Other Spanish reformers, such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, modernized the religious orders, attempting to weed out the more dubious and superstitious devotions and make the spiritual quest more systematic and less dependent on the whims of inadequate advisers. Mystics of the new age should know what to expect, learn how to deal with the pitfalls and dangers of the interior life, and husband their spiritual energies productively. The former soldier Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Society of Jesus, perfectly embodied the efficiency and effectiveness of the early modern West. His Spiritual Exercises provided a systematic, time-efficient, thirty-day retreat—a sort of crash course in mysticism, designed to make each Jesuit a dynamic force in the world. Like the Iberian explorers, Jesuit missionaries were dispatched all over the world: Francis Xavier (1506–52) to Japan, Robert di Nobili (1577–1656) to India, and Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) to China.
The reformed Catholic Church and the new Protestant denominations all succumbed to the iconoclasm of modernity, which would forever feel obliged to destroy what had been personally superseded. The positive achievements of the Catholic reformation were balanced by the horrors of the Inquisition. Protestants used the Old Testament ban on images as a mandate to trash statues and frescoes. Luther raged against the pope, Turks, Jews, women, and rebellious peasants. The Protestant reformers may have demanded that Christians be free to read and interpret the Bible as they chose, but there was no toleration for anybody who opposed their own teachings. Luther believed that all “heretical” books should be burned, and both Calvin and Zwingli were prepared to execute dissidents. Despite its intense religiosity, the divisions effected by the Protestant Reformation also helped to accelerate the process of secularization and the growth of nationalism. In order to maintain order, the princes had to separate themselves from the turmoil engendered by the squabbling churches and denominations, whose political power therefore diminished. As an infant nation struggled for political independence from Rome, it built a distinct identity, opting for Catholic or Protestant affiliation, and nonconformists were often persecuted as political dissidents and traitors.
As it entered the modern period, therefore, the West was torn between a frequently strident dogmatism on the one hand, and a more liberal humility that recognized the limits of knowledge on the other. The plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) explored the myriad possibilities of the human personality. He shared the Renaissance understanding of the importance of context; ideas, customs, and behavior were inextricably combined with a particular set of circumstances, so it was impossible to judge them from a purely objective, theoretical point of view. Human affairs were not motivated primarily by rational considerations. People were often caught unawares by unconscious or emotional impulses that were neither pragmatic nor efficient but sometimes worked against their own interests. Hamlet depicted the tortured consciousness of a hero with whom everybody somehow identified turning ceaselessly yet fruitlessly upon itself, unable to understand its motivation or achieve any degree of certainty about the most pressing and practical matters. In Othello, the apparently “motiveless malignancy” of Iago militated against simplistic ideas of good and evil. Shakespeare made his audiences aware that human beings were mysterious to themselves and others, and that it was disastrous and counterproductive to either attempt to manipulate them or expect them to act in a certain way.
In his own distinctive way, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) expressed a similar spirit, and was skeptical of any human attempt to attain absolute truth. In the famous “Apology of Raymond Sebond,” written, tongue-in-cheek, largely to please his father, Montaigne had marveled at Sebond’s intellectual confidence. This sixteenth-century Spanish philosopher had argued that we could derive all the information we required about God, salvation, and human life from a study of the natural world. But for Montaigne, reason was so blind and lame that nothing was certain or even probable. If an argument was sufficiently attractive, human beings could be persuaded to believe almost anything. But, far from being cast down by this unknowing, Montaigne was able to live quite happily with this modest assessment of the human intellect and seemed to enjoy the diversity and complexity of early modern life. Like the Renaissance humanists, he had no wish to pass judgment on a world that was daily becoming more difficult to assess. He regarded himself as a loyal Catholic but, in light of the new discoveries that constantly revealed the limits of human understanding, judged the attempt to impose any kind of orthodoxy as arrogant, futile, and dishonest.
It would be a mistake to imagine that the entire population absorbed the new ideas instantaneously. The vast majority probably felt obscurely perplexed at the sudden fragmentation of Christendom without any clear understanding of what was going on. For at least two hundred years, old mental habits of thought persisted, sometimes jostling uneasily with the new values, and we can see this at work even in the scientific revolution. In 1530, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473— 1543), the Polish-born canon of the cathedral of Frauenburg in Prussia, completed De revolutionibus, a thesis that argued that the sun was the center of the universe. A typical Renaissance man, Copernicus had studied mathematics, optics, and perspective at Krakow, canon law in Bologna, and medicine at Padua and had lectured on astronomy in Rome. In Frauenberg, working at different times as a church administrator, bailiff, military governor, judge, and physician, he had continued his study of the stars. Copernicus knew that most of the population would find the idea of a heliocentric, or sun-centered, universe impossible either to understand or to accept, so he did not publish his treatise but circulated the manuscript privately. Nevertheless, De revolutionibus was widely read in both Catholic and Protestant countries and inspired a good deal of interest.
