conquering all evil through man’s God-given reason (17th c) was gradually extinguished altogether in the belief that man’s natural reason and scientific achievements would progressively realize a secular utopian era marked by peace, plenitude, and a complete mastery over nature (19th c). Gone here is the Christian sense of original sin, fall, and collective guilt in favor of an optimistic human self-development and the conviction that reason and science would eventually triumph over human ignorance, suffering and social evil. While the classical Greek worldview had emphasized the goal of human intellectual and spiritual activity as the essential unification (reunification) of man with the cosmos (divine intelligence), and the Christian goal was to reunite man and the world with God (kingdom of God beginning on earth), the modern goal was to create the greatest possible freedom for the individual – from nature, oppressive political, economic, and social systems, from religious or metaphysical beliefs, from the church, from the Judaic-Christian God, from static and finite Aristotelian-Christian cosmos, from medieval Scholasticism, from ancient Greek authorities, and from all primitive conceptions (childish/indulgent) of the world. The autonomous power of the individual human intellect was enough to ensure domination and control of nature and so the goal of freedom, plenitude, and peace.

Of course, this summary has its limits and I will come back to these later. First I want to examine again how the modern worldview arose out of its predecessors the classical and Christian worldviews.

Ancient (classical) and modern worldviews

Classical Greek thought provided Renaissance Europe with most of the theoretical equipment required to produce the scientific revolution: (1) intuition that the universe has a rational order, (2) Pythagorean mathematics, (3)The Platonically defined problem of the planets, (4) Euclidean geometry, (5) Ptolemaic astronomy, (6) alternative ancient cosmological theories with a moving earth (7) neo-Platonic exaltation of the sun, (8) atomists’ mechanistic materialism, (9) Hermetic esotericism, and (10) and the underlying foundation of Pre-Socratic and Aristotelian empiricism, naturalism and rationalism. Yet increasingly the modern mind rejected the ancients as authorities both in science and philosophy and depreciated their views as “primitive”. Why?

One of the most productive motives impelling the 16th and 17th c European scientists to engage in observation and measurement of natural phenomena derived from the controversy between orthodox Scholastic Aristotelian physics and the heterodox revival of Pythagorean-Platonic mathematical mysticism. It is no small irony that Aristotle, the greatest naturalist and empirical scientist of antiquity (whose work sustained Western science for two thousand years) was rejected by the new science under the impetus of romantic Renaissance Platonism (Plato was the speculative idealist who wished to leave the world of the senses). The trouble was that Aristotle’s transformation by contemporary academies into a stultified dogmatist left the humanist Platonists with an opening for the scientific imagination and a fresh sense of intellectual adventure. Of course, at a deeper level Aristotle’s empiricism was also extended, to the extreme, by the new

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scientific revolution even as Aristotle himself was rejected in that revolution (an oedipal reaction to the ancient father?).

For just as decisively was Plato overthrown and rejected. If Aristotle was deposed and yet maintained in the spirit of empiricism, so Plato was venerated in theory but overthrown and rejected in spirit.

The scientific revolution from Copernicus to Newton was inspired by Plato, his Pythagorean predecessors and neo-Platonists successors, (1) in the search for perfect timeless mathematical forms that underlay the phenomenal world, (2) the apriori belief that planetary movements conformed to continuous and regular geometric figures, (3) the instruction to avoid being misled by the apparent chaos of the empirical heavens, (4) a confidence in the beauty and simplicity of the true solution of the problem of the planets, (5) the exaltation of the sun as the image of the created godhead, the proposal of non-geocentric cosmologies, (6) the belief that the universe was permeated by divine reason, and (7) that God’s glory was especially revealed in the heavens. Euclid whose geometry formed the basis of both Descartes rationalist philosophy and the entire Copernican-Newtonian paradigm had been a Platonist. The modern scientific method itself as developed by Kepler and Galileo was founded on the Pythagorean faith that the language of the physical world was one of number which provided the rationale for the conviction that empirical observation of nature and the testing of hypotheses should be pursued through quantitative measurement. Moreover, all modern science implicitly is based on Plato’s fundamental hierarchy of reality in which a diverse and ever changing nature of the material world is ultimately obedient to certain unifying and eternal laws that transcend the phenomena they govern. Above all else modern science inherited the Platonic belief in the rational intelligibility of the world order, and in the essential nobility of the human quest to understand that order. But these essentially Platonic assumptions eventually led to a thorough-going naturalism and left little room for Plato’s idealist metaphysics. Gone were the numinosity of the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition as empirically unverifiable, and replaced by a direct scientific understanding of the natural world.

Of course, the explanatory power of mathematics was Pythagorean-Platonic (and was being vindicated by natural science) but this merely raised the question why should it be that mathematics works so well in the brute natural world? But after Newton this question was simply ignored in favor of a certain mechanical view of natural order without much deeper meaning. Gone here was any sense that this match between mathematics and nature was due to some revelatory Forms by which the mind of man was comprehended by the mind of God. Mathematics was simply the nature of things/mind and not viewed in a Platonic spirit. The laws of nature might be timeless but only because that was the nature of nature and had nothing to do with the divine.

So with the exception of mathematics, Platonic philosophy waned in the modern context, and science’s quantitative character was left with an entirely secular meaning (i.e., nature). Given its success as a mechanistic natural science, as well as the ascendancy of positivistic empiricism and nominalism in philosophy, any claim to Platonic metaphysics (the religious meaning of science) to the effect that the true meaning of the world resided in the transcendent was dismissed as imaginary. Paradoxically then while Plato served as the sine qua non for the modern worldview,

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this worldview controverted its very basis. Or, the mechanistic science/philosophy of the 18th c and the materialistic science/philosophy of the 19th c were ironically built on the mystical (Platonic) foundation of mathematics of the 17th c.

Furthermore, it is ironical that the giants of ancient thought (Aristotle and Plato) were also defeated by the minority traditions of ancients thought. Thus, in the course of the classical and medieval periods, the mechanistic and materialistic atomism of Leucippus and Democritus, the heterodox (non-geocentric/non-geostatic) cosmologies of Philolaus, Heraclitus, and Aristarchus, and the radical skepticism if Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus had been overshadowed by the philosophical triumvirate of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (and the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmology), but eventually, as a result of the Renaissance humanists’ retrieval, these minority views were validated in the scientific revolution. Similarly, the sophists would enjoy a restoration in the secular humanism and relativistic skepticism of the Enlightenment.

Nevertheless, the rise of the “new science” (its practical and intellectual superiority) overwhelmed any effort by medieval and Renaissance thinkers to recover the classical golden age luminaries. Thus, while recovering something of the literary and humanistic accomplishment of the classical period, the new age of science dismissed the ancient’s cosmology, epistemology, and metaphysics as naïve and scientifically erroneous.

