Renaissance to the Age of Reason
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Darren Staloff, Ph.D. From the close of the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, Latin Christendom was fundamentally transformed. Philosophically, the epoch is opened by the age of the Renaissance, a rebirth of classical learning and art. The seventeenth-century Age of Reason was characterized by a thorough rejection of all received authorities and a growing awareness of the tensions between rational philosophic speculation and traditional religious beliefs. The seminal work of Sir Isaac Newton brings the Age of Reason to a close and marks the onset of the Age of Enlightenment.
Outline: I. From the close of the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, Latin Christendom was fundamentally transformed. The period marks the end of the feudal and medieval epochs and the birth of the modern age. A. The end of the fifteenth century marked the beginning of the age of discovery. The transfer and development of technologies revolutionize the age. B. The age of discovery, tapping into long-distance trade networks, heralded an age of commerce, both within Europe and between Europe and the rest of the inhabited world. C. Accompanying the commercial revolution (and a concurrent demographic revolution) was the emergence of the early territorial nation state. D. These centuries were also characterized by a series of intense confessional struggles between the Catholic and Protestant nations and churches.
II. Philosophically, the epoch is opened by the Renaissance, a rebirth of classical learning and art, a self-conscious rejection of religious tradition. A. The southern or Italian Renaissance was characterized by an unflinching embrace of classical humanism and was often hostile to Christian ethical, political, and scientific teachings. B. The northern Renaissance was far more pietistic and sought to unify classical learning with the social ethic of Christianity, while nonetheless rejecting the scholastic inheritance. 1. In his Utopia, Thomas More sought to show the fundamental affinity between the teachings of Christ and those of Plato in The Republic. 2. Erasmus critiqued the enthusiasm and dogmatism of the reformed scholastics and urged instead a more humanistic concentration on good works and a commitment to religious toleration. C. The scientific Renaissance rejected the presumed authority and sanction of scholasticism and its fusion of revealed dogma with Aristotelian metaphysics. 1. Francis Bacon argued instead for a modem science that would produce useful knowledge by means of induction and experiment. His goal was to make man the master of his world and, thus, the measure of all things. 2. Galileo claimed that nature is the book of God and that it is written in the language of mathematics. Science is a “priestcraft” that reveals to us God’s will.
III. The seventeenth century Age of Reason was characterized by a thorough rejection of all received authorities and a growing awareness of the tensions between rational philosophic speculation and traditional religious beliefs.
A. The Rationalists sought to construct philosophic systems on the basis of pure mathematical reason. 1. René Descartes formulated the central project of rationalism with his exposition on method, epistemology of clear and distinct ideas, and his metaphysical dualism of mind and body. 2. Hobbes’s primary concems were political, and he grounds his analysis on a realistic assessment of human psychology and motivation. The “laws of nature” he proffers are purportedly scientific truths that can be rationally demonstrated. 3. Spinoza embraced monism and, thus, reduced the entire cosmos to the realm of mechanical nature. The result of this thinking was an affirmation of determinacy that was both metaphysical and psychological. B. The fideists used skepticism to argued that because one could not have certain knowledge on a purely rational basis, one ought to resort to faith on the most central issues that face us. 1. Pierre Bayle dramatized the conflict between faith and reason to argue for the priority of faith. Ultimately, however, this proved a losing battle when many of his subsequent sympathetic readers would interpret his skepticism as irreligious in intent. 2. Blaise Pascal stressed the centrality of faith and God for the most basic and important questions in our lives. Questions of truth, mortality of the soul, and the existence of God give meaning and direction to our existence; the importance of these issues is highlighted in his famous wager.
IV. The seminal work of Sir Isaac Newton brings the Age of Reason to a close and marks the onset of the Age of Enlightenment. A. Newton firmly established the authority of modern mathematical science and its deductive-experimental method. B. Newton’s adoption of the principle of ‘~action at a distance” signaled the end of primary causes in favor of secondary causes as the mode of scientific investigation, as subsequent physicists would reject ultimate causes for more proximate and measurable ones. C. Despite his own pietism, Newton’s achievement would encourage many of his admirers to embrace natural religion (and deism in particular) over Christian revelation. Newton’s mechanics would give rise to the image of the universe as a vast clockwork designed by a deity who simply wound it up and left it to its own inexorable workings. Essential Reading: Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (New York: 1963). Frederick, S.J. Copleston, A Histon’ of Philosophy (New York: 1985), Book II, Vol. I, pp. 1—62. Questions to Consider: 1. If the Age of Reason dismissed all traditional authorities, what authority did it pose in their place? 2. What were the primary differences between the Renaissance of northern and southern Europe?
