Renaissance Genius #2

From the Greek Miracle to the Scientific Revolution

Following up on my previous post, I now turn to the Renaissance rediscovery of Greek science (called “natural philosophy” back then). The main argument is that the scientific genius of European civilization sprang from the Greek miracle, not from the Christian revelation. This is not new, but I think it needs to be reaffirmed, because there is, in my view, much confusion today about what is wrong with the West, among Christians but also among Traditionalists.[1]

Louis Rougier, The Genius of the West (1971)

On this subject, I have just read an excellent book by French philosopher Louis Rougier, The Genius of the West (1971), an abridged edition of the French version, Le Génie de l’Occident (1969), which I can only recommend (it is on archive.org). Rougier is a remarkably erudite, logical and articulate scholar. In the first chapters, he writes about “the ‘quantum leap’ of the human spirit achieved by Greece”.

In place of the empirical routine of Eastern thought, the Greeks substituted the science of proof. This science is not satisfied with the evidence of the senses which describes the how of things: it insists upon intellectual evidence which can explain the why. Instead of the practical geometry of the Egyptians we get the axiomatic and deductive geometry of the Pythagoreans; instead of the calculations of the Phoenicians traders, the theory of numbers; in place of the descriptive and numeric astronomy of the Babylonians, the theoretical and explanatory astronomy of Eudoxus, Hipparchus and Ptolemy, which explains the apparently capricious movements of the planets by a geometric combination of simple, circular and uniform movements in an expanded universe. In place of the theogonies of Homer and Hesiod, we find that first the Milesian philosophers and then the Atomists substituted the science of physics, which had as its goal the explanation of all phenomena, celestial as well as terrestrial, by means of purely natural causes. In place of the magical and priestly medicine of the East, Asclepiades and his followers developed a science of healing founded upon clinical observations. For the legendary tales of the bards there were substituted narrative history by Herodotus and interpretive history by Thucydides and Polybius. New words appear which have no equivalents in the ancient Oriental languages: theory, demonstration, logic, and syllogism.[2]

It was almost miraculous that part of these intellectual breakthroughs survived Christianity, to be rediscovered in the Renaissance:

The triumph of Christianity in the West as the religion of the state had provoked one of the greatest destructions of books, manuscripts, libraries and works of art ever recorded in history. If a few works survived this holocaust, it was due to some old Romans, high dignitaries of the court of Theodoric. It is not to the West, but to the Orient—Byzantium, Syria, Persia and Arabia—that we owe the survival of Hellenic culture. / Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries the works of Archimedes, Apollonius, and others reached the West via Syria, Baghdad, Cordova, Toledo, and Palermo, arousing scientific thought from its long sleep. It was a passage in Archimedes which led Copernicus to the hypothesis of the heliocentric universe; it was Apollonius who led Kepler to substitute an ellipse for a circle in his explanation of the orbits of the planets; and above all, it was Archimedes who taught Leonardo da Vinci, Benedetti and Galileo to use mathematics in their studies of nature. A problem posed by Pappus on the locus of points led Descartes to create analytical geometry. There are many such examples. It is not too great a claim to say that the fate of Western civilization turned on the almost haphazard preservation of a few dozen ancient manuscripts.[3]

This is hardly controversial. But Rougier also makes an original analysis of the limitation of Greek thought, and of an important contribution of the Christian Middle Ages which did bring added value to Greek science when it was rediscovered. The Greeks loved knowledge for its own sake, but lacked the incentive to apply it practically. This is because they relied on slaves for mechanical labor, which led them to look down on it as unworthy of free citizens.

Prejudice against the mechanical arts became so strong that Archimedes, the inventor of the lever, wedge, pulley, worm screw, and winch, would not—if we may believe Plutarch—leave behind any written treatise on these matters: “regarding the work of an engineer and every art that ministers to the needs of life as ignoble and vulgar, he devoted his earnest efforts only to those studies the charm and subtlety of which are not affected by the claims of necessity.”[4]

Slavery, Rougier explains, ultimately “brought ruin to the Greek cities, to the Hellenic empire, and finally to Rome, by creating an expansive urban proletariat and by impoverishing the agrarian masses.”[5] This explains the rise of Christianity, a slave-religion as Nietzsche saw it. Christianity raised, to some degree, the status of the working and merchant classes, which allowed them to organize in guilds and fostered their creativity.

The glorification of skilled work was one of the factors responsible for the long series of very useful inventions perfected during the Middle Ages. / At the very beginning came the water mill and the windmill. … During the tenth and eleventh centuries rapidly flowing streams were widely exploited for water power, prompting a veritable industrial revolution.[6]

With the invention of the camshaft, circular motion could be converted into linear motion, and operate mechanical saws or hydraulic hammers. Progress in mining, metallurgy, chemistry, weaving, building, transport, and more importantly agricultural techniques, were made of good use.

