Abstract
Galileo’s recantation before the ecclesiastical authorities in 1633 of his defence of the Copernican theory of a heliocentric universe is an iconic scene in the saga of putative conflict between religion and science, though it is also a scene whose meaning has been the subject of much debate.1 The ‘emergence of science’ in the late Renaissance is a story that has often been told in such dramatic terms as the sloughing off of dogma and turgid scripturalism by anti-authoritarian thinkers heroically struggling for intellectual liberty. While Thomas Kuhn famously and proficiently muddied the waters in terms of the pace of the ‘Scientific Revolution’, and while other scholars have presented a more complex relationship between the two protagonists, science and religion, the picture remains, by and large, one of dawning clarity, in which a biblical myopia is replaced with a view of the world less textually hidebound, with science cast as the enlightened man emerging from Plato’s cave.2
I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year a prisoner on my knees, and before your Eminences having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and detest the error and the heresy of the movement of the earth.
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Notes
Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1896), vol. 1, p. 142.
William Draper, The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1875; reprint Farnborough, Hants: Gregg International Publishers, 1970), p. 171. 2.
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Among the works dealing with this subject in more nuanced terms are Harold Nebelsick, The Renaissance, the Reformation and the Rise of Science (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1992);
Eugene Klaaren, Religious Origins of Modern Science (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1977);
Alister E. McGrath, The Foundations of Dialogue in Science and Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).
Useful collections of essays are David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)
and David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Robert Boyle, The Excellency of Theology, Compar’d with Natural Philosophy, (as both are Objects of Men’s Study) (1674) in The Work of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, 14 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000), vol. 8, p. 32.
See also Jan W. Wojcik, Robert Boyle and the Limits of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
Michael Hunter, Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000);
David L. Woodall, ‘The Relationship between Science and Scripture in the Thought of Robert Boyle’, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 49 (March, 1997), 32.
Peter Harrison, ‘Curiosity, Forbidden Knowledge, and the Reformation of Natural Philosophy in Early Modern England’, Isis 92:2 (June, 2001), 265–290, at 278; Lambert Daneau, The Wonderfull Woorkmanship of the World, wherin is conteined an excellent discourse of Christian naturall philosophie concemyng the fourme, knowledge and use of all things created; specially gathered out of the fountaines of holy scripture, trans. Thomas Twyne (London, 1578), F.
Thomas Campanella, A Defense of Galileo, the Mathematician from Florence. Translated with an introduction and notes by R. J. Blackwell (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pp. 54, 68–69.
Jole Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine: The Ideas, Intellectual Context, and Influence of Petrus Severinus: 1540–1602 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004), p. 172.
Thomas Williams, ‘Biblical Interpretation’, in Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 60.
See Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 3–9, 299–326.
See John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991; reprint 1993), pp. 192–225, both on the historiographical traditions of conflict and harmonious models. On critical traditions in the history of science,
see H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Useful works include Donald McKim (ed.), Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters (Leicester: Intervarsity Press, 1998); Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974);
Alan Hauser and Duane F. Watson, A History of Biblical Interpretation, 5 vols. forthcoming (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2003–);
Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson (eds), Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996);
David C. Steinmetz (ed.), The Interpretation of the Bible in the Sixteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995);
Richard Griffiths (ed.), The Bible in the Renaissance: Essays on Biblical Commentary in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).
Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 4.
Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Mark Sebanc (vol. 1) and E. M. Macierowski (vol. 2) (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1998, 2000). There are a number of variants on this interpretative scheme.
K. E. Greene-McCreight, Ad Litteram: How Augustine, Calvin, and Barth Read the “Plain Sense” of Genesis 1–3 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), p. 97: ‘verum sensum scripturae, qui germanus est et simplex.’
Michael T. Walton, ‘Robert Boyle, “The Sceptical Chymist,” and Hebrew’, in Gerhild Scholz Williams and Charles D. Gunnoe, Jr. (eds), Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine, & Astrology in Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2002), pp. 187–205, at p. 203, citing Boyle’s Excellency of Theology.
