By Michael Sauter
During the early modern period, Europe suffered a series of blows to the worldview that it had inherited in from the middle ages. In 1492, as you know, an Italian named Christopher Columbus led a small fleet of ships across the Atlantic in search of India and encountered, unexpectedly, lands that the ancients had never seen and peoples that God seemed to have forgotten. In 1543, as I mentioned in a previous lecture on science, Nicolaus Copernicus published his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, which provided the first sustained discussion of a heliocentric model for the universe since ancient times. Confronted not only with peoples who should not have been where they, in fact, were and with a universe that suddenly seemed distant and cold, Europeans had to find new ways to explain the world they lived in. This became the fundamental impetus behind modern science.
In today’s discussion I will explore the institutional and intellectual contexts that gave form to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In the last lecture on science, we looked at science’s renaissance origins. I noted then that it was to understand the institutional contexts in which science was practiced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. During this period science was closely attached to courts and early-modern universities. As Europe entered the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, this institutional context changed dramatically, as scientific academies appeared that not only sponsored research but also published their findings for all to read. Science became a public matter, and the implications of the latest research became the stuff of general discussion. Thus, what you should note, here, is that there are important connections between the world of science and the print public sphere that I discussed in the lecture on the Enlightenment and Revolution.
Before I consider science’s new institutional contexts, however, I want to step back and look at some general trends that encouraged new ways of thinking about science especially after 1650. I will pay particular attention to England here, but I use it only as a model for what are greater European trends.
In England, science must be understood through the decline of Puritanism. The Puritan Revolution from 1640 to 1660 delegitimized the religious and moral instinct in English public life, leaving most people just plain tired of conflict. In this context, Charles II was the perfect king. Both a libertine and a skeptic, he believed in nothing too fervently and pursued nothing with too much vigor, which gave the English intellectual classes the freedom to find new sources of stability. So while Charles played, science became England’s most important source of intellectual and political stability. Toward the end of Charles’ reign, as he became more autocratic, new conceptions of political authority predominated.
England also benefited greatly from the increase in economic productivity through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was due, in part, to English successes overseas, but it was also rooted in the sale of monastic properties to the new English gentry class. The gentry brought new attitudes to property management that emphasized constant increases in production. This trend created a market dedicated to common goods rather than to luxuries, which were common on the Continent.
The appearance of a bourgeois market economy, especially in England, sparked a general interest in quantification. As you know, you cannot have science without numbers, and England’s rise as a naval power made numbers a matter of public discussion. An example is the debate in England during in 1695 and 96 about the extensive shipping losses that England suffered during the Nine Years’ War. In order to assess the damage a Board of Statistics was established that was responsible for reporting imports, exports, and losses to Parliament.
Numbers became part of the general public discussion in England and across Europe. William Petty, for example, a political economist and member of the Royal Society, published a series of works on economic statistics including his famous Essays in Political Arithmetick and Political Survey or Anatomy of Ireland (1672). Today, we would judge Petty harshly, since from our point of view his numbers were simply made up. In the seventeenth century, however, political arithmetic was a wholly new way of talking about the world. Other countries used numbers in new ways as well. In the Netherlands, Jan de Witt, who led the Dutch Republic during its conflict with England, floated public bonds that were based on actuarial tables, which tell you how long you can expect people to live. In France, Colbert harangued his intendants to be exact in all their reports to Paris, so that the government would know exactly how many people it had and how much in taxes it could expect. By the end of the seventeenth century, seemingly everything was reduced to number.
Now that I have considered the general problem of numbers in the seventeenth century, I will turn to reorganization of science in the same period. In this context, the appearance of the scientific academy moves to the fore. The idea of the “Academy” is not new in western history. In the fourth century BC, Plato set up his own Academy in Greece as a place for speculation on the natural world. The Academy idea took a while to return, however. The last Academy for philosophical speculation in Europe was shut down in sixth century, and there would be no other until Marcilio Ficino’s Platonic Academy appeared in Renaissance Florence. Nonetheless, Ficino’s academies sparked what some historians have called the Academy Spirit, as many academies appeared in Europe, though most were linguistic in nature--that is, dedicated to the cultivation of language.
The first European Academy dedicated to science was the Accademia dei Lincei, which was founded in 1603 outside of Rome. This Academy represented a new way of looking at scientific activity. Science was open-ended and new knowledge could only come through the collaborative investigation of the natural world. From this point forth, experimentation and communication were fundamental to western science. Other academies followed this vision. The Accademia del Cimento, which was founded in 1657 in Florence, was dedicated to experimentation and published the results of its work.
The same spirit was apparent in France. In 1666, and under the influence of Colbert, the French crown established the Academie des Sciences. This Academy met in the king’s personal library twice per week, and its members had access to state-funded laboratories. Each meeting alternated in subject between physics and mathematics. Initially, under Colbert, the Academie enjoyed great freedom to do research. Under Colbert’s successor as head of the Academy Louvois, the Academie was bound more closely to the state’s interests, particularly its military concerns.
The most famous example of the academy spirit was the English Royal Society. The Royal Society was not as closely tied to the state as were some of the societies that I have mentioned, but it had a political mission. Founded in 1662, in the wake of the revolution, the society precluded the discussion of religious questions, because quantification and research were considered neutral and stabilizing. The idea was to create a language of discussion that was controlled and not subject to emotional outbursts of the Puritan sort. You have already seen one example of this desire for exact language in Hobbes’ Leviathan, which is chock full of definitions and axioms. Another example of the perceived need to control language appears in the work of Henry Oldenburg, who was the Royal Society’s secretary from 1663 to 1677. Oldenburg took it as his mission to write reports of the society’s meetings in the official journal Philosophical Transactions. The language he used was deliberately rigorous and exclusive. This scientific style helped to make science an independent field, but it also increased the prestige of English across the continent. By the end of the seventeenth century, it became necessary to know English in order to practice science.
As I have already noted, the academy spirit is general to Europe. I have not yet mentioned Germany, but its experience with science was broad and varied. In 1652, a group of physicians in Schweinfurt, which is in Bavaria, founded a society called the Collegium Naturae Curiosorum, which published its results throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in a periodical called Miscellanea Curiosa. (In fact, its successor institution continues to publish results of sponsored experiments.) In 1682, another German publication the Acta Eruditorum began appearing out of Leipzig, publishing scientific and philosophical treatises, as well as review essays of recent publications and reports. In 1700, the Elector of Brandenburg sponsored the foundation the Royal Academy of Sciences (Akademie der Wissenschaften), which was designed to for the production of practical knowledge about the world. This Academy was the brainchild of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whom you have already encountered. Leibniz is a good example of the general interest in science. Not only did he publish some of his works in the Acta Eruditorum but he was also a motivating force behind the foundation of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in Imperial Russia in 1724. By the middle of the eighteenth century, science was a European phenomenon.
In concentrating on academies thus far, I have been trying to highlight the importance of two things: first, the rise of intellectual exchange and, second, the use of experiment. Without these two things seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science would have looked quite different, if it appeared at all. These points are essential for understanding the science of the period, but there is also something more. We need to understand a fundamental philosophical trend that these two factors set in motion, namely what has been called the desanctification of nature. What does this mean? In essence, the desanctification of nature removes God from the universe and makes Him a matter for conscience alone. Believe what you will about God, the universe is composed of blind forces, and God’s relationship to this universe is one of cause-and-effect. God created the universe and set it in motion. Hence, the universe, like human beings themselves, exists separately from God and can, therefore, be the object of study.
To the extent that there is such a thing as a modern consciousness, it is deeply rooted in the insights gained from the Scientific Revolution. This consciousness has two aspects: first, knowledge must be based on the observation of external phenomena; second, for the data gathered to be coherent, they must submit to mathematical analysis. If the numbers do not add up, something is wrong. The divorce between religious questions and what we call science—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was called natural philosophy—is absolute. Any concern for the spirits is banished from scientific thought and only the phenomenal world can be the object of investigation. Thus, in this period nature came to be seen as a separate entity—separated from both human beings and God—for better and worse.
Now I will conclude with some general thoughts on the conditions for the rise of modern science. The first condition is that nature must be regarded as an object divorced from its ontological roots. (Ontology is the study of origins.) How the universe came into being is not a matter for science; how it works is the only legitimate question. Second, the only form of knowledge that has value is that which can be counted and ascribed to universal laws. These are the conditions under which Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding became possible. I have mentioned both these texts in another lecture as fundamental to the Enlightenment, and you have also read one of them, so it will be worthwhile for you to consider them in the context of this lecture. Both texts emphasize experience as the foundation of all knowledge. Both see the universe as fundamentally rational. Both assume a God to be a rational being. There is, therefore, a direct connection between seventeenth century science and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. We will conclude next time with a more detailed discussion of how science set the Enlightenment in motion.
martes, 18 de septiembre de 2007
Lecture 7: The Challenge os Sacred Politics: Popular Culture in a Christian World
By Michael Sauter
One big theme that has run through the previous lectures is the importance of religion to the politics of early-modern Europe. Although never motivated wholly by religion, the strategic competition among Europe’s major powers took on religious overtones, as political and religious opposition often amounted to the same thing. Looking at early-modern Europe along these lines is illuminating at a political level, because it explains the nature of key divisions that motivated European politics. That is to say, religion was a divisive force in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Still, although the political divisions are neat, we don’t want to lose sight of common problems that all European states faced, be they Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed. One central problem for every state was that by 1500 much of Europe was not fully Christianized. In the cities, towns, and villages across Europe pagan beliefs and practices persisted, regardless of church opposition to them. It was believed, for example, that urinating on the walls of a monastery caused kidney stones. Some also held that a woman who clasped her hands tightly during intercourse would conceive a son. Many believed that sorcery could prevent couples from consummating their marriages. In one town in southwestern Germany, the peasants insisted on burying a live cow in order to combat a cattle-plague. In sixteenth-century Italy, a miller named Menocchio asserted before his inquisitors: “I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together, and out of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.”
So if there was one thing that united all early-modern powers, it was the need to get a handle on popular culture, and to expel from it heretical ideas. Thus, during the sixteenth century Lutheran and Reformed preachers, as well as Counter-Reformation priests ministered to the benighted masses, intent on rectifying their awkward beliefs, though not always successfully. These beliefs could simply be ancient practices that had been grafted onto Christian celebrations. For example, in 1655, the synod of Utrecht lamented that the common people still slaughtered and salted a pig during the feast of St. Martin. Such sacrifices were pagan practices that had simply been grafted onto Christian culture, but they persisted because they were part of daily practice. We can add things such as Carnival, which persists into our own day, and the tradition of Charivari, which was public humiliation in response to a violation of community standards, especially in sexual matters.
Although many pagan practices persisted at the popular level, it is important to recognize that pagan practice was not static. It was not as if early-modern common people simply did what their pre-Christian ancestors had done. Common practice was malleable and constantly in flux. In part this was due to the persistence of unregulated information networks. Most information in villages was passed on orally, particularly from old to young. But there was also movement of information between villages, cities, and towns in the form of chapbooks. These books were nothing more than pamphlets printed on the cheapest paper, and they contained tales of extraordinary happenings, such as visions or prophecies. In 1648, for example, a man name Hans Keil, who lived in southwestern Germany, claimed that an angel had visited him in his vineyard, lamented the people’s sins, and then cut six of Keil’s vines, which began to bleed. Keil’s tale spread across southern Germany in various chapbook editions. The state of Württemberg pursued the chapbook printers and distributors and destroyed every copy of the offending text that they could find.
The chapbooks are a concrete example of popular culture’s distribution, but most popular culture was difficult to find. Early-modern Europe was full of itinerant entertainers of all sorts. You have probably all heard the tale of the Pied Piper, who led the children of the German town of Hamelin away, after the elders refused to pay for his rat catching services. This story is a fanciful representation of daily reality. Early-modern Europe’s roads were full of dramatists, storytellers, musicians, preachers, and healers who moved from town to town, spreading the latest news of events here and there, or offering descriptions of strange practices. As you may imagine, the town’s local authority figures, especially the clerical ones, did not look kindly on such people.
Before I continued with public authorities’ view of popular cultural practices, I should note something that did not happen in the early-modern world. The various churches and states did not expel magic from the world. There is a tendency today to hold that the Reformation was the first step toward a more rational world that had no place for magic. This is not true. The fight, for instance, between Lutheran preachers in Germany and pagan practices was not about ending magic, but was centered on the belief that human beings could do magic. Martin Luther believed all sorts of evil forces were at work in the world. His attack on magic was theological, for he held that man had no influence on the world, but was subject only to the word of God. Thus, from a Lutheran perspective practices such as the use of talismans, or the invocation of curses were not irrational, but heretical, because they denied Man’s complete subjection to the Lord’s will. Still, Luther did have room in his theology for witches, about which I will say more later.
Lutheranism’s attack on magic brings to the fore the universal pursuit of heresy in Europe. Not all religious traditions were as vigorous in this search as, say, the Spanish Inquisition. Nonetheless, by the sixteenth century, ending heresy (or even heterodoxy) was common across Europe, and it was usually the responsibility of the state apparatus. Thus, the city of Geneva burned the heretic Michael Servetus with John Calvin’s urging. Thus, also, we see increasing attempts by states in Europe to teach the populace the proper path and make certain they remained on it. In 1534, the Württemberg reformer Johannes Brenz taught that local magistrates should punish people who were stubborn, quarrelsome, and disobedient. Over time, this relatively simple mission expanded ever further into social practice, as magistrates punished those who scorned God or refused to take the sacraments. In 1587, one Hans Weiss of the village of Neckartailfingen was thrown in jail for refusing to take Communion. Throughout the early-modern period religious and political authority reinforced each other and grew together. To the extent that these authorities made the world more rational, it had nothing to do with reason.
Of course, we should not oversell Catholic and Protestant attacks on popular culture. For the most part, the authorities ignored those practices that seemed no threat to the established order. Those practices that threatened order, however, came in for significant criticism. Already in 1495, for example, a renaissance lawyer named Johan Geiler von Kaiserberg criticized Carnival in Strasbourg, because it undermined order. Erasmus, to take another example, thought that Carnival was “unchristian,” because it contained practices that he thought were pagan, and it encouraged the common people to get drunk, which was always a problem. Catholic reformers also attacked the Charivari, seeing it as a mockery of matrimony, which was a Holy Sacrament, after all. Protestant reformers betrayed the same instinct to protect marriage by prohibiting rowdy funeral parties, which may have contributed to illicit sexual activity. Other reformers attacked the traditional of public festivals, especially in France, seeing them as wasteful and full of political danger. As the century progressed, the state became ever more enmeshed in controlling common behavior.
A good example of the increase in state scrutiny was the spread of witchcraft trials early in the sixteenth century. Witchcraft was not a criminal act in the early Middle Ages, though concerns about witches grew during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Medieval popular culture held that the world was full of male (incubi) and female (succubi) demons, poised to do harm to humans. By the fifteenth century, this basic belief in demons was transformed by the growing certainty that these demons engaged in sexual intercourse with human beings and, thus, imparted to them magical powers. The concern over occult powers transferred in this way to human beings is already evident in the first witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1486 by two German witch hunters named Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer. The Malleus introduced incubi and succubi, noting thus that both men and women could become witches, but claimed there were more female witches since women were more lustful than men. All told, this text went through at least 29 editions in Germany, France, Italy, and England.
The (elite) religious attitude toward witches is difficult to gauge. On the one hand, official Catholic Church doctrine recognized the power of witches, and Jean Bodin wrote an entire treatise against them, the Démonomanie des sorciers (1580). On the other hand, some members of the elite such as Erasmus satirized the fear of sorcery in his Praise of Folly, while other humanists ridiculed the belief in witches. Still, as the sixteenth century progressed, the belief in witches seems to have become firmer, as in the case of Martin Luther, who decided in 1522 that witches “Devil’s whores who steal milk, raise storms, ride on goats or broomsticks, lame or maim people, torture babies in their cradles, change things into different shapes…” Nor was Calvin any better, as he was frightened of so-called “plague-spreaders” (engraissuers). So, in general, belief in witches was both widespread and, at the same time, subject to ridicule.
The ambivalence I have noted in elite culture goes some way to explaining why, in fact, witchcraft was not as widely prosecuted, as were other crimes. It is true that witchcraft trials increased in number by comparison to the Middle Ages, and this increase came in a relatively compressed period. But it is still an exaggeration to see the sixteenth century as a great European witch-hunt. Much more important were trials for infanticide, and these ended much more often in a death sentence. Moreover, diversity rules the day on this issue. Witch trials were rare in England. In France, Germany, and Italy, there were more of them, though the number of depended on the region and the local situation. The worst areas for witches were Lorraine and the Rhineland. In Lorraine, for example, there were some 3000 witch trials between 1580 and 1630, with a conviction rate of around 90%. Other areas were less vigilant. Geneva had 477 witch trials in a similar period, but here the conviction rate was only 30%.
In spite of this mixed picture, we do need to keep in mind that witchcraft trials did increase in number during the sixteenth century. This may have been due to a general increase in the fear of witches, but it seems more likely to me that it was due to the general increase in supervision of state and religious authorities over common people. Common people had always been afraid of witches and throughout the early-modern period were wont to take the law into their own hands, leading to local prosecutions. During the sixteenth century, however, local prosecutions were themselves a problem, and they were rapidly enveloped by written law. Thus, in 1532 Charles V promulgated a new law code, the Constitutio criminalis carolina, which systematized, among things the prosecution of witches.
And, indeed, authorities in the Spanish Netherlands and Lorraine used the new laws to encourage their people to prosecute witches. Moreover, in southwestern Germany, where the small size of the states meant that the local government was relatively close to the people, local magistrates listened carefully to witnesses against witches, asking questions and writing extensive reports. The point is that the appearance of more effective government across Europe made the major uptick in witch prosecutions possible, in those areas that were already susceptible to such fears.
Let me conclude then by offering a few general points. First, regardless of the religious confession, all states had to confront the problem of educating a populace that still practiced pagan rituals. This was accomplished across Europe by an ever-greater array of public functionaries that extended state and religious power into the countryside. Second, although general trends are visible in this alliance between religion and state, it is important to keep in mind the diversity of experience across Europe. One state was certainly different from another in enforcing the law, but even within a state, neighboring towns and villages could act differently. Finally, it is important not to accept the simple idea that religion and the state banished magic and set Europe on the path to a rationalist worldview. In fact, as we have seen, it was often quite the opposite. Either ideas that we may consider magical persisted within religion, or religious thinkers came to accept magical ideas. No clear line was ever drawn between magic and reason in this period. Next time, we will turn our attention to the Counter Reformation.
