From a review by John Gray of a new book by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, in the latest New Statesman magazine:
"In one sense, science begins with a form of
scepticism: mistrust of the senses. It aims to penetrate
surface appearances and expose underlying truths.” Modern
science received another stimulus from a tradition of
empirical thinking that emerged from Christian theology. St
Thomas Aquinas “was part of what can properly be called a
scientific movement – perhaps even a scientific revolution
or renaissance – in high medieval
Europe”. In Thomistic theology, God was bound by
natural laws; the study of the natural world was therefore a
religious obligation. Rational theology led to the idea that
science was the discovery of a rational order in the universe.
In the comic-book history of ideas that is promoted by
rationalists today, Isaac Newton is revered as one of the
authors of “the Scientific Revolution”. In fact, as Fernández-
Armesto points out, “Newton was a traditional figure: an
old-fashioned humanist and encyclopaedist, a biblical
scholar obsessed by sacred chronology – even, in his wilder
fantasies, a magus hunting down the secret of a systematic
universe, or an alchemist seeking the Philosopher’s Stone.”
It is not the first time Newton has been seen in this way.
John Maynard Keynes, in a lecture titled “Newton, the Man”
– meant to be given on the tercentenary of Newton’s birth in
1942, but delayed by the Second World War and delivered
after Keynes’s death by his brother in 1946 – wrote:
“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the
last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and
Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the
visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those
who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less
than 10,000 years ago.”
Having been the first person to have seen some of Newton’s
manuscripts that had been kept secret until they were sold
in 1936, Keynes had solid evidence for this claim. Yet it has
not dented the rationalist view of modern science as the
product of something called “the Renaissance” – supposedly
a movement that rejected mysticism and magic in favour of
reason. Fernández-Armesto is unusually caustic on this
subject: “If I had my way, we would drop the word
‘Renaissance’ from our historical lexicon. It was invented in
1855 by Jules Michelet, a French historian who wanted to
emphasise the recovery or ‘rebirth’ of ancient learning,
classical texts, and the artistic heritage of Greece and Rome
in the way people thought about and pictured the world.”
But Michelet saw the past in the terms of his own time,
when more pupils were learning Greek and Latin than ever
before. Following Michelet, we are told that the Renaissance
“dethroned scholasticism and inaugurated humanism”,
when actually Renaissance humanism grew out of medieval
scholastic humanism. We are taught that the Renaissance
was secular or pagan, but throughout the period to which
the term is commonly applied “the Church remained the
patron of most art and scholarship”. The popular idea of the
Renaissance, transmitted by legions of writers who inveigh
against medievalism and religion, is a phantom not a
historical reality.
"In one sense, science begins with a form of
scepticism: mistrust of the senses. It aims to penetrate
surface appearances and expose underlying truths.” Modern
science received another stimulus from a tradition of
empirical thinking that emerged from Christian theology. St
Thomas Aquinas “was part of what can properly be called a
scientific movement – perhaps even a scientific revolution
or renaissance – in high medieval
Europe”. In Thomistic theology, God was bound by
natural laws; the study of the natural world was therefore a
religious obligation. Rational theology led to the idea that
science was the discovery of a rational order in the universe.
In the comic-book history of ideas that is promoted by
rationalists today, Isaac Newton is revered as one of the
authors of “the Scientific Revolution”. In fact, as Fernández-
Armesto points out, “Newton was a traditional figure: an
old-fashioned humanist and encyclopaedist, a biblical
scholar obsessed by sacred chronology – even, in his wilder
fantasies, a magus hunting down the secret of a systematic
universe, or an alchemist seeking the Philosopher’s Stone.”
It is not the first time Newton has been seen in this way.
John Maynard Keynes, in a lecture titled “Newton, the Man”
– meant to be given on the tercentenary of Newton’s birth in
1942, but delayed by the Second World War and delivered
after Keynes’s death by his brother in 1946 – wrote:
“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the
last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and
Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the
visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those
who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less
than 10,000 years ago.”
Having been the first person to have seen some of Newton’s
manuscripts that had been kept secret until they were sold
in 1936, Keynes had solid evidence for this claim. Yet it has
not dented the rationalist view of modern science as the
product of something called “the Renaissance” – supposedly
a movement that rejected mysticism and magic in favour of
reason. Fernández-Armesto is unusually caustic on this
subject: “If I had my way, we would drop the word
‘Renaissance’ from our historical lexicon. It was invented in
1855 by Jules Michelet, a French historian who wanted to
emphasise the recovery or ‘rebirth’ of ancient learning,
classical texts, and the artistic heritage of Greece and Rome
in the way people thought about and pictured the world.”
But Michelet saw the past in the terms of his own time,
when more pupils were learning Greek and Latin than ever
before. Following Michelet, we are told that the Renaissance
“dethroned scholasticism and inaugurated humanism”,
when actually Renaissance humanism grew out of medieval
scholastic humanism. We are taught that the Renaissance
was secular or pagan, but throughout the period to which
the term is commonly applied “the Church remained the
patron of most art and scholarship”. The popular idea of the
Renaissance, transmitted by legions of writers who inveigh
against medievalism and religion, is a phantom not a
historical reality.