Anticlericalism: The belief that the religious, social, or political influence of the clergy is harmful and should be restrained. Apologetics: Defense by argument, most often of the Christian faith. Cartesian: Pertaining to Descartes or to his followers. Cogito ergo sum: From Latin, “1 think, therefore I am”— Descartes’s bedrock dictum of epistemology. Corporeal: Relating to matter and to physical properties. Deduction: Reasoning from the general to the particular or from premises to what follows logically from those premises. Disputatio: The model of teaching, examination, and argument that dominated medieval and early modem universities in Europe, based on authority and logical deduction from received authorities. Dualism: The philosophical opinion that reality and, in particular, the human being, is divided into two distinct and irreconcilable substances, body and soul. Fideism: A religious form of philosophical skepticism that views the uncertainty and weakness of natural human knowledge as an indication of the necessity of faith. Geocentric: A system of astronomy in which the earth is the center of the cosmos. Heliocentric: A system of astronomy in which the sun is the center of the cosmos. Humanism: The celebration of mankind and secular concerns, strongly associated with the Renaissance. Idealism: The philosophical doctrine that thought has as its object ideas rather than material objects. Idols of the Mind: For Francis Bacon, the fictions (“Tribe,” “Cave,” “Marketplace,” and “Theater”) created by language and custom. Induction: Reasoning from the particular to the general or from a number of common facts to a general conclusion. Jansenism: A movement in early modern European Catholicism that emphasized the texts of Saint Augustine that most stressed predestination and the need for personal and unmerited grace. Manichean heresy: The belief that the universe is governed by opposing and equal forces of good and evil. Materialism: The philosophical theory that matter is the only (or only knowable) substance in the universe. Monism: The belief that the universe is made of one substance. Neo-Pythagoreans: A group that developed early in the Christian era that combined elements of Jewish and Hellenistic philosophy in resurrecting some of the mystical tenets of Pythagoras. Objective being: In Cartesian philosophy, that which is represented by an idea. Philosophia Christi: Literally, “philosophy of Christ.” According. to Erasmus, the teachings of Christ that should serve as a model for reforming religious and secular abuses. Pyrrhonism: Named after the Greek skeptic Pyrrho, an extreme form of philosophical skepticism; best known for its doubt that even the proposition "Nothing can be known with certainty” could be known with certainty. Rationalism: The philosophical doctrine that all true knowledge is found by reason alone, independent of the senses. Renaissance: Literally, "a rebirth”; specifically, the rebirth of classical learning and art in Europe during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. Scholasticism: A system of thought arising from the fusion of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology that dominated the schools of Europe from the late fourteenth until the end of the seventeenth century. State of nature: Term of social contract theory that describes the human condition before the establishment of governmental authority. Utopia: From Latin, literally "no-place.” Thomas More’s fictional island kingdom of the same name was a critique of the status quo in the sixteenth century and has become synonymous with the notion of an ideal society that is unattainable. Bacon, Francis (1561—1626). Statesman and philosopher, Bacon undertook a fundamental revision of human inquiry and knowledge. The son of a powerful Tudor politician, Francis Bacon studied at Trinity College, Cambridge; became a banister; and rose to the position of Lord Chancellor of the kingdom, becoming the Baron Verulam and the Viscount of St. Albans. He was dismissed from power in 1621 for bribery, a common charge in the perilous world of Tudor-Stuart politics, and spent the final years of his life working on his great philosophical project, the 1n~tau ratio Magna, of which one vital part, the Novurn Organum, became his most influential legacy. Bayle, Pierre (1647—1706). Erudite scholar, religious controversialist, and ardent Huguenot (French Calvinist), Bayle shook the learned world of the late seventeenth century with his critique of intellectual arrogance. superstition, and religious intolerance. After a brief conversion to Catholicism, Pierre Bayle returned to his Calvinist origins and taught philosophy at the Protestant Academy of Sedan; he later taught philosophy and history to the growing number of persecuted Huguenots who took refuge there. Bayle feuded with the Huguenot leader, Pierre Jurieu, on matters of political theology, and was stripped of his professorship in 1693. He served as editor of a leading journal of the European learned world, wrote major works on tolerance and religious belief, and authored a celebrated Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697, the first of many editions). Descartes, René (1596—1650). Educated first by the Jesuits, then in law in France, Descartes became the most influential Continental philosopher of the seventeenth century. Between 1618 and 1628, he traveled and studied throughout Europe while on military service, writing and publishing foundational works of mathematics and philosophy. In 1628, he moved to Holland, where censorship was far less severe than in his native France. He visited Paris in 1647 and in 1648 met with leading European philosophers of his age. A series of works published between 1637 and 1649—Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy, Principles of Philosophy, and Treatise on the Passions—earned him ardent disciples, and his system of philosophy soon challenged Aristotle’s for dominance among European thinkers. Posthumously published works only added to his fame. He was attacked bitterly for his challenges to the Aristotelian system, but his defenders and acolytes included both eminent theologians and natural philosophers. Erasmus (1466?