Math Circle 8: Incarnation and Science (Part 3)

Revisit History

For centuries, the “Dark Ages” label has hidden a significant truth: modern science has deep medieval Christian roots. Far from backward, the Middle Ages were a time of innovation driven by churchmen and faith. Thinkers like Jean Buridan laid groundwork for Newton’s laws of motion. Revisiting this history could heal today’s divide between faith and science.

Revisit History

EN: You point out that most people today have no idea that modern science has these medieval Christian roots. If that connection were widely understood again, what do you think would change—either in science itself or in how we think about faith?

James D. Nickel: First, we must purge our wrong thinking about the word “Medieval.” It comes from the early 19^th century, from modern Latin medium aevum “middle age.” Almost all dictionaries add to this definition words like old-fashioned, unenlightened, archaic, regressive, brutal, barbarian, obscurant, primitive … illustrated in a phrase like this: “Your behavior is decidedly medieval.”

The “Middle Ages” denotation came into existence during the period of the Enlightenment, a period of European history ca.1650 to ca. 1850. These historians have structured and adjudicated history in three stages:

1. Ancient or Classical (positive: Light).

2. Medieval (negative: Darkness).

3. Modern (positive: Rebirth of Light).

The German classics historian Christoph Cellarius (1638-1707) may have been the first to make this division in his work entitled Universal History, Divided into Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Time Periods. See also Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World (1955), p. 54.

Those living in the European “Middle Ages” would not have judged their time like this. To them, they were living in the “Age of Faith/Light.” Notice how the modern world replaces light with darkness and vice versa (cf. Isaiah 5:20).

Why?

In The Medieval World (1961), historian Friedrich Heer (1916-1983) comments: “It is sheer prejudice which condemns the entire Middle Ages as a Dark Age, based on the hackneyed assumption that the medieval mind was narrow, dominated by a fanatical clergy, strait‑jacketed by a rigid set of dogmas. Reality presents quite a contrary picture” (p. 20).

In An Introduction to Medieval Europe: 300‑1500 (1938), another medieval historian, James Westphal Thompson (1869-1941), spoke of the Dark Ages as the age of pioneers: “There was much evidence that the human spirit was alive. It was above all an age of pioneers who, because no education could be had outside the Church, and because there was no other civilizing institution, were for the most part churchmen. Popes and monks were forging the new instruments of a new culture” (p. 184).

Medieval historian William Carroll Bark (1910-1997) echoes Thompson with his observations in Origins of the Medieval World (1958): “… the early medieval society was a pioneer society living on a frontier, both geographical and intellectual, and engaged in advancing it. It is remarkable that historians of the West should so long have failed to apprehend this absolutely vital truth about the origins of their own tradition” (pp. 27-28).

Historians and scientists who have accepted the adjudications of Cellarius ignore the ground from which their work grew. This prejudiced perception of history is the fruit of science absolutized, i.e., scientism. To relate faith, indeed, the Christian faith to science, is to scientism a cultural shibboleth.

Engaging in the following resources will engender a cathartic cleansing of minds constipated by such scientism.

Lynn White, Jr. Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) and Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (Speculum 15, 1940), an essay reprinted in Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (1978).

Arnold Pacey, The Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology (1974).

D. S. L. Cardwell, Turning Points in Western Technology (1972).

Charles Singer, The Mediterranean Civilization and the Middle Ages, Volume Two of the five-volume study A History of Technology (1972).

James Burke, Connections (1978). I used this book to expose my students in Australia to the fascinating world of the triggering effect, i.e., how one idea or invention triggers something else that triggers something else, etc. The video series based on this book is available online.

Joseph and Frances Gies, Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages (1995).

Jean Gempel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (1977).

After you read these books, read Daniel Boorstin’s (1914-2004) The Discoverers (1983), who as the former director of the Library of Congress, wrote an entire chapter depicting medievals as blind prisoners of Christian dogma. (Chapter 13, “The Prison of Christian Dogma,” pp. 100-106). The specter of Christian theology lies behind this discriminatory decree, a theology ignored by today’s secular historians and scientists who embrace King Lear’s words about such faith with almost violent forcefulness: “That way lies madness.”

Next, read the writings of the Parisian philosophers Jean Buridan (1301-1358) and Nicole Oresme’s (1325-1382) in Marshall Clagett, The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (1961), Chapter 8, and Edward Grant, Sourcebook on Medieval Science (1974), pp. 275-289. It was Buridan’s theory of impetus that laid the critical groundwork for what came later through Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion, the Law of Inertia.

We quote Clagett on Buridan: “The characteristic of permanence which Buridan assigned to his impetus made it plausible for him to explain the everlasting movement of the heavens by the imposition of impetus by God at the time of the world’s creation: ‘ … it does not appear necessary to posit intelligences of this kind, because it could be answered that God, when He created the world moved each of the celestial orbs as He pleased, and in moving them impressed in them impetuses which moved them without his having to move them any more …. And these impetuses which he impressed in the celestial bodies were not decreased or corrupted afterwards because there was no inclination of the celestial bodies for other movements. Nor was there resistance which would be corruptive or repressive of that impetus’” (pp. 524-525).

We can trace a direct line from the writings of Buridan to Galileo to Descartes and then to Newton even though none of these 17^th-century representatives of Whitehead’s “Century of Genius” (Chapter III of Science and the Modern World) credited Buridan. We quote Pierre Duhem in Le Systéme du monde: “Such is, in a few words [of Buridan], the balance of the acquisitions made by the science of mechanics of the Parisians, between the time of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the time of Albert of Saxony. The dynamics of Aristotle has been completely overturned. The foundations have been laid for a dynamics which will be that of Galileo, of Descartes, of Pierre Gassendi, of Torricelli, a dynamics waiting to become the dynamics of Huygens, of Leibniz, and of Newton” [cited in Stanley L. Jaki, Scientist and Catholic: Pierre Duhem (1991), p. 266].

Since the physical sciences are all about motion, is it not scientific, indeed, is it not exceedingly sensible, to investigate the way scientists first came to grips with the science of motion? Maybe then, our modern world will cease imparting intellectual nullity to the Christian faith. Perhaps if they revisit that ground, their work might bear fresh fruit that will flourish in multifaceted ways in the milieu of the 21^st century.

CONTINUED

Original essay, Math Circles 8: Incarnation and Modern Science.