Historian Edward Grant illuminates how today's scientific culture originated with the religious thinkers of the Middle Ages. In the early centuries of Christianity, Christians studied science and natural philosophy only to the extent that these subjects proved useful for a better understanding of the Christian faith, not to acquire knowledge for its own sake.
However, with the influx of Greco-Arabic science and natural philosophy into Western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Christian attitude toward science changed dramatically. Despite some tensions in the thirteenth century, the Church and its theologians became favorably disposed toward science and natural philosophy and used them extensively in their theological deliberations.
Here are some facts you probably didn't learn in school:
- People in the Middle Ages did not think the world was flat. In fact, medieval scholars could prove it wasn't
- The Inquisition never executed anyone
because of their scientific ideas or discoveries (actually, the Church
was the chief sponsor of scientific research and several popes were
celebrated for their knowledge of the subject)
- It was medieval
scientific discoveries, methods, and principles that made possible
western civilization's Scientific Revolution
If you were taught
that the Middle Ages were a time of intellectual stagnation,
superstition, and ignorance, you were taught a myth that has been
utterly refuted by modern scholarship.
As a physicist and historian of science James Hannam shows in his book, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution, without the scholarship of the "barbaric" Middle Ages, modern science simply would not exist.
The
Middle Ages were a time of one intellectual triumph after another. As
Dr. Hannam writes, "The people of medieval Europe invented spectacles,
the mechanical clock, the windmill, and the blast furnace by themselves.
Lenses and cameras, almost all kinds of machinery, and the industrial
revolution itself all owe their origins to the forgotten inventors of
the Middle Ages."
The adjective 'medieval' has become a synonym for brutality and
uncivilised behaviour. Yet without the work of medieval scholars there
could have been no Galileo, no Newton and no Scientific Revolution.
In God's Philosophers, James Hannam debunks many of the myths about
the Middle Ages, showing that medieval people did not think the earth
was flat, nor did Columbus 'prove' that it is a sphere; the Inquisition
burnt nobody for their science nor was Copernicus afraid of persecution;
no Pope tried to ban human dissection or the number zero.
God's Philosophers is a celebration of the forgotten scientific
achievements of the Middle Ages - advances which were often made thanks
to, rather than in spite of, the influence of Christianity and Islam.
Decisive progress was also made in technology: spectacles and the
mechanical clock, for instance, were both invented in thirteenth-century
Europe.
Charting an epic journey through six centuries of history, God's
Philosophers brings back to light the discoveries of neglected geniuses
like John Buridan, Nicole Oresme and Thomas Bradwardine, as well as
putting into context the contributions of more familiar figures like
Roger Bacon, William of Ockham and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Contrary to prevailing opinion, the roots of modern science were planted
in the ancient and medieval worlds long before the Scientific
Revolution of the seventeenth century. Indeed, that revolution would
have been inconceivable without the cumulative antecedent efforts of
three great civilisations: Greek, Islamic, and Latin. With the
scientific riches it derived by translation from Greco-Islamic sources
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Christian Latin
civilisation of Western Europe began the last leg of the intellectual
journey that culminated in a scientific revolution that transformed the
world. The factors that produced this unique achievement are found in
the way Christianity developed in the West, and in the invention of the
university in 1200. As this 1997 study shows, it is no mere coincidence
that the origins of modern science and the modern university occurred
simultaneously in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages.