—1536). Dutch humanist, author, ordained priest. Desiderius Erasmus was a renowned scholar who counted among his friends Sir Thomas More and Henry VIII. He translated much of the Bible and the writings of the early church fathers into Latin. His best-known books include Manual of the Christian Knight, Adages, and especially, The Praise of Folly. An advocate of church reform, Erasmus earned the bitter opposition of Martin Luther, whose doctrine of predestination he had vehemently criticized. Galilei, Galileo (1564—1642). Mathematician, astronomer, inventor, and physicist, Galileo both laid the foundations of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and polemicized with astute effectiveness against the prevailing Aristotelian scholastic philosophy. In 1589, he became a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Pisa and in 1592, he was awarded a chair in mathematics at the University of Padua, a position that he held for eighteen years. His development of an effective astronomical telescope in 1609 and his telescopic discoveries, published in 1610, made him a European celebrity. An early defender of the Copernican heliocentric theory, he was charged with heresy and theological error in 1633, forced to recant his Copernicanism, and placed under house arrest on his own estate, where he died in 1642. Although forbidden from writing during his arrest, he completed and smuggled out to the public his foundational work on the new physics. Hobbes, Thomas (1588—1679). Born only 68 years after Machiavelli wrote The Prince, Hobbes followed Machiavelli, especially in his break with Plato’s idealism and frank endorsement of realism in politics. Hobbes, like Plato and Machiavelli, faced massive political crisis in his time and, like them both, his remedy was based on a diagnosis of human nature and a prescription of strong leadership. Born in a small town in southwest England at a time when the country was being threatened by invasion from the Spanish Armada, Hobbes said that his mother unknowingly gave birth to twins: himself and fear. Educated at Oxford and influenced by Sir Francis Bacon (156 1—1626), Hobbes translated Thucydides in 1628 to recommend its lessons to seventeenth-century England and completed his masterpiece, The Leviathan, in 165 1. Although Hobbes saw himself as more than a political theorist, this is how he is seen today. Machiavelli, Niccolo (1469—1527). Born in Florence into an impoverished branch of a distinguished family, Machiavelli became a major figure in Renaissance political philosophy. As a Florentine diplomat, he learned about power politics and met many of the figures about whom he subsequently wrote— among them Cesare Borgia, Pope Julius If, and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I. When the Medici took power in Florence in 1512, Machiavelli was dismissed from his post and withdrew to his home in the countryside. In 1513, he was briefly imprisoned and tortured for his alleged role in a conspiracy against the Medici. More, Thomas (1478—1535). More was educated at Oxford University and subsequently became a successful London lawyer and a diplomat in the court of Henry VIII. After serving the king in a number of important governmental positions, he was appointed Lord Chancellor in 1529. More resigned this position in 1532 and was soon thereafter imprisoned in the Tower of London for refusing to swear allegiance to Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. Beheaded in 1535, More died a celebrated martyr in the Roman Catholic Church. Newton, Isaac (1642—1727). Newton was born at Woolsthorpe. England, and attended Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1664, the university was forced to close temporarily because of the plague, and Newton returned home to Woolsthorpe where, during the following eighteen months, he made his revolutionary discoveries in gravitation, calculus, and the composition of light. At the urging of the astronomer Edmund Halley, Newton published his theories regarding gravity and other subjects in his famous Principia in 1687. Newton was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and president of the Royal Society from 1703 until his death in 1727. Although a pious man, he was also deeply interested in alchemy and numerology, writing many more pages on these pseudoscientific subjects than on his scientific and mathematical insights. Newton was very sensitive to criticism, and he engaged in numerous intellectual quarrels; the most famous of these was his debate with Leibniz over which of them had been the first to invent the calculus. Pascal, Blaise (1623—1662). Pascal was a child prodigy in mathematics, but as a young man, he abandoned, with periods of activity interspersed, a breathtaking scientific career to devote himself primarily to the religious life, including religious controversies and apologetics. In mathematics and science, he won international acclaim for his work on cycloid curves, barometrics, geometry, hydrodynamics, and the mechanics of calculation. After an intense conversion to Jansenism, he lived a generally ascetic and devout life, writing an immensely successful Augustinian criticism of Jesuit casuistry, Les Provinciales (The Provincial Letters), and an unfinished apologia of Christianity, published posthumously as his Pensees, a work of immediate and enduring influence and popularity. Spinoza, Baruch (1632—1677). Born in Amsterdam of Jewish parents who had fled the Portuguese Inquisition, Spinoza was one of the preeminent philosophers of the seventeenth century. He was educated at the Rabbinical School, where he studied Hebrew, the Old Testament, the Talmud, and the works of Maimonides. René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes. In 1656, Spinoza was excommunicated from the orthodox Jewish community in Amsterdam for expressing doubts about orthodox Judaism. Largely cut off from the Jewish community in Holland, he spent the rest of his life in several Dutch towns, grinding lenses and developing his philosophy. At age forty, he was offered but declined a chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, preferring his quiet life in Holland. Spinoza died of tuberculosis, his illness likely worsened by the dust from grinding lenses.
Machiavelli and the Origins of Political Science Darren Staloff, Ph.D. Scope: As a premier work of political realism, Machiavelli’s The Prince marks a sharp departure from the classical idealist tradition associated with Plato. The book’s “hero,” Cesare Borgia, is a cold-hearted, unscrupulous, calculating despot. The word “Machiavellian” has come to refer to a sinister, cunning person who ruthlessly pursues personal power in the manner described in The Prince. This lecture will explain Machiavelli’s purposes in writing The Prince and outline his practical advice for gaining and keeping political power. Outline I. The Prince, by Machiavelli (1467—1527), represents the rebirth of the classical tradition of empirical political speculation. It is a practical work on how to acquire, secure, hold, and improve princely power. Its stark realism and proto-nationalism prefigure political thinking and practice in the centuries that have followed. II. All principalities are either based on heredity or are newly founded. The former are easy to maintain as long as tradition is respected. The latter, however, are somewhat more difficult to control, and the precise difficulty in such a situation depends on certain fundamental circumstances. A. If the kingdom has the same culture and language as the prince, he need simply eliminate all the members of the old royal family. B. A new kingdom of a different language and culture is much more difficult to hold and requires the exercise of skill to maintain power. The prince should reside in the new territory, plant colonies at strategic locations in the new principality, and side with his less powerful neighbors against his more powerful rivals, similar to Rome’s expansion into Sicily.