Since the twelfth century, Europeans had adopted a cosmology based on Aristotelian physics and popularized by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (c. 90–168).46 The Earth was firmly at the center of the universe, encased like an onion in eight spherical shells composed of an invisible substance called ether. These spheres revolved in a uniform manner around the Earth, and embedded in the ether of each of the first seven spheres was one of the heavenly bodies: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The fixed stars occupied the eighth sphere at the outermost rim of the universe and gave stability to the whole. The Ptolemaic system was the most accurate account of the data that had been accumulated in the ancient world, when techniques of observation had, of course, been limited and inadequate. The medievals also found it morally satisfying. The Earth may have been the center of the universe but it was also the lowest point of creation. On Earth all was change and decay. But as one moved past the waxing and waning moon to the more constant sun and, finally, reached the fixed stars, everything became more reliable, until beyond the eighth sphere was the immutable world of heaven. Even though Ptolemy’s system was spiritually uplifting, however, it was cumbersome scientifically. Because the circle was universally regarded as the symbol of perfection, it was taken for granted that the planetary orbits described a perfect circle. But observers had noted that some planets appeared to move erratically and seemed brighter at some times than at others. Ptolemy tried to account for these irregularities by an intricate mathematical device that had the planets revolving in small “epicycles” around a central point, which itself described a perfectly circular course around the Earth. When viewed from the Earth, he explained, the center of the epicycle seemed to move irregularly, but if it were possible to observe it from an off-center point, it would be seen to move in a wholly uniform manner.
Copernicus turned the whole system inside out.47 Even though his thesis would spark an intellectual revolution, he still retained a foothold in the old mythical world, finding it impossible to abandon the heavenly spheres or the symbolism of the circular planetary orbits. Copernicus, the church administrator, scanned the heavens in order to fix the dates of the religious festivals, but, as a Renaissance man, he was disturbed by the inelegance of Ptolemaic cosmology. How
could the Creator have devised such an unwieldy and aesthetically unpleasing cosmos? Looking back ad fontes to classical antiquity, he found that in the third century BCE, Aristarchus of Samos had suggested that the planets revolved around the sun and that the Earth revolved on its own axis. He discovered that the Pythagoreans believed that mathematics rather than physics was the key to any understanding of the natural world, and that Philolaus, one of Pythagoras’s pupils, thought that the Earth, planets, and sun all revolved around a central, cosmic fire.
But none of these Greek phusikoi had worked out the mathematical implications of their theories. Copernicus proceeded to do so and produced a radically new hypothesis. If, for the sake of argument, we supposed that the Earth revolved daily on its own axis and also described an annual revolution around the sun, we could account for all known celestial phenomena just as accurately as Ptolemy did but in a far more elegant manner. The daily revolution of the celestial bodies and the annual motion of the sun that we thought we observed could be explained by the Earth’s diurnal rotation on its axis and its annual orbit around the sun. The heavenly movements we observed were simply a projection of the Earth’s motion in the opposite direction.
Copernicus’s theory was roundly criticized, not because he could not prove it, but because it contravened basic principles of Aristotelian physics. The mathematics worked beautifully, but—according to the traditional academic hierarchy—mathematics was supposed to defer to physics, the superior science. It is not surprising that most people found the idea of a sun-centered universe incredible. It contradicted not only the standard scientific explanation but also basic common sense. Copernicus was asking his colleagues to believe that the Earth, which seemed static, was actually moving very fast indeed and that the planets only appeared to be in motion around us because of a mistaken projection. Copernican theory demanded that people no longer trust the evidence of their senses and accept on faith the counterintuitive theories of an eccentric mathematician.
There were at first few specifically religious objections. Even though some biblical texts implied that the sun moved in the heavens and that the Earth was stable,48 Catholics were not obliged to interpret them literally. They still followed Augustine’s principle of accommodation, which had ruled that a scriptural text should be reinterpreted if it clashed with science. Copernicus had offered his hypothesis sub imaginationem in the traditional way, and when he read his treatise in the Vatican in 1534, the pope gave it cautious approval. When De revolutionibus was finally published in 1543, Copernicus was on his deathbed and his editor Andreas Osiander (1498–1552) took it upon himself to write a preface to protect the dying man from harassment: because astronomy could not prove any of its hypotheses, we should depend on divine revelation for reliable information about the cosmos.49
Neither Copernicus nor the handful of people who were able to entertain the idea of a heliocentric universe regarded themselves as religious rebels. Luther is reported to have remarked irritably in his Table Talk that Copernicus was a “fool” who wanted “to turn the whole art of astronomy upside down” but seemed more concerned about scientific orthodoxy than its religious implications.50 Luther was not a biblical literalist; his disciple Philipp Melanchthon (14971560) was initially hostile to Copernicus, but mathematics and astronomy figured prominently in the curricula he devised for Protestant universities. Calvin never mentioned Copernicus, but he held fast to Augustine’s principle of accommodation. He was not surprised to hear that the biblical description of the cosmos differed from the latest discoveries of learned philosophers. In Genesis, for example, Moses had described the sun and moon as the largest of the heavenly bodies, but modern astronomers claimed that Saturn was bigger. “Here lies the difference; Moses wrote in a popular style things which, without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand; but astronomers investigate with great labour whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend.”51 The Bible had nothing to say about astronomy. “He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere,” Calvin instructed emphatically. Science was “very useful” and must not be impeded “because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them.”52
Intrigued by Copernicus’s hypothesis, some scientists tried to develop his ideas. In his observatory on the island of Hveen in the Swedish Sound, the Danish astronomer, mathematician, and imperial astrologer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) corrected outstanding inaccuracies in the astronomical table and discovered a new star in Cassiopeia. He rejected Copernicus’s theory, however, and suggested a compromise with the Ptolemaic system: the planets rotated round the sun, which revolved around the stationary Earth. The English astronomer William Gilbert (1540–1603) thought that the Earth might have an inner magnetism that caused it to turn daily on its axis. In Italy, the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) left his religious order in 1576 and inveighed against the inadequacies of Aristotelian physics. Fascinated by the ancient hermetic religion of Egypt, Bruno was convinced that esoteric spiritual exercises could give the philosopher direct access to the divine life that lay hidden behind the veil of physical reality.53 This, he claimed, was the real meaning of heliocentric theory, which Copernicus—a mere jobbing mathematician—had not fully understood.