One big theme that has run through the previous lectures is the importance of religion to the politics of early-modern Europe. Although never motivated wholly by religion, the strategic competition among Europe’s major powers took on religious overtones, as political and religious opposition often amounted to the same thing. Looking at early-modern Europe along these lines is illuminating at a political level, because it explains the nature of key divisions that motivated European politics. That is to say, religion was a divisive force in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Still, although the political divisions are neat, we don’t want to lose sight of common problems that all European states faced, be they Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed. One central problem for every state was that by 1500 much of Europe was not fully Christianized. In the cities, towns, and villages across Europe pagan beliefs and practices persisted, regardless of church opposition to them. It was believed, for example, that urinating on the walls of a monastery caused kidney stones. Some also held that a woman who clasped her hands tightly during intercourse would conceive a son. Many believed that sorcery could prevent couples from consummating their marriages. In one town in southwestern Germany, the peasants insisted on burying a live cow in order to combat a cattle-plague. In sixteenth-century Italy, a miller named Menocchio asserted before his inquisitors: “I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together, and out of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.”
So if there was one thing that united all early-modern powers, it was the need to get a handle on popular culture, and to expel from it heretical ideas. Thus, during the sixteenth century Lutheran and Reformed preachers, as well as Counter-Reformation priests ministered to the benighted masses, intent on rectifying their awkward beliefs, though not always successfully. These beliefs could simply be ancient practices that had been grafted onto Christian celebrations. For example, in 1655, the synod of Utrecht lamented that the common people still slaughtered and salted a pig during the feast of St. Martin. Such sacrifices were pagan practices that had simply been grafted onto Christian culture, but they persisted because they were part of daily practice. We can add things such as Carnival, which persists into our own day, and the tradition of Charivari, which was public humiliation in response to a violation of community standards, especially in sexual matters.
Although many pagan practices persisted at the popular level, it is important to recognize that pagan practice was not static. It was not as if early-modern common people simply did what their pre-Christian ancestors had done. Common practice was malleable and constantly in flux. In part this was due to the persistence of unregulated information networks. Most information in villages was passed on orally, particularly from old to young. But there was also movement of information between villages, cities, and towns in the form of chapbooks. These books were nothing more than pamphlets printed on the cheapest paper, and they contained tales of extraordinary happenings, such as visions or prophecies. In 1648, for example, a man name Hans Keil, who lived in southwestern Germany, claimed that an angel had visited him in his vineyard, lamented the people’s sins, and then cut six of Keil’s vines, which began to bleed. Keil’s tale spread across southern Germany in various chapbook editions. The state of Württemberg pursued the chapbook printers and distributors and destroyed every copy of the offending text that they could find.
The chapbooks are a concrete example of popular culture’s distribution, but most popular culture was difficult to find. Early-modern Europe was full of itinerant entertainers of all sorts. You have probably all heard the tale of the Pied Piper, who led the children of the German town of Hamelin away, after the elders refused to pay for his rat catching services. This story is a fanciful representation of daily reality. Early-modern Europe’s roads were full of dramatists, storytellers, musicians, preachers, and healers who moved from town to town, spreading the latest news of events here and there, or offering descriptions of strange practices. As you may imagine, the town’s local authority figures, especially the clerical ones, did not look kindly on such people.
Before I continued with public authorities’ view of popular cultural practices, I should note something that did not happen in the early-modern world. The various churches and states did not expel magic from the world. There is a tendency today to hold that the Reformation was the first step toward a more rational world that had no place for magic. This is not true. The fight, for instance, between Lutheran preachers in Germany and pagan practices was not about ending magic, but was centered on the belief that human beings could do magic. Martin Luther believed all sorts of evil forces were at work in the world. His attack on magic was theological, for he held that man had no influence on the world, but was subject only to the word of God. Thus, from a Lutheran perspective practices such as the use of talismans, or the invocation of curses were not irrational, but heretical, because they denied Man’s complete subjection to the Lord’s will. Still, Luther did have room in his theology for witches, about which I will say more later.
Lutheranism’s attack on magic brings to the fore the universal pursuit of heresy in Europe. Not all religious traditions were as vigorous in this search as, say, the Spanish Inquisition. Nonetheless, by the sixteenth century, ending heresy (or even heterodoxy) was common across Europe, and it was usually the responsibility of the state apparatus. Thus, the city of Geneva burned the heretic Michael Servetus with John Calvin’s urging. Thus, also, we see increasing attempts by states in Europe to teach the populace the proper path and make certain they remained on it. In 1534, the Württemberg reformer Johannes Brenz taught that local magistrates should punish people who were stubborn, quarrelsome, and disobedient. Over time, this relatively simple mission expanded ever further into social practice, as magistrates punished those who scorned God or refused to take the sacraments. In 1587, one Hans Weiss of the village of Neckartailfingen was thrown in jail for refusing to take Communion. Throughout the early-modern period religious and political authority reinforced each other and grew together. To the extent that these authorities made the world more rational, it had nothing to do with reason.
Of course, we should not oversell Catholic and Protestant attacks on popular culture. For the most part, the authorities ignored those practices that seemed no threat to the established order. Those practices that threatened order, however, came in for significant criticism. Already in 1495, for example, a renaissance lawyer named Johan Geiler von Kaiserberg criticized Carnival in Strasbourg, because it undermined order. Erasmus, to take another example, thought that Carnival was “unchristian,” because it contained practices that he thought were pagan, and it encouraged the common people to get drunk, which was always a problem. Catholic reformers also attacked the Charivari, seeing it as a mockery of matrimony, which was a Holy Sacrament, after all. Protestant reformers betrayed the same instinct to protect marriage by prohibiting rowdy funeral parties, which may have contributed to illicit sexual activity. Other reformers attacked the traditional of public festivals, especially in France, seeing them as wasteful and full of political danger. As the century progressed, the state became ever more enmeshed in controlling common behavior.
A good example of the increase in state scrutiny was the spread of witchcraft trials early in the sixteenth century. Witchcraft was not a criminal act in the early Middle Ages, though concerns about witches grew during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Medieval popular culture held that the world was full of male (incubi) and female (succubi) demons, poised to do harm to humans. By the fifteenth century, this basic belief in demons was transformed by the growing certainty that these demons engaged in sexual intercourse with human beings and, thus, imparted to them magical powers. The concern over occult powers transferred in this way to human beings is already evident in the first witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1486 by two German witch hunters named Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer. The Malleus introduced incubi and succubi, noting thus that both men and women could become witches, but claimed there were more female witches since women were more lustful than men. All told, this text went through at least 29 editions in Germany, France, Italy, and England.
The (elite) religious attitude toward witches is difficult to gauge. On the one hand, official Catholic Church doctrine recognized the power of witches, and Jean Bodin wrote an entire treatise against them, the Démonomanie des sorciers (1580). On the other hand, some members of the elite such as Erasmus satirized the fear of sorcery in his Praise of Folly, while other humanists ridiculed the belief in witches. Still, as the sixteenth century progressed, the belief in witches seems to have become firmer, as in the case of Martin Luther, who decided in 1522 that witches “Devil’s whores who steal milk, raise storms, ride on goats or broomsticks, lame or maim people, torture babies in their cradles, change things into different shapes…” Nor was Calvin any better, as he was frightened of so-called “plague-spreaders” (engraissuers). So, in general, belief in witches was both widespread and, at the same time, subject to ridicule.
The ambivalence I have noted in elite culture goes some way to explaining why, in fact, witchcraft was not as widely prosecuted, as were other crimes. It is true that witchcraft trials increased in number by comparison to the Middle Ages, and this increase came in a relatively compressed period. But it is still an exaggeration to see the sixteenth century as a great European witch-hunt. Much more important were trials for infanticide, and these ended much more often in a death sentence. Moreover, diversity rules the day on this issue. Witch trials were rare in England. In France, Germany, and Italy, there were more of them, though the number of depended on the region and the local situation. The worst areas for witches were Lorraine and the Rhineland. In Lorraine, for example, there were some 3000 witch trials between 1580 and 1630, with a conviction rate of around 90%. Other areas were less vigilant. Geneva had 477 witch trials in a similar period, but here the conviction rate was only 30%.
In spite of this mixed picture, we do need to keep in mind that witchcraft trials did increase in number during the sixteenth century. This may have been due to a general increase in the fear of witches, but it seems more likely to me that it was due to the general increase in supervision of state and religious authorities over common people. Common people had always been afraid of witches and throughout the early-modern period were wont to take the law into their own hands, leading to local prosecutions. During the sixteenth century, however, local prosecutions were themselves a problem, and they were rapidly enveloped by written law. Thus, in 1532 Charles V promulgated a new law code, the Constitutio criminalis carolina, which systematized, among things the prosecution of witches.
And, indeed, authorities in the Spanish Netherlands and Lorraine used the new laws to encourage their people to prosecute witches. Moreover, in southwestern Germany, where the small size of the states meant that the local government was relatively close to the people, local magistrates listened carefully to witnesses against witches, asking questions and writing extensive reports. The point is that the appearance of more effective government across Europe made the major uptick in witch prosecutions possible, in those areas that were already susceptible to such fears.
Let me conclude then by offering a few general points. First, regardless of the religious confession, all states had to confront the problem of educating a populace that still practiced pagan rituals. This was accomplished across Europe by an ever-greater array of public functionaries that extended state and religious power into the countryside. Second, although general trends are visible in this alliance between religion and state, it is important to keep in mind the diversity of experience across Europe. One state was certainly different from another in enforcing the law, but even within a state, neighboring towns and villages could act differently. Finally, it is important not to accept the simple idea that religion and the state banished magic and set Europe on the path to a rationalist worldview. In fact, as we have seen, it was often quite the opposite. Either ideas that we may consider magical persisted within religion, or religious thinkers came to accept magical ideas. No clear line was ever drawn between magic and reason in this period. Next time, we will turn our attention to the Counter Reformation.
Lecture 6: Philosophy and Politics in the Seventeenth Century
By Michael Sauter
One of the most important intellectual currents of seventeenth-century Europe was the use of mathematics as counter-point to medieval intellectual traditions. Any attempt to understand this current’s full significance must begin with Galileo, who stands at the apex of a long trend in western mathematics that dates back to Archimedes and runs through the medieval Franciscans. In Galileo we see, in its purest form, the belief that mathematics offers true and precise knowledge, and we also see the awareness that this knowledge undermines medieval “bookmen,” or the scholastics. As Galileo saw it, the bookmen fought over words, but mathematics allowed people to fight over real things. Most important here is Galileo’s appreciation of mathematics as a language that can be applied to the universe. With mathematics man is able to understand the natural world in clear terms, and the growing confidence in the language of mathematics represented a retreat from the discussion of natural essences and a move toward a description of natural phenomena. For Galileo the behavior of all physical objects could not necessarily be understood fully via equations, but it could be described sufficiently. And this recognition that accurate description is the foundation of all knowledge runs through the seventeenth century.
René Descartes encapsulated the desire to develop a language that was clear enough to describe real things. The son of a Breton magistrate, he attended the famous Jesuit College La Flèche as a young boy, where he learned Aristotelian philosophy, before heading to Poitiers for university study. After completing four years there Descartes joined the army in order to see the world. In 1619, while serving in Neuburg on the Danube, under Maurice of Nassau, Descartes had a vision of mathematics that came to him in a series of three dreams. The first dream affirmed that world had a wholly mathematical structure. The second informed Descartes that it was his duty to make this structure clear to everyone. The third revealed that God himself guaranteed the mathematical underpinnings of the universe. After having these dreams, Descartes traveled to the famous shrine of the Virgin Mary at Loreto in Italy in order to confirm his impression of them. It is ironic, perhaps, but this half-conscious, half-religious process marks the birth of western rationalism.
Descartes worked out his mathematical vision over the next decade, and the first fruit of his labors was Traité du Monde, a radically mechanist (and mathematical) interpretation of the universe. The text was to have been published in 1633, but Descartes stopped publication at the last minute, after having heard of Galileo’s unenviable fate in Italy. Like Aristotle centuries before him, Descartes eschewed allowing the powers that be to sin against philosophy. Descartes then pursued less radical (and less dangerous) themes. In 1635, he published his Discourse on Method, a fundamental text in the history of applied mathematics, followed in 1641 by his Meditations, one of the most important texts in the history of western philosophy. (This text is the source of the famous Cartesian “cogito.”) These latter two works are significant, nonetheless, because in them Descartes not only mathematicized the universe but also plumbed the philosophical implications of this new stance, a process that came to fruition in what we, today, call Cartesian rationalism. In essence, Descartes emphasized reason as the only true foundation for truth, setting aside the tradition of citing ancient authorities that he had learned from his scholastic masters in La Flèche. In 1649, Descartes left Paris and took his new philosophical approach to Holland, whose intellectual atmosphere he found to be more intellectually congenial. In that same year, Queen Christina of Sweden lured Descartes to Stockholm, in order to bask in the glory of having such a famous philosopher on her staff. The Swedish winter and the requisite 5am meetings with the Queen proved to be too much, however, for Descartes and in 1650 he succumbed to a fever and died.
Now, let us consider Descartes’ intellectual trajectory more narrowly. After 1641 Descartes pursued the desire to challenge scholastic approaches to nature, all of which were based in Aristotelian philosophy. The distinctive feature of Descartes’ universe was his idea of the plenum, or fullness. Descartes believed that each part of the universe butted up against every other part. This position had medieval remnants, in so far as Descartes disputed the possibility of a vacuum, just as had his scholastic masters. More importantly, it also closed the door to the forces that fascinated Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. (Descartes feared that in speaking of invisible forces, these men were courting the return of spirits to the universe.) In the Cartesian universe there was, hence, no action at a distance, and all motion was determined by direct contact between substances, rather like playing billiards, only on a larger scale. From Descartes’ perspective this approach had the advantage that it associated every movement with a direct cause, which meant that the physicist did not need strange, occult forces to explain motion in God’s universe. Another key feature of the Cartesian universe is Descartes’ vortex theory. Consistent with the Aristotelian emphasis on circular motion, Descartes held that the all motion is circular, although within vortices that were created by matter. These vortices spun because heavier matter naturally moved to the center of the vortex, while lighter matter shifted its position to the outside. In this vision, what we today would call gravity is conceptualized as a system under constant pressure. The particular significance of this idea lies in the philosophical assumption that undergirded it, namely that all matter is uniform and constant. To put the issue in Kantian terms, matter does not simply blink in and out of existence and, for that reason, the universe is predictable, which meant that it was subject to mathematical analysis.
Another of the great ironies behind Descartes’ philosophy is that in searching for a philosophy to justify his mathematics he turned away from one Greek philosopher, Aristotle, and toward another, Plato. For all its flaws, Aristotelian philosophy had the virtue of being grounded in empirics; Aristotle wanted to know how the world really worked. Descartes, however, turned away from this empirical tradition and toward Platonism, because he wanted to ground deduction as a mental process within reason itself. Plato’s two-world theory had, in effect, made the world “rational” by connecting the actual, changeable world to an ideal and permanent one. Descartes’ turn toward Plato must also be understood in terms of the contemporary resurgence of interest in St. Augustine in France. French theologians, particularly those in a monastery at Port Royal, which was outside of Paris, sought in St. Augustine an austere Christianity, in which the individual’s relationship to God took center stage. The medieval, Aristotelian church had, of course, emphasized church as a mediator between God and Man. The resurgence in Augustinian studies in France helps to explain, in part, the complete victory of Cartesianism in France during the second half of the seventeenth century.
Descartes’ combination of Platonism with Augustinianism led him down a philosophical path that had first been discovered in the Middle Ages but not fully pursued, the use of radical doubt. Many of you will be familiar with Descartes’ famous dictum “cogito, ergo sum”: I think, therefore, I am. Descartes pursued doubt relentlessly and concluded that he could doubt all parts of his worldly experience except for one, namely that he doubted. It seems paradoxical, but this method opened the way to a new philosophy of certainty, because it affirmed the individual’s (rather tortured) existence by ascribing significance to the act of thinking itself. This insight is backward-looking, in part, because it emerged from St. Augustine’s well-documented interest in human interiority. Call it Christian navel gazing. Nonetheless, Descartes could not merely stop here, because he needed to affirm both God and the external universe. Here again, he turned to medieval traditions, in this case making use St. Anselm’s classic ontological proof of God’s existence, which for our purposes here should be understood as justifying the idea that existence itself is its own predicate.
Descartes’ reliance on the ontological proof as the foundation of a new, more certain philosophy merged with the larger interest in France in Platonism. Platonic thought was compatible with the ontological proof, because it also reified ideas. For a true Platonist, ideas are more real than the physical world, hence, Descartes could throw out Aristotle and write off the Stagirite’s insistence on sense experience as an essential component of all knowledge. The theological result of this turn was that one could now rove God’s existence without resorting to sense experience. The larger historical significance of this Platonic/Augustinian turn lies, however, in Descartes’ determined association of God with mathematics. God guaranteed the universe’s structure, and Man gained access to this structure through mathematics. This is an enormously important idea, because it justified the assumption of a rational universe from a wholly internal and human position. Descartes’ doubt allowed him to deduce God and the universe from the standpoint of his own existence.
Initially, Descartes’ ideas were received most enthusiastically and thoroughly in Holland and the larger Netherlands, especially in the universities there. By 1663, for example, the University of Louvain, which was then part of the Spanish Netherlands (today’s Belgium), became such a hotbed of Cartesian thought that the Spanish government banned Cartesianism, for fear that it mechanistic approach would undermine the belief in a providential God. Cartesianism penetrated the French scene more slowly and haphazardly, in part because the Catholic Church was more organized there. The Jesuits, for example, mounted determined resistance to Cartesianism, but were unable to stem the tide completely, because some of their theological enemies, including especially the Jansenists and the Oratorians, had accepted the mechanistic view of the universe. In particular, French Cartesians seized on Descartes’ logic as the foundation for all knowledge, which promoted a tremendous confidence not only in nature but also in the ability of reason to apprehend and understand it. By the seventeenth century’s end, Aristotle was unimportant to the study of the natural world, largely because a French philosopher had so thoroughly doubted his own existence.