Rejected entirely were the esoteric elements of the ancient tradition such as astrology, alchemy, hermeticism which had also been instrumental in giving birth to the new scientific era. Thus, the ancient birth of astronomy (indeed science itself) was intricately tied to astrological understanding of the heavens as a superior realm of divine significance with the planetary movements having implications in human affairs. Astrology’s tie to astronomy was essential to the latter’s progress for it was the astrological presuppositions that gave astronomy its social and psychological significance and well as its political and military utility in matters of state. Astrological predictions required the most accurately possible astronomical data, so that astrology supplied astronomy with a compelling motive for solving the problem of the planets. It is no accident that the science of astronomy prior to the scientific revolution enjoyed its most rapid periods of progress precisely during the Hellenistic, late Middle Ages, and the Renaissance when astrology was most widely accepted.

Nor did the protagonists of the scientific revolution sever this bond to the ancients. Copernicus made no distinction between astronomy and astrology (they were both the head of all the liberal arts). Kepler confessed that his astronomical research was inspired by the celestial “music of the spheres”. Both he and Brahe served as Renaissance astrologers to the Holy Roman Emperor. Even Galileo like most renaissance astronomers routinely calculated astrological birth charts. Newton too reported his own interest in astrology that stimulated his discoveries in mathematics, and he later studied alchemy. There was little difference between scientific and esoteric visions in these early pioneers of the scientific revolution.

In fact, the collaboration between science and the esoteric tradition was the norm for the renaissance and served to play an indispensable role in the birth of modern science.

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(1) Pythagorean and neo-Platonic mathematical mysticism and the exaltation of the sun was generally held by Copernican astronomers;

(2) Roger Bacon who pioneered experimental science was devoted to alchemy and astrology;(3) Giordano Bruno who championed the Copernican universe was a polymath esotericist;(4) Paracelsus was an alchemists who laid the foundations for modern chemistry and

medicine;(5) William Gilbert, who formulated the theory of the earth’s magnetism believed that the

world-soul was embodied in that magnet;(6) William Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood revealed the human body to

be a microscopic reflection of the earth’s circulatory systems and the cosmos’ planetary motions;

(7) Descartes was affiliated with mystical Rosicrucianism;(8) Newton was affiliated with the Cambridge Platonists and believed that he work was in

the ancient tradition of secret wisdom dating back to Pythagoras, and in fact Newton’s law of universal gravitation was modeled on his sympathies with hermetic philosophy.

Clearly the emergence of the new scientific revolution was filled with ambiguity.

Of course, the new universe that emerged from the scientific revolution was not ambiguous and rejected all astrological and esoteric principles. While the new astronomers were unaware or unconcerned about how their new formulations/theories clashed with astronomy, these clashes became soon apparent. The planetary earth undermined the entire foundation of astrological thinking since astrologers held that the earth had a privileged position as the center of the universe influenced by other planets/stars. The entire tradition of cosmography from Aristotle to Dante was shattered as a moving earth now trespassed into domains previously defined as the exclusive domain of specific planetary powers. After Galileo and Newton there was no division between celestial and terrestrial realms and without this dichotomy, the metaphysical and psychological premises that helped support the ancient astrology began to collapse. The heavenly bodies were now planets, material objects, moved by inertia and gravity (not archetypal symbols moved by cosmic intelligence). Before Newton there were few who did not adhere to astrological science; after Newton there were few who thought astrology worth examining and astrology went underground into small groups of esotericists and uncritical masses. After being the classical “queen of the sciences” and the guide of emperors and kings for 2000 years astrology was no longer credible.

[The rapid decline of Renaissance esotericism in Restoration England was influenced by the highly charged social and political environment that marked 17th c British history. During the revolutionary upheavals in the English Civil War and the Interregnum (1642-1660) esoteric philosophies such as astrology and hermeticism were extremely popular and their close association with radical political and religious movements was threatening to the established church and the propertied classes. Astrological almanacs outsold the Bible and influential astrologers like William Lilly encouraged rebellion. At a conceptual level, esoteric philosophies supported anti-authoritarian political and religious activism of the radical movements with direct spiritual illumination seen as alive and permeated at all levels by divinity and perpetually self-transforming. After the Restoration in 1660 leading intellectuals and clergy stressed the importance of sober natural philosophy – such as was

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part of the new mechanistic, materialistic science. Hermetic ideas were attacked and astrology ceased being taught at universities, and all this was supported by the Royal Society (established in 1660 as well) which favored a despiritualized world. While major figures in the Royal Society such as Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren continued to adhere to astrology in private (believing like Francis bacon that astrology should be reformed not rejected), the political climate became increasingly unfavorable towards astrology (Boyle did not allow his defense of astrology to be published after his death). This social-political context also influenced Newton to suppress the esoteric side of his science.]

With the exception of the Romantics, the modern mind also gradually outgrew the Renaissance fascination with ancient myth as an autonomous dimension of existence. Of course, from the Enlightenment onward little argument was needed to rid us of the gods as merely pagan fantasy. Just as Platonic forms (metaphysics) died out in philosophy (their place being taken by objective empirical qualities, subjective concepts, cognitive categories, or linguistic family resemblances, so the ancient gods became literary characters, artistic images, useful metaphors without any claim to ontological reality.

Modern science cleansed the universe of all human and spiritual properties previously projected unto it. The universe was now neutral, opaque, and material and therefore no dialogue with nature was possible – whether through magic, mysticism, or divine authority. Only the impersonal employment of empirically based rational intellect could attain an understanding of nature. Thus, while an astonishing variety of epistemological sources had made the scientific revolution possible [(1). the immensely imaginative and anti-empirical leap to planetary earth, (2) the Pythagorean and neo-Platonic aesthetic and mystical beliefs, (3) Descartes’ revelatory dream and vision of a new universal science, (4) Newton’s hermetically inspired concept of gravitational attraction, (5) all the serendipitously recoveries of ancient manuscripts (e.g., Lucretius, Archimedes, Sextus Empiricus, the neo-Platonists), (6) the fundamentally metaphorical character of various scientific theories/explanations], all these were later deemed to belong to the context of scientific discovery and not science proper. Science proper was “epistemological justification” in terms of empirical evidence and rational analysis.

Classical culture would long remain an exalted realm in Western imaginative and aesthetic creations; it provided modern thinkers with inspiring political and moral ideals and models. Greek philosophy and Greek and Latin languages and literatures, the events and the personalities of ancient history still evoke in the modern mind a scholarly respect and avid interest even bordering on reverence. But humanistic nostalgia for classicism can not hide its increasing irrelevance for the modern mind – nothing could beat the intellectual rigor and efficacy of modern understanding. And yet the ancient Greek mind still pervaded the modern mind. In the virtual religious zeal of the scientist’s quest for knowledge, in his unconscious assumptions about the rationality of the world and man’s capacity to know it, in his critical independence of judgment and his ambitious drive to expand human knowledge beyond ever more distant horizons, in all this Greece lives on.

