4
We saw in the previous two chapters how those ideas now being presented by modern-day atheists and secularists as undermining traditional Christian belief, far from being new, original, and shocking, are in most cases many centuries old. But what I want to do now is trace some of the arguments and myths that have led to so much attack on the Christian faith, especially in the twentieth century.
In spite of a massive body of original research from the nineteenth century onwards, undertaken by scholars across Europe and America, into the documented history of the medieval centuries, and the rich, vibrant, and ingenious culture that it has revealed, the popular myth remains that the centuries between AD 500 and 1500 were “dark”. It is a myth that has been fed into the Western imagination by nineteenth-century “gothic” novels (complete with cackling monks), paintings of deranged alchemists, and, most of all, by Hollywood and television (the Monty Python comedies and The Name of the Rose spring to mind as examples). An age not only dark, but also filthy, in which only heroes and heroines ever washed – and usually had “orthodontically perfect” smiles to boot! Monks in particular got it in the neck from anti-medieval fantasists. Evil fellows, the lot of ’em, obsessed with making décolletée maidens “confess” their lustful thoughts, plotting nasty deeds, or perhaps shuffling around subterranean laboratories full of bubbling retorts in search of the philosopher’s stone or trying to conjure up the legions of hell. Alternatively, they might be overweight buffoons, as in the popular cinematic depictions of Friar Tuck.
In this popular way of thinking, the medieval world is a place as alien as Mars. Sandwiched between the sunny glories of Greece and Rome (and if you are religious, the time of Jesus) and the “Renaissance”, which dawned when the skies cleared once again after 1500, it is a foreign place of superstition and repression. And worst of all, for a Protestant, it was Catholic! Indeed, it became a hell-sent playground for atheists, mockers, and secular “progressives” of all shades, for what horrors of backwardness can you not project back onto the “Dark Ages”?
As an extenuating circumstance for the Christianity-haters, however, one has to admit that they did not invent vilification of the medieval, but found it as a tempting brickbat all ready to throw! For the Protestant Christians got there first. Indeed, it was the anti-medieval, anti-Catholic Protestant rhetoric, going right back to the sixteenth-century Reformers themselves, that began the task of darkening the 1,000 years that had rolled before then. For were not the Protestant Reformers seeing the Gospels in a light that had been dimmed since the days of the apostles, and which “the church” of the medieval centuries had almost snuffed out? Indeed, you had only to look at such things as popes, the seven sacraments, transubstantiation (the bread and wine miraculously being transformed into the body and blood of Jesus by the priest during Mass), Purgatory, elaborate vestments, crucifixes, and other “idols”, the “worship” of the Virgin Mary and the saints, liturgical ceremonies, monks and nuns, confession, and a host of other things that had never been mentioned in the New Testament, to realize how “superstitious” the Roman Catholic Church had made the simple teachings of Jesus!
So some early Protestants smashed church decorations, burned “Popish” books, dissolved religious communities, and, between 1535 and 1680, barbarously executed, often by hanging, drawing, and quartering, well over 100 English Roman Catholic bishops, priests, monks, nuns, and laity as “traitors”. Their treachery, however, in the vast majority of cases (barring Spanish-inspired fanatics) rarely lay in anything more serious than refusing to assent to King Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy of 1534, which made the king supreme governor of the English Church and formally excluded papal authority from England. They were executed simply for continuing in their loyalty to the Catholic faith of their English and European ancestors – a faith which King Henry himself had passionately defended up to 1533. It was this new Act of Supremacy that led to Lord Chancellor Sir (Saint) Thomas More (A Man for all Seasons) losing his head in 1535, and to the barbarous judicial murder of numerous Jesuit priests such as St Edmund Campion and St Ambrose Barlow who, over the ensuing century, would go to the butcher’s block for nothing more wicked than taking the sacraments to beleaguered Catholic households around England.
Of course, one is not denying that Protestantism had its own equally brave martyrs, burnt during the Catholic Queen Mary’s short reign in the 1550s and immortalized in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563). And Protestantism had its own great strengths and great glories, most notably the use of vernacular languages in worship and in accessible printed Bibles. But what is relevant to my argument is that the Protestants began the job of vilifying the Middle Ages through their vilification of the Catholic Church. And when science began to occupy an increasingly prominent place in the cultural agenda, the Middle Ages came under especial attack, for why had science not “progressed” in the days between the last Greeks and us “moderns”? This way of thinking, moreover, was natural to Robert Hooke, the pioneer of experimental science and a leading early Fellow of the Royal Society, in the early 1660s. As he spelled out in the surviving manuscript of a lecture which he delivered to the Royal Society on 4 December 1689, these times were backward. Indeed, Hooke, the son of an Isle of Wight clergyman and educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, with an array of bishops, senior Anglican clergy, and learned laymen among his friends (including the devout Robert Boyle), was a Protestant to his fingertips, with no love of the Church of Rome. In his lecture he writes off the entire medieval age – “the Darknesse of those times” – as a scientific wilderness, with only two exceptions. One was Pope Sylvester II (elected AD 999), a French mathematician and supposed designer of clockwork; while the other was Friar Roger Bacon of Oxford, the alchemist and optician. For Hooke, science proper came into existence not much before he himself was born in 1635, when the telescope, magnetic devices, and other new instruments began to change the world through experimental knowledge. And Hooke was by no means unique in his day, for what impressed him was how knowledge of geography, optics, astronomy, mechanics, physiology, and practically everything else had advanced by leaps and bounds since the end of “the Darknesse of those times”.