The influence of mathematics on seventeenth-century thought is just as clear in the great English thinker Thomas Hobbes, although here the new way of reasoning became a fundamental element of the science of politics. Hobbes’ significance as a political thinker is clear to us today, but in his own time, people emphasized the influence of his ethics and psychology. He is a key factor in the development of modern approaches to politics, nonetheless. Hobbes stands at the end of a long process that begins with Machiavelli. Machiavelli first developed the notion that politics was an autonomous realm, its rules and practices existing outside theology and the church. This early stage in the larger process of discovering politics came to an end with Jean Bodin, who applied Roman Law to the religious conflicts that plagued Europe, thus, identifying sovereignty as the fundamental political problem for everybody. Concomitantly, we must also consider Hugo Grotius, who fashioned the other great legal pillar of modern political thought, what we will call secularized natural law. Grotius believed that natural law came not from God but from the basic sociability of human beings. That is, human interaction on this world was fundamental to the larger concept of law. From the end of the fifteenth until the end of the sixteenth century, politics and law became established ways of thinking about the human condition. Thomas Hobbes took many of these fundamental political ideas another step further and, in the process, founded modern political thought.
Thomas Hobbes identified the very boundaries of his own life with the great political events of his day. He was born on April 8, 1588, when (supposedly) news of the impending Spanish invasion so upset his mother that she entered labor. Hobbes summed up the circumstances of his birth by saying, “Fear and I were born together.” Hobbes’ education was largely the doing of his uncle, who not only paid for tutors but also sent him to Oxford. (Hobbes’ father was nothing more than a drunken country vicar.) Oxford did not, however, cover itself in glory at the time, as is evidence by John Milton’s contemporary judgement that the college was a sow’s feast of brambles and thistles.
The deplorable state of undergraduate education at Oxford meant for Hobbes that the best education was to be sought outside of official channels, and he spent much of his youthful energies acquiring knowledge on his own. Hobbes’ pursuit of independent study received a significant boost when he was appointed tutor to the son of the Earl of Devonshire, a position that gave him access to the latest intellectual currents. The Earl of Devonshire was a great art and book collector and devoted his household to intellectual pursuits. Indeed, much of England’s intellectual life at the time occurred within the confines of great households, and Hobbes’ position in one such house afforded him regular access to a great library and to great personages such as Ben Jonson, Viscount Falkland, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury.
In 1610, Hobbes continued his extra-university education by accompanying his charge on a grand tour of the Continent, where he met many of the greatest scientific minds of the age. In Florence he met Galileo, in Paris Marin Mersenne. While on the Continent, Hobbes also acquired a profound taste for the works of the great Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote the most important contemporary account of the Peloponnesian War. Hobbes’ reading of Thucydides convinced him that politics was nothing more than a naked struggle for power. The classical Greek tradition influenced Hobbes even further, however, through Euclid’s work. While visiting Geneva, Hobbes found a copy of Euclid’s work on geometry and he was deeply impressed by Euclid’s conceptual method, in which the latter completed a proof through a series of rigorously defined logical, because this method offered another way to bypass the tyranny of words. For a nominalist and a skeptic such as Hobbes this discovery of method was extremely important, because it suggested that there was a path to firm knowledge. By 1630, Hobbes was back in England, where he these new insights affected deeply his understanding of the political crises that confronted England up through 1660.
Hobbes returned to the Continent in 1640, with the outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, and settled in Paris. This period was another extremely formative time for Hobbes, because it reinforced his growing belief that nature was harsh and cruel, that there was no God, and that only the material world existed. These ideas are most evident in his first two important works, De Corpore (1640) and De Cive (1642), both of which explained the world in purely physical and earthly terms. During this time, Hobbes also met Descartes, but the French rationalist did not appreciate Hobbes’ atheism and materialism. Hobbes’ atheism also got him in trouble at the court of the later Charles II, who had fled the Revolution to France with some family members. Hobbes was initially appointed general tutor to the court, but when his atheism was uncovered, his position was reduced to mathematics only.
Hobbes’ ambiguous relationship to his religion, country, and king drove him to seek out new positions in political theory. In essence, Hobbes became a theorist of secular absolutism, a way of thinking that, as it turned out, was equally congenial to Oliver Cromwell’s dictatorship as it was the Stuart monarchs, because refused to ground political legitimacy in ethical considerations. For Hobbes, legitimacy was a de facto condition. For example, Hobbes published his most famous text Leviathan in 1651, the same year in which it became fully apparent that Cromwell had won the Civil War, at least for the time being. The most important aspect of this text was that it justified victory over doctrine, both Cromwell and the executed Charles I could see themselves in Hobbes’ concept of the Leviathan. This legitimation of power for its own sake is what makes the text so historically significant.
Hobbes’s absolutism appears “modern” to us, because it deals with political power in the frankest, unsentimental terms. Yet, this modern approach to politics was deeply rooted in medieval ways of thinking. Hobbes’s thought emerged from the philosophical tradition known as Nominalism, which dominated Oxford when Hobbes studied there. Nominalism emerged as a response to late Scholasticism and, most simply, argued that words do not express things. Words are merely names that pertain to thoughts in our heads. The effect of this Nominalist position was to explode the metaphysical tradition of thinking about the nature of God. In this philosophical world there can be no notion of a divine Providence, or, if we keep Grotius in mind, of divinely inspired Natural Law. Hobbes was, therefore, a key figure in the secularization of Natural Law that emerged from Nominalist criticism. He did not speak of Natural Law but of laws of nature, and since we cannot know nature completely, each law is, at best, a theorem that can only be applied imperfectly to an individual situation. The consequence of this position was the reduction of Natural Law to a series of unstable, loose guides for individual moral conduct.
The sense of a humanity cut loose from the divine justified a reassessment of the traditional sociable anthropology on which Natural Law theory had been based. Hobbes’ materialist vision of nature led him to posit a particularly pessimistic vision of Man. What was Man for Hobbes? Hobbes defined Man as nothing more than a body living on this earth. Thus, unlike Descartes, who defined Man through the Mind, Hobbes gave Mind no reality whatsoever. For Hobbes, Man is a sensate creature and the Mind is, therefore, nothing more than decaying sense. (This attitude will run through John Locke and David Hume.) Moreover, Man has no control over how his mind works. Instead of being a rational creature that considered problems through deduction, Man was for Hobbes a bundle of desires that emerged from the random sensations imposed on the body by the world—and most important among these desires was the human will. (This was also, in part, a medieval inheritance, since the Nominalists also prized will over reason, though they applied this distinction to God.) The vision of human beings as non-rational, willful creatures had a profound effect on Hobbes’ notion of politics. Because for Hobbes, Man is proud, unsociable, aggressive, Man’s desires can only be realized at the expense of others. The most important desire in this world is the desire for self-preservation an in the pursuit of that desire conflict naturally emerged. Moreover, to the extent that human beings do live together, it is only for the purpose of defending their own lives. (Locke would put a different spin on this idea, holding that human beings are so ration that they see the virtue in joining a collective of some sort in the name of defense.) Now, having begun from the standpoint that Man was nothing more than a beast, Hobbes constructs a zero-sum political world, in which there is no ethical community, only a war of all against all with shifting alliances contracted for mutual defense.
I have been describing, of course, the philosophical origins of the Hobbesian State of Nature. It is important when reading Hobbes to understand that he never argued that this State of Nature was a real historical period. (Rousseau would take much the same line.) The State of Nature is a philosophical abstraction that explains what was, for Hobbes, a real social problem: Man is not an inherently social creature, but must be socialized to live in a community. This anthropology is quite different from that of Aristotle, who saw Man as a political animal, and is, in fact, the secular counterpart to St. Augustine’s City of God. For St. Augustine, Man was a broken creature, soaked in sin, and who needed external authority to guarantee his further existence. Hobbes then used the idea of self-preservation to justify the origin of governments. He relies here in the concept of prudence to lift people out of the Hell that he has created for them, arguing that the fear of death at the hands of others drives people to vest their right to self-preservation in some central authority, such as a prince or an assembly—there is no difference for Hobbes. Hobbes then posits the notion of a covenant that justifies the power of the new central authority. This covenant is not, however, one between the prince and his people: it is, in fact, between the people themselves, which signified that the prince or the Leviathan had neither metaphysical nor historical rights. The state existed to aid in the process of self-preservation, and the moment that the prince could not guarantee self-preservation, the contract was dissolved and a new one became justified through necessity alone. Why is this important? Hobbes has just proved that the state is a fiction and, more importantly, that this fiction has no religious sanction. The state was, then, nothing more than a Mortal God whose authority derived from general consent.
Hobbes’ recreation of central authority as the Mortal God had serious implications for the tradition of Natural Law. In traditional Natural Law, political authority was composed of secular and religious authorities, that is, the church and Scripture had some say in how a state or its people must act. Hobbes argued, however, that all authority resided in the state, and to the extent that Scripture offered maxims for individual conduct it was the state authority that justified the interpretation of them. That is, the prince determined the meaning of the church’s doctrines, and the church became a state church, devoted to the maintenance of authority. In taking this position, Hobbes broke with a medieval political-religious dualism that dated back at least to the Investiture Controversy of 1077 and probably as far back as the pretensions of Pope Gelasius, who in the fifth century had argued (unsuccessfully) that the spiritual power was more important than secular power.
Hobbes’ views on the church also had implications for religious tolerance. Hobbes took a narrow view of tolerance and religious liberty. Since the church was part of the state, it became the ruler’s duty to maintain religious practices and beliefs. Hence, all people in a given state are, for Hobbes, required to conform externally to the rules and principles that had been laid down by the ruler. This doctrine sounds harsh, but it also had the virtue of guaranteeing the rights of conscience, since every person had the right to believe differently in private. The line was to be drawn at public expression of disagreement. Given the tenor of the times, Hobbes’ emphasis on maintaining order over allowing religious debate had a certain virtue, especially since the most extreme Puritans engaged in religious repression that was much worse than what had come before.
Rarely has a book provoked as much revulsion as did Hobbes’ Leviathan. Dubbed “Monster of Malmesbury” by his critics, Hobbes managed with the Leviathan to tread on just about everyone’s toes. England’s legal community was angry, because their field had been subordinated thoroughly to princely power. If there was n o low outside the Leviathan, then why even have lawyers? The church hierarchy was angry at having the church’s traditional monopoly on the interpretation of religious texts be undermined. In addition, the growing number of religious sectarians, people who believed that religious liberty was a prerequisite for social peace, was also upset, because Hobbes left no room for the public expression of conscience. Hobbes was not bothered by any of the criticism, especially given that Charles II had read the Leviathan as justifying his royal authority. With such a protector, Hobbes was safe from persecution and, in the end, he enjoyed a quite life, living to a ripe old age that included much singing, which he believed kept him healthy and regular exercise in the form of tennis.
In spite of the general opposition to Hobbes’ work, the Leviathan was quite influential. This influence was rooted mostly in Hobbes’ intellectual rigor, because the structured nature of his thought required all future discussions of a religious polity to take place on Hobbes’ terms and not those of his critics. It also helped that Hobbes was a talented polemicist who seemed to enjoy debate. He tangled, for example, with a group of thinkers called the Cambridge Platonists over free will. Hobbes’ tendency toward polemics aside, however, what endures is his restructuring of politics within a wholly secular realm. Rather than beginning with the “cogito,” Hobbes began with human need, making it the foundation for all politics, and he pursued need to very dark but also realistic conclusions. As a result, he desanctified the state, thus opening the door to further critiques of the state’s foundations. In making the state a product of will Hobbes also made it something that could be deconstructed and reconstructed as the need arose. Hobbes may not have liked failed revolutions, but he still justified all the successful ones.
One of the most important intellectual currents of seventeenth-century Europe was the use of mathematics as counter-point to medieval intellectual traditions. Any attempt to understand this current’s full significance must begin with Galileo, who stands at the apex of a long trend in western mathematics that dates back to Archimedes and runs through the medieval Franciscans. In Galileo we see, in its purest form, the belief that mathematics offers true and precise knowledge, and we also see the awareness that this knowledge undermines medieval “bookmen,” or the scholastics. As Galileo saw it, the bookmen fought over words, but mathematics allowed people to fight over real things. Most important here is Galileo’s appreciation of mathematics as a language that can be applied to the universe. With mathematics man is able to understand the natural world in clear terms, and the growing confidence in the language of mathematics represented a retreat from the discussion of natural essences and a move toward a description of natural phenomena. For Galileo the behavior of all physical objects could not necessarily be understood fully via equations, but it could be described sufficiently. And this recognition that accurate description is the foundation of all knowledge runs through the seventeenth century.
René Descartes encapsulated the desire to develop a language that was clear enough to describe real things. The son of a Breton magistrate, he attended the famous Jesuit College La Flèche as a young boy, where he learned Aristotelian philosophy, before heading to Poitiers for university study. After completing four years there Descartes joined the army in order to see the world. In 1619, while serving in Neuburg on the Danube, under Maurice of Nassau, Descartes had a vision of mathematics that came to him in a series of three dreams. The first dream affirmed that world had a wholly mathematical structure. The second informed Descartes that it was his duty to make this structure clear to everyone. The third revealed that God himself guaranteed the mathematical underpinnings of the universe. After having these dreams, Descartes traveled to the famous shrine of the Virgin Mary at Loreto in Italy in order to confirm his impression of them. It is ironic, perhaps, but this half-conscious, half-religious process marks the birth of western rationalism.
Descartes worked out his mathematical vision over the next decade, and the first fruit of his labors was Traité du Monde, a radically mechanist (and mathematical) interpretation of the universe. The text was to have been published in 1633, but Descartes stopped publication at the last minute, after having heard of Galileo’s unenviable fate in Italy. Like Aristotle centuries before him, Descartes eschewed allowing the powers that be to sin against philosophy. Descartes then pursued less radical (and less dangerous) themes. In 1635, he published his Discourse on Method, a fundamental text in the history of applied mathematics, followed in 1641 by his Meditations, one of the most important texts in the history of western philosophy. (This text is the source of the famous Cartesian “cogito.”) These latter two works are significant, nonetheless, because in them Descartes not only mathematicized the universe but also plumbed the philosophical implications of this new stance, a process that came to fruition in what we, today, call Cartesian rationalism. In essence, Descartes emphasized reason as the only true foundation for truth, setting aside the tradition of citing ancient authorities that he had learned from his scholastic masters in La Flèche. In 1649, Descartes left Paris and took his new philosophical approach to Holland, whose intellectual atmosphere he found to be more intellectually congenial. In that same year, Queen Christina of Sweden lured Descartes to Stockholm, in order to bask in the glory of having such a famous philosopher on her staff. The Swedish winter and the requisite 5am meetings with the Queen proved to be too much, however, for Descartes and in 1650 he succumbed to a fever and died.
Now, let us consider Descartes’ intellectual trajectory more narrowly. After 1641 Descartes pursued the desire to challenge scholastic approaches to nature, all of which were based in Aristotelian philosophy. The distinctive feature of Descartes’ universe was his idea of the plenum, or fullness. Descartes believed that each part of the universe butted up against every other part. This position had medieval remnants, in so far as Descartes disputed the possibility of a vacuum, just as had his scholastic masters. More importantly, it also closed the door to the forces that fascinated Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. (Descartes feared that in speaking of invisible forces, these men were courting the return of spirits to the universe.) In the Cartesian universe there was, hence, no action at a distance, and all motion was determined by direct contact between substances, rather like playing billiards, only on a larger scale. From Descartes’ perspective this approach had the advantage that it associated every movement with a direct cause, which meant that the physicist did not need strange, occult forces to explain motion in God’s universe. Another key feature of the Cartesian universe is Descartes’ vortex theory. Consistent with the Aristotelian emphasis on circular motion, Descartes held that the all motion is circular, although within vortices that were created by matter. These vortices spun because heavier matter naturally moved to the center of the vortex, while lighter matter shifted its position to the outside. In this vision, what we today would call gravity is conceptualized as a system under constant pressure. The particular significance of this idea lies in the philosophical assumption that undergirded it, namely that all matter is uniform and constant. To put the issue in Kantian terms, matter does not simply blink in and out of existence and, for that reason, the universe is predictable, which meant that it was subject to mathematical analysis.
Another of the great ironies behind Descartes’ philosophy is that in searching for a philosophy to justify his mathematics he turned away from one Greek philosopher, Aristotle, and toward another, Plato. For all its flaws, Aristotelian philosophy had the virtue of being grounded in empirics; Aristotle wanted to know how the world really worked. Descartes, however, turned away from this empirical tradition and toward Platonism, because he wanted to ground deduction as a mental process within reason itself. Plato’s two-world theory had, in effect, made the world “rational” by connecting the actual, changeable world to an ideal and permanent one. Descartes’ turn toward Plato must also be understood in terms of the contemporary resurgence of interest in St. Augustine in France. French theologians, particularly those in a monastery at Port Royal, which was outside of Paris, sought in St. Augustine an austere Christianity, in which the individual’s relationship to God took center stage. The medieval, Aristotelian church had, of course, emphasized church as a mediator between God and Man. The resurgence in Augustinian studies in France helps to explain, in part, the complete victory of Cartesianism in France during the second half of the seventeenth century.
Descartes’ combination of Platonism with Augustinianism led him down a philosophical path that had first been discovered in the Middle Ages but not fully pursued, the use of radical doubt. Many of you will be familiar with Descartes’ famous dictum “cogito, ergo sum”: I think, therefore, I am. Descartes pursued doubt relentlessly and concluded that he could doubt all parts of his worldly experience except for one, namely that he doubted. It seems paradoxical, but this method opened the way to a new philosophy of certainty, because it affirmed the individual’s (rather tortured) existence by ascribing significance to the act of thinking itself. This insight is backward-looking, in part, because it emerged from St. Augustine’s well-documented interest in human interiority. Call it Christian navel gazing. Nonetheless, Descartes could not merely stop here, because he needed to affirm both God and the external universe. Here again, he turned to medieval traditions, in this case making use St. Anselm’s classic ontological proof of God’s existence, which for our purposes here should be understood as justifying the idea that existence itself is its own predicate.
Descartes’ reliance on the ontological proof as the foundation of a new, more certain philosophy merged with the larger interest in France in Platonism. Platonic thought was compatible with the ontological proof, because it also reified ideas. For a true Platonist, ideas are more real than the physical world, hence, Descartes could throw out Aristotle and write off the Stagirite’s insistence on sense experience as an essential component of all knowledge. The theological result of this turn was that one could now rove God’s existence without resorting to sense experience. The larger historical significance of this Platonic/Augustinian turn lies, however, in Descartes’ determined association of God with mathematics. God guaranteed the universe’s structure, and Man gained access to this structure through mathematics. This is an enormously important idea, because it justified the assumption of a rational universe from a wholly internal and human position. Descartes’ doubt allowed him to deduce God and the universe from the standpoint of his own existence.