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The triumph of secularism

Science and religion: the early concord

The fate of Christianity in the wake of the scientific revolution was not dissimilar to the fate of classical/ancient (Greek) thought, and it also included its share of paradoxes.

If the Greek supplied most of the theoretical sources for the scientific revolution, the RC church (for all its dogmatic structures) provided the necessary matrix within which the Western mind was able to develop and from which the scientific revolution emerged. The nature of that contribution by the church was both practical and doctrinal. From the beginning of the middle ages the church provided the monasteries within which classical culture was preserved and within which the spirit of this classical culture continued. From the end of the first millennium the church officially supported the cast Scholastic enterprise of scholarship and education without which Western modern intellectuality might never have arisen.

(1) Ecclesiastical sponsorship was justified by a complex and unique constellation of theological positions. Thus, precision in Christian doctrine had to be accompanied by logical clarity and intellectual acuity.

(2) With the recognition of the physical world in the high middle ages there arose a corresponding recognition of the positive role of scientific understanding in an appreciation of God’s wondrous creation. For all its wariness of the mundane life and “the world”, the Judaic-Christian religion nevertheless placed enormous emphasis on the ontological reality of that world and its ultimate relationship to the good and just God. Christianity took life seriously. It is in this seriousness that the significance of religion lay for the scientific quest which depended not only on human being’s active responsibility in this world, but also on the belief in the reality of this world and its order and, at least at the start of the modern science, its coherent relationship to the omnipotent and infinitely wise creator.

(3) Nor was the Scholastics’ contribution merely an imperfect Christian recovery of Greek ideas. The Scholastics critically examined these ideas, created alternative theories an concepts (e.g., rudimentary formulations of inertia and momentum, the uniform acceleration of freely falling bodies, hypothetical argument for a moving earth) that allowed modern science from Copernicus to Galileo to begin to formulate a new paradigm.

(4) Most consequential was not specific nature of the Scholastics’ theoretical innovations, nor their revitalization of the Hellenic spirit, but the more tangible existential attitude that medieval thinkers passed on to their modern descendents: the theologically founded confidence that man’s God-given reason possessed the capacity, and the religious duty, to comprehend the natural world. Man’s intellectual relation to the creative Logos, man’s privileged position of the divine light of the active intellect (St. Aquinas’ lumen intellectus agentis) was from a Christian perspective precisely what mediated our human

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understanding of the cosmos. Descartes’ natural light of reason was the secular inheritor of that medieval conception. It was after all Aquinas who had written in his Summa Theologica that “authority is the weakest form of proof” – a dictum that would be central to the independence so valued by the modern mind. Modern rationalism, naturalism, and empiricism all had Scholastic roots.

However, the Scholasticism that 16th and 17th c natural philosophers encountered was a pedagogically dogmatic and aging structure that no longer spoke to the new spirit of the age. Little new was emerging from its confines. It was obsessed with Aristotle and failed to submit theory to experimental test, and it was perceived as an outmoded, ingrown institution whose intellectual authority had to be overthrown if the new science was not to be smothered. After Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton that authority was impugned and its reputation never recovered. From then on science and philosophy would proceed without theological justification, without recourse to a divine light in the human intellect, without the colossal superstructure of Scholastic metaphysics and epistemology.

Yet despite the secular character of modern science that eventual emerged from the scientific revolution, the original scientific revolutionaries continued to act, think, ands speak of their work in religious terms. They perceived their intellectual scientific breakthroughs as foundational contribution to a sacred mission – awakening the divine architecture of the universe – revelations of true cosmic order. Newton’s exclamation “O God, I think hey thoughts after thee” was but the culmination of a series of such epiphanies marking the birth of modern science. Copernicus celebrated astronomy as a “science more divine than human”, closest to God in its nobility of character, and upheld the heliocentric theory as revealing the structural grandeur of God’s cosmos. Kepler’s writings were ablaze with the sense of being divinely illuminated as the inner mysteries unfolding before his eyes. He declared that astronomers were to be “priests of the most high God with respect to the book of nature”, and saw his own role as “the honor of guarding the door of God’s temple” in which Copernicus serve before the high altar. Galileo spoke of the telescope as made possible by God’s grace enlightening his mind. Even the worldly Bacon envisioned human progress through science in explicitly religious and pietistic terms with the material improvement of mankind corresponding to its spiritual approach to the Christian millennium. Descartes interpreted his vision of the new universal science, and a subsequent dream in which that science was symbolically presented to him, as a divine mandate for his life’s work: God had shown him the way to certain knowledge, and assured him of his scientific quest’s ultimate success. With Newton, the divine birth was considered complete: A new Genesis had been written.

As the poet Alexander Pope declares for the Enlightenment:

Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in the nightGod said, ‘let Newton be” and all was light.

The great passions to discover the laws of nature felt by the scientific revolutionaries derived from the sense that they were recovering divine knowledge that had been lost in the primal fall. At last the human mind had comprehended the working of God’s principles. The eternal laws of creation, divine handiwork itself, now stood unveiled. Through science man had served God’s

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greater glory, demonstrating mathematical beauty and complex precision, the stupendous order reigning over the heavens and earth.

This was not a generalized religious sentiment. Newton was zealously absorbed in Christian theology and Biblical studies as he was in physics. Galileo was committed to saving his church from a costly error and despite the Inquisition he faced, he remained a devout RC. Descartes lived and died a devout RC. Moreover, their Christian presuppositions were intellectually pervasive, embedded in the very fabric of their scientific and philosophical theories. Both Descartes and Newton constructed their cosmological systems as the assumption of God’s existence. For Descartes the objective world existed as a stable reality because it stood in the mind of God, and human reason was epistemologically reliable because of God’s intrinsic veracious character. Similarly Newton’s matter could not be explained on its own terms but necessitated a prime mover, a creator, a supreme architect and governor. God had established the physical world and its laws, and therein lay the world’s continuing existence and order. Indeed, because of certain unresolved problems in his calculations, Newton concluded that God’s intervention was periodically necessary to maintain the system’s regularity.

Compromise and conflict

However, the early modern accord between science and Christianity was already displaying some tensions and contradictions. Apart from the creationist ontology that was still underpinning the new paradigm, the new scientific universe with its mechanical forces, material heavens, and planetary earth was not congruent with the traditional Christian conception of the cosmos. The early claim that the earth and humankind were pivotal to God’s creation was not supported by scientific evidence (which held that the earth and the sun were merely two planets among others moving in an infinite void). “I am terrified”, said the religious mathematician Pascal, “by the eternal silence of these infinite spaces”. Intellectual Christians attempted to modify and reinterpret their religious understanding to accommodate this new scientific universe that was so drastically different from ancient and medieval cosmology within which the Christian religion had evolved, nevertheless the metaphysical hiatus widened. In Newton’s universe, heaven and hell had lost their physical locations, natural phenomena lost their symbolic import, and divine intervention now appeared implausible in contradicting the clockwork order of the universe. Yet Christian faith could hardly be negated altogether.