III. All principalities are governed with the aid of either appointed ministers or hereditary barons. The prince will always have more power in the former than in the latter. A. Regimes with ministers are difficult to conquer but easy to hold, as with Alexander’s conquest of Persia. B. Regimes with barons are easy to conquer because they are decentralized, but they’re difficult to hold.
IV. Free cities are extremely difficult to conquer and hold because of their traditions of independence and liberty. Once acquired, the prince can either despoil the city, reside there himself, or give the city autonomy under a friendly local elite and take tribute.
V. Private citizens who rise to become princes do so either through their own efforts and abilities or through fortune or the efforts of others. A. The former group finds it difficult to acquire new possessions because of the new rules they must impose. Once obtained and reformed, however, these territories are easy to hold. B. Those who become princes through fortune or the efforts of others have an easy ascent to power but a tough time holding onto it, dependent as they are on their benefactors, as in the case of Cesare Borgia.
VI. Some princes rise to power through villainy, while others are elevated to the position by fellow citizens. A. In the case of the villainous prince, the prudent ruler will commit all acts of cruelty at once, softening his rule afterwards, again, as in the case of Borgia. B. A prince elevated by his fellow citizens will need to play the nobles against the people. It’s wiser to side with the people than with the elite. The prince should also make sure that the people always need him.
VII. In addition to good laws, the basic foundation of any regime is a sound military. A. The prince must study the military arts and their historical practice. B. Armies are made of mercenaries, auxiliaries (the forces of allied nations), or a national militia. The first two are rife with deficiencies. The militia, more trustworthy, is the only safe form of army.
VIII. It is better for a prince to have the reputation for niggardliness than to be too liberal with his resources.
IX. It is sometimes better to show cruelty than clemency. A. It is always better to be feared than loved, because love is fickle, but fear is constant. B. Fear need not and should not bring hatred. The key to avoiding hatred is to never take the property of citizens.
X. The prince should have the reputation for honesty, integrity, and religion, but not always the reality. Noble force and deceitful cunning must sometimes be used. For princes, the end justifies the mean.
Essential Reading: Niccolo Machiavelli. The Prince (Hackett, 1995). Supplementary Reading: Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: 1972), pp. 504—512. Frederick, S.J. Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Book I, Vol. III (Image Books, 1985), pp. 3 15—320. Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth Century Florence (New York: 1984). Hanna Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli (Berkeley, 1984). J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: 1984). Questions to Consider: 1. What does Machiavelli regard as the main duty of a prince? What must the prince do to fulfill this duty? 2. How can one reconcile Machiavelli’s praise of republicanism in The Discourses with his championing of monarchical rule in The Prince? Darren Staloff, Ph.D. Scope: Thomas More’s Utopia is a Christian-humanist view of an ideal society. More offers this vision not only as a mental ideal, but also as one that humans can strive to create in this world. The text is a self-conscious effort by More to offer his readers a Christianization of Plato’s Republic. This lecture will review the features and significance of More’s ideal system, highlighting its similarities to, and divergences from, Plato’s utopia. Outline I. Sir Thomas More was a Renaissance man, a Christian saint known for his piety, devotion, and integrity; beheaded for not acknowledging Henry Viii’s rule of the English church; a member of Parliament, a diplomat, an ambassador, and Lord Chancellor of England. He was also a man of great learning and wit. Associated with the northern Renaissance, he tried to wed the Christian ethos with ancient wisdom. II. More’s book, Utopia, is the last great Christian synthesis of the Renaissance. A. The Christian aspect of the synthesis is Christ’s gospel of caring for the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden. B. The Platonic, Republican tradition is the Greek aspect of the synthesis. C. More wrote the Utopia with a comedic tone, allowing him to speak his truth while telling his deeper story esoterically.
III. Utopia takes the form of a dialogue led by a Socratic wise man, Raphael. The first book sets the stage for all that is to follow, and the second book is an exposition of the communal, social, and political arrangements of the Utopians.
IV. Book 11 details the actual workings of the Utopian society. A. Utopia was very similar to England in its physical topography, which serves to highlight the idea that this was not just a ~Utopian scheme,” but a legitimate form of Christian reconstruction. B. Utopian society is characterized by the communal ownership of property. 1. All property in Utopia was owned by the community and all production, except agriculture, was located in the household. 2. Trades were assigned on the basis of aptitude and choice, and the household was the locus of all production. All houses were maintained publicly, without locks. 3. Utopians treasured leisure—not for the sake of idleness, but to spend their time in hobbies and the pursuit of various avenues of self-improvement. 4. Utopians don’t perform some tasks, such as butchering animals, for which they have slaves. 5. Marriage was for love, not by arrangement. C. The politics of Utopia were based on a combination of English parliamentary government and Platonic Republicanism. 1. Political issues were never spoken of outside of chambers, and no legislation could be discussed on the day it was introduced. Thus were factions and negotiation prevented. 2. Utopia had an elected parliament with a prince elected for life. The parliament’s function was to allocate goods and labor to the individual towns, as well as to set foreign policy and create new colonies. The parliament didn’t pass laws, because society, lacking private property, didn’t need them. 3. Teachers, priests, and rulers were chosen from the intellectual class. 4. Commerce was important for acquiring iron and precious metals. 5. Utopians fought wars for only three reasons: to defend their territory, to defend the territory of an ally, or to liberate oppressed people. They sign no treaties with their allies but are capable of deviousness when fighting wars. 6. Everyone, including women, is trained for combat in case Utopia must be defended, but the Utopians leave the spoils of war to their allies. They extend quarter to the noncombatants of their enemy-states. D. Utopian culture combined the best of the ancient and Christian traditions. 1. Utopians are nonsectarian monotheists who practice religious toleration. 2. Utopian moral theory is “eudaemonic”—or happiness-oriented—and informed by a “higher” hedonism, much as in the Greek tradition of Epicurus. Pleasures don’t include gambling, fine clothing, excessive intake of food and alcohol, and the like. 3. The highest pleasures are those that center on the contemplation of a higher truth and the realization of a life well lived. Essential Reading: Thomas More, Utopia (New York: 1965). Supplementary Reading: Frederick, S.J. Copleston, A History of Philosophy (New York: 1985), Book I, Vol. III, pp. 320—322. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: 1972), pp. 512—522. Jack H. Hexter, More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (Greenwood, 1952). Edward I. Surtz, The Praise of Pleasure: Philosophy Education, and Communism in More’s ‘Utopia” (Cambridge, MA: 1957). Karl Kautsky, Thomas More and His Utopia (Humanities, 1980). Questions to Consider: 1. Compare and contrast the governments of More’s utopia and Plato’s ideal republic. 2. How similar is More’s moral eudaemonism to that of the classical Greeks?