Initially, Descartes’ ideas were received most enthusiastically and thoroughly in Holland and the larger Netherlands, especially in the universities there. By 1663, for example, the University of Louvain, which was then part of the Spanish Netherlands (today’s Belgium), became such a hotbed of Cartesian thought that the Spanish government banned Cartesianism, for fear that it mechanistic approach would undermine the belief in a providential God. Cartesianism penetrated the French scene more slowly and haphazardly, in part because the Catholic Church was more organized there. The Jesuits, for example, mounted determined resistance to Cartesianism, but were unable to stem the tide completely, because some of their theological enemies, including especially the Jansenists and the Oratorians, had accepted the mechanistic view of the universe. In particular, French Cartesians seized on Descartes’ logic as the foundation for all knowledge, which promoted a tremendous confidence not only in nature but also in the ability of reason to apprehend and understand it. By the seventeenth century’s end, Aristotle was unimportant to the study of the natural world, largely because a French philosopher had so thoroughly doubted his own existence.
The influence of mathematics on seventeenth-century thought is just as clear in the great English thinker Thomas Hobbes, although here the new way of reasoning became a fundamental element of the science of politics. Hobbes’ significance as a political thinker is clear to us today, but in his own time, people emphasized the influence of his ethics and psychology. He is a key factor in the development of modern approaches to politics, nonetheless. Hobbes stands at the end of a long process that begins with Machiavelli. Machiavelli first developed the notion that politics was an autonomous realm, its rules and practices existing outside theology and the church. This early stage in the larger process of discovering politics came to an end with Jean Bodin, who applied Roman Law to the religious conflicts that plagued Europe, thus, identifying sovereignty as the fundamental political problem for everybody. Concomitantly, we must also consider Hugo Grotius, who fashioned the other great legal pillar of modern political thought, what we will call secularized natural law. Grotius believed that natural law came not from God but from the basic sociability of human beings. That is, human interaction on this world was fundamental to the larger concept of law. From the end of the fifteenth until the end of the sixteenth century, politics and law became established ways of thinking about the human condition. Thomas Hobbes took many of these fundamental political ideas another step further and, in the process, founded modern political thought.
Thomas Hobbes identified the very boundaries of his own life with the great political events of his day. He was born on April 8, 1588, when (supposedly) news of the impending Spanish invasion so upset his mother that she entered labor. Hobbes summed up the circumstances of his birth by saying, “Fear and I were born together.” Hobbes’ education was largely the doing of his uncle, who not only paid for tutors but also sent him to Oxford. (Hobbes’ father was nothing more than a drunken country vicar.) Oxford did not, however, cover itself in glory at the time, as is evidence by John Milton’s contemporary judgement that the college was a sow’s feast of brambles and thistles.
The deplorable state of undergraduate education at Oxford meant for Hobbes that the best education was to be sought outside of official channels, and he spent much of his youthful energies acquiring knowledge on his own. Hobbes’ pursuit of independent study received a significant boost when he was appointed tutor to the son of the Earl of Devonshire, a position that gave him access to the latest intellectual currents. The Earl of Devonshire was a great art and book collector and devoted his household to intellectual pursuits. Indeed, much of England’s intellectual life at the time occurred within the confines of great households, and Hobbes’ position in one such house afforded him regular access to a great library and to great personages such as Ben Jonson, Viscount Falkland, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury.
In 1610, Hobbes continued his extra-university education by accompanying his charge on a grand tour of the Continent, where he met many of the greatest scientific minds of the age. In Florence he met Galileo, in Paris Marin Mersenne. While on the Continent, Hobbes also acquired a profound taste for the works of the great Greek historian Thucydides, who wrote the most important contemporary account of the Peloponnesian War. Hobbes’ reading of Thucydides convinced him that politics was nothing more than a naked struggle for power. The classical Greek tradition influenced Hobbes even further, however, through Euclid’s work. While visiting Geneva, Hobbes found a copy of Euclid’s work on geometry and he was deeply impressed by Euclid’s conceptual method, in which the latter completed a proof through a series of rigorously defined logical, because this method offered another way to bypass the tyranny of words. For a nominalist and a skeptic such as Hobbes this discovery of method was extremely important, because it suggested that there was a path to firm knowledge. By 1630, Hobbes was back in England, where he these new insights affected deeply his understanding of the political crises that confronted England up through 1660.
Hobbes returned to the Continent in 1640, with the outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, and settled in Paris. This period was another extremely formative time for Hobbes, because it reinforced his growing belief that nature was harsh and cruel, that there was no God, and that only the material world existed. These ideas are most evident in his first two important works, De Corpore (1640) and De Cive (1642), both of which explained the world in purely physical and earthly terms. During this time, Hobbes also met Descartes, but the French rationalist did not appreciate Hobbes’ atheism and materialism. Hobbes’ atheism also got him in trouble at the court of the later Charles II, who had fled the Revolution to France with some family members. Hobbes was initially appointed general tutor to the court, but when his atheism was uncovered, his position was reduced to mathematics only.
Hobbes’ ambiguous relationship to his religion, country, and king drove him to seek out new positions in political theory. In essence, Hobbes became a theorist of secular absolutism, a way of thinking that, as it turned out, was equally congenial to Oliver Cromwell’s dictatorship as it was the Stuart monarchs, because refused to ground political legitimacy in ethical considerations. For Hobbes, legitimacy was a de facto condition. For example, Hobbes published his most famous text Leviathan in 1651, the same year in which it became fully apparent that Cromwell had won the Civil War, at least for the time being. The most important aspect of this text was that it justified victory over doctrine, both Cromwell and the executed Charles I could see themselves in Hobbes’ concept of the Leviathan. This legitimation of power for its own sake is what makes the text so historically significant.
Hobbes’s absolutism appears “modern” to us, because it deals with political power in the frankest, unsentimental terms. Yet, this modern approach to politics was deeply rooted in medieval ways of thinking. Hobbes’s thought emerged from the philosophical tradition known as Nominalism, which dominated Oxford when Hobbes studied there. Nominalism emerged as a response to late Scholasticism and, most simply, argued that words do not express things. Words are merely names that pertain to thoughts in our heads. The effect of this Nominalist position was to explode the metaphysical tradition of thinking about the nature of God. In this philosophical world there can be no notion of a divine Providence, or, if we keep Grotius in mind, of divinely inspired Natural Law. Hobbes was, therefore, a key figure in the secularization of Natural Law that emerged from Nominalist criticism. He did not speak of Natural Law but of laws of nature, and since we cannot know nature completely, each law is, at best, a theorem that can only be applied imperfectly to an individual situation. The consequence of this position was the reduction of Natural Law to a series of unstable, loose guides for individual moral conduct.
The sense of a humanity cut loose from the divine justified a reassessment of the traditional sociable anthropology on which Natural Law theory had been based. Hobbes’ materialist vision of nature led him to posit a particularly pessimistic vision of Man. What was Man for Hobbes? Hobbes defined Man as nothing more than a body living on this earth. Thus, unlike Descartes, who defined Man through the Mind, Hobbes gave Mind no reality whatsoever. For Hobbes, Man is a sensate creature and the Mind is, therefore, nothing more than decaying sense. (This attitude will run through John Locke and David Hume.) Moreover, Man has no control over how his mind works. Instead of being a rational creature that considered problems through deduction, Man was for Hobbes a bundle of desires that emerged from the random sensations imposed on the body by the world—and most important among these desires was the human will. (This was also, in part, a medieval inheritance, since the Nominalists also prized will over reason, though they applied this distinction to God.) The vision of human beings as non-rational, willful creatures had a profound effect on Hobbes’ notion of politics. Because for Hobbes, Man is proud, unsociable, aggressive, Man’s desires can only be realized at the expense of others. The most important desire in this world is the desire for self-preservation an in the pursuit of that desire conflict naturally emerged. Moreover, to the extent that human beings do live together, it is only for the purpose of defending their own lives. (Locke would put a different spin on this idea, holding that human beings are so ration that they see the virtue in joining a collective of some sort in the name of defense.) Now, having begun from the standpoint that Man was nothing more than a beast, Hobbes constructs a zero-sum political world, in which there is no ethical community, only a war of all against all with shifting alliances contracted for mutual defense.
I have been describing, of course, the philosophical origins of the Hobbesian State of Nature. It is important when reading Hobbes to understand that he never argued that this State of Nature was a real historical period. (Rousseau would take much the same line.) The State of Nature is a philosophical abstraction that explains what was, for Hobbes, a real social problem: Man is not an inherently social creature, but must be socialized to live in a community. This anthropology is quite different from that of Aristotle, who saw Man as a political animal, and is, in fact, the secular counterpart to St. Augustine’s City of God. For St. Augustine, Man was a broken creature, soaked in sin, and who needed external authority to guarantee his further existence. Hobbes then used the idea of self-preservation to justify the origin of governments. He relies here in the concept of prudence to lift people out of the Hell that he has created for them, arguing that the fear of death at the hands of others drives people to vest their right to self-preservation in some central authority, such as a prince or an assembly—there is no difference for Hobbes. Hobbes then posits the notion of a covenant that justifies the power of the new central authority. This covenant is not, however, one between the prince and his people: it is, in fact, between the people themselves, which signified that the prince or the Leviathan had neither metaphysical nor historical rights. The state existed to aid in the process of self-preservation, and the moment that the prince could not guarantee self-preservation, the contract was dissolved and a new one became justified through necessity alone. Why is this important? Hobbes has just proved that the state is a fiction and, more importantly, that this fiction has no religious sanction. The state was, then, nothing more than a Mortal God whose authority derived from general consent.
Hobbes’ recreation of central authority as the Mortal God had serious implications for the tradition of Natural Law. In traditional Natural Law, political authority was composed of secular and religious authorities, that is, the church and Scripture had some say in how a state or its people must act. Hobbes argued, however, that all authority resided in the state, and to the extent that Scripture offered maxims for individual conduct it was the state authority that justified the interpretation of them. That is, the prince determined the meaning of the church’s doctrines, and the church became a state church, devoted to the maintenance of authority. In taking this position, Hobbes broke with a medieval political-religious dualism that dated back at least to the Investiture Controversy of 1077 and probably as far back as the pretensions of Pope Gelasius, who in the fifth century had argued (unsuccessfully) that the spiritual power was more important than secular power.
Hobbes’ views on the church also had implications for religious tolerance. Hobbes took a narrow view of tolerance and religious liberty. Since the church was part of the state, it became the ruler’s duty to maintain religious practices and beliefs. Hence, all people in a given state are, for Hobbes, required to conform externally to the rules and principles that had been laid down by the ruler. This doctrine sounds harsh, but it also had the virtue of guaranteeing the rights of conscience, since every person had the right to believe differently in private. The line was to be drawn at public expression of disagreement. Given the tenor of the times, Hobbes’ emphasis on maintaining order over allowing religious debate had a certain virtue, especially since the most extreme Puritans engaged in religious repression that was much worse than what had come before.
Rarely has a book provoked as much revulsion as did Hobbes’ Leviathan. Dubbed “Monster of Malmesbury” by his critics, Hobbes managed with the Leviathan to tread on just about everyone’s toes. England’s legal community was angry, because their field had been subordinated thoroughly to princely power. If there was n o low outside the Leviathan, then why even have lawyers? The church hierarchy was angry at having the church’s traditional monopoly on the interpretation of religious texts be undermined. In addition, the growing number of religious sectarians, people who believed that religious liberty was a prerequisite for social peace, was also upset, because Hobbes left no room for the public expression of conscience. Hobbes was not bothered by any of the criticism, especially given that Charles II had read the Leviathan as justifying his royal authority. With such a protector, Hobbes was safe from persecution and, in the end, he enjoyed a quite life, living to a ripe old age that included much singing, which he believed kept him healthy and regular exercise in the form of tennis.
In spite of the general opposition to Hobbes’ work, the Leviathan was quite influential. This influence was rooted mostly in Hobbes’ intellectual rigor, because the structured nature of his thought required all future discussions of a religious polity to take place on Hobbes’ terms and not those of his critics. It also helped that Hobbes was a talented polemicist who seemed to enjoy debate. He tangled, for example, with a group of thinkers called the Cambridge Platonists over free will. Hobbes’ tendency toward polemics aside, however, what endures is his restructuring of politics within a wholly secular realm. Rather than beginning with the “cogito,” Hobbes began with human need, making it the foundation for all politics, and he pursued need to very dark but also realistic conclusions. As a result, he desanctified the state, thus opening the door to further critiques of the state’s foundations. In making the state a product of will Hobbes also made it something that could be deconstructed and reconstructed as the need arose. Hobbes may not have liked failed revolutions, but he still justified all the successful ones.
Lecture 5: Science and Magic in Early-Modern Europe, 1450-1867
By Michael Sauter
Traditionally, the period of history we call the Scientific Revolution has been placed in the seventeenth century and it is usually portrayed as a heroic age, when man sloughed off mysticism and religion, and began to see the universe as it really is. According to this view, this revolution’s highpoints were in astronomy and physics, where thanks to a few fearless men of imagination—Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, among others—a new worldview was fashioned that fundamentally changed the human being’s understanding of the universe. As the historian of science Herbert Butterfield put it in 1948:
This is a bit of an overstatement, though it does reflect sentiments that were already expressed in the eighteenth century. Consider Alexander Pope’s famous couplet: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”
If you have learned to be suspicious of anything, however, it should be of blanket or celebratory pronouncements on the modernity of people who lived and died more than two centuries before anybody in this room was born. In fact, the idea that all was light after Newton pronounced the new physics is itself a selective whitewash. First, Newton did not free the universe from superstition at all. In Newton’s universe God was present as a tinkerer, giving Creation a nudge here or there as the need arose. Second, to the end of his life Newton remained a convinced alchemist, seeking to transmute metals as a way of delving ever deeper into Creation’s secrets. Indeed, there is reason to believe that Newton suffered from mercury poisoning when he died in 1727--mercury being the essential to all alchemical work. Finally, there was more to science before Newton than simply astronomy, as advances in chemistry and medicine also laid the foundation for generations of subsequent scientific work.
So if we are to consider science in the early-modern world, we must expand our horizons beyond merely the seventeenth century and astronomy. I want to accomplish this today by following two themes. First, I will emphasize how early-modern science was rooted in Renaissance humanist textual criticism. Second, I will show how central magical and alchemical traditions were not only to the break with the medieval worldview, but also to the rise of modern scientific traditions.
So let us begin by looking back to the early Renaissance, in order to trace some of the attitudes and practices that would become fundamental to early-modern science. In my lecture on the Italian Renaissance I discussed how important Petrarch was to the development of Humanism in fifteenth-century Italy, for it was Petrarch who first cultivated a sense of difference from the medieval past. We can make a similar case for Petrarch’s importance to the history of science, since he was also the first European writer to glorify observation of nature since ancient times. Thanks, in part, to him it became fashionable to observe nature as a counterbalance to the untrustworthy medieval inheritance. That is to say, one way of overcoming slavish medieval adherence to textual authority was to treat nature as an alternate text with its own form of authority.
You also know, of course, that another key aspect of the Renaissance was the return of lost classical texts to the European canon. The same holds true for the history of science. In 1406, for example, Jacopo Angelo returned from Constantinople with the first copy of the Ptolemy’s Geography to be seen in the west since classical times. This is an important moment to the history of science, but it is also of more general significance, since it inspired new interest in geography just before Europe was preparing to sail off to what would become the New World. The text’s return is also quite an heroic tale. You see Angelo had gone to Constantinople for the purpose of collecting manuscripts. Unfortunately, his ship sank during his return trip, and the Geography was the one text that he was able to rescue for posterity.
I should also add two examples from the history of physics and medicine, respectively. First, consider that in 1417, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) discovered in an Italian monastery the sole surviving copy of Lucretius’ De rerum natura. Lucretius was a Roman philosopher and poet in the tradition of the Greek philosopher Democritus, which mean that he subscribed to the classical Greek doctrine of atomism. The republication of Lucretius’ poetry sparked interest in Greek atomism and it became fundamental to the rise of atomism in science during the seventeenth century Europe. Second, medicine benefited from another discovery in Italian monasteries, when Guarino de Verona (1370-1460) recovered Celsus’ De medicina. This text was important for two reasons. First, the Latin prose was beautiful, which gave it an allure beyond its content. Second, it became an alternate source of medical authority beyond the ancient Galenic texts that the scholastics had emphasized.
Perhaps the most important aspect of this general recovery is, however, the spread of Greek among European scholars. We have already noted how important Greek was to both the Renaissance in Italy and the Reformation in northern Europe. In science, its return is equally important. In a previous lecture I discussed the importance of Manuel Chrysolorus as a teacher of Greek in Florence for the Renaissance. In 1439, another Byzantine scholar, Gemistos Pletho, arrived in Florence to teach Greek, and his influence sparked an even larger revival in Greek studies. As a result, by the end of the fifteenth century, many scholars were engaged in large projects of translation. The humanist scholar Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), for example, translated all of Proclus (410-485) and some still unknown Galenic texts into Latin. In Paris, Johannes Guinter of Andernach (1505-1574) translated almost the entirety of Galen’s medical works into Latin, and this was important, as we will see, because Guinter taught Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), the founder of modern anatomical study.
Still, with the return of Greek also came something that the modern mind finds strange, Greek mysticism. I have already mentioned in another lecture Plato’s mysticism, one aspect of which some of you have run across in his two-world theory. In a few words, one world is physical, but unreal, while the other world is ideal, but real; philosophers, of course, can think their way to the real world. In the third century AD an Egyptian philosopher named Plotinus reinterpreted this dichotomous worldview in hierarchical terms, holding that the physical and ideal worlds existed in a continuum, which meant that human beings could think their way up to the Supreme Being. This theory is what historians of philosophy refer to as Neo-Platonism, and it is enormously important historically, since it shaped generations of European minds.