So there arose the psychological necessity of a double-truth universe: reason and faith came to be seen as different realms. Scientific reality and religious reality were distinct. Joined together in the high middle ages by Scholastics culminating in Aquinas, then severed by Ockham and nominalism, faith had moved in one direction with the Reformation, Luther, and the literal Scripture, fundamentalist Protestantism, and counter-Reformation Catholicism, while reason had moved in another direction with bacon, Descartes, Locke, Hume, empirical science, rational philosophy, and the Enlightenment. Attempts at bridging failed the preserve the character of one or the other (as Kant tried to do by delimiting religion to morality).

With religion and science as discrepant yet both vitally alive, European culture bifurcated, reflecting a metaphysical schism that existed within individuals and within societies. Religion became compartmentalized seen as not relevant to the external world but to the inner world, no

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relevant to the contemporary spirit but reflecting the nobility of tradition, not relevant to this life but to the afterlife, not relevant to weekdays but to Sundays. Of course, most people still believed Christian dogma and, as if in reaction the new science, there arose many religious movements: pietism in Germany, Jansenism in France, the Quakers and Methodists in England, the Great Awakening in the US and all these received much support in the 17th and 18th c. These were also the years in which Western religious music reached its apogee in Bach and Handel born within months of Newton’s Principia. Amidst all this pluralism wherein science and religion followed very different paths, the overriding cultural direction was clear however: scientific rationalism was ineluctably on the ascent.

Within two centuries after Newton, the secularity of the modern outlook had fully established itself: mechanistic materialism (scientific materialism) had proven its explanatory power and utilitarian efficacy. Experiences that seemed to defy science (such as alleged miracles, faith healings, self-proclaimed revelations and spiritual ecstasies, prophesies, symbolic interpretations of natural phenomena, encounters with God or the devil) were now regarded as madness, charlatanry or both. Questions concerning God’s existence or transcendent reality ceased to have any role in the scientific imagination which was becoming the shared framework for the general public. Pascal already in the 17th c faced his own religious doubt and philosophical skepticism by making the leap of faith a wager – and he seemed to be losing the bet.

What then caused the shift from explicit religiosity of the scientific revolutionaries of the 16th and 17th c to the emphatic secularism of the Western intellect in the 19th and 20th c?

1. There was the metaphysical incongruity of the two outlooks, the cognitive dissonance resulting from the attempt to hold together innately different systems and sensibilities, eventually forcing the issue in one direction or the other. The character and implications of the Christian revelation simply did not fit well with scientific revelation. Essentially the Christian faith was the belief in Christ’s physical resurrection after death, an event that in its apostolic witness and interpretation had served as the foundation of Christianity. But the new science with its explanatory laws would have to reject all this (e.g., miracles, faith healing, divinity, virgin birth, manna from heaven, wine from water, water from rocks, parting of seas, etc.); these were increasingly improbable to the modern mind as did the many mythical and legendary concoctions of the ancient imagination.

2. Damaging criticism also came from the newly emerging discipline of Biblical scholarship which demonstrated that Scripture had many voices and a historical context. Both Renaissance humanists and Reformation theologians had pressed for a return to original Greek and Hebrew sources which led to a more critical reading and re-evaluation original texts and their meaning. Scripture in the course of several generations began to lose its divine inspiration. Textual criticisms were followed by critical historical studies of Christian dogma and the church, as well as by historical investigations into the life of Jesus. Methods developed to analyze secular history and literatures were now applied to the sacred foundations of Christianity itself with unsettling consequences for the faithful.

3. In the 19th c these developments were joined with Darwin’s theory of evolution making the entire Genesis story problematic. Man could hardly be made in the image of God if

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man was also a biological descendent of subhuman primates. The thrust of biological evolution was not spiritual transfiguration/fulfillment but biological survival. While right up through Newton science had in fact supported an argument for the existence of God based on the order/design of the universe, the evidence of natural history in the late 18th and 19th c replaced this concept of order with natural selection and random mutation rather than a Transcendent Designer. There were some Christian scientists who noted the affinity of the theory of evolution with the Judaic-Christian notion of God’s progressive and providential plan of history, and drew parallels between the NT conception of an immanent evolutionary process of divine incarnation in man and nature (even to the extent of supplementing Darwinism’s theoretical shortcomings with religious explanatory principles). Yet for a culture that was accustomed to understanding the Bible at face value there were glaring inconsistencies between the creation of species and their transmutation over eons of time. This led to massive agnostic defections. For at bottom, the Christian belief in a God who acted through revelation and grace appeared to be wildly incompatible with common sense and science’ claim about how the world worked. With Luther the structure of the medieval church had cracked, with Copernicus and Galileo, the medieval Christian cosmology itself cracked. With Darwin, the Christian worldview seemed to collapse altogether.

4. In an era of reason and science, the “good news” of Christianity seemed less convincing as a metaphysical structure upon which to build one’s life – it was less psychologically necessary. The whole that idea that an infinite God would come into the world/history as a particular events taking place within two millennia on a tiny piece of rocks in the middle of nowhere seemed entire implausible. It seemed entirely implausible that such an event would have any meaning in a universe whose proportions were enormous and lawful. Christian belief began to wither. The reason the Judaic-Christian God persisted, in the eyes of the modern intellectual, was a peculiar combination of wish-fulfillment fantasy and anthropomorphic projection to bear the suffering of existence. In contrast, the unsentimental reason clinging as it does to observation of the world required no such projection. The natural data suggested overwhelmingly that the natural world and its history were merely an impersonal process. The ancient concerns with cosmic design and divine purpose (with metaphysical issues of the WHY of phenomena) ceased to engage scientists. Their concern was with the how of material mechanism, the laws of nature, and the concrete data that could be measured and tested. Spiritual causes and teleological designs could not be tested and hence it was better to stay with empirical evidence. With its apocalyptic prophesies and sacred rituals, its deified human hero and world savior motifs, its miracle stories, moralisms, and veneration of saints and relics, Christianity seemed at best a singularly successful folk myth – inspiring hope, giving meaning and order, but without ontological foundation. Christians may be well-meaning but credulous. With the victory of Darwinism (celebrated at Oxford in the debate between Bishop Wilberforce and T. H. Huxley in 1860) science had unequivocally achieved its independence from theology. After Darwin there seemed little further possibility of contact between science and theology, with science having authority over nature and theology relegated to small groups of intellectual believers. Faced with an intelligible universe over against spiritual verities, modern theology adopted an increasingly subjectivist stance. Thus, the early Christian belief in the fall and redemption pertained

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not just to man but to the entire cosmos. If this belief was already fading with the Reformation, it now disappeared altogether. The process of salvation if it had any meaning at all was solely one between God and man. The inner rewards of the Christian faith were now stressed, with the consequence of a radical discontinuity between the religious experience (subjective) and knowledge of this world. God was wholly other than man/world and therein laid religious experience. The “leap of faith” substituted for a self-evidence creation and the objectivity of Scripture.