Erasmus
Against Enthusiasm Jeremy Adams, Ph.D. This lecture examines the commitment of Erasmus, the most outstanding Christian humanist of the northern Renaissance, to oppose excessive enthusiasm in any religious or intellectual matter. This distinctive feature of his work, his message, and his enduring tradition sprang from the circumstances of his early life and education and marked most of his copious and profitable literary output. It expressed itself most memorably in his famous satire, The Praise of Folly, and in a painful exchange of letters between himself and Martin Luther over the place of free will in human salvation. Generally rejected by most parties to the ferocious religious controversies of the next century and more, Erasmus has emerged again as a compelling voice of reasoned culture. Outline:
I. Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1469?—1536) was the outstanding Christian humanist of the northern Renaissance. He was a model of disciplined scholarship, literary elegance, refined friendship, severe personal piety, and tolerant awareness of the need to avoid conflict in resolving issues as likely to wound spirits and shed blood as to find and establish truth. He spent his life fighting ignorance and superstition, but he came to find enthusiasm almost as dangerous.
II. Erasmus’s model life.
A. Erasmus was the illegitimate son of a rural priest who overcame the embarrassment of his origins by becoming a youth of self-restraint and deep study.
B. Erasmus’s reputation as a man of letters was unsurpassed in western Europe during his lifetime. His complete works comprise 150 volumes of moderate size.
C. Perhaps the most readable of Erasmus’s works today is The Praise of Folly (Encontium Moriae in its original punning title; Erasmus dedicated it to his good friend Thomas More, who loved jokes). It was published in Paris in 1511.
III. Erasmus’s distrust of enthusiasm was central to his thought and literary output.
A. Throughout his work, Erasmus attacked the superstition that had encrusted the message of the Gospel.
B. When Martin Luther first attacked the indulgence trade in 1517, Erasmus was in favor of his protests. He also supported Luther’s attack on the general corruption of the papacy and his insistence on reading the Bible directly rather than listening to scholastic interpretations of Scriptural doctrine. C. But when Luther developed a stringent interpretation of the doctrine of predestination, denying any role to the freedom of the human will—a corollary about which Luther was both logical and enthusiastic—Erasmus could not go that far.
IV. Erasmus died a dozen years after he had parted ways with the enthusiastic reformer Luther. He died in 1536, the year the young John Calvin published his Institutes of the Christian Religion, perhaps the classic statement of Protestant Christianity with predestination as its cornerstone—not a book Erasmus would have liked. He was not unhappy to die, having outlived the humane Renaissance, the most optimistic phase of which he had embodied with such sober brilliance. A. Erasmus’s legacy lived on, reaching a second peak in the ecumenical movement of twentieth-century Christianity—Christian, not secular, humanism. B. Before that, it inspired the most tolerant wings of western Europe’s established national churches, such as the exceptional religious tolerance of the established Dutch Protestant church and of Polish Catholicism until the late eighteenth century. In England, it inspired the “low-church (and High-Church) latitudinarianism” of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglicanism. C. In a more secular vein, Erasmus’s condemnation of enthusiasm, even in what might seem a good and idealistic cause, inspired Edmund Burke’s defense of tradition and of what seemed irrational "prejudice” during the French Revolution. Supplementary Reading: Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, translated by Hoyt Hudson (Princeton, 1941). Johan Huizinga, Erasmus, many editions and several translations since 1924, translated by F. Hopman. The most recent edition is by Phaidon, 1995. Roland Bainton, Erasmus of Christendom (New York: 1969), paperback, 1988. George Faludy, Erasmus of Rotterda,n (London: 1970). Questions to Consider: 1. “Enthusiasm” is a very positive word in twentieth-century American English. Do you understand Erasmus’s sense of its potential dangers? 2. Is there an inherent contradiction between humanism and enthusiasm?
Galileo and the New Astronom Alan Kors, Ph.D.
