Regarding the Scientific Revolution
The following is adapted from an essay I wrote for a Western Civilization class I took during the summer. Highlights important views of mine on medievalism, ethics, and science.
Science is a major part of modern life, permeating various daily activities and finding ways to structure or inform the thinking of the average person without scientific credentials, even without them knowing. When we start our car to drive us to work, a simple task, hundreds of scientific operations occur in that moment that we turn the key in the ignition switch. A large electric charge is produced from a redox reaction within a circuit of lead-acid cells, this charge is directed to the spark plug which creates a spark that ignites the car’s gas that begins to power the engine’s cylinders and provide the car with the power needed to move. All these complex and powerful electrical, chemical, and mechanical operations occur from the simple turn of a key. We are surrounded and inundated by a scientific world and its scientific processes and methodologies. This has been the way of the world for a good two hundred years now, as men have taken a fine-tooth comb to Creation, pulled back its curtain, studied its every trick and tick, and have erected a systematized manner of thinking and understanding based on their observations. These scientists have become the prophets of the Holy Trinity of the Proton, Neutron, and Electron.
Originating from the fertile pool of newfound and nascent social and intellectual currents in late-medieval Europe, the Scientific Revolution set the basis for our brave new world. The major and fundamental figures of “the New Science” were primarily humanists and neo-Platonists, disciples of the Renaissance each, primarily based among the Italian thinkers but also taking root in the thinking of the French and English.1 Owing to their philosophical influences these thinkers came to view the natural world in a mathematical and measurable sense, modeling Plato’s own reverence for the mathematical and rationalistic. This methodology and thinking permeated all realms of the natural world and was applied to all. The heavens were subjected to this and notions of the heavenly spheres, their aethereal composition, their perfectly round dances centered on Earth, of their perfect shapes and masses were dislodged and instead the spheres became giant rocks, their orbits nonspecial and grounded by a dozen disparate and dispassionate factors, and the whole of the heavenly order was brought under a unified mathematical system.2 Even the human body was opened up and the pumping of the heart, the movement of the lungs, and the flowing of the blood was exposed to the external world and probed with great rigor, and the humoral and Galenic systems that had been utilized by medical practitioners since the days of Rome were quickly swept away by the detailed and rigorous examinations of the human body’s clockwork.3
The fast changing currents of medieval/early modern Europe were truly monumental. The Ptolemaic system that prevailed until then was, much like the current age, common sense and unconsciously touched the lives of everyone. The rapid and emphatic speed with which its main tenets were being overturned and challenged, not merely on the basis of observation but philosophy as well, was certainly whiplashing to many. Nature, what so many humans for thousands of years regarded as a primordial and powerful force, became something like a pet, docile and placid. For the learned Westerner the world around him was something to be mastered, not braved or avoided, with Nature becoming a thing “out there,” an estranged reality held back by the paving of roads and the chugging of the engine, rather than something over or encompassing us.4 The veritable revolution that this constituted challenged many institutions basic to medieval society, with the Catholic Church’s Aristotelian grounding of its metaphysics being throttled and its authority being challenged by imposing kings, religious dissidents, looming caliphs in the east, and on every other front,5 and the humanistic via moderna collapsed feudalistic societal mores that led to radical flattening and reorganization that erupted both mildly and majorly in certain settings as new systems were built.6 Even the family could be said to have been savaged by the energies of this rapid movement, for with man at his basest a quantifiable and measurable creature, dethroned from Creation, what is he and his relations? Accordingly, the modern man echoes another seminal thinker of the times, “Man is born free; and everywhere is in chains.”7
In comparison to medieval cosmology, the modern world is vastly different. In ways that have been implicitly given so far the medieval world had a far more “symphonic” view of the world.8 While the scientists took the scalpel to the natural world, the natural philosophers took the metronome. The revolutionaries were enamored with Plato’s metaphysics, the way he searched “for an abstract and mathematically elegant truth,” and from this developed their clockwork conception of Creation.9 However, in doing so these neo-Platonists overlooked an equally important aspect of Plato’s thinking, one they direly underemphasized, which was Plato’s conviction that not just mathematics but music was the greatest achievement of the human being as well.10
The medieval thinkers were “symphonic” in their cosmology, and they saw the natural world as interrelated, interpenetrative, and teleological. For them the whole universe was involved in the cosmic drama played out in the acts of creation, corruption, salvation, and consummation. This symphonic vision of Creation is captured excellently in the literature of Boethius, the preeminent medieval Christian thinker, such as in his following poem:
“Creator of the star-filled universe, seated upon your eternal throne. You move the heavens in their swift orbits. You hold the stars in their assigned paths, so that sometimes the shining moon is full in the light of her brother sun and hides the lesser star; sometimes, nearer the sun she wanes and loses her glory. You ordain that Hesperus, after rising at nightfall to drive the cold stars before him, should change his role and, as Lucifer, grow pale before the rising sun.