5. Under such limitation, modern Christianity assumed a new and far less encompassing intellectual role. Of course, Christian ethics remained (the moral ideals of Jesus were as admirable as any) but Christianity had nothing to say about the visible world or the universe as a framework for Western culture. Christian revelation, the infallible word of God, the divine plan for salvation, the miracles, etc., could no longer be taken seriously. Compassion for humanity was till upheld as a social and individual ideal but its basis was now secular ands humanistic not religious. The humanitarian liberal adhered to certain tenets of the Christian ethos but would have nothing to do with its foundation. In the same way as the modern mind admired the spirit and moral tone of the ancient Greeks but rejected their metaphysics and epistemology, so Christianity continued to be tacitly respected, and even followed, for its ethical concepts, but rejected in its metaphysics and epistemology.

6. It is also true that in the eyes of not a few scientists and philosophers, science itself contained religious meaning, or was at least open to religious interpretation. The beauty of nature’s forms, the splendor of its variety, the extraordinarily intricate functioning of the human body/brain, the evolutionary development of the human eye/mind, the mathematical patterning of the universe, the unimaginable magnitude of the heavenly spaces, etc. all these seemed to require the existence of a divine intelligence and power of miraculous sophistication. Of course many others argued that all this was simple the random result of the natural laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. Their claim was that the human psyche merely longed for the security of a comic providence susceptible to personification of man’s own values and purposes. Poetic perhaps but not scientific. God was an unnecessary hypothesis.

Philosophy, politics, and psychology

Developments in philosophy during this period also reinforced the secular progression. During the scientific revolution and the early Enlightenment, religion still had a hold on philosophers but this was rapidly changing. In preference to biblical Christianity, Enlightenment deists like Voltaire argued in favor of a “rational religion” or a “natural religion”, one that is compatible to the rational apprehension of the order of nature, the requirement of a first cause, but also the West’s encounter with other religions and cultures which suggested a universal sensibility to religion as a common human experience. In this context, Christianity could not longer hold center stage. Newtons’ cosmic architecture demanded a cosmic architect but the attributes of such a God could only be derived from an empirical examination of his creation, not from dogma or pronouncements of revelation. Early religious conceptions - primitive, biblical, ad medieval –

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were merely infantile steps towards a more modern understanding of a rational deity presiding over an orderly creation.

But even this rational reconceptualization of God was soon to lose philosophical support. Descartes had God’s existence proven not by faith but by reason, yet reason could not indefinitely sustain God’s certain existence, as Hume and Kant culminating the Enlightenment, suggested in different ways. Much as Ockham warned four centuries earlier rational philosophy could not presume to pronounce on matters that transcended the empirically based intellect (reason). Locke had followed Bacon in rooting all knowledge of the world in sensory experience, and subsequent reflection on that experience. Locke’s own inclinations were deist, and he retained Descartes certainty that God’s existence could be logical proven from self-evident intuitions. But the empiricism Locke championed necessarily limited reason’s capacity for knowledge to that tested in experience. As successive philosophers drew more rigorous conclusions from the empiricist basis, it became clear that they could not make justifiable assertions about God, the immortality of the soul, and human freedom all of which transcended human experience.

Hume and Kant (in the 18th c) systematically refuted rational philosophical arguments for God’s existence, pointing out the unwarrantability of using causal reasoning to move from the sensible to the super-sensible. Only the realm of concrete particulars registered in the senses offered valid ground for philosophical conclusions. Hume who was entirely a secular thinker and unequivocal in his skepticism, the matter was simple enough: To argue from problematic evidence of the senses to the existence of a good and omnipotent God is philosophically absurd. But even Kant, though highly religious himself and intent on preserving the moral imperative of Christian conscience, nevertheless recognized that Descartes’ had stopped short in his philosophical skepticism with his dogmatic assertion that God exists as derived from the cogito. For Kant, God was thinkable but unknowably transcendent. God was thinkable (noumenal) in our reflection on our inner sense of moral duty, but God could not be known. Neither reason nor observation could give us any direct knowledge of God. Man could have faith in God, he could believe in the soul’s immortality and in his own freedom, but he could not claim that these “thinkables” were rationally certain. For the rigorous modern philosopher, metaphysical certainties about God etc., were spurious, lacking sound basis in verification. The inevitable outcome of empiricism and critical philosophy (Kant) was to eliminate any theological substrate from modern philosophy.

At the same time, the bolder thinkers of the French Enlightenment (philosophes) tended towards not only skepticism but also atheistic materialism as the most justified of scientific discoveries. Diderot, the chief editor of the Encyclopedia which was the Enlightenment’s greatest project of cultural educational, showed in his own life the transition from religious belief to deism to skepticism and finally to materialism jointly with deistic ethics. La Mettrie, the physician, portrayed man as a purely material entity, an organic machine whose illusion of possessing an independent soul/mind was produced simply by the interplay of material components. The ethical consequence of materialistic philosophy was of course hedonism and La Mettrie did not fail to advocate hedonism. The physicist Baron d’Holbach was similarly a materialist, declared religious belief an absurdity in the face of experience and, given all the evil in the world, claimed that any God must be deficient in power or else in justice and compassion. On the other hand, the seemingly random occurrence of good and evil in the world was entirely in accord with a

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materialistic, mechanistic universe; what is necessary is atheism in order to destroy religious fantasy that endangered the human race. We need to bring back reason, nature and experience.

It was the 19th c that would bring the Enlightenment secular progression to its logical conclusion in Comte, Mill, Feuerbach, Marx, Haeckel, Spencer, Huxley, and in a rather different spirit, Nietzsche, all sounded the death knell of religion. The claim was that the Judaic-Christian religion was a product of man’s own creation and this need for that creation had dwindled with humankind’s maturation. History could be understood as a progression from a mythical- theological stage, through a metaphysical and abstract stage, to its final triumph in science which is positive and concrete. “Positive” in the sense that it is only this perceptible world and man in it that is demonstrable, sensible, and real. All metaphysical speculation about higher spiritual realities is nothing but idle intellectual fantasy and a disservice to humankind. The task of this age is to humanize God who was a mere projection of human inner nature. One could, as Kant did, speak of the “unknowable” behind the phenomenal universe but that was the extent. Science held the universe and man in it to be “natural” and coming to terms with “nature” as science does is the only hope for humankind. Of course, the question remained as to what or who initiated this whole phenomenal universe, but intellectual honesty precluded any speculation in this regard. The answer to the question was epistemologically beyond man’s ken and given that there is yet so much to be known, beyond his current interest. With Descartes and Kant the relationship between science and religion was effectively attenuated and by the late 19th c even this attenuated relation was absent.