Scope: Astronomy, focused on the immutable heavens, was an eminent science in
the seventeenth century, and it is not accidental that so much of the challenge
to scholasticism began in that field of inquiry. The astronomy adopted by the
Aristotelian scholastics was that of Claudius Ptolemy (second century AD), which
fit wonderfully with their system. Among the challenges to Aristotelianism in
the early modern age was neoPythagorean thought, which viewed the universe in
terms of mathematics and geometry, not in terms of Aristotelian “qualities,” and
saw the sun as an emblem of God’s divinity. Copernicus, in the sixteenth century, and Johannes Kepler (1571— 1630), in the seventeenth, sought to create a more harmonious view of the heavens by placing the sun at the center of the system. Kepler, driven by neo-Pythagorean passions and heir to better data than his predecessors about the heavenly bodies, devised three laws of planetary motion that he believed disclosed God’s mathematical order in the universe. Galileo (1564—1642) did not accept Kepler’s laws (which would not be proven until Newton), but he did polemicize for the heliocentric astronomy and for a quantitative rather than qualitative view of nature. He castigated the scholastics for their blind adherence to human books rather than an inquiry into God’s book of nature; he criticized the use of Scripture as a scientific textbook; and he urged observation, reason, and mathematical proofs, all dealing with the quantities of nature, as the means to know the creation. Kepler and Galileo represent a great enthusiasm of the seventeenth-century mind, the belief that they were observing God’s actual work with understanding for the first time. Galileo’s demanding methodology in the sciences and his struggle against those Aristotelians who controlled offices of censorship and philosophical conformity in the church became emblems and foundations of the attempt at a rigorous and free natural philosophy. Outline I. The state of astronomy in scholastic thought derived from the ancient world. A. The astronomy that the Aristotelian scholastics had adopted was that of the Greek astronomer Ptolemy, which seemed wonderfully consistent with their philosophical and theological systems. B. Ptolemaic astronomy held that the earth was at the center of the universe. The moon, planets, sun, and an orb of fixed stars revolved around the earth in perfect circular motion. C. The corrupt, changing world existed below the moon; above the moon were the unchanging heavens.
II. Among the intellectual movements that arose to challenge Aristotelian scholasticism was neo-Pythagorean thought. Where the scholastics viewed God’s creation in terms of perfections and purposes, the neo-Pythagoreans viewed it in terms of mathematics and geometry.
A. The worldview of Aristotelian scholasticism was qualitative, not quantitative, in its conception of the universe and of natural phenomena; it was essentialistic and teleological in its view of motion. B. For the neo-Pythagoreans, the divine mind, God, expressed itself in the order, harmonies, and ratios of the creation. Reality emanated from the Divinity itself and was numerical and geometrical. C. The Pythagoreans worshipped the sun; neo-Pythagoreans saw the sun, a luminous perfect circle, as an emblem of the Divinity.
III. The work of Joharmes Kepler reveals both the fusion of neo-Pythagorean number mysticism and natural philosophy, on the one hand, and, on the other, the fruitfulness of a quantitative science.
A. Copernicus’s unproven heliocentric hypothesis deeply affected Kepler. B. Kepler believed that with the sun at the rightful center of the universe, the quantitative and geometrical harmonies and ratios of God’s creation would be disclosed. C. Using the work of astronomer Tyco Brahe, Kepler went through an ordeal of mathematical hard labor to arrive at his first two laws of planetary motion: I. The planets, including the earth, described elliptic, not circular, orbits around the sun. 2. The line joining a planet to the sun—the radial vector—swept out equal areas in equal times. D. Kepler loathed the “imperfect” ellipses. For ten more years, Kepler engaged in a computational struggle to find God’s harmony in this universe of ellipses. In 1619, he found it in his third law of planetary motion: the square of the period of revolution of a planet is proportional to the cube of its average distance from the sun. E. The glory of the divine mind was evident in the creation, maintained Kepler. "I let myself go in divine rage,” he wrote in On the Harmony of the World, utterly confident in what he had accomplished.
IV. Galileo’s quantitative reality followed from Kepler’s work, even as it offered an alternative.
A. The mathematician Galileo, Kepler’s admirer and fellow astronomer, could not accept Kepler’s laws. They seemed too speculative to him, but he shared Kepler’s sense that nature was to be understood quantitatively, not in terms of perfections or purposes. 1. Galileo developed a method: induction from observation, deduction of hypothesis, experiment, and compelling demonstration of conclusions. 2. Galileo’s use of the telescope was revolutionary: he urged the power of observation and mathematical proof over the presumptive authority of tradition. B. Galileo’s most revolutionary assault upon Aristotelian scholasticism was not his Copernican astronomy—although this would get him in such great difficulty—but his rejection of qualitative perfections and his distinction between secondary versus primary qualities. 1. Secondary qualities, in which category he placed almost all the Aristotelian qualities, were not real in the objects thus described but depended on human perception (e.g., sweetness and color). 2. Primary qualities defined what truly existed apart from perception, the qualities of objects themselves, the reality of God’s natural creation. These were all quantitative: dimension, shape, in short, the measurable. 3. What scholastics called “perfections” were, for Galileo, human projections upon a natural world that was quantity or mass in motion, a world to be understood in terms of mathematical law. 4. Empirical observation, mathematical ordering, and mathematical testing led to laws of motion. Motion described the relationship of bodies to time and distance; it did not express the perfections or purposes of things.