Arguably the most brilliant of these pioneering scientists was the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630),54 who had corresponded with Brahe, helped him in his work, and succeeded him in the post of imperial astrologer. Like Copernicus, Kepler was convinced that mathematics was the key to understanding the cosmos and that the scientist’s task was to test his mathematical theories against rigorous empirical observation. In 1609, he published Mysterium cosmographicum, the first public attempt to justify and refine Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, which had been unnecessarily complicated by Copernicus’s retention of the circular planetary orbits; there were also outstanding problems with his hypothesis. What kept terrestrial objects from flying off the earth as it traveled through space at such high speed? After struggling for ten years to find a way of confirming the idea that the planets moved in perfect circles, Kepler was finally persuaded by Brahe’s remarkably accurate observations to jettison it and, basing his calculations on Euclidean geometry, formulated the first “natural laws”—precise, verifiable statements about particular phenomena that were universally applicable.55
First: the planets moved in elliptical rather than circular orbits, traveling at speeds that varied proportionately according to their distance from the sun. Second: while in orbit, the planet would sweep out equal areas of the ellipse in equal intervals of time. Third: the ratio of the squares of the orbital periods was exactly equal to the ratio of the cubes of their average distance from the sun.56 Kepler also suggested that instead of being moved by the automatic motion of the spheres, the planets were moved by mathematical forces. Extending Gilbert’s theory of the earth’s magnetism to all celestial bodies, he suggested that the elliptical orbits of the planets were created by the moving force (anima motrix) of the sun, combined with its own magnetism and that of the planets. The universe was, therefore, a self-regulating machine and ran on the same principles that governed dynamics here on earth.57
In reaching these groundbreaking conclusions, Kepler had depended not only on mathematics and empirical observation but on the same kind of hermetic mystical speculations as Bruno. He too was convinced that Copernicus had not understood the full implications of his theory, which he had stumbled upon “like a blind man, leaning on a stick as he walks.”58 But with the aid of theology, he, Kepler, would show that it was no accident that the universe took the form it did.59 Geometry was God’s language; like the Word that had existed with God from before the creation, it was identical with God.60 So the study of geometry was the study of God, and by studying the mathematical laws that inform all natural phenomena, we commune with the divine mind.61 Because he was convinced that God had impressed his image on the cosmos, Kepler saw th
e Trinity everywhere. The Trinity was the “form and archetype” of the only three stationary things in the universe: the sun, the fixed stars, and the space between the heavenly bodies.62 The planets rotated in their orbits because of a mystic force, emanating from the sun in the same way as the Father creates through the Son and sets things in motion through the Spirit.63 The solar system did not merely remind Kepler of the Trinity; he insisted that the Trinity had in part prompted his discoveries. But he was not entirely swept away by religious enthusiasm. He knew that the theological truth he found in the cosmos was dependent upon mathematics, empirical observation, and measurement. “If they do not agree, the whole of the preceding work has undoubtedly been a delusion.”64
Today it is often assumed that modern science has always clashed with religion. Kepler, a mathematician of extraordinary genius, reminds us that early modern science was rooted in faith. These pioneering scientists had no desire to get rid of religion. Instead, they would develop a secular theology, written by and for laymen, because their discoveries made them think differently about God. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, science, philosophy, and religion were tightly welded together. Kepler was convinced that during his mathematical exploration of the universe, he had “followed with sweat and panting the footprints of the Creator.”65 Scientists had to cast aside everything they thought they knew and confront the unknown—in rather the same way as their contemporary John of the Cross encountered the unknown God, telling his readers: “To come to the knowledge you have not, you must go by a way in which you know not.”66 If they did not have the courage to move beyond the safety of received ideas, mystic and scientist alike would become trapped in theories that were no longer adequate.
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