Of course, there were many other non-epistemological factors contributing to the secularization of the modern mind: political, social, economic, and psychological. Even prior to the industrial revolution had demonstrated science’s superior utilitarian value, other cultural developments had recommended the scientific view over the religious. The scientific revolution was born amidst the immense turmoil and the destruction of the wars of religion that followed the Reformation, wars in the name of divergent Christian absolutism that had caused over one century of crisis in Europe. As a result many doubted the integrity of Christian understanding and its ability to foster relative peace and security in Europe, let alone universal compassion. Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist, Anabaptist, Anglican, Puritan or RC they broke up any sense of religious universality and created space for a less controversial, subjective, and more rationally persuasive belief system. Thus, the neutral and empirically verifiable world view of secular science soon found an ardent reception at least among the educated classes – one that could cut across political and religious boundaries. Just as the last revulsions of post-Reformational bloodshed were being expended, the scientific revolution was approaching completion. The final decade of the Thirty-Years War (1638-1648) saw the completion of Galileo’s Dialogue concerning two new sciences and Descartes’ Principle of philosophy, as well as the birth of Newton.

Political circumstances also played a role in the modern shift away from religion. For centuries there had been the fateful association of the hierarchical Christian worldview and the established social-political structure of feudal Europe centering on the authority of God, pope and king. By the 18th c this association had become mutually disadvantageous. The growing implausibility of religion and the injustices of the political order combined to produce the image of a senile syste, that demanded revolt for the good of humanity. The French philosophes – Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet and their successors – saw the church and its wealth as allied with conservative forces

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of the ancient regime. To the philosophes, the power of the organized clergy posed the obstacle to progress in civilization. The issue of economic and social exploitation, censorship, intolerance, and intellectual rigidity was all attributed to the dogmatic pretensions and vested interests of the ecclesiastical establishment.

Voltaire has seen and admired first hand the consequences of the Enlightenment religious toleration which along with the intellectual clarifications of Bacon, Locke, and Newton he presented to the continent for emulation. Armed with science, reason, and empirical facts the Enlightenment saw itself as engaged in a noble struggle against the conflicting forces of the medieval church and tyrannical political structure and corrupt privilege. The cultural authority of dogmatic religion was seen as inherently inimical to personal freedom and unhampered intellectual speculation and discovery. Hence, the religious sensibility – except for a rationalized form of deism – was antagonistic to human freedom. [The composition of the clergy in France also played a complex role in these developments. The clergy’s upper ranks were typically occupied by the aristocracy’s younger sons whose entire lifestyle was indistinguishable from that of the aristocracy. The church seemed less interested in salvation than in the maintaining the orthodoxy of political advantage. Further complicating this was the fact that the clergy began to embrace Enlightenment rationalism thereby strengthening the forces within the church. See The Columbia History of the World, Ed. P. Gay and J. A. Garraty, Harper & Row, 1972.]

Yet one philosophe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserted a very different view. Like the others he argues with critical reason and reformist zeal, yet the Enlightenment progress they celebrated was to him a great evil. Man suffered from civilization’s corrupt progress that alienated him from nature, from simplicity, sincerity, quality, kindness, and genuine understanding. Besides, Rousseau believed that religion was intrinsic to the human condition. He contended that the philosophes exaltation of reason has in fact neglected man’s actual nature, his feeling, depth of impulse and intuition, and spiritual hunger that transcended all abstraction. Rousseau had no love for the church or clergy and he rejected all forms of worship as absurd. Yet he understood that the mediation of theological dogma, priestly hierarchies, and hostile sectarianism, humanity could learn to worship the Creator by turning towards nature – for it is in nature that there was sublimity. The rationally demonstrable God of the deist was unacceptable for the love of God and the awareness of morality dependent on feeling not reason. The deity that Rousseau recognized was a God of love and beauty whom the human soul could know from within. Reverent awe before the cosmos, the joy of meditative solitude, the direct intuition of moral conscience, the natural spontaneity of human compassion, and the theism of the heart – it was these that constituted the true nature of religion.

Rousseau set forth an immensely influential position beyond those of church orthodoxy and the skeptical philosophes by combining the religiosity of the former with the rational reformism of the latter, yet critical of both because one threatened narrowness of dogma and the other the abstractness of reason. Herein lay the seeds of contradictory developments. As Rousseau affirmed man’s religious nature he also encouraged modern sensibility in its gradual departure from Christian orthodoxy. He gave rational support to the lingering religious impulse of the modern mind, yet in doing so he asserted the Enlightenments’ undermining of the Christian tradition. Rousseau’s embrace of religion whose essence was universal rather than exclusive, whose ground was in nature and human subjective emotions and mystical intuitions rather than

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Biblical revelation, initiated a spiritual current in Western culture that would lead to Romanticism and eventually to existentialism.

Thus, whether it was the anti-clerical deism of Voltaire, the rational skepticism of Diderot, the agnostic empiricism of Hume, the atheistic materialism of Holbach, or the natural mysticism and emotional religiosity of Rousseau, the 18th c saw a decline in the influence of Christianity in many progressive Europeans. By the 19th c both organized religion and the religious impulse itself had been subjected to Karl Marx and astute social political critique, as well as a prophetically directed impulse in a revolutionary direction. Marx’ reductive analysis that all ideas and cultural forms were merely materially motivated, specifically in the class struggle, also included religion beliefs and ideas. Despite their high-minded dogma the church seldom seemed to concern itself with the plight of the poor. This seeming contradiction Marx suggested what inherent to the church’s character, for the true role of religion was to keep the lower classes in order. The social opiate of religion in effect served to maintain the ruling class to keep the masses from rebelling against exploitation and injustice which was everywhere by giving the masses a false sense of security of divine providence and the false promise of eternal life. Organized religion according to Marx served as one element in the Bourgeoisie’s control of society in its own interest. To speak of God and to lull the proletariat into complacency was to betray humankind. Any genuine philosophy of action, Marx held, must begin with human need, and to address human need one must first rid oneself of delusion – and religion was such a pernicious delusion.