V. Galileo struggled with the Aristotelians.
A. Galileo argued explicitly against Aristotle and against the principle of intellectual authority. Facts are determined by nature, not by books or men—not even by the pope. Galileo insisted, however, reminding scholastics of Aristotle’s commitment to induction, that "if Aristotle were here today, he would agree with me.” He turned the scholastics’ theory of knowledge against them. B. With critics of the new astronomy insisting that Copernican hypotheses were contradicted by Scripture, Galileo distinguished between the two revelations from God: his book of nature, our source of knowledge about the creation, and his book of Scripture, our source of knowledge about salvation and things beyond nature. C. For Galileo, our senses, intellect, reason, and mathematical proofs are from God. Experience and mathematical logic were irrefutable because God’s creation is the ultimate test. To read the book of nature, he wrote, one must know the language of line and geometry and number. D. The prosecution of Galileo affected both the substance and symbol of the new science. 1. The effect on Descartes was great. Learning about the condemnation of Galileo, he stopped working on one book that wasn’t published until after his death. 2. Thus was created the symbolic Galileo, the "martyr” of science. E. The seventeenth-century mind knew great excitement: seventeenth-century authors, rejecting authority, believed that for the first time, with proper method, the human mind was looking on God’s work with understanding. Essential Reading: Galileo Galilei, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, translated and edited by Stillman Drake (New York: 1957), particularly The Starry Messenger, The Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, and The Assayer. Supplementary Reading: Galileo, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Questions to Consider: 1. Modern scientists often believe that seventeenth-century scientists were practical experimentalists just as they themselves are today. How different are Kepler and Galileo from modern scientists in their thought and work? 2. What changes in a view of nature when one moves from qualitative to quantitative description’?
Bacon’s New Organon and the New Science Alan Kors, Ph.D. Scope: From the end of the sixteenth century until his death, Francis Bacon (156 1—1626), politician and philosopher, undertook to criticize the Western intellectual inheritance, to transform the human quest for knowledge, and to alter the uses of power over the forces of nature on which our suffering or well-being depended. For Bacon, the causes of error were many (the Idols of the Mind) and separated us from understanding the world that God had created. The key to overcoming error was rightful method, which for Bacon meant induction from the particulars of nature to general principles that would be tested experimentally. Nature, not the errant mind, should determine the truth or falsity of our beliefs. Unable to refute Aristotelianism on its own terms, he appealed to the charity and power inherent in his model and redefinition of knowledge and to the advantages to both faith and natural philosophy if each were restricted to its proper sphere. His most essential work, The New Organon, argued that such an inductive, experimental science, free from the dead weight of the past, could yield a new kind of knowledge that would be dynamic, cumulative, and useful. His ultimate vision was that human beings, if governed by charity, could use knowledge to alter their relationship to nature and society on behalf of “the effecting of all things possible.” Outline I. Bacon’s dissatisfaction with tradition explains much of his subsequent work. A. Francis Bacon’s life reflected the changes occurring in the audience of higher education. He entered Cambridge University at the end of the sixteenth century, when the children of aristocrats and merchants were receiving the same education as that once reserved for clerics. B. Bacon encountered the traditional Aristotelian education, but brimming with worldly ambitions and concerns. A contemporary of his wrote that at Cambridge, Bacon “first fell into the dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle.. .finding it a philosophy only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of mankind.”
II. In the early seventeenth century, Bacon began his momentous assault on the traditional philosophies.
A. Bacon argued, in a series of works, that the European philosophical tradition stood condemned on a number of grounds:
B. For Bacon, European thought had become enslaved to the systems of five or
six III. Bacon, in two fundamental ways, sought to win readers to his redefinition of the goals of human knowledge. A. New kinds and methods of knowledge would make possible an expansion of human empire over the phenomena on which our suffering or well-being depend. B. He believed he could convince his audience that the Christian ethic entails knowledge in the service of charity, which means that the fruits of knowledge must permit one to enhance the condition of one’s fellow creatures, not merely to be used for enhancing one’s fame and reputation. Let the latter kind of knowledge, he wrote, “be set at nought.” IV. The New Organon was an audacious challenge to Aristotle’s Organon. A. Bacon’s most essential work was The New Organon, the new instrument of method for acquiring useful knowledge. He reversed the model of received tradition—the ancients were children, he argued, on whose work we build with added experience. The New Organon had four essential and profoundly influential themes: 1. Knowledge is human power. Knowledge is the ability to navigate, to grow crops, to avoid human starvation. 2. Natural philosophy (science) must be separated from theology. Natural philosophers or theologians should not interfere in each other’s disciplines. 3. The method of induction, from particulars to generalizations, is tested by experiment. The question is not what follows from a given axiom but from observing the particulars of the world. 4. Science is a dynamic, cooperative, cumulative enterprise. Science is always self-correcting. B. Bacon cautioned Christians against worshiping false “Idols of the Mind” rather than God’s actual creations. 1. The Idols of the Tribe are inherent in human nature: impatience rather than caution. 2. The Idols of the Cave are the particular biases of the individual man, which derive from education, psychology, need. 3. The Idols of the Marketplace are the ambiguity of words, the currency by which knowledge is traded. 4. The Idols of the Theater, our received philosophical tradition, is worshipped under the notion of Authority, whether Aristotle, Pliny, or Galen. V. In the New Atlantis, Bacon treats the place of natural knowledge in society. A. In Bacon’s portrait of utopia, human beings govern their relationship to nature and society on behalf of their own interest in human well-being. B. The instrument of mankind’s betterment was knowledge methodically drawn from patient observation and experiment “to the [end of] effecting all things possible.”
Essential Reading: Francis Bacon, Novum Organunt, translated and edited by Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: 1994), Introduction and Book One.
