The Church and Science
You know how it goes...we complain. We complain especially about ‘medieval’ cellphone coverage, poor connectivity, and our much-vaunted tech - when it has gone wonky.
When that happens, people love to compare NOW to, "back then." And somewhow we always seem to imagine it was the very worst in the period we call the Middle Ages: between 500–1500 in Europe... Medieval Times.
Paradoxically, this is because there is actually quite a lot of recorded information from that time, and most of our cultural norms arose then - it's a communal history for us all. Yet, we call them the, "Dark Ages" where we imagine it was all superstition, and leaders scorned scientific expertise.
However, modern research shows it wasnt total stagnation at all; it was also a period of impressive innovation and ingenuity.
For example, it’s still commonly assumed that medieval people thought the earth was flat, until enlightened explorers like Columbus proved them wrong. At that moment we should we recall the words of Henry Ford, who said, "History is bunk."
What he meant was that we generalize about what WE think “people” did or thought in the past, because we can only view the past through the lense of our own biases and current perceptions.
But we now understand that learned and scholarly men in those times realized immediately that the earth was round.
They recorded the proofs in textbooks, handwritten on smooth animal-skin parchment called, "vellum.".
The most popular of these was appropriately named, "The Sphere."
It was written in about 1230 AD by Johannes de Sacrobosco— John of Hollywood. As a ship sails away from harbor, noted Sacrobosco, a lookout at the top of the mast will still be able to see land long after the sailors on deck have lost sight of it. A beautiful diagram in many manuscripts illustrates this, showing that the seas must be covering a round body.
Sacrobosco also proved how one could calculate the size of the earth, by measuring the height of the sun above the horizon in two different cities. The answer he gave was remarkably accurate.
There were those who thought the Sun and other planets went around the Earth, but THAT, too, was challenged in the Middle Ages, and it led to very clever and precise astronomy.
Sacrobosco’s Sphere, and many other works of science, were enthusiastically studied in the new universities that sprung up across Europe from the 12th century onwards.
Students and lecturers traveled and communicated across borders in the first truly international language of learning: Latin.
And that meant that a great many universities were founded directly by the Catholic Church. Some still exist to this day.
These Catholic Christians enthusiastically embraced discoveries of all kinds, from people of other faiths. So despite what you may have been led to beleive, Catholics accepted good thinking even if it was from someone else....myth busted!
Sure, there were terrible examples of racial and religious persecution in the Middle Ages (just as today). But scholars back then used knowledge where they found it.
On a side note, many scientific works of the period were advanced guides to gadgetry — for medieval people loved technology just as we do today.
For example, the medieval hot-tech of the time was the astrolabe. Portable, multifunctional and elegant, it was both cutting-edge and a status symbol. It could tell the time, could help you find the height of a building or the way home, and it could even track the motions of the stars, if needed.
Medieval people respected ancient authority — but they also innovated....seemingly different than today.
What he meant was that we generalize about what WE think “people” did or thought in the past, because we can only view the past through the lense of our own biases and current perceptions.
But we now understand that learned and scholarly men in those times realized immediately that the earth was round.
They recorded the proofs in textbooks, handwritten on smooth animal-skin parchment called, "vellum.".
The most popular of these was appropriately named, "The Sphere."
It was written in about 1230 AD by Johannes de Sacrobosco— John of Hollywood. As a ship sails away from harbor, noted Sacrobosco, a lookout at the top of the mast will still be able to see land long after the sailors on deck have lost sight of it. A beautiful diagram in many manuscripts illustrates this, showing that the seas must be covering a round body.
Sacrobosco also proved how one could calculate the size of the earth, by measuring the height of the sun above the horizon in two different cities. The answer he gave was remarkably accurate.
There were those who thought the Sun and other planets went around the Earth, but THAT, too, was challenged in the Middle Ages, and it led to very clever and precise astronomy.
Sacrobosco’s Sphere, and many other works of science, were enthusiastically studied in the new universities that sprung up across Europe from the 12th century onwards.
Students and lecturers traveled and communicated across borders in the first truly international language of learning: Latin.
And that meant that a great many universities were founded directly by the Catholic Church. Some still exist to this day.
These Catholic Christians enthusiastically embraced discoveries of all kinds, from people of other faiths. So despite what you may have been led to beleive, Catholics accepted good thinking even if it was from someone else....myth busted!
Sure, there were terrible examples of racial and religious persecution in the Middle Ages (just as today). But scholars back then used knowledge where they found it.