Of course there were more moderate voices as well. 19th c liberalism also argued for the reduction of organized religion in the political and intellectual life of Western society and did so by promoting a pluralism of freedom of belief consonant with social order. Liberal thinkers of religious persuasion recognized not only the political necessity of freedom of worship, or not, in a liberal democracy, but they also recognized the religious necessity of such freedom. To be constrained to be religious, let alone a particular religion, could scarcely be a genuinely religious approach to life. In such a liberal and pluralistic social milieu, a more secular sensibility became commonplace. Religious tolerance eventually became religious indifference. Fewer and fewer people found the Christian faith compelling. Liberal utilitarians and radical socialists appeared to offer more programs for human betterment than traditional religions. Nor was the tenor of materialism unique to Marxism, for while capitalism had earlier aligned itself with Protestant sensibilities, the capitalist societies’ increasing preoccupation with material progress could not but help depreciate the urgency of the Christian salvational message and the spiritual enterprise in general. Thus, while religious observances continued to be widely upheld as a pillar of social integrity and civilized values these observances was often indistinguishable from the social conventions of Victorian morality. [Those who tried to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God]

The Christian churches where themselves unwittingly contributors to their own demise. The RC and its counter-Reformational response to the Protestant heresy had reinforced its conservative structure and so left itself unable to respond to changes in the modern era. While RC maintained its strength among the vast number of faithful, it did so at the cost of its appeal to modern sensibility. Conversely, the Reformational response to RC had established a more anti-auythoritarian and non-centralized structure casting off institutional dogma for the literal truth of

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Scripture, but in doing so it tended to fray out in ever diversifying sectarianism while leaving its later membership antithetical (under the influence of scientific discoveries) to Scriptural literalism – and consequent secularism. In both cases Christianity lost much of its relevance and by the 20th c not only had many left their traditional Christian heritage but the church waned in cultural importance.

Christianity not only experienced itself as a divided but as a shrinking church in the face of the onslaught of secularism. The Christian church suddenly found itself as it did at its inception (one faith among many) in a large, sophisticated, urbanize environment: a world ambivalent about religion in general and distanced from the Christian revelation in particular. The enmities between RC and Protestantism, and between the multiple branches of the both, were now secondary to the growing secular world which became dominant. In fact, even kinship with Judaism which had been rejected by Christendom was now warmly acknowledged. In the modern secular world all religions have more in common than they have in dispute. There was a general view that this was the last remnant of Christianity and that soon it would disappear (as would all such irrationality).

But the Judaic-Christian tradition sustained itself. Millions of families continued to nurture their children in the tenets and images of the inherited Christian faith. Theologians continued to develop historically nuanced understanding of Scripture and church, and formulate more flexible and imaginative applications of religious principles to life in the modern age. The RC church began to open itself to plurality, ecumenism, and freedom in all matters of faith and dogma and worship. Efforts began to make God more immanent and evolutionary in character, more congruent with the current cosmology and intellectual trends. Prominent philosophers, scientists, artists, and writers found personal meaning and spiritual comfort in the Judaic-Christian framework. Even so the general cultural elite, and the whole of modern sensibility – of the religious child reared in skeptical and secular modern maturity – was largely otherwise.

The reason is that beyond the institutional and scriptural anachronisms discouraging the Christian faith was a more general psychological discrepancy between the traditional Judaic-Christian self-image and that of modern man. As early as the 18th-19th c the heavy taint of original sin ceased in an age of light and progress. Moreover, sin hardly could be reconciled with the scientific conception of man. The traditional image of the Semitic-Augustinian-Protestant God, who creates man too weak to withstand evil temptation, and who predestines the majority of humankind to eternal damnation with little consideration for their good works or honest effort at virtue, ceased to be palatable or plausible to sensitive members of modern culture. There was an internal liberation from religious guilt and fear (consistent with the secular worldview) just as there was an earlier external liberation from the oppressive church-dominated political and social structures. It also became clear that the human spirit was expressed in secular life, or it was not expressed at all, and so any division between secular and spiritual fell away with the result that both were impoverished. To locate the human spirit in this world rather than transcendentally, was to subvert that spirit altogether.

It was Friedrich Nietzsche’s “death of God” that culminated the long evolution in the Western psyche and foreshadowed the existential moods of the 20th c. With ruthless perceptiveness, Nietzsche held up a dark mirror to the soul of Christianity (Christianity’s attitudes and values

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opposed man’s existential situation, his body, the earth, to courage and heroism, to joy and freedom, and to life itself): “they would have to sing better songs to me that I might believe in their redeemer; his disciples would have to look more redeemed”. Many agreed. Nietzsche did not just reject religion as an illusion rather he proclaimed the demise of an entire civilization which had too long held man back from a daring, liberating embrace of life’s totality.

With Freud the modern psychological evaluation of religion achieved a new level of systematic and penetrating theoretical analysis. The discovery of the unconscious and of the human psyche’s tendency to project traumatic memories unto later experiences opened up a crucially new dimension to the critical understanding of religious beliefs. In the light of psychoanalysis the Judaic-Christian God became a reified psychological projection based on the child’s naïve view of its libidinally restrictive and seemingly omnipotent parent. Conceived in this way many aspects of religious behavior and belief appeared comprehensible as symptoms of a deeply rooted culturally obsessive-compulsive neurosis. The projection of a morally authoritative patriarchal deity could be seen as having been a social necessity in the earlier stage so human development by satisfying the psyche’s need for a powerful external force to undergird society’s ethical requirements. In having internalized those requirements, the psychologically mature individual could recognize projection for what it is and dispense with it.

An important role in the devaluation of traditional religion was also played by the issue of sexual experience. With the rise in the 20th c of a broadly-minded secular and psychological informed perspective, the long-held Christian ideal of asexual and anti-sexual asceticism seemed symptomatic more of cultural and personal psychoneurosis that of eternal spiritual law. Medieval practices such as mortification of the flesh were recognized as pathological aberrations rather than saintly exercises. The sexual attitudes of the Victorian era were seen as parochial inhibitions. Both the Puritan Protestant and the RC traditions continued restrictiveness in sexual matters, particularly its prohibition of contraception, and this served to alienate thousand from the fold. The demands and delights of Eros (pleasure of the flesh) made traditional religious attitudes seem unhealthily constraining. As Freud’s insights became part of the modern ethic of personal liberty and self-realization, a powerful Dionysian impulse arose in the West. Even for staid sensibilities it made little sense to repress part of our being human, our physical being, that was not only our evolutionary inheritance but our existential foundation. Modern man committed himself to this world with all the entailments of such a choice.

Finally, even the long schooling of the Western mind in the Christian value system served to undermine Christianity in the modern era. From the Enlightenment onward, the Western mind developed a social conscience, recognized unconscious prejudices and injustices, and won historical knowledge that all shed new light on the Christian religion over the centuries. The Christian injunction to love and serve humanity, it high value placed on the individual soul now stood in sharp contract to the long Christian history of bigotry, violent intolerance, forcible conversions, ruthless suppression of other cultural perspectives, persecution of heretics, crusades against the Muslims, oppression of the Jews, depreciation of women’s spirituality, exclusion of women from ecclesiastical office, association with slavery and colonialist exploitation, and all kinds of religious arrogance against those outside the fold. Measured by its own standards, Christianity fell woefully short of ethical greatness, and many alternative systems, from the Stoics to modern liberalism and socialism seemed to do as well.