Supplementary Reading: Francis Bacon, The Complete Essays of Francis Bacon, including The New Atlantis, edited by Henry LeRoy Finch (New York: 1963).
Questions to Consider: 1. Why, for Bacon, is fundamental philosophy so essential to charity? 2. When later scientists, including Newton, describe themselves as “Baconian,” what parts of his system did they take or not take as their own?
Descarte - The Method of Modern
Philosophy Alan Kors, Ph.D. Scope: From (at least) the time of Plato, it has been a dream of Western philosophy to know things as they truly are, in and of themselves, undistorted by the human senses, passions, and perspective. In the seventeenth century, Descartes embodied that dream and created a coherent philosophical system that became, on the Continent, the major challenge to the scholastic hegemony, arousing great enthusiasms and projects. Descartes sought to demonstrate that we could establish a criterion of truth and, with it, know with certainty the real nature and the real causes of things. For his legions of disciples, Descartes’s work accomplished this and more. It freed philosophy from authority and from the Aristotelians; it explained the nature of ideas, knowledge, and the source of error; it refuted the skeptics who denied the possibility of certainty; and it “proved” God and the immortality of the soul. The work of Descartes also demonstrated that the physical world was matter in motion according to the laws of mechanics, making possible a rigorous new quantitative science of all physical reality, and established the absolute distinction between body and mind, that is, between matter and spirit. In all of these things, Descartes’s thinking challenged scholasticism in the most fundamental ways and altered the nature and problems of Western philosophy and science. Dramatically, it bequeathed to contemporaries a categorical dualism: the world divided into mind or body, mental or physical domains. That legacy, “the mind-body problem,” has been one of the most enduring aspects of post-Cartesian Western philosophy and thought. Outline I. René Descartes sought to reconstruct all of human knowledge. His work, Cartesian philosophy (from the Latin, Cartesius, of his name), became the great challenge to Aristotelian scholasticism in the seventeenth century, above all on the Continent. A. Descartes spoke to the vision of ultimate philosophy: Plato’s cave (knowing things in themselves, as they really are). In Plato, the philosopher is the sole one to step outside the cave and sees things as they really are. B. Descartes’s dream was to gain a perfect knowledge of being and of causes, the knowledge of why and how things happen.
C. Descartes’s appeal crossed the entire spectrum of European interests, from mechanistic scientists to mystical theologians.
II. The Cartesian drama presents a dilemma: Why does a thinker come to define the options of an intellectual age?
A. First, many vital or troubling issues of the period converge in Descartes’s work. B. The Cartesian response to five primary convergences, in particular, aroused great enthusiasm: 1. The epistemological crises of the Reformation—the supreme authority of the Church had been questioned. 2. The revival and appeal of classical skepticism—skepticism argues that it is impossible for the human mind to know anything with certainty. 3. The specter of libertinism and the new Pyrrhonism—the latter school maintained that even uncertainty couldn’t be claimed with certainty. 4. The neo-Pythagorean revival—the great concern for seeing the quantitative truth of nature. 5. The assault on Aristotle and all Aristotelian authority.
III. Descartes’s Meditations was a quest for non-Aristotelian certainty. A. The hyperbolic doubt of Descartes goes beyond even the skeptics and their critics. He argues that we can’t even distinguish between states of dreaming and waking. B. The “cogito ergo sum” is a clear (self-evident) and distinct (independent) idea. “I think therefore I am” is indubitable. C. Descartes needs to prove God and soul to satisfy Christian demands: to fix certainty; to demonstrate the system. D. A body might be illusion, but thought exists as something independent of matter—from it derives the soul, the very essence of which is thought. E. Descartes offers two proofs of God on the metaphysical side. 1. The first is an argument from objective cause: the idea of a perfect being could only come from an infinitely perfect being. 2. The second is an argument from necessity: a perfect being must have existence in order to be perfect. Nonexistence would be a contradiction in terms for such a being.
IV. Descartes’s physics caused at least as much intellectual excitement as his metaphysics. A. Descartes’s distinction between the essences of soul and body leads to Cartesian dualism: immaterial soul and material body. B. The essence of soul is thought; the essence of body is extension in height, width, and breadth. C. What can be known about extension? Descartes reached basically the same conclusion that Galileo did: the physical world is dimension, motion, and the mechanisms of matter touching and communicating force to matter. D. Given God’s will, Descartes proposed fixed mechanical laws of motion, from which he deduced inertia. The task of a new science was to discover the laws, mechanisms, and effects of matter in motion.
V. The Cartesian legacy is profound. A. In dualism, God has created soul and body, mind and matter. B. This dualism leads to natural mechanism and materialism. C. But this split reveals the mind-body problem, a difficulty that will haunt Descartes, his followers, and all of Western philosophy. D. Cartesians led the assault on superstition and belief in witchcraft.
VI. In conclusion, we consider the mixed bequest of Descartes. A. Per Descartes, how do we explain the interaction of spirit and matter in human life’? Or the Eucharist? Or the concept of miracle—if everything physical happens by natural causes’? B. The implications for authority—Aristotle——and the concept of natural knowledge were extraordinary, overturning much of the Greek tradition. C. Descartes created the mind-body problem and attempted to resolve it. I. Descartes’s “solution,” the pineal gland, attracted few adherents. 2. Idealism, based on the premise that matter doesn’t exist, was one resulting school. 3. Materialism, the idea that all men |