Yet the more modern historical scholarship investigates the culture of medieval Europe, the more sophisticated and elaborate that culture becomes. For while Hooke was correct in finding very little experimental, inquisitive, research-driven science in the Middle Ages, this could hardly in fairness be used as an accusation against the culture of that time. Not until the great oceanic voyages of discovery after 1480, and their knock-on effect on the problem of interpreting new knowledge and devising new instruments to make sense of that knowledge, was European science forced to confront a mass of fresh facts never dreamed of by the ancient Greeks. Such as why there are vast oceans and continents on the earth never mentioned by the Greek geographical writer Ptolemy, and why there are animals, birds, and reptiles never described by Aristotle, and winds and tidal currents never discussed by Pliny.
Science in the Middle Ages was not backward, so much as about other things. What drove it was not so much experiment, as mathematical geometry, taxonomy, logical deduction, and philosophical theology. On the other hand, let us be clear about one thing: no medieval scholar of any worth thought the earth was flat, and no educated person in 1492 believed that Columbus or the other early navigators would sail over the edge of it. (That seems to have been a folk myth propagated by American writers such as Washington Irving in the early nineteenth century.)
Indeed, one needs only to read the astronomical literature of the Middle Ages to realize that the spherical nature of the earth, about 6,000 or 8,000 miles across, was standard knowledge, and taught to university students from Salamanca to Prague. One has only, too, to read the first medieval astronomical treatise to be written in English, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe (c. 1381), to find that the spherical, mathematical geometry of the earth and the heavens was also standard knowledge. Inherited in unbroken succession from the Greeks, in fact, taught by the Venerable Bede to the young monks of Jarrow Abbey in AD 710, and encapsulated in John of the Holy Wood’s (Johannes de Sacrobosco’s) Latin textbook De Sphaera Mundi (“On the Sphere of the Earth”) of c. 1240. All of these writers, moreover, told how the round shadow of the earth that fell across the lunar disk during a lunar eclipse could only be produced by a sphere.
“Aha!” I hear someone say by way of contradiction, “What about those flat-earth maps, such as that of c. 1300 preserved in Hereford Cathedral, showing the earth as a flat disk, with water around the edge?” These “Mappa Mundi” charts, however, were symbolic maps, placing Jerusalem at their centre, with countries such as the British Isles and Spain squeezed into the edge. They were not scientific teaching or direction-finding maps so much as spiritual maps, showing Christ crucified at the centre of the world. Just compare them to a map of the London Underground. Do the straight, curved, and diagonal coloured lines on the Underground map look like London? Of course not: it is a schematic representation of local stations and their relationships with each other. Ditto for the disk-like distortions of the “Mappa Mundi”. On the other hand, if you look at the “Portolano” navigational charts of the Middle Ages, you find the countries and regions from the Baltic to North Africa drawn to an amazing standard of geographical accuracy. From the fourteenth century onwards, in fact, Europe developed a rich tradition of scientificcartography, as our museum collections testify.
No medieval undergraduate, moreover, could take his degree without demonstrating his knowledge of astronomy, mathematics, and geometry; while the medical faculties of Paris, Montpellier, Padua, and other great European universities regularly dissected human and animal cadavers as part of the MD degree.
But one major area where medieval Europe initiated experimentation was in the science of optics. Starting out from Aristotle’s and Ptolemy’s optical writings, which were further developed by Alhazen of Cairo in c. AD 1000 (whose Arabic Optical Thesaurus was soon translated into Latin), Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Theodoric of Freiburg, and others pioneered original researches into the refraction, reflection, and colours of light by 1350. Why, they asked, did the white light from the sun and stars become coloured when it passed through glass or water? And let us be quite clear that while Sir Isaac Newton after 1672 did fundamental work on the light spectrum, it was the classical Greeks, medieval Arabs, and, most especially, the medieval Europeans who made and publicized crucial breakthroughs in our understanding of light.
Roger Bacon, perhaps when living in Oxford around 1250, made a detailed study of the optics of the rainbow, and came to realize that the bow was simply part of a geometrical cone of light, with the sun at the apex of the cone. And taking measurements with a brass astrolabe, Bacon discovered what I have been bold enough to call the earliest law of experimental physics: namely, that the coloured light coming out of the clouds producing the rainbow unfailingly does so at an angle of 42° to the white sunlight going into the cloud. Bacon even found that the same geometry applied to “artificial” rainbows made by the spray thrown up by water wheels. You can get the same effect from a modern lawn sprinkler. Try it, with the sun directed behind you, and the spray going up high.
