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When Science and Christianity Meet

By Ronald L. Numbers

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2003 Ronald L. Numbers
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226482146
The Medieval Church Encounters the Classical Tradition: Saint Augustine, Roger Bacon, and the Handmaiden Metaphor

David C. Lindberg

The Problem

According to widespread popular belief, the period of European history known as the Middle Ages or medieval period (roughly the years 450-1450) was a time of barbarism, ignorance, and superstition. The epithet Dark Ages often applied to it nicely captures this opinion. As for the ills that threatened literacy, learning, and especially science during the Middle Ages, blame is most often laid at the feet of the Christian church, which is alleged to have placed religious authority above personal experience and rational activity, thereby snuffng out the faint sparks of scientific and other forms of intellectual creativity that had survived the barbarian invasions of late antiquity.

But this is a caricature, the acceptance of which has proved an obstacle to an understanding of the Middle Ages as they really were. It is true that the early centuries of the medieval period, like those of late antiquity, saw a great deal of political and social turmoil. It is also true that literacy and learning, in this early period, were in a state of decline. But an account that fails to acknowledge differences among geographical regions and change over time cannot do justice to the complex medieval reality. An accurate account will reveal that learning grew from small beginnings in the early Middle Ages to become a thriving industry in the later Middle Ages; that important scientific achievements emerged during this period; and that the church and its theology maintained a relationship to the natural sciences far too complicated to be captured by simple black-and-white categories such as adversaries or allies. Unquestionably, some portions of the classical tradition gave rise to suspicion, hostility, and even ecclesiastical condemnation. However, such cases were exceptional; far more commonly, critical reflection about the nature of the world was tolerated and even encouraged. In their quest to understand the world in which they lived, medieval scholars employed all of the resources at their disposal, including inherited scientific ideas, personal observation, rational inference, and religious tradition. And they did so with as much integrity as one finds today in the average university professor and with far less interference from the church than the caricature of the Middle Ages would suggest.

By way of developing and defending these claims, I propose to concentrate on two historical figures who have contributed mightily to the image of the Middle Ages: Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430), the early church father who did more to determine medieval Christian attitudes toward pagan science than any other person, and Roger Bacon (ca. 1220ca. 1292), the most notorious scientific figure of the Middle Ages, widely acclaimed for his rejection of authority and his campaign on behalf of mathematical and what he called experimental science. (I employ the term pagan without pejorative intent, to mean simply non-Judeo-Christian.) I do not claim, of course, that the lives of Augustine and Bacon present us with the whole story of medieval encounter between science and religion, but I do believe that an examination of their careers will reveal the basic contours of that story.

The Middle Ages and the Classical Tradition

Several preliminaries must first occupy us. About 850 years separate Augustine and Bacon. What are the chronological divisions associated with this long period of European history? There were no catastrophes or achievements so decisive or conspicuous that we can use them as chronological markers, and the boundaries are therefore intrinsically fuzzy. But in round numbers the declining years of the Roman Empire run from about A.D. 180 to 450. Church historians know this as the patristic periodan era during which Christian doctrine was codified by a series of church councils and influential church fathers. The characteristics that strike us as distinctively medieval emerged gradually in the course of the fifth century. The early medieval period is customarily dated from about 450 to 1000. This was followed by a period of European recovery, 10001200, and the high or later Middle Ages, roughly 12001450. The story recounted in this essay runs from the closing decades of the patristic period to the first seventy-five years of the high Middle Ages.

Was there, in fact, any science worthy of the name during this long period? Certainly many of the ingredients of what we now regard as science were present: languages for describing nature, methods for exploring it, factual and theoretical claims that emerged from such explorations, and criteria for judging the truth or validity of the claims thus made. Moreover, it is clear that pieces of the resulting medieval knowledge were for all practical purposes identical to what is now taken to be genuine science (planetary astronomy and geometrical optics are good examples).

But patristic and medieval approaches to nature also differed from ours in significant ways. Knowledge about the world of nature was then an integral part of the larger philosophical enterprisea characteristic that modern scientists would find alien. Theology and religion were regarded as legitimate participants in the investigation and formulation of truths about the natural world far more frequently than they are today. Observational evidence, though regularly employed in the validation of theoretical claims during the medieval period, had a profile considerably lower than in modern science. The motivation for pursuing science and the institutions where that pursuit took place were quite different from the modern ones. The governmental support that drives big science today would have been inconceivable during the patristic and medieval periods. And the mechanisms now available for disseminating scientific knowledge are far more efficient than were those operating in a culture that antedated the printing press and electronic media.

Given these similarities and differences, are we justified in calling this patristic and medieval effort science? This question is a matter of dispute among historians of science. Some prefer the cautious expression natural knowledge. Others speak of natural philosophy, in order to call attention to the integral relationship in that earlier era between the pursuit of natural knowledge and the pursuit of other forms of understanding. And some boldly use the expression science or natural science, declaring thereby that the objects of their scholarship, although not identical to modern science, are the ancestors of modern scientific disciplines and practices and therefore are entitled to claim the family name. This seems to me a pointless debate. The important thing is to agree on what we are talking about and to employ terminology that facilitates communication on that subject. In the following pages, I will employ all three of the aforementioned competing locutions indiscriminately, as synonyms. I will also employ expressions denoting specific branches of the pursuit of natural knowledge, such as mathematical science, astronomy, cosmology, optics, meteorology, and medicine. The reader should understand that at no point do I wish to maintain identity between the patristic and medieval enterprises thus named and their modern descendants.

Augustine and Bacon encountered...