“When the cold of winter makes the trees bare, You shorten the day to a briefer span; but when warm summer comes, You make the night hours go swiftly. Your power governs the changing year: in spring, Zephyrus renews the delicate leaves that Boreas, the winds of winter, had destroyed; and Sirius burns the high corn in the autumn that Arcturus had seen in seed. …”11
As Boethius, and numerous other medieval intellectuals (many of whom were influenced by him),12 saw it, Creation was a harmonious and holistic organism (not something inert or mechanical) that splendidly worked together at the wondrous conduction of its Master.13 Nothing was just “merely” matter, rocks, gravity, energy, or any other reductionist physicality. Everything played its role in the grand cosmic scheme of their righteous Creator. Indeed, this permeated all of Creation, for not only were the heavenly spheres grand and majestic pieces in the cosmic orchestra, but medieval thinkers exalted animalkind as well, considering them as capable of hosting virtues (as was often found in medieval bestiaries that allegorically tied certain/perceived animal behaviors to Christian ethics, like the belief that pelicans tore open its breast to bring its young to life with its own blood, which represented Christ’s bloody sacrifice) and companions in man’s God-given stewardship of Creation.14 For medieval thinkers “there is a rational order that keeps the world in balance, keeping it from spinning out of control” which is a “deep, mathematical harmony that frames out the world in understandable patterns,” which is how Jason Baxter explains it, this grand, precise, and harmonious arrangement contributing to the medieval identification of it as “music,” insofar that they considered human instrumental music as capturing the musica universalis.15
This was more fundamental than how they thought things fell, floated, or orbited, because their theoria defined their praxis, and when all the room one’s theoria makes for is a dumb machine16 what must one’s praxis be? Think of anthropic disasters often prattled about, of caricatures of the greedy and exploitative industrialists mowing down Third World jungles and corralling villagers into sweatshops. Is the industrialist merely greedy, or does he see his factory as another machine, one better than Nature, not as “crude” and “primitive” but more valuable and marketable; is he just a cutthroat competitor? Marvin Perry captures the tragic irony of the revolutionary pangs as he notes that “Descartes,” proudly anti-Aristotelian and modern, “was among the first to dream about the capacity of science to control an dominate nature, though he never could have imagined its modern potential to destroy nature.”17
The Scientific Revolution stands as a testament to the transformative power of human inquiry. Influenced by recovered access to the ancient intellectual heritages of Rome and Greece pioneered by the Renaissance, scientists of this era embarked on a journey that would forever reshape our understanding of the natural world. Through their dedication to mechanistic and mathematical approaches they brought profound changes as they unveiled the mysteries of the cosmos, human body, and nature itself. Although, it has to be recognized that the pursuit for control over nature brought unintended consequences, challenging established institutions and societal norms, with natural and cultural stability being dealt similar blows. To navigate the complexities of our modern age, we must strike a delicate balance between scientific progress and environmental stewardship. By integrating scientific inquiry with a profound respect for the interconnectedness of our planet, we can forge a sustainable future. The legacy of the Scientific Revolution serves as a poignant reminder of the immense power and inherent limitations of scientific knowledge, and that with the integration of a more holistic perspective we can preserve the symphony of Creation, and take steps towards the most universal aspiration of all: ensuring a better future.
Marvin Perry et al., Western Civilization, 2 vols., 2:402.
Ibid., 2:403-7.
Ibid., 2:408-10.
Ibid., 2:416.
Ibid., 2:406; cf. 1:369-398, 2:423-27.
Ibid., 2:417-553; cf. Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, tr. G. D. H. Cole, 3.
This cosmology was primarily kindled in and given to me through my following of the wisdom of C.S. Lewis, a devout medievalist. Lewis’ key text on medievalist cosmology is his The Discarded Image, an insightful and overlooked read. See also C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature; Jason Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, esp. 19-68; Andrew Hicks, Composing the World; Jeremy Begbie, A Peculiar Orthodoxy; Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic, 67-100; Johannes Kepler, The Harmony of the World, trs. E.J. Aiton, J.V. Field, and A.M. Duncan.
Parry et al., 2:402.
Parry et al., ibid.
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, tr. Douglas Langston, 12.
For more on Boethius’ symphonic philosophy and cosmology see, first, as a primary sources, his De institutione musica (much of Boethius’ corpus outside the Consolation is overlooked or fragmentary, so no easily accessible and singular edition of this exists; all I am aware of is Oliver Strunk’s Source Readings In Music History, which is good in itself, on pp. 79-86 of which are selections from De institutione musica) and Consolation, plus, secondarily, Lewis, The Discarded Image, 75-90; David Chamberlain, “Philosophy of Music in the Consolatio of Boethius,” Speculum 45:1: 80-97; Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, 24-32.
Contra the popular (mis)conception of the medievals as ignorant, babbling, and abusive fools (one of many misconceptions of the era). See the Victoria & Albert Museum’s piece “Christian Symbolism: The Natural World,” Barbara Boehm’s “Animals in Medieval Art,” and Paul Cret’s “Animals in Christian Art.”
Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, 25. As Baxter also explains, this is why music had a therapeutic aspect and was so important to the ancients, such as in the case of Boethius, because by listening to it we are attuned to the cosmic harmony, ordered in and by God, which soothes the soul.
Parry et al., 2:400.
Ibid., 2:413.