Neo-Platonism, in turn, helped to set the stage for the arrival of the most important mystical tradition, Hermeticism. During the fifteenth century, texts ascribed to one Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice-Great Hermes) began to appear in Italy. This Hermes was believed to have lived in ancient Egypt and to have been the inventor of writing, and among his greatest works were the mystically inspired Corpus Hermeticum. It turned out later that these texts were not written in ancient Egypt by the inventor of writing, but were written down somewhere between the first and third centuries AD, probably in Hellenistic Alexandria. Written mostly in Greek, these texts included speculation on alchemy, astrology, theology, and philosophy. When a copy of this corpus finally arrived in Florence in 1463, Cosimo de Medici required the famous scholar Marsilio Ficino to translate the entire collection of 17 books before doing any other work. (You need to think about this, for a moment. The greatest scholar of Greek in Europe was required to translate works on the occult, even before turning his attention to Plato’s lost dialogues. This is not take cast aspersion on the decision, but to show you how important these texts were thought to have been at the time.)
The Hermetic texts almost immediately became central to the elaboration of a system of natural magic. Yes, magic was once central to science in early-modern Europe. It is important to understand, however, that this was not black magic or witchcraft. The magic of the scientist was considered to be an essential part of God’s universe, because all parts of the universe existed in harmony. We can see this in the general belief in the macrocosm/microcosm relationship. Put simply, many people in the fifteenth century believed that man was a microcosm of the larger universe, connected in mystical ways to the divine whole. This meant, as a practical matter, for example, that man could be affected by the stars, but could also affect them. We may chuckle at this idea now, but it was enormously productive in the cultural realm. Much of Renaissance Italian art was deeply affected by the macrocosm/microcosm arrangement, and Renaissance science derived much from it as well.
One example of mysticism’s fundamental contribution to science, perhaps even its central one, is the elevation of number in early-modern eyes. The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras had founded a philosophical tradition that took numbers to be symbols for greater things, thus injecting numerology into Greek philosophy. The interest in numbers persisted in Greek thought right through Plato, who included numerological speculations in his dialogue Timaeus. This meant that things such as numbers and geometric shapes became pregnant with meaning in the Renaissance world. In 1584, for example the Renaissance scientists Giambattista della Porta (1535-1615) published Natural Magick, in which he expounded on the natural sympathies that coursed through the universe. In Germany, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) associated magic with religion in his De occulta philosophia (1509-1510), thus bringing together the study of nature with religious worship. And one final example, the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler believed that the solar system was designed to coincide with a series of geometric shapes. Thus, astronomy became a way to derive religious meaning from the design of God’s universe.
What all this means is that things we believe do not belong to science were fundamental to scientific practice right through Isaac Newton, and even beyond. The universe was a sympathetic place, in which correspondences existed that could be manipulated through the proper understanding of things such as number. This belief ran across all the modern sciences that appeared at the time, such as astronomy, medicine, and chemistry. And now I will offer a brief overview of some key players in the creation of modern science.
We will begin with chemistry, since modern science derives mostly from early chemical work and language. The most important person in the history of early chemistry is Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, otherwise known as Paracelsus, or “beyond Celsus.” From just outside of Zurich, Paracelsus’ father was a rural doctor with a penchant for Renaissance science, which meant that the younger von Hohenheim grew up being exposed to the latest Humanist criticism. Paracelsus is important to both the history of chemistry and the history of medicine. In chemistry, he first directed people’s attention to the fact that compounds can be dissolved, and his emphasis on the use of tools such as distillation equipment pointed to the future of laboratory science. In medicine, he turned people’s attention away from Galenic humors and encouraged doctors to look for the causes of disease outside the body.
In medicine, a series of important people command attention, including Realdo Columbo (1510-1559), Gabriele Falloppio (1523-1562), Andreas Vesalius () and William Harvey. All of these men either studied or taught at the university of Padua. Vesalius and Harvey are the two most important of them. In 1543, Vesalius published the first complete anatomical text written in Europe since Galenic times, his De humani corporis fabrica (1543), which became a benchmark in the medical world for its emphasis on direct observation in medicine over commentary on ancient texts. Galen no longer had all the answers.
One important outcome of this new attitude toward direct observation of the human body was William Harvey’s discovery of the human circulatory system. In his De motu cordis (1628), Harvey put together the first correct explanation of human circulation. Whereas Galen had believed that blood actually passed through invisible pores in the heart’s central wall, Harvey showed how it went through the right side of the heart, then to the lungs before passing through the left side of the heart on its way out to the rest of the body. Harvey’s work is now considered a masterpiece, but it was accepted ony very slowly. The marked differences between the early-modern world and our own is that one of Harvey’s earliest and most vocal supporters was Robert Fludd, who believed that Harvey’s hypothesis offered insight into deeper mystical truths.
It is in the context of Renaissance chemistry and medicine that we can approach the astronomical segment of the Scientific Revolution. Every history of modern astronomy begins with Nicolaus Copernicus, the first astronomer to posit a heliocentric universe over the traditional geocentric one. Although we see him as the creator of a new astronomy, Copernicus was a man of the middle ages. His work was not based on new observations of astral phenomena, but simply an aesthetic reinterpretation of the traditional cosmology.
Whereas, medieval Aristotelian cosmology had held that the universe rotated around the earth, Copernicus posited as an hypothesis that the earth revolved around the sun. This shift in perspective would allow the astronomer to get rid of what were called epicycles. The problem was that the other planets appeared to move backward in the sky at certain times of the year. Astronomers had long posited epicycles, circles within circular motion to explain this relative motion. Copernicus held, however, that it would make more sense simply to put the earth in orbit around the sun to get rid of all the epicycles. In 1543, Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, which explained the entire system from the new perspective.
As was the case with Harvey, the acceptance of this new hypothesis was slow, at best. But over the next century most astronomers accepted the new system. Johannes Kepler accepted the Copernican approach, because he could not make the old system square with the volumes of observations he inherited from his mentor the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Kepler, reduced the Copernican system to s series of laws that governed planetary motion, though as I have mentioned, these laws covered for a deeper mystical arrangement behind God’s universe.
Kepler was rooted in the Renaissance, but the mystical influences lessened in the work of men such as Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. Galileo’s contribution was to reduce the importance of the why question in astronomy and physics and to concentrate on the how. That is, it was more important to observe and explain how things moved in the universe than to speculate on God’s plan for the entire universe. To that end, he introduced basic experiments in acceleration that are still done in physics classrooms. He also destroyed the last remnants of the scholastic vision of the universe by being the first to use the telescope to observe the Heavens. Among other things, he discovered that the moon was not a perfect sphere and that other planets also had moons. There was, therefore, no reason to believe that the heavens were a realm of perfection.
Isaac Newton brought together all of these advances in physics and astronomy, providing the first unified theory of planetary motion. In his Principia Mathematica (1687) Newton brought together the Copernican system with Kepler’s laws of motion, and Galileo’s interest in physical experiment. In this text Newton posited a universal theory of gravity and demonstrated how planetary motion could be explained exactly by the application of this rule. Of course, as I have already noted, there was till plenty of room in Newton’s mind for speculative work, including his alchemical studies. How Newton’s legacy was purged of these less-than-scientific-elements is another story. The point for us to keep in mind now, however, is to see Newton’s universe as an outgrowth of a larger process of change that began with the Renaissance and extended into the eighteenth century. Modern science may have arrived in 1687, but early-modern mysticism managed to hang around for a while longer.
Traditionally, the period of history we call the Scientific Revolution has been placed in the seventeenth century and it is usually portrayed as a heroic age, when man sloughed off mysticism and religion, and began to see the universe as it really is. According to this view, this revolution’s highpoints were in astronomy and physics, where thanks to a few fearless men of imagination—Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton, among others—a new worldview was fashioned that fundamentally changed the human being’s understanding of the universe. As the historian of science Herbert Butterfield put it in 1948:
The Scientific Revolution outshines everything since the rise of Christianity
and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere
internal displacements within the system of medieval Christianity.
This is a bit of an overstatement, though it does reflect sentiments that were already expressed in the eighteenth century. Consider Alexander Pope’s famous couplet: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”
If you have learned to be suspicious of anything, however, it should be of blanket or celebratory pronouncements on the modernity of people who lived and died more than two centuries before anybody in this room was born. In fact, the idea that all was light after Newton pronounced the new physics is itself a selective whitewash. First, Newton did not free the universe from superstition at all. In Newton’s universe God was present as a tinkerer, giving Creation a nudge here or there as the need arose. Second, to the end of his life Newton remained a convinced alchemist, seeking to transmute metals as a way of delving ever deeper into Creation’s secrets. Indeed, there is reason to believe that Newton suffered from mercury poisoning when he died in 1727--mercury being the essential to all alchemical work. Finally, there was more to science before Newton than simply astronomy, as advances in chemistry and medicine also laid the foundation for generations of subsequent scientific work.
So if we are to consider science in the early-modern world, we must expand our horizons beyond merely the seventeenth century and astronomy. I want to accomplish this today by following two themes. First, I will emphasize how early-modern science was rooted in Renaissance humanist textual criticism. Second, I will show how central magical and alchemical traditions were not only to the break with the medieval worldview, but also to the rise of modern scientific traditions.
So let us begin by looking back to the early Renaissance, in order to trace some of the attitudes and practices that would become fundamental to early-modern science. In my lecture on the Italian Renaissance I discussed how important Petrarch was to the development of Humanism in fifteenth-century Italy, for it was Petrarch who first cultivated a sense of difference from the medieval past. We can make a similar case for Petrarch’s importance to the history of science, since he was also the first European writer to glorify observation of nature since ancient times. Thanks, in part, to him it became fashionable to observe nature as a counterbalance to the untrustworthy medieval inheritance. That is to say, one way of overcoming slavish medieval adherence to textual authority was to treat nature as an alternate text with its own form of authority.
You also know, of course, that another key aspect of the Renaissance was the return of lost classical texts to the European canon. The same holds true for the history of science. In 1406, for example, Jacopo Angelo returned from Constantinople with the first copy of the Ptolemy’s Geography to be seen in the west since classical times. This is an important moment to the history of science, but it is also of more general significance, since it inspired new interest in geography just before Europe was preparing to sail off to what would become the New World. The text’s return is also quite an heroic tale. You see Angelo had gone to Constantinople for the purpose of collecting manuscripts. Unfortunately, his ship sank during his return trip, and the Geography was the one text that he was able to rescue for posterity.
I should also add two examples from the history of physics and medicine, respectively. First, consider that in 1417, Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) discovered in an Italian monastery the sole surviving copy of Lucretius’ De rerum natura. Lucretius was a Roman philosopher and poet in the tradition of the Greek philosopher Democritus, which mean that he subscribed to the classical Greek doctrine of atomism. The republication of Lucretius’ poetry sparked interest in Greek atomism and it became fundamental to the rise of atomism in science during the seventeenth century Europe. Second, medicine benefited from another discovery in Italian monasteries, when Guarino de Verona (1370-1460) recovered Celsus’ De medicina. This text was important for two reasons. First, the Latin prose was beautiful, which gave it an allure beyond its content. Second, it became an alternate source of medical authority beyond the ancient Galenic texts that the scholastics had emphasized.
Perhaps the most important aspect of this general recovery is, however, the spread of Greek among European scholars. We have already noted how important Greek was to both the Renaissance in Italy and the Reformation in northern Europe. In science, its return is equally important. In a previous lecture I discussed the importance of Manuel Chrysolorus as a teacher of Greek in Florence for the Renaissance. In 1439, another Byzantine scholar, Gemistos Pletho, arrived in Florence to teach Greek, and his influence sparked an even larger revival in Greek studies. As a result, by the end of the fifteenth century, many scholars were engaged in large projects of translation. The humanist scholar Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), for example, translated all of Proclus (410-485) and some still unknown Galenic texts into Latin. In Paris, Johannes Guinter of Andernach (1505-1574) translated almost the entirety of Galen’s medical works into Latin, and this was important, as we will see, because Guinter taught Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), the founder of modern anatomical study.
Still, with the return of Greek also came something that the modern mind finds strange, Greek mysticism. I have already mentioned in another lecture Plato’s mysticism, one aspect of which some of you have run across in his two-world theory. In a few words, one world is physical, but unreal, while the other world is ideal, but real; philosophers, of course, can think their way to the real world. In the third century AD an Egyptian philosopher named Plotinus reinterpreted this dichotomous worldview in hierarchical terms, holding that the physical and ideal worlds existed in a continuum, which meant that human beings could think their way up to the Supreme Being. This theory is what historians of philosophy refer to as Neo-Platonism, and it is enormously important historically, since it shaped generations of European minds.
Neo-Platonism, in turn, helped to set the stage for the arrival of the most important mystical tradition, Hermeticism. During the fifteenth century, texts ascribed to one Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice-Great Hermes) began to appear in Italy. This Hermes was believed to have lived in ancient Egypt and to have been the inventor of writing, and among his greatest works were the mystically inspired Corpus Hermeticum. It turned out later that these texts were not written in ancient Egypt by the inventor of writing, but were written down somewhere between the first and third centuries AD, probably in Hellenistic Alexandria. Written mostly in Greek, these texts included speculation on alchemy, astrology, theology, and philosophy. When a copy of this corpus finally arrived in Florence in 1463, Cosimo de Medici required the famous scholar Marsilio Ficino to translate the entire collection of 17 books before doing any other work. (You need to think about this, for a moment. The greatest scholar of Greek in Europe was required to translate works on the occult, even before turning his attention to Plato’s lost dialogues. This is not take cast aspersion on the decision, but to show you how important these texts were thought to have been at the time.)
The Hermetic texts almost immediately became central to the elaboration of a system of natural magic. Yes, magic was once central to science in early-modern Europe. It is important to understand, however, that this was not black magic or witchcraft. The magic of the scientist was considered to be an essential part of God’s universe, because all parts of the universe existed in harmony. We can see this in the general belief in the macrocosm/microcosm relationship. Put simply, many people in the fifteenth century believed that man was a microcosm of the larger universe, connected in mystical ways to the divine whole. This meant, as a practical matter, for example, that man could be affected by the stars, but could also affect them. We may chuckle at this idea now, but it was enormously productive in the cultural realm. Much of Renaissance Italian art was deeply affected by the macrocosm/microcosm arrangement, and Renaissance science derived much from it as well.
One example of mysticism’s fundamental contribution to science, perhaps even its central one, is the elevation of number in early-modern eyes. The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras had founded a philosophical tradition that took numbers to be symbols for greater things, thus injecting numerology into Greek philosophy. The interest in numbers persisted in Greek thought right through Plato, who included numerological speculations in his dialogue Timaeus. This meant that things such as numbers and geometric shapes became pregnant with meaning in the Renaissance world. In 1584, for example the Renaissance scientists Giambattista della Porta (1535-1615) published Natural Magick, in which he expounded on the natural sympathies that coursed through the universe. In Germany, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) associated magic with religion in his De occulta philosophia (1509-1510), thus bringing together the study of nature with religious worship. And one final example, the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler believed that the solar system was designed to coincide with a series of geometric shapes. Thus, astronomy became a way to derive religious meaning from the design of God’s universe.
What all this means is that things we believe do not belong to science were fundamental to scientific practice right through Isaac Newton, and even beyond. The universe was a sympathetic place, in which correspondences existed that could be manipulated through the proper understanding of things such as number. This belief ran across all the modern sciences that appeared at the time, such as astronomy, medicine, and chemistry. And now I will offer a brief overview of some key players in the creation of modern science.
We will begin with chemistry, since modern science derives mostly from early chemical work and language. The most important person in the history of early chemistry is Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, otherwise known as Paracelsus, or “beyond Celsus.” From just outside of Zurich, Paracelsus’ father was a rural doctor with a penchant for Renaissance science, which meant that the younger von Hohenheim grew up being exposed to the latest Humanist criticism. Paracelsus is important to both the history of chemistry and the history of medicine. In chemistry, he first directed people’s attention to the fact that compounds can be dissolved, and his emphasis on the use of tools such as distillation equipment pointed to the future of laboratory science. In medicine, he turned people’s attention away from Galenic humors and encouraged doctors to look for the causes of disease outside the body.
In medicine, a series of important people command attention, including Realdo Columbo (1510-1559), Gabriele Falloppio (1523-1562), Andreas Vesalius () and William Harvey. All of these men either studied or taught at the university of Padua. Vesalius and Harvey are the two most important of them. In 1543, Vesalius published the first complete anatomical text written in Europe since Galenic times, his De humani corporis fabrica (1543), which became a benchmark in the medical world for its emphasis on direct observation in medicine over commentary on ancient texts. Galen no longer had all the answers.
One important outcome of this new attitude toward direct observation of the human body was William Harvey’s discovery of the human circulatory system. In his De motu cordis (1628), Harvey put together the first correct explanation of human circulation. Whereas Galen had believed that blood actually passed through invisible pores in the heart’s central wall, Harvey showed how it went through the right side of the heart, then to the lungs before passing through the left side of the heart on its way out to the rest of the body. Harvey’s work is now considered a masterpiece, but it was accepted ony very slowly. The marked differences between the early-modern world and our own is that one of Harvey’s earliest and most vocal supporters was Robert Fludd, who believed that Harvey’s hypothesis offered insight into deeper mystical truths.
It is in the context of Renaissance chemistry and medicine that we can approach the astronomical segment of the Scientific Revolution. Every history of modern astronomy begins with Nicolaus Copernicus, the first astronomer to posit a heliocentric universe over the traditional geocentric one. Although we see him as the creator of a new astronomy, Copernicus was a man of the middle ages. His work was not based on new observations of astral phenomena, but simply an aesthetic reinterpretation of the traditional cosmology.
Whereas, medieval Aristotelian cosmology had held that the universe rotated around the earth, Copernicus posited as an hypothesis that the earth revolved around the sun. This shift in perspective would allow the astronomer to get rid of what were called epicycles. The problem was that the other planets appeared to move backward in the sky at certain times of the year. Astronomers had long posited epicycles, circles within circular motion to explain this relative motion. Copernicus held, however, that it would make more sense simply to put the earth in orbit around the sun to get rid of all the epicycles. In 1543, Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, which explained the entire system from the new perspective.
As was the case with Harvey, the acceptance of this new hypothesis was slow, at best. But over the next century most astronomers accepted the new system. Johannes Kepler accepted the Copernican approach, because he could not make the old system square with the volumes of observations he inherited from his mentor the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Kepler, reduced the Copernican system to s series of laws that governed planetary motion, though as I have mentioned, these laws covered for a deeper mystical arrangement behind God’s universe.