On a side note, many scientific works of the period were advanced guides to gadgetry — for medieval people loved technology just as we do today.
For example, the medieval hot-tech of the time was the astrolabe. Portable, multifunctional and elegant, it was both cutting-edge and a status symbol. It could tell the time, could help you find the height of a building or the way home, and it could even track the motions of the stars, if needed.
Medieval people respected ancient authority — but they also innovated....seemingly different than today.
And it was in this era that Catholic monks devised the first complex mechanical clocks, displaying fractional changes in the length of the day that most clocks even today don’t show. Their advances in engineering permitted the construction of magnificent, towering cathedrals. These are still studied as examples by engineering students. Experiments with lenses led to the first eyeglasses, and paved the way for the telescopes and microscopes of the early modern period.
So, contrary to more popular myths, the Catholic Church was a great supporter of science. It’s not hard to see why, either, since the goal of devout Christians has always been to get closer to God. And theologians of that time believed that the keys to God's divine plan wre found written in two books:
- The book of Scripture, aka The Bible
- The book of Nature (which predated the former)
In other words, to understand the mind of God, one should study the Bible, AND, His visible Creations. And should such study lead one to find that empirical evidence might seem different that scripture, Christian scholars made another great leap of understanding: They did not feel compelled to fall back on the flawed demand of fundamentalists and take biblical descriptions literally.
Instead, they worked harder to find answers that fit into Nature, which was ultimately God's creation. In their view, the one was joined to the other.
Many of the biggest names in medieval science were, in fact, monks and friars. Some — such as Robert Grosseteste and Thomas Bradwardine — reached the highest levels of the Church's hierarchy to became bishops and even archbishops.
Why does any of this even matter? Because we often mock the medieval period so as to inflate ourselves. Indeed, anything that happened before WE came along is automatically dismissed as inferior. So, if we see those who medieval men who came before us as ignorant, then we appear so much smarter... and we can tell ourselves that scientific progress is inevitably ours alone.
Along with this stuck-up attitude, we also lead oursleves to to an imagined pre-eminence over God...., then to denoucing religion as being, antiquated, and so, uneeded.
But if we use the Middle Ages, not to scoff, but as a measuring stick, we see two things:
1. Human intellgence and the ability to reason has never been limited, and has always been the second greatest gift that God has given us.
(The first being God's Love for His creation, manifested as Man's free-will)
2. Otherwise intelligent people can believe the wrong things, simply by telling themselves their reasons are right.
So, contrary to more popular myths, the Catholic Church was a great supporter of science. It’s not hard to see why, either, since the goal of devout Christians has always been to get closer to God. And theologians of that time believed that the keys to God's divine plan wre found written in two books:
- The book of Scripture, aka The Bible
- The book of Nature (which predated the former)
In other words, to understand the mind of God, one should study the Bible, AND, His visible Creations. And should such study lead one to find that empirical evidence might seem different that scripture, Christian scholars made another great leap of understanding: They did not feel compelled to fall back on the flawed demand of fundamentalists and take biblical descriptions literally.
Instead, they worked harder to find answers that fit into Nature, which was ultimately God's creation. In their view, the one was joined to the other.
Many of the biggest names in medieval science were, in fact, monks and friars. Some — such as Robert Grosseteste and Thomas Bradwardine — reached the highest levels of the Church's hierarchy to became bishops and even archbishops.
Why does any of this even matter? Because we often mock the medieval period so as to inflate ourselves. Indeed, anything that happened before WE came along is automatically dismissed as inferior. So, if we see those who medieval men who came before us as ignorant, then we appear so much smarter... and we can tell ourselves that scientific progress is inevitably ours alone.
Along with this stuck-up attitude, we also lead oursleves to to an imagined pre-eminence over God...., then to denoucing religion as being, antiquated, and so, uneeded.
But if we use the Middle Ages, not to scoff, but as a measuring stick, we see two things:
1. Human intellgence and the ability to reason has never been limited, and has always been the second greatest gift that God has given us.
(The first being God's Love for His creation, manifested as Man's free-will)
2. Otherwise intelligent people can believe the wrong things, simply by telling themselves their reasons are right.
In many ways, the medieval world will remain unintelligible to us, just as Henry Ford suggested. And in many ways, we’re just the same as we’ve always been.
Inspired by a Time magazine article by Seb Falk, author of, "The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science."
Read the article in Time magazine: https://time.com/5911003/middle-ages-myths/
Comments
Post a Comment