Then Theodoric of Freiburg took the idea further, discovering that it was not simply the cloud or mist of water that produced the colours and the 42° angle, but each individual droplet of water – perhaps many millions – each one both refracting and reflecting the sunlight. He even devised a “lab” experiment in optics: one of the earliest times a scientific researcher had tried to “model” a piece of nature under controlled conditions. And once again, it is so easy and safe that even young children could do it. Simply take a plain cylindrical drinking glass or jam-jar full of water, and place it on a piece of white paper in a darkened room. Prepare a good torch with a mask, so that it only emits a single narrow ray of light. (Theodoric probably used sunlight coming through a small hole in a window shutter.) Make sure your eyes get thoroughly dark-adapted, then shine the narrow torch beam along the table top with the light glancing into the glass of water. You will then notice a thin band of colours coming from the glass. And if you use a simple school protractor, you will find that the exiting “rainbow” on the paper forms an exact 42° with the white torchlight going in. In short, you are replicating the optical geometry of the rainbow on a table top. And if anybody tries to tell you there was no science in the Middle Ages, and that everyone superstitiously believed that one could find pots of gold at the end of a rainbow, you can confidently proclaim “Myth!”
Optics, light, and lenses were close to the heart and intellect of the Middle Ages, for not only did they provide elegant, geometrical demonstrations of meteorological phenomena, but they brought science and faith intimately together. For divine light was a luminous emanation of God. Genesis tells us that it was present at the creation, when it penetrated the darkness and illumined the world; Psalm 104 further tells us that God decked himself “with light as it were a garment”, while Jesus came as “the Light” into the world.
And by the 1320s, the wonders of that newly devised technology, clockwork, were being applied to demonstrate God’s glory. Around 1326, Richard of Wallingford, abbot of the great Benedictine house at St Albans and already a mathematician of European standing, designed and built the most sophisticated machine of the entire Middle Ages. This was not merely a clock to tell the time, for these weight-driven geared machines were already being used to mark the hours and ring bells, but a working model of the universe as it was then understood.
At that time, the best geometrical and observational evidence pointed to the hypothesis that all the astronomical bodies rotated around the earth. (There would be no physical, measured proof that the earth moved in space until 1728.) So Abbot Richard used gears, weights, ratchets, and levers to set up a machine that depicted the sun, moon, and stars rotating accurately around a central earth. Indeed, for 200 years it was one of the mechanical wonders of Europe, and pilgrims coming to the Shrine of St Alban the Martyr were fascinated to see how human intellect and hands could mirror the geometrical perfection of God’s cosmos. Tragically, the great clock vanished at the Reformation – almost certainly smashed by Protestant zealots as a Popish bauble. But luckily, descriptions and drawings of its ingenious gearing survive, and a replica now ticks away in the monastic church which became St Albans Cathedral in the sixteenth century.
Finally, it was medieval scholars who touched upon concepts that would not really re-emerge – albeit in a different context – until the “new physics” of the twentieth century. For example, in Oxford around 1330, Thomas Bradwardine was asking questions about infinity, for could not an infinitely powerful God create an infinity of worlds if he chose to do so? Did time exist in heaven? Or, as St Augustine had argued, was it restricted to the cosmos governed by orbiting astronomical bodies? So were the dead outside time? And how could God create everything from nothing – which he clearly had done? What was matter really made of? And Nicholas of Cusa and Nicole de Oresme in Europe, and the famous Merton College Oxford geometers, pursued all kinds of ideas about time, space, and relative motion.
It is true that none of these men had telescopes or cyclotrons as twenty-first-century scientists do. Rather, they came to their ideas from philosophy, geometry, and “thought experiments” based upon trying to deduce what powers an infinite, loving creator God might choose to exercise. It was, indeed, a world of extraordinary breadth and ingenuity, in which classical and contemporary science, the properties of nature, the perfection of mathematics, logic, philosophy, and theology all came together.
And surely, they must have got into serious trouble with “the church” for entertaining such ideas? The answer is that none of them did. Thomas Bradwardine and Nicole de Oresme became Roman Catholic bishops, and Nicholas of Cusa was a cardinal. But the plain fact is that, unless they doubted the nature and powers of God, academics in European universities enjoyed a remarkable degree of freedom in the pursuit of ideas, for surely (and most scholars in the universities were friars, deacons, or priests) these intellectual explorations could only add to mankind’s awareness of the glory of God.
And also let us remember that, in firm contradiction to standard modern mythology, the medieval church was in no way biblically fundamentalist. For St Augustine – perhaps the most influential early theologian in the thought of medieval Europe – had pointed out in his commentary on Genesis after AD 401 that the physical world described in Genesis – with its flat earth and tent-like sky – was not the same as the spherical physical world and sky known to the Greeks. But this did not invalidate the Bible, for the Bible’s primary message – about God creating everything from nothing, humanity being in God’s image, God’s love, and the saviourship of Jesus Christ – remained unchanged.
I am aware that I have spent a great deal of time on the Middle Ages and its rich intellectual culture. But I have done this in the hope of countering one of the most pervasive and grotesque myths in the whole history of the relationship between science and Christianity.