Studies of Boyle himself have, it should be noted, shown themselves fully aware of the complexities of interaction between his theology and natural philosophy; see, for example, Jan W. Wojcik, Robert Boyle and Limits of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
and Michael Hunter, Robert Boyle (1627–91) Scrupulosity and Science (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000).
Kenneth J. Howell, God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science (Notre Dame, IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), p. 11.
See, for example, Ernan McMullin, ‘Galileo on Science and Scripture’, in Peter Machamer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Galileo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
William E. Carroll, ‘Galileo, Science and the Bible’, Acta Philosophica 6 (1997), 5–33;
Maurice A. Finnocchiaro (ed.), The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989);
Richard Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991).
A summary, discussion and reprint of key articles on the matter is given in I. Bernard Cohen (ed.), Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). Merton’s formulation is quoted on p. 15 of Cohen’s introduction. The argument has been taken up and modified by, for example,
Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965)
and Charles Webster, The Grand Instauration; Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975).
Also problematic in the idea is assessing who is ‘Puritan’ or, indeed who qualifies as a ‘scientist’. See, for example, Theodore Rabb, ‘Puritanism and the Rise of Experimental Science in England’, in Charles Webster (ed.), The Intellectual Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974);
John Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural Science: A Historical Interpretation (London: Collins, 1961), p. 130.
On Catholic science in the era, see, for example, John W. O’Malley, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, and Steve J. Harris (eds), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, 2006);
Mordechai Feingold (ed.), Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003);
Mordechai Feingold (ed.), The New Science and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth Century Perspectives (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002).
Paolo Rossi, The Birth of Modern Science, trans. Cynthia De Nardi Ipsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 108.
See Paul-Henri Michel, The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno, trans. R. E. W. Maddison (London: Methuen, 1973);
Hilary Gatti, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
See E. Rothacker, Das ‘Buch der Natur’: Materialien und Grundsatzliches zur Metapherngeschichte (Bonn: Bouvier, 1979). The trope was by no means unique to the period. On its medieval provenance,
see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), ch. 16, ‘The Book as Symbol’.
Thomas Browne, Religio Medici in works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 4 vols. (London: Faber, 1964), vol. 1, pp. 24–25, 1.16.
Quoted and translated in John Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 169.
See Stephen A. McKnight (ed.), Science, Pseudo-Science, and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992);
Margaret J. Osier (ed.), Rethinking the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Armand Beaulieu, ‘L’attitude nuancée de Mersenne envers la Chymie’, in Jean-Claude Margolin and Sylvain Matton (eds), Alchimie et Philosophie à la Renaissance (Paris: Vrin, 1993), pp. 395–403.
See Massimo Luigi Bianchi, Signatura Rerum: Segni, Magia e conoscenza da Paracelso a Leibniz (Roma: Edizioni dell’ Ateneo, 1987).
Shackelford, A Philosophical Path for Paracelsian Medicine, p. 320. See Ann Blair, ‘Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philosophy in the Late Renaissance’, Isis 91 (2000), 32–58.
On exegesis and science within humanist thought, see Kevin Killeen, Searching the Scriptures and Reading the Natural World: Biblical Exegesis and Interpretative Strategies in Early Modern Literary Culture (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2004).
Stephen N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 4. Zwicker’s emphasis is on typology and political allegory.
James Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and Medicine, Vol. 1: Ficino to Descartes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 12.
Paracelsus, De Caducis, in Arthur Edward Waite, The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus, The Great, 2 vols. (Chicago, IL: de Laurence, Scott & Co., 1910), vol. 1, 48 n.
John Wilkins, An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (London, 1668). See Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England, Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), forthcoming.
For a helpful discussion of ‘science’ and ‘natural philosophy’, see David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 B.C. to A.D. 1450 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 1–4.
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Forshaw, P.J., Killeen, K. (2007). Introduction: The Word and the World. In: Killeen, K., Forshaw, P.J. (eds) The Word and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230206472_1
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