1

4. The modern world-view

The Renaissance 1

The Reformation 6

The Scientific Revolution 16

Copernicus 16

The religious reaction 18

Kepler 19

Galileo 21

Forging the Newtonian cosmology 23

The Philosophical Revolution30

Bacon30

Descartes 31

Foundations of Modern Worldview 35

Ancients and Moderns40

The triumph of secularism45

Science and religion: early concord 45

Science and religion: compromise and conflict 47

Philosophy, politics, and psychology50

The modern character 57

Hidden continuities 58

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 suddenlyof 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.

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 Europewhat 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 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 MotherChurch, 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.

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.

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.