Taking shape was a technical civilization destined to transform economic and social life and man’s view of the world. This development was greatly aided by the gradual disappearance of slavery and by the establishment of relative security from invasion as great feudal monarchies emerged from the eleventh century on.[7]

All these improvements were mostly empirical, but this empirical approach proved decisive when combined with Greek science in such geniuses as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) or Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who united theoretical science and practical craftsmanship, and transformed knowledge into power.

The Renaissance men of knowledge

Let us review just a few areas where the rediscovery of the Greeks was critical. During the Middle Ages, medicine had regressed from the time of Claudius Galen of Pergamon (c. 129-201 AD), who had built on the Hippocratic Corpus, systematized anatomical observation, formulated hypotheses on physiological processes—and healed Marcus Aurelius. Because medieval clerics and monks were strongly discouraged from the practice of medicine, and because the dissection of corpses was taboo, less was known about medicine in the 12th century than eight centuries earlier by the Greeks.[8] What little learning appeared then came from Muslim scholars (more often Persians than Arabs ethnically, although writing in Arab), through whom the Latins discovered parts of Galen, as well as the Persian Avicenna (980-1037), translated into Latin in Toledo between 1150 and 1187.

The same applies to geography. The Greeks (Thales, Herodotus, Aristotle) were renowned for their incentive to explore and describe the world. Eratosthenes (276-194 BC), director of the Library of Alexandria, calculated mathematically the earth’s circumference with great precision. Around 150 AD, Claudius Ptolemy composed a compilation of the available geographical data. All this science fell into oblivion in the West during the Middle Ages. Cartography was virtually non-existent, or limited to a symbolic representation of the world with Jerusalem at its center. Geography was only revived with the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geography in the early 15th century, and established itself as a discipline in its own right with the discovery of the New World.

In astronomy, no real progress had been made since Ptolemy, whose treatise Almagest was rediscovered by the “Arabs” in the 12th century. When Copernicus defended heliocentrism in his treatise De Revolutionibus in 1543, he still had to build up from the Greeks. He claimed to be inspired by Pythagoras, while Galileo, a century later, wrote under the patronage of Plato. Between Ptolemy and Copernicus, there was no medieval astronomy of any significance in Europe.

In the field of Law, the European early Middle Ages knew feudal customary law, on one hand, and ecclesiastical canon law on the other. Roman law was not discovered before a Byzantine copy of Justinian’s Digesta came into the hands of Bolognese scholars around 1080, and it was the Hohenstaufen emperors of the 13th century who made it the basis of a new legal order (Frederick II Hohenstaufen was, in many ways, a precursor of Renaissance princes). Hugo Grotius’s On the Law of War and Peace (1625), considered the first systematic treatise on international law, is based on Roman law. The rational character of Roman law explains, according to René Robaye, why it “has outlived the society that created it, to become, several centuries later, the foundation of the most important family of modern legal systems. … Most universities continue to make it an object of scientific research, for the genius of Rome is first and foremost that of its law, and the influence of Roman institutions remains considerable.”[9]

We can therefore conclude for science as we did for the arts (previous post): Europe’s unique scientific creativity began in the Renaissance, with the reappropriation of ancient Greek and Roman science. As the trial of Galileo suffices to illustrate, the Church played a predominantly negative role in this scientific take-off. This could not be otherwise, since scientific progress came from questioning the Church’s authority in matters of truth, and challenging the belief in miracles by faith in natural laws. As an emblematic example of the clash between science and the Church, it was with scientific philological criteria that Nicolas de Cues in 1433, then Lorenzo Valla eight years later, proved that Constantine’s Donation was a forgery—a serious blow to the prestige and hegemonic claims of the popes.

The conflict between Church and science during the Renaissance was by no means a conflict between faith in God and atheism. Atheism was non-existent in the debates of the 15th century. In the following century, humanists like Erasmus and his friend Thomas More were horrified by the religious wars, but considered atheism even worse than religious fanaticism. Scientists believed in God, and this was still the case in the 17th century: Isaac Newton, the greatest scientific genius of his time, was intensely religious.

However, the idea of God held by these men of learning was moving further and further away from Christian doctrine and closer to Greek philosophy: it was a God who governed the world through natural laws rather than miracles, and who communicated with man through reason rather than Revelation. The life of the French mathematician Blaise Pascal is a dramatic illustration of this dialectical tension between two ideas of God. Pascal was a genius of great renown. But in 1654, at the age of 31, he had a mystical experience and renounced the “God of the philosophers” in favor of the God of the Gospels. He stopped contributing to science and moved closer to the Jansenist abbey of Port-Royal. He died of a neurological disease at the age of 39.