Kepler was rooted in the Renaissance, but the mystical influences lessened in the work of men such as Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. Galileo’s contribution was to reduce the importance of the why question in astronomy and physics and to concentrate on the how. That is, it was more important to observe and explain how things moved in the universe than to speculate on God’s plan for the entire universe. To that end, he introduced basic experiments in acceleration that are still done in physics classrooms. He also destroyed the last remnants of the scholastic vision of the universe by being the first to use the telescope to observe the Heavens. Among other things, he discovered that the moon was not a perfect sphere and that other planets also had moons. There was, therefore, no reason to believe that the heavens were a realm of perfection.
Isaac Newton brought together all of these advances in physics and astronomy, providing the first unified theory of planetary motion. In his Principia Mathematica (1687) Newton brought together the Copernican system with Kepler’s laws of motion, and Galileo’s interest in physical experiment. In this text Newton posited a universal theory of gravity and demonstrated how planetary motion could be explained exactly by the application of this rule. Of course, as I have already noted, there was till plenty of room in Newton’s mind for speculative work, including his alchemical studies. How Newton’s legacy was purged of these less-than-scientific-elements is another story. The point for us to keep in mind now, however, is to see Newton’s universe as an outgrowth of a larger process of change that began with the Renaissance and extended into the eighteenth century. Modern science may have arrived in 1687, but early-modern mysticism managed to hang around for a while longer.
Lecture 4: The Catolic Reformation
By Michael Sauter
We began this course with the problem of modernity, which I noted has generally been understood as Europe’s exit from the Middle Ages. Of course, we also noted questions about the way people have thought about this exit. Did it happen quickly or slowly? Was it a broad movement or a narrow one? Nonetheless, the general argument, even today, and in spite of much debate, still holds that the Renaissance and the Reformation freed the modern world from Europe’s medieval past, and the most important aspect of this manumission was the discovery of the individual.
The individual man—for it was always men—recognized and reveled in his uniqueness, his creativity, and his intellect. So when you look at portrait of, say, Niccoló Machiavelli or Martin Luther, back stare at you the faces of the world’s first modern men.
This is hogwash. Machiavelli was nothing more than an out-of-work Italian courtier with a taste for the classics and lots of free time; and Martin Luther was an angry monk with a taste for medieval theology and disputation. Modernity did not sprout fully formed from the minds of these great men, and to the extent that the modern individual did appear in this period its arrival has, I will argue today, as much to do with the Catholic Church as it does any of the heroes we have discussed so far.
So today I want to begin with a new idea that we will call the Catholic Reformation, for the Catholic Church also devoted great energy to updating its medieval structures. What you need to understand about the Catholic Reformation is that it was not simply a response to Protestantism, but was rooted in a long tradition of reform within the church that dated back to the late medieval period. The Babylonian Captivity (1309-1377) had made some people within the church aware of the need for internal reform, and the Council of Constance (1414-1418) was the first sign of deeper stirrings that ran into the fifteenth century.
Catholic Reformers saw the worldly church as hopelessly corrupt. The Renaissance Papacy, especially during the time of the Borgias, had been a moral embarrassment, as the Popes became so embroiled in politics that they forgot the church’s religious mission. Just about everyone believed that a general council was necessary to fix all the church’s problems, including such famous people as Martin Luther, Charles V, Erasmus, and the infamous Torquemada.
Four individuals provide specific examples of the desire for reform within the Catholic tradition. First, in Spain Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436-1517), who was Isabella I’s confessor and twice regent, reformed pastoral care and the Spanish system of education. He is most famous, however, for sponsoring the publication of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible (1514-17), which printed the biblical text in several ancient languages that were situated in adjacent columns, with the Old Testament appearing in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and the New Testament appearing in Greek and Latin. Second, in France Guillaume Briçonnet (1472-1534), Bishop of Meaux, instituted extensive visitations in the parishes under his control and promoted a religious revival through his sermons and printed texts. Briçonnet was also part of a circle, which included the great Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, and which emphasized Bible study, especially the Epistles of St. Paul, as a path back to true religion. Third, in Italy Gian Matteo Giberti (1495-1543), Bishop of Verona, whose accomplishments included reforming ecclesiastical education, setting up a printing press, and establishing stricter oversight over local parishes. Giberti’s system enjoyed wide influence as the Bishop of Milan borrowed heavily from it, as did Briçonnet in France. Finally, on the lay side we have Ignatius de Loyola, who founded the Jesuit Order in 1521, before the Reformation was truly under way. Originally, it was both a missionary and teaching order that spread Christianity and a rigorous system of education not only to the New World but also to large parts of Europe. The order’s emphasis on education was spectacularly successful. Just to name two of its most famous products in the early-modern period, René Descartes and Voltaire both went to Jesuit colleges, though in the latter’s case the Jesuits created their worst enemy.
Having identified the Catholic Reformation and some of its practitioners, let us consider, now, its general spirit. Much like its Protestant counterpart, the Catholic Reformation wanted to personalize religious belief. Thus, its reformers put a heavy emphasis on reading and writing texts. This is similar to Protestant zeal for putting the Bible in people’s hands, but with a different emphasis. For Catholic Reformers the idea was to give the individual greater access to religion’s comforting power, not necessarily to the Lord’s Word. As we will see at the end of this lecture, this approach to religion had its liberating aspects, especially in art, music, and architecture. For now, however, we need to keep in mind that the Catholic Reformation stressed the worldly church. It reformed pastoral education and care, making certain that priests were both educated and moral. And it also emptied the world of most—though not all—of its mystical elements.
So, in effect, we confront in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries two Reformations that then set about the work of making Europeans truly Christian. More importantly, and although some today may recoil at the notion, these two Reformations played an integral part in making Europe and, later, the New World “modern,” for in their desire to make everyone truly Christian, these Reformations helped to eliminate ideas and practices that were truly medieval, even pagan.
You will surely have noted by now that although there were two reformations, the Catholic one got started later. As I have already noted, it begins only in 1545. So we need to address now an obvious question: why did things get underway so late within the Catholic Church? The simple answer is war. As you know, the French invaded Italy in 1494, unleashing a period of warfare in Italian peninsula that included such awful spectacles as unscrupulous Papal alliance making and unmaking, as well as the sacking of Rome in 1527 by Charles V’s mercenary troops. (I should note here that the sacking of Rome is the traditional date on which the Renaissance ended in Italy.) It was not until 1545 that a council could be called, and even then it was adjourned twice for long periods due to war’s return.
The Council of Trent consisted of three separate meetings: 1545-47, 1551-52, and 1562-63. Taken together these meetings achieved two important things. First, they fundamentally restructured the church’s internal organization. Second, they reaffirmed traditional Catholic dogma against Protestantism’s attacks.
Internally, the council renovated the church’s structure, creating 70 new cardinals and 15 new congregations. This was done, in part, to make certain that all the church’s work was done, since there had not been enough cardinals to provide sufficient oversight. In addition, the council established firm rules for bishops, requiring that he actually live in his see and that he visit every parish in his see at least once every five years to assess the quality of the teaching and pastoral care. Finally, as a result of the council’s work, in 1587 the church opened a Vatican printing press for the distribution of catholic books and pamphlets. The church would now propagandize just as its enemies had been doing for 70 years.
Theologically, the council did extensive work. Among other things, it reaffirmed the seven sacraments of baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, holy orders, matrimony, and anointing of the sick and dying, accepted the Nicene Creed as the basis of the faith, and set the definition of original sin. It also rejected Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone and established a single teaching on transubstantiation.
Early-modern fights over transubstantiation sound strange to us, and for that reason they are worth considering in more detail. First, let us define transubstantiation. In the Catholic tradition transubstantiation refers to the role of the Eucharist in the Sunday Mass. During the Mass the priest reenacts the Seder meal presided over by Jesus of Nazareth shortly before his crucifixion; Christians refer to this meal as the Last Supper. Catholics believe that when the priest blesses the wine and unleavened bread at the altar, Jesus’ flesh and blood enters the substance of both items, though without changing either item’s form. This belief is a product the scholastic distinction between form and matter cultivated by medieval theologians, who were themselves heirs to classical, especially Aristotelian, philosophy.
For all their opposition to Rome, the Lutheran and Anglican churches largely accept the catholic approach to the Eucharist. The Reformed churches, however, have dispensed with it. Huldrych Zwingli, for example, believed that the Eucharist was merely a reenactment of a real historical event. John Calvin, for his part, accepted that Jesus’ blood and flesh were present in spirit in the bread and wine, but not in actual fact. Thus, on distinctions so fine, have entire movements have been built.
Having set an ambitious agenda, it was then left to the Bishops of the church to reform religious practice in their sees. One example is Pierre Saulnier, Bishop of Autun, who instituted a program to raise the quality of parish priests. Until this point, parish priests had been mostly ignored, and the position had degraded into nothing more than a sinecure, a gift to wealthy peasants with political connections. Saulnier discovered in his see that priests were usually drunks, illiterates, and even usurers. After Saulnier’s reforms, however, the priests in his see all went to seminaries and the bishop visited each one regularly.
Indeed, Saulnier’s and others’ visitations offer an interesting perspective on the changes within the church. In the late sixteenth century, many priests were still illiterate and habitually drunk. By 1691, however, most priests were educated and even owned books. Such a development appears minor in from the perspective of our wealthier age, but having literate priests was enormously important to the final eradication of pagan beliefs, which included the persistence of moon worship, fertility rites, the practice of magic, and the general disrespect of the church in such things as stealing the host. You must recall that the state was, as yet, in capable of paying for a general system of education. Parish priests were, therefore, the only way to spread knowledge—especially in rural areas. All told, the church emphasized literacy and dogma more clearly than it ever had before.
The Council of Trent was not, however, all that there was to the spirit of reform within Catholicism. Women, who were excluded from the church’s patriarchal hierarchy, also brought change. Women’s contributions went in two directions. First, some female reformers required that Catholics engage the world. I have already noted the Jesuit order, which subordinated itself to the Pope and created a rigorous system of education that exported the council’s reforms all over. Women also founded such teaching orders. In 1535, a nun named Angela Merici (1470/4-1540) founded the Order of St. Ursula in Brescia Italy, consecrating herself and her fellow devotees to the mission of delivering a Christian education to girls. Unlike more contemplative orders, the original Ursulines did not retreat into the cloister, but remained living with their families, while educating the young girls around them. (Later, Ursulines began living in cloisters.)
The second manifestation of feminine was directed inward, as women became a primary means for the rise of mysticism within the early-modern church. Mysticism’s roots run deep into Mediterranean history, not to mention the history of the Church. Ancient Greece and Rome had numerous mystical cults, and all three great Semitic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have incorporated mystical currents that have appeared and disappeared as the conditions warranted.
Catholic mysticism of the sixteenth century is part of the general yearning for a closer relationship to God. A mystical approach to religion emphasizes spiritual inwardness and the individual contemplation and confrontation with God. Like Martin Luther, Catholic mystics were burdened by a sense of guilt and yearned for an immediate experience of the divine. These mystics cropped up all over Europe, though significantly the most important ones were women, and the most famous such mystic was St. Teresa of Ávila (1518-1552), a Carmelite nun. The Carmelite order was originally a monastic order that appeared in Palestine, during the twelfth century. By the thirteenth century the monks fled Islamic armies and settled in Western Europe, where they prospered. In 1452, the first Carmelite house was established for women, and many more such houses followed. St. Teresa was, therefore, one of many Carmelite nuns in early-modern Europe. In 1555, after suffering a serious illness, St. Teresa made a mystical connection to God through intense prayer sessions. These mystical experiences ended in 1558, whereupon St. Teresa was motivated to institute a rigorous reform program. In 1562, she founded a new Carmelite cloister at Ávila, organizing the community into an intense and austere organization that required the complete withdrawal into prayer and contemplation.
To this point, I have sketched a broad outline of the reform efforts that constituted the Catholic version of the Reformation. Before I move on to discuss art, music, and architecture, I want to summarize the general points of agreement among the various reformations. First, all the reformations cultivated individual forms of belief. Second, the general emphasis was on this world, especially in education and ministering to the poor. Third, reading devotional texts became central to the religious experience in all the confessions. Fourth, all the reformations emptied the world of the divine, attacking those pagan remnants that ascribed worldly power to spirits. Finally, all the reformations created an apparatus of control that extended some form of social and political control more deeply into the average person’s life. By the seventeenth century’s end, most Europeans were subject to the to extensive intervention in their religious lives.
One of the most interventions in people’s lives came through the church’s programmatic use of art and architecture after the Council of Trent. It was especially in Italy, Austria, and Bavaria that the church implemented a program of beautification that was to appeal directly to the person’s senses. Church ceilings and walls were now painted with complex images that were both earthly and heavenly, and were always decorated with rich colors and precious metal. The decorations were designed to pull the viewer’s attention ever higher, from the earth to Heaven.
What I have been describing was, of course, the baroque. This is a notoriously difficult term to define, since it covers so many fields and appears in so many countries. Nonetheless, the term’s origins are architectural and we can use it to understand how art and architecture took on a propagandistic ethos. The impetus for baroque art and architecture began in Rome, as sculptors such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) and architects such as Francesco Borromini dramatically altered the use of space and light to overwhelm the viewer’s senses.
The Italian influence spread outward. In Salzburg successive archbishops had Italian architects beautify their city, as Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552-1616) provided the plans for Salzburg’s town square and Santino Solari drew up plans for the renovation of Salzburg cathedral that began in 1614. The Italian influence spread throughout Austria, as the Karlskirche in Vienna testifies. Started in 1715 with plans drawn by the famous Austrian architect Johan Fischer von Erlach (1656-1723), it virtually drenches the viewer in sculptures, reliefs, paintings, engravings, gold, and silver. The same trends were apparent in other German cities, even Protestant ones. Augustus I (1670-1733), who was both Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, spent lavishly on baroque buildings in the Saxon capital of Dresden, including such structures as the Zwinger Palace (1711-1722) and the Frauenkirche (1726-1743).
The baroque style had many supporters and contexts. European monarchs, regardless of their confession, used its complexity to increase their own splendor, as was the case with the Elector Augustus I in Dresden. Of course, it also extended into music and crossed confessional lines there, as well. The great Johann Sebastian Bach was a German Protestant from Leipzig, while the equally great Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) was an Italian Catholic Priest from Venice. Over the course of the seventeenth century a common musical vocabulary developed that not only was understood in all parts of Europe, but was also the object of patronage in many European cities.
So to bring this broad discussion to a conclusion, what we have seen is that the religious revival that we will now call the Catholic Reformation had wide-ranging religious and cultural effects. We will discuss some of the political effects in our discussion of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). For now, however, we need to understand that to the extent that modernity was built on the twin pillars Renaissance and Reformation, the Reformation pillar also had its Catholic aspects. Indeed, Europe would have been a much different—and much more boring place—without the Catholic revival that came in the Council of Trent’s wake.
We began this course with the problem of modernity, which I noted has generally been understood as Europe’s exit from the Middle Ages. Of course, we also noted questions about the way people have thought about this exit. Did it happen quickly or slowly? Was it a broad movement or a narrow one? Nonetheless, the general argument, even today, and in spite of much debate, still holds that the Renaissance and the Reformation freed the modern world from Europe’s medieval past, and the most important aspect of this manumission was the discovery of the individual.
The individual man—for it was always men—recognized and reveled in his uniqueness, his creativity, and his intellect. So when you look at portrait of, say, Niccoló Machiavelli or Martin Luther, back stare at you the faces of the world’s first modern men.
This is hogwash. Machiavelli was nothing more than an out-of-work Italian courtier with a taste for the classics and lots of free time; and Martin Luther was an angry monk with a taste for medieval theology and disputation. Modernity did not sprout fully formed from the minds of these great men, and to the extent that the modern individual did appear in this period its arrival has, I will argue today, as much to do with the Catholic Church as it does any of the heroes we have discussed so far.
So today I want to begin with a new idea that we will call the Catholic Reformation, for the Catholic Church also devoted great energy to updating its medieval structures. What you need to understand about the Catholic Reformation is that it was not simply a response to Protestantism, but was rooted in a long tradition of reform within the church that dated back to the late medieval period. The Babylonian Captivity (1309-1377) had made some people within the church aware of the need for internal reform, and the Council of Constance (1414-1418) was the first sign of deeper stirrings that ran into the fifteenth century.
Catholic Reformers saw the worldly church as hopelessly corrupt. The Renaissance Papacy, especially during the time of the Borgias, had been a moral embarrassment, as the Popes became so embroiled in politics that they forgot the church’s religious mission. Just about everyone believed that a general council was necessary to fix all the church’s problems, including such famous people as Martin Luther, Charles V, Erasmus, and the infamous Torquemada.
Four individuals provide specific examples of the desire for reform within the Catholic tradition. First, in Spain Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436-1517), who was Isabella I’s confessor and twice regent, reformed pastoral care and the Spanish system of education. He is most famous, however, for sponsoring the publication of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible (1514-17), which printed the biblical text in several ancient languages that were situated in adjacent columns, with the Old Testament appearing in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and the New Testament appearing in Greek and Latin. Second, in France Guillaume Briçonnet (1472-1534), Bishop of Meaux, instituted extensive visitations in the parishes under his control and promoted a religious revival through his sermons and printed texts. Briçonnet was also part of a circle, which included the great Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, and which emphasized Bible study, especially the Epistles of St. Paul, as a path back to true religion. Third, in Italy Gian Matteo Giberti (1495-1543), Bishop of Verona, whose accomplishments included reforming ecclesiastical education, setting up a printing press, and establishing stricter oversight over local parishes. Giberti’s system enjoyed wide influence as the Bishop of Milan borrowed heavily from it, as did Briçonnet in France. Finally, on the lay side we have Ignatius de Loyola, who founded the Jesuit Order in 1521, before the Reformation was truly under way. Originally, it was both a missionary and teaching order that spread Christianity and a rigorous system of education not only to the New World but also to large parts of Europe. The order’s emphasis on education was spectacularly successful. Just to name two of its most famous products in the early-modern period, René Descartes and Voltaire both went to Jesuit colleges, though in the latter’s case the Jesuits created their worst enemy.
Having identified the Catholic Reformation and some of its practitioners, let us consider, now, its general spirit. Much like its Protestant counterpart, the Catholic Reformation wanted to personalize religious belief. Thus, its reformers put a heavy emphasis on reading and writing texts. This is similar to Protestant zeal for putting the Bible in people’s hands, but with a different emphasis. For Catholic Reformers the idea was to give the individual greater access to religion’s comforting power, not necessarily to the Lord’s Word. As we will see at the end of this lecture, this approach to religion had its liberating aspects, especially in art, music, and architecture. For now, however, we need to keep in mind that the Catholic Reformation stressed the worldly church. It reformed pastoral education and care, making certain that priests were both educated and moral. And it also emptied the world of most—though not all—of its mystical elements.