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The modern character

We see that the movement from a Christian worldview to a secular worldview was over-determined. In fact, the overall driving force of secularism did not lie in any specific factors or combination of factor – (e.g., the scientific discrepancies with Biblical revelation, the metaphysical consequences of empiricism, the social political critiques of organized religion, the growing psychological acuity, the changing sexual mores, etc.) any of these could have been negotiable as in fact they were for many Christians. Rather, secularism reflected a more general shift in the character of the Western psyche, one that was evident in many specific factors but also one that transcended all of them in a global logic of its own. The psychological constitution of the modern character had been developing since the high Middle Ages, had emerged in the Renaissance, was sharply clarified in the scientific revolution, and then extended and solidified during the Enlightenment. By the 19th c, in the wake of the industrial and democratic revolutions, it has achieved mature form. The direction and quality of that character reflected a gradual but finally radical shift

of psychological allegiance from God to man, from dependence to independence,from other-worldliness to this worldliness,from transcendent to empirical, from myth and belief to reason and fact, from universals to particulars, from a supernaturally determined static cosmos to a naturally determining evolving cosmos, and from a fallen humanity to an advancing one.

The tenor of Christianity no longer suited the prevailing mood of man’s self-sustaining progress and mastery of the world. Modern man’s capacity to understand nature, and the natural order, to bend that order to its own benefit diminished our sense of dependency on God. Using our own intelligence, and without the aid of Holy Scripture and revelation, man had penetrated nature’s mysteries and transformed this universe, and so immeasurably enhanced his existence.

Combined with the seemingly non-Christian character of the scientifically revealed natural order, this new sense of human dignity and power inevitably moved man towards his secular self. The tangible immediacy of this world and man’s ability to find meaning in it, to respond to its demands, to experience progress within it, all relieved him of that incessant striving for and anxiety about the afterworld salvation. Man was responsible for his own earthly destiny; by his own wits could he change the world; he began to have faith not only in scientific knowledge but also in himself.

It was this emerging psychological climate that made the sequence of philosophical and scientific advances (whether by Locke, Hume, Kant, or Darwin, Marx, and Freud) so potent and effective in undercutting religion and its role in Western life. The Christian attitudes were no longer appropriate to the modern mind.

Especially consequential for the secularization of the modern character was its allegiance to reason. The modern mind exulted in reason, in critical independence of judgment, an existential

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posture that was not easily compatible with pious surrender required of belief in divine revelation or obedience to the precepts of the priestly hierarchy. Modern autonomous personal judgment in Luther, Galileo, and Descartes made continuation of the medieval reliance on external authority (church and Aristotle) almost impossible. As modern man continued to mature, intellectual independence grew absolute.

Thus, the advance of the modern era brought about a massive shift in the psychological vector of perceived authority. Whereas in earlier periods wisdom and authority were characteristically located in the past (prophets, ancient bards, classical philosophers, the apostles, early church fathers_ modern awareness increasingly located that power in the present, in its own unprecedented achievements, its own self-consciousness as the evolutionary vanguard of human experience. Earlier era looked backward while the modern era looks at itself and forward. Modern culture’s complexity, productivity, and sophistication put this era beyond all previous ones. This passion placed all transcendence in the now, the immanent. Medieval theism and ancient cosmism gave way to modern humanism.

Hidden continuities

The West lost its faith and found a new one in science and man. Paradoxically the Christian worldview continued in the West’s new secular outlook. Just as the evolving Christian worldview did not fully divorce itself from its Hellenistic predecessors, so the modern humanist world retained elements of Christianity.

The Christian ethical values and Scholastic-developed faith in human reason and the intelligibility of the empirical universe were conspicuous, but even as fundamentalist a Judaic-Christian doctrine as the command in Genesis that man exercise dominion over nature was affirmed in Bacon, Descartes, and subsequent technological and scientific advances. [This view was contested by Christians who interpreted that command as signifying “stewardship” rather than exploitation – where the latter was seen as reflecting the alienation of the fall.]

The Judaic-Christian regard for the individual soul, endowed with sacred individual rights and intrinsic dignity was also something that continued in the secular humanist ideal of modern liberalism. Other themes such as moral self-responsibility, the tension between the ethical and political, the imperative to care for the poor and less fortunate, and the ultimate unity of humankind were also Christian themes marking secularism.

The West’s belief in itself as the most historically significant and favored culture also reflected the Judaic-Christian theme of a chosen people.

The global expansion of Western culture as the best and most appropriate for all humankind represented a continuation of the RC church’s self-concept as the one universal church for all humanity.

Modern civilization now replaced Christianity as the cultural norm and ideal with which other societies were to be compared and to which they were to be converted. Just as Christianity had in succeeding the Roman Empire become the centralized, hierarchical, and politically motivated

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RC church, so too did the modern secular Wets in the process of overcoming Christianity incorporate many of its characteristic approaches.

But the most pervasive and specifically Judaic-Christian component that was tacitly retained in the modern worldview was the belief in man’s linear historical progress toward ultimate fulfillment. Modern man’s self-understanding was emphatically teleological with humanity seen as moving in a historical development out of a dark past (of ignorance, primitiveness, poverty, suffering, and oppression) towards a brighter ideal future characterized by intelligence, sophistication, prosperity, happiness, and freedom. The faith in that movement is based on an underlying trust in the redeeming effect of expanding human knowledge and a world reconstructed by science. The original Judaic-Christian eschatological expectation has been transformed into a secular faith. The religious faith in God’s eventual salvation of humankind (whether Israel’s arrival in the Promised land, the church’s arrival at the millennium, the Holy Spirit’s progressive perfecting of humanity, or the Second Coming of Christ) now became the evolutionary confidence in a this-worldly utopia whose realization would come in the application of reason to nature and society.

Even the Christian’s own understanding of the end of time moved from a passive waiting to an active preparation for the Second Coming. Erasmus had suggested a new understanding of the Christian eschatology whereby humanity might move towards perfection in this world with history realizing the Kingdom of God in a peaceful earthly society not through apocalypse divine intervention, or otherworldly escape, but through divine immanence working within historical evolution. Similarly, Bacon heralded the coming scientific revolution towards material redemption as coincident with the Christian millennium. As secularization advanced during the modern era, the Christian element in the forthcoming utopia waned even though the expectation continued. In time the focus on social utopia merged into futurology which replaced earlier anticipations of the Kingdom of Heaven. “Planning” replaced “hoping” as human reason and technology demonstrated their miraculous efficacy.

Confidence in human progress, akin to the Biblical faith in humanity’s spiritual evolution and future consummation, was so central to the modern worldview that it notably increased with the decline of Christianity. Expectations of humankind’s fulfillment found vivid expression in Condorcet, Comte, and Marx. Indeed, the ultimate statement of belief in evolutionary human deification was found in Christianity’s most fervent antagonist Friedrich Nietzsche, whose superman would be born out of the death of God and the overcoming of the old and limited man.

Robust modernity would replace religion and faith with science and instrumental reason (“I know”), and God’s will with the human will (“I can”).

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