So, in effect, we confront in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries two Reformations that then set about the work of making Europeans truly Christian. More importantly, and although some today may recoil at the notion, these two Reformations played an integral part in making Europe and, later, the New World “modern,” for in their desire to make everyone truly Christian, these Reformations helped to eliminate ideas and practices that were truly medieval, even pagan.
You will surely have noted by now that although there were two reformations, the Catholic one got started later. As I have already noted, it begins only in 1545. So we need to address now an obvious question: why did things get underway so late within the Catholic Church? The simple answer is war. As you know, the French invaded Italy in 1494, unleashing a period of warfare in Italian peninsula that included such awful spectacles as unscrupulous Papal alliance making and unmaking, as well as the sacking of Rome in 1527 by Charles V’s mercenary troops. (I should note here that the sacking of Rome is the traditional date on which the Renaissance ended in Italy.) It was not until 1545 that a council could be called, and even then it was adjourned twice for long periods due to war’s return.
The Council of Trent consisted of three separate meetings: 1545-47, 1551-52, and 1562-63. Taken together these meetings achieved two important things. First, they fundamentally restructured the church’s internal organization. Second, they reaffirmed traditional Catholic dogma against Protestantism’s attacks.
Internally, the council renovated the church’s structure, creating 70 new cardinals and 15 new congregations. This was done, in part, to make certain that all the church’s work was done, since there had not been enough cardinals to provide sufficient oversight. In addition, the council established firm rules for bishops, requiring that he actually live in his see and that he visit every parish in his see at least once every five years to assess the quality of the teaching and pastoral care. Finally, as a result of the council’s work, in 1587 the church opened a Vatican printing press for the distribution of catholic books and pamphlets. The church would now propagandize just as its enemies had been doing for 70 years.
Theologically, the council did extensive work. Among other things, it reaffirmed the seven sacraments of baptism, confirmation, the Eucharist, penance, holy orders, matrimony, and anointing of the sick and dying, accepted the Nicene Creed as the basis of the faith, and set the definition of original sin. It also rejected Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone and established a single teaching on transubstantiation.
Early-modern fights over transubstantiation sound strange to us, and for that reason they are worth considering in more detail. First, let us define transubstantiation. In the Catholic tradition transubstantiation refers to the role of the Eucharist in the Sunday Mass. During the Mass the priest reenacts the Seder meal presided over by Jesus of Nazareth shortly before his crucifixion; Christians refer to this meal as the Last Supper. Catholics believe that when the priest blesses the wine and unleavened bread at the altar, Jesus’ flesh and blood enters the substance of both items, though without changing either item’s form. This belief is a product the scholastic distinction between form and matter cultivated by medieval theologians, who were themselves heirs to classical, especially Aristotelian, philosophy.
For all their opposition to Rome, the Lutheran and Anglican churches largely accept the catholic approach to the Eucharist. The Reformed churches, however, have dispensed with it. Huldrych Zwingli, for example, believed that the Eucharist was merely a reenactment of a real historical event. John Calvin, for his part, accepted that Jesus’ blood and flesh were present in spirit in the bread and wine, but not in actual fact. Thus, on distinctions so fine, have entire movements have been built.
Having set an ambitious agenda, it was then left to the Bishops of the church to reform religious practice in their sees. One example is Pierre Saulnier, Bishop of Autun, who instituted a program to raise the quality of parish priests. Until this point, parish priests had been mostly ignored, and the position had degraded into nothing more than a sinecure, a gift to wealthy peasants with political connections. Saulnier discovered in his see that priests were usually drunks, illiterates, and even usurers. After Saulnier’s reforms, however, the priests in his see all went to seminaries and the bishop visited each one regularly.
Indeed, Saulnier’s and others’ visitations offer an interesting perspective on the changes within the church. In the late sixteenth century, many priests were still illiterate and habitually drunk. By 1691, however, most priests were educated and even owned books. Such a development appears minor in from the perspective of our wealthier age, but having literate priests was enormously important to the final eradication of pagan beliefs, which included the persistence of moon worship, fertility rites, the practice of magic, and the general disrespect of the church in such things as stealing the host. You must recall that the state was, as yet, in capable of paying for a general system of education. Parish priests were, therefore, the only way to spread knowledge—especially in rural areas. All told, the church emphasized literacy and dogma more clearly than it ever had before.
The Council of Trent was not, however, all that there was to the spirit of reform within Catholicism. Women, who were excluded from the church’s patriarchal hierarchy, also brought change. Women’s contributions went in two directions. First, some female reformers required that Catholics engage the world. I have already noted the Jesuit order, which subordinated itself to the Pope and created a rigorous system of education that exported the council’s reforms all over. Women also founded such teaching orders. In 1535, a nun named Angela Merici (1470/4-1540) founded the Order of St. Ursula in Brescia Italy, consecrating herself and her fellow devotees to the mission of delivering a Christian education to girls. Unlike more contemplative orders, the original Ursulines did not retreat into the cloister, but remained living with their families, while educating the young girls around them. (Later, Ursulines began living in cloisters.)
The second manifestation of feminine was directed inward, as women became a primary means for the rise of mysticism within the early-modern church. Mysticism’s roots run deep into Mediterranean history, not to mention the history of the Church. Ancient Greece and Rome had numerous mystical cults, and all three great Semitic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have incorporated mystical currents that have appeared and disappeared as the conditions warranted.
Catholic mysticism of the sixteenth century is part of the general yearning for a closer relationship to God. A mystical approach to religion emphasizes spiritual inwardness and the individual contemplation and confrontation with God. Like Martin Luther, Catholic mystics were burdened by a sense of guilt and yearned for an immediate experience of the divine. These mystics cropped up all over Europe, though significantly the most important ones were women, and the most famous such mystic was St. Teresa of Ávila (1518-1552), a Carmelite nun. The Carmelite order was originally a monastic order that appeared in Palestine, during the twelfth century. By the thirteenth century the monks fled Islamic armies and settled in Western Europe, where they prospered. In 1452, the first Carmelite house was established for women, and many more such houses followed. St. Teresa was, therefore, one of many Carmelite nuns in early-modern Europe. In 1555, after suffering a serious illness, St. Teresa made a mystical connection to God through intense prayer sessions. These mystical experiences ended in 1558, whereupon St. Teresa was motivated to institute a rigorous reform program. In 1562, she founded a new Carmelite cloister at Ávila, organizing the community into an intense and austere organization that required the complete withdrawal into prayer and contemplation.
To this point, I have sketched a broad outline of the reform efforts that constituted the Catholic version of the Reformation. Before I move on to discuss art, music, and architecture, I want to summarize the general points of agreement among the various reformations. First, all the reformations cultivated individual forms of belief. Second, the general emphasis was on this world, especially in education and ministering to the poor. Third, reading devotional texts became central to the religious experience in all the confessions. Fourth, all the reformations emptied the world of the divine, attacking those pagan remnants that ascribed worldly power to spirits. Finally, all the reformations created an apparatus of control that extended some form of social and political control more deeply into the average person’s life. By the seventeenth century’s end, most Europeans were subject to the to extensive intervention in their religious lives.
One of the most interventions in people’s lives came through the church’s programmatic use of art and architecture after the Council of Trent. It was especially in Italy, Austria, and Bavaria that the church implemented a program of beautification that was to appeal directly to the person’s senses. Church ceilings and walls were now painted with complex images that were both earthly and heavenly, and were always decorated with rich colors and precious metal. The decorations were designed to pull the viewer’s attention ever higher, from the earth to Heaven.
What I have been describing was, of course, the baroque. This is a notoriously difficult term to define, since it covers so many fields and appears in so many countries. Nonetheless, the term’s origins are architectural and we can use it to understand how art and architecture took on a propagandistic ethos. The impetus for baroque art and architecture began in Rome, as sculptors such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) and architects such as Francesco Borromini dramatically altered the use of space and light to overwhelm the viewer’s senses.
The Italian influence spread outward. In Salzburg successive archbishops had Italian architects beautify their city, as Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552-1616) provided the plans for Salzburg’s town square and Santino Solari drew up plans for the renovation of Salzburg cathedral that began in 1614. The Italian influence spread throughout Austria, as the Karlskirche in Vienna testifies. Started in 1715 with plans drawn by the famous Austrian architect Johan Fischer von Erlach (1656-1723), it virtually drenches the viewer in sculptures, reliefs, paintings, engravings, gold, and silver. The same trends were apparent in other German cities, even Protestant ones. Augustus I (1670-1733), who was both Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, spent lavishly on baroque buildings in the Saxon capital of Dresden, including such structures as the Zwinger Palace (1711-1722) and the Frauenkirche (1726-1743).
The baroque style had many supporters and contexts. European monarchs, regardless of their confession, used its complexity to increase their own splendor, as was the case with the Elector Augustus I in Dresden. Of course, it also extended into music and crossed confessional lines there, as well. The great Johann Sebastian Bach was a German Protestant from Leipzig, while the equally great Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) was an Italian Catholic Priest from Venice. Over the course of the seventeenth century a common musical vocabulary developed that not only was understood in all parts of Europe, but was also the object of patronage in many European cities.
So to bring this broad discussion to a conclusion, what we have seen is that the religious revival that we will now call the Catholic Reformation had wide-ranging religious and cultural effects. We will discuss some of the political effects in our discussion of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). For now, however, we need to understand that to the extent that modernity was built on the twin pillars Renaissance and Reformation, the Reformation pillar also had its Catholic aspects. Indeed, Europe would have been a much different—and much more boring place—without the Catholic revival that came in the Council of Trent’s wake.
Lecture 3: Christian Humanism and the Reformation
By Michael Sauter
We finished last time with Humanism and the Renaissance’s new definition of Man. This Renaissance Man was vigorous, an individual, devoted to acting publicly in a particular community. He calculated, acted, spent money freely, and let the rest take care of itself. I have already alluded to this point in other lectures, but some historians have tried to discover the modern individual in this vision of the Renaissance. This is intimately tied up with the idea of modernity that we discussed in the first lecture, and many historians have been tempted to find themselves in this past. Thus, modernity arrives with the appearance of people like us. I don’t believe any of this. In my view, the modern individual is not one thing, but is constantly evolving. Although the Renaissance is important to creating the modern individual as we know it, the desire of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians to find the individual in it is merely self-flattery. Nonetheless, I want to take the problem of the modern individual as our point of departure. And what I want to show is that whatever else it may have accomplished, the Renaissance did not create the modern individual; other forces made important contributions, and one of the most important was the Reformation.
As a review before continuing, let’s look back to the Renaissance. We said last time that Humanism was one of Renaissance Italy’s central contributions. It was rooted in the Middle Ages, but became clear as a movement by 1400, and was in full bloom by 1450. Let’s define most simply what it was: Renaissance Humanism was the desire to use the intellectual apparatus of the classical world for the benefit of modern secular pursuits. As we look north, however, we see that there was another Humanism, one that arose in Northern Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century. We will call this Humanism Christian Humanism.
Christian Humanism also used the classics for the benefit of modernity, but its practitioners were more interested in reforming the modern church. Moreover, unlike the Italian Humanists the Christian Humanists studied different classical texts. Whereas, the Italians read the pagan classics that had been written before the Christianization of the Roman Empire, which occurred officially in AD 395, Christian Humanists concentrated on the Patristics, early Christian texts written in Latin between the fifth and the seventh centuries, including the so-called Four Latin Church Doctors, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Gregory the Great.
Christian Humanism’s main concern was not to improve civic life here, but to uncover the true spirit of early Christianity. This is a significant innovation in two respects. First, searching for a past injected into the Christian tradition a belief in the importance of using historical documents critically. In this way, Christian Humanists learned to question whether early Christian texts were genuine, even going so far as to question certain parts of the Bible. (This critical use of history within Christianity became extremely important in Germany, and by the eighteenth century it contributed to the creation of the modern research instinct.) Second, the desire to get back to the original spirit of early Christianity became Protestantism’s fundamental impulse, and the later Protestant movement would use Humanism’s insistence on studying the patristic writings for the purpose of overthrowing the church hierarchy.
The most significant example of this Humanist tradition was the great Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had learned Humanism from the Italians and then imported their approaches and techniques to the north. Erasmus’s key contribution to Christian Humanism was to personalize the Christian faith in a way that had been lost in the Middle Ages. He elaborated a more personal relationship to God, and this emphasis on a personal connection to the Christian creator still reverberates through Christian practice today. But, unlike his Reformation colleagues in Germany, Erasmus was not a theologian. He was a monk who also had tremendous literary gifts and was trained in classical techniques, as you will, no doubt, see when you read In Praise of Folly.
In general, Erasmus wanted to reform the church through the gentle application of reason. For him, reform had to be reasonable and gradual to succeed, and that is why he couched it in pedagogical terms. In his view, the best way to reform Christianity was to reform Christians, and he wanted to teach a new (lay) generation of Christians to approach God, though always within the church. In this vein, he cultivated a new kind of public, writing specifically for an educated laity and not for theologians. Viewed historically, however, his greatest achievements were, in fact, academic. He edited St. Jerome’s texts, for example, and his critical edition of the Greek New Testament, complete with critical footnotes put Biblical criticism on an entirely new foundation. Thus, Erasmus provided his generation with a new lay Christianity, though it was still an elite religion. Martin Luther would change all of that.
The Reformation as an historical age began with Martin Luther, an obscure German monk from Saxony, who took much of what Erasmus did and built on it, though in ways that horrified the Dutchman. Unlike Erasmus, Luther was a trained theologian, a man steeped in the traditions of late medieval theology. As I noted earlier, theology was never as dominant in the south as it became in the north. In the north, questions of logic, doctrine, and interpretation predominated. Less interested in aesthetic ideals than they were in sharp distinctions, medieval theologians argued for the purpose of excluding heterodox ideas and people.
Luther’s Reformation and those of his successors would take this emphasis on doctrine and combine it with the affective aspect of the Renaissance that Erasmus had imported to the north. That is to say that the Reformation offered another view of the individual. Rather than reaching back to the pagan past and rooting the person in the community, the Reformation rooted the individual in Christianity, emphasizing the personal journey to God and cultivating the absolute freedom of individual conscience. Or to put it in terms specific to Luther: he combined the emotive aspects of the Renaissance with the doctrinal rigor of late medieval theology, making the individual, in the process, a neurotic, fearful creature, tortured by his distance from God.
Let us begin the Reformation’s story by considering Martin Luther’s career. Born in 1486 in Saxony to a modestly prosperous miner, Luther had originally been destined for law. Thanks to his father’s money, he completed both a bachelor’s and master’s degree at the then famous University of Erfurt in southeastern Germany. On July 17, 1505, however, the young Martin Luther gave up his law books and entered an Augustinian monastery in Erfurt, in the wake of a conversion experience that was aided by a bolt of lightning. Luther’s conversion tormented him, as he felt alienated from God, experiencing Him as a hostile and strange force, divorced from His Creation. The entry into the monastery was an attempt, for Luther, to find his way back to the Creator.
Luther studied theology at the monastery, before entering a program in Theology at the new University of Wittenberg with professors of what is called the “Nominalist” school. Here we need some historical background. Nominalism was a late medieval response to Thomist theology. During the twelfth century, theologians imported Aristotle to Europe and created a philosophical school called Realism, which held that Universals exist and can be known by reason. What this meant practically is that human reason could think its way up to God, the greatest Universal. The Nominalist school, in contrast, which finds its origins in the teaching of the English theologian William of Occam, held that there were no universals and that reason could not reach God. We cannot ascribe reason to God; we are only subject to His will. Theologically this implied that Man played no role in his salvation; the will of God alone determined man’s destiny.
Nominalism suited well Luther’s alienation, for it allowed him to work constructively with his feelings. He earned an intermediary degree in theology from Wittenberg before returning to Erfurt to pursue the doctorate. In 1512, a newly minted PhD, he began to teaching publicly at Erfurt, commenting on various books of the Bible, including the Psalms, Romans, and Galatians. Later, he returned to Wittenberg to found a new program in theology. Luther was never quite satisfied with existing theological approaches, since he felt that they downplayed the Lord’s divine majesty. His theological breakthrough came around 1517, when he contemplated St. Paul’s notion of Justicia Dei, applying the Nominalist approach to Man’s relationship to God. In effect, Luther decided that God’s justice was so far above us that we could not comprehend it, nor could we in any way merit it.
Luther took this theological position even further when he pondered St. Paul’s vision of faith. In Romans 1:17, there is a phrase, ”The just shall live by faith.” Luther was captivated by this phrase and in thinking about it added a key word, sola or alone. The just shall live by faith alone, which is rendered in Latin as sola fide, and a new theology now began to unfold that we today called solifidianism. Luther’s belief that only faith in God can save the Christian predisposed him to criticize almost all the remnants of the medieval church, especially its doctrine of good works, which holds that human beings merit entry into Heaven through good deeds in life.
Luther was, thus, theologically opposed to many of the Catholic Church’s fundamental teachings and practices. The difference could probably have been finagled somehow, except that Luther got angry. In 1517, he became exercised over the Roman church’s practice of selling indulgences. Indulgences were a recent innovation that allowed the penitent a modicum of relief from the burden of judgment day. The Church allowed the fearful person to pay a small fee and thereby, in theory, lessened the price that would be paid in the afterlife. This legitimate attempt to soothe tormented consciences turned rapidly, however, into a get out of purgatory early card, both for the penitent and for his or her deceased relatives.
According to legend, Luther became so angry at the sale of indulgences in Germany by a certain Johannes Tetzel, a subordinate of the Pope, that he wrote his famous 95 Theses in response and nailed them on the door of Wittenberg’s cathedral. This probably did not happen. But what did happen is that Luther’s theses entered the print trade and soon thousands of copies of Luther’s manifesto circulated throughout Germany, and soon in translation across Europe.
At this point the politics of central Europe move to the center of the story, because Luther’s theological insights had political implications. We will talk more about the Holy Roman Empire in another lecture, so you will have to take the personalities that I discuss now on faith. In early-modern Europe, Luther’s rebellion was an incendiary act. First, the Pope Leo X and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I could not accept any attacks on indulgences, because both expected to profit handsomely from their sale. Second, the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, had founded the University of Wittenberg and was loathe to allow anyone else to tell him what to do in his own territory. Although a prince of the empire, he was also a territorial prince, which meant that his authority was above everyone else’s in Saxony. And if this were not trouble enough, the then Emperor Maximilian I needed the Elector of Saxony’s support to gain the imperial succession for his son, the future Charles V. To keep the Elector’s support, the Emperor needed to indulge him on the matter of Luther, which only gave Luther’s theology time to grow roots. This is a political mess, of course, with political issues ramifying in different directions. The end result of all the maneuvering was, however, an early-modern political revolution.
I will have more to say about the Reformation as a political phenomenon few lectures hence. For now, I want you to understand that Luther’s religious doctrines were a form of political speech. This speech not only awoke many resentments that Germans felt against the Pope in Rome, but it was also useful to German princes who wanted to assert their power against the Emperor. In addition, Luther’s declaration of independence from a venal and corrupt Papacy became attractive in to other parts of Europe, as well. As the Protestant movement spread to other areas, the simple doctrine that the just should live by faith alone became the justification for over a century of war and devastation.
I have noted that the Reformation spread to other areas, and before taking leave of this historical movement, we need to understand that it was not purely a German phenomenon. Although Luther inspired many religious reforms around Europe, other Reformations developed, and each one was rooted in a different political and social context. And now a brief survey of the two most important extensions of the Reformation, the Anglican and Calvinist:
The Reformation that had the least to do with Luther’s doctrines came in England. When he came to the throne in 1509, the Tudor monarch Henry VIII was bent on increasing his kingdom’s prestige. As part of this policy, Henry initially opposed the Lutheran Reformation, even going so far as to refute Luther directly, and being rewarded for it by the Pope with the title Defender of the Faith.
By the 1520s, however, a new political situation emerged. Henry had not been able to produce a male heir, a problem for a monarchy whose stability depended on the perception of continuity through male succession, and Henry wished a divorce from his wife Catherine of Aragon. The only problem for Henry was that Catherine was sister to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and ally to the Pope in the matter of Martin Luther. The Pope could not grant a divorce without offending the Emperor, which meant that no divorce would be forthcoming.
In response, Henry began the process of removing England from the catholic realm. Between 1529 and 1535, he detached England from the Pope’s authority and made himself head of the Anglican Church. To do this, however, he needed Parliament’s support, which did its part by passing a law that legalized Henry’s preeminence within a new church. This was an immediate help to Henry, but it also strengthened the parliament in its role as a law-giving body. Henry then turned on England’s medieval monasteries, confiscating their land and selling it to many of England’s political leaders, a process that created a new gentry that would dominate English politics for centuries.
Although they occurred for different reasons, the German and English Reformations shared a common characteristic; they were both wrought in the name of political authority. Religious faith and loyalty to a single person were combined in both cases. In this sense, both the English and German Reformations are deeply traditional, in that no real distinction emerged between church and state. Calvinism would prove different.
The second major Reformation began with the work of John Calvin (1509-1564). It was the most dynamic and international of all the reformations, because it had the least to do with local political authority. This is ironic, since Calvin was not a theologian and his work began with Luther’s doctrines, but Calvinism rapidly became a religion of subversion. Calvin was a Frenchman and had been educated in to new Humanist tradition. He began his studies at the University of Paris, which had been the center of medieval theology, before finishing a law degree at the University of Orleans. At Paris he first encountered the Reformation’s arguments and he developed great sympathy for the idea of Reform. Calvin was no theologian, however, he was a lawyer, and although eh respected Luther’s work, his theological doctrines move beyond Luther’s into a politically subversive realm.
Calvin’s theology is based on the doctrine of predestination. Taking the logic that he learned in law school to its ultimate conclusion, Calvin held that since God already knows who is to be saved, our worldly conduct does not matter at all. Some people are already elected and some ore damned. The only way to tell the difference between the two groups is in their conduct. Those who live well and work hard are not earning their way into Heaven, but are showing that they are already there.
Calvin’s theology was subversive, because it by-passed the entire church apparatus, since the elect have no need of the church’s medieval hierarchy and ceremonies. The new doctrine appealed especially to merchants and business people in the towns, who liked to identify their frugal habits with virtue. It also appealed to peasants in France who still resisted the intrusion of the central government into their lives. As Calvin’s doctrines spread, the French King, who had cut a deal with the Pope in 1516 for local control over the French Catholic Church, promptly had Calvin ushered out of the country. In 1534, Calvin landed in Geneva, which had been undergoing its own Reformation under the influence of another Reformer, Huldrich Zwingli of Zurich. Thus, before Calvin’s arrival the Swiss already had a tradition of overthrowing the Catholic Church and setting up their own local churches. Using Swiss religious fervor, Calvin set up a theocracy in Geneva, which came to have a powerful symbolic influence across Europe as a center of Reform.
So we conclude this brief survey of the Reformation. You will wish to keep the basic outlines of both the theology and the politics that I have discussed in mind as we discuss the various national histories in the coming weeks.
We finished last time with Humanism and the Renaissance’s new definition of Man. This Renaissance Man was vigorous, an individual, devoted to acting publicly in a particular community. He calculated, acted, spent money freely, and let the rest take care of itself. I have already alluded to this point in other lectures, but some historians have tried to discover the modern individual in this vision of the Renaissance. This is intimately tied up with the idea of modernity that we discussed in the first lecture, and many historians have been tempted to find themselves in this past. Thus, modernity arrives with the appearance of people like us. I don’t believe any of this. In my view, the modern individual is not one thing, but is constantly evolving. Although the Renaissance is important to creating the modern individual as we know it, the desire of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historians to find the individual in it is merely self-flattery. Nonetheless, I want to take the problem of the modern individual as our point of departure. And what I want to show is that whatever else it may have accomplished, the Renaissance did not create the modern individual; other forces made important contributions, and one of the most important was the Reformation.
As a review before continuing, let’s look back to the Renaissance. We said last time that Humanism was one of Renaissance Italy’s central contributions. It was rooted in the Middle Ages, but became clear as a movement by 1400, and was in full bloom by 1450. Let’s define most simply what it was: Renaissance Humanism was the desire to use the intellectual apparatus of the classical world for the benefit of modern secular pursuits. As we look north, however, we see that there was another Humanism, one that arose in Northern Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century. We will call this Humanism Christian Humanism.
Christian Humanism also used the classics for the benefit of modernity, but its practitioners were more interested in reforming the modern church. Moreover, unlike the Italian Humanists the Christian Humanists studied different classical texts. Whereas, the Italians read the pagan classics that had been written before the Christianization of the Roman Empire, which occurred officially in AD 395, Christian Humanists concentrated on the Patristics, early Christian texts written in Latin between the fifth and the seventh centuries, including the so-called Four Latin Church Doctors, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Gregory the Great.
Christian Humanism’s main concern was not to improve civic life here, but to uncover the true spirit of early Christianity. This is a significant innovation in two respects. First, searching for a past injected into the Christian tradition a belief in the importance of using historical documents critically. In this way, Christian Humanists learned to question whether early Christian texts were genuine, even going so far as to question certain parts of the Bible. (This critical use of history within Christianity became extremely important in Germany, and by the eighteenth century it contributed to the creation of the modern research instinct.) Second, the desire to get back to the original spirit of early Christianity became Protestantism’s fundamental impulse, and the later Protestant movement would use Humanism’s insistence on studying the patristic writings for the purpose of overthrowing the church hierarchy.
The most significant example of this Humanist tradition was the great Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had learned Humanism from the Italians and then imported their approaches and techniques to the north. Erasmus’s key contribution to Christian Humanism was to personalize the Christian faith in a way that had been lost in the Middle Ages. He elaborated a more personal relationship to God, and this emphasis on a personal connection to the Christian creator still reverberates through Christian practice today. But, unlike his Reformation colleagues in Germany, Erasmus was not a theologian. He was a monk who also had tremendous literary gifts and was trained in classical techniques, as you will, no doubt, see when you read In Praise of Folly.
In general, Erasmus wanted to reform the church through the gentle application of reason. For him, reform had to be reasonable and gradual to succeed, and that is why he couched it in pedagogical terms. In his view, the best way to reform Christianity was to reform Christians, and he wanted to teach a new (lay) generation of Christians to approach God, though always within the church. In this vein, he cultivated a new kind of public, writing specifically for an educated laity and not for theologians. Viewed historically, however, his greatest achievements were, in fact, academic. He edited St. Jerome’s texts, for example, and his critical edition of the Greek New Testament, complete with critical footnotes put Biblical criticism on an entirely new foundation. Thus, Erasmus provided his generation with a new lay Christianity, though it was still an elite religion. Martin Luther would change all of that.
The Reformation as an historical age began with Martin Luther, an obscure German monk from Saxony, who took much of what Erasmus did and built on it, though in ways that horrified the Dutchman. Unlike Erasmus, Luther was a trained theologian, a man steeped in the traditions of late medieval theology. As I noted earlier, theology was never as dominant in the south as it became in the north. In the north, questions of logic, doctrine, and interpretation predominated. Less interested in aesthetic ideals than they were in sharp distinctions, medieval theologians argued for the purpose of excluding heterodox ideas and people.
Luther’s Reformation and those of his successors would take this emphasis on doctrine and combine it with the affective aspect of the Renaissance that Erasmus had imported to the north. That is to say that the Reformation offered another view of the individual. Rather than reaching back to the pagan past and rooting the person in the community, the Reformation rooted the individual in Christianity, emphasizing the personal journey to God and cultivating the absolute freedom of individual conscience. Or to put it in terms specific to Luther: he combined the emotive aspects of the Renaissance with the doctrinal rigor of late medieval theology, making the individual, in the process, a neurotic, fearful creature, tortured by his distance from God.
Let us begin the Reformation’s story by considering Martin Luther’s career. Born in 1486 in Saxony to a modestly prosperous miner, Luther had originally been destined for law. Thanks to his father’s money, he completed both a bachelor’s and master’s degree at the then famous University of Erfurt in southeastern Germany. On July 17, 1505, however, the young Martin Luther gave up his law books and entered an Augustinian monastery in Erfurt, in the wake of a conversion experience that was aided by a bolt of lightning. Luther’s conversion tormented him, as he felt alienated from God, experiencing Him as a hostile and strange force, divorced from His Creation. The entry into the monastery was an attempt, for Luther, to find his way back to the Creator.
Luther studied theology at the monastery, before entering a program in Theology at the new University of Wittenberg with professors of what is called the “Nominalist” school. Here we need some historical background. Nominalism was a late medieval response to Thomist theology. During the twelfth century, theologians imported Aristotle to Europe and created a philosophical school called Realism, which held that Universals exist and can be known by reason. What this meant practically is that human reason could think its way up to God, the greatest Universal. The Nominalist school, in contrast, which finds its origins in the teaching of the English theologian William of Occam, held that there were no universals and that reason could not reach God. We cannot ascribe reason to God; we are only subject to His will. Theologically this implied that Man played no role in his salvation; the will of God alone determined man’s destiny.
Nominalism suited well Luther’s alienation, for it allowed him to work constructively with his feelings. He earned an intermediary degree in theology from Wittenberg before returning to Erfurt to pursue the doctorate. In 1512, a newly minted PhD, he began to teaching publicly at Erfurt, commenting on various books of the Bible, including the Psalms, Romans, and Galatians. Later, he returned to Wittenberg to found a new program in theology. Luther was never quite satisfied with existing theological approaches, since he felt that they downplayed the Lord’s divine majesty. His theological breakthrough came around 1517, when he contemplated St. Paul’s notion of Justicia Dei, applying the Nominalist approach to Man’s relationship to God. In effect, Luther decided that God’s justice was so far above us that we could not comprehend it, nor could we in any way merit it.
Luther took this theological position even further when he pondered St. Paul’s vision of faith. In Romans 1:17, there is a phrase, ”The just shall live by faith.” Luther was captivated by this phrase and in thinking about it added a key word, sola or alone. The just shall live by faith alone, which is rendered in Latin as sola fide, and a new theology now began to unfold that we today called solifidianism. Luther’s belief that only faith in God can save the Christian predisposed him to criticize almost all the remnants of the medieval church, especially its doctrine of good works, which holds that human beings merit entry into Heaven through good deeds in life.
Luther was, thus, theologically opposed to many of the Catholic Church’s fundamental teachings and practices. The difference could probably have been finagled somehow, except that Luther got angry. In 1517, he became exercised over the Roman church’s practice of selling indulgences. Indulgences were a recent innovation that allowed the penitent a modicum of relief from the burden of judgment day. The Church allowed the fearful person to pay a small fee and thereby, in theory, lessened the price that would be paid in the afterlife. This legitimate attempt to soothe tormented consciences turned rapidly, however, into a get out of purgatory early card, both for the penitent and for his or her deceased relatives.
According to legend, Luther became so angry at the sale of indulgences in Germany by a certain Johannes Tetzel, a subordinate of the Pope, that he wrote his famous 95 Theses in response and nailed them on the door of Wittenberg’s cathedral. This probably did not happen. But what did happen is that Luther’s theses entered the print trade and soon thousands of copies of Luther’s manifesto circulated throughout Germany, and soon in translation across Europe.
At this point the politics of central Europe move to the center of the story, because Luther’s theological insights had political implications. We will talk more about the Holy Roman Empire in another lecture, so you will have to take the personalities that I discuss now on faith. In early-modern Europe, Luther’s rebellion was an incendiary act. First, the Pope Leo X and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I could not accept any attacks on indulgences, because both expected to profit handsomely from their sale. Second, the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, had founded the University of Wittenberg and was loathe to allow anyone else to tell him what to do in his own territory. Although a prince of the empire, he was also a territorial prince, which meant that his authority was above everyone else’s in Saxony. And if this were not trouble enough, the then Emperor Maximilian I needed the Elector of Saxony’s support to gain the imperial succession for his son, the future Charles V. To keep the Elector’s support, the Emperor needed to indulge him on the matter of Luther, which only gave Luther’s theology time to grow roots. This is a political mess, of course, with political issues ramifying in different directions. The end result of all the maneuvering was, however, an early-modern political revolution.
I will have more to say about the Reformation as a political phenomenon few lectures hence. For now, I want you to understand that Luther’s religious doctrines were a form of political speech. This speech not only awoke many resentments that Germans felt against the Pope in Rome, but it was also useful to German princes who wanted to assert their power against the Emperor. In addition, Luther’s declaration of independence from a venal and corrupt Papacy became attractive in to other parts of Europe, as well. As the Protestant movement spread to other areas, the simple doctrine that the just should live by faith alone became the justification for over a century of war and devastation.
I have noted that the Reformation spread to other areas, and before taking leave of this historical movement, we need to understand that it was not purely a German phenomenon. Although Luther inspired many religious reforms around Europe, other Reformations developed, and each one was rooted in a different political and social context. And now a brief survey of the two most important extensions of the Reformation, the Anglican and Calvinist:
The Reformation that had the least to do with Luther’s doctrines came in England. When he came to the throne in 1509, the Tudor monarch Henry VIII was bent on increasing his kingdom’s prestige. As part of this policy, Henry initially opposed the Lutheran Reformation, even going so far as to refute Luther directly, and being rewarded for it by the Pope with the title Defender of the Faith.
By the 1520s, however, a new political situation emerged. Henry had not been able to produce a male heir, a problem for a monarchy whose stability depended on the perception of continuity through male succession, and Henry wished a divorce from his wife Catherine of Aragon. The only problem for Henry was that Catherine was sister to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and ally to the Pope in the matter of Martin Luther. The Pope could not grant a divorce without offending the Emperor, which meant that no divorce would be forthcoming.
In response, Henry began the process of removing England from the catholic realm. Between 1529 and 1535, he detached England from the Pope’s authority and made himself head of the Anglican Church. To do this, however, he needed Parliament’s support, which did its part by passing a law that legalized Henry’s preeminence within a new church. This was an immediate help to Henry, but it also strengthened the parliament in its role as a law-giving body. Henry then turned on England’s medieval monasteries, confiscating their land and selling it to many of England’s political leaders, a process that created a new gentry that would dominate English politics for centuries.
Although they occurred for different reasons, the German and English Reformations shared a common characteristic; they were both wrought in the name of political authority. Religious faith and loyalty to a single person were combined in both cases. In this sense, both the English and German Reformations are deeply traditional, in that no real distinction emerged between church and state. Calvinism would prove different.
The second major Reformation began with the work of John Calvin (1509-1564). It was the most dynamic and international of all the reformations, because it had the least to do with local political authority. This is ironic, since Calvin was not a theologian and his work began with Luther’s doctrines, but Calvinism rapidly became a religion of subversion. Calvin was a Frenchman and had been educated in to new Humanist tradition. He began his studies at the University of Paris, which had been the center of medieval theology, before finishing a law degree at the University of Orleans. At Paris he first encountered the Reformation’s arguments and he developed great sympathy for the idea of Reform. Calvin was no theologian, however, he was a lawyer, and although eh respected Luther’s work, his theological doctrines move beyond Luther’s into a politically subversive realm.
Calvin’s theology is based on the doctrine of predestination. Taking the logic that he learned in law school to its ultimate conclusion, Calvin held that since God already knows who is to be saved, our worldly conduct does not matter at all. Some people are already elected and some ore damned. The only way to tell the difference between the two groups is in their conduct. Those who live well and work hard are not earning their way into Heaven, but are showing that they are already there.
Calvin’s theology was subversive, because it by-passed the entire church apparatus, since the elect have no need of the church’s medieval hierarchy and ceremonies. The new doctrine appealed especially to merchants and business people in the towns, who liked to identify their frugal habits with virtue. It also appealed to peasants in France who still resisted the intrusion of the central government into their lives. As Calvin’s doctrines spread, the French King, who had cut a deal with the Pope in 1516 for local control over the French Catholic Church, promptly had Calvin ushered out of the country. In 1534, Calvin landed in Geneva, which had been undergoing its own Reformation under the influence of another Reformer, Huldrich Zwingli of Zurich. Thus, before Calvin’s arrival the Swiss already had a tradition of overthrowing the Catholic Church and setting up their own local churches. Using Swiss religious fervor, Calvin set up a theocracy in Geneva, which came to have a powerful symbolic influence across Europe as a center of Reform.
So we conclude this brief survey of the Reformation. You will wish to keep the basic outlines of both the theology and the politics that I have discussed in mind as we discuss the various national histories in